tahini milkshakes

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We have a dog chicken. You know, like a dog cat, a cat that behaves like a dog, but a chicken. It started last month when we noticed that one of our chickens was looking blue and had a little blood on her head from getting her feathers picked out by the other chickens, it was so sad! We separated her so she could heal in peace, and gave her special treatment, like extra cucumbers and apples. Eventually we let her roam around the yard, freely outside of the run, and she became so personable! Not like the other chickens who run away if you try to come near them. This chicken comes up to you when you’re in the yard and lets you pet her. Occasionally she visits Eggboy in the workshop. On Mother’s Day when we presented Eggmom with her gift (a wagon to hook on to her lawn mower), Eggboy had all of us stand in one part of the yard to watch the big reveal, and as all of the Eggs and I assembled in a little group as the audience, Chicken also gathered with us and stood attentively waiting for the show. It was the best. She’s the best. I love her. I know you’re not supposed to pick favorite chicken children, but she’s my fave. 

Anyway, over the weekend we had a scare. We heard a flopping noise, ran outside, and couldn’t find her anywhere. All we could see was white feathers scattered about in two different parts of the yard, and we searched everywhere but couldn’t find her. It was the worst. A fox, a hawk, or a coyote had come to eat her, we figured :( But then!! Two very sad long hours later, she reappeared!!!!! A little shaken but still her happy self. She must have been hiding from whatever monster tried to get her. We sliced up celebratory cucumber, danced around, and then put her to bed and then went inside and ate celebratory Chana Masala and watched celebratory Breaking Bad.

This morning as I left for the gym, I saw her keeping Eggboy company while he weedwacked and it made me so happy. I am a little bummed that we’re going to have to move her back into the coop with the other chickens soon but at least she’s safe.

This is a pic of her I took when I was using up the rest of my shots on my Paris cameras:

So that’s what’s happening around the farm.

In tahini news, it occurred to me last month that it has been over a year since I had the earth shatteringly amazing tahini shake at Goldie, in Philadelphia. I decided that it was time to start making my own. But did you know that if you do a Google for tahini shake recipe, the internet automatically assumes that you also want dates?? And, worst case scenario, bananas????? Like I realize that tahini is classified as a health food in some brains and fits snuggly in with this practice of sweetening shakes with dates and creamifying them with bananas, but I just really wanted… sugar. And no date flavor. And real ice cream. Bananas can gtfo forever and ever. ❌🚫🙅🏻‍♀️

I wanted an old school milkshake, like the chocolate peanut butter ones we got at Steak 'n Shake in high school to have with their crispy shoestring fries, only instead of peanut butter I wanted tahini.  And I wanted a smaller milkshake too because one problem I have with the world of milkshakes is that they are always too darn big. They tempt me into bellyache sugar crash territory and these days I just never order them because of this and resort to stealing sips of my dad’s or Eggboy’s during our annual In-N-Out trips. If there was a universally understood kiddie cone equivalent option, or like a shot of milkshake option, that would be ideal. That’s what my future imaginary restaurant will have, shots of milkshakes. And then the cute as a button juice glasses in these pics will be the jumbo size.

My last opinion about milkshakes is that I appreciate when they have something in them to chew on, like cookies or a whole piece of chocolate cake, a la Portillo’s or the Oreo Dairy Queen Blizzard. So I’ve thrown in handfuls of crushed chocolate cookies here. They get so good and soft as they soak up the shake. The rest of the shake is as perfect as you’d imagine: nutty and extra creamy, thanks to the tahini, and perfect with a dollop of fresh whipped cream. A pinch of cinnamon enhances the tahini flavor, and an optional drizzle of chocolate syrup will do no harm. And rainbow sprinkles, doyyy.

Tahini Milkshakes

Makes 6-8 mini shakes or 4 medium (pictured)

ingredients

2 c (400g) vanilla ice cream

3/4 c (180g) whole milk

1/2 c (100g) tahini

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

a pinch of cinnamon

a drizzle of chocolate syrup, optional

a handful of crushed chocolate cookies (homemade or store-bought), optional but highly recommended

fresh whipped cream

rainbow sprinkles

clues

In a blender, combine the ice cream, milk, tahini, vanilla, and cinnamon, and blend to combine. Pour into glasses and top with a drizzle of chocolate syrup and crushed cookies (if using), whipped cream, and sprinkles and enjoy.

