Sweet Amandine

There you have it

2012-01-16T13:05:00.000-05:00

On December 31st, 2011, I sent my friend Molly a text: I’m having a salad vision.

It looked like this:

(Minus the feet.)

Butter lettuce, toasted walnuts, fresh ricotta, and sautéed dates for our New Year’s Eve dinner that night. The list of ingredients is more or less the recipe today, so there you have it, but I do want to talk to you for just a moment about the dates. I can’t stop thinking about them.

The dates are where my salad vision began. Specifically, with the sautéed dates and yogurt that I ate for breakfast at Sitka and Spruce in Seattle last May. I’d been meaning to recreate the dish, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it, and it suddenly occurred to me that sautéed dates might be equally at home at dinner, maybe with cheese instead of yogurt, and some greens on the side. It would be a plated salad. We'd toss the lettuce with a vinegary dressing, sauté the dates in olive oil, and lay them over small heaps of ricotta. Molly was in, and in typical Molly fashion, she upped the ante. With butter. We should sauté the dates in butter. Sing it, Molly.

Sautéing dates is a beautiful, beautiful thing. You roll them in a pan of hot, foaming butter and, once coated, leave them alone. The skin against the pan starts to caramelize, and after about a minute or so, you flip them, and let the other side do the same. Just out of the pan, they gleam. They're deep mahogany where they’ve taken the most heat, more candy in places than fruit. Like toffee-in-the-making at the hard-ball stage.

Dress the greens, top with walnuts; spoon the ricotta, top with dates. A vision. Yep.

Sautéed Dates with Ricotta and Butter Lettuce
Inspired by breakfast at Sitka and Spruce, with help from the one and only Molly B.

I’ve called out butter lettuce in the title of this recipe since that was my original plan, but in the end I used part butter lettuce and part red leaf lettuce. Get whatever looks good. Just steer clear of the boxed and bagged lettuces and you’ll be fine. You’re welcome to use your own favorite vinaigrette for the dressing. You want something with enough of a vinegary bite to balance the sweetness on the other side of the plate. Simple is best. I went with oil and vinegar with a squirt of Dijon mustard and a few grinds of black pepper – no herbs or spices.

2 c. fresh ricotta (store bought – go for the good stuff – or make your own)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
12 Medjool dates
Maldon salt (optional)
2 medium heads of butter lettuce (or butter lettuce and red leaf lettuce, one head each)
1 c. walnuts

For the vinaigrette:
6 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil (plus a little more if you decide to tone down the vinegar)
3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 squirt (about ¼ tsp.) Dijon mustard (you can add more, if you want)
A few grinds of black pepper

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast them for about 7 minutes, until fragrant. Set aside.

Remove the lettuce leaves from the heads, gently wash them in cold water, spin dry, then lay them out on towels and leave them to finish drying. (If your kitchen is very hot, it’s best to lay them out somewhere else to prevent the leaves from wilting.)

Shake up the vinaigrette in an empty jar, or whisk it together in a bowl. Start with 6 tablespoons of olive oil, then taste it. If it’s too vinegary for you, add more oil, one teaspoon at a time, until you get something you like.

Spoon about a third of a cup of ricotta onto each plate. You’ll want to put it over to one side to leave room for the lettuce.

Slice the ends off of the dates and pull out their pits. Melt the butter in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter foams, add the dates. Let them sit undisturbed for about a minute, until their bottoms begin to caramelize and turn deep brown. Flip them, and leave them for another minute to do the same. Remove the dates to a plate when they’re done.

Toss the lettuce with the vinaigrette (less is more; you will most likely have extra dressing), and place a pile of leaves next to each heap of ricotta. Top the lettuce with the toasted walnuts and the cheese with the sautéed dates, two per plate. If you think of it, sprinkle a few flakes of Maldon salt on the dates. I meant to, but I forgot. Next time.

Serves 6.

Three

2012-01-07T23:58:00.004-05:00

Today is January 7th, 2012, which means that Sweet Amandine is three. It’s been kind of insane, hasn’t it? There was the brain thing, the baby thing, a summer in Berlin, a new apartment and construction projects galore, so(!) much(!) butter and sugar and flour. Whew. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you.

January feels like an honest to goodness starting line this year. I’ve got a couple of new projects on the drawing board, and while I’m not exactly sure what comes next, I’m excited. 2012 will be a year for working hard on things I care about. I’m really looking forward to that.

We had some friends over on New Year’s Eve to cook and to eat. That’s Steph up there grinding the pepper for the fennel and Molly working on the gnocchi. The blur all the way on the right is me. I’m making ricotta. We started the evening at 5pm, and instead of putting together the entire meal at once, we prepared one course at a time, gathering around the table to eat whenever the next round was up. It’s my new favorite way to do dinner.

Molly and I figured out the menu over e-mail and texts all week long. We decided to keep it simple, and I’m glad. The salad was butter lettuce in a mustardy vinaigrette, toasted walnuts, ricotta, and sautéed dates. Then, while Molly dropped her gnocchi into the pot and prepared a brown butter sage sauce, I caramelized the fennel and tossed it with the dill and garlic that Steph had chopped.

It was the best night.

We finished with bourbon balls, pear tarte Tatin, and a dance party in the living room.

(Champagne, too, of course.)

And then we found out that on New Year’s Eve, we can see fireworks from our living room. 2012, you're full of surprises already.

No shortage of recipes to share with you tonight, as you can see, but it’s late, so I’m going to sign off for now. I’ll be back soon with one or two from this meal.

Happy 2012.

2-0-1-1

2011-12-30T15:12:00.003-05:00

Ahhh, 2011, you’ve treated us well. A new apartment! A new human! And for the first year since 2007, no one cut open my head! Yahooooo! 2-0-1-1, you thought of everything. Then, to top it all off, you squeezed in some fudgy bourbon balls just under the wire. That’s bourbon and chocolate together in one boozy confection.

It’s been a very good year.

The recipe comes from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, the same cookbook that brought us that special snacking cake and rosemary-laced lemon bars, which practically makes these bourbon balls delicious by association. I added them to our Chanukah party spread last week, sent some off to my family in Ohio, then hurried right back into the kitchen to prepare a batch for New Year’s Eve. I thought you might want to make them for New Year’s Eve, too, though to be perfectly honest, I’m kicking myself for sharing the recipe with you only this afternoon. You can start these bourbon balls the night before, or even the day you plan to serve them if you can get the dough together with enough time to let it rest before rolling. The one- to two-day old balls will be very good. But I’ve found that they don’t really arrive until day four or five. That’s when their fudginess peaks. (The bourbon in these little buggers sneaks up on you, by the way, so watch out.)

A couple of things about this recipe surprised me. First, there’s the fact that you crunch up store-bought chocolate cookies in a food processor and use the crumbs as the base for the balls. In other words, you’re making what amounts to a cookie out of cookies. It's cookie cannibalism, people. Then comes the part where you have to leave the dough (can I even call it “dough?”) uncovered for hours to dry it out. That also felt strange, and especially so when I realized that the finished balls also do best when left out in the open. For days. But then you have yourself a plate of bourbon balls so dense and rich – almost chewy – that suddenly, the whole thing feels perfectly natural. Of course, that could be the bourbon talking.

I’m going to unplug next week to wrap up a work project and get some ducks in a row, but I’ll be back on January 7th with a recipe and some thoughts for 2012. Until then, Happy New Year, friends.

[Oh, and p.s. – When we moved last spring, we did so with the help of some good friends. No boxes, if you recall. We just picked up our stuff and carried it over to the apartment next door. Eli captured the whole apartment take-down on camera and stitched the shots together into a stop-action video. It’s a fun piece, and I thought you might like to see it… if only to see poor Eli trot across our empty living room with a 19-weeks-pregnant Jess on his back!]

Music: "Cripple Creek," Mike Seeger.

Fudgy Bourbon Balls
Adapted from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, by Melissa Clark

Melissa Clark recommends using Nabisco Famous wafers for the cookie crumbs, but any crisp chocolate cookie will do. Think Oreo cookie (minus the cream) or crisper. I used Mi-Del Chocolate Snaps. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen has a recipe for chocolate wafers that would work beautifully, if you’re into the whole bake a cookie to make a cookie routine.

2½ c. chocolate cookie crumbs
1¼ c. pecans
½ c. good bourbon or rum (I used Woodford Reserve)
1 c. confectioners’ sugar, plus additional for rolling
3 Tbsps. unsweetened cocoa powder, plus additional for rolling
1½ Tbsps. honey

In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the cookie crumbs and the pecans until the nuts are finely ground.

In a separate bowl, stir together the bourbon and the rum, 1 cup confectioners’ sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa powder, and honey. Add the mixture to the food processor and pulse until just combined. Transfer the dough to a bowl, preferably a wide, shallow one to maximize air exposure, and let it rest, uncovered, at room temperature for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. You want the dough to try out a bit before rolling the balls.

Using one level teaspoonful of dough per ball, use your fingers to roll into balls. Roll some of the balls in confectioners’ sugar, and some of them in cocoa powder. The coatings will absorb into the balls over time, so if you want, you can sprinkle or re-roll in the sugar and cocoa just before serving.

Yield: A zillion bourbon balls, by which I mean about 100.

She made soup

2011-12-26T10:43:00.000-05:00

The first few weeks after Mia was born were the soupiest weeks of my life. My mother made mushroom barley soup, my friends dropped by with lentil soup, more lentil soup, and minestrone, and when we ran out of all that, Eli defrosted a container of his mother’s chicken soup. We ate it with matzo balls, parsnips, carrots, and celery and then, when Mia was five and a half weeks old, my stepmother, Amy, came to town.

I wish I could remember more about that visit. According to my journal, that was the week when Mia started crying actual tears, and the week she first looked me straight in the eye and beamed, so that’s something. Amy did laundry – I remember that – and she hung out with Mia early one morning so that I could sleep for an hour or two. She cooked, of course: a pumpkin stuffed with everything good, some kind of chicken in wine, maybe a pasta dish. And because Amy knows what you want to eat most of all when you’ve just made a human, she made soup.

Soups, I should say. Four in the not even five days she was here. She started with pea soup, I think, then moved on to beef stew, which isn’t exactly soup, but I’m counting it anyway, then to kale and bean soup, which we’ll come back to in a second. On Amy’s last morning here, Eli, Mia, my father, and I drove up to the Newburyport Half Marathon (Eli ran, we cheered), and when we got back, she was gone. In her place, a tomato-based vegetable soup, still warm, sat waiting to be sealed and stowed. Poof! Amy knows how to make an exit.

I like soup, and this specific cluster of soups was especially good. I hate to play favorites, but -- as you've probably already guessed -- the kale and bean soup was a standout, for me. Amy sent me the recipe when she got home, and I’ve been making it on repeat ever since. Kale and bean soup is a homely soup with just a few simple ingredients: an onion, two garlic cloves, kale, a couple of cans of beans, and vegetable stock. You can toss in a Parmesan rind, too, if you have one. What got me excited about this soup is the way you lightly mash some of the beans when you add them to the pot so that they give their guts over to the broth. Now that I have an eye out for it, I realize that partial bean mashing is standard operating procedure for a lot of bean soups, but I had never done it before. One recipe that I came across last week says that mashing the beans “thickens” the soup, but I would describe the effect more as a “texturizing.” It reminds me a little of miso soup, the way the mashed beans cloud the broth.

I took a break from this soup over the last few days to focus my attention on latkes and all manner of sweets, but today, it’s making a comeback. I’m guessing that in these last days of 2011, we could all use a little soup. Enjoy.

Kale and Bean Soup
Adapted from The Columbus Dispatch

I’ve made a few changes to the recipe that Amy sent along. Instead of two cans of cannellini beans, I use one can of cannellini, and one can of chickpeas. I tried the chickpeas at Eli’s suggestion, and he was right. They make the soup feel richer. I’m not sure why. Are chickpea guts richer than cannellini guts? Maybe. At any rate, I think chickpeas have a more distinctive flavor than cannellini beans, so that might be it. I also added garlic into the mix. As for the kale, I usually prefer dinosaur kale (a.k.a. Lacinato kale, the kind with flat, dark leaves), but for this soup, I go with curly. It stands up better to the twenty-minute soak and steam in the pot. (Though if all you have is dinosaur, use it. It will be fine.)

1 lb. kale
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 14.5 oz. can each cannellini beans and chickpeas, drained and rinsed
4 c. water
2 c. vegetable broth
A Parmesan rind, if you have one
Shaved Parmesan for serving (I use a vegetable peeler to shave nice, wide ribbons.)
Salt and pepper

Rinse the kale and tear the leaves away from the stems. The original recipe says to cut the leaves into ½-inch strips, but I just tear them into small-ish pieces with my hands.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the chopped onion, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the sliced garlic, and push it around a little with the onions. When the aroma rises, add half of the beans, and mash them lightly in the pot. I find that a potato masher works best, but a fork will also do. Either way, hold onto the side of the pot with one (oven-mitted) hand while you mash to make sure that the pot doesn’t slide.

Add the water, the broth, and the Parmesan rind, if using, and bring to a boil. Stir in the kale and the remaining beans, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer, partially covered, until the kale is tender, about 20 minutes.

Ladle the soup into bowls, and drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil. Top with the shaved Parmesan and plenty of black pepper.

Serves 4.

Hi

2011-12-14T18:13:00.003-05:00

We're having kale and bean soup for dinner, and my favorite squash salad from Plenty. How about you?

The good stuff

2011-12-09T17:11:00.006-05:00

My friend, Mathias, knows a thing or two about coffee. When I found out that he was coming to stay with us for a few days in August, I bought a Chemex coffee maker in the hope that he would teach me how to use it. He did, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

I’m not much of a coffee drinker – probably why I never learned how to brew a proper cup – but I am a breakfast maker and eater, and when I have people over for pancakes or custard-filled corn bread, it’s nice to be able to offer them a cup of the good stuff. Much better than my previous modus operandi, which consisted of me apologetically nudging a French press and a bag of (cover your eyes, Mathias) pre-ground coffee in the direction of my guests, and having them make it themselves.

Earlier this week, Mathias published a coffee gear guide on his blog. It’s a great resource if, like me, you’re just starting out, so I wanted to share it with you.

Some other things to kick off the weekend:

:: Karrah Kwasnik’s photography. I met Karrah last night at a PechKucha Night in Portsmouth, where she presented her work. This woman does amazing things with ~~film~~. Correction: Not film! She shoots in digital, prints the negatives on transparency paper, and makes the images using the Van Dyke Brown printing process. In other words, Karrah is even cooler than I thought.

:: Mr. W. Poor guy. (Thanks for this, Kasey.)

:: This beautiful essay by Marisa about her “imaginary mentor.” I think it’s important to have those.

See you next week.

PechaKucha Night: Everybody Eats

2011-12-08T14:22:00.006-05:00

Hi, all.

I wanted to stop in today to tell you about a PechaKucha event happening tonight in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The theme of the event is food, and here’s how it works: Nine people who care about food will present for a few minutes about what they do. Each presenter is allowed 20 slides, and 20 seconds per slide to tell his or her story. (The slides advance automatically.) Tonight’s presenters are a fisherman, a sculptor, a photographer, a chef, an activist, a writer, a restaurant owner, a local food organizer, oh, and ME!

The story that I’ll be telling tonight is ours. It’s the story of this blog: how I got sick, lost my everyday, and how this space helped me find it again. How Sweet Amandine helped me find me again. I’ve never talked about this stuff out loud in public before, so I’m pretty nervous. Also, excited!

For the uninitiated: PechaKucha means “chit-chat” in Japanese, and events take place all over the world. The idea behind them is simply to get creative people together and talking. I’ve only ever been to one, but I can tell you that I left feeling inspired.

Tonight’s event will be held at Street 360, 801 Islington St. in Portsmouth, NH. Doors open at 6:00pm, and we’ll begin at 7:00pm. You can find more information about the event and my fellow presenters here.

I know it’s short notice, but if you happen to live in the area, it would be great to see you out there.

What the cookie tin wants

2011-12-07T10:38:00.015-05:00

All right, enough with the parsnip and cabbage. Let’s have dessert.

Around this time every year, I go cookie hunting. (In fact, I just noticed that it was exactly one year ago to the day that I posted last year’s find. What are the chances of that?) I know I’m not the only one. We all have our tried and trues, but the cookie tin wants what the cookie tin wants, and come December, what it wants is something new. So we take to our cookbooks, our magazines, our piles of recipes, printed and clipped, and armed with sticky tabs, off we go. We’re never sure exactly what we’re looking for. We’ll know it when we see it.

The December cookie once traveled in packs (sometimes, it still does). Today, it most often flies solo, like the one I spotted yesterday among the beasts and fowl, vegetation, and other edibles of a new, already-beloved cookbook. There, in the glorious habitat of Dorie Greenspan’s Paris kitchen, I discovered a whole new species.

It’s called a croquant, and its identifying characteristics are difficult to describe. Imagine a cross between a macaroon (this variety) and a meringue. It’s sort of like that. Croquant means crunchy, and crunchy it is, though not in the typical way. To me, crunchy cookies mean sugar cookies, buttery slabs that snap when you bite in. The croquant takes crunchy in a different direction. “Airy” is not a word that I usually associate with cookies, especially not the crisp kind, but here, it works. That’s because of the way this cookie crumbles, which is not like a cookie at all. It crumbles more like a cracker, specifically, like those rice crackers with practically no ingredients. You know the ones. Croquants are similarly simple, with just four ingredients to speak of. When I was chopping the nuts, then stirring them in with the sugar, then the egg whites, then the flour, I had trouble picturing what a cookie empty of butter, and oil, and extracts, and leavening, would even look like. Well, it looks like this, people:

And it’s worth every bit of its nonexistent salt. The croquant is a rare bird, indeed.

::

p.s. If you're reading this via RSS or e-mail, I hope you'll click over to the site today. I've made some changes that I'm excited to share with you.

Croquants
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Around my French Table

One teaspoon of dough per cookie will look like a pitifully small amount, but don’t be alarmed. The dough spreads and puffs into a perfect two-to-three-bite cookie as it bakes. As you might imagine from the ingredient list, these cookies are quite sweet. That makes them very nice with a cup of unsweetened coffee or tea or, my favorite, warm milk.

About the nuts: I used a combination of unskinned hazelnuts and almonds, which Dorie Greenspan says is the most popular in these croquants. She also notes that the version she makes with salted cashews is her "house favorite." I'm thinking of making a batch with pecans or walnuts the next time around.

3½ ounces (about a cup) of nuts, barely chopped
1¼ c. sugar
2 large egg whites
½ c. plus 1 Tbsp. flour, sifted

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Put the nuts and the sugar in a medium mixing bowl and stir together with a rubber spatula. Stir in the egg whites, then the flour, to form a loose dough. Don’t worry if it looks more like a grainy batter than any cookie dough you’ve ever seen. It’s supposed to look that way.

Drop the dough by the teaspoonful onto the parchment-lined baking sheets. The dough will spread, so be sure to leave about 2 inches between each mound of dough. You can use your finger to round the edges of each one.

Bake the cookies for 8-10 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through, until they puff up, and the tops crackle and brown. I baked these cookies one sheet at a time. If you want to bake two sheets at once, swap the upper and lower sheets after the first 4-5 minutes so that your cookies will brown evenly.

Place the baking sheet on a cooling rack, and let the cookies stand for about 10 minutes, until you can easily peel them away from the parchment. Transfer the cookies to the cooling rack, and allow them to cool to room temperature. Repeat with the remaining dough. Use a cool baking sheet each time, or your dough will start to melt and spread before you even make it to the oven.

Store in a dry, covered container – not in a plastic bag or plastic wrap – or they will lose their crunch.

Dorie Greenspan says that this recipe makes 34 cookies. Using a level teaspoon of dough for each cookie and rather large bits of nuts, I had closer to 50.

I’m talking about parsnip

2011-11-29T14:05:00.010-05:00

When I was a little girl, “Friday night dinner” was a thing, an event that began each week in the lobby of my grandparents’ apartment building. I got to find the buzzer on the board, number 815, and press it with my finger. Then, there was an elevator ride up, and my grandfather standing in the doorway of the last apartment on the left. My sister and I would charge down the long hallway. I haven’t thought about that for a long time, and it surprises me how clearly I remember the sound of our footfall on the carpet. “When I was a little girl” means something different to me now that Mia’s here.

My grandmother’s name was Marion. The last time I was home in Cleveland, I found a photo of her that was taken in the house where my mother grew up.

I never saw her kitchen like that, so cluttered with dishes, and pots, and appliances (and, uh, Grape Ade?), but I wish I had. She looks happy.

My grandmother was beautiful and liked to make herself more beautiful. Most days, she smelled faintly of hairspray and makeup, but on Friday nights, when I loved her most, she smelled like soup, brothy, salted, and sweet. I’m not sure if she would have appreciated my saying a thing like that. If she were here, I hope she would know what I mean. For those Friday night meals, my grandmother would sometimes make pea soup, and sometimes mushroom barley, but her fallback position was chicken soup. She made it almost every week.

I’m not going to tell you about my grandmother’s chicken soup today, though someday, I’d like to. Instead, I want to tell you about just one special component of it. At least I thought it was, when I was a kid. Special, and also a little bit weird. I’m talking about parsnip. By now, I’ve eaten parsnip every which way – roasted and braised, steamed and stewed – but back then, the only parsnip I’d ever met was the parsnip that turned up each week in that soup. It looked like carrot floating there in the pot, only white, and that felt exotic, to me. It tasted exotic, too, richer and greener and more fragrant than the other root vegetables I knew. I always asked for extra parsnip in my bowl.

The soup I have for us today features parsnip, along with more fresh parsley than I’ve ever seen in a single recipe. I’m used to measuring parsley by the tablespoon, or by the handful, at most. So if you’re like me, the sight of two cups of chopped parsley on your cutting board will mildly terrify you. You may even decide that, the first time around, you’ll add just a cup, and see how it goes, because two cups, two cups – that can’t be right. Like me, you’d be wrong. I’m not sure how it works, but in there with the parsnips and leeks (Oh, did I mention? There are also leeks.), two cups of parsley is perfect. All of that parsley has an added benefit, too: it turns the soup the loveliest shade of green. You’ll have to trust me on this one, since I’ve gone black and white on you, today. Or, you can click over to Elise’s site, where I found the recipe. She’s posted a gorgeous green glamour shot right here.

I made this soup twice the week before Thanksgiving to use up the last of the parsnips and leeks from this year’s farm share, and I’ll be making it again, soon. It takes only a few minutes to get everything into the pot, and just another few later on to purée it. It’s 100% vegetables, which means it's quite light, but rich enough that a friend of mine asked if it had any cream in it. All of which makes it a nice soup to have in your back pocket this time of year. You know, when your front pockets are full of cookies.

Parsnip Soup with Leeks and Parsley
Adapted from Simply Recipes

I mentioned the pretty green color of this soup, so I should warn you that it holds onto its green for only so long. It will still taste perfectly delicious on the second or third day after you make it, but it will lose some of its vibrance. Also, a word about parsnip prep: If the cores are hard and fibrous, remove them before chopping the rest of the parsnip. If the cores seem okay to you, you can leave them in.

2 Tbsp. butter
3 leeks, white and pale green parts only, sliced lengthwise, and then crosswise into ¼-inch slices
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1½-2 pounds parsnips, peeled and chopped
4 strips lemon peel, 1” x 2” each
1-2 tsp. salt
4 c. vegetable stock
2 c. water
2 c. finely chopped fresh Italian (flat leaf) parsley (plus a little more, if you want some for garnish)
1-2 Tbsp. lemon juice
Black pepper, to taste

Heat the butter in a 4 to 6 quart pot over a medium flame. When the butter foams, add the leeks, and toss to coat them with the butter. Once the leeks are sizzling, lower the heat and cover the pan. Cook until soft. Don’t let the leeks brown.

Add the parsnips and olive oil, and toss to coat. Sprinkle with salt, then add the stock, the water, and lemon peel. Bring to a boil, uncovered, then lower the heat, cover the pot, and cook at a low simmer until the parsnips are completely tender. It should take about 30 minutes.

Remove and discard the lemon peels. Add the parsley, and purée the soup until smooth with an immersion or stand blender. If using a stand blender, be careful! When blending hot liquids, never fill the blender more than halfway. I like to hold the cover of the blender closed with a dish towel, just to be safe.

Return the puréed soup to the pot, and stir in the lemon juice. Taste, and add more salt or black pepper, if needed. Garnish with the rest of the chopped parsley, a little olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper. Elise also suggests chopped chives. That sounds good, to me.

Serves 6.

How we gather

2011-11-23T21:44:00.015-05:00

A baby lives with us now, which means that I get less sleeping time. Less sleeping time, though, means more thinking time, and that feels like a fair trade. Today, I’ve been thinking about how we gather.

My parents are divorced, so how we gather, the “we” that gathers, changes each year.

Last year, we joined my step-mom Amy’s family for Thanksgiving in Toledo, Ohio. These photos are from that trip. With guitars, and buckeyes, and elbows on the table is how we gathered there.

With borrowed sweatshirts, a football, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (he’s back!), and three kinds of pie.

Before the meal, we joined hands around the table. Each of us had to say out loud why we were thankful for the person on our left. I like that we gather that way. A person who loves me very much was standing on my right, and when her turn came, she said simply that she was thankful that I was here. I had had my fourth and final surgery five and a half months earlier, a surgery that we hadn’t expected, but that had felt like a finish line, of sorts. That’s why she said it, I know, because my being almost gone, but then here, was still on everyone’s mind. The thing is, it had only just recently stopped being always on my mind, so being thanked for being “here” felt hard. “Is that the bar, for me? Not dead?” I asked Eli before bed that night. I want to be more than just “here.”

We’re staying put in Cambridge this year for Thanksgiving. My mother is with us, and we’re going to my friend Julia’s parents’ house tomorrow. I’m bringing apple cake. Maybe something chocolate, too.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you next week, with soup.

A greater slaw

2011-11-16T05:57:00.001-05:00

I was on the phone with a friend the other day, when she mentioned something that occurred “last summer.” I happened to know for a fact that that something could not have occurred “last summer,” by which, I assumed, she meant the summer of 2010, summer of Schoko-Reiswaffeln, and pelmeni, and exceedingly kind Dutch waiters. But of course, by “last summer” she meant last summer, the one that began and ended a few months ago in our very own 2011. This year’s last summer. That this year already has a “last summer” to speak of blew my mind. How did that happen? It’s November, friends! Halfway to December, even. Yet I somehow missed the part where summer slipped so far into our past that we have to glance back over our shoulders to get a good look at it.

There were signs: the darker days, the stuffed pumpkin for dinner, the return of the scarves and, not least, the September baby – so tiny that I thought she might pop at the lightest touch – now nine weeks old. And then, this week, there was cabbage. I’m not talking about the white-ish green Arrowhead cabbages that have been manning the markets now for months. I mean the purple kind, huge, heavy, and sweet. One turned up in our farm share box last week. I was thinking about what to do with it, heading in the direction of braise, when Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Plenty, arrived at my door with a game-changing page 102. The recipe is called “Sweet winter slaw” and, after momentarily panicking that the purple cabbage in my fridge meant I’d missed the end of autumn, too, I realized that this past summer was not only a slippery one, but a slaw-less one. I’ll say it again, this time with feeling: How did that happen? Cue the compensatory slaw, a winter slaw made mid-autumn to make up for a slaw-less summer.

Ottolenghi’s slaw, the one in the book, is rather more involved than the one you see here. The “sweet” in the title is not just red cabbage-sweet, but papaya-sweet, mango-sweet and, above all, caramelized macadamias-sweet. Ottolenghi calls for a fresh red chile. And cilantro! And mint! And lemongrass in the dressing! I would like to eat that slaw. If I ever find myself in a kitchen with all said items present, I will. In the meantime, I’ll eat it the way I made it last week (three times!), with what I had on hand: cabbage and more cabbage. I threw in some peanuts and sesame seeds, too. Eli and I first ate it for dinner alongside scrambled eggs last week, and he immediately insisted that it’s more of a salad than a slaw. I thought it was because, for him, slaw means coleslaw, and coleslaw means mayo. (“The only slaw I ever knew,” he said.) But today he tells me it’s because this slaw feels like something more than slaw. It’s a greater slaw, as slaws go, a slaw that requires very little, if anything, else on the plate to make it a meal. So call it salad, or call it slaw. With a couple of rye crackers and a bit of cheese, I call it lunch.

