Midweek Marvels - Fever Tree Ginger Ale

I have a very weird guilty pleasure; I love wandering around grocery stores. Whenever I find myself in a new state, or town or just happened to travel down a new road, I have to check out the nearest grocery store. And even when I'm just bored at home, I'll head down to my regular haunts and scan sections I have seemingly no use for like the sugarless aisle with foods for managing diabetes, the pet food aisle when I've never owned a pet. I'll even do this when I'm a passing through a Walgreen's or a gas station I don't know too well. I love to wander through stores, and I mean every aisle, to check out their setup, scan their frozen food section for any untested Ben and Jerry's flavors (of course), and see if they have anything I don't recognize. What kind of music do they play? What does the produce section look like? Is their deli or bakery any good (a rarity)? What kind of things are in their "ethnic" section (never what you'd expect)? For some reason I find the experience so extremely therapeutic for my food nerd sensibilities. I imagine it's the same feeling some people get from window shopping for shoes, or cars, or garden gnomes (yes! let's be friends!). So! As a total beard/excuse for me to indulge myself further I've decided to add another recurring feature called Midweek Marvels where I talk about new foods that I've discovered  through my grocery geeking out/ insane compulsive behavior. Wait... uh.. hobby! My charming hobby!

This week I bring you Fever Tree Ginger Ale. 

It probably makes me a weirdo to say it but ginger ale is my favorite soft drink. Something about how rough  and mean it tastes compared to something like Pepsi or Fanta has always appealed to me. A harshness almost like it wanted to be liquor but didn't quite make it. I am always in search for a new, meaner, put some hair on your chest tasting ginger ale, especially since my all time favorite, Reed's Ginger Brew, has become increasingly hard to find in my area, so when I stumbled upon Fever Tree I thought I would give it a chance. The flavor though wasn't exactly what I was expecting, it has a gentle herbal freshness that mirrored its delicate gold packaging and dainty 6 ounce bottles. It was pretty much exactly the opposite of what I look for in a ginger ale, I was looking for a monster truck rally and stumbled into a tea party by mistake. Even so, it wasn't that bad. I added a sprig of thyme I had growing on my balcony to highlight its light, floral notes (yeah I know, how monster trucks is that?!), and I found it to be surprisingly refreshing. Would I buy it again? Probably not. Fever Tree is far too civilized for my taste, so I guess my search for a ginger ale strong enough to give me a whisky cough and a pair of low hangers, continues.

Tomato Art Fest 2013

The East Nashville Tomato Art Fest was just as amazing as I hoped it would be. I magically manged to go this year because the universe loves me and my bosses were on vacation this week (what?!?). Although I managed to miss the parade again (WHAT?!) I still got to do most of my favorite things while we were there, (woo!) and eat lots of awesome food. Here are the highlights.

The Costumes!

The guy in the tomato suit was my favorite, he was so enthusiastic!

I decided to do it up right this year and wore red and green from head to toe. I scraped up a shoulder length cherry red *cough*children's Disney princess*cough* wig, and wandered around all day with an apparently very visible bra line, (me = honey badger).

The Art!

As usual I wanted to take all of the art home with me, these last two are some of my favorites, but since most of the pieces ranged in price from $100-$500 I'll just have to enjoy these pictures I snuck with my iphone. Ugh! I have to bring more monies next time!

The Food!

We started with dessert first because that's how I roll. Earlier in the week Jeni's Nashville tweeted about a special green tomato frozen yogurt that would be on the menu for tomato fest and I was terrified/excited to try it. It had a taste that was completely unique, sort of sweet and savory at the same time, and the yogurt gave it a sort of sour cream-y/ cheesecake taste that was really interesting. I didn't taste tomato exactly, which as a relief in a way, though I could tell there was a zesty flavor there that was surprising. It had a sort of an intriguing, acidic bite, like a tart key lime pie. I really loved it.

For lunch we hit up our food truck friends at the Grilled Cheeserie, they also had a festival themed menu item, The Triple Tomater Melt; Italian blend cheese, local heirloom tomato, basil and tomato aioli on tomato bread, which really hit the spot. 

Not tomato-y but still delicious, we stopped by the Country Pop tent on our way out of the festival and tried their surprisingly tasty take on caramel corn. Country pop is made with a corn puff that's light and crispy (kind of like a Cheeto) and coated with a buttery, salty caramel coating that's heavily addictive. I was reluctant to try a sample when we first passed their tent but after that first taste I couldn't resist taking a bag of it home with me.

The Treasure!
As usual I had to stop myself from buying every treasure at every tent, filling my teeny apartment up with crazy knickknacks, but I was really tempted by the teapots and the soup can water cooler. 

I can not recommend this festival enough, it is too much fun, and the perfect place to visit if you want to feel like you're living in a cartoon. The museum, the people, the food, it's just such a good time. I'll definitely be coming back next year.