-yeh!

photos by chantell and brett! dress from gap!

grilled tahini chicken

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We spent so much time outside this weekend, soaking up the sun before the bugs invade. We kayaked down the Red River, cooked weenies over a fire, biked all around town, and planted our garden! Finally! I’m so excited. Our method for choosing what to plant was that if anything had “rainbow” in the name, we got it. Rainbow carrots, rainbow radishes, I even OK’ed rainbow beets because they looked so pretty on the seed envelope. We listened to oldies and dug up the dirt and every so often Sven, Ole, Coco, and Macaroni came to say hello. It was the best. Now it’s supposed to rain for the next few days, so I won’t feel so bad staying inside and watching all of Riverdale season 2.

How was your Memorial day weekend??

I have to tell you about this new cookbook that I’m completely in love with! It’s Repertoire, by Jessica Battilana, and the subtitle is “All the recipes you need,” which sums it up perfectly and instantly drew me in. It spoils you with quality over quantity: one insane grilled lamb situation, some really amazing pasta recipes, a few salads I really want to eat, and—wait for it—hot dog fried rice. (Any book that contains a recipe for hot dog fried rice is an instant winner in my kitchen. Same goes for grilled scallion pancakes. Same goes for a whole page dedicated to Negronis and Potato chips.) I love this recipe selection for the same reason I love Grand Forks: when I have a specific craving, there is one reliable option and I don’t have to make a decision. Nothing in Repertoire is fussy and everything feels fresh. It’s the cookbook equivalent to this new Lululemon dress I just acquired that I plan on wearing every single day this summer: it can be dressed up or dressed down and looks good in any situation and feels like Lululemon pants all over my body. Which is to say that I could live in the world of this book. 

Sometimes I dream of having a little guest house on the farm for city friends to come and stay for a long time, like long enough to write an opera. And in this little guest house there would be only the bare bones basics, but like nice cute basics: one perfectly sized matte black dutch oven, one nice wooden spoon, two Marian mugs, and a small pink Smeg. Repertoire would be in this kitchen. 

This tahini chicken is the first recipe I cooked from this book, for obvious reasons. The tahini here is complemented by a fierce amount of lemon and a correct amount of paprika. It doesn’t require too much advanced planning and you don’t need any fancy ingredients. Jessica recommends serving it with the fattoush in Repertoire and, yes, it’s the perfect dill-packed addition. Here is the tahini chicken but you’ll have to buy the book to get the fattoush! Or you can head over to my Instagram where I am giving away a copy!

grilled tahini chicken

serves 4

from repertoire by jessica battilana

ingredients

1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken, cut into 10 pieces

kosher salt

6 cloves garlic, peeled

2 tsp whole cumin seeds, toasted (or 2 1/2 tsp ground cumin)

2 tsp paprika

1/4 c tahini

1/4 c lemon juice

2 tb olive oil

clues

season the chicken pieces on both sides with salt, transfer to a plate or small baking pan, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or up to overnight). 

in a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic to a paste with a pinch of salt. add the cumin seeds and pound until ground, then transfer to a bowl and add the paprika, tahini, lemon juice, and olive oil and season to taste with salt; it will have the consistency of peanut butter. (if you're using ground cumin, smash  the garlic to a paste with the side of your knife, then transfer to a bowl and add the cumin and remaining ingredients.)

remove the chicken from the refrigerator and slather the tahini marinade all over each piece. cover loosely with plastic wrap and let stand until the chicken is at room temperature (no more than an hour).

preheat a charcoal or gas grill for direct, medium-high-heat grilling. when the grill is hot, put the chicken pieces on the grill fate, skin-side down, and cook until the skin begins to brown and you can easily lift the pieces off the grate, then continue to cook, turning frequently and moving the chicken pieces from hotter to cooler parts of the grill as needed, until cooked through, about 25 to 30 minutes. the chicken has a tendency to stick, so be vigilant about turning it frequently. if the chicken threatens to burn before it's cooked through, you can move the pieces to the cooler zone of the grill (leaving the cover vents open), and continue grilling until it's cooked through; use a meat thermometer or the tip of a sharp knife to check.

transfer to a platter and serve hot or at room temperature.

-yeh!

photos by chantell and brett!

strawberries and cream frozen cocktail with cardamom and pistachios

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I have a funny relationship with strawberries! I didn’t used to like them, which was three times more embarrassing than my banana phobia because people are supposed to love strawberries the way they love summer and baby animals. When I was a kid I didn’t really like any fruits or vegetables, so this was pretty on brand and most grownups in my life went with this but strawberries were often treated like an exception. Surely you’d eat a strawberry, they are like candy! Nope, no, they’re slimy and getting the way of the chocolate and vanilla in my Neapolitan ice cream. This came to a head in high school, when during a concert band tour of Germany, I stayed with a host mom who greeted me with a big bowl of strawberries and sugar. She didn’t speak English except for when she left the room and I whispered to my friend that I didn’t like strawberries and she overheard me. You don’t like strawberries?? She asked, poking her head back in. I felt so bad! I pretended like I was kidding and choked some down, discovering that I actually kind of enjoyed them but was not yet ready to admit it. 

Eight years later, with grownup tastebuds, I was back in Germany during strawberry season and had an opposite experience, where I braved a downpour in the name of small juicy strawberries from the market that were red all the way through and perfectly sweet. They were marvelous! I still have never had anything else like them. And even though sometime in the course of those eight years I grew to not fear them, I can still probably count the number of other times I’ve deeply connected with a strawberry on one hand: chocolate dipped strawberries on the lawn of Ravinia with Jaclyn and Katie, a shortcake at Blue Hill, and a daiquiri sipped out of a cocoa dusted glass at a speakeasy in Hong Kong. 

So maybe it’s that I’m making up for lost time or maybe it’s that I’m in need of vitamin C, but these days I have strawberries of all forms on hand at all times. *Slathers on strawberry scented lip balm*. And right this moment I am craving one of these here strawberries and cream frozen cocktails but it is morning time and don’t tell me that it’s five o’clock somewhere, I am too old for that today. 

What makes this a cocktail is Prairie Organic Vodka, which is from Minnesota! I was so excited to find out about them. It’s distilled from organic single vintage yellow corn that is grown on family farms, just a little south of where we live. I’ve always known that corn is super common around here, we have corn farmer friends, but Prairie Organic is the first vodka I’ve tasted made from it. It is so smooth, even a little bit creamy, which is why it goes so well in this cocktail. And I love that its ingredients can be traced back to sustainability conscious Minnesota family farms, just like Eggboy’s!

A great thing about this cocktail is how unfussy it is. I’ve always been extremely impressed with my friends who can welcome me into their house and carry on a conversation as they fiddle with fancy tools, light things on fire, drip precise amounts of bitters into a glass, and spin me a very complicated cocktail. I am not that person yet, maybe one day, but for now I appreciate a simple fun thing that is good by way of great ingredients. A nice glug of cream, strawberries (bonus points if you picked them?!), and a smidgen of cardamom, which will add beautiful dimension. I also like a pistachio rimmed glass for crunch, nuttiness, and color.

Cheers to the weekend, friends!!

Strawberries and Cream Frozen Cocktail with Cardamom and Pistachios

makes 2

ingredients

A drizzle of honey 

Finely chopped raw or roasted pistachios and freeze dried strawberries, for rim

2 c (280g) frozen strawberries

1/4 c (50g) sugar

1/4 c whole milk

1/4 c heavy cream

1/4 c Prairie Organic Vodka

1/2 tsp vanilla

A good pinch of ground cardamom

Dried rose petals, optional

clues

Apply a thin even layer of honey around the rim of two glasses (I find it’s easiest to drizzle it directly on the top outside edge of the glass and then use a small rubber spatula or knife to spread it all around) and then coat it with the pistachios and freeze dried strawberries. Set the glasses aside.

In a blender, combine the strawberries, sugar, milk, cream, vodka, vanilla, and cardamom and blend until smooth. Pour into glasses and top with pistachios, dried rose petals (if using), and another tiny pinch of cardamom. Enjoy!

-yeh!

Thank you so much to Prairie Organic Spirits for sponsoring this post! This recipe is only intended for those of legal drinking age (21+) and should not be shared or distributed to any underaged persons. Please enjoy responsibly! 

Photos by Chantell and Brett Quernemoen

rhubarb cake!

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It is my birthday! And also Doug’s and the eve of my Dad’s and the dawn after Stefani’s. And maybe also yours??? Happy birthday to all of us! It’s a great day to turn 29. 28 was honestly starting to feel a little stale, although it was a great year! It had a solid ratio of time spent doing things I love (making cake! traveling about! sitting on the couch with Eggboy watching tv eating dinner with my favorite spoon!) to things I don’t love (brushing my hair! cleaning the fridge!) so I’ll try to keep that going. Overall I think one big takeaway from this year was that I learned to like doing healthy things more, like drinking green juice and being up to date on my dentist visits. Kind of vanilla, right?!? My 22-year-old self would have felt so ashamed that this was my big birthday takeaway but well here it is. It’s probably just that my older wiser brain can now see further into the future and know more easily when something that feels fun at the time, like putting too much mayonnaise on my french fries, isn’t going to feel good in my belly after an hour. Which doesn’t mean I don’t do that anymore I just do it less. 

So with that I’d like to announce a temporary hold on my birthday breakfast sandwich tradition, for I will be having a green juice. And then I’ll be working out, and then getting a massage with the strongest masseuse in town, then I’m going to lunch at the museum cafe, and then I’m going to sit down with my favorite cookbooks and plan really awesome dinners for the rest of the week until dinner time when I’m going to make chèvre chaud salads for Eggboy and me. A salad! For my birthday dinner! I barely recognize myself. I’ve just been craving it soo hard since Paris (omg cannot wait to tell you about Paris) and fried cheese on a salad is my favorite form of balance. 

