From the category archives:
PS: This is amazing gelato. Especially with farm fresh strawberries on a hot nyc summer night. Find it here.
Also, if you have noticed an upswing in posts tonight, that might be due to the addition of “Press This” on my tool bar. Revelations to this time starved design scout.
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Summer is not summer without grilled food. Yesterday I bought this Lodge Logic 10.5 by 10.5 inch stove top grill at Zabar’s. The 2nd floor housewares section at Zabar’s is a veritable kitchen supply mecca — it’s what William Sonoma should be. I like this grill size because it fits on one burner and is large enough to grill chicken/pork/burgers for two comfortably. Some of the other stove top grills I’ve seen are too big (esp. for NYC sized kitchens). We tried it out last night with chicken tenderloins and loved the results. We marinated the chicken in dill and lemon juice for 30 minutes. Tip: let the pan get reallllllllly hot. We served our chicken with this amazing greek orzo side dish (Thanks for the recipe Rachel!). You can pick up the Lodge Logic pan for $28 at KaTom Restaurant Supply. Ps The Greek Orzo is a great picnic dish.
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On Monday I bundled Alex in my Ergo Sport baby carrier (which I’m in love with!) and turned in my thesis. It now becomes part of the Smithsonian’s collection, which I find fairly unbelievably awesome. I’ve spent the last 48 hours in a post deadline stupor but have been drinking a few celebratory glasses of my new favorite white wine: Bio-Weingut H.U.M Hofer Gruner Veltiner. It comes in liter bottles with a soda bottle cap! I love that. In fact, I’m planning a summer party all around this wine (and bottle — it looks crisp and unexpected on the table). It is the perfect spring wine — light, refreshing and makes me feel glamorous. Like maybe the way sitting cross legged on the deck of a Parisian barge moored on the Seine would feel. $13.99 at Whole Foods Wine. Image from Second Glass.
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I made these last night after Stephanie passed along the recipe. Holy strawberries! I gobbled these down like Mr. Fox. Delicious, easy and fun even. A total kid’s food too. I futzed with the recipe and used brown sugar and half milk half keifer. But, seriously, you can’t go wrong with this one. It would be amazing with peaches, blueberries, you name it.
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Our friends Jim and Becca created the Feburary holiday of Febgiving and this year Tim and I decided to get into the act ourselves. Tim designed an awesome invite and on Saturday we hosted 25 friends and seven babies for a turkey feast! Everyone brought a side dish, dessert or cheese. The table groaned under the weight of such deliciousness.
The feast in progress! I’m obsessed with Whole Foods brand Italian sparkling water. Tastes amazing and costs $1.29 a bottle.
The table setting with red parrot tulips from the corner bodega, Marta glasses ($1.50-2.50 from CB2) and our silver, bought at auction. This vase was re-purposed from this experiment. I also used some of these vases from Jamali Garden Supply and mini daffodil plants.
We tucked fortune fish (left over from our wedding) into each napkin. Everyone had fun with them.
A delicious looking plate.
A room full of happy babies. Alex was so happy to share his toys with all the little people.
Tim and Alex toast the Febgiving crowd.
Thanks to Katherine and Joanna for the lovely photos!
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Stephanie, Alex and I went on an epic five and half hour journey to that blogger utopia Kinokuniya, the Japanese bookstore on 6th avenue. It was everything the bloggers who had gone before us had promised: a three floor mecca of craft books, stationary supplies and amazing gardening books. However, the highlight of the day was a delicious carrot cake whoopie pie. $1.50 at Kinokuniya’s cafe. I came home and baked up a batch using the recipe below. We had friends over for delicious Greek take out last night and these cookies were universally consumed with moans and then demands for seconds, so I think they count as a major hit. NB: If you don’t have silpat mats ($18), they are a kitchen gadget well worth investing in. They are the spanx of the cooking world.
Adapted from Gourmet (RIP!)
1 1/8 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup coarsely grated carrots (2 medium)
1/2 cup raisins (2 1/2 ounces)
8 ounces cream cheese
1/4 cup honey
Put oven racks in upper and lower thirds of oven and preheat oven to 375°F.
Whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a bowl.
Beat together butter, sugars, egg, and vanilla in a bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Mix in carrots and raisins at low speed, then add flour mixture and beat until just combined.
Chill dough in freezer for 15 minutes.
Drop 1 tablespoon batter per cookie 2 inches apart on silplat mats and bake on baking sheets, switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until cookies are lightly browned and springy to the touch, 12 to 16 minutes total. Cool cookies on sheets on racks 1 minute, then transfer cookies to racks to cool completely.
While cookies are baking, blend cream cheese and honey in a food processor until smooth.
Sandwich flat sides of cookies together with a generous tablespoon of cream cheese filling in between. These are good the first night, but if you store in an airtight container, they get amazingly moist and whoopie pie like on the second night.
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I’ve been obsessed with the rainbow cake like everyone else in blogland. Today Stephanie came over (she lives three blocks from me!!) and demonstrated her baking chops and produced these rainbow cupcakes using Wilton food coloring. Next up, the full cake!
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Our friends Jim and Becca wrote an awesome book on the craft of cheese making in Wisconsin. This would make an amazing valentine’s gift for the cheese nerd (like me!) in your life ($18 at Amazon). Add a box of cheese from the University of Wisconsin-Madison ($19) and they’ll love you forever. I have personally sampled the aged cheddar and can give it the AGDS seal of approval. I love Jim and Becca for many reasons but one of my favorite is that they created Febgiving, the celebration of thanksgiving in February. This year Febgiving is celebrated Feb. 14 and 20th. I can’t wait.
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We had a little tree trimming party on Sunday, one of the highlights of which was my new obsession: La Tur cheese. Joanna and Alex brought it over on Friday night and its safe to say my life hasn’t been the same since. I’ve eaten it five days in a row (thanks Whole Foods) and I hate to say it but there is half a wheel in the fridge as I type this. It is a combination of goat, cow and sheep’s milk that melts in your mouth and makes you happy, thin and rich.
Murray’s says:
“Three milks, and two textures, that merge into one cheese’s best approximations of ice cream. A thin, edible skin barely contains a hair’s breadth of drippy tang, and then: deep, tongue-skimming, milk cloud, full and moist, with a liberal salting that makes you wish they left the sugar out of gelato entirely. A mild and delightful cheese”
La Tur, La Tur, I like to say it, type it, and most of all, I like to eat it. I spent part of Monday thinking about the social acceptability of naming any second child La Tur. (No, but, I would like to). At the tree trimming party we also served mulled cider, a selection of cheese to act as back up singers to the La Tur, an array of cured meats, homemade cookies (Russian tea cakes and chocolate chip), lots of oranges and as the night wore on, some piping hot quiche. (And, it was a treat to watch Leon and Alex roll around like puppies in the nursery). Here’s a gratuitous shot of our now trimmed tree:
PS Top image from the cheese blog 365 Cheeses.
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Tim cooked skirt steak with golden beets and stir-fried greens tonight and it was delicious (and took 30 minutes to prep and cook). If you’ve never had golden beets you are in for a treat. I HATE beets as a result of my grandparents forcing me to eat the red canned variety when I was 6 and I was so skeptical about these, but they are mellow and earthy, a perfect compliment to the steak. Skirt steak is an amazingly flavorful and CHEAP cut of meat, too. I had no idea.
This recipe is adapted from a great Everyday Food recipe. Everyday Food is one of my favorite magazines (I love it’s tiny size). I cook something new and delicious every month from this magazine. Since I now worry that every magazine I depend on is going to fold, I’ll say it: subscribe. It’s $12 dollars for the year and I promise you’ll find at least 12 great recipes to add to your repertoire and cook time and again.
Skirt Steak with Golden Beets and Stir-Fry Greens
4 yellow beets peeled and cut into 1/2 inch wedges
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
1 skirt steak (1.5 lbs) cut into 4 equal pieces
Any combination of swiss chard, baby bok choi, mustards greens, chicory, kale, beet tops, spinach greens. Depending on which greens you like, I’d combine a few baby bok choi with a 6 or 7 swiss chard leaves with some kale for a total of 12 ozs of greens (or however much you can fit in your saute pan).
