Welcome to Hill Reeves, a blog where I write about the things I cook and bake in NYC.
Reach me at Hill.Reeves@gmail.com
All in Recipes
I just got back from a delightful Long Island day, reconnecting with my roots. The day started at the beach. My girl Alli brought me a homemade turkey sandwich (the only appropriate beach meal, guys). Then, me, Iris and Blase stopped by Carvel for some soft serve. Finally, shopping at Target and Roosevelt Field Mall, the mall I begged my mom to take me to every weekend throughout middle school. I left with some fantastic new PJs, new stationary, and socks, *blushing smile emoji*.
When it didn't rain this weekend, I instead spent my time prancing around the house, listening to Carly Rae Jepsen and then dress shopping with Candice. We went to a handful of stores in Manhattan in search of a dress for a wedding she's going to this weekend and then ended up just buying workout clothes at Old Navy. Life is full of twists and turns.
My shower is broken! So if you could all send me some condolences until I get my $h!t together enough to arrange for a plumber to come to my house, that would be great. I swear I'm trying; plumbers are just very, very busy people, apparently. You have to call a lot before they answer their phones and leaving just one voicemail takes a lot out of me because I am a millennial and Twitter is how I communicate.
Oh boy, it's so darn hot. I visited my mom in Florida, FLORIDA last week and it was not this hot. I usually try to conserve energy and deal with the summer heat like a European, but the AC has been on pretty much non-stop at our house for the past few days. I even baked some cookies last week cause I was like, how much hotter could it possibly get?
July was absolutely bonkers around here. Dan and I pretty much tag-teamed real-life, as we took turns going out of town all month long. The pups were NOT happy about this arrangement. Jelly's gotten extra clingy as a result, and is never not snuggled up next to me now, but I suppose there are worse things in this world than having a cuddly 1-year-old yellow lab hanging around. It's pretty buhnnoying when I'm trying to do yoga, though.
I don't have great photos of this sticky toffee pudding because we ate it up too quickly for pictures. It was so freakin' delicious. And the coolest part was that I used beets in the batter! Yes, beets, the root veggie that tastes like dirt.
I spent the weekend in Orlando for the Food & Wine Conference by The Sunday Supper Movement and had so much fun. But that means I'm very behind in all things blogging. Funny how meeting other bloggers IRL and talking about how to make our blogs better made me completely slack off.
Everything inside me told me not to do this. Who was I to believe that I could make decent breakfast sandwiches at home? I live in New York, for heaven's sake. There's no way my dinky skillet could ever compete with the flavor of a bodega griddle that's made thousands of egg sandwiches and seen few, if any, cleanings in its lifetime.
Mmm, muffins. Or as I like to call them, cake for breakfast!
When I was in college, I worked part-time as a barista and became a total muffin junkie. Work started when it was still dark out (the people of NYC need their coffee bright and early), so when I left my apartment at 4:30 AM to get to the store in time for my shift, it was always way too soon in the day to stomach anything.
Most of the time, I cook for cravings. When your life revolves around dinner, like mine does, there are a lot hours in the day when you're tossing together ingredients in your mind until you come up with an idea of what sounds exactly perfect. That's how I've discovered favorite meals of mine. It starts with thoughts like "how can I eat as much cheese for dinner as possible?" And ends with a chorizo and poblano queso fundido with warm tortillas. An out-of-hand appetite begets genius.
Some weekends, I go a little kitchen crazy. When cooking and baking are your go-to methods for letting off steam, stressful weeks can result in a weekend that produces more cookies than a human (and her boyfriend and her dogs) can possibly handle. This swiss roll happened on one of those weekends.