Red Cabbage Slaw
Adapted from Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

Yotam Ottolenghi’s as-written recipes are perfectly tuned. I know because I’ve had the chance to eat several dishes from this book at the table of my friend, Molly. I was fairly certain at first that paring down this recipe to the barest of bones made me a bad person. Then, I tasted my version, and I felt better. It’s delicious this way, too.

For the dressing:

6½ Tbsp. lime juice
3 Tbsp. maple syrup
2 Tbsp. toasted (or just plain old) sesame oil
1 tsp. soy sauce
¼ tsp. chile flakes
4 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

For the salad:

½ a red cabbage (10 oz.), finely shredded
7 inner leaves of a Savoy cabbage (6 oz.), finely shredded (Any green cabbage will do if you don’t have a Savoy.)
½ tsp. chile flakes
A few pinches of salt
¾ c. peanuts
2 Tbsp. sesame seeds
1 c. loosely packed cilantro, roughly chopped (optional; I know how some of you out there feel about cilantro.)

Make the dressing: In a small saucepan, heat all of the ingredients but the oils. Reduce over high heat for 5-10 minutes, or until thick and syrupy. Remove from the heat, let cool, and whisk in the oils.

Pile the shredded cabbage in a large mixing bowl, season with the salt ad ½ teaspoon chile flakes, and toss with the dressing. Add the peanuts and sesame seeds, a little more salt, if necessary, toss again, and serve.

Serves four hungry people who will eat it as a main dish, and six not-so-hungry people who will eat it on the side.

P.S.

2011-11-07T07:20:00.000-05:00

I know what you’re thinking: that couldn’t possibly be a photo of an apple cake. Especially not an apple cake that looks so strikingly similar to a certain Teddie’s Apple Cake that I described to you not one week ago. What can I say? That cake and I weren’t through.

It’s nothing new. I’ve never been good at leaving well enough alone. One day last week, I spent so much time penning over a “1” that looked suspiciously seven-ish on an outgoing piece of mail that I had to tear up the envelope and start over. And back in September, I couldn’t help but swoop down with my spatula to smooth a tiny blip in the frosting on my father’s birthday cake, thereby creating a new tiny blip, which I fixed, but then blip, fixed, but then blip, and so on, until I had resurfaced the entire thing. I’m working on it. At least I was. But then along came a cake that confirms what I’ve always suspected: sometimes “well enough,” even very, very well enough, could be, should be better.

My friend, Molly, came over for some baby squishing the day that I first made Teddie’s. I had prepared enough batter to fill a giant tube pan, but since I don’t own a tube pan, I had divided it into two 9-inch cake pans, which meant that I had an extra cake parked on my counter when Molly arrived. We ate from the first, and she took the second cake home to serve at a dinner party that evening. I had told her about my niggly plans for a browner, wheatier Teddie’s, and the next morning, I got an e-mail. The cake had been a hit:

“if you improve upon it in the ways you were saying, i think it will be unstoppable. an apple cake to take over the world.”

Friends, meet your new world leader.

Everything I told you about last week’s Teddie’s is true of this week’s too, only it’s darker, on account of the brown sugar, heartier, on account of the whole wheat, and bolder by the degree of an additional half a teaspoon each vanilla and cinnamon. The whole wheat flour is on its best behavior, here. Like in these cookies and this snacking cake, it does its thing quietly, adding a nutty warmth to the cake without weighing the whole thing down. Meanwhile, the brown sugar makes the cake taste rounder, fuller, richer, as if you’ve sneaked an invisible something caramelized into the batter. There’s an earthy sweetness to this version, and I like that a lot.

So, about last week’s cake: P.S. – Make this one, too.

Jess’s Teddie’s
Adapted (again) from The New York Times, November 4, 2007 (Originally published, September 30, 1973)

1 c. whole wheat flour
½ c. all purpose flour
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. baking soda
¾ c. vegetable oil
1 lightly packed c. dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. peeled, cored, and thickly sliced apples (I used a combination of Jonagold and Cortland.)
Heaped ½ c. walnuts, chopped
1 Tbsp. Demarara sugar (optional)

Oil and flour a 9-inch round cake pan and heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Dump the packed brown sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer and unpack it with a fork. Add the oil, and use the fork to moisten all of the sugar. (If you skip these first steps, the brown sugar will get pressed up against the sides of the bowl instead of mixing with the oil.) Beat the oil and sugar together in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Meanwhile, sift together the flours, salt, cinnamon, and baking soda in a medium bowl. After five minutes, add the eggs and then the vanilla to the oil and sugar, and continue beating until the mixture is creamy.

Add the dry ingredients into the sugar, egg, and oil mixture and stir by hand until just combined. Fold in the apple slices and walnuts. It will look like a lot of apple and not enough batter, but it all works out in the end.

Transfer the batter to the prepared pan, sprinkle with Demarara sugar if you'd like, and bake for about 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan before turning out.

Serves 8-10.

I recommend Teddie's

2011-11-02T06:57:00.005-04:00

Some things I’ve learned since Mia’s come on the scene:

1. The following things I can do with one hand: Eat cereal. Unwrap popsicles. Put on shoes and socks. The following things I cannot: Pull my hair back into a ponytail that stays. Floss.

2. Cucumbers dissolve. When left to their own devices in the crisper drawer for six weeks, they dissolve.

3. I’ve learned what moms are for. You might think that, having had a mom for a few decades now, I’d have figured it out a long time ago. But until mine showed up just minutes after Mia was born and, for the next two weeks, left no meal uncooked, no pile of laundry unwashed, I had no idea. Not really. I’ve never needed my mother more than I did those first couple of weeks home. And not just for the steady supply of perfect scrambled eggs and clean underwear. It’s hard for me to put into words the kind of care and compassion I needed, and how she so quietly, carefully made sure that I got it. Suffice it to say that without her, Eli and I would have been very different parents in those early days. About a week into her stay, I heard my mother say to Eli that she was worried about being in the way. “Laurie, you are the way,” Eli said. Amen. It’s no wonder I cried when she left.

4. Breastfeeding: Not as straightforward as one might think. And that, I promise you, is all I will say about that.

5. It is very important to have friends who cook. Friends who do cook, I should say, who show up at your door with trays of meatballs, all manner of soups, one quiche for supper, and one for the freezer, too.

6. When the tiny creature who has come to live with you is three weeks old, it’s time to bake an apple cake. The simplest one you can find, preferably. It should also be delicious. I recommend Teddie’s.

The recipe for Teddie’s Apple Cake first appeared in a New York Times article by Jean Hewitt in 1973. Amanda Hesser published it again in the Times in 2007, and again when it made the cut for The Essential New York Times Cookbook that came out last year. The recipe is, of course, Teddie’s. And while we don’t know anything about this Teddie, not even a last name, one thing is clear: whoever Teddie was, Teddie knew her (his?) cake.

There is nothing surprising about this cake. Apple meets cinnamon, meets walnut, meets sugar, eggs, and flour. An obvious combination, if ever there was one. Classic is classic for a reason, though. Teddie must have gotten that. The cake is made with oil, not butter, which caught my attention because I like the texture of most oil-based cakes: the way the crumbs cling to each other only lightly, as if trying not to touch at all, how when you mash your fork with the slightest pressure into the last bits on the plate, they stick. In some ways, it’s a delicate cake, but thanks to so much apple and a craggy upper crust, it feels hearty, too.

Teddie’s cake is an everyday cake, which is to say that it’s simple enough that you don’t need a special occasion to make it. It’s icing-less, and not too sweet and, in this case, so packed with fruit, it’s practically health food. But my favorite thing about everyday cakes is that, almost without fail, they are also anytime cakes. This one is, for sure. Eat it for dessert with loosely whipped cream, for breakfast, for second breakfast, or for those unnamed meals between pages written, or phone calls returned, when a quick stroll through the kitchen is only civilized. Yes, when it’s time to bake an apple cake, I recommend Teddie’s.

Teddie’s Apple Cake
Adapted from The New York Times, November 4, 2007 (Originally published, September 30, 1973)

The original recipe is for a large amount of batter that bakes in a 9-inch tube pan. I shied away from that for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t have a tube pan. But moreover, tube cakes are huge. I’m all for everyday cake, but if I’m going to eat a cake every day (and, as we’ve also established, anytime), I need to be able to slice off a wedge every now and then that’s significantly smaller than the state of Texas. Plus, there are only two of us here – two cake eaters, anyway – and this cake would be a terrible thing to waste. If you’d prefer to make the original whopper of a tube cake, double this recipe, use 3 eggs instead of two, and increase the bake time to 1 hour and 15 minutes. The recipe here is for one 9-inch round cake. Finally, the original recipe calls for 1 cup of raisins, but I omitted them because I thought that they might make the cake too sweet. If you decide to include raisins, add them when you add the walnuts.

1½ c. flour
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. baking soda
¾ c. vegetable oil
1 c. sugar
2 large eggs
½ tsp. vanilla
2 c. peeled, cored, and thickly sliced apples (I used a combination of Jonagold and Cortland.)
Heaped ½ c. walnuts, chopped
1 Tbsp. Demerara sugar (optional)

Oil and flour a 9-inch round cake pan and heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Beat the oil and sugar together in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Meanwhile, sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon, and baking soda in a medium bowl. After five minutes, add the eggs and then the vanilla to the oil and sugar, and continue beating until the mixture is creamy.

Add the dry ingredients into the sugar, egg, and oil mixture and stir by hand until just combined. Fold in the apple slices and walnuts. It will look like a lot of apple and not enough batter, but it all works out in the end.

Transfer the batter to the prepared pan, sprinkle with Demarara sugar if you'd like, and bake for 45-50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan before turning out.

Serves 8-10.

My way back in

2011-10-26T21:24:00.002-04:00

Many moons ago, in a far off land called my kitchen, I once baked a lot of chocolate chip cookies. Remember that? I do. I think. Sort of.

Anyway, in the comments section of that post, a couple of you asked how the pregnancy was going, which made me realize that, except for confessing to a stronger than usual commitment to the art and practice of snacking, I hadn’t said much about it here. So, I clicked over to a clean white screen, typed a few sentences about how I was feeling great, really great, that no, I hadn’t experienced any cravings, though my fondness for vinegar had reached new and towering heights, and that the one food – the sight of it, the smell of it, sometimes the mere thought of it – that had me sweaty-palmed and heaving right up until the day I delivered was c-h-i-c-k-e-n. (We’re back on now, chicken and me.) I put up this photo that Eli took twenty days before Mia was born:

Then, I went to bed with the plan to finish up the next morning. The next morning, though – thirty six weeks and two days into my pregnancy – things got weird. And by weird, I mean contractions weird. Also weird: Eli, as in, that guy I’m married to, as in, the father of the baby on the other side of those contractions, was in Australia. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. AUSTRALIA.* I called the doctor, who said that the contractions could progress to full-on labor within the hour, or could carry on intermittently all the way up through my fortieth week. Eli’s plane would touch down 48 hours later, and he suggested that, to maximize the chance that Eli would be present for his daughter’s birth, I stay as horizontal as possible until then. No problem. Except for that my family was in town to guard the belly while Eli was away, and my father was turning 60, and I had planned a surprise birthday party to be executed within those 48 hours. No problem. Because it was a party at a movie house, with a screening of The Wizard of Oz (Blu-ray! 70th anniversary edition!), since it’s common knowledge that if my dad “could see only one movie for the rest of his life” that’s what it would be. I could put my feet up and be more or less horizontal the whole time. So no problem. No problem at all – but for the single step down into the projection room that my full-term belly obscured. Owwww. I didn’t realize how bad it was until a few hours later, when my right ankle went from really quite painful to REALLY QUITE PAINFUL, and suddenly it’s midnight, and I’m sitting on a bed pillow on the floor, trying (unsuccessfully) to scooch my way to the bathroom. And that, friends, is how Eli, after 28 hours in the air from Brisbane to Sydney to San Francisco to Boston, found me, swollen-ankled, contracting, and crying (but hey, still pregnant!) when he walked through the door. Then came an ambulance, and a stretcher, and an x-ray (sprained, not broken), and an air cast, and crutches, and a 9-months-pregnant Jess crutching around with as much grace as a 9-months-pregnant Jess.

Suddenly, whatever I was saying in that original post about my no-big-deal-I’ll-go-run-a-few-miles-just-please-don’t-feed-me-chicken pregnancy felt like yesterday’s news. I almost let the whole thing go, since I was afraid that the recipe I wanted to share with you, Julia Child’s ratatouille, was also yesterday’s news. (October, October, where did you go? Oh, right.) But my sources tell me that there are still a few decent tomatoes to be found at the farmers’ markets, and we’ve still got green peppers, eggplant, and parsley sneaking into our weekly farm share box, so if you act fast, maybe it’s not too late, after all.

So, how was my pregnancy, you ask? It was great. Really great. The oddest thing though: throughout it, I wasn’t very hungry at all. Oh, I ate plenty, never fear, not only because I took the business of growing a tiny human inside of me very seriously, but also because, if I didn’t, the world would go all spinny and a little bit grey. But lightheadedness is very much not the same thing as hunger, and grabbing a cluster of grapes and a few spoonsful of yogurt to stay upright and conscious is very much not the same thing as chewing and swallowing to satisfy an honest to goodness desire to eat. It’s much less fun. I missed the urge to reach for seconds, to walk the long way home past the bakery so that I could grab a pecan-raisin roll, or order the tasting menu at my favorite Cambridge restaurant and take it down, every last bite. A tiny, squished up appetite together with a constant supply of produce that requires only a sharp knife, a trickle of olive oil, and a splash (okay, a river) of vinegar, meant that I wasn’t spending much time in the kitchen. I missed that, too.

Julia Child’s ratatouille was my way back in. It is, in Ms. Child’s words, “not one of the quicker dishes to make,” and one day in late July, after so many meals of assembled raw things on a plate with crackers and a bit of cheese, that sounded just about perfect to me.

Assembled cooked things on a plate with crackers and a bit of cheese may sound like more of the same, but that afternoon, it felt like a breakthrough.

I first tried ratatouille when I was in college, where they sold it in plastic containers at the University Food Mart. It was a little sad and shelf-weary, but because it was my first, it was, in my mind, what ratatouille was supposed to be: summer vegetables buried in a thick, very red, mildly sweet sauce. For years, I never followed a recipe. I just modeled the ratatouille in my own kitchen after that one. I never made it the same way twice, but it was always saucy and rich, leaning heavily on the glorious summer tomato (and sometimes on a tablespoon of tomato paste, too). Over a steaming pillow of polenta, ratatouille was dinner. Heaped on thick slices of garlic-rubbed toast, it was lunch. Julia Child’s ratatouille is dryer, more of a relish than a sauce, more pepper-, parsley-, and zucchini-green than tomato-red. It’s the kind of thing you eat on the side, or for a snack, or a snack-like meal, as the case may be. According to Ms. Child, what makes this ratatouille is that “each element is cooked separately before it is arranged in the casserole to partake of a brief communal simmer.” That way, “each vegetable retains its own shape and character.” If it sounds as if this recipe will tether you to the kitchen for a while, that’s because it will. Feels good, sometimes.

*For his brother’s wedding! The best possible reason. Happy, happy day, Katie and Jonathan.

p.s. -- Thank you for your cheers on the last post, friends. It was so fun, so special, to share the news with you here.

Julia Child’s Ratatouille
Adapted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking

1 pound firm, ripe, red tomatoes
½ pound eggplant
½ pound zucchini
½ pound (about 1½ c.) thinly sliced yellow onions
2 (about 1 c.) sliced green bell peppers
2 cloves mashed garlic
3 T. minced parsley
Olive oil
Salt
Black pepper

Peel, seed, and juice the tomatoes. I use Julia Child’s method:

Drop the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water and boil for 10 seconds. Remove, and cut out the stems. The skins will slip right off. Cut the peeled tomatoes in half crosswise, not through the stem. Gently squeeze the seeds and juices from each half.

Peel the eggplant and slice it lengthwise (“3/8 inch thick, about 3 inches long, and 1 inch wide,” says Julia Child; I didn’t measure). Scrub the zucchini, slice off the two ends, and cut it into slices about the same size as the eggplant pieces. Place the sliced eggplant in a bowl, and the sliced zucchini in another, and toss with a few pinches of salt. Let stand for 30 minutes. Drain. Dry each slice (!), or do as I did, and spread the slices out on a towel, lay a second towel on top, and press gently to absorb any excess liquid.

Heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a 10- or 12-inch skillet. Sauté the eggplant and then the zucchini in batches, a single layer at a time, until lightly brown. It should take about a minute on each side. Transfer to a dish and set aside.

In the same skillet, cook the sliced onions and peppers for about 10 minutes, until tender but not browned. Stir in the mashed garlic and season to taste.

Slice the peeled, seeded, and juiced tomatoes into 3/8-inch strips. Lay them over the onions and peppers, and season with salt and pepper. Cover, and cook over low heat for 5 minutes, or until tomatoes have begun to render their juice. Uncover, baste the tomatoes with the juices, raise the heat, and boil for several minutes, until the juice has almost entirely evaporated.

Place a third of the tomato mixture in the bottom of a casserole or Dutch oven and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of the minced parsley. Arrange half of the eggplant and zucchini on top, then repeat: tomatoes, parsley, eggplant and zucchini, and finish with the remaining tomatoes and parsley.

Cover the casserole or Dutch oven and simmer over low heat for 10 minutes. Uncover, and baste with the rendered juices. Add salt and pepper, to taste. Raise the heat slightly and cook uncovered for about 15 minutes, basting several times, until the juices have evaporated, leaving a spoonful or two of flavored olive oil.

Serve warm, cold, or room temperature. It’s all good.

Serves 6-8.

She's here

2011-09-23T10:16:00.011-04:00

I baked you something special today.

Her name is Mia Louise.

She came screaming out into the world on September 9, 2011, at 8:56pm, three weeks early, but healthy and strong. She weighed 6 lbs. 7.7 oz. and was 18 inches long.

Mia likes to eat in the nude, hiccup like it's going out of style, then settle in for a nice long cuddle.

She's also really into this guy.

Over the last two weeks, we've been doing a lot of this:

and this:

and, of course, this:

I already feel so privileged just to know her. So unspeakably glad. She's the best.

Back soon.

xo.

p.s. -- You can get a closer look at Mia in all her tininess if you click on any one of the photos here.

I call them at home

2011-08-31T23:46:00.024-04:00

These cookies.

These cookies.

For almost two months now, I’ve been mixing the dough, scooping it into mounds, parking it in the fridge, baking off a cookie or so at a time and, when the dough runs out, starting all over again. These cookies are from Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain, which came out in the spring of 2010. In the year or so since, they’ve exploded onto the scene. (We’re a “scene,” right, we who hang around the interwebs swapping recipes and telling stories? I like to think so.) Some very smart people have already said some very smart things about these cookies, so I didn’t plan on mentioning them here. I’d just keep mixing, and scooping, and chilling, and baking, quietly enjoying my cookies and kicking myself between bites for having taken so long to make them in the first place.

But over the last couple of months, it has come to my attention that there are people out there, good, salt of the earth, chocolate-chip-cookie-loving people who, like me, are only now awakening to the glory of Kim Boyce’s cookies. I know some of these people. I call them at home. In fact, anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that there is an entire sub-population on this planet that is just now trying them, just now turning on ovens and baking first batches. Not that I’m implying a class system of chocolate chip cookie eaters based on who has, and who has not, experienced these cookies. (Or am I?) In any case, it has finally dawned on me that maybe, just maybe one of you reading today has never heard of them. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

I first made these cookies with my sister, Anna, who came to visit in early July. We prepared the dough on a Friday morning, and left it in the fridge until the following night, when we – Anna, Eli, and I – piled onto our (new! pink!) sofa to watch The Adjustment Bureau (a movie that, incidentally, features more Jason Bourne-style running scenes than all three Bourne films combined). We baked off three cookies, one for each of us, and once they were cool enough for consumption, we ferried them over to the coffee table in front of the television. We were about a half an hour into the movie, and we kept right on watching while we took our first bites. What happened next I can only describe as silent pandemonium. We looked down at our plates, and said, “!!!!” We looked up at each other, and said, “????” Down. Up. Down. Up. “!!!!” “????” “!!!!” “????” Eli and I were already scrambling for the remote when Anna yelled, “PAUSE!” and we spent the next few minutes in deep discussion over what, what?, I ask you, makes this cookie so very, very good. (We didn’t come up with a single satisfying answer, by the way. We tried out words like “nubby,” “textured,” “pebbly,” and “thick,” all of which make it sound as though eating this cookie is like taking a bite out of your favorite sweater. I promise you, it’s nothing like that at all.) Anna asked for the recipe so that she could, and I quote, “blow people’s minds.” The following week, back home in Columbus, Ohio, that’s what she did.

And so it began: A few days after Anna left, I baked off one of the remaining cookies for a friend. She asked for the recipe. Then, my mother came to visit. She wanted it, too. Eli had a birthday at the beginning of this month and asked for these cookies in lieu of a cake. His brothers were in town, and a few friends came by, and I was so busy chatting with everyone (the perils of an open kitchen!) that I lost track of what my hands were doing, namely, pressing double, maybe triple, the usual amount of salt flakes into those poor lumps of dough. The cookies turned out so salty that no one even tried to pretend otherwise. Still, they ate them. And asked for the recipe. I tell you, these cookies can do no wrong.

The defining feature of this cookie is that it’s made exclusively with whole wheat flour, which does all sorts of terrific things for its flavor and texture. You might wonder at first what else is in there, maybe ground walnuts or oats, or some kind of earthy mystery spice. But that’s just the whole wheat talking. Whole wheat, it turns out, has some important things to say. These cookies bake up fat and tall, with a crisp, almost crust-like exterior. On the inside, they’re soft, even borderline flakey. They remind me a little of scones or buttermilk biscuits in that way. Eli told me not to tell you that, since he thinks it might give you the wrong idea about these cookies, but I decided to toss it out there, anyway. When you taste them, maybe you’ll see what I mean.

Most interesting to me about these cookies is the One Cookie Phenomenon (OCP) they seem to inspire. It’s a phenomenon that I never knew existed in the land of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, where the insatiable desire for cookie after cookie after cookie reigns supreme. You’ve been there, right? All cookied out, and maybe even mildly sick? This cookie gets how that can happen, and it has your back. Yes, you spend your whole time with this cookie wishing it would never end. But then it does, and you realize you’re okay. You’re filled with precisely the right amount of cookie, and you are done. And very, very happy.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce

Boyce writes that “this dough is made to go straight from the bowl into the oven” (just be sure to use cold butter), but I followed a tip from Molly and chilled the pre-scooped dough. I’ve let the dough age anywhere from 18 hours to a whole week. I really like the way these mature dough balls bake up, fat, and tall, and rich in flavor, so I prepare the dough, scoop it into individual cookies, and store them in the fridge on a baking sheet wrapped in plastic. Then, when the mood strikes, I bake them off a cookie or two at a time. Boyce breaks down her ingredient list into two categories, “dry mix” and “wet mix.” I like that, since it helps me organize my brain and my bowls before I get started. A note about the dry ingredients: Boyce has you sift them into a bowl, but I whisk them together, instead.

Dry ingredients:
3 c. whole wheat flour
1½ tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1½ tsp. kosher salt

Wet ingredients:
2 sticks (8 oz.) cold, unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes
1 c. dark brown sugar
1 c. sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
8 oz. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (I use Scharffen Berger, 62%), roughly chopped into ¼- and ½-inch pieces

Sea salt flakes for finishing. (I use Maldon.)

[If you plan on baking these cookies right away, pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment.]

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Put the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and mix on low speed until just blended. (It should take about 2 minutes.) Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until each one is incorporated. Mix in the vanilla.

Add the flour mixture to the bowl, and blend on low speed until the flour is just incorporated. If there are any small pockets of flour lurking in the dough, rub them in with your fingers. (Much better, Boyce says, than over-mixing.)

Scoop the dough – about 3 tablespoons per cookie – onto the baking sheets. I use a 1½-tablespoon ice cream scoop and pile one level scoop on top of another for added height. If you’re going the chill-now-bake-later-route, you can crowd them all onto a single sheet so that they’ll take up less room in the fridge. (You’ll remove the two or three or however many cookies to a separate sheet when you’re ready to bake them.) If you’ll be baking the cookies right away, you’ll need about 3 inches between them.

Just before baking, press a few flakes of salt into each dough ball. Boyce suggests a baking time of 16-20 minutes at 350 degrees. My chilled dough takes an even 20. If you’re baking up a bunch at a time, rotate the baking sheets halfway through. Transfer the cookies, still on the parchment, to the counter to cool. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Yield: a little over 20 cookies

He wanted trifle

2011-07-22T18:22:00.019-04:00

What I’m about to do might be considered cheating. Somehow, though, I don’t think you’re going to mind.

Back at the end of May, I mentioned a triumph in trifle. It was beautiful, but we were hungry, so we skipped the photographing and went straight to the eating. It’s important to do that, sometimes. I made that trifle again a few weeks ago, and this time, I decided to snap a few shots before digging in, just in case I’d want to share it with you. The thing is, this trifle is not exactly new. Or, the trifle’s new, but the recipe is, shall we say, “gently used,” an old workhorse from the archives that I nipped and tucked into its current form. And wait. I just remembered something. I’ve cribbed from that recipe not once, but twice. C-h-e-a-t-e-r. One who keeps her eyes a little too focused on her own paper, I guess, but a cheater nonetheless.

This trifle came about in precisely the same way as the cloth from which it was cut: by the special request of my friend, Eitan, who prefers to celebrate his birthday with an abundance of strawberries, custard, and cream. (I choose the best friends.) Two years ago, that meant a cake, a strawberry custard cassata cake inspired by the version I grew up with in Cleveland. Eitan will be the first to tell you that there was nothing wrong with that cake, but this year what he really wanted was – how do I put this? – a cake with less cake. Something that you scoop instead of slice, that calls for bowls and spoons over plates and forks. He wanted trifle. It’s that same cassata cake, more or less, only soaked in berry purée and stuffed into a bowl.

Strawberries are on their way out in these parts, but if you hurry to the market, maybe you can snag a few lingering baskets. This trifle makes a fine finale.

Strawberry Trifle
Adapted from this recipe for Strawberry Custard Cassata Cake (or, Cleveland Cassata) and the Trifle of Summer Fruit in Tartine, by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson

You can make this trifle with any génoise, chiffon, or sponge cake. If you have a favorite, feel free to swap it in. I went with a lemony version of the sponge cake from my cassata recipe. It never gives me any trouble. I like to make the custard and bake the cakes in advance so that all I have to do is slice the berries, zhizh the purée, whip the cream, and assemble the thing on the day I want to serve it. My recipe reflects this process, but you can do it in one day, as long as you give the custard 3-4 hours to chill, and the assembled trifle at least 3-4 hours in the fridge before you serve it.

Note: You will need 2-3 pounds of strawberries, total, some for the fruit purée and some for layering between the cake and the custard.

For the cake:
2¼ c. cake flour
1¼ c. plus ¼ c. sugar, divided
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
¼ c. freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ c. cold water
½ c. vegetable oil
1 Tbsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. vanilla extract
5 large egg yolks at room temperature
8 large egg whites at room temperature
½ tsp. cream of tartar

For the custard:
6 large egg yolks
½ c. sugar
2 c. half and half
1 tsp. vanilla
3 Tbsps. cornstarch

For the fruit purée:
3 c. sliced strawberries
1/3 c. sugar (you can add up to ½ c. if you prefer a sweet purée)
You can also add a pour of Chambord, Grand Marnier, sweet sherry, white wine, or kirsch, if you’d like.

For the whipped cream:
1 2/3 c. very cold heavy cream
3 Tbsp. sugar

4-5 c. sliced strawberries for layering

Make the custard (I do this step one or two days ahead):
Whisk together all of the custard ingredients in a saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-low heat, whisking constantly. Turn down the heat so that the mixture just simmers. Keep whisking until thick, about 2 minutes. Transfer the custard to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a round of wax paper, and cool. Then, chill the custard, covered, for at least 3 hours.

Bake the cakes (I do this step the night before I want to serve the trifle):
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees, and line the bottoms of two 9-inch round cake pans with lightly oiled parchment paper. Otherwise, leave the pans ungreased.