There will also be this rhubarb cake but not until the weekend when I defrost this sucker for some friends!! It was going to be an alpaca cake until I realized that llama has a silent “l” at the beginning and that’s way more quirky and cool than the trendy alpaca. No offense, alpacas. So this is a happy llama cake! It was inspired by this embroidered llama and I used this cookie cutter. My biggest challenge was making it not look like a baby shower cake, hence the mustard yellow frosting. 

I’m so happy that I could use some of our backyard rhubarb in this. Before it even popped up, I knew I wanted to make a pink fluffy buttery cake. Just like Stella's and Adrianna’s strawberry cakes but rhubarby. Only when I googled rhubarb cake the only things that came up were cakes with entire stalks of rhubarb in the batter or upside down cakes. So I experimented, using my sprinkle cake as a general roadmap and turning to Stella's and Adrianna’s cake as examples for incorporating fruit purée. I thought I’d have a long road of hibiscus-cake-style tweaking ahead of me since rhubarb is quite sour and anytime you change the pH of a batter you need to pay attention to the leavening amounts, but it turns out strawberry and rhubarb have extremely similar pH levels. So the first go was deeelicious! Fluffy, buttery, fruity, and bright. A handful of moisture tweaks later and here it is! It's so tasty and the sourness of the rhubarb balances the sweetness really nicely. To emphasis the rhubarb flavor, I’ve added a layer of rhubarb jam between the layers, along with buttercream. I like a basic vanilla buttercream with this but if rhubarb buttercream is speaking to you then go for it!

rhubarb cake

makes one 2-layer 8" cake

ingredients

cake:

10 oz (284g) rhubarb, chopped

1/4 c water 

1/2 c whole milk

2 3/4 c (352g) cake flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 c (225g) unsalted butter, softened

1/4 c (50g) flavorless oil

1 1/2 c (300g) sugar

Red or pink food coloring, optional

4 large egg whites, at room temperature

2 tsp vanilla

 

assembly:

vanilla frosting (recipe here) or rhubarb frosting (recipe below)

rhubarb jam (1/4 c per layer)

sprinkles, marzipan, optional but recommended

 

clues

Preheat the oven to 350°f. Grease and line the bottoms of two 8” cake pans with parchment and set aside. 

Combine the rhubarb and water in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium high. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the rhubarb is very soft. Let it cool and then combine with the milk in a blender and purée until very smooth.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the butter, oil, sugar, and food coloring, if using, and beat on medium high until light and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the egg whites one at a time, mixing after each, and then add the vanilla. Reduce the mixer to medium low and add the dry ingredients and rhubarb purée in three alternating additions, mixing just until incorporated. Do not over-beat. Divide the batter between the two cake pans and spread it out evenly. Give them a tap on the counter to get rid of any air bubbles and then bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with just a few crumbs; begin checking for doneness at 30 minutes. Let cool in the pans for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Make your frosting of choice! 

Stack up the layers with a thin layer of frosting and rhubarb jam in the middle. If you want to get really fancy and have more rhubarb jam distributed throughout you can slice the layers in half to make four very thin layers. To make the cake pictured, add a layer of funfetti cake in the middle.

Decorate with sprinkles and a marzipan llama. Or alpaca. Up to you.

rhubarb frosting

makes enough for one 2-layer 8" cake

ingredients

8 oz (226g) rhubarb, chopped

2 tb water

1 1/2 c (338g) unsalted butter, softened

5 c (600g) powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract

1/4 tsp rosewater, optional

1/4 tsp kosher salt

3 tb heavy cream

pink food coloring, optional
 

clues

Combine the rhubarb and water in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium high. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for about 15 minutes, until the rhubarb is very soft. Let it cool and then purée in a blender.

In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until soft and creamy. Add the powdered sugar gradually and mix until combined. Add the vanilla, rosewater (if using), and salt and then gradually mix in the cooled rhubarb puree. It may look curdled but continue to beat for 3-5 minutes until combined. Add the heavy cream and food coloring (if using) and beat until combined.

-yeh!

Photos by Chantell and Brett Quernemoen

Pictured: Sweater (cuyana), Funfetti socks (old navy), cake stand (mosser glass)


P.S. Thank you, friends, soooooooooooo much for all of your sweet messages about Girl Meets Farm!! I am so darn thankful for your support and I cannot wait to show you behind the scenes pics and vids and tell you all about the process of filming. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for June 24th, 11am eastern/10am central/11am pacific!