Jocelyn Ziegler

Today despite not having much to do I decided to not waste my day by taking a few trial runs on holiday baking. The first recipe I tried was pumpkin bars with cream cheese icing. I got the recipe from a friend from work brought the bars in for Black Friday. I’m not a fan of pumpkin pie so I passed on trying one until two days later when I worked a late floorset. The ladies I worked with raved about how good they were and I had to have one. It was just as good as they had said. So today I tried baking it myself:

Pre-baking:

Post Baking and cut into bars:

Once these were finished baking I made some Puppy chow! Sorry Lucy… despite the name this isn’t for you! But don’t be sad. She got a regular dog treat after I took the photo.

As a Christmas present for myself I bought icing tips. This was my trial run and it was pretty fun. I ended up deciding just to ice them regularly because I had a lot of leftover icing and since they were all different they looked a little silly.

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Lately I’ve been taking steps to try to better myself: volunteering, exercising and eating right (I’m also considering taking up yoga). As far as eating goes I’ve been challenging myself to make one day a week meatless. It has been much harder than I originally thought. I tend to start out really well at the beginning of the day and then I have moments where I completely forget and end up eating a chicken sandwich (or a burger or really any other meat) So I’m writing this to put it out in the blogosphere that I will commit to one day meat free a week starting today.

Breakfast: Bagel, Vanilla Yogurt, OJ

Lunch: Grilled Cheese, Cream of Broccoli Soup, Water

Dinner: To be decided. Any suggestions?

In an unrelated note Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is set to expire in 4 days from Hulu. Check it out here and the movie as well as the soundtrack is on my Christmas list. *wink wink*

This was my first year at the Taste of Cincinnati. It has been AMAZING!
The random food I’ve eaten in the last two days has been nothing short of epic.

I started yesterday at lunchtime. My parents came to visit and were pretty adamant about going to Montgomery Inn. I’ve lived in Cincinnati for three and a half years and I realized I had never eaten there. So, we all went there for lunch. My mom got the ribs and let me have a bite- Holy crap it was delicious. My dad and I got the pulled pork and between the three of us we split Saratoga Chips and BBQ sauce. I was happy with my pulled pork (I’m a terribly messy eater so I wouldn’t have gotten the ribs anyway) but the Saratoga Chips were a little stale. The BBQ sauce covered it well though. Then of course there was Graeter’s.

Graeter’s was conducting a blind taste test on the Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream. They’re trying to take everything artificial out of their ice cream. They’re trying to change the mint chocolate chip ice cream from green to white (sad!). Granted, it’s better for you but it’s MINT and you want it to be GREEN. Maybe offering both would be smart? I asked them about whether they could find a natural alternative to the green, but they said they had tried everything to no avail.

In any case, for dinner I tried a gyro from Taz. I wasn’t very impressed because it had been pre-made and was cold. I understand if you’re busy making them ahead of time but I wouldn’t make so many that they got cold. It was depressing.

Today I didn’t go until 6:30. But I was starving since I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I started with a slice of pizza from Balboa’s which was awesome. I had never heard of it until I actually walked by when I was going to the event on Saturday. The business was closed so I was excited to see them there. Then the corn was strongly recommended to me. I bought mine from City BBQ and was not disappointed by the juicy deliciousness. Then- of course, more Graeter’s.

I would really like to go back tomorrow just to try to some of the Thai, Chinese, or German food. Ya know that eating better thing I was talking about in previous posts? I swear that will happen after Monday. Seriously. I even bought Healthy Choice meals the last time I was at the grocery store.

Tonight for dinner I went to York Street Cafe. I am interning for CityBeat and they just rolled out the Best of Cincinnati card and York Street Cafe is one of the participating restaurants. We were so lucky. As it turns out that on Wednesday & Sunday if you buy two entrees you get a bottle of wine for $1. Yes. ONE DOLLAR. How awesome is that?

So we started with a bottle of Riesling and our appetizer (I forget the name and for some reason it’s not on the online menu) was a bread topped with pesto, goat cheese, tomato, provolone cheese, and a berry vinaigrette. Absolutely phenomenal. Goat cheese has such a distinctive taste and the vinaigrette was quite an opposite flavor so it all just exploded deliciousness from all sides in your mouth.

For our main course I ordered the shrimp penne paste and my friend ordered the ribs. The shrimp penne pasta included corn, tomatoes, and scallions along with the shrimp and the sauce was absolutely perfect. Of course we shared bites and the ribs were a bit too spicy for my taste. My friend loved them though and they were accompanied by mashed potatoes and broccoli.

The meal was winding down and the server asked if we wanted dessert. Well everything else had been great so we really couldn’t turn it down. I had the peanut butter pie and he had a milk chocolate cake with chocolate icing. My peanut butter pie was so thick and creamy that I really didn’t want to share, but the cake looked almost as good. It was almost as good, but on a scale of 1-10 my peanut butter pie was at least a 15.

All-in-all a great experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere (very cute- I could totally understand why this was voted best place for a first date.) It had a certain comfort to it; like you were visiting back home.  The service was also great. The room we were seated in ended up having a birthday party that was bigger than they had anticipated so they asked us if we would like to move to the back before we got our entrees. Everyone was very personable and helpful. For a three course meal for two with wine on a Wednesday our total was $66.61 before tip. Highly recommended and worth it.