Cooking Inside the Box

2012-01-08T21:27:00.009-05:00

Hello, dear readers, and apologies for my recent blog-neglecting. I didn't update because I didn't have a whole lot to write about, at least not a whole lot of local, seasonal, farmer's market-y food. It seemed like every time I stepped into my kitchen in December, I came out with one of these things:

Pumpkin Brown Butter Cupcakes with Cinnamon Frosting,
via Sprinkle Bakes

Frosted Sugar Cookies

Almond Biscotti
via Smitten Kitchen

Cherry Winks
via my mom's "secret" recipe

All were very delicious, but none were really in keeping with the general theme of this blog, hence the radio silence. Until now.

Tonight, I defrosted the farmer's market rhubarb I'd tucked away in the freezer seven months ago and made this pie that is at once hideously ugly and incredibly delicious. It's got the lovely, bright flavor of rhubarb softened by creamy layers of vanilla-scented custard, all poured into a yummy butter-laden crust. This pie is exactly the little bit of springtime in the winter I'd been anticipating since freezing the rhubarb last June... and I'm so glad that I did!

Rhubarb Custard Pie!

After dinner tonight, when I proudly presented this pie (sans one slice) to Ed, he was all, "I don't really like rhubarb, you know. Too stringy."

And I was like, "Oh man, what a bummer!" (But of course, what I really meant was, "Whoo hoo! More for me!")

Rhubarb Custard Pie
adapted from AllRecipes.com

one unbaked pie crust (I used a homemade all-butter crust from Southern Pies, but you could use your favorite recipe or a store-bought frozen crust.)

3 c. chopped rhubarb
3 eggs
1 c. sugar
2 1/2 T all-purpose flour
1 T butter, melted
1 1/2 t. vanilla

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

Distribute the chopped rhubarb evenly inside of the pie crust.

In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs until frothy. Stir in sugar and whisk until well-combined, then whisk in remaining ingredients. Pour egg mixture over rhubarb in pie crust.

Bake at 425 degrees for ten minutes, then turn your oven down to 375 degrees and continue to cook for an additional 30 minutes. If you can muster the willpower to refrain from gobbling it all down as soon as it comes out of the oven, you really should wait until pie is cool to slice into it. (But I won't blame you if you can't.)

Whiskey & Salt #1: Southern Comfort!

2011-12-09T01:03:00.010-05:00

Okay. It's been almost a week, and I think I've finally recovered from Saturday's supper club marathon of cooking, cleaning and general insanity. It was pretty dicey for a few moments there - everything from malfunctioning ice cream makers to melted stove knobs to forgotten Kitchenaid mixer attachments - but I think we pulled it off pretty well! (Even if we did forget to take pictures of one of our courses. Whoops! You're just going to have to imagine that one.)

Emily and I welcomed our sixteen guests into our temporary home for the evening - the Ted and Amy Supper Club's gorgeous Fort Greene digs - and kicked things off with a cocktail hour featuring thyme-spiked gin lemonade and three little bites:

Crostini of chicken liver pate, bacon jam and diced green apple

Vinegar-spiked deviled eggs

Triscuits with cream cheese and Emily's homemade hot pepper jelly

Cocktail hour passed in a blur for us - we were cooking up the first course, greeting our guests and making sure everyone had a full glass and a bite to eat, all at the same time. It was awesome, though - I think Emily and I both had a moment when we were looking at all the folks gathered around, drinking and eating and chatting and laughing, and we thought - we're really doing this!

Soon enough, it was time for everyone to take their seats so we could serve the first course.

Photo credit: Kathy Blake, The Experimental Gourmand

When we'd designed the menu, we knew we wanted to do a shrimp and grits course, but we weren't sure exactly what kind of shrimp to serve. Something spicy? Creamy? Bacon and garlic-y? We were a little bit stumped. Then, as if by kismet, we both hit on the winning idea - New Orleans style BBQ shrimp! A little bit spicy and a whole lot of buttery, this shrimp was seriously amazing, especially together with creamy, cheesy grits cakes and spicy Cajun pickled okra.

Our second course was a last minute addition, on the advice of cupcake mogul Allison Robicelli. She suggested that we add a course that could be prepared in advance and be served to our hungry guests while they waited for our endless chicken-frying marathon to draw to a close. It was a brilliant idea - Emily and I came up with a brussel sprout slaw, tossed with pecans and a sharp, lemony vinaigrette and topped with shaved ricotta salata, and it wound up being the perfect middle course. A little bit of raw veggie, a little bit refreshing - and it bought us just enough time to finish up frying the chicken thighs!

Mmmm.... chicken thighs! After extensive testing, we settled on a regular ol' brine for the thighs with the Ad Hoc at Home recipe for the buttermilk dip and seasoned flour. Then we fried them up in some lard at 350 degrees, held them in a 200 degree oven and topped them with a generous squeeze of Mike's Hot Honey. A little sweet, a little heat and a whole lot of crunchy, meaty awesomeness. On the side? A fluffy buttermilk biscuit made from a Southern grandma's secret recipe and a mess of collard greens cooked down with lemon juice and my current obsession, Harrington's bacon.

We also served a second round of cocktails - an autumnal mixture of rye whiskey, apple cider and Emily's homemade ginger syrup. We'd originally intended to serve the cocktail in glasses rimmed with smoked sea salt, but somehow that idea got lost in the rush to get drinks into thirsty hands. Next time!

The piece de resistance? Banana pudding baked Alaska.

Oh, HELL YES. This stuff was so good, I could have eaten all of these. In one sitting. All by myself. We started with a cake made out of Nilla wafers, topped with more crushed Nilla wafers, then added a scoop of this crazy good banana ice cream from Bravetart and a big dollop of meringue. And then we added bananas. And then we torched it.

Photo credit: Kathy Blake, The Experimental Gourmand

Ohhhh, crispy creamy crunchy sweet and smooth and marshmallow-y meringue and everything good in the world contained in a little bowl of heaven. At the end of the night, I collapsed into an empty seat at the table, next to a good friend I hadn't seen in ages, and dug my spoon into this crazy banana-filled treat, and there we were, surrounded by folks with full bellies, flickering candles, empty bottles of gin and towering stacks of dishes. But we'd done it. We'd made it! This crazy idea we'd hatched one wine-soaked night in lower Manhattan had become a reality. And Emily and I couldn't be more proud.

Of course, we didn't do it alone. So many people deserve special thanks here, especially Kara of Ted and Amy, who rented us her kitchen and living room for the day and could not have been more patient, helpful or awesome. (And FYI, if you're looking for a space to hold a party, a cooking class or another similar sort of event, contact Kara through Ted and Amy Supper Club for more information on renting her gorgeous, well-stocked space for the day!)

We also couldn't have done it without our "sous chef" for the day, Eryn of Ugly Food Tastes Better, or my amazing boyfriend Ed, who not only helped me carry about 500 pounds of stuff over to Kara's but also ran back to our apartment at the very last minute to grab the extremely important Kitchenaid mixer bowl I'd left there. Allison Robicelli gave us an absolute ton of great ideas for making things extra professional, from the parsley garnish on the shrimp to keeping the collards warm without sacrificing a burner by using a slow cooker.

And finally, super duper extra special thanks to all of the folks who came to dinner with us! We loved having the opportunity to share our cooking with you. If you didn't make it this time, stay tuned for the next edition of the Whiskey & Salt Supper Club... coming (relatively) soon!

All photographs by Emily Hanhan unless otherwise noted.

Vegan PB &J cupcakes!

2011-11-03T21:57:00.003-04:00

One of my colleagues did me a major favor at work last week. Like, major major. Totally above and beyond. There were no words to express my gratitude to her... but where words fail, baked goods speak.

Since this particular colleague is vegan, I couldn't just use any of my butter and cream-loaded standard recipes. I panicked for a few moments - without French buttercream, I'm nothing! - then sucked it up and got Googling.

These lovely little strawberry cupcakes with peanut butter frosting are what I finally came up with, and let me tell you, you really won't miss the eggs or dairy at all. The cupcakes are tender and moist, leavened with baking soda and vinegar and flavored with a cup of strawberry puree I'd tucked away in the freezer back in June. And the peanut butter frosting? Crazy good! It's made with Earth Balance shortening, gobs of peanut butter, a splash of vanilla and a few cups of powdered sugar. The recipe called for soy milk, but I'm not a big fan of the stuff and was not about to buy a whole carton of soy milk for a few tablespoons of liquid, so I just substituted water. I'd be surprised if using soy milk would actually make a major difference, flavor-wise.

The little heart decorations are just all natural strawberry fruit leather. I totally thought I had a teeny heart-shaped cookie cutter, but as it turns out, I only have a giant one, so these are freehand. And misshapen. But still kinda cute, right?

All in all, I think my first vegan baking experience was a total success. I hope my awesome colleague likes them! We'll find out tomorrow...

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup

2011-10-29T12:52:00.007-04:00

I was starting to feel a little under the weather last weekend, so I decided to spend Saturday afternoon simmering up a restorative chicken broth. It turned out so rich and delicious that now I want to spend every Saturday making soup!

I started out by heating some olive oil in a large stockpot and searing a pound and a half of chicken backs. Once they were nice and golden brown, I added in two onions, cut in half, and half a head of celery and a large handful of carrots, roughly chopped, and let them brown up a little bit. Then I added enough water to cover everything, a couple of bay leaves and a small sprinkle of dried thyme, brought it to a boil and then turned it down to low and let it start simmering.

While the soup simmered, I roasted a whole 4 1/2 lb chicken in the oven for dinner. The other half of the celery and two more halved onions were tucked underneath the chicken. Once it was done, I removed the breasts for that night's dinner, picked the remaining meat off the carcass and set it aside, then added the chicken bones and roasted vegetables into the stock pot, adding more water to cover.

All in all, the chicken stock simmered for about six hours, until it was deeply brown and flavorful. I added a little bit of kosher salt to taste then strained the whole mess into a glass bowl, which went straight into the fridge. In the morning, I scraped the gloppy layer of fat from the top of the bowl and was left with about a gallon of lovely, rich chicken stock.

Some of it went right into this chicken and stars - and escarole! - soup. Oh man. If there's anything better than homemade chicken soup, I don't know what it is.

Once you have your homemade stock, this soup comes together super fast. Just heat up your broth and some of the reserved chicken, boil up a cup of tiny star-shaped pasta and then mix the cooked pasta into the broth. This week, we received a mystery green from the CSA - I originally thought it was lettuce and tried to make a salad out of it, then realized that it was way too thick and strongly flavored to be lettuce. Next guess? Escarole! Just the thing to shred into ribbons and mix into a boiling pot of soup for some extra flavor and nutrition. Yum!

After the soup was made, I took the rest of the chicken stock and froze it in ice cube trays, knowing how delicious it would make everything it touched. And I was right! It made this celeraic soup absolutely delightful.

This isn't just celeraic soup, actually. It's celeraic-apple-leek-potato soup, a delicious way to use up about half of this week's CSA share in one yummy, warming pureed soup. It's crazy easy, too - just peel and chop one large knob of celeraic, two apples, one potato, one clove of garlic and a bunch of leeks, saute them in a bit of oil to get some browning action going on, then cover them in chicken stock and simmer for 30 minutes. Once everything is tender, puree the soup with an immersion blender - or in batches in a traditional blender - and adjust the seasonings, if necessary. You can also stir in a few pats of butter or a splash of cream if you're feeling indulgent, but it's really not required. I served this soup with a bit of paprika and black pepper on top, but croutons would be absolutely wonderful, if you have some around.