Sift the flour, 1¼ c. sugar, baking powder, and salt twice into a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, use an electric mixer on high speed to beat together the yolks, lemon juice, water, oil, zest, and vanilla until smooth. Stir into the flour mixture.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Add the remaining ¼ c. sugar, and beat on high until the peaks are stiff but not dry.

Using a rubber spatula and a very light touch, fold about a quarter of the fluffy egg whites into the egg yolk mixture. Then, fold in the remaining whites. Be gentle. The goal here is to incorporate the egg whites without allowing them to deflate significantly. As soon as the egg whites are no longer visible, stop folding.

Scrape the batter into the two prepared pans and spread evenly. Bake for approximately 35 minutes, until the tops spring back when lightly pressed and a toothpick inserted into the centers comes out clean.

Allow the cakes to cool in their pans on a cooling rack for at least an hour. When completely cool, run a knife around the sides to release the cakes, and carefully flip them out of their pans. Wrap the cakes in wax paper, then plastic wrap, and chill until you’re ready to use them. I find that a sponge cake chilled overnight splits more easily than a just-baked room temperature cake.

Make the strawberry purée and whip the cream (I do this the morning of):

Slice the strawberries for between the cake and custard layers and set aside.

Slice the strawberries for the fruit purée, combine them in a blender with the sugar (and the wine or liqueur, if using) and blend on high speed until very smooth. Set aside.

Whip the cream until it begins to thicken, then add the 3 Tbsps. sugar and whisk until the cream holds soft peaks. (I use my stand mixer, but you can also do it by hand. It will just take longer.) Set aside.

Assemble the trifle!

Remove the chilled cakes from the fridge, unwrap, and carefully saw them in two using a long serrated bread knife. I typically use just three of the four resulting layers for this trifle. (You can freeze the remaining layer, double wrapped in plastic.) Trim your cake rounds so that they will fit inside of the trifle bowl (or whatever glass bowl you’re using). I do this by placing my trifle bowl upside down over each layer and slicing off the excess cake that sticks out from underneath.

Press one cake layer into the trifle bowl. Pour 2/3 c. of the strawberry purée over top and spread evenly across the cake with a spatula. It may look like a lot of purée, but it will soak into the cake over time. Top the purée with a third of the berries. Place some of the berries with their cut sides up against the glass for a presentation's sake, if you want.

Give the chilled custard a good stir. Spoon half of it over the fruit, then half of the whipped cream over the custard.

And repeat: a second cake layer, 1 c. of strawberry purée, half of the remaining strawberries, the rest of the custard, then the rest of the whipped cream.

Place your last cake layer on top, and press gently. Top with the rest of the purée, then the last of the sliced strawberries.

Chill for at least 3 hours, up to 1 day, before serving. Serve cold, straight from the refrigerator.

Serves 8-10.

My middle name

2011-07-07T18:07:00.001-04:00

There’s a new cake in town, and its name is Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake. I’m going to pause right there for a moment so you can take that in: Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake. Whole. Wheat. Cinnamon. Snacking. Cake. WholeWheatCinnamonSnackingCake. What a name, eh? Don’t you just want to sing it? You think I’m kidding, but seriously, think fiddle, or maybe banjo, get Pony Boy going in your head, finesse the final cadence a little, and toss in the name of this cake for the last lyric: Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up, whoa!... Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake. Do you hear it? Yes? No? Are you, as I fear, backing slowly away from your computer screen and the girl who sings cake names? Oh dear.

Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake has been following me around now for almost a month. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to tell you about it. I’ve never needed any help figuring out that some cakes are meant for snacking (“and that’s just what I’ll do…” Oh lord. Send help.), but it made my day to stumble upon a cake that comes right out and says it. A cake with a built-in directive. I like that. Its middle name is “Snacking,” for heaven’s sake! That alone sold me on this recipe, not least because, lately, that’s my middle name, too.

As of last week, I’m officially in my third trimester, which means that my growing belly is now quite intent on squeezing my stomach out of its prime real estate. That leaves me with limited options – precisely two, by my count – for packing away those all-important calories in a manner that does not immediately set my chest and throat on fire. The first: long, leisurely, pause-and-digest-as-you-go meals that laze on for two or three hours and involve, say, a wild mushroom salad that tastes of the forest and makes your body go all quiet and still between bites. It helps to take these meals with friends, so that you have several extra mouths at the ready when you need help cleaning your plate. I’m very fond of this strategy. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly compatible with the everyday life I find myself living most days of the week. Hence, the second option, my fallback position, which is to give up altogether on the traditional notion of “meals” and, instead, to eat more or less constantly, a handful of walnuts here, a few spoonfuls of yogurt there, throughout the day. In other words, I have become a diehard snacker, thoroughly committed to the art and practice of snacking. So when a cake like Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake announces itself, I switch on the oven, grease up a pan, and get right down to business.

I discovered this cake one morning at breakfast, while paging through Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite. I mentioned this book last week – it’s the same one that brought us those lemon curd squares with rosemary – and I’ve been looking forward to telling you more about it, despite the fact that it came out a while ago, now. You’ve probably already read all kinds of nice things about Melissa Clark, her recipes, and her writing, but I can’t help but add my voice to the chorus. What I appreciate most is how she invites you not only into her kitchen, but into her workshop of a brain. She tells you what went wrong and what went right (and what went wrong that turned out so very right!) on her way to the recipe you’re about to prepare. She explains what she was aiming for and what was on her mind when she, for example, replaces the corn syrup with honey and lemon in one recipe (she was inspired by a Luden’s cough drop), or nudges tarte Tatin over into cake territory. Reading this cookbook makes me feel bold and creative in the kitchen, willing to make a mess of things and see where it takes me. Above all, In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite reminds me to be on the lookout for inspiration at all times. Because, as Melissa Clark shows us, it’s everywhere.

This cake is actually a variation on another cake from Clark’s book, something called Chocolate Chip Pecan Loaf Cake, which Clark says is “almost like a big, soft chocolate chip cookie in sliceable form.” I keep meaning to try the original, but every time I open my book to the recipe, I get distracted by this snacking cake and make it instead. That a humble snacking cake trumps a recipe rumored to produce a big, soft chocolate chip cookie in sliceable form just about says it all.

Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake is yet another specimen that lives at the intersection of quick bread and pound cake. It’s rich like a pound cake, but not heavy like one which, I’m guessing, might have something to do with the fact that you melt the butter and then fold it into the well-whisked batter (as opposed to creaming room-temperature butter and beating it in). The word that keeps popping into my mind when I think about the texture of this cake is “hearty.” That sounds like some kind of euphemism for describing a cake that’s heavy or overly dense (it’s not fat, it’s big boned!), but that’s not how I mean it at all. With almost a one-to-one ratio of white to whole wheat flour and the mellow, earthy flavor of a full cup of brown sugar, it is hearty. And yet, despite all of that whole wheat flour, there’s a lightness to it, too. More like a bread is light than a cake is light, but a lightness just the same.

The caramel-like flavor resembles nothing more closely than a Biscoff cookie. Remember those? The cracker-like cookies in flat, red packets that Delta flight attendants hand out? I’m not sure I would have recognized it if I hadn’t just flown back to Boston on a Delta flight a few days before I discovered this cake, but there it was: that magic combination of vanilla, cinnamon, and brown sugar that tricks you into thinking that there must be something else in there (oats? nuts?), something more complicated going on, when in both cookie and cake, there's nothing of the kind. Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake. It’s supple, and warm, and everything good. And as it bakes, a mahogany lip of a crust creeps up along the perimeter of the loaf. I should warn you right now that I will fight you for an end piece with its crisp, perfect edges.

Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake, people. You’ve got to try this one.

Whole Wheat Cinnamon Snacking Cake
Adapted from Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite

I like to eat this cake plain, or with a thin layer of raspberry jam, but you can dress it up if you want, maybe with some fresh berries and loosely whipped cream.

1 c. brown sugar (the original recipe calls for light brown; it’s great with dark brown, too)
2/3 c. plain yogurt or buttermilk (I’ve only tried it with buttermilk)
1 T. vanilla extract
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
3 large eggs
1 c. all-purpose flour
¾ c. whole wheat flour
1½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
2/3 c. unsalted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over the lowest possible flame. Meanwhile:

In a large bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, buttermilk (or yogurt), vanilla, and cinnamon. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking well after each addition.

In a separate, smaller bowl, whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Whisk the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until smooth.

Use a spatula to fold the melted butter into the batter in 3 additions. The batter will look very slick and oily at first, and you might wonder whether you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way. Keep folding. It will be okay.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 50-55 minutes, until the cake is a deep golden brown, and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in its pan for 5 minutes. Then, run a knife around the perimeter of the loaf, and turn it out onto a wire rack to cool to room temperature.

Season to Taste

2011-06-27T14:36:00.006-04:00

Hello, friends, and happy Monday to you!

Hey, what are you doing tomorrow night at 7pm? I’ll be at the Harvard Book Store listening to my friend, Molly Birnbaum, read from her first book, Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way. If you live in the Boston area, I hope you’ll join me.

Some of you might know Molly from her blog, My Madeleine. If you do, then you already know that she’s a beautiful writer. Molly once compared writing to grasping at sentences that burrow into your brain like worms, which must mean that she, like the rest of us, occasionally struggles to get the words down on the page. To read her prose, you’d never know it. Sometimes, when I’m all jammed up and feeling the urge to hurl my stupid, stupid computer and its stupid, blinky cursor out the window, I click over to her site and read a couple of posts, instead. I always feel much better. Molly’s writing reminds me of what words can do when you just chill the heck out and let them do it. That may not sound like much in the way of epiphanies, but some days, it feels like everything.

I can’t remember exactly when or how I found Molly. I’m pretty sure that it was sometime during those first few months of my recovery back in 2008, when things were still touch and go. I’ve never mentioned it here before, but when the surgeons went in to scrape out the infection that had set in around my brain (memories!), my olfactory nerves were damaged. For a while, I could smell nothing. Someone must have mentioned an article that Molly had written in The New York Times about the loss of her own sense of smell following a terrible accident, and her gradual recovery. I don’t think I read it then, but months later, I somehow discovered her blog, remembered her story, and dug into her archives to learn more: how she had graduated from college planning to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America; how she sweated it out in one of the finest kitchens around, up to her elbows in pork fat, washing dishes, deveining shrimp; and how, just a few months before starting culinary school, she was hit by a car, lost her sense of smell, and with it, her ability to taste. Suddenly, she had to rethink everything.

Season to Taste is the story of all this and more. It came out just last week, and it’s been so much fun watching the world grab hold of it. Today, Molly can smell just about everything, and in her book she tells us how she got here. It’s a memoir, but it’s also a brilliant and moving piece of science writing about the sense of smell, the psychology of it, and what’s actually going on up there in that tangle of nerves that allows us to breathe in and register something about the world that would otherwise remain invisible. Best of all, whether she’s writing about love and loss, or the discovery of elephant sex pheromones, Molly sounds like Molly. I know, because last summer, Molly moved to Cambridge, and quickly became one of my truest friends. I get to hear her voice all the time, and I love the thought that all of you get to hear it now, too.

In honor of the release, I want to share a recipe for lemon curd squares with rosemary. Rosemary was the first thing that Molly smelled when her nerves began to recover, so it feels only natural to include it here, today. I found the recipe in Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, a book I can’t wait to tell you more about, and I didn’t change a thing. I noticed last night that, in a strange coincidence, Molly also just posted about lemon bars on her blog! Oh well. We’re celebrating, right? Bring on the dessert. Lemon bars for everyone!

Congratulations, M. I’m so thrilled for you.

Lemon Curd Squares with Rosemary
Adapted from In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite by Melissa Clark

For the shortbread:
3 c. all-purpose flour
1½ c. (3 sticks) unsalted butter
½ c. granulated sugar
1/3 c. confectioners’ sugar, plus additional for sprinkling
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh rosemary (just to be clear, measure after you’ve chopped)
1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest

For the lemon curd:
6 large eggs
1½ c. granulated sugar
2/3 c. freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 4 lemons)
¼ c. all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. finely grated lemon zest
A pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 325 and lightly grease a 9 x 13-inch baking pan.

Make the shortbread:
Combine the 3 c. flour, butter, ½ c. granulated sugar, confectioners’ sugar, rosemary, and 1 tsp. lemon zest in a food processor, and pulse until a crumbly dough forms. Don’t be alarmed if the dough is very, very crumbly, indeed. That’s just how it is. It will come together beautifully as it bakes.

Press the dough into the prepared pan and bake until the shortbread is golden around the edges, about 40 minutes.

While the shortbread is baking, make the lemon curd:
In a large bowl, lightly beat the eggs, then add the 1½ c. granulated sugar, lemon juice, flour, ¼ c. flour, 1 Tbsp. lemon zest, and salt, and whisk until smooth.

When the shortbread is ready, take it out of the oven and increase the temperature to 350. Pour the lemon curd onto the shortbread and return the pan to the oven. Bake for about 20 minutes more, until the topping is just set. Allow to cool to room temperature before cutting into squares. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar right before serving.

The bars will keep, covered and refrigerated, for up to 3 days.

Yield: 24 squares.

A little bit of news

2011-06-14T09:06:00.008-04:00

I am no fortune teller, no reader of palms. This blog is no crystal ball. But a funny thing happened back in January when I mentioned some changes afoot around here. I was referring to our move, as far as I knew, but perhaps this site knew better. Because a few days later, I learned there was a tiny something stirring, a something else, that is, that spelled a different kind of change:

Eli and I are expecting. I still can’t believe that I get to say that. I’m due at the end of September, and we’re over the moon. If my profile of late is any indication, it is also quite possible that I’ve swallowed the moon. It’s wild. I’m loving every minute.

At our big ultrasound in April, we asked the technician to write the baby’s sex on a card and seal it up. We thought it might be nice to find out a thing like that somewhere other than a doctor’s office, preferably in the presence of dessert. When my dad came to visit a couple of weeks later, we decided to let him tell us the news.

With ice cream.

We went to Toscanini’s and chose two flavors, one for a boy, and one for a girl. Then, we handed over the envelope to my dad. He opened it and, once he pulled himself together, ordered a scoop of the designated flavor. Eli and I sat and waited with our backs turned away from the counter. It went down a little something like this:

Then, up came the napkin, and we knew. It’s a…

STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM CONE! Meaningless information, I realize, until I explain that the other designated flavor was bananas Foster. (Banana - get it?) (And yes, Toscanini’s makes bananas Foster ice cream.)

Oh baby.

We can’t wait to meet her.

Strawberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream
Adapted from The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz

Today I’d like to share a recipe for a very special strawberry ice cream. It’s a Philadelphia-style ice cream which, unlike the French-style that’s made from an egg-rich custard, involves only cream. Without the egg yolks, Philadelphia-style ice cream is lighter and brighter than its French counterpart. That’s great news for the strawberries in this recipe. While a French-style ice cream can weigh down the flavor of the berries, here they get to shine. We had a couple of friends over for dessert when I made my first batch, and it was that berry flavor, they said, that blew them away. Eli was disappointed at first by the texture – it’s not as smooth as the French-style ice creams he’s used to – but I caught him with a bowl of two scoops today. I think he’s getting over it.

1 pound (450 grams) fresh strawberries, rinsed, dried, and hulled
¾ c. (150 grams) sugar
1 Tbsp. vodka or kirsch (I use vodka.)
1 c. (240 grams) full fat sour cream
1 c. (250 ml) heavy cream
½ tsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice

Slice the strawberries and toss them in a bowl with the sugar and the vodka. Stir until the sugar begins to dissolve. Cover the bowl and let stand at room temperature for about an hour. Every now and then, give the berries a stir.

In a blender or food processor, pulse the macerated strawberries and their liquid with the remaining ingredients. You’re not aiming for a completely smooth purée, so go easy. You want a slightly chunky consistency.

Refrigerate for 1 hour (or longer), then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The ice cream will be quite soft when you first scrape it from the ice cream maker, but will firm up significantly in the freezer.

Makes about 1¼ quarts (1¼ liters).

All about the bits

2011-06-10T07:31:00.004-04:00

Notice anything special about this rhubarb?

Wait, let me give you a closer look.

Too close? Sorry. How about this:

Better?

What we have here, friends, is an unusual specimen, indeed: a rhubarb sauce that manages to hold onto its bits. Rhubarb sauce, the one that I make, anyway, is typically a stovetop affair. The chopped rhubarb bits soften over a medium flame and, little by little, give themselves over to a dense, rosy sauce. Rhubarb sauce – the making of it, the eating of it – is lovely, through and through. But things get tricky if you’re after a sauce with a little chunk and heft to it. Those bits slipping away into nothing is how rhubarb sauce comes to be. Stop them from doing their thing, and all you have is a pot of mushy rhubarb. I’ve heard stories of rhubarb sauce yanked from the heat in time to preserve some semblance of bits, but by the time my sauce looks like the sauce I want it to be, all I ever have left are a few stubborn strands, at best.

Now, technically speaking, this sauce we’re discussing is no sauce at all. It’s actually roasted rhubarb. Unlike rhubarb sauce, roasted rhubarb is all about the bits. They remain more or less intact even as they stew in a shallow bath of water or wine and release their juices. I love roasted rhubarb, don’t get me wrong, but it can look awfully swimmy there in its puddle of thin cooking liquid. You can probably see where I’m going with this. What rhubarb sauce lacks in bits it makes up for in, well, sauce; roasted rhubarb, vice versa.

That’s where today’s recipe comes in. It’s a hybrid creature bred from rhubarb sauce and roasted rhubarb, a rare species that inherits the best from the both of them. It’s like a sturdy rhubarb sauce. Or maybe a saucy roasted rhubarb. Call it what you will. I call it roasted rhubarb compote.

Roasted rhubarb compote begins like many a roasted rhubarb, with sugared, thickly sliced stalks and a vanilla bean, splashed with citrus and tucked into an oven bound baking dish. You leave it alone to roast for a while, as you might expect. But about thirty minutes later, things get interesting. You pull the rhubarb from the oven mid-roast, and lift half of it into a sieve that you’ve placed over a small pot. Then, you return the untouched rhubarb to the oven and let it roast some more. When it has flushed a shade or two deeper and broken down considerably into a pulpy, almost-but-not-quite sauce, you strain it into your pot, too, and reduce the juices you’ve gathered into a brilliant pink syrup. Finally, you reassemble all of the pieces – the bits, the pulp, the syrup – in the baking dish. It’s funny business, to be sure, but it pays off.

A few Sundays ago, when I told you about that custard-filled corn bread, I threatened to bake it again the following weekend for some visiting friends, and to serve it with this rhubarb. That happened. We were so busy eating (custard-filled corn bread with roasted rhubarb compote is very, very good) and talking about hunter-gatherers’ gazelle hunting techniques (you know, typical breakfast conversation) that I forgot to take a photograph. I guess you’re going to have to trust me. Between the rhubarb photos here, and the corn bread photos there, you should be able to assemble the thing in your mind easily enough. And if your mind doesn’t feel like playing, I suppose you’ll just have to make up one batch each of corn bread and compote, and assemble the dish with your spoon, instead. Poor you.

Roasted Rhubarb Compote

In place of the orange zest and juice in this recipe, you might try ¼ to ½ a cup of fruity white wine. Brandi, whose rhubarb shortcake with mascarpone cream at Delancey last month made me gasp so loudly, I think I freaked out our server, makes a similar compote. She uses Grand Marnier instead of the citrus.

3 pounds rhubarb
Zest and juice from 1 orange (about ¼ c. of juice)
1 vanilla bean (when I’m without a bean, I substitute 1½ tsps. pure vanilla extract)
¾ c. sugar
3 Tbsps. butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cut the rhubarb into ½ inch – 1 inch thick pieces. If the stalks are particularly thick, I sometimes slice them in half vertically first. Slide the rhubarb into a deep baking dish, and toss with the sugar, orange juice, and zest. Slice open the vanilla bean, scrape out the seeds, add them and the split pod to the dish, and stir. Let sit for 30 minutes, until the sugar has more or less dissolved, then give it a gentle stir.

Thinly slice the butter and scatter the pats over the top of the dish. Roast the rhubarb for 25-30 minutes, until the bits go soft, but still retain their shape. How soft is up to you. I like my rhubarb bits pretty firm, just a notch or two down from an actual crunch. If you prefer softer bits, leave them to roast for an additional 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, set up a fine-mesh strainer over a small saucepan. (A colander will also work, in a pinch.) When your bits have reached the desired consistency, remove the dish from the oven, and lift half of the rhubarb into the strainer. Press lightly on the rhubarb with the back of a spoon to encourage the juices to drain in the pot. (Be gentle. You don’t want to mash the rhubarb.)

Return the baking dish to the oven, and continue roasting the other half of the rhubarb for 15 minutes. The rhubarb will begin to break down and get saucy. Strain the second half of the rhubarb into the saucepan, fish out the vanilla bean, and return all of the strained rhubarb to the baking dish.

Bring the rhubarb juice to a boil and, stirring frequently, reduce it to a light syrup. Pour the syrup back over the waiting rhubarb, and stir.

Serve warm, room temperature, or cold. Anything goes.
Serves 6.

Plotting, together

2011-05-31T13:13:00.008-04:00

Earlier this month, Eli and I shook the sawdust from our hair, packed our bags, and flew west, destination: Seattle. Eli’s back there for work every few months, but this visit was my first time joining him in two years. Two years. I don’t how I stayed away that long.

I’m telling you, friends: Seattle has some kind of hold over me. Over both of us. That this city is all wrapped up in our story – or perhaps our story is all wrapped up in it – has something to do with it, I’m sure. Eli moved to Seattle for a job right out of college, just a few weeks after we realized in an instant that we wanted to do our lives together, and half toppled, half sailed from the solid ground of our friendship into something new. My post-graduation plan was to study abroad for a year (turned out to be two), and before I left, I flew out to Seattle for a visit. I remember Eli insisting that I get myself a window seat on the left side of the airplane so that I could see Mount Rainier when we flew by. This was very, very important to him. I promised that I would, and once we crossed the Mississippi, I barely peeled my eyes from the window. I was afraid I’d miss it. “How will I know when I see it?” I had asked. “You’ll just know,” he assured me. He was right. I saw it, and I knew. It was beautiful. Too beautiful to be real, and too beautiful not to be, at once terrifying and reassuring in its hugeness, all mine and the whole world’s.

Those were two heady weeks. Eli made his mom’s tuna casserole for dinner on my first night there and we mapped out our visit over steaming bowls. We wandered from Eli’s apartment in Capitol Hill down to Pike Place Market and ate Beecher’s grilled cheese sandwiches by the sound. We climbed to the top of the water tower in Volunteer Park, then snacked on chocolate covered cherries in the grass. One chilly morning, we drove to Queen Anne for breakfast at the Five Spot. My dad had given me a fully manual film camera for graduation, and I shot my first rolls, timid and terrible, on that trip.

Towards the end of my stay, we hiked up along the White Chuck River and spent a few days camping near Glacier Peak. I awoke in our tent on the first morning to find Eli looking at me. “I’m thinking about the ring that I want to make for you,” he said, “and it’s beautiful.” I just noticed that I’ve used the word “beautiful” three times in as many paragraphs, but it’s the truth: It was beautiful. All of it. (Plus, this last “beautiful” was Eli talking, not me, so I get that one for free.)

I was so glad for that visit. This way, I could picture Eli in his space, doing his Eli things, when I was scratching off phone cards half a world away. When I thought of Eli, I thought of Seattle, and vice versa. And when, in 2004, I bought a one-way ticket back to the U.S. of A., it was not only Eli, but Seattle that welcomed me home.

I’ve often felt as though Seattle were in on some kind of secret back then, a secret about who we were, who we would become, and this life that would be ours. Seattle is the city where Eli learned how to climb mountains, how to build big, beautiful (!) things out of wood, and where I ran my first 5K. It’s where we started plotting, together, the rest of our lives. It’s also where I lived, for the first time ever, in an apartment all my own, where I first really started to bake and to cook. There in my green- and yellow-tiled kitchen, I began to think about food in ways that surprised me, excited me, made me feel more like me.

I loved living alone. That’s what I had planned on telling you about when I sat down to write this morning. I thought I’d write about that apartment, the kitchen table that I bought for twenty-five dollars from a woman whose husband had made it in college, and the first meals that I hosted there; about the ends of those meals, when everyone would leave, and I’d be there with the crumpled napkins and the spoon-scraped plates feeling so full; about the man who would sometimes sleep on the stoop of my building, and how it made me feel sad and sorry to see him, a little bit afraid, too, and annoyed with myself that I was afraid. But then I started telling you about other things, and since by now you’re probably hungry (I am!), I’ll wrap it up. Suffice it to say that I discovered something important that year in that apartment, namely, that from inside of me, and me alone, I could spin this thing called home.

I also discovered cream of asparagus soup. I didn’t grow up with “cream of” soups. I knew they existed, of course, but we were more a chicken or vegetable soup family. Cream of soups seemed somehow out of reach. They felt luxurious – a little too luxurious. Not the kind of thing that regular old people should be making in their regular old homes. What I didn’t know then is that cream of soups are among the simplest, most straightforward soups out there. Typically, all you need is a couple of pounds of a single vegetable, an onion and some fat to cook it in, stock, and a pour of heavy cream. The recipe for a pot of most other soups could swallow that ingredient list whole. This probably isn’t news to any of you, but it was to twenty-four year old me, the me who had never puréed a soup before and had to borrow Eli’s blender for the task. I remember puréeing that first batch, late on a Thursday night, for a dinner that I was hosting the following evening. I was so pleased with the result and, frankly, with myself for making it, that when I finally climbed into bed, I couldn’t sleep. My early twenties were obviously full of excitement.

Today is an odd day to be writing about soup, sitting as I am with my hair pulled up, the window pushed open, and the fan spinning overhead. But if recent weather patterns are any indication – from 50 degrees to 85 in a single week’s time – soup weather may once again be upon us without so much as a moment’s notice. I am nothing if not prepared.

I’m now seven springs out from the first time I made this cream of asparagus soup and, while I’m no longer losing sleep over it, I’m still convinced that it’s special. Seven springs worth of dinner guests seem to think so, too. Even before they tell me so, I know by the way they fall silent after the first bite and slow down. It’s that kind of soup. I hope you’ll try it.

p.s. – The photos that you see here (except for the old Five Spot shot and the ones of the soup on my red table) are from our recent trip to Seattle. You’re looking at two restaurants, Delancey and Sitka & Spruce. Both should be at the very top of your list the next time you’re in Seattle.

Cream of Asparagus Soup
Adapted from Gourmet, March 2001

Fresh-squeezed lemon juice adds a nice bright spot to this soup. The original recipe calls for just ¼ teaspoon for the entire pot, but I like to add more than that – a teaspoon, at least. Another option is to go with the minimal amount, and then serve the soup with individual lemon wedges so that people can up the citrus factor if they wish. If you’re going to make this soup ahead, which I recommend, add the last tablespoon of butter and the lemon juice after reheating, just before serving. I have had success making this soup dairy-free, using olive oil in place of the butter and soy milk in place of the cream. Without the butter and the cream it’s a different animal, but there’s still something to it. Something good.

2 pounds asparagus stalks, their tough bottoms snapped or sliced off
1 large yellow onion
3 Tbsps. unsalted butter
5-6 cups vegetable broth
½ cup heavy cream
Fresh lemon juice, to taste (see note, above)
Sea salt and black pepper

Coarsely chop the onion.

Cut the tips from 8 asparagus stalks and reserve for garnish. (If that feels too fussy, you’re welcome to skip the garnish.) Cut the stalks and all of the remaining asparagus into ½-inch pieces.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter in a heavy pot over medium-low heat until it just begins to foam. Add the asparagus pieces, a few grinds of sea salt and black pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Add the 5 cups of vegetable broth and simmer, covered, until the asparagus is very tender, 15 to 20 minutes.

While the soup simmers, briefly steam or boil the reserved asparagus tips. If you like them firm, like I do, cook for only about 2 minutes, tops. Drain and set aside.

