Wilde Week #5

1. I think I have a problem - I'm addicted to Fairway markets.  If you aren't from the Tri-state area, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about.  If you live near one of these beautiful grocery stores, you totally understand.  If you live in Brooklyn, I feel for you and your Sandy-ravaged store.  (Worry not, it's opening back up on March 1st!).  If I ever need any strange, foreign or fancy ingredient, I know that I can go to Fairway and they will have exactly what I need.

On my most recent trip there I bought the following strange variety of items...
- Blueberry extract
- Biscoff Spread
- Adobo sauce
- Gummy bears
- Meyer lemons
- Tiny, fancy pears
- Dried Kiwi

2. The book of the week - "Matched" by Ally Condie.  Yeah, so I'm a total sucker for teen lit.  Matched is another girl living in a post-apocalyptic world.  Something changes her perspective and all of a sudden the rebellion is on.  Needless to say, I loved it and it only took three days to read.  I'm on to the second book.
3. Sometimes chemistry is super cool.  Take this compound that I made earlier this week.  I walked away from it for twenty minutes and when I came back it had transformed!  It turned from a yellow oil to a sparkly crystal!  Too neat.

4. What color are my nails this week?  They're teal of course!  ("Skinny Jeans" - Sephora by OPI)


I've had this on for a few days, so please ignore the chipped tips!



5. I love this and this and I'm totally doing it later this week.  The question is, weekday hourly photo or weekend hourly photo?  If I do it during the week, you'll get four different views of the commuter trains of NYC!  If I do it on the weekend you'll realize I'm totally boring and like to hang out at home, with a short side trip to Fairway...

6. My mom is super talented and crafty.  Three weeks ago I sent her a pinterest link with a quilt that I thought was pretty.  Within the hour she had asked what size quilt I wanted and had made her way to the quilting store.  Yesterday I received  a giant package in the mail from my mom and it was filled with this amazing quilt!  She's so good to me.

7. Have an iPhone?  Go grocery shopping?  You have to get this app.  Grocery IQ (see it down there, green icon, orange in the Q).  You can use it on all your iDevices and it will sync to each of them!  I like to make my grocery list on the couch with my iPad.  Then I bring my phone with me to the grocery store and shop!  Check check check and I'm done.  I like it that I can add things to my list whenever I think of them.

8. Crossfit continues!  Yesterday they kicked my butt with a power clean warm-up drill.  We went into the core workout in teams of three and performed a round of three exercises.  Pull-ups, power cleans and 200m runs.  As many rounds as your team could do in twenty minutes!  It helped that everyone cheers each other on during the workout, I felt so good after the workout.  Loving it.  Getting buff.

Pear-Raspberry Soda

I'm not quite sure if I still have legs right now.  I mean, I see them and they did carry me home from the gym last night, but they don't really seem to be attached to my body.  I blame Crossfit.

Yep, that's right, I joined the Crossfit cult.  Although I'm not really sure if I'm ready to drink the Kool-aid.  I spent four years participating in and teaching BodyPump  - a totally different type of weight lifting class.  BodyPump is all about repetition until you reach muscle failure.  Crossfit is an Olympic style lifting class that seems to try and make your legs fall off with excessive rowing.

So much rowing!  My poor shins are tired!

There are a few reasons I decided to give Crossfit a try...

1. I have been doing BodyPump for five years and was looking for something a little different.
2. Many of my friends have been going to Crossfit and RAVE about, constantly.
3. The Crossfit gym is literally a block away from my apartment and they have 8pm classes.

Sold.  I'm signed up to go twice a week and I'm ready to burn!  First, I had to spend two weeks taking a Fundamentals class - learning the bar moves so I won't hurt myself during class.  I've been to three classes in the past week and I'm enjoying it, though my legs are wishing we'd cut it with the rowing.

You're wondering what an average Crossfit workout looks like?  Here's what we did yesterday...

Strength work
Bench Press - warm-up & 2x5reps at max weight, 3rd set - go until muscle failure

Conditioning Work
225 jump ropes (or 75 double-unders... which I haven't mastered yet)
50 Ball squats (you first do a squat, then you toss a heavy ball in the air)
25 Knees to elbows (hanging from a pull-up bar, you lift your knees as high as you can!)
Row 1500 meters (So much rowing)

I came home and ate a whole bunch of Girl Scout cookies.  Yum.

I'll keep you posted with the workouts and whether I see myself getting stronger and leaner.  Leaner probably won't happen if I continue finishing my workouts with a row of Peanut Butter patties...

Cereal Milk Panna Cotta

You may have read last week that Boyfriend and I spent Valentine's Day at a baking class in Brooklyn.  Not just any baking class, we spent two hours with the baking team at Momofuku Milk bar, learning the secrets of Crack pie and cereal milk from Christina Tosi.

A few weeks ago, BF sent me a link to the baking class.  How he found it, I have no idea.  He thinks it may have been on Twitter, not sure.  Even though BF isn't really a baker, or even likes to be in the kitchen, he agreed to come with me and bake.  I signed us up and we all of a sudden had Valentine's day plans!  (I later tried to sign up for a second class only to find that they had all sold out!)

If you haven't been to Momofuku Milk bar before, you should put it on your places to visit on your next trip to New York City.  Christina Tosi is the owner/head baker and evil baking genius at Milk bar.  The treats you will find on the menu are creative, mind-boggling and delicious.  Cereal milk ice cream, cornflake marshmallow cookies, kimchi & blue cheese croissants.  Everything I've had there is crazy delicious.

BF and I arrived in Brooklyn Thursday night, ready to bake!  Well, I was ready to bake, BF was ready to help me.  Just outside the door to the Milk bar storefront in Williamsburg was a huge sign, welcoming us to the "Bake the Book Series."  We were ushered inside of the commissary - the Milk bars main baking facility.  The walls are lined with ingredients that you might not traditionally find in a bakery - cases of Ovaltine and tons of cereal.  As well as the usual stuff - giant stand mixers, a wall of ovens and bakers decked out in their kitchen whites.

Our Valentine's day class was the inaugural Momofuku class and the Milk bar team was so welcoming and excited to have us in their kitchen.  I was so excited to hear that we were the first group to be joining the team at the mixers.  Christina Tosi hollered over the crowd, climbed onto a wheeled cart piled high with baking sheets, and gave us a brief history of Milk bar.  The entire baking staff was on hand to help us in the kitchen and answer any questions we had.  They were amazing.

The class was thirty students, fifteen Beville stand mixers and lots of sugar, butter, milk and cereal.  We started out with making the Milk bar classic - Crack pie.  It's super sweet, dense pie, with a mild cereal flavor.  The recipe is in the cookbook, but the secrets are straight from the bakers.  I'll re-run this recipe in a few weeks (after BF and I finish these two pies that we still have!) and see if I remember all the little tips.  The take home tip for making crack pie - don't overmix the filling!

While our pies were baking, we made our second recipe of the night - Cereal milk.  It's a Milk bar classic and it's so crazy simple tasty.  Soak corn flakes in milk for twenty minutes.  Strain off the corn flakes then season with brown sugar and salt.  It's the "milk at the bottom of the cereal bowl."  We bottled it up and tasted a few cereal milk products, including their amazing cereal milk soft serve with corn flake crunch.  The other thing we tried out was a panna cotta made with the milk and that's what I made with my cereal milk at home!

The class finished off with a totally informal question and answer session with the whole Milk bar team.  They were an amazing bunch of people who really seemed to take pride and joy in their work.  I packed up our Crack pies and cereal milk in a carrier bag, picked up a few items before we left (glucose, dehydrated corn powder & a cookie making kit) and got my Milk Bar cookbook signed by the pastry queen herself.  It was a great Valentine's day (topped off with a stop at Crif dogs for some hot dogs) spent with my favorite guy, doing something that I love.

Thanks Milk Bar!  I can't wait to come back!