Amazing Lunch: De Jred

Since I am on a mini-vacation with plans that always fall through, I was left with really nothing going on on Friday, until one of my friends from work, who also had the day off, was looking for someone to go to lunch with.

We wound up meeting up at De Jred, a new Jamaican restaurant in Skokie that her friends had been telling her about. Because my friend is Jamaican, and clearly I'm not, nor do I have any experience with Jamaican food, I let her do the ordering.

We both wound up getting the Jerk Chicken plate (which you can get as half chicken, or breast only, I believe we wound up with half chickens), which, at only $7.00, came with A LOT of food:

In addition to the chicken, the plate also came with fried plantains, a bowl of rice and red peas (which are kidney beans), and steamed cabbage (I cannot express enough my love for steamed cabbage of any sort. I love that stuff, and was super excited about it).

I am not normally a big fan of chicken on the bone, but in this case, it didn't really matter. This was by far the most tender chicken I have ever eaten in my entire life. We were given knives, but honestly did not need them. The chicken was just falling off of the bone. I never understood how people could describe meat as 'melting in your mouth', but I do now.

As far as the seasoning on the chicken went, it had a nice heat to it. I love hot food, but I also love being able to enjoy food. This chicken had the right balance of being both hot and enjoyable.

One other thing I loved? My bottle of "Kola Champagne". It's like cream soda, which I normally don't like. But, the reason I don't normally like it is because it's too syrupy and heavy. Not Kola Champagne. This stuff was amazing; although it was still pretty sweet, it didn't leave me feeling the need to drink 5 gallons of water and cleanse it out of my system.

The service at De Jred was always very fast and friendly. I'm planning on going back for more jerk chicken, and possibly even going out on a limb and trying the goat stew.

And for those interested:

De Jred
4901 W. Oakton (corner of Oakton and Lamon)
Skokie, IL 60077

Fall Cupcakes

Two cupcakes I made on Friday for my fall seasonals:

Pumpkin cake with clove & cinnamon cream cheese frosting

These ones are super moist. And to change up the boring regular cream cheese frosting that accompanies a lot of pumpkin cakes, I added cinnamon and fresh ground cloves.

Cinnamon Apple Cake with Cayenne Caramel Icing and Spiced Pecans

For this one, I pulled the 'frosting' recipe from the November 2009 issue of Bon Appetit and added 1/2 tsp. of cayenne pepper. I was expecting something a bit thicker, but wound up with something that, while still good, was more icing-like than i expected, even after chilling for 3 hours.

Zombieland and BLTs

Monday I made this bomb-ass BLT. I got home from work about 8 o'clock, started making bread. I went to the store, got some thick bacon, avocado, and lettuce. 11 o'clock rolls around and my bread is ready. I've got bacon. I've got mayo. I've got this amazing tomato that I stole from my mom's tomato plants on Saturday. I have the best BLT in the world. It may not look like much, but that shit was amazing. And huge! I'm a simple person, I can enjoy simple things. And bacon is one of the best of them:

Tuesday night after work, I went to see Zombieland. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. I love zombies and zombie movies, however, I do not like fast zombies, and this movie was chock full of them. At one point during the movie, I announced that I was bored. My mind was on three things and three things only, and this is in order of importance:

3) Why is that chick familiar? (She was in Superbad)
2) Woody Harrelson is hot:

I mean sure that other kid is kind of cute, but Woody Harrelson is just really hot.
1) Bacon sandwich. And dammit, you know I made another one as soon as I got home.

Bacon, don't you ever leave me.

it's the middle of october already?

The past month and a half has seriously flown by...right into the pre-winter weather we all know...and hate. I'm already sleeping with hoodies and spaceheaters and extra blankets. The worst part is how the mornings are always dull and gray. I just want to see a couple more sunny days before the snow starts coming. That's all.

One good thing about the colder weather is that now when the oven is on, instead of it being painfully hot in the kitchen, it's quite comfortable and warm. And I have been doing a lot of baking.

I did my first wedding last week. It wasn't a big affair, but it feels good to have one under my belt. There was an eminent near disaster, when I realized that the giant cupcake cake was not done, and had to start over again. That's when I decided beer would come in handy. And everything else went swimmingly.

The next morning, I had to take the cake to the destination, which was an hour and a half away. I did have severe worries about the structural integrity of the cake stand, as it was comprised, from what I could tell, entirely of cardboard, and was definitely shifting as i was transferring the cake from the box to the stand. I'm not going to lie; once I realized that there was a possibility of collapse, I hauled ass on out of there. BUT! I did take a picture. I know it's totally not stunning or anything, but it was my first one, and it can only get better from there.

The big part of it and half of the cupcakes were lemon raspberry and the rest of the cupcakes were plain vanilla with vanilla buttercream. I'm going to have to pat myself on the back and say that it was the best buttercream I've ever made.

While I did worry that the cake was not going to make it until the reception, someone did post pictures. I was afraid that there would be some sort of cake disaster pictures, but yes, the cake did survive.

My first savory cupcake...and one other

A couple weeks ago, my roommate and I hosted this like beauty/facial thingy party at our house. I don't know. Whatever. BUT! as all parties in our house go, we have good food and drinks.

I contributed cupcakes to this bonanza. I did lemon-raspberry to test out what I was doing for the wedding last weekend. And then I brainstormed in my little mind and came up with something truly amazing. I picked up some Asian pears on my last trip to H-mart; and I knew I wanted to roast them. Also, everyone (I think) knows that walnuts go well with pears. I didn't want to do a regular old cake for them, so I went with a brown sugar pound cake. My original idea was to do a goat cheese and honey frosting, but I thought the goat cheese might throw some people off, and I stuck with a cream cheese and honey frosting that was pretty amazing. These suckers went like hotcakes. Do people still say that anymore??? I think this one is definitely going on the list of fall seasonal cakes, which I've been working on getting completed.

Also, I have a friend from work that has been throwing some ideas for savory-type cakes at me. I'm really not into these so much. I'm cool with scones and muffins and whatnot, but not quite savory cakes. This weekend, after the wedding cake was delivered and I had time to recuperate from that little bit of stress, I busted one of his ideas out. This is a dill cake with smoked salmon cream cheese...I hesitate to say frosting, because it's lacking the key components of butter and sugar, although I did whip some heavy cream into it to make it a bit fluffier.

I really enjoyed the cake part of it, the fresh dill flavor was pretty nice. BUT, I am NOT a fan of smoked salmon, so the combination was a little bit lost on me. The recipient of said cakes did enjoy them though. Will I make them again? Likely not.