Purée the soup in batches in a stand blender, or use an immersion blender to purée it in the pot. If you go the stand blender route, you might want to wait for the soup to cool slightly. Be very careful when blending hot liquids; fill the blender only one half to three quarters of the way full with each batch. Return the puréed soup to the pot, stir in the cream, then add more broth, if necessary, to thin the soup. Taste, and season with salt and pepper. Bring the soup to a boil and whisk in the remaining tablespoon of butter. (I admit, sometimes I’m a butter wimp and I leave out this final tablespoon. The soup is plenty rich without it.)

Add the lemon juice just before serving and garnish each bowl with two asparagus tips.

Serves 4.

Page 251

2011-05-22T06:26:00.022-04:00

Your attention, please, for a very important announcement: Molly Wizenberg. A Homemade Life. Page 251.

If you’re checking in here early enough this morning, you now know what you’re having for Sunday brunch. It’s called custard-filled corn bread, it is the oddest, most wonderful thing, and it looks like this:

To those of you who have a copy of Molly’s book on your shelves: That is all. You’re dismissed. Go on, now, into the kitchen! The rest of us will be along soon.

I arrived at this custard-filled corn bread en route to something else entirely, namely, baked oatmeal. Or, I should say, a vision of baked oatmeal – what it might be in the best of all possible worlds – that jolted me awake precisely two weeks, two days ago at 3:33am. I had never eaten baked oatmeal before, let alone prepared it, so in all likelihood, my expectations were wildly unfair, and perhaps even borderline delusional. I wanted something like a bowl of creamy oats, turned custardy in the oven, but only in places, oats that swelled and seethed – and partially set up? – beneath a crisp, nut-studded top layer. I’m not sure if oats even do that. Some people have imaginary friends. I, apparently, have imaginary breakfasts.

A couple of days later, I did it. I baked oatmeal. It was just okay. The specimen did, at least, have the crunchy outer crust I was after, but that’s about it. It wasn’t creamy enough. It certainly wasn’t custardy. I must have been fixating on this last part when I was discussing all of this with Molly, because after batting around a few potential tweaks and changes for my next attempt, she mentioned her custard-filled corn bread.

Custard-filled corn bread is also called spider cake, Molly told me. That sounded kind of creepy to me, so I decided to do some digging. I looked up “spider cake” in the Oxford English Dictionary to find that a spider cake (“spider-cake”) is a word of U.S. origin meaning “a cake cooked in a spider pan.” The entry offers up a line from the 1869 book, We Girls: a home story, by American writer Adeline Dutton Train Whitney. The quotation sounded so promising that I tracked it down in the book itself. I think you’ll understand why I can’t help sharing it with you in context:

Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days. Not her very finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts. It wasn’t fair to give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very best, and send people home to wish for them. But she made some of her “griddles trimmed with lace,” as only Barbara’s griddles were trimmed; the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree. And another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt, and delicately with pepper, - the oven doing the rest, and turning it into a snowy soufflé.

Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens should come into play; for who cares to put one’s genius into the universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-soufflés to be carried half a mile to the table? (Pages 79 and 80 of the 1871 edition.)

M. F. K. Fisher, eat your heart out!

But back to our custard-filled corn bread, “a cake cooked in a spider pan,” which, according to another dictionary entry, is “a kind of frying-pan having legs and a long handle.” You can read about the history of the spider pan over here, or just click here for a picture of the thing, if you’d like. Whew. This spider cake business is quite the rabbit hole. I’d better get on with it. How about one more photo to fortify ourselves?

Our custard-filled corn bread, or spider cake, the one you’ll be eating in an hour or so, begins as a very loose, milky batter. I’ve poured pancakes from batter thicker than this. But fret not! That’s how it’s supposed to be. The magic – and it really does feel like magic – begins just before baking, when you transfer the batter to its warmed and buttered pan, measure out a cup of heavy cream, and pour it into the very center of the thing. I had envisioned the cream drifting out like a sheet over the batter, but instead, it disappears straightaway through a tiny belly button of a sinkhole. In the oven, the cream spreads and separates into a layer of silky custard just beneath the cake-like surface. And beneath that is corn bread. A moist, coarse-grained cornbread that is perfect in every way. It’s bread! It’s custard! It’s cake! It’s a little like cream of wheat, too, said Eli, after moaning Molly’s name in a way that some people might consider entirely inappropriate. (“Some people” have obviously never tasted Molly’s custard-filled corn bread.)

I haven’t made it yet to the perfect baked oatmeal, but as far as I’m concerned, this recipe is to baked oatmeal what Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon are to a cross-country drive from point A to point B. Custard-filled corn bread is a glorious detour, indeed. I’ve always preferred the scenic route.

Custard-Filled Corn Bread
Adapted from A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg

Molly’s corn bread is inspired by a recipe from Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book. If you read Molly’s blog, Orangette, you already know that Ms. Wizenberg and Ms. Cunningham make quite the team. The one change that I would make to this recipe the next time around is to add more salt. I might even go so far as to double it. I plan on baking this corn bread again next Sunday for some out-of-town guests (Martha and Rich, if you’re reading this, brace yourselves!), so I’ll up the salt then and report back. ~~For now, I’ve kept it at half-a-teaspoon, as printed.~~ UPDATE: I have upped the salt in this recipe to 3/4 teaspoon. This corn bread is best enjoyed warm, preferably with maple syrup à la Molly’s husband, Brandon, a man who counts grades of syrup instead of sheep before drifting off to sleep.

3 Tbsps. unsalted butter
1 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
¾ c. yellow cornmeal, preferably medium ground
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
2 large eggs
3 Tbsps. sugar
¾ tsp. salt
2 c. whole milk (not low fat or nonfat)
1½ Tbsps. distilled vinegar
1 c. heavy cream
Pure maple syrup, for serving. (And perhaps some roasted rhubarb, too, my plan for next weekend.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan (I used the latter), and put it into the oven to warm while you mix together the batter.

Melt the butter according to your preferred method. I like to do it on the stovetop over a gentle flame; Molly suggests melting it in the microwave (carefully, on medium power, so it doesn’t splatter) or in a heatproof bowl placed in the preheated oven.

Transfer the melted butter to a large mixing bowl. While it cools, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and baking soda in a small bowl. Set aside.

Whisk the eggs into the slightly cooled butter. Add the sugar, salt, milk, and vinegar, and whisk well. Then, while continuing to whisk, add the flour mixture. Whisk until the batter is quite smooth.

Remove the heated pan from the oven, and pour in the batter. Slowly pour the cream into the center of the batter. Do not stir. Carefully place the pan into the oven – don’t jostle it – and bake until golden brown on top, 50 minutes to 1 hour. I let the just-baked bread rest for 10-15 minutes so that the custard would have a chance to set up a little. Serve warm.

Molly notes that covered with plastic wrap, the bread will keep at room temperature for one day, and in the fridge for three. Brandon suggests reheating the leftovers in the toaster oven. Something about crispy edges. Good man.

Serves 6-8.

Back in the saddle

2011-05-20T17:01:00.011-04:00

I’d like to tell you that I’ve been breaking in our new kitchen over this last month, but more accurately, it’s been breaking me in. Our refrigerator door, for one, is clearly out to get me. I’ll think that I’ve pushed it shut and turn my back, only to hear a faint rattle of jars and feel it thwack against my shoulder blades. Eli says the floor is slanted. That, or it’s personal. Also, I broke a plate. I’ve never done that before. I simply deposited it into the sink, and not with any particular enthusiasm or great show of force. I just put it down. One second, I had a plate in my hand; the next, I had only half of it.

As for the cooking, it’s been, well, erratic. I feel as if I’m training a wild horse. Just when I think I’m securely in the saddle – I did okay with those potatoes – I’m unseated by a spectacularly ho-hum coconut chiffon cake. Or worse. A few weeks back, I unpacked an old spatula that I should have tossed out a long time ago and proceeded to stir a pot of soup with it. A pot of beautiful, almost-done, intended-for-guests-that-night soup. The spatula melted. I poured out the soup. Then, later that day, back in the saddle. A triumph in trifle! A masterpiece in macaroons! Proof positive:

Giddy-up!

I forgot to snap a shot of the trifle, which really is too bad. It was so pretty. Also not pictured, though not at all too bad: an herbed loaf of bread that lived out its final days on our counter, struck down by the overdose of thyme that I inflicted upon it; a pasta salad so inexplicably, irreversibly bland that I nearly fell asleep eating it; and a batch of ricotta, strained with a new (and never again) brand of cheesecloth that frayed and sloughed off tiny bits of string, like dandruff, into the curds.

It’s been a rough ride. The dust is settling, though, and the kitchen – the whole apartment, really – is feeling tamer, like it’s ours. Slowly but surely, we’re starting to get our first whiffs of normal life here in this new place, and all I can say is breathe it in, people! It sure beats paint fumes. With this normal life has come normal lunch, the surest sign that our new home is, in fact, home. Normal lunch is what happens when I’m doing my normal thing: working like a normal person at my normal desk. It commences every afternoon with a faint tickle of hunger that scoops me up, drops me on my feet, and points me toward the kitchen. Normal lunch is almost always unscripted. I’ll bump around without a recipe or a plan, stick my head into the fridge, and scan the shelves until my eyes land on, say, a wedge of Parmesan. I’ll slice off a bite, close the refrigerator door (all the way!), and pass the time it takes to chew and swallow by considering what I might want to eat “for real,” that is, for lunch. Before long, it will hit me that the very cheese in my mouth surely fits the bill, that if this cheese isn’t “real,” then I don’t know what is, and standing there with one hand still pressed against the closed refrigerator door (one can never be too careful), I’ll think about the fact that Parmesan doesn’t get much billing as a by-the-hunk kind of cheese.

I seem to have slid into the future tense a few sentences back, which may have led you to believe that I’m talking about some hypothetical normal lunch, a potential normal lunch that hasn’t yet occurred. But it has. It did, just a couple of weeks ago. I stood there by the fridge and wondered why we, all of us, do not engage more often in high volume Parmesan consumption. Why a stolen bite of Parmesan from the fridge feels, in some small way, transgressive. Why we so rarely find ourselves with a wedge of Parmesan in one hand without a grater in the other. These are the things I think about on my lunch break. So much for normal.

For the record, I couldn’t come up with a single answer to these questions. (Can you?) On the other hand, the distinct pleasures of biting into a hunk of Parmesan are many. Parmesan cheese has texture, a lovely, nubby texture; it cracks and crumbles as you chew, which is fun, and has an out-loud flavor just itching to be heard in full voice – all features that are muted or lost when we grate it to smithereens. So. I hereby propose a campaign: PARMESAN BY THE HUNK! Who’s with me? The salad that I composed that day for lunch – strawberries, avocado, and Parmesan drizzled with balsamic vinegar and oil – is the perfect kickoff. The cheese in this salad is, admittedly, more ribbon than hunk, but that’s okay. It’s a start. If you wield your vegetable peeler with feeling, digging deeply into the wedge with each stroke, you’ll get ribbons that are more hunky than frilly, in any case. That’s what I do. Or, forget the peeler and use a sharp knife, instead. Either way, you’ll have a bang-up lunch.

EMBRACE THE HUNK! (Oooo, normal lunch just got interesting.)

Enjoy.

Strawberry and Avocado Salad with Shaved Parmesan

5-6 strawberries, washed, dried, hulled, and quartered
½ an avocado, diced
Several generous shavings (or slices, or hunks) of Parmesan
1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp. balsamic vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Arrange the quartered strawberries and diced avocado on a plate. Drizzle with the oil and vinegar, top with a grind or two of black pepper, and crown with the Parmesan shavings.

Serves 1.

The making of it

2011-04-29T17:47:00.006-04:00

According to the calendar, April has been chugging along now for twenty-nine days. This realization might have qualified as a where-has-the-time-gone moment if I didn’t know precisely where it’s gone. We’ve been moving. I can now happily report that we are no longer living next to a construction site. Instead, we’re living in one. This one is of our own making, though – we’re the ones doing the constructing – so even though our (new!) apartment is a royal mess, it’s our royal mess. Eli is king, I am queen, and we are presiding most happily over our dust and drop cloths.

We are also most tired. Most dirty, too.

This move has taught me a couple of things. I’ve learned that Mozart’s sonata, K.332 in F, plinking from laptop speakers takes on new life when accompanied by the squish-drag-squish of a paint roller. I’ve learned that when you’re shuttling books from room to room, shelving them according to genre (no, by size… no wait, by author… or maybe by title… or by color… okay, NEVER MIND, by genre) there comes a time when you must sit your weary self down in the middle of the living room floor, tear into a fresh package of Hint-O-Mint Newman-O’s, and consume approximately three to five more than you had intended. While you’re down there, you might look up and notice that the tree in the window is suddenly studded with tiny green buds. And though it’s barely spring, you’ll think ahead to fall, when that tree will blaze orange, when which books live on which shelves in which rooms will be old news.

This move has also confirmed something that I’ve known for a while: Falling head over heels for the most capable man you know is just plain smart. Eli has a way with, well, things. Physical things. Mechanical things. He just gets them. He sizes them up, thumps them, pokes around inside of them. Sometimes, he simply contemplates a thing from across the room and instinctively, like magic, understands the way it works. Ever since Eli was a kid, he’s been building things, taking things apart - a nightlight, a clock radio - to see how they work or, sometimes, for the sheer joy of putting them back together again. The grown-up version of that kid knows his way around a circular saw, a miter saw, a nail gun, and half-a-dozen other tools I can’t name. He makes desks and shelves and wine racks and cutting boards and wooden-handled knives. He’s a builder, a maker, a dream-it-up-and-bang-it-out-er. It’s fun being married to a guy like that. The best. And when you’ve got a list of new apartment to-dos, it is also exquisitely convenient.

We’ve had access to our old apartment all month, and Eli has converted it into a woodshop. He’s set up tables and rented tools, and stalks the aisles of Home Depot once, sometimes twice, each day in search of plywood sheets, drill bits, mounting hardware, brad nails, 2x4s (and 1x10s, and 1x12s, and 1x3s and 1x4s…), wood primer, flat white paint, and semi-gloss, too. A recent shopping list included 200 number eight ¾-inch screws, 40 zinc-plated corner brackets, 21 cabinet pulls, and one shower rod, all of which are by now holding together various corners of our new home. Whew.

By the end of our first week here, Eli had ripped out the oddly placed hanging poles in our even more oddly shaped closets and fitted them all with shelves, cubbies, hooks, and rods that make sense. Never in my life have I been more excited about storage.

That week we also installed the steel framing for our open pantry (!) and designed the built-in bookcase that’s now underway. Then, for good measure, Eli unhinged the dial and locking mechanism from the in-wall bedroom safe that had been left open, and sat stroking the notched wheels, ‘round and ‘round, until he had cracked the long lost combination, and the lever clicked and caught. I spoke with a close friend of mine the other night who said that he doesn’t know which is cooler, that Eli knows how to do all of this stuff, or that he actually goes and does it. I’m typing this now from the bed while Eli knocks a board into place on the desk he’s building into the wall for me, and from where I sit, I’d say it’s both of these things.

So, anyway, we’ve been busy. Food, the eating of it, has sometimes been an afterthought over these last few weeks. The making of it, though, has been at the front of my mind as I set up my kitchen. When I’m finding new homes for my spoons, and knives, and baking sheets, I’m thinking about the way that I cook, where I want to stand when the mixer groans to life, and how far I want to reach for my yellow spatula when it’s time to scrape down the bowl. What I cooked first in our new kitchen is something that I call salt and vinegar potatoes with green beans. It is also what I cooked last in our old kitchen. No surprise there, prone as I am to recipe spells.

Salt and vinegar potatoes with green beans are the cool weather cousin of my favorite potato salad, the one that my step-mom, Amy, has made for as long as I can remember. Instead of boiling the potatoes, you roast them in a very hot oven until they’re blistered and wrinkly skinned. Then, you shower them with salt, douse them with vinegar, and toss them together with blanched and shocked green beans. Simple. So simple, that I wasn’t even planning on sharing it with you. But then I served it to some friends a few weeks back – the last meal at our red table by the window! – and it turns out that I am not the only one who finds a hot, salty potato, a perfectly blanched bean, and a river of vinegar irresistible. Something worth talking about, for sure.

I’ve served it for dinner – alongside Eli’s brisket one night, and baked eggplant another – and, as you see here, for breakfast, too, beneath fried eggs. The snap of cold, sweet beans against earthy potatoes, the bright slap of vinegar, the crust of salt, it all feels like spring to me, and that’s where I want to be.

Salt and Vinegar Potatoes with Green Beans

The key to perfect, blistery potatoes is a very hot oven, and I mean hot. Make sure that your oven has reached 500 degrees Fahrenheit before you even think about sliding in those potatoes. If you roast the potatoes at a lower temperature, the insides of the potatoes will be mush by the time they blister. Also, be careful not to overcook the beans. Have your ice bath ready, and prepare to move when it’s time to transfer the steaming beans into the water.

2 pounds of baby red potatoes (the smaller the better)
1½ pounds of green beans
2-3 Tbsps. olive oil
5 Tbsps. red wine vinegar (a bit more or less, according to taste)
A copious amount of coarsely ground sea salt (I use Maldon flakes in this recipe)
Black pepper

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F.

Wash and trim the beans, and set aside. Scrub the potatoes, dry them, cut them in half, and toss them with the olive oil in a large bowl. Season with salt and a few grinds of pepper. I usually start with 3-4 generous pinches of salt and add more later on.

Dump the oiled potatoes onto a baking sheet and arrange them cut side up. I use a rimmed baking sheet so that the oil doesn’t slide off, and I line it with parchment paper for easy cleanup. Roast the potatoes for 20-25 minutes, until fork-tender. Hold onto that oily bowl. You’ll need it later.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to boil. Also, prepare your ice bath. You’ll want to use a bowl big enough to hold plenty of water and ice so that the temperature in there remains quite cold, even after you’ve dunked the hot beans. Add the beans to the boiling water and blanch for 1½-2 minutes. Immediately remove the pot from the heat, drain the beans into a colander, transfer them into the ice bath, and keep them there until you’re ready to toss them with the potatoes.

When the potatoes are brown, blistered, and cooked through, transfer them back into their original bowl. Be sure to scrape all of the oil that’s pooled around the potatoes into the bowl, too. Then, toss with the vinegar. I begin with 5 tablespoons, and usually end up adding more. Taste, and add more salt, as needed. Dry the blanched and shocked beans, add them to the potatoes, mix, and serve immediately.

Serves 6, as a side dish.

What I know for certain

2011-03-21T09:42:00.012-04:00

We’re in finishing touches territory now over at the new apartment. We have been for weeks. It’s been a strange and uncomfortable time to be focusing on the nitty-gritties of a new home, one with strong, unbending walls that stand on dry, solid ground. But in a way, it has also felt oddly appropriate. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a home a home, and that feels right.

A friend of mine asked me recently if we’re “prepared” for our move, and I was reminded that moving to an apartment right next door doesn’t look like other moves. I’m not even sure if it qualifies as an actual move. It feels like cheating, like swaying our hips an inch to the right and having the nerve to call it “dancing.” No boxes. No packing tape. No moving trucks or crumpled newsprint. Instead, we have a small army of friends who will help us carry our stacks of dishes and maneuver our dressers the few steps down the hall. To those of you in the throes of a real move right now who, halfway through this paragraph, armed yourselves with all manner of rotten vegetables: Ready, aim, fire! We deserve it.

There’s just one tiny drawback to moving into the next door apartment: the next door construction site. For the most part, it’s no big deal. I don’t mind the hammering, scraping, or sanding one bit. It’s the fumes. With the hardworking crew slapping down final layers of paint, and finishing (and re-finishing, and re-re-finishing – don’t ask) the floors, we’ve been treated to a dizzying array of them over this last month. From solvents to stains to sealants, it’s mean stuff. And, because of where the shared walls between our current and soon-to-be apartments line up, the point of entry for these fumes is our kitchen. That’s even meaner. I had planned on having some last hurrahs in there before our move, but it’s hard to hurrah when you’re busy trying not to pass out.

Most recently, it was the particularly toxic fumes from multiple floor coatings of polyurethane that got us. We did what we could: Ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. We pushed open all of the windows, circulated the air with electric fans, and set up camp in the room that’s as far as can be from the kitchen, the room that happens to be our bedroom. The climate in here was, well, brisk, but for the most part, all that ventilating did the trick. We dressed in scarves, hats, and wrist worms. There were pizzas delivered, and pad-thai picnics on the bed. I can’t complain.

But sometime last week, I snapped. I awoke in the six o’ clock hour to the distinct aroma of nothing. The most recent coating of polyurethane had fully dried, and by my calculations, I had approximately two hours before the workers would arrive to lay down the next coat. I tore into the kitchen, found a sad and blackened pair of bananas, and my mind went where it often goes when I need something quick, foolproof, and deeply reassuring. Banana bread. There was no time to mess with add-ins like nuts, or chocolate, or even the crumble topping of my beloved standby. Plus, in my kitchen-deprived state, I was itching to try something new. I flipped open my laptop and started clicking. I found a recipe for banana cake that Dorie Greenspan posted on Serious Eats a few years back and, detecting little difference volume-wise between her cake and most banana bread recipes I’ve met, I went for it. I’m going to tell you something now that you no doubt already know: When time is short and you must put all of your eggs (and bananas) in one basket, Dorie Greenspan is precisely the person you want in the kitchen with you.

The banana bread looks rather moody there, I know, but I assure you that it is really quite cheerful. It just happened to be particularly dark and grey that morning, and the fresh fumes that had already begun to seep into the kitchen by this point didn’t give me much time to focus on things like proper exposure. Or to focus, period, as you can see.

I’ve mashed up many a black banana for many a banana bread over the years, but this recipe stands alone. The two ingredients that set it apart are yogurt and butter. I typically favor quick bread recipes that rely on oil for their fat, for the straightforward reason that loaves made with oil are moister and spongier than their butter-rich counterparts. In this oil-less recipe, though, the yogurt picks up the slack. At least I think that’s what’s going on. What I know for certain is that this loaf is as moist as ever, perhaps the slightest bit dense, but in a good way. Meanwhile, the butter is left to do what butter does best, which is simply to be its fabulous buttery self. The flavor of the butter in this recipe is so direct that it caught me off guard. It doesn’t hide behind cinnamon, or honey, or orange zest. It marches right up, and with a firm handshake, announces itself in caramelized edges that smack of tarte Tatin. The beautifully burnished loaf smells of brown butter and bananas which, come to think of it, is exactly how banana bread should smell, isn’t it? Slice after slice, I had the distinct feeling that I was eating banana bread in its truest, purest form. I think of banana bread as a classic, but until I tried this recipe, I’m not sure I ever really understood what that meant. It’s as if all of the other banana bread recipes that I have ever baked were riffs —albeit, often virtuosic riffs— on this one.

Hi, banana bread, old friend. It’s nice to meet you.

Have a good week, everyone.

Banana Yogurt Bread
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s recipe, “Banana Cake Big and Small” (which, incidentally, sounds like the title of my new favorite children's book that hasn't yet been written), posted on Serious Eats.

I’ve wrestled before with the question of where to draw the line between a quick bread and a cake, and I’m not the only one. Honestly, I’m stumped. I baked this recipe in a loaf pan, so I’m calling it a “bread.” But I’d eagerly follow Dorie Greenspan’s lead and bake it in muffin tins or a Bundt pan (double the recipe for the latter) and call it a cake. Works for me, either way. I happened to use 1 cup of all-purpose flour and ½ cup of whole wheat flour because it’s what I had within reach. (The new bag of all-purpose flour was up on a high shelf and, as you know, time was of the essence.) I liked it with the whole wheat, and I’ll bake it again this way. The original recipe calls for 1½ cups of all-purpose flour.

1 c. all-purpose flour
½ c. whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 very ripe bananas, mashed (about ¾ cup)
½ c. sour cream or plain, whole-milk yogurt (I used yogurt.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and generously butter and flour a loaf pan.

Whisk together the flours, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugar and beat at medium speed until pale and fluffy. Add the vanilla and the egg, and beat for about 1 minute. Reduce the speed to low and mix in the bananas. Mix in half of the flour mixture, then all of the yogurt, then the rest of the dry ingredients. Don’t worry if the batter is a little lumpy.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for 55-60 minutes, until a tester inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then carefully turn out the loaf onto a cooling rack. You’ll want to let the loaf cool considerably so that it has a chance to get its bearings and doesn’t tear beneath the knife. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Lucky souls

2011-02-17T16:01:00.018-05:00

Writing about rhubarb in the middle of February feels about as kind as bragging about the bikini you’ll be wearing on that mid-winter escape to Saint Barths. In other words: not very kind. Rhubarb season is still a couple of months off which, in February time – how is it that the shortest month of the year always feels the longest? – is the equivalent of about one million years. But if you’re one of the lucky souls out there who squirreled away some rhubarb last season, and you still have a pound or so in your freezer, you’re going to want to hear about this.

Yes, you’ve seen this cake before. It’s the olive oil citrus cake from Rustic Fruit Desserts that I posted about a year ago. If you were reading back then, you know that I liked this cake a lot. What you don’t know is that it has become something of a wintertime fixation. These days, when I head into the kitchen to bake, the majority of the time it is to bake this cake. Either I am a woman obsessed (perhaps), or this is a very good cake (definitely).

I told you last year that this cake is brilliant all on its own. I stand by that statement, but that hasn’t stopped me from dressing it up from time to time. Powdered sugar, lemon sorbet, the lovely glaze from the original recipe: excellent options, one and all. (Though, for my taste, preferably not all at once.) But now, please direct your attention to the photo, and therein to the rhubarb sauce rolling down onto the plate. Of all of the toppings and accoutrements that I’ve tried, this one takes (makes?) the cake.

I remember the week when I first made this sauce. It was the first week of April last year, and suddenly, mercifully, it felt like spring. Eli came home from climbing that Thursday night with a bouquet of orange ranunculuses, and the next morning I found rhubarb at the market. Before I had even unpacked the shopping bags, the rhubarb was chopped and melting into sugar over a low flame. I had grabbed only a few stalks of rhubarb, so it was a tiny batch of sauce, just enough for a serving or so. I spent the rest of the morning writing letters, and then I spooned the sauce over a drift of fresh ricotta, and ate it with my feet up on the radiator. The sun was so bright, I remember, that I had to pull down the shade. The next day, Eli and I were walking through the park when, out of nowhere, a pillow fight broke out. A pillow fight. Feathers were flying everywhere, and I remember thinking, I thought that only happens in cartoons. A few days later, we decided it was time for our first picnic of the season, but we got home later than expected, and we had to race against the sun. By the time we were outside on the blanket, it was almost a full half-hour after the sun had officially set, but still another full half-hour before it would be truly dark. One of us, probably me, said something about the light, about how blue it was. We ate steamed artichokes, and pasta with mushrooms, lemon, and thyme. We talked about what it means to be brave, and I realized that I don’t know very many brave people, and that I am not nearly as brave as I’d like to be. Then, we lay on our backs for a while until the sky went completely black. I made a second, larger batch of rhubarb sauce that night before bed. I loved that week. It felt important, somehow.

There’s not much to this sauce, really, which is probably why I think it’s so great. (I’m a rhubarb purist.) It’s rhubarb, a few tablespoons of sugar, some vanilla, and a squeeze of lemon. I’ve tried souping it up with orange zest and liqueur, but honestly, I think simple is best here. The sauce is rosy and bright. Very un-February. Just what February needs.

Rhubarb Sauce

1¼ pounds chopped rhubarb (if frozen, do not thaw)
3 Tbsps sugar
1½ tsps vanilla
Juice of ½ a lemon (If you’re making the olive oil citrus cake, too, you can use half of the lemon that you zest for that recipe.)

Combine all of the ingredients in a medium, non-reactive saucepan. Cover and heat over a medium-low flame, until the rhubarb pieces soften and melt into each other. Stir occasionally to keep the sauce from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Taste, and add another tablespoon or two of sugar if you prefer a sweeter sauce. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

A real talent

2011-02-13T11:47:00.015-05:00

Anyone for pancakes? I hope so, because that’s what we’re having for breakfast this morning.

Today’s pancakes are brought to you by yesterday’s conversation about the pancakes that we’re planning on eating one week from today. Did you get that? I wrote it, and even I had to go back and read that sentence twice. Let me explain.