Sunday Kind Of Love

Love Sonnet XII- Pablo Neruda

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon

thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light

what obscure brilliance opens between your columns? 

What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Oh, loving is a journey with water and with stars,

with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour;

loving is a clash of lightning bolts

and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,

your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,

and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood

until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,

until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

Cherry Frangipane Tart

75 grams granulated white sugar

4 tablespoons unsalted butter softened

1 large egg

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

45 grams almond meal 

1 tablespoon all purpose flour

1 sheet puff pastry, room temperature, (store bought or make your own)

Approx 22 cherries ( enough to cover the tart, add more or less to taste), split and pitted

slivered almonds to taste, and powdered sugar


Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

In a mixing bowl cream together the butter and sugar until the mixture is fluffy. Add the vanilla and the egg, and whisk to combine, then whisk in the almond meal and flour.

On a lightly floured surface, gently roll out the sheet of puff pastry so it's nice and even. Place puff pastry on a parchment lined baking sheet and then prick the pastry all over with a fork to vent steam and prevent irregular puffing.

Spoon the almond mixture onto the sheet of puff pastry, being sure to leave a 1/2 inch lip around the entire tart to form a crust. Top with cherry halves and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Next, remove the tart from the oven and top with the sliced almonds, return the tart to the oven and bake 10 more minutes and until golden brown*.

Serve warm or cooled, topped with a light dusting of powdered sugar ( or ice cream!).


*= know your oven! If it runs hot and you think it will burn the sliced almonds hold off until the last 5-7 minutes of cooking, so that the nuts on top only become toasted not, you know, toast.

New Blog Feature - Sunday Kind Of Love

I've been thinking a lot about inspiration lately. Part of the trouble with keeping up a blog for any length of time is keeping up your inspiration, and in these days with so many people with so many clever ideas it's easy to feel intimidated and crippled and like anything I do would seem in someway  like a rip off of... everyone. So what I like to do every now and then is take a step back from the millions of voices an opinions on one subject, and turn my attention to different forms of art to recharge my creative mojo.

A few months back I read an article on the benefits of memorizing and reciting poetry, and it reminded me of how as a result of a kind of old fashioned parenting, I had been encouraged to memorize poems as a child.
And even though it sounds like a tedious chore in a way, there was just something about memorizing  and reciting poems that just felt good, like the chanting and the repetition not only caused the actual emotion of the poem to take root in my heart, but like a paint brush had changed the colors of my mind from shades of grey to wild lime greens, pastels, and disco silvers that made me feel alive.

Inspiration comes when the brain lets go of the task at hand and focuses on something else entirely, and one of the best ways to release your brain is to focus on something emotional. For me memorizing and reciting poetry is a magnificent way to escape from the logical, analytical, rational mind space to the emotional, free-thinking creative mind.

I've decided to harness the creative energy this pastime provides, and I've created a new blog feature to appear every other Sunday, called Sunday Kind Of Love where I'll combine the poem that I'm memorizing with a dish or recipe it inspired. It won't always be an incredibly literal interpretation, I anticipate that most of the time it might seem a little abstract, but my aim is to convey to the emotion of the poem with a dish that I feel represents the same.

I'm starting this project out with my all time favorite poem, Pablo Neruda's Love Sonnet XII,  a poem that I've loved for years ( it's the reason the blog is named The Full Woman), though I've never taken the time before to memorize it.

I'm really excited to share this project with you and sort of mix things up on the blog a little.

See you Sunday.

-m

"Food Truck Life" and "A Possible End To Radio Silence"

It's been a bumpy year for the blog, and really for the inside of my head. I got into the full swing of culinary school and the planning and execution of a job change and things around this space got sort of put on the back burner.

I'm a planner, and I thought that if I planned out a perfect pathway to my ideal future (school>internship>job) that I'd leave my childhood behind and I'd make the transition to responsible, respectable adult smoothly, but it hasn't really turned out that way. If anything I feel like going back to school and ditching everything to work on a food truck has just launched me into a second adolescence and I'm not too sure if I'm worried about it. I don't really know what I'm doing anymore, other than finishing school, or what I'm aiming for but I'm having an absolutely marvelous time traveling all over Nashville, getting to see places I never would normally even look. I've been able to try all kinds of food on the road as a result of lunch trips between double shifts, left over event food, and food truck to food truck goody trade. But the road is too unpredictable for my nice camera (aka "my infant son") and all this interesting food I eat rarely makes it home, or if it does makes it home in the dark of night, so my ability to blog has been hindered.

So in an attempt to solve my blogging problem and further prove myself to be a teen girl, I've ditched the technological equivalent of a speaking telegraph that I've been carrying around in my purse, finally, finally upgraded to a smartphone to use as an on the road camera situation, and now have both a twitter and instagram account that I intend to fill with the highlights of my travels.

Follow if you feel so inclined, you'll find me both places as madame_magar , and stay tuned to this space for some changes and more frequent updates appearing in the very near future.

-m