Ode to the Philly Pretzel

Chicago deep dish pizza. Memphis barbecue. New York bagels. Famous regional specialties are one of the most important components of the (young) American culinary culture. With Tricia's recent move to the Philadelphia-area, we have recently had the chance to start developing as pretzel connoisseurs by sampling various Philly twists. We have tried quite a few locations (chains, independent storefronts, street vendors), and here a few of our favorites. By no means is this list comprehensive, and if you have suggestions for better pretzels, please send them our way! But for now, this is our ode to the Philly Pretzel!

Lavender Shortbread cookies

It's tea time, and we know the perfect cookie you can have for such occasion. We love all teas, especially English black teas (well they are really teas from India, but the idea of tea time and milk with tea came from the British). Siddharth loves shortbread cookies and we found dried lavender petals at an Asian food store so we figured it would make a great cookie combination. These cookies are great alone, but better when dipped in tea. Lavender might be hard to find, but you can use other floral aromas or citrus zest. Here's the recipe (adapted from London Foodie in New York):

Happy Fall Apple Turnovers!

Happy fall everyone! Autumn is in the air, and this year, it's a great season to apple pick. I just recently inherited more than 5lbs of Macintosh apples. Now, let me preface this: I can eat 1-2 apples a day, but 5lbs of apples is a lot. So here's a recipe for apple turnovers, a perfect baked goody to be enjoyed as a snack or an on-the-go breakfast during the week. This recipe is really easy because it utilizes puff pastry dough that gives the apple turnover flakey crust while pocketing the apples in its caramel sauce. You can skip the hard part by buying frozen puff pastry dough. I used Pepperidge Farm's pastry dough that I thawed out for 10 minutes on the counter. 

The recipe follows: