Blue fire and (decreasingly ambitious) foods of summer

We seem to get more views/comments when we post about food. So we offer our second all-food post.

Life in our new apartment is good so far. There have been a couple minor surprises. One was our oven. Once we figured out how to turn it on, we discovered that this is how it heats:

Yes, those are flames coming directly up the back.

It works, though. The other night we felt ambitious, and made tomato, spinach and herb-y ricotta phyllo cups, with sides of stone fruit slaw and lentil salad.

Other nights, we are slightly less ambitious. Tonight, we used the leftover ricotta to make a baked ziti:

Or - even cheaper and easier, we made mango lassies. The mangoes were free (!), courtesy of a produce-seller at our local market who needed to get rid of them. This was also an excuse to use our new stick blender.

That all makes us sound fancier than we are, however. For several nights in a row, this has been our 'home-made' dessert:

It's home-made, because one mixes the ice cream and Coco Pops in a bowl at home. The result is, as the box suggests it would be, an unnaturally crunchy milkshake.

There's a similar spectrum of class/ambition in eating out. For our New Year's Eve picnic (see previous post), we picked up some vegetarian herb-braised faux-duck with bok choi:

Closer to home, and appealing to our baser tendencies (SUGAR + FAT), is an Argentinian gelato place:

This was dark chocolate + wild cherry + gelatello (basically dolce de leche with chocolate biscuit pieces). We weren't seeking out fancy dessert... it was New Year's Day, it was hot, and not much was open.

And, finally, at the far end of the spectrum:

They taste exactly like what you'd expect. The bag (which notes that they are back by popular demand) promises a 'burgery tang'... without actual beef!