The first thing you need to know is that our friends, Eitan and Julia, who relocated to D.C. during the 2009 mass exodus from Cambridge, moved back to town about six weeks ago. They now live in an apartment just four blocks from ours, and if you ask me, four is a much, much nicer number than four hundred and forty-seven, the approximate number of miles between Cambridge, MA and Washington, D.C. We marked their return with pizza, champagne, and Fairytale Brownies. It was late when we left their place that night, but only eight minutes later when we walked through our own front door. I'm so glad they're back.

That our friends are not only back, but four-blocks-away back, means that we often have occasion to walk home together from wherever it is we’ve been. Yesterday, on just such a walk, my thoughts turned to pancakes, and to the shamefully long list of Oscar-nominated movies that I haven’t yet seen, but that I’d like to before the awards ceremony later this month. And so, a plan was hatched: a Sunday morning of pancakes and movies at our place with our home again friends, one week from today. It was a lovely plan. It still is. The only problem is that when you’ve got pancakes on the brain, a week is an impossibly long time to wait to have them on your plate. So we didn’t.

I like to give credit where credit is due, so I should tell you that Eli is the head pancake maker in our household. My role in the process is more like head pancake desirer. It’s my job to recognize the hunger for pancakes when it strikes, and –quick like a pancake-crazed bunny– to alert Eli to the fact that it’s time. I have a real talent for it.

Pancakes around here normally mean Molly’s oatmeal pancakes, for the simple reason that they are amazing. But it’s February, and oatmeal has been in heavy breakfast rotation for four long, cold months now, and though I never thought I’d say it, I needed a break. I asked Eli for a more traditional buttermilk pancake this time around, and boy, did he deliver.

There are three things that set this recipe apart from your standard buttermilk pancake recipe. The first is the yogurt, a whole cup of it. That sounds like a lot of yogurt, especially against a single cup of flour, but the yogurt is barely perceptible in the finished pancakes. All that remains of it is the slightest tang. I think it’s also thanks to the yogurt that these pancakes manage to be both moist and light, a rare combination in the land of buttermilk pancakes, I’ve learned. While we’re talking texture, there’s also the cornmeal, a mere two tablespoons that, if you go for the more coarsely ground stuff, adds some barely-there grit to the smooth batter. It surprised me at first, but Eli said, "Embrace it!" and I did, and then I liked it a lot. Finally, the sugar in this recipe is brown, and that does something quite nice to the flavor. It’s deeper, smoother, more grown-up. I tend to steer clear of traditional pancakes because of the inevitable post-pancake crash, a result, no doubt, of so much unmitigated flour and sugar. These pancakes though, with more buttermilk, yogurt, and egg than flour, cornmeal, and sugar, combined, picked me up and kept me up.

Next Sunday can’t come soon enough.

Buttermilk Yogurt Pancakes
Adapted from Bon Appétit, October 2004

The editors at Bon Appétit call these pancakes “Buttermilk Pancakes With Maple Syrup Apples.” If you click through, above, to the original recipe, you can read all about these maple syrup apples, which earned high praise from home cooks in the reviews. We ate our pancakes with sliced pears (yes, those are pears on that plate up there, not pickles; don't they look like pickles?) and maple syrup, instead. I’d do it again. I decided to rename the recipe “Buttermilk Yogurt Pancakes” because there’s just as much yogurt in there as buttermilk, and it’s the yogurt, I think, that makes these pancakes so special.

1 c. all purpose flour
2 Tbsps. yellow cornmeal
2 packed Tbsps. light brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 c. buttermilk
1 c. plain whole-milk yogurt
1 large egg
1½ Tbsps. unsalted butter, melted
Additional butter for the pan

Combine the first six ingredients in a large bowl, and whisk to blend. In a medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, yogurt, and egg. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, and stir until just blended, but still lumpy. Don’t over-mix the batter, or your pancakes will be heavy. Gently mix in the melted butter.

Heat a large nonstick griddle or pan over medium heat and melt just enough butter to thinly coat the entire surface. Working in batches, drop the batter by 1/3-cupfuls into the pan. The pancakes will spread slightly, so be sure to leave some space between them. Cook the pancakes for about 3 minutes, until they are golden brown on the bottom, and bubbles form on top. Turn the pancakes over and cook until the bottoms are brown and the pancakes are barely firm to the touch. Transfer to an oven-safe plate, and keep warm in a low oven until you’re ready to serve.

Repeat with the remaining batter, adding more butter to the pan, as needed.

Serves 3.

Something else, too

2011-02-09T17:31:00.011-05:00

I have been eating anchovies for a very long time. I started cooking with them only recently. There’s something I’ve been meaning to say about that: Thank you, Luisa Weiss.

I like to think of Luisa as an air traffic controller for my kitchen. She peers up into the crowded sky of recipes, and clears only the very best of them for landing. When a recipe isn’t worthy, she tells us so, and off it sails into oblivion. I’m not sure what the air traffic controller equivalent of perfect pitch might be, but Luisa’s got it. Back in October, she posted a recipe for Marcella Hazan’s tomato anchovy sauce. Any recipe with Marcella Hazan in the cockpit and Luisa Weiss waving it down into my kitchen is a recipe worth making at once, so I got right down to it.

While I’m assigning alternate career paths to our dear Luisa, I should also tell you that she is a poet. So, when she instructed us to “melt a few anchovies in some olive oil,” I assumed that she was being, you know, poetic. Fish, as far as I knew, do not melt. Obviously, I had never cooked with anchovies before, because anchovies do melt. They do! To be fair, the technical term for what’s going on in the pan is probably something more along the lines of disintegration. But they sure do look as if they’re melting away. Luisa was just calling it like she saw it.

Marcella Hazan’s tomato anchovy sauce is about as straightforward as it gets. It’s one of those recipes that could chase even the cold-cereal-for-dinner type into the kitchen because, really, this is cooking? That’s all there is to it? Yes, that’s all. It’s foolproof. Unless you’re a total weirdo and think, hey, I like anchovies. Kind of a lot. And to avoid having to wrap up the several anchovies left in the tin, you decide to toss them all into the pan. As you’ve probably guessed, I am this weirdo. Now, I’d tell you that an entire tin of anchovies in a single dish of pasta is a lot of anchovies, but the trouble isn’t really the anchovies. It’s the salt. Anchovies packed in salt are, go figure, very, very salty. They are not meant to be eaten by the tinful, and if you don’t believe me, just ask my tongue which, a couple of bites into lunch, threatened to pack its bags and move out. Luisa, I shall never stray again.

I learned a lot that afternoon. It was a big day for me and anchovies, and I started thinking a little differently about them. In the years before anchovies ever hit the pan in my kitchen, I thought of them primarily as a topping, in the sense that lettuce, tomato, and onion top a burger, or mushrooms top a pizza. I’d drape two or three anchovies over a salad, or press a couple between the layers of a Swiss cheese, spinach, and mustard sandwich. In the days since my bungled sauce (which, un-bungled, is a very fine sauce indeed, you should know) I’ve been thinking of anchovies as something else, too: seasoning. Swap anchovies in for salt, and you get some pretty spectacular results. Because anchovies are more than seasoning, actually. They’re seasoning, plus. The “plus” is what’s there in addition to the saltiness, the flavor that you expect will taste like fish, but instead tastes like something you can’t quite pin down. The word “umami” comes to mind. Anchovies make Luisa’s sauce taste bigger; they make pasta with spicy broccoli taste like Dinner with a capital “D,” and lend this crustless quiche a surprising gravitas.

I just dubbed this specimen “crustless quiche,” but in truth, the dish comfortably straddles the frittata-quiche divide. So comfortably, in fact, that I had a hard time figuring out just what to call it. It’s flatter and less custardy than your average quiche; it looks and feels more like a frittata, but any frittata that I’ve ever met begins its life on the stovetop. This lovely concoction, on the other hand, cooks from start to finish in the oven. Like a quiche. I spun myself around in circles for a while, frittata, quiche, frittata, quiche, and then, as usual, Harold McGee set me straight. In his On Food and Cooking, McGee writes that a quiche is a “savory custard or a close relative of the omelet,” a “pie-shaped mixture of eggs and cream or milk that contains small pieces of a vegetable, meat, or cheese.” He explains that it can be baked “either alone or in a precooked crust,” and then, finally, comes the line that I’d been waiting for: “The Italian frittata and Egyptian eggah are similar preparations that omit any milk or cream.” Ah ha! So I guess it’s the milk, then, that pushes this dish into quiche territory. Thanks to you, too, Harold McGee.

It’s recipe time now, but I’m actually hoping you might trade me something for it this week, namely, an anchovy tip or two. How do you cook with them? I’d love to hear.

Kale and Onion Crustless Quiche
Inspired by Luisa Weiss's melting anchovies, Judy Rodgers's spicy broccoli, and a bunch of kale in my fridge

This quiche is great for Sunday morning company since you can do most of the prep work in advance. Toast the breadcrumbs and sauté the onions and kale the night before, and the next morning all that’s left to do is to whisk together the milk and eggs, prepare the pan, and assemble. You’ll be done even before the oven has a chance to preheat.

¼ cup breadcrumbs
1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 bunch Lacinato (a.k.a. "dinosaur) kale, de-ribbed, rinsed, and not-so-thoroughly dried
5 salt-packed anchovy fillets, chopped
3-4 generous pinches dried red chili flakes
3 large eggs
1 cup whole milk
Butter for the pie dish
A couple of glugs of olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Shake the breadcrumbs into a single layer on a baking pan, and toast for 5-6 minutes, until golden. Butter a 10-inch shallow(ish) glass pie dish and coat it with the breadcrumbs, and set aside.

Heat a couple of glugs of olive oil over a medium-high flame in a 12-inch skillet, and sauté the sliced onion until translucent. Add the kale, turn the heat down to medium, cover, and leave it alone for 2-3 minutes to part-sauté, part-steam. When the kale is tender and has considerably reduced, add the chopped anchovies and red chili flakes. Stir, and cook for another minute or two, until the anchovies have melted away. Then, turn off the heat and allow the vegetables to cool slightly while you prepare the egg and milk mixture.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs and the whole milk. No need to add salt, since the anchovies take care of that. Transfer the spiced and anchovied kale and onions to the prepared pie dish, and pour the egg and milk mixture over top. Bake for about 35 minutes, until the quiche is just set.

Serve warm or room temperature.

The flavors did

2011-01-22T18:14:00.001-05:00

The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers is a magic hat of a book. Just when I think I’ve emptied it of every last trick, I fish around inside, and pull out something new.

I wasn’t even after a recipe late last Thursday night. Eli and I were traveling home on the T, and a couple of stops out, the conversation turned to chicken. We had two small birds in our fridge that we planned on roasting the following evening, and I casually mentioned – as casually as one can mention something of such import – that we should rub them down with salt before bed. We knew that we should. We knew it was the right thing to do. But we couldn’t quite remember why. I mumbled something about texture, but the real answer was simple: Because Judy Rodgers told us so.

I didn’t come here today to tell you about chicken. I’m here to talk broccoli, capers, and breadcrumbs in unexpected places. It would be unkind, though, to deprive you of the chance to hear Judy Rodgers tell you so, too. It’s what happens next in this story, in any case.

The Zuni Café Cookbook is as lovely to read as it is to cook from. The only thing lovelier than reading and cooking from it is doing both at the same time, an act that requires two cooks in the kitchen, one on the bird, one on the book. While Eli began plucking, salting, and patting, I turned to a small masterpiece in the opening pages, “The Practice of Salting Early,” and read aloud. Rodgers opens with the story of a Paris restaurant at midnight, the site of her first awakening to the power of this practice. About a page in, she offers the following explanation:

Aside from simply allowing time to diffuse the seasoning throughout the food, which is reason enough to try the technique, early salting also promotes juiciness and improves texture. This is the felicitous result of a few reliable processes. First, salt helps dissolve some of the proteins within and around muscle fibers that would otherwise resist chewing. A second process is more complex. Initially, salt does draw moisture from cells – whence the widely accepted belief that it dries food out. However, the quiet trauma of osmosis is temporary. With time, the cells reabsorb moisture in reverse osmosis. When they do, that moisture is seasoned with salt.

I honestly cannot say whether I find this woman’s food or her words more captivating. With only a couple of raw, salted chickens in the kitchen that night, I decided to fill up on the latter. I toted the volume to bed, and paged through the recipes, past old favorites like panades, crostinis, and mushroom plates, and on-decks like sage grilled cheese and ricotta gnocchi. I was about to switch off the light, when the book fell open to something I hadn’t noticed before, something called “Pasta with Spicy Broccoli and Cauliflower.” I saw capers and anchovies, garlic and fennel. I read on, and in the denouement – a word entirely suited to the resolution of Judy Rodgers’s recipes, I promise you – came the following words, “Taste – every flavor should be clamoring for dominance.” I was sold.

Eli and I have fallen into the habit of Sunday supper over the last couple of years. For us, it’s something between a late lunch and an early dinner, usually taken in the 4 or 5 o’ clock hour (hence the fading blue-ish light in these photographs). The fare is always simple: a pot of soup, a loaf of bread, maybe a wedge of cheese. Often, it’s a meal scraped together from the week’s last scraps which, this past Sunday, included two heads of broccoli lurking in the crisper drawer. Perfect. Sunday supper is no time to fuss, so I made Judy Rodgers’s “Pasta with Spicy Broccoli and Cauliflower” with what I had on hand. That meant no cauliflower. I also replaced the olives with an extra scoop of capers, since Eli’s not an olive man. (No one’s perfect.) I dropped the broccoli into the oil and left it alone to brown and frizzle around the edges, as Rodgers said it would. I pushed the chopped capers from the cutting board next, and once they had shriveled and crisped, the anchovies, garlic, and fennel seeds. Only then did I give the whole thing a stir, and scatter several three-fingered pinches of dried chili flakes over top. I do as I am told, so then, I tasted. Clamor, the flavors did.

By then, the pasta was ready to drain; the breadcrumbs were toasted and warm. Ah, the breadcrumbs! Rodgers lists them as an optional ingredient, and I almost did without them. Why would I want bread on my pasta? Well. It turns out that these breadcrumbs are about as optional as the pour of milk in my Earl Grey tea, which is to say, not optional at all. Pasta with breadcrumbs, or “pasta con il pangrattato,” is pasta that crunches, people. Pasta that tastes like toast! It’s apparently some kind of Italian culinary institution, an age-old solution to dressing up a bowl of pasta when more expensive ingredients like meat are scarce. I had no idea. Now I know.

I also know something else, courtesy of Tuesday dinner: this broccoli and breadcrumbs is equally delicious over a bowl of brown rice. Just to be certain, on Thursday, I confirmed it.

In case you’re wondering, the chicken was good, too.

Pasta with Spicy Broccoli (and Cauliflower)
Adapted from The Zuni Café Cookbook by Judy Rodgers

In her exposition, Judy Rodgers encourages us to experiment within the loosely drawn borders of her recipe: “You can try minced fennel bulb in lieu of seeds for a sweeter, more subtle note, or dash both and use freshly chopped mint instead. Substitute pecorino romano if you don’t feel like bread crumbs, trade black olives for green ones, or skip the olives and add more capers or anchovies.” Except for that bit about leaving out the crumbs (heaven forbid!), it all sounds good to me. The following list of ingredients reflects my own take on the recipe. I skipped the 4 to 5 tablespoons of coarsely chopped pitted olives (I upped the capers, instead) and the 1 tablespoon of chopped parsley that Rodgers includes in the original recipe. And I suggest using slightly less pasta than the 1 pound that Rodgers recommends; I prefer a tighter broccoli to pasta ratio.

About 1 cup (about 2 ounces) fresh breadcrumbs made from slightly stale country bread, crusts removed (In a pinch one night, I used panko breadcrumbs from a canister, and I'd do it again.)
¼ cup olive oil, plus an additional 2-3 Tbsps
¾ pound pasta (I used spaghetti)
Two medium-large heads of broccoli with a few inches of stem intact (or one head of broccoli, and one of cauliflower; about 24 ounces, total)
4 heaped Tbsps of capers, drained and dried lightly between towels
6-8 salt-packed anchovy fillets (if you increase the amount of anchovies, remember to adjust the salt in the opposite direction)
6 garlic cloves
½ tsp. fennel seeds
4-8 hefty, three-fingered pinches of dried chili flakes
A splash or two of rice vinegar for deglazing the pan
Sea salt

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Toss the breadcrumbs with 2 tsps. of olive oil, and shake into a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake for 4-5 minutes, until golden. Keep the crumbs on the stovetop until needed.

Put up a pot of water to boil. When it does, add the pasta, and cook until al dente.

Slice the broccoli lengthwise into 1/8-inch pieces. You’ll have some pieces that are all stalk, some that are all flower, and some that are a little bit of both. If the strips of stalk look too long to you, chop them in half.

Pound the fennel seeds lightly in a mortar, and chop the capers with a single pass of the knife. Then, coarsely chop the anchovies and garlic.

Warm the ¼ cup oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium heat. Add most of the sliced broccoli. Leave the tiny buds and bits behind for now so that they don’t burn. Salt very lightly (keeping in mind the saltiness of the anchovies), and swirl the pan for a second or two. Then, put it down on the burner and leave it alone. That part is very important. You want to give the broccoli time to brown and frizzle, so don’t touch it for a good 3-5 minutes.

Drizzle with another tablespoonful of olive oil, and scrape the remaining broccoli and capers into the pan. Shake gently so that the tiny buds and capers fall to the bottom of the pan and crisp up. Still do not stir. After another 3 minutes, reduce the heat, scatter the anchovies, garlic, fennel, and chili over the broccoli, and then only then, give it a gentle stir. Cook for another minute or two. If there are a lot of brown bits clinging to the bottom of the pan, splash with rice vinegar, and scrape them up with a wooden spatula.

When the pasta is ready – just a few minutes after you’ve finished the broccoli, hopefully – drain and toss with the broccoli in the pan. Garnish with the warm, toasted breadcrumbs.

Serves 4-6.

This next part

2011-01-13T10:00:00.025-05:00

So.

We’re moving.

But just a little. Same city, same neighborhood, same building, same floor. We’re moving to the unit right next door. Apparently, this brings out the Dr. Seuss in me.

The new place doesn’t feel all that much bigger than our current apartment, but it does have a second bedroom, which means that now, we’ll be able to offer our guests a mattress and a door. We are very grown up. It also has a slightly larger kitchen, eastern-facing windows (good morning!), and a tree outside of one of them that turns bright orange every fall. If you look closely at the top photo, you’ll see it there.

Eli and I call our new apartment “Davis’s apartment,” even though our sweet neighbor Davis moved out last spring. He lived in that apartment for decades, so our building management decided to completely renovate it before renting it again. The key word in that last sentence is “renting.” It’s what makes this next part so unbelievable: When it was more or less settled that Eli and I would be moving in when the unit was done, the building manager asked us if we might have any particular preferences for the renovations. For the apartment that we do not own. And never will. (The units in our building are rental only.) Crazy, right? And incredibly cool. There is no guarantee, of course, that every wish on our list will come true. Why should it? We’re renters! But words like butcher block and soapstone have been tossed around, and they did let Eli get in there before they closed up the ceiling so that he could wire the kitchen for speakers, and – drum roll please – half of the wall between the kitchen and the dining room is now quite gone.

There will be a breakfast bar where that wall used to be. Though I think we’ll use it most often as a visit-the-cook-in-the-kitchen bar. A step up from having to wedge yourself in the doorway, for sure.

Eli and I are fixer-upper kind of people. We’ve loved researching materials and thinking about our new space. It’s the next best thing to getting in there and doing the work ourselves. Thanks to a building manager with a heart of gold, and a contractor who is every bit an artist and a craftsman, we’re having so much fun. I try to sneak over there every now and then with my camera. Are you interested in seeing some photos of the kitchen as it comes along? If so, I think that can be arranged. We don’t have a set move-in date yet, but we’re hoping for sometime next month. We’ll see.

When Davis moved out, his niece came to pack up his belongings. I had just – literally just – gotten back from a week of pastry-making at the CIA, and I hadn’t yet changed out of my chef’s whites when she rang our bell. We got to talking, and I explained that, no, I am not a cook, but that yes (a thousand times yes!) I like to cook, and then she told me to hold on. She’d be right back. A minute later, she was handing me a first-edition copy of Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cook Book with Davis’s full name inscribed on the inside cover. We didn’t yet know that we’d be moving in to Davis’s apartment. Now, I can’t flip through the pages of his book without my heart thumping a little louder in my chest. Soon, I'll be cooking from Davis’s old book in Davis's old kitchen.

Unlike Amanda Hesser’s recent masterpiece, Craig Claiborne’s volume includes recipes from a single decade, only: 1950 to 1960. (In other words, you need both books on your shelf.) I had been eyeing a walnut cake recipe in Davis’s book for a while, and on Sunday, out of the blue, I decided that it was time. The impulse to bake this cake must have been some kind of premonition, because friends, it’s been a long week. I’ve needed this cake. And maybe a few extra hours for sleeping, too. Pass the cake, please.

This recipe is a cross between a quick bread and a pound cake. It’s a bread in the sense that banana bread, or pumpkin bread, or lemon poppy seed bread are breads, and I almost went so far as to change the name of the recipe to “walnut bread.” A few things stopped me. The first is the stick and a half of butter. It’s not so much the quantity of butter in the recipe – though most of the quick breads that I bake call for oil – as the quality of its presence in the finished loaf. I’m afraid that sounds kind of new age-y, but I don’t know how else to put it. The butter is there. Not quite as there as in a full-fledged, classic pound cake, but there, nonetheless. The vanilla is, too, in a way that’s usually reserved for ice creams, custards, and the occasional cookie. This cake is also sturdier than the quick breads I know. Its crumb is tighter, encased in a crisp, golden crust, which makes for a cake that stands up to serious toasting. It’s not every day that you meet a cake like that.

Cheers to the old, and cheers to the new, friends. Speaking of new, after two years, I thought it was about time to push the windows open and shine things up for us here. I hope you like what I've done with the place.

Walnut Cake
Adapted from The New York Times Cook Book by Craig Claiborne

A quick note on not toasting the walnuts: The recipe doesn’t say to toast the walnuts, so I didn't. The whole time that the cake was in the oven, I regretted it. Then, I tried a piece, and I felt much better. The walnuts work beautifully just as they are. I noticed that they were more firmly secured inside of the cake than they usually are in my nut-packed cakes and breads. It was as if they were nut-like continuations of the crumb itself. I wonder if this is because you mix them in with the dry ingredients, instead of adding them into the batter at the very end. Thoughts?

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour (which means that you sift first, then measure)
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
¾ cup chopped walnuts (again, chop first, then measure)
¾ cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter
¾ cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
¼ cup whole milk

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Butter a 9½ x 5¼ x 2¾-inch loaf pan, line with parchment paper, and butter the paper.

Combine the sifted flour, baking powder, salt, and chopped walnuts in a bowl, and mix.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, whip the butter until soft. Add the sugar gradually and whip until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, waiting until each egg has fully incorporated before adding the next. Add the vanilla. Add the dry ingredients and the milk alternately to the butter mixture, stirring only until all the flour is dampened.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan and bake about one and one quarter hours, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan for ten minutes before turning out onto a rack.

Two

2011-01-07T15:31:00.003-05:00

Sweet Amandine turns two today, so I just had to stop by. I want to thank you for being here, for reading, for cooking along, and for all of your kind words and cheers over the last two years. Without you, this little operation would be nowhere near as much fun. Two years is not a very long time at all. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re still at the beginning, that this is still chapter one. I like that.

In 2007, Joan Didion earned the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award. I listened to her acceptance speech a few months ago, and copied down the following words: “We know how to write when we begin. What we learn from doing it is what writing [is] for.” That has been the story of this little blog, and I hope it always will be.

I shared a lot of special meals at a lot of special tables over this last year. Today, I’ve brought some photos of just a few of them. One of the things that I love about the new year – and a blog birthday that, conveniently, falls within the first week of it – is how it inspires me to look backwards and forwards at the same time. On that note, I should mention that there’s some change afoot around here. I’ll be back soon to tell you – and show you – what’s up.

Happy two, friends. I can’t wait for more and more.

"its light pretending not to move"

2011-01-05T15:53:00.006-05:00

Move along, now. Nothing to see here. Just some Memorial Day sun and backyard barbeque.

I am very cold today.

And now, I want a burger.

[The title of this post is a line from "To This May" by W. S. Merwin. Full poem here.]

To the moon

2010-12-31T15:32:00.009-05:00

I learned something in planning this year’s Chanukah party: When you host a party every December for half a decade and, year after year, pile your table high with certain tried and trues, your guests may develop a sense of… protectiveness, shall we say, about the offerings.

After five years, I thought it might be time for a few tweaks to the menu here and there. I quickly learned that such radical ideas would not be tolerated. Reactions to the mention of possible changes ran the gamut, from the anxious (“But you’ll keep the carrot cake cupcakes, right? The almond tarts?” Furrow, furrow, giggle, furrow) to the outraged (“No! It’s tradition!”). One friend simply cocked her head, and let out an “Okaaaay…” half-sigh, half-whisper, as if I had just told her that I’d decided to run off with my secret Italian lover. To the moon.

Well.

I would have to proceed carefully. In the end – as a comparison with last year’s party map will show – I got rid of very little.

Much to the relief of everyone involved, I guarded the flame with plenty of “classics” – cupcakes, cookies, tarts, and toffees – but fanned it, too, with a couple of somethings new. First, there were mini chocolate hazelnut cakes with sea salt, which you might remember from earlier this year. I eyed the crumb-strewn plate at the end of the night, and immediately knew that these cakes had joined the ranks of Things That Shall Not be Stricken from Parties Chanukah to Come.

On Chanukah, it’s customary to eat foods made with oil (okay, usually fried in oil, hence the latkes), to celebrate the drop of oil that, according to legend, burned on and on, against all odds. So for my second addition, I chose olive oil madeleines. I wasn’t sure what to make of these madeleines at first – a madeleine without butter? – and I’m not the only one. I found them in the recipe index of the August, 2009 issue of Gourmet not under the heading, “Desserts,” as one might expect, but in that odd little category tacked on at the end: “Miscellaneous.” It’s a strange place for a cake-like cookie, or a cookie-like cake, or however you might describe a thing that, either way, resembles dessert in one form or another. But after a single bite, I realized that the editors were right. These madeleines are decidedly miscellaneous. With only a half a cup of sugar in the recipe and three times the amount of olive oil, they’re almost – almost – savory. It kind of messes with you, actually. In a way that makes you eat another, and another still, in an effort to figure out just what, exactly, is going on in there amidst that tender crumb. Note: I am not complaining.

The recipe calls for the grated zest of two lemons, and I upped it to three at the suggestion of both Eli and my sister, Kasey. Still, the lemon flavor didn’t quite pop. I considered adding an extra hit of lemon via a few drops of lemon extract, a squeeze or two of juice, or a final shower of zest. But then it hit me: These madeleines are called Olive-Oil madeleines, not Lemon Olive Oil madeleines. The predominant flavor is supposed to be the oil, not the lemon. Once I alerted myself to this fact, I decided that I liked them this way, with the earthiness of the oil at top billing, and the lemon hovering more around than inside of the little cakes themselves. There’s a faint aura of citrus that hangs in the air over these madeleines, something you can smell, but just barely taste. It’s nice.

I’ve made these madeleines a couple of times already, and I’ll likely make them again, though probably not for next year’s Chanukah party. The trouble is the outer crust. Straight from the oven, it's delicate and crisp and absolutely perfect. But at room temperature, the crust turns soft and, after about an hour, borderline soggy. A solution to this problem is built into the recipe: “Madeleines can be made 4 hours ahead. Reheat, wrapped in foil, in oven until warm, about 15 minutes.” I did that, and it worked to some degree, but nothing beats that straight-from-the-oven crust.

What it all boils down to is that you should make these madeleines, and eat them right away. Which means that while they may not be the best candidates for leaving out on a plate during an hours-long party, they are ideally suited to the close of an intimate dinner party: Prepare the batter in advance, spoon it into the madeleine pan just before you clear the dishes, bake for 12-minutes, and serve hot, preferably paired with something cold, like ice cream or sorbet. Today, of all days, I should also mention that, dusted with powdered sugar and washed down with a flute of champagne, they would make a very fine midnight snack.

Happy 2011, friends. I saw something today that sums up exactly how I feel about the coming year. Click here. Up and up we go.

