It’s pumpkin spice season!!! 🎃
And no one can stop me. Plus a strange Raccoon Café.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week we make the Best Pumpkin Bread, drink a Pumpkin Coffee, and more. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Pumpkin maple cafe au lait at home
Made with easy pantry ingredients.
Fall is almost here! Which means the advent of my least favorite New York season of all time: It is chilly outside but the radiator in your building is inexplicably set too high which makes your apartment feel like a fruit dehydrator at all times, and your skin feel like fruit leather. I guess the upside is that I have officially begun embracing the Fall Spice flavors, beginning with the most controversial: Pumpkin spice. Pumpkin on its own tends to have a bit of an acidic, carroty flavor, which is why I actually used dark roast for this pumpkin maple cafe au lait. I do prefer light roast at all times, but this is one case where having a more toasty bean balances out the acid in the pumpkin. To make the pumpkin maple cafe au lait, mix 1 tablespoon of pumpkin puree into 8oz of hot, freshly brewed dark roast coffee, ½ tsp of good cinnamon, a sprinkle each of nutmeg and cloves, and 1 teaspoon of maple syrup. Steam 3oz of whole milk, froth, pour over, and enjoy.
Pumpkin bread with candied ginger at home
Recipe adapted from Taste of Home.
In the Ranking of Breakfast Breads, pumpkin falls below both banana and apple to me, which means I make it approximately once a year and always forget which recipe to use. It’s almost impossible to find a recipe that uses a full can of pumpkin puree and also doesn’t require me to use too many brain cells (I have a thing about recipe ingredient proportions being multiples of each other) so I settled with this simple one from Taste of Home, which uses about half a can. Thankfully, it was a near perfect pumpkin bread recipe – extremely moist and beautifully spiced, which means I’m bookmarking it and won’t have to Google from scratch next year. I reduced the sugar to 1 cup and added about half a cup of candied ginger bits, finding it plenty sweet and flavorful.
Las bisteca burrito at Tacombi
255 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10014
Everytime I hang out with my two pals we always go to Tacombi, because Same Food is a beautiful and safe space. The concept of Same Pals, Same Food is that you avoid the whole awful “where should we go for dinner? You decide! No, you decide!” that depletes you of your thinking energy. However, for some unknown reason I decided to try something new at Same Food dinner, which means I had a full on existential brain melt down as the waiter asked me what I wanted to order. I ended up getting a steak burrito at Tacombi, a taco place, instead of fish tacos, which is my safe order. The burrito was solidly okay! I don’t really like burritos because I don’t like carbs that have other carbs in them as filling (see: Perogies). But I did appreciate that the burrito was Not Too Big, and also had no cheese or sour cream in it.
Ice cream sammie at Milk Bar
74 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014
I feel like Milk Bar products have extreme variation in product quality depending on the location you go to. Or, maybe it’s just that all Milk Bar products are a little bad, except for the Corn Cookie, which is one of my favorite cookies of all time. I don’t know why, but all the products at Milk Bar in the West Village were prepackaged and extremely sad tasting. I stopped by after dinner and the guy behind the counter gave me an ice cream sammie because he was trying to close shop. The ice cream sandwich was composed of approximately 90% rainbow sprinkles and was extremely sweet. Now, I love a vanilla Mr. Softee cone with rainbow sprinkles but the amount of sprinkles on this sandwich was so extreme I felt like I was getting high off the sugar and food dye. That being said, I still enjoyed the first few bites, because an ice cream sammie is an ice cream sammie, no matter how sad.
Coconut pudding in a coconut at Raccoon Cave Coconut Desserts
275 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10014
Everyone who knows me knows that raccoons are my mortal enemy. Yes, they are cute, but any mammal that is smarter than my cat should not also have the ability to move into my attic. Which is why I felt more than a little spooked out by this raccoon themed boba and coconut pudding shop. There’s also the fact that the server serves you your boba (or coconut pudding) order from a hole in the wall wearing a pair of furry raccoon paws. My one friend was convinced that this cafe, which has an extremely odd aura, complete with a trio of airplane gate seating chairs along one side, must be a front for money laundering or something. My other friend, however, loved the whole experience, so YMMV. Personally, I cannot condone any pro-raccoon propaganda, however I did think the coconut pudding served in a fresh coconut was quite tasty.
XOXO,
Soph
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