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (or balsamic if you don’t have red wine vinegar)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place beets on a large sheet of tin foil, drizzle with 1 tablespoon oil and generous amount of salt and pepper Fold foil to make tent like packet over the beets. Place on baking sheet (rimmed if you have it) and roast until beets are tender, about 30 minutes.
While the beets are cooking, heat 1 tablespoon oil over medium high. Season steaks with salt and peeper and cook until medium rare 3-6 minutes a side (depending on thickness). Transfer to plate to rest.
Wipe skillet clean with a paper towel, return to store and heat 1 tablespoon oil over medium- high, add greens and cook until wilted, 2 minutes. Add beets and vinegar, season with salt and peeper and toss to combine. Thinly slice steak against the grain and serve with beets and greens.
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What can I say but this week blurred by, mostly due to a higher than normal level of sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep makes me a) tired and b) do crazy shit. As in, this week I managed to throw out my keys. As the mothers who read this blog with undoubtedly understand, when you have a baby, your daily routine hangs in a very delicate balance. Doing something like throwing out your keys is like throwing dynamite into said schedule. It took me the better part of a week to get replacement keys, which I have so far managed not to throw out.
I should invent some sort of gizmo for new mothers, like one of those rave glow sticks, that indicates how little sleep they’d had. That way anyone they interacted with, say, husbands, best friends or mothers, would instantaneously understand what they were dealing with (and do things like check the recycling for their wives house keys). Yes, I recycled my keys.
Yet, as in my favorite column in the magazine The Week, “It wasn’t all bad.” I did manage to bake some good oatmeal cranberry cookies. I do my best to eat a low glycemic diet, which means that I swapped the sugar in this recipe with agave syrup and I highly recommend the results. I adapted this from an excellent Smitten Kitchen Oatmeal Raisin recipe.
Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies (makes 18 medium cookies).
1 stick butter, softened (the softened part is really important — if you use cold butter, it makes your cookies flat…)
Slightly less than 1/2 cup agave
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup dried cranberries
Preheat oven to 400 °F.
In a food processor (I use a Cuisinart), cream together the butter, agave, egg and almond extract until smooth. This is usually between 8-10 “pulses” on my Cuisinart. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together. Combine this into the butter/sugar mixture (I usually break it up into four parts and pulse each into the Cuisinart mixture). I then pour this mixture out of the Cuisnart and into a bowl. Stir in the oats and cranberries.
Deb at Smitten Kitchen says “At this point you can either chill the dough for a bit in the fridge and then scoop it, or scoop the cookies onto a sheet and then chill the whole tray before baking them. You could also bake them right away, if you’re impatient, but I do find that they end up slightly less thick.” And I found that chilling them does makes the cookies thicker.
Bake them for 10 to 12 minutes (your baking time will vary, depending on your oven and how cold the cookies were going in), taking them out when golden at the edges but still a little undercooked-looking on top.
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A friend emailed me raving about an Ina Garten-themed dinner party she went to on Sunday. Everyone was assigned a course, and the recipe had to come from ina’s ‘canon’. Evidently it was fun and delicious and a great deal of the “juice of a few flowers” was consumed by all. On your behalf, dear readers, I demanded the menu asap and here it is:
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My obsession with the combination of chocolate and peanut butter is well documented on this blog, and I have the next installment today: Purely Decadent’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl. I’m not one to use the term “off the hook” but somehow the term applies here. IT IS THE MOST DELICIOUS THING I’VE EATEN IN A LONG TIME. As an added bonus, it is organic, dairy free (but you’d NEVER know it) and about half the fat of my favorite haagen-dazs flavor. I am stockpiling it in my freezer against the day they stop making it (which happened with my favorite chocolate peanut butter flavor from Ben and Jerry’s so it can happen people, it can happen).
PS: My macbook pro charger cord melted down/burned up spectacularly last night — it was nothing short of scary.
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