Olive Oil Madeleines
Adapted from Gourmet, August 2009
(where it was adapted from the kitchen of Chef Daniel Humm at Eleven Madison Park)

5 large eggs
½ cup granulated sugar
1 ½ cups plus
1 Tbs flour
1 ¼ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt
1 ½ cups extra-virgin olive oil; ideally, one you’d happily down by the spoonful
Zest from 3 lemons
Powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk together the eggs and the sugar. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt, and whisk until just combined. Whisk in the olive oil and the zest.

Fill each mold of an ungreased madeleine pan with 1 level tablespoon of batter. Don’t worry too much about spreading the batter down into the crevices of the molds. It will spread on its own in the heat of the oven. Bake for about 12 minutes, until the cakes are golden and domed.

Transfer to a rack to cool slightly. Dust with powdered sugar, and serve warm.

Yield: 48 madeleines.

For the best

2010-12-17T10:39:00.013-05:00

I must be very delicious, because my dissertation is currently eating me alive. The good news is that it’s not so bad in the belly of this beast. The only trouble with all of this dissertating is that it has kept me from telling you about this year’s Chanukah party, and a certain lemon-scented newcomer to the dessert table. Give me a week to plow through some deadlines, and I’ll be back with all of the details. Until then, how about a handful of nuts to tide you over?

It’s probably for the best. I’m guessing that the last thing you need this weekend is another cookie recipe to add to your list. Will you pelt me with shortbread if I suggest that we forget about the cookie tin for today? I hope not. Let’s forget about the cookie tin for today. I’d like to shift our attention to the jar, instead. Or maybe to a pretty white dish, the kind that more or less lives on your table this time of year, filled with the overflow from your latest batch of toffee, or chocolate, or the spiced almonds we’re about to discuss. It’s the bowl that’s filled in the previous sentence, by the way, not the year, but I’m typing too quickly this morning to worry about questionably placed modifiers. Anyway, a year filled with chocolate and nuts doesn’t sound half bad.

I have a lot of nice things to say about these almonds. Here’s the biggie: They’re more nut than candy, more spiced than sugared. They’re sweet, yes, but there’s no thick crust of sugar to distract you from the fact that there’s a nut under there. I appreciate that. Sweet is nice, but I’m much more interested in the cinnamon, citrus, coriander, and cloves on board.

Packed in mason jars, they make a lovely gift. But you hardly need me to tell you that this time of year.

Off to the library. See you next week.

Moroccan Almonds
Adapted from First Impressions, 175 Memorable Appetizers and First Courses by Betty Rosbottom

Amy made these nuts for Thanksgiving this year, and when I asked her for the recipe, she directed me to this book from her collection. The title of the book and the curlicue writing on the cover made me snicker at first, but then I popped another couple of Amy’s almonds. That shut me right up. The book is by a woman named Betty Rosbottom. Betty Rosbottom! Now that is the name of someone I’d like to tell me how to cook. And how to garden, and sew and, judging from the photograph on the inside flap of the book cover, how to do the early-nineties hairspray thing and somehow pull it off. I want my name to be Betty Rosbottom. Ms. Robottom, according to the author blurb, “divides her time between Columbus and Amherst, Massachusetts.” Being a part-time Ohioan and a part-time Massachussett (-ette? Massachusite? Massachusian?) myself, I like that, too.

I struggled with what to call this recipe. These almonds didn’t exactly scream “Morocco!” to me, despite having been inspired by “Moroccan cuisine, known for its enticing combinations of both sweet and savory flavors.” I think of them more as “Sweet and Savory Spiced Almonds,” or “Spiced Almonds with Citrus,” but these options are so clumsy that I decided to stick with the original name.

¼ c. sugar (I might try even a little less next time)
1 tsp. ground coriander
½ tsp. ground cloves
2 tsps cinnamon
1 egg white
1 ½ tsps grated orange zest
2 c. (about 8 ounces) whole, unblanched almonds

Cooking spray or vegetable oil for the pan.

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Line a rimmed baking pan with aluminum foil, and spray or brush lightly with vegetable oil.

Combine the sugar and spices in a small bowl, and stir. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white until frothy. Add the spices to the egg, and whisk again. Stir in the orange zest, then the almonds, and mix until the nuts are well-coated.

Pour the nuts onto the prepared baking pan and spread them into a single layer. Bake for 40 minutes. Every 10 minutes or so, give the baking pan a shake, and push the nuts around with a heat-safe spatula. Remove the nuts from the oven, and let them cool to room temperature on the baking pan.

The nuts will keep in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks.

The keeping kind

2010-12-06T18:26:00.004-05:00

This Thanksgiving, I cooked exactly nothing. That’s precisely how much I baked, too, which brings the grand total amount of food that I prepared for the holiday to a whopping zero dishes. Instead, I focused on the eating. I am what Calvin Trillin would call a “serious eater,” and with nothing to distract me from scooping up the next bit of food and raising it to my lips, I was in top form. I know well the satisfaction of spinning a kitchen full of ingredients into a table full of food. But there’s a quiet pleasure, too, in lifting my plate from a leaf-strewn table and loading it with food that’s been roasted and sliced and mashed and whipped and rolled out entirely by somebody else. I’d forgotten about that, and it felt really nice to remember.

By Friday morning, I’d been out of the kitchen for a while, and I woke up feeling bake-ish. We were in Ohio with my family, which meant that I had access to Amy’s cookbook collection, including a copy of Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert. Around the holidays, some people trim trees. I trim cookbooks. That morning, with a fresh pack of sticky tabs by my side, I gave Pure Dessert the old flip and trim treatment, plucking and pressing yellow tabs onto one promising recipe after another. A recipe for something called sesame coins had caught my eye somewhere along the way, and I skipped back a few tabs to find it.

Sesame coins. I made them twice. Is it possible to have a favorite currency? Is that a thing? And do cookie currencies count? I’m going to go ahead and say yes, yes, and yes, if only for the chance to tell you that I would like nothing more this holiday season than a life-size piggy bank filled tail to snout with sesame coins, plus a hammer to smash it at once.

When I read in the recipe notes that these cookies are “inspired by the taste of halvah,” I thought, “hey, I’m inspired by the taste of halvah, too!” Inspired, that is, to make a cup of tea, and maybe peel an orange. That was my nightly routine when I was living in Israel. I would buy a soft brick of halvah at the market every week or two and, before bed, I'd shave off a slab to go with my tea. In the winter, I’d usually eat an orange, too.

What makes these cookies so gloriously reminiscent of halvah is a generous scoop of sesame seed paste, which I call by its Hebrew name, techina, and you might call tahini. It’s all about texture, the texture that’s at once grainy and smooth and, I’m pretty sure, is responsible for both the halvah lovers and the halvah haters in this world. Eli is in the latter camp, and this was his response to these cookies: “They’re great. But there’s something weird that happens with the texture at the end. They remind me of something… Halvah?” Swap his “but” for an “and,” his “weird” for a “wonderful,” and his “?” for an “!,” and you’ll have my response, instead. My friend, Janet, offered the wisest observation about these cookies. She took one bite, and uttered a single word: “Creamy.” It struck me, at first, as an odd thing to say about a cookie that’s tender, but notably on the drier side. You know what, though? Janet was right. They are creamy. They’re creamy in the way that halvah is creamy, which is to say that they give the strong impression of creaminess, while being fully capable of - even inclined toward - crumbling. Just like halvah. Janet! You’re so smart.

According to Alice Medrich, these cookies will keep for up to a month if you store them in an airtight container. I’m going to have to take her word for it, given that my entire first batch – forty-some cookies – was gone in a day, and my second batch didn’t last much longer. That sesame coins are the keeping kind of cookies makes them an excellent addition to the holiday tin, especially one that needs a few days to get where it’s going. (Just be sure to wrap the cookies carefully for shipping; they’re more delicate than they look.) Of course, they’ll do just as well in the tin parked on your very own kitchen counter. They’re the keeping kind of cookies in that way, too.

***

It's Chanukah! Whether or not you're celebrating, may your week be filled with joy and light. If you’re still in need of a potato latke fix, here are some recipes for you from the archives:

Eli’s Potato Latkes
Sweet Potato Curry Latkes

We serve them with cranberry applesauce and sour cream.

For dessert, here are a couple of recipes for cakes made with oil, a nod to the tiny bit of oil that, according to Chanukah legend, lasted for eight days :

Carrot Cake Cupcakes
Olive Oil Citrus Cake

Sesame Coins
Adapted from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich

The original recipe recommends that you chill the dough for at least two hours, but I would suggest chilling it for at least four, or overnight. At two hours, my dough was still quite soft. I found it difficult to work with. A few more hours in the fridge made all the difference. Also, you might want to take a look at a ruler before you begin. It turns out that ¼ of an inch is much thicker than I realized. You don’t want to roll out the cookies any thinner than that, or you might have trouble transferring the cut dough to the baking pans. For a double recipe, says Alice, use one whole egg instead of two yolks.

2/3 cup (3 ounces) flour
¼ tsp. baking soda
2/3 cup unsalted tahini (sesame seed paste)
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
½ cup sugar
1 large egg yolk
½ tsp. vanilla
½ tsp. salt
3 Tbsp. sesame seeds

Whisk together the flour and baking soda in a small bowl, and set aside. In a medium bowl, mix the remaining ingredients (except for the sesame seeds) until smooth. Add the flour mixture, and work it into the wet ingredients with your hands. The dough will feel like an oily, slightly crumbly pie dough.

Divide the dough in half and pat into thick disks. Wrap each disk in plastic and chill for at least four hours, or overnight.

When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 325 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Remove half of the dough from the refrigerator and allow it to soften, but only slightly. Unwrap the dough, place it between two pieces of wax paper, and roll it into a ¼-inch sheet (no thinner; see my note, above). Sprinkle the dough with half of the sesame seeds, and lightly roll over them with the rolling pin to press them into the dough. Using a 1½-inch round cookie cutter, cut as many “coins” as you can from the rolled-out dough. Transfer each coin to the lined baking pan. I use a metal spatula to keep from bending the edges of the cookies with my fingers. With a light touch (you don’t want to overwork or over-warm the dough), press together and roll out the remaining dough, and cut a few more cookies.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the edges of the cookies are lightly brown. Allow the cookies to cool completely on the baking sheets. While the first half of the batch is baking, repeat the above steps with the second disk of chilled dough.

Yield: About 40 cookies.

My requisite pass

2010-11-24T07:45:00.011-05:00

I ducked into the bookstore on my way home from the library last week. I was looking for a title that a friend of mine had recommended. I assumed the position, my chin pointed at a slight angle towards my left shoulder, and walked along the bookcase as quickly as I could while still registering the names of the authors streaming by. Bellow. Chabon. Cheever. Clancy. Dickens. Didion. Other people were doing it, too, moving along the walls of books, chins askew, looking half ahead, and half to the side. There was a man who had wedged himself into a corner, doing his best to create some semblance of a lap on which he could balance an oversized volume. A grown woman crawled around on the floor while another crouch-hopped along, both inspecting the bottom shelves. Typical bookstore behavior. There were collisions between people who were not quite as adept as they imagined themselves to be at keeping one eye on the books and the other eye on the path ahead. One of those people was me.

Shopping for books is not like shopping for anything else. A bookstore browse is the slowest, most solitary browse I know. It’s not like shopping for clothing, where shirts and skirts are whisked from racks into dressing rooms, there's talking, noise, and the fit is known at once. Book browsers stand alone. Legs slightly spread, heads bent, lips apart, silent. Side by side in the non-fiction aisle, they’re worlds apart. I’ve never bought a car, but I wonder if it might be the kind of shopping that feels most like book browsing. You have to get inside, feel the thing moving beneath you, with you, carrying you. You have to test out the ride, hear the engine, feel its particular power.

I found my book. It was time for my requisite pass through the cookbook section. A woman on her knees was thumbing through a copy of The Silver Spoon, and wondering out loud to her friend if she should buy it. “The fruits of the forest crumble in there is great,” I offered. It’s Eli’s favorite crumble, in fact. I hadn’t made it in a while.

When I hear the word crumble, I usually think of a topping thick with oats, something coarse, maybe with clumps that crunch. This version, however, is crumble with an emphasis on crumb. The topping is butter rubbed into flour and sugar, and that’s all. It’s delicate, more like a sandy crust that fuses in a tight layer to the sugared fruit below. If you use a particularly wide-mouthed baking dish, like I did this time around, the crumb layer will be rather thin, and the fruit will bubble up and lap at its edges. I usually prefer to make this crumble in one of my deeper, narrower dishes so that I can mound the crumbs higher on top of the fruit, but so much time had passed since I last made it, that I had forgotten. It was good this way, too.

Fruits of the Forest Crumble
Adapted from The Silver Spoon

“Fruits of the forest” is just a frilly way of saying “whichever berries you have on hand” which, in my case, meant a few baggies of blueberries and raspberries packed away in the freezer. Use what you’ve got. The original recipe calls for all white flour, but I like to use a mix of white and whole wheat. Because I have a feeling that you might ask, I should tell you that I’m not sure why the recipe tells you to let the topping rest before baking. I went to my usual sources, and came up dry. Any thoughts? (Because I am a rabid directions follower, I always wait.)

For the topping:
1 cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter

For the fruit:
4-5 cups mixed berries, such as blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries (if your berries are frozen, do not thaw)
½ cup brown sugar

Make the topping:
Sift the flours into a large bowl, and stir in the sugar. Cut the butter into half-inch cubes, and scatter into the bowl. Use your fingers to rub the butter into the dry ingredients. Let the topping stand in a cool place, but not in the refrigerator, for about 30 minutes.

Make the fruit and assemble the crumble:
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees

Put the berries into a deep baking dish, add the brown sugar, and mix well. Sprinkle the topping over the fruit, and bake for 40 minutes, until golden brown.

Serve warm.

Yield: 6 servings.

p.s. -- Happy Thanksgiving, friends. Here are a few recipes just under the wire:

Sweets
Cranberry apple pandowdy
Dutch appeltaart
Tarte aux pommes
Pear tarte Tatin

Sauces
Cranberry applesauce
Cranberry relish

Drink
Boozy Mulled Cider

And for the post-Thanksgiving flop on the couch:
Kettle corn and a movie

I made it for lunch

2010-11-11T18:47:00.005-05:00

I have two pink slabs of salmon in the fridge, and a bowl of baby Brussels sprouts, rinsed and dried, on the counter. Eli will be home soon from the climbing gym. He’ll turn on the shower and undress while the water warms, and I’ll slide the sprouts into the oven that’s been heating since the call that he was – that he will be – on his way home. I’ll wait until the pipes are silent and I hear the scrape of the shower curtain, and then I will heat the oil and lift the salmon into the pan. Unless Eli is very hungry. If he is very hungry, he will probably go right for a handful of dried apricots, which he won’t have realized that I have moved from the table by the sofa, where he left them last night, back to the pantry. He’ll figure it out. He’ll walk from the table by the sofa to the pantry, which is actually a deep closet off of the room that we call his office, which is actually a room off of the kitchen that’s supposed to be a dining room. Eli’s desk is in there, the one he built in a woodshop in Seattle, and my grandmother’s piano, and a wooden buffet, and a red chair. (Our table, the almost-square one that we bought up on the North Shore where we were married, is in the living room, between the windows and the fireplace. “We do our eating in the living,” I never say, but I think it sometimes, and I like the way it sounds, unspoken.) Eli will find his apricots and join me in the kitchen, and skip the shower until after we’ve eaten. He’ll tell me something that will make me laugh, something small that, right now, an hour or so before he says it, I can’t wait to hear.

The salmon is in the fridge, and the sprouts are rinsed and dried. I’ll get the call; I’ll heat the oven. But first, I’ll sit and write – I’ve sat and I’ve written – for a few quiet minutes, about the salmon, and the sprouts, the apricots and the shower, and now, about egg salad, too, the egg salad that I made last month, and then promptly forgot, until I picked up a roll of film on Sunday, a pack of slides, actually, and found this frame, tucked between the Wish Tree at the MoMA and a blurry pan of anchovies:

I saw that egg salad, remembered it, and made it for lunch on Monday. I made it for lunch on Tuesday, and I would have again on Wednesday, and maybe even again today, but enough was probably enough. Egg salad haters everywhere will tell you that there is a lot to hate about egg salad and, if they’re referring to egg salad about which there is, in fact, everything to hate, egg salad haters everywhere will be right. But I don’t care to discuss it. It would only ruin your appetite, and mine, and undermine the egg salad that I do care to discuss, an egg salad about which there is precisely nothing to hate and, more precisely, very much to love.

The sauce is Hellmann’s mayonnaise – it really must be Hellman’s – and a fat dab of Dijon mustard, which for me, means Grey Poupon. It’s a vinegary, briny egg salad. The vinegar’s in with the mustard, the brine, on the skins of the capers that I shake into my palm. I let the liquid drain between my fingers, and tip my hand; the capers drop, and scatter when they hit the chopped egg. Into the bowl: A grind of black pepper. Into the bowl: A tuft of fresh dill. Into the bowl: A pinch of flaked sea salt that, against the twinge of vinegar and brine, is unexpectedly sharp. Next time, I’ll do without.

I guide a stack of water crackers from a plastic sleeve and bury them into the salad at the side of the bowl. I sit at the almost-square table in the living room on Monday, and on Tuesday, in the red chair in the dining room (that room off the kitchen with no table, a desk, and a piano). I rest my feet on the radiator that isn’t too hot.

I am very hungry.

Egg Salad with Capers and Dill

Here is the hard boiling technique that I use to get yellow yolks (cooked through, but not dry), tender whites, and shells that peel right off: Place the eggs in a small saucepan and cover with about an inch of water. Heat to the barest simmer. There shouldn’t be bubbles. You don’t want your eggs knocking around in there. It is important to keep the temperature of the eggs relatively low as they cook. Also, for easier peeling, use older eggs. Harold McGee can tell you why. Simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Prepare an ice bath in a large bowl and, with a slotted spoon, transfer the cooked eggs directly from the pot into the cold water.

I take my time and use a very sharp knife when chopping my eggs so that the pieces are fairly uniform in size.

2 large hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1 Tbsp Hellmann’s mayonnaise
1 tsp Dijon mustard (I use Grey Poupon)
1 tsp chopped fresh dill
1 heaped tsp capers
Ground black pepper, to taste
A pinch of flaked sea salt (optional; taste before adding)

Mix the mayonnaise and mustard in a small bowl. Gently fold in the chopped egg with a spatula. Top with the capers, dill, black pepper and, if using, salt.

Serves one, for lunch.
Serves two, for a snack.

In the name of the cookie

2010-10-31T23:38:00.007-04:00

My cousin, Katie, was married last weekend in Brooklyn.

The festivities began with a dinner at Frankies Spuntino that made me want to strap on an extra stomach for the evening. Alas, single-stomached creature that I am, I had no choice but to leave several lonely bites of gnocchi marinara and fresh ricotta slumping sadly on my plate. The wedding itself was the next day, at The Bell House, a 1920s warehouse that was converted into a performance venue a couple of years back. It’s a warm and welcoming space, dimly lit by crystal chandeliers that hang from wooden beams. Katie and her husband, Kit, who both work in theatre –that’s how they met– were married up on stage, under the glow of stage lights and paper lanterns. It was elegant and intimate, glamorous and simple at the same time.

A few months back, Katie asked me to bake for the reception. Obviously, I agreed. I flitted between cookbooks and paged through my recipe file, but nothing seemed quite right. I went from toffee, to almond tarts, to molasses cookies when, finally, about two weeks before the wedding, my genius of a step-mom, Amy, solved it. Our phone conversation went something like this:

Me: …and so noooow, I think I’m going to make those gingery molasses cookies. Katie likes the flavors; they’ll taste like fall. Plus, they travel well.
Amy: Sounds good. But have you thought about making those Mexican wedding cakes?
Me: [silence.] Oh my gosh, that’s brilliant. You’re brilliant. HOW did you think of that?
Amy: Uh, well, there is that word “wedding” in the name of the cookie…

Sometimes I am not very smart.

I ate my first Mexican wedding cake five years ago, not long after Eli and I were married. (Five years ago. Five years! As of yesterday, that’s how long we’ve been married. I’ll take another five now, please. And then another. And another, yep, and another, yes, yes. Until forever, please. Amen.) Amy made these cakes which, as you can see, are actually cookies, for a post-wedding party that she and my dad threw for us back in Ohio. I remember holding one between my index finger and thumb, tilting my head forward to keep from dusting my new satin blouse with powdered sugar, and cupping my other hand beneath the cookie to protect the floor. I was expecting something like a doughnut hole, cakey and soft (there is that word “cake” in the name of the cookie), but what I got was much better.

Mexican wedding cakes are made from an eggless, butter-rich dough, splashed with vanilla and speckled with toasted ground pecans. Genealogically speaking, they’re a relative of the shortbread cookie. But while most shortbread is dense and hard by design, Mexican wedding cakes are anything but. Smooth and tight on the outside, tender and loose within, they’re like tiny bombs of sandy, nut-flecked crumbs that half explode, half melt in your mouth. Instantly smitten, I scored the recipe from Amy, and made them a few weeks later for our first Chanukah party in our new home. Given that they’ve made an appearance every year since, and that they are, I think, my most-requested cookie recipe, it’s hard to believe that it has taken me so long to deposit them here. Thanks for the nudge, Katie and Kit, and for a beautiful and inspiring wedding weekend.

I'd like to end today with the poem by James Kavanaugh that Katie asked me to read during the ceremony. May we all get to live in this kind of love.

To Love is Not to Possess

To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one's self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one's self
And perfectly join in permanent commitment
To another—and to one's inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon's own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child's scars
Or an adult's deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are—and always secretly were,
In the very true core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide.

***
Mexican Wedding Cakes
Adapted from Bon Appétit, May 2003

For the dough:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
½ cup powdered sugar
2 tsps. vanilla
2 cups flour
1 cup pecans, toasted, coarsely ground

For the sugar coating:
1½ cups powdered sugar
¼ tsp. cinnamon

Beat the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the ½ cup powdered sugar and vanilla, and blend well. Beat in the flour, and then the toasted, ground pecans. Divide the dough in half, form each half into a ball, and wrap separately in plastic. Chill for at least 30 minutes, or overnight. (If you chill the dough overnight, you’ll need to let it soften on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes before you scoop it. Don’t let it get too warm; it should be scoopable, but still cold.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Whisk together the 1½ cups powdered sugar and cinnamon in a pie dish or a large bowl, and set aside.

Remove half of the chilled dough from the fridge and, using one level tablespoonful of dough for each cookie, roll into balls between the palms of your hands. Arrange the dough balls about half an inch apart on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for about 15-17 minutes, until the cookies flush a shade darker on top, and are golden brown on the bottom. Cool the cookies for about five minutes on the baking sheet, and then gently toss them in the cinnamon sugar. Transfer the coated cookies to a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Hold onto any leftover cinnamon sugar for quick touch-ups before serving.

Store these cookies at room temperature in an airtight container, and they’ll keep well for several days. Possibly up to a week, though I’ve never seen them last that long.

Yield: About 40 cookies.

Rebound

2010-10-26T14:43:00.007-04:00

I baked some cookies last Wednesday night that robbed me of the will to chew and swallow. They were that bad. Worse, actually, seeing as how they contained an entire ten-ounce brick of Scharffen-Berger chocolate (what a waste), and even that couldn’t save them from the trash. I had to wait for them to cool so that they wouldn’t melt the garbage bag. It was a sad, sad scene. The waiting period between straight-from-the-oven and into-the-mouth may be the best waiting there is, precisely because the waiting ends, in due time, with a cookie. This was not that kind of waiting. Dumping cookies into the garbage straight from the rack is borderline torture. I wouldn’t be surprised if tucked away in some fiery corner of hell, there’s a rack of still-warm cookies that the condemned are forced to tip into the trash for all eternity.

For obvious reasons, these cookies are not what I want to share with you today. Rather, I want to tell you about the rebound cookie, the cookie that I jumped out of bed to bake at 6:30am the next morning, for the sole reason that I was feeling like I needed a win, and I knew that this cookie would deliver.

I had made this recipe once before, the previous week, for my brother’s eighteenth (EIGHTEENTH!) birthday and, quite simply, the resulting cookie blew me away. It’s a peanut butter cookie with milk chocolate chunks. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I never really got peanut butter cookies until this particular peanut butter cookie came along.

I’m not sure if I should admit this here, but until a week and a half ago, I hadn’t even thought of peanut butter cookies as real cookies. That probably makes me some kind of cookie bigot, which is as baffling as it is horrifying. A peanut butter sandwich is undoubtedly a real sandwich, after all, one that I hold in very high esteem, no less. Sometimes, I don’t get me.

While I can’t tell you precisely what went wrong between me and peanut butter cookies in the past, a simple comparison with the new cookie in my life does provide at least a clue, a clue that leads me to believe that it must have been a texture thing. The only peanut butter cookies that I had ever tasted were crisp, brittle ones. In theory, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; there is room in my heart for cookies that snap. Some cookies are truly best that way. And some cookies – like peanut butter cookies, if you ask me – are not. When I mentioned peanut butter cookies to my father-in-law a couple of weeks ago, he shook his head and said, “I take my peanut butter straight.” So do I, typically, whether it’s between two slices of bread, smeared on a salted rice cake, scraped onto an apple wedge or, most commonly, licked directly from the spoon. For me, peanut butter pleasure has only about thirty percent to do with flavor. The remaining seventy percent is all about texture, and I have a feeling that I’m not the only one who feels this way. The very existence of the varieties of peanut butter out there – creamy, chunky, extra-chunky, all variations on the theme of texture – speaks to this point, I think. Texture matters. Yet baked into a dry, crumbly cookie, the texture of peanut butter disappears completely.

All of this is a fancy way of saying that these cookies are chewy, and that it’s thanks to this chewiness that peanut butter cookies have, at long last, taken up their rightful place in my personal pantheon of outstanding cookies. These cookies are crisp around the edges, yes, but soft in the center, so that they retain a hint of the creaminess that makes peanut butter, well, peanut butter in the first place. With their shards of chocolate, rippled tops, and the caramel-like undertones brought on by that happy combination of brown sugar and vanilla, they’re like really good chocolate chip cookies zipped into peanut butter cookie suits. They’re the perfect antidote to even the most devastating failure in the kitchen, though I don’t plan on waiting for my next big flop to make these again. And neither should you.

Peanut Butter Cookies with Milk Chocolate Chunks
Adapted from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito (via Design*Sponge)

I don’t yet own the Baked cookbook, but that has got to change. I have it on good authority that every recipe was tested ten times. Ten times! Apparently, these peanut butter cookies are only the beginning. There is at least one instance in there of bona fide magic, I hear, resulting from a particularly inspired combination of salt, chocolate and caramel. Obviously, this cookbook belongs on my shelf.

Back to the cookies at hand: For spreading, smearing, and spooning, I typically prefer natural peanut butter, but I’ve never tried it for baking. I was worried that it might behave strangely because of its inconsistent texture, and so I went with Simply Jif instead. It worked like a charm. As for the chocolate, milk is definitely the way to go. According to Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, the recipe’s creators (as reported by Grace over at Design*Sponge), dark chocolate will taste unpleasantly bitter against the peanut butter. Finally, after so much talk about the glory of chewy peanut butter cookies, if you prefer yours crisp – we can still be friends! – just add a couple of minutes to the baking time. I actually baked my first couple of trays a little bit longer than the time I recommend here, and they firmed right up.

1 ¾ c. flour
2 tsps. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 c. granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 c. firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 c. creamy peanut butter (I use Simply Jif)
6 oz. milk chocolate, coarsely chopped or broken into shards (I use Ghirardelli milk chocolate baking bars.)

Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and, with the mixer running, add the eggs one at a time. (Wait for the first egg to incorporate before adding the second.) Add the vanilla and the peanut butter, and beat until just incorporated.

Add half of the flour mixture, and mix for 15 seconds. Add the rest of the flour mixture and mix, once again, until just incorporated.

Gently fold in the chocolate with a spatula. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight. Depending on the temperature of your fridge and how long you’ve chilled the dough, you may need to let the dough soften slightly before scooping. When I chill the dough overnight, I find that leaving it on the counter for about 20-30 minutes does the trick. Just don’t let the dough get too warm. As soon as it’s soft enough to scoop, get going.

When it’s time to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 375 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Drop the dough by rounded tablespoons (I used a 1½ tablespoon cookie scoop) onto the prepared baking sheets. The cookies will spread, so be sure to leave at least 2 inches between them. Then, gently press down each cookie with the palm of your hand. You’re just looking to flatten the tops ever so slightly.

Sprinkle the cookies with granulated sugar and bake for 8-9 minutes for chewy cookies, and about 10 minutes for crisp cookies. When you remove the cookies from the oven, especially if you’re aiming for chewy, they will be cooked through but extremely soft. Don’t be alarmed; they’ll firm up as they cool. The only challenge is getting them in one piece from the sheet to the cooling rack. I recommend one of two things: Leave them on the sheet for a minute or two so that they cool at least a bit, and then use a metal spatula – which is thinner than the plastic kind – to transfer them carefully to a cooling rack. Or, you can skip the spatula all together, and slide the entire cookie-loaded sheet of parchment from the baking sheet to the rack.

A bowl of cheese

2010-10-11T23:24:00.010-04:00

Today, I’d like to tell you about a bowl of cheese.

Some of you out there may argue that a bowl of cheese is not a meal, and there was a day when I might have agreed with you. I don’t like to think about that day anymore.

Brooklyn readers, perhaps you recognize that bowl of cheese up there? I snapped that shot at a place called Five Leaves, where I met a friend for breakfast a couple of Sundays ago. She lives in Williamsburg, not far from Five Leaves, but she had never been there before. When we were on our way out, she said, “I’d like to come here again with you.” I decided to write that as one long sentence, since I think that’s how she meant it, with equal emphasis on the “here” and the “you.” But in truth, it sounded as if the “with you” part were tacked on, that what really mattered was having another go at that cheese or, in her case, that heaping bowl of house-made granola, yogurt, and fruit. I don’t blame her. It was very good.

The cheese, by the way, was fresh ricotta, served with figs, honey, and thyme. Fanned out on the plate beneath the bowl was bread, shot through with fruit and nuts. I’m not sure if you can tell from the photo, but this ricotta was drier and crumblier than the kind that’s been pressed into plastic tubs. Store-bought ricotta is often heavy and dense, a single, brick-like mass that you scoop out of the container in lumps. Fresh ricotta settles more in drifts. The curds are distinct, and cling to each other only loosely.

Ricotta is the simplest and most satisfying thing I’ve made in a while. If you can boil milk, you can make ricotta. Actually, if you can boil milk, you will make ricotta. So long as you add something acidic like vinegar, or lemon juice or, in the case of this recipe, buttermilk. From what I understand, the acid encourages the milk to curdle as it heats. The temperature climbs to 175 degrees and then, quite suddenly, instead of a pot of milk, you’re looking at a pot of curds and whey. I know it’s plain science, but it feels like magic. The curds bob and shimmy to the surface, you skim them into a cheesecloth-lined colander, gather up the corners of the cloth to form a small pouch, and leave it to drain for a quarter of an hour or so. And then, there it is. Cheese. That’s all there is to it.

I’m on my second batch now, and I’ve been sneaking ricotta into all manner of things. We’re bound to get to one or two of those things here sooner or later, but I feel it’s important to start with ricotta and toast, mostly because I’ve been eating so much of it. I can’t imagine a bread that wouldn’t pair beautifully with a heap of fresh ricotta, but I like it best on something chewy, brown, and lightly sweet. These days, I’ve been going with slices of a cinnamon raisin version of this loaf, or my favorite soda bread. It may not sound like much, but hot toast, a cushion of cheese, and a dribble of honey is a killer combination. Sometimes, I’ll prime the toast with a layer of apricot jam before I reach for the cheese, and then top things off with a pinch or two of chopped thyme. Now that is good stuff.

Five Leaves has three menus, one for breakfast and lunch, one for dinner, and one for “in between.” Their house-made ricotta is on every last one of them, which I take as a sign that a bowl of cheese is not only a meal, but any darn meal you please.

Homemade Ricotta
Adapted from 101 Cookbooks

In her recipe notes, Heidi writes, “Ricotta tastes and smells like the milk it is made from so use the best and freshest dairy you can find.” I second that. The fewer the ingredients in a recipe, the more important it is to make sure that they are of the highest quality. Heidi also suggests replacing a portion of the milk with goat milk for a variation on this recipe. I haven’t tried it, but it sounds good to me, and Heidi has never steered me wrong. Next time.

1 gallon whole milk
1 quart buttermilk
Sea salt (I use Maldon sea salt flakes.)

Pour the milk and buttermilk into a large, heavy pot and warm over medium-high heat. Stir occasionally to prevent burning. I clip a candy thermometer to the side of the pot to keep track of the rising temperature. Once the milk is hot, you can stop stirring.

While the milk is heating, line a colander with four or five layers of cheesecloth. Cheesecloth can be clingy, and typically comes in strips that are longer than they are wide. Rather than trying to fold the cloth multiple times, which can be tricky, I suggest draping the cloth in a single layer over the colander, and then folding in the overhang until you’ve got the desired number of layers. Oh, and a tip from Heidi: It’s best to use a wide-mouthed colander to facilitate faster cooling.

When the temperature of the milk reaches about 175 degrees, the curds and the whey will separate. Remove the pot from the heat, place the colander in the sink, and spoon the curds into the colander. After every few spoonfuls, add a couple of pinches of salt, to taste. Gently lift the sides of the cheesecloth every now and then to drain off excess liquid. Do not squeeze the curds, or press down on them with the spoon, or you’ll destroy the texture of the cheese. Once you’ve loaded all of the curds into the colander, gather the edges of the cheesecloth and tie them together with a piece of kitchen string. Tie the pouch to the faucet and leave the curds to drain for about 15-20 minutes. (You can adjust the time based on your desired consistency. The longer you leave the curds to drain, the drier your cheese will be.)

Transfer any unused cheese to an airtight container and refrigerate.

Makes about 4 cups.

The nine states

2010-10-02T19:47:00.001-04:00

Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, and my very own Commonwealth of Massachusetts, listen up! This one’s for you. I’ll explain, but first things first. The bottom line is this: I love this kettle corn.

I also love my mother-in-law, Sarah. She had a birthday at the end of August, and it was a big one, the kind that ends with a zero, and feels important. To celebrate, she and my father-in-law rented a house on the beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island, and invited their four kids (plus three spouses, an almost-spouse, and a 17-month old grandson) to join them for a long weekend. Sarah claimed it was a birthday gift to herself, on account of getting to spend a few days with all of us. That’s what she wanted most, she said. But I don’t know. With barbeques in the evenings, and early-morning sits on a seaside bench, and a knit hat that Sarah made and gifted to me, it kind of felt more like my birthday. Which, knowing Sarah, would no doubt make her very happy.

Eli and I arrived in Narragansett to a fully stocked kitchen. It was no surprise, given Sarah’s habit of traveling with enough food to feed a small army. There was meat in the fridge, fruit on the counter, potatoes blanching in a pot on the stove, and an enormous bag of kettle corn – something called Angie’s Kettle Corn – on the table. I eyed it warily. I think that I probably feel about large packages of food the way my cousin, Michelle, once felt about presents. Michelle’s in college now, but as a child, when it came time to open holiday gifts, she once burst into tears when confronted with a box half the size of her little body. I remember her wailing, “It’s too biiiiig!” She refused to open it. I didn’t get it. But now, I do. I get it, Michelle. There is something about industrial-sized packages of food – even very good food – that makes me feel the exact same way. It’s simply too much. It’s sensory overload, or the anticipation of sensory overload, or something. The summer before I went away to college, I worked as a waitress, and once a week it was my job to fill the ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise jars from the bulk containers in the walk-in fridge. It’s a task that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Have you ever stared into the gloppy depths of a 5-gallon tub of mayonnaise? I was mildly terrified, and it was thanks only to many slow, deep breaths that I made it through. I swore off condiments for a while after that.

A bloated bag of kettle corn’s got nothing on a giant vat of mayo, so when Sarah pulled open the package and pointed it in my general direction, I went for it. I am very brave. What I would discover over the next few days is that there is a reason for packaging this kettle corn in bags the size of overstuffed bed pillows. Unlike mayonnaise, kettle corn – this particular kettle corn, anyway – can and should be eaten by the handful. By the handsful, actually. Pack it up in bags any smaller, and you’d have little more than a single serving, barely enough to share. I would know, seeing as how I plowed through almost the entire bag all by myself during our stay. Eli and I visited his family again last weekend, and this time, Sarah had procured three bags (good lord!) for my – ahem, our – consumption. “I’ve never seen you snack like this,” my sister-in-law said. “It’s research,” I told her.

Research, indeed. The thing is, when you start in on this kettle corn, you don’t much feel like stopping. That’s all well and good if you happen to live in a place where Angie’s Kettle Corn is readily available. If only we all could be so lucky. Which brings us back to the residents of the nine states I called out at the beginning of this post, the states that, according to the company website, are bereft of Angie’s Kettle Corn. I could have moved – preferably to Minnesota to be close to company headquarters – but instead, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I did it for you. For us.

Kettle corn is, in theory, not all that exciting. It’s just sugared popcorn dusted with salt. Except there’s nothing “just” about it. The sugar melts in the hot oil and, as it cools, encases each popped kernel in a thin, glassy shell. Then comes the salt, and it’s so long! to whatever else you were planning on eating that day. I have skipped dinner exactly twice over the last month due to kettle corn overconsumption. I’m not proud; I just thought you should know. Consider it a warning. It’s the sweet and salty combination that does it. And the crunch doesn’t hurt. The effect is hypnotic. After a handful or two, I’m in a full-on kettle corn trance. Scoop. Eat. Repeat.

I hesitated to include that last photograph, given that it’s not a particularly flattering shot of my thighs. But the kettle corn looks damn good, and I know what really matters.

Kettle Corn
Inspired by Angie’s Kettle Corn

The only thing that could get in the way of a perfect batch of kettle corn is a layer of burnt kernels along the bottom of the pot. That’s true of all popcorn, to be sure, but the sugar in kettle corn heightens the risk. Here are two tips to keep your kettle corn from burning:

1. Remove the pot from the heat sooner than you normally would.
Over the years, I have refined my popcorn popping skills so that I end up with very few unpopped kernels at the bottom of the batch. Twice in my life I have actually popped every last one of those suckers, without scorching a single kernel. Those were big days for me, people. Big. But when it comes to kettle corn, I check my pride at the kitchen door, and I urge you to do the same. The sugar will burn before the popcorn, so if you wait until (what is typically) the very last moment to remove the pot from the heat, it will probably be too late. When the popping slows considerably – if you can count more than a second, two seconds, maximum, between pops – get that pot off of the flame! You’ll end up with more unpopped kernels at the bottom of the pot, but it’s a small price to pay for unscathed kettle corn.

2. Transfer the kettle corn immediately from the hot pot to a large bowl.
If you don’t, the sugar at the bottom of the pot will continue to cook, and might burn.

Most recipes for kettle corn – and popcorn, in general – call for some kind of vegetable oil, but I’ve been popping corn in olive oil for years. I like the stronger flavor, and I think it’s especially lovely in this sweet and salty recipe.

¾ c. corn kernels
1/3 c. olive oil (not extra-virgin), or enough to thickly coat the bottom of a large pot
¼ c. granulated sugar
Several generous pinches (about ½ tsp.) sea salt

Heat the oil and a couple of kernels in a large covered pot. Meanwhile, measure the corn kernels and sugar into a bowl so that you’re ready for a quick dump. When you hear the test kernels pop, remove the lid, and quickly pour the rest of the kernels and sugar into pot. Stir briefly to coat the kernels with oil and sugar, and replace the lid. With mitted hands, lift the pot by the handles (use your thumbs to keep the lid in place), and shake occasionally.

When the popping slows, remove the kettle corn from the heat, and immediately dump into a large bowl. Sprinkle with a few generous pinches of sea salt.

I remember granola

2010-09-25T23:37:00.008-04:00

Whenever I return home after living somewhere else for a while, I suffer from a peculiar form of amnesia: What do I eat here, again? It’s a simple enough question. It should be, anyway, for someone who purportedly spends a great deal of time thinking about what she will eat next. But for my first twenty-four to forty-eight hours at home, I am helpless to answer it. It’s a dark day when writers’ block gets between you and a shopping list. A shopping list, people. Not good. I bump around my kitchen, flipping cupboard doors open and shut, but it’s no use. I’m sure there’s a reason for those cans of tomatoes in there, the dried lentils, the chickpeas, but for the life of me, I can’t tell you what it is. Stepping into the supermarket for the first time since I’ve been back only makes matters worse. In case you haven’t noticed, that place is huge. (Whole Foods on River St., I’m talking about you.) I know how to shop for groceries. It’s not that hard. But here, I have no idea what I’m looking for. It’s as if my brain has been rewired while I’ve been away, the pathways of my old routine erased and replaced by my new routine in Berlin. Where’s the quark? Where’s the Pflaumenmus? And what’s with all the breakfast cereal? This place is weird. I may starve.

But then the cart begins to roll, as if on its own, like when I visit my hometown in Ohio, and I can no longer tell you how to get from point A to point B, but if I grip the wheel, the car will take us there. I push through my old haunts – the produce section, the dairy aisle, bulk foods – and slowly, I begin to remember. I remember Greek yogurt. I remember brown sugar. I remember peanut butter. I remember granola.

I go through phases with granola making. That’s true of other things in my life, too, things like adding a glug of heavy cream to my afternoon tea, moisturizing, or going to bed early. I’ll practice these things religiously, for weeks, maybe months on end. I’ll swear by them. Earl Grey is dessert ! My skin is so soft! I’m wide awake! I’ll ask myself why on earth I don’t always do these things. Then, for no good reason, one of these habits will fall of my radar until, for no better reason, I pick it up again somewhere down the line. For me, making granola is like that. It ebbs and it flows.

I was smack in the middle of some serious granola flow when I flew off to Berlin at the end of June, leaving a couple of jars of the stuff behind on the table for the friends who’d be staying at our place. In a developmental psychology class in college, I learned about object permanence, the understanding that a thing still exists even when it can no longer be seen. A ball, for example, is still there, even when covered by a blanket or tossed out the door. Babies have this concept down by late in the first year of life, I was taught, which makes me a little old – approximately twenty-nine years too old – for out of sight out of mind. Nevertheless, when I shut the door of my apartment and turned the key, my granola ceased to exist. In my defense, I did have savory breakfasts of seeded bread, salted butter, cucumbers, and quark to distract me. Give that to a baby and see if he gives a hoot about some ball.

The important thing is that now, I remember. And being prone to bouts of amnesia and unexpected ebbs, I figure that I’d better get the recipe down here, quick. I mentioned a while back that a few recipes followed me home from Ohio last Memorial Day weekend, and the recipe for this granola is one of them. It’s from my stepmom, Amy, the same Amy who’s given us almond tart, toffee squares, cranberry relish, sour cream coffee cake, cream of tomato risotto, potato salad, and vinaigrette, so you know it’s going to be good. When I walked in, the granola was on the table in one of her tinted glass jars with the bent metal lids. I can’t remember if I shook a little into my hand and poured it into my mouth at that moment, but I’m willing to bet that I did. I’m not one to waste time. For the rest of the weekend, when I wasn’t busy with birthday cake, backyard barbeques, board games, Graeter’s black raspberry chip, and crossword puzzles (that’s Amy in the last photo, by the way; hey, Amy!), I was getting acquainted with that granola. Every day for breakfast, I ate granola, sometimes with yogurt, sometimes with a splash of milk. Even when Amy made pancakes one morning, and it looked as if I wouldn’t be having granola for breakfast, I had granola for breakfast. There just happened to be a yogurt-slathered pancake beneath it. And when it came time for a mid-morning snack or an afternoon nibble, granola it was, straight out of hand.

This granola has a lot going for it, but one of my favorite things about it is what it doesn’t have: an overdose of sweetness. It’s lightly sweetened with just a couple of tablespoons of maple syrup which, in a recipe that produces upwards of five cups of granola, is not very much at all. Whatever sweetness the syrup does impart fades in the oven, together with the strong maple flavor, so that only the merest suggestion of sugar and sap remains. All of the good stuff that you normally associate with making granola – the heady aroma of cinnamon and toasting nuts, the way the dried fruit plumps and softens against the just-baked oats and seeds – is true about making this granola, too, so there’s no need for me to go on about it. But I do want to talk to you about one thing, namely, the coconut in this recipe.

I don’t particularly enjoy coconut in my breakfast cereal. If I hadn’t just downed a bowlful of this granola when I found out that it’s laced with three-quarters of a cup of coconut, I probably would have passed on the recipe. That would have been quite sad of course, because then, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it, and we’d all be missing out on some seriously stellar granola. The point is this: until Amy pointed out the coconut, I was oblivious to its presence. Then, once I knew to look for it, I realized that I could taste the coconut, just not how I would expect to taste it. The best way that I can explain it is that, in this recipe, coconut functions more like a spice than a dry ingredient. It’s true that if you reach for it, you’ll find that the flavor that toasted coconut adds to this granola is indeed that of – surprise!—toasted coconut. But for some reason, something having to do with the particular combination of ingredients maybe, what you taste is a whole lot of “toasted” and not so much coconut. I’m not sure that “toasted” can be considered a flavor independent of the toasted thing itself, but the disappearing, reappearing coconut in this recipe has me convinced that maybe it could be. It’s pretty amazing. In other words, coconut haters, think twice before skipping this recipe. No, scratch that. Don’t think. Give it a shot and then decide.

As for me, I’m back to chomping through the stuff at the rate of about one batch per week, and wondering how I possibly could have forgotten that this granola is “what I eat here, again.” And again. And again.

Jamie’s Easy Granola
Adapted from Jamie’s Food Revolution, by Jamie Oliver, and printed in the October 2009 issue of Health.

This recipe lends itself to all manner of tweaking. I reduced the amount of oil and maple syrup in the original recipe, and loaded it up with my favorite seeds, nuts, and dried fruits. I’m addicted to the formula that you see here, but you should personalize it however you see fit. Sesame seeds, perhaps, instead of flax seeds? Walnuts instead of almonds? Have fun with it.

2 cups whole rolled oats
¾ c. whole almonds
2 heaping Tbsps. each pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds
¾ c. unsweetened shredded coconut
1 tsp. cinnamon
1-2 generous pinches of sea salt
2-3 Tbsps. maple syrup
2 Tbsps. olive oil
1 c. dried California apricots (they’re more tangy than sweet)
½ c. unsweetened dried cherries

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix the oats, almonds, seeds, coconut, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl. Add the maple syrup and olive oil, and stir. Spread evenly on a baking sheet (I usually line mine with parchment paper, to prevent sticking), and bake for approximately 25 minutes. Open the oven door every 8-10 minutes and push the granola around with a wooden spoon to encourage it to brown evenly. Be sure to watch it toward the end of the baking time, as it tends to go from perfectly golden to burnt very quickly. While the granola is baking, slice the apricots into small strips. Remove the granola from the oven, dump it back into the mixing bowl, add the dried fruit, and stir to incorporate. This granola, like most granola, is probably meant to be enjoyed once it has fully cooled, but I highly recommend that you treat yourself to a bowl of it warm, with a dollop or two of cold yogurt.

Yield: “Makes enough to fill a large jar,” says Jamie Oliver, which is to say, about 5 cups.

It sneaks up

2010-09-17T16:33:00.012-04:00

There’s something you should know about Amsterdam, something that you may have already gathered from my breathless account of our visit: the Dutch are good people. I know I’m generalizing here, and that there’s probably an Amsterdam-dweller somewhere out there who thinks his bike is cooler than your bike, and another fellow who’d push you into a canal just for the heck of it, if only he had the chance. But we didn’t meet any of those folks. As far as I can tell, the spirit of generosity and goodwill runs rampant through the streets and alleyways of Amsterdam. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it which, for us, was right outside the train station, when our taxi driver smiled, shook his head, and unloaded our bags from his trunk. We were a mere three blocks away from our hotel, it turned out, and he had a feeling that we might prefer to hold onto our euro and walk it.

Then there were the women, eight of them, who crowded the table beside us at dinner on our first night there. They ranged in age from seventy to eighty-two, I would later find out, and they were beautiful. They sported perfectly coiffed helmets of dyed blond (but not overly platinum) hair, and wore subtle makeup in neutral tones. They spoke quickly, all at once, regularly collapsing with laughter onto each other's shoulders. The woman closest to me leaned over to ask where we were from, and introduced herself and her friends. They had all grown up together in Amsterdam, but today they live in scattered suburbs outside of the city. They were widows, she explained, since men “get dead” before women, and every few weeks, they meet for dinner in the heart of town. The woman on my left nearly leapt into my lap when she learned that we were visiting Amsterdam for the first time. She demanded that we tell her our complete itinerary so that she could make sure we weren’t missing a thing. Did we know that Gay Pride Amsterdam was going on that week?, she wanted to know. The rain was a shame, she said, since it meant that fewer men would be running around in their underwear. She also urged us to visit the Red Light District. Then, she winked, and continued to wink at me every now and then throughout the rest of our meal. These women loved their city, every last bit of it, and they wanted us to love it, too.

When we stood to leave, they waved and blew kisses. I felt a tap on my shoulder a few steps from the café, and I assumed that one of our new friends had remembered yet another corner of Amsterdam for us to explore. Instead, it was our server. We had accidentally overpaid, and he had followed us outside to return the twenty euro bill. From the way that he pressed it into my palm with both hands, I got the feeling that he was genuinely delighted to save us from the expense of our own mistake. His demeanor was not unlike that of the clerk on the tram who appeared quite tickled when he ran out of tickets for us to purchase the next day. He bounced in his seat as he told us that we’d have to take a free ride.

Everywhere we went, it seemed, the people of Amsterdam were tripping over their swollen hearts to wrap up whatever little piece of the city was theirs to give, and hand it over. You already know about the chef who so generously shared his cookie recipe. You also know that that’s not the only recipe I brought home.

I was actually on the lookout for an apple dessert from the moment we landed in Amsterdam. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, was fast approaching. The holiday would fall early this year – one week into September, still three weeks out from the official end of summer – which meant that we had a special situation on our hands, culinarily speaking. We’d be eating our holiday meals right on the cusp, with one foot firmly planted in summer and the other toeing its way over into fall. I wanted a dessert that would honor both feet equally. I also wanted something that would incorporate apples and honey, foods traditionally eaten to usher in a sweet year. The custom is to serve apples dipped in honey as a kind of appetizer, but this year, we’d lock in that sweetness on both ends of the meal. (You never can be too careful.) At 30,000 feet, somewhere between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam, it hit me: Alice Medrich’s honey ice cream over a to-be-determined dessert stuffed with the season’s first apples. I figured that I’d return to Cambridge, flip through my cookbooks and magazines, ask around, put in some calls to a few of my favorite bakers, and work it out. I wanted something not too sweet, something sturdy, like a pie, but with a somewhat cakey crumb for soaking up the ice cream. Little did I know that the quintessential Dutch dessert is this checklist incarnate: Dutch Appeltaart. It is virtually impossible to walk into an Amsterdam café without coming face to face with it.

I spotted my first appeltaart just after we arrived in Amsterdam, on that rainy night at Villa Zeezicht. From above, appeltaart appears positively pie-like, its top crust bronzed and gleaming under an egg white glaze. But in profile, the high, cushy wall gives you the distinct impression that what you’re looking at is cake. Peek around to the front of the slice, and you’ll find apples, piled high. I’m used to an American apple pie that oozes syrupy apples onto the plate. This filling is different. For one thing, it’s drier. The recipe actually involves draining the excess juices from the bubbling, just-baked appeltaart. Yes, it’s treacherous. And yes, it’s as terrifying as it sounds. But have courage. If you’re anything like me, your breathing will start back up again just as soon as you flip the thing back over into an upright position and unmit your trembling hands. In a Dutch appeltaart, the apples are not sliced, but cut into large chunks, or sometimes simply quartered. They remain relatively firm, and when they fall out onto the plate, they tumble more than they slide. There’s also something to be said for the refreshingly straightforward spicing. Apples – in pies, in cakes, in crumbles and crisps – often attract all kinds of things: nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom, mace, allspice, not to mention the flour, tapioca, cornstarch and cheddar that often get thrown in. In Dutch appeltaart, or in this version, anyway, there’s just cinnamon, two spoonfuls of sugar, and a few squeezes of lemon. That’s all.

It was late when I swallowed my first bite, and the café had mostly cleared out for the night. Our server sat at a table across the room sorting silverware and rolling napkins. I asked him if we might be able to get the recipe, and he disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, the chef came bounding up the stairs. He pulled a chair over to our two-person table, sat down, and proceeded to apologize profusely for the sweat on his brow and the stains on his kitchen whites. Because, you know, he had a lot of nerve preparing delicious food for us to eat in that hot kitchen down there! He handed me a slip of paper with the ingredient list, and talked me through the recipe while I scribbled furiously in my notebook. He showed me how to press the crumbly dough into the pan, how to measure the thickness of the sides by imagining my index finger sliced vertically in half, how to mound the apples to account for shrinkage, and how to use my hands to pat the dough into patches for the top crust. He cautioned me against lifting the springform pan from the sides when it came time to flip and drain, and I did my best to explain the differences between his appeltaart and the apple pies I’ve always known. (He’s never traveled to the United States, but he’d like to.) I asked him what he thought of my plan to serve the appeltaart with honey ice cream, and at first his face tightened – in Amsterdam appeltaart is served plain or with a side of whipped cream – but on second thought, if the apples were tart enough, he agreed that it could be lovely. He ducked back into the kitchen, and I told Eli that maybe serving this dessert with ice cream wasn’t such a good idea. I didn’t want to bastardize it. “It’s not bastardizing,” Eli said, “it’s fusion!” Good man.

I’ve never thought of it this way before, but I do a lot of re-gifting on this site. Only instead of passing along a horrid polka dot pitcher or a heart-shaped frosted glass figurine (actual wedding gifts, both), I gather up the best of the recipes I’ve been given and let you decide which ones to make your own. This one, I really hope you’ll take. I exaggerate only mildly when I say that I think all of Amsterdam would want you to have it.

Dutch Appeltaart (with Alice Medrich’s honey ice cream)
Adapted from the restaurant, Villa Zeezicht

I want to say a little more about the crust before I send you on your way: The dough doesn’t come together like typical pie dough, so don’t expect it to. It’s crumbly and coarse, and only begins to look like real dough when you’re pressing it into the pan. Once baked, it’s like a cross between a cookie and a cakey pie crust. Also – and pay attention here, because this is important – Don’t forget to vent the top crust, or you’ll end up with applesauce for filling. I prepared this appeltaart three times to make sure to get it just right for you, and one of those times I got so caught up in tweaking the oven temperature and the flour and fat quantities, that I completely forgot to make sure that the steam from the cooking apples would have somewhere to go. The crust was gorgeous, but the inside was mush. So vent, vent, vent!

And about the apples: I use Cortland apples. I like that they’re the slightest bit tart, and that they stand up well to the long baking time. I’d also like to try even tarter apples, like Granny Smiths.

Finally, the ice cream: I was going to include the recipe for Alice Medrich’s honey ice cream here, but I did a search, and found that Molly wrote about it a couple of years back. Click on over to her site, and she’ll tell you all about it. It was, for the record, a hit with the appeltaart.

For the dough:
4 cups flour
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 sticks + 2 Tbsps. cold butter, cut into small cubes
2 eggs
1 egg white, lightly beaten, for the glaze

For the filling:
3-4 pounds apples (8-10 medium apples); I recommend Cortland or Granny Smith
1 ½ tsps. cinnamon
2 Tbsps. sugar
Half a lemon

In the bowl of a large (14-cup) food processor, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Pulse to blend. Add the cubed butter, and process for about ten seconds, until the dough looks like a coarse meal. Add the two eggs, and pulse to incorporate. Dump the dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap, push it together into a lump, wrap tightly, and refrigerate for 1-2 hours.

While the dough is chilling (or, during the last half an hour of that time, anyway), butter and flour a 9-inch springform pan, peel, core, and quarter the apples, stir together the cinnamon and sugar in a small bowl, and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Press about three-quarters of the chilled dough into the bottom and up the sides of the prepared pan. The thickness of the dough along the sides should be about a quarter of an inch or, as the chef explained, the thickness of half of your index finger, sliced vertically, from knuckle to nail.

Place a layer of apples into the pan, squirt them with a few squeezes of lemon, and sprinkle them with half of the cinnamon and sugar mixture. Repeat with another layer of apples, lemon juice, cinnamon, and sugar. The apples will lose some of their liquid and shrink as they bake, so you’ll want to mound them an inch or so higher than the top of the pan.

Use the remaining dough to form a top crust: Rip off a handful of dough, press and pat it flat between the palms of your hands, and drape it over a portion of the apples. Repeat until you have covered all of the apples. I leave enough space between some of the dough patches to serve as “built-in” vents for the steam. If you’re very thorough in covering every last bit of apple, you’ll need to vent the top crust with a knife before you bake it. (See my recipe note, above.) Paint the top crust with the lightly-beaten egg white.

Bake at 350 degrees for one and a half hours, turning the pan once half way through. My springform pan has never leaked, but I hear that they do sometimes, so I place mine on a baking sheet before I slide it into the oven.

When the appeltaart is golden and the juices are bubbling up through the vents, remove it from the oven, cover it with a plate (our salad plates are the perfect fit), flip upside down over the sink, and press the plate into the top crust to drain. Never hold the pan by the sides alone! (This dessert is heavy, and I’m afraid that the sides of the springform pan could pop right off. Support the weight from the bottom, always.) Increase the temperature of the oven to 400 degrees, and bake for an additional ten minutes to caramelize the syrup that’s still clinging to the edges of the crust.

It’s best to wait until the appeltaart has cooled to room temperature before slicing into it so that the filling can set, but I’ve had success slicing it when it’s still just slightly warm. If you want to serve it quite warm, your best bet is to slice the appeltaart when it’s cool, and heat the slices individually.

Serves 10-12.

Hello, tomatoes

2010-09-08T18:37:00.021-04:00

Leaving Berlin wasn't easy. There were many goodbyes. Goodbye, Sonnenblumenkernbrot! Goodbye, Schoko-Reiswaffel! Goodbye, disembodied fake leg! But coming home to Boston in late August means coming home to tomatoes, the good ones, and plenty of them.

Hello, tomatoes.

They met me at the market just a few hours after our plane landed. I was pale and puffy-eyed, they were scarred and seamy. It was an unglamorous reunion, but I didn’t mind. I bought more than I had intended, and tottered home.

Through my ripening fatigue, I remembered that there was a recipe, one that had languished on deck in my kitchen last summer until the season had passed. A tomato crumble, or something like that. My sleepy tongue could hardly be bothered to spit out words in their proper order, but I did know just where to find the recipe, in last year’s August Gourmet. My brain has its priorities.

It is indeed a dish in the crumble family, the sweet crumble’s savory cousin, perhaps. First, you butter a baking dish, and line it with thick rounds of tomato. You sprinkle the tomatoes with thyme and lemon zest, and then bury them under a blanket of toasted hazelnuts and pebbly breadcrumbs. The tomatoes melt and shrivel, slump and bubble up through the crisp crust, and when, forty minutes later, you open the oven door, it's hello, tomatoes all over again.

We did the dishes to force ourselves awake for an extra twenty minutes. I didn’t dream of tomatoes, but I did have one for breakfast the next day.

Baked Tomatoes with Hazelnut Bread Crumbs
Adapted from Gourmet, August 2009

A few quick notes about my adaptations: The original recipe calls for lemon thyme. I didn’t have any, so I used your standard thyme and added some lemon zest. I tried a mix of heirloom tomatoes the first time that I made this dish, since that's what we had on hand, and beefsteak tomatoes the second time, as the recipe suggests. I loved both versions equally, but Eli preferred the beefsteaks. He thought there was something lost in the particular heirlooms that we used – mostly pineapple and Aussie tomatoes – when they were baked for so long. If there are any tomato experts out there, and you’d like to suggest an ideal tomato for this dish, I’m all ears.

About the breadcrumbs: Instead of making my breadcrumbs first and then toasting them, I toast several slices of bread, cut off the crusts, and then pulse the already toasted bread in a food processor. The breadcrumbs are perhaps a little chewier than they would be if you pulsed first, and then toasted, but they crisp up the rest of the way in the oven later on.

Finally, the oven temperature. The original recipe suggests baking the tomatoes at 450 degrees for 15-20 minutes, but I wanted my tomatoes to melt a little more. The problem is that at 450, the topping will burn if you leave it in the oven for much longer. The second time around, I baked the dish at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, and then I turned up the heat to 450 for another 10. Perfection.

2 cups toasted whole-wheat bread crumbs (see my toasting method in the notes, above)
4-6 large, ripe beefsteak tomatoes (Or use what you’ve got. It’s all good.)
1 ½ Tbsp thyme, divided
½ tsp lemon zest
½ stick unsalted butter
1 cup hazelnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped. (Rub off any loose skins with a dish towel before chopping.)
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Butter a 2-quart shallow baking dish. Thickly slice the tomatoes and arrange them, overlapping, in the dish. Season the tomatoes with a few grinds of salt and pepper, and sprinkle the lemon zest and one tablespoon of the thyme over top. Set aside.

Melt the butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Cook the nuts and the crumbs, stirring frequently, until golden, 4 to 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, and spoon the topping over the tomatoes.

Bake for 30 minutes at 400 degrees, until the tomatoes are bubbling and melting into each other, and the crumbs have browned a shade darker. Turn up the heat to 450 degrees and bake for an additional 10 minutes. Cool the dish for a few minutes, and just before serving, sprinkle it with the remaining half a teaspoon of thyme.

Serves 4-6 people as a main dish, and 8 as a side.

There was Amsterdam

2010-09-04T23:43:00.016-04:00

I realized the other day that, despite the fact that I’ve been dying to show you around Berlin, we haven’t even made it out the front door! There’s a whole city out there, one that has kept me very well-fed, I might add, but so far, all I’ve managed to give you is a grand tour of our apartment, a tale about a crumble broadcast from our kitchen, and a few sundry grocery aisle items, eaten and photographed at our dining room table. I’ve been holding out on you, and I mean to do something about it. To the streets, friends! To breakfast, lunch, and dinner we will go! Soon. But not today. Because between St. Petersburg and our last few days in Berlin, there was Amsterdam.

Amsterdam! I can’t get it out of my mind, nor do I want to. A brain freshly stuffed with memories of Amsterdam is an exceedingly pleasant thing to have knocking around in one’s head, so if you’ll pardon the indulgence, I’m going to stick with Amsterdam for today. I have so much to tell you about this lovely, lovely city. And to show you. It was all so pretty. Then, I promise: Berlin.

Amsterdam greeted us with dark clouds, the first fat drops of an impending deluge, and a humble yet heart-stopping display of canals and winding streets as far as the eye could see. Every second or third building looked as if it had been squeezed with some effort into the row; the rooftops and shuttered windows tilted this way and that, jostling for space along the water. Right off the bat, Eli said, “This is what Venice is supposed to be.” I knew just what he meant.

It had been hours since our last pelmeni, and we were hungry, perhaps deliriously so. I don’t know how else I can explain our decision to drop our bags at the hotel and, map-less and umbrella-less (unless you consider the broken tangle of a thing we borrowed from the front desk an umbrella; I do not), venture out into the now-pouring rain in search of food. Within seconds, our pant legs were drenched and dragging, and soon my longing to be free of those pants and dry beneath the covers trumped any desire to sit down for a proper meal. There were gummy candies in our hotel room, I remembered. Gummy candies! And green apples at reception! Suddenly, that sounded like dinner to me. We ducked under an orange and white striped awning, as much to keep from drowning as it was to peek inside a small café. I saw soup. That settled it. We were going in. We did our best to make ourselves presentable, Eli wrangling our umbrella into submission while I, blue-lipped and shivering, peeled back the stray, wet curls plastered against my cheek. We shuffled over to our table with as much grace as we could muster which, with our shoes and socks squishing and squelching every step of the way, could not have been very much grace at all.

Our server clearly had some experience with scraggly, sopping wet patrons, because he knew just what to do. Before I said a word, he offered hot water with fresh mint, and soon I was cupping my hands around a tapered glass tumbler, and leaning into wisps of mint-scented steam. The mouth of the glass was wide enough for me to have slipped in a few frozen toes, but I resisted. I am so civilized. With the mint tea – or tisane, I should say – came honey, served in a shot glass, which you can see up there in the photo, in front of the bread basket and butter crock. Honey in a shot glass! Isn’t that great? In my wind and rain-addled condition, that was all it took to coax a minor swoon out of me. Then again, here I am on my sofa, quite dry, and in a fairly calm and rational state of mind, and I’m still thinking that honey in a shot glass is one of the nicest things I’ve seen on a table in a long while. That honey wore its shot glass well. Amsterdam, you’re civilized, too.

I was spreading a hunk of soft, brown bread with even softer herbed butter when my soup arrived. It was a vegetable soup, as simple and clean as vegetable soups come, and exactly what I wanted on that very wet night. It was exactly what I wanted the next, not-so-wet night, too, and so we went back.

Soup and fresh mint and shot glasses aside, I have another important reason for telling you about this place: It was there that I first spotted Dutch Appeltaart. We have much to discuss about this critical topic, and it’s going to be fun. Because, on our second night there (spoiler alert!), I got the recipe. I’ll tell you all about it once I have time to test it, tweak it, and get it just right for you.

The name of the café, by the way, is Villa Zeezicht. Write that down. And while you’re at it, write this down, too: Gebroeders Niemeijer. Now, circle it. Star it. Underline it three times. And with gusto! This place warrants gusto, and lots of it. I don’t know how many times you need to visit a bakery before it becomes “your” bakery, but after less than a handful of breakfasts at Gebroeders Niemeijer, I’m thinking of laying claim to it.

The bakery is set up like several of the cafés and restaurants that we visited in Amsterdam, with the counter and a few tables on the ground floor and, in the back, a larger loft-style eating area half a floor up, above the open basement kitchen. We always sat up top, near the back wall where, despite our distance from the counter and the hum of the morning crowd, we would hear the crackle of knives against crusts, crisp yet delicate, from down below. The sound reminded me of autumn leaves crunching underfoot, an analogy that makes me roll my eyes and snort a little now that I’ve put it in writing, but that felt just right when I said it out loud to Eli during our first breakfast there.

We went to “our” bakery for breakfast every morning, or at least we tried. It is worth noting that Gebroeders Niemeijer is closed on Mondays, mostly so that if you’re planning a trip to Amsterdam that will last under a week, you can arrange to be there from Tuesday through Sunday. (You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.) I’d rather not relive the moment when we showed up for breakfast, only to find a darkened storefront lined with empty bread baskets. The disappointment of arriving at a closed bakery when you fully expect it to be open is a special kind of disappointment, the kind that no one should have to endure so early in the day, let alone on a Monday. The following morning, we told our server, the same sunny young woman who had been bringing us our breakfast all week, about our abortive attempt to return the day before. Her face clouded with genuine sympathy. “Shit,” she said in English (which, with her adorably short, barely-there “i” sounded more like “sht”). She totally understood.

On the first morning, I ordered a cup of tangy yogurt with fruit and – uncomfortable as I am speaking in superlatives about such things – the best pain au chocolat that I have ever eaten. Now, before all of you Francophiles out there tie me up and cram your favorite Parisian specimens down my throat (actually, that doesn’t sound so bad; carry on), I should admit that when I visited Paris, I was so distracted by the banana and Nutella® crêpes on every street corner that I never got around to the pains au chocolat. However. I have eaten in many a Parisian-style (or so they say) bakery in a handful or two of first-rate cities, and I’ve never encountered anything like what I tasted that morning in Amsterdam. I think it’s the texture of the chocolate that often troubles me. The chocolate baton is sometimes too, well, baton-y. It snaps between the teeth in a way that, to me, feels off against the fragile puff pastry. Or, just as often, the chocolate’s too soft. It settles in glops on the tongue, and I end up scraping what’s left of it out from the belly of the pastry and into the garbage, all the while cursing myself for having strayed from my usual plain butter croissant with jam. The chocolate’s too sweet, or too grainy, or too oozy and, consequently, too burn-y on the outside of the dough. I don’t know if I’ve seen it all, but a while back, I decided that I had seen enough to give up on the pain au chocolat entirely. I hadn’t ordered one in years, and I’m not sure what possessed me to go for it. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did.

I leaned over my plate and bit into the crackly outer layer, which immediately shattered, and gave way to supple inner folds that began dissolving in my mouth before I had a moment to chew. And then there was the chocolate, dark and smooth. The consistency was perfect, like a stick of butter left out on the counter to soften. For his part, Eli would order some version of the “petit déjeuner,” which consisted of three crusty rolls, a croissant or brioche – yes, bread with a side of bread – butter, jam, fruit, and sometimes, cheese. There was nothing “petit” about it.

As I was swiping the crumbs from my lap one day, I looked up at Eli and said, “I think it would be impossible to have a bad day after a breakfast like that.”

We spent most of our time in Amsterdam wandering the streets, falling hard for Dutch design, Dutch bicycles, Dutch art, and Dutch people, and secretly wishing that we could be a little bit Dutch, too. Sometimes, we’d take a break along the canals. Or, more accurately, Eli would take a break, while I circled the block with my cameras.

It’s getting late, so I’m going to fast forward over Rembrandt, Van Gogh, pancakes, and cheese, wonderful as they all were, and skip right to our last dinner in Amsterdam.

It was in a candlelit greenhouse.

It’s hard to know what to say after that since, I mean, a candlelit greenhouse. In the middle of Frankendael Park. Which, to make matters worse (and by worse, of course, I mean better) is actually a 17th-century country estate. When we arrived, raindrops were plinking on the glass rooftop and trailing down the glass walls like so many cellophane streamers. The light through the clouds was gauzy and cool. It was magnificent.

The name of the restaurant is, fittingly, De Kas (which means “the greenhouse” in English). To get there, you walk over a footbridge, down a short path, and through the surrounding herb gardens up to the glass front doors. You step inside, and then, if you ask nicely, your husband will hold your bag for you while you crouch to photograph the basil – twenty-five different kinds, our server told us! – that grows in the greenhouse right there beside the dining room.

The tables are preset with crusty boules and shallow white dishes of olive oil, thick with fresh basil. Everything glows, and your eyes do the only thing they can do in such a setting, which is to look, and look, and look some more. Once you’re seated, someone will bring you two more of those shallow white bowls, one filled with olives, and the other with zucchini, grown on the premises, sliced, and pickled with mustard seeds.

The meal itself was as special as the setting. There’s one fixed menu available each day: an appetizer of three small plates, a main course, and a dessert. (The chef is happy to accommodate vegetarians and those with dietary restrictions.) Vegetables are the stars of this kitchen and, like the salad greens and celery hearts that we ate that night, they’re pretty much left alone to do their thing. Everything on our plates was simply and, it seemed to me, gently prepared. If you’re looking for further proof that the best food is food that tastes like itself, De Kas is it.

I could easily go on for another thousand words, at least, but I don’t want to bore you, so I’m going to rip my fingers from the keyboard and stop here. For the odd insatiable reader (and because, let’s face it, I can’t help myself), I’ll cram a few more recommendations into the list of addresses, which you’ll find below, after the recipe.

Wait, did I just say recipe?

Yes, recipe! After chewing your ear off about shots of honey, and perfect pastries, and greenhouse dinners, the least I can do is offer you a taste. (Of Amsterdam; not the ear). So. I’m going to tell you just one more thing. Then, for the love of your sock drawer that, no doubt, needs organizing, I’ll stop there.

One night in Amsterdam, Eli and I went to a restaurant called Spelt. The chef, as you might suspect, features spelt in many of his dishes, including a startlingly magenta spelt and beet risotto that had me scraping my plate. The pacing of the meal was unusually slow, but I had a very nice forehead to keep me company between courses, so I can’t complain.

My favorite bite of the evening – two bites, really – was an unassuming little cookie that came with my hot water and mint. (If it seems as if I drank hot water and mint everywhere we went in Amsterdam, it’s because I did.) The cookie, a sturdy thing that snapped like a cracker, was made of spelt flour, of course, and chopped sunflower seeds. What’s remarkable to me about this seemingly unremarkable cookie is how the flavors hang together in a way that makes it tricky to tease them apart. For such a plain-looking, approachable cookie, it’s surprisingly complex. There’s cinnamon, ginger, lemon zest, and vanilla in there, but at first, all I knew was that I was tasting something familiar, something kind of like a Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux® cookie (remember those?), something rich with butter, something hinting of caramel, or maybe toffee, something delicious. By the time I jumped up to photograph our table in the fading light, that cookie was long gone. Maybe you can imagine it there on the saucer, leaning against the steaming mug. I hope so.

If you’re having trouble imagining, a batch of these cookies from your very own oven should do the trick. Thanks to the generosity of the chef, I have the recipe for you. At the end of our meal, he disappeared into the kitchen with my black pocket notebook, deposited the recipe, and returned to our table to talk me through it. So kind! I tucked my notebook back into my bag, and thought, “That’s my kind of souvenir.” I hope you’ll like these cookies as much as I do.

Oh, Amsterdam! I never would have chosen you – you were Eli’s pick, not mine – but now I’d choose you every time.

Spelt Cookies
Adapted from the restaurant, Spelt

I’m afraid that some of you might be scared off by the mention of spelt flour, an ingredient that sounds like something out of the hippie handbook. But please, hold your clicks! I wish you could have seen the chef that night enthusing about spelt flour. You'd be instantly reassured. That man is crazy about spelt, and I’m beginning to understand why. If you’ve ever baked with oat flour, I think you’ll find spelt flour to be somewhat similar in flavor. There’s a sweetness and a nuttiness to it, so when you’re after a sweet and nutty cookie, it’s the perfect choice. In case you’re wondering, I buy the Arrowhead Mills brand.

¾ cup granulated sugar
1 stick + 5 Tbsps. butter
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups + 2 Tbsps. spelt flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. ground ginger
½ tsp. lemon zest
¼ cup plus 1 heaping Tbsp. salted sunflower seeds, coarsely chopped (If you use unsalted seeds, add a couple of generous pinches of salt to the dry ingredients.)

Mix the flour, cinnamon, ginger, zest, and chopped sunflower seeds in a large bowl, and set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and the sugar. Mix in the vanilla, scrape down the sides of the bowl and, with the mixer on low, add the dry ingredients. The dough will start off looking crumbly, but will smooth out once the flour and spices are fully incorporated into the fat. You’re good to go when the caramel-colored dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and hugs the spinning paddle.

Scrape the dough into a lump in the center of the bowl, and divide it into two more or less equal mini-lumps. Roll each lump into a sausage about one and a half inches in diameter. Wrap each sausage in wax paper, and twirl the overhanging paper at each of the ends so that the dough won’t dry out. Chill the dough for at least an hour. (You can keep the dough in the fridge overnight, if you want, and bake the cookies the next day.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Unwrap one package of dough and slice it into cookies about a quarter of an inch thick. Bake on a parchment lined baking sheet for 16-18 minutes, until the cookies are a toasty, golden brown. Transfer immediately to a rack and cool to room temperature. The cookies will be soft when you first remove them from the oven, but they’ll harden up as they cool.

Yield: 80-90 cookies, which sounds like a lot, but they’re small, and best enjoyed in multiples of three.

Recipe updated 9/6/2010.

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Addresses

Gebroeders Niemeijer
Nieuwendijk 35
Phone: 06 51087148

De Kas
Kamerlingh Onneslaan 3
Phone: 020 4624562

Spelt
Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 5A
Phone: 020 4207022

Villa Zeezicht
Singel 161
Phone: 020 6267433

Not mentioned above, but recommended:

Buffet van Odette (Salads, soups, sandwiches)
Herengracht 309
Phone: 020 4236034

De Kaaskamer (Wonderful raw milk cheeses)
Runstraat 7
Phone: 020 6233483

Pancakes! Amsterdam (Pancakes, obviously.)
Berenstraat 38
Phone: 020 5289797

Winkel (More sandwiches, more soups, more sandwiches!)
Noordermarkt 43
Phone: 020 6230223

For (much, much) more on what to eat in Amsterdam, and where, click over to Vicky Hampton's lovely site, Amsterdam Foodie.

St. Petersburg (more!)

2010-08-24T13:32:00.023-04:00

I’ve received a few requests in the comments and via e-mail for more details about our St. Petersburg trip, including the names and addresses of restaurants and our hotel. I’m more than happy to tell you about where we happened to lay our heads and fill our stomachs while we were there. Just please keep in mind that, having only visited for a few days, I’m probably not the best person to ask if you’re looking for authoritative touring information! If you’ve lived in St. Petersburg, or visited, and you have your own tips to share, please do leave a note in the comments section.

As for us, we stayed at Hotel Vera in the Liteyny/Smolny neighborhood, just east of the so-called “historic heart” of the city. It’s a mid-range hotel, clean, air conditioned, walking distance to the center of town, and a block away from major bus lines. There are mini-refrigerators in the rooms, which come in handy if you happen to pick up a bag of homemade string cheese at the farmers’ market.

The kind people at the reception desk spoke English quite well. They answered all of our questions about how to get around, and nodded politely when, late one night, I went on for a full two minutes about the virtues of a certain standout pickled tomato before Eli dragged me off to bed. The complimentary breakfast included a selection of breads (the black bread was my daily pick), cheeses, meats, hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, yogurts, packets of something that I think may have been instant strawberry-flavored oatmeal (does this ring a bell to any St. Petersburgers out there?) and, as you’ve already seen, fancy butter. Just one word of caution if you happen to stay there: That green foil-wrapped square on the dresser may look like a mint, but it’s not. It’s bug food. And it’s poison.

Every day of our trip, we ate pelmeni – soft, ravioli-like dumplings filled with all manner of things – at a variety of eateries, from the high-end to the national chain. Our favorite pelmeni, the pelmeni that I want to tell you about, were from a hole-in-the-wall place called, appropriately enough, Pelmeni Bar. They’re the ones in the photo that I showed you last time. What sets these pelmeni apart is their impossibly thin, smooth dough. Unlike the thicker-skinned versions splashed with broth instead of butter, these pelmeni just barely hold together from plate to fork to mouth; they split open as soon as they hit the teeth, and slide right down the throat. The pelmeni that we ordered were stuffed with mushrooms and creamy potatoes, and Eli said that they reminded him of chicken soup. I didn’t exactly follow, given that there was nothing remotely chicken- or soup-like on the plate, but I know enough about how he feels about chicken soup to understand that this was a compliment of the highest order. If Eli compared me to chicken soup, I’d take it. We also had an order of pickled mushrooms, but if I were you – or if I were me, there with the wisdom of future me – I’d skip them. Pelmeni Bar doesn’t have a website, at least not one that I can find by searching in English, but it’s located at Gorokhovaya ul 3 in the center of town, a block away from the Admiralty and the surrounding gardens. The phone number (though, unless you speak Russian, I can’t imagine what you might say if you called) is 570.0405. That’s a photograph of the storefront up there on the left.

The site of the ultimate pickled tomato, and the best all-around meal that we ate in St. Petersburg, was a place called Molokhovets’ Dream. The restaurant was inspired by Elena Molokhovets, the author of a 19th-century treasury of traditional Russian recipes and household advice called A Gift to Young Housewives. There are all kinds of Russian specialties on the menu, including three different types of borscht (beet soup), both hot and cold, and a variety of koulibiaca (fish-stuffed pastries). Elena Molokhovets dreamt mostly of meat, it seems, but there is more than enough vegetarian fare on the menu to cobble together a meal if you decide to go that route. With the soup course came brioches, mildly sweet, the size of small fists, and swollen with fresh cranberries. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about a mini-dessert served mid-meal. Then I sank my teeth into it, and I quickly figured out that how I felt about it was good. Cold beet soup, I am now convinced, is meant to be enjoyed between bites of a sweet-tart, cranberry-stuffed brioche.

Bushe Bakery, the one bakery that we visited in St. Petersburg, was not particularly exciting. Unless you count our run-in with that creepy pinching man, but that wasn’t exactly the kind of excitement we were after. It’s never fun writing about a disappointing bakery, and it’s especially frustrating when, according to reputable sources, the bakery is typically quite good. Perhaps we were there on an off day, or ordered the wrong things. All I know is that the jam-filled pastry was dry, and the apple strudel-like thing tasted only of sugar. We didn’t finish either one, and not because we were full. I’ve been thinking that I should have gone for the almond horn instead. An almond horn has never let me down.

There’s only one thing that I would have done differently during our stay in St. Petersburg (well, two things, if you count the almond horn): I would have eaten more blini. We had them just once, at a restaurant called Matrosskaya Tishina, on our last day in St. Petersburg. That day also happened to be Eli’s birthday, and I think birthday blini could have a real future as a cake alternative. Especially for Eli, who’s not much into cake, anyway. The blini – plump, springy pancakes the size of small saucers – arrived at the end of our meal with a bowl of jammy raspberry sauce. The blini were golden brown, crisp around the edges and, unlike most American-style pancakes that are spongy on the inside, these were almost custardy.

I should also mention that Matrosskaya Tishini, according to the guidebooks, is St. Petersbug’s best seafood restaurant. I did, indeed, eat some kind of well-prepared fish there, but it was served on a bed of kasha so unusually delicious – the grains were fat, as if in full bloom, and loaded with caramelized onions and browned mushrooms; it was light on the fork as kasha very often is not, and not at all waterlogged, as it so often is –that I’ve entirely forgotten what kind of fish it was, and what was so great about it. The décor of the place was a charming, if puzzling, combination of upscale and kitsch. There were all the trappings of fine dining, including linen napkins, candlelight, and first-rate service. But there was also an ocean soundtrack (think waves crashing, seagulls crowing, and foghorns blowing) playing over the easy-listening dinner music, a Wiggling Willy on the wall (yes, the singing fish), and restrooms built Disneyworld-style into a structure that looked like the belly of a ship.

That bag of cheese up top, and the straight-from-the-comb honey that I mentioned last time, were both procured at the Kuznechny Market, where fruit and vegetable vendors literally embrace you and, with one hand on your shoulder and the other on the small of your back, steer you over to their tables to sample slivers of peaches and tomatoes from their knives. It was the most aggressive produce pedaling I had ever encountered.

Of course, when we weren’t sleeping or eating, we were doing other things. We walked up and down Nevsky Prospect, the city’s bustling main street, and wandered, wide-eyed, through the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the one with the candy-like spires. (It’s worth the price of admission to see the stunning floor-to-ceiling mosaics on the interior walls.) We sprawled out on the grass for some people watching – and pelmeni digesting – at the Admiralty Gardens; stood frozen in Dvortsovaya Square, entranced by thoughts of revolution and bloodshed; and saturated our eyeballs with art at the magnificent Hermitage and Russian Museum. (There’s an incredible Picasso exhibition at the Hermitage right now, on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris. All I can say is WOW, and if you’re in St. Petersburg, go!). The days were long thanks to the late, late-setting sun, and we filled them to the brim. One day, we estimated that we had covered thirteen miles on foot since morning. That night, we tucked ourselves into a corner table at the tiny JFC Jazz Club and, over drinks we weren’t sure we had ordered, hummed along to bass lines we were sure we had heard before. A few hours later, we stepped out into the blue light of the 10 o’ clock hour, walked back to our hotel, and fell into bed as the sky went, finally, black.

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To review…

Sleeping:

Hotel Vera
Suvorovsky pr 25/16
Phone: 702.7206

Eating:

Bushe Bakery
Malaya Morskaya ul 7
Phone: (7.812) 764.2927

Kuznechny Market
Kuznechny per 3
Phone: (7.812) 312.4161

Matrosskaya Tishina
Ul Marata 54/34
Phone: (7.812) 764.4413

Molokhovets’ Dream
Ul Radishcheva 10
Phone: (7.812) 929.2247

Pelmeni Bar
Gorokhovaya ul 3
Phone: (7.812) 570.0405

Everything else:

The Admiralty (and surrounding gardens)
Admiralteysky proezd 1

Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood
Nab kanala Griboedova 2a
Phone: (7.812) 315.1636

The Hermitage
Dvortsovaya nab 34
Phone: (7.812) 571.3420

JFC Jazz Club
Shpalernaya ul 33
Phone: (7.812) 272.9850

Russian Museum
Inzhenernaya ul 4
Phone: (7.812) 595.4248