2011-10-15T19:21:00.011-04:00

More often than not these days, I'm totally wiped out when I get home from work. The last thing I want to do most evenings is cook an elaborate, complicated dinner - I just want food, and I want it now! And I don't want it to come out of a box... especially not a pizza-sized box from the crappy pizzeria next door. So I've been experimenting with ways to get most of the work for dinner done ahead of time. A few weekends ago, I made a triple batch of meatballs, rolled them up and flash froze them in the raw and stacked them up in a freezer bag. It's easy as pie to come home, stick a couple of them in the oven for thirty minutes, boil up some spaghetti or slice open a hero roll and have dinner ready by the time the six o'clock news starts.

Ratatouille is another great make-ahead meal. It can safely stay in the fridge for a few days after it's prepared, and like most stews, it only gets better with age. I can also serve it in a few different, easy ways to mix things up a little bit - while I love a simple, warm bowl of ratatouille with some crusty bread for dipping, a dish of olives and a glass of wine, you could also plate it with rice, couscous or savory crepes for something different! And look how yummy it looks, all full of herbes de provence and soft, tender vegetables.

I'm going to tell you how to make my favorite version of ratatouille, but first I want to show you my inspiration for this dinner... the most beautiful bell pepper I've ever seen.

Seriously, though. Isn't that something? As soon as I saw those in our CSA selection this week, I was all, MINE! And then there were little purple eggplant in the next bucket, and I was like, HEY THESE MATCH!

And then I got them home and I was like, SO NOW WHAT? Eggplant... pepper... hey, and I have those oven-dried tomatoes still in the fridge, marinating in oil... oh! Ratatouille. Well, obviously.

For dessert, a gorgeous, perfect apple pie, made in penance for the one that I totally screwed up at my parents' house a few weekends ago. I got it right this time, starting with the Pillsbury pie crust fresh from my grocer's freezer. (I hate to admit it, but I think pie dough is one of those things that really isn't better homemade. Or at least not in my home.)

I'd intended to make Four and Twenty Blackbirds' amazing Salted Caramel Apple Pie, but when I picked up the sugar bowl to start making caramel, I realized that I was very low on sugar - and didn't want to risk the last scant cup of sugar in my house in a potentially dicey caramel-making endeavor. But I'd already sliced the apples - on a mandolin, no less - and time was running out. So I went where I always go when I need a recipe that I'm sure will be absolutely perfect: Smitten Kitchen. I used Deb's Apple Pie recipe with only a few slight changes - I added a teaspoon of vanilla and an extra tablespoon of flour and substituted a full teaspoon of fleur de sel for the quarter teaspoon of regular salt. (I also used a different kind of apple, though I've now forgotten which kind. I'm kicking myself, for real.)

This was the first time I'd ever actually followed a recipe for apple pie, and boy, was it worth it. Look at this thing!

Look at it! All browned and sugary and flaky and delicious... and look at the inside, too! LOOK!

Oh man, perfectly tender, compact layers of apple filling and thickened juices just gooey enough, scented with just enough cinnamon and vanilla... this is quite possibly the best apple pie I have ever made. I cannot stop eating it. Honestly, if there's a better apple pie in the world, I don't want to know about it. Oh, and it makes your house smell kind of amazing while it's baking, too. So... you should definitely make one. Today.

And one final dish: My lovely and talented friend Emily and I have recently announced our newest culinary venture - the Whiskey & Salt Supper Club! If my ideas are intriguing to you and you wish to subscribe to my newsletter... or if you just want to eat some delicious food, with a menu prepared and executed by Emily and I, drink some fabulous cocktails and meet some fun folks around the dinner table, head over to whiskeyandsalt.com and sign up for our email list! We'll keep you posted on how you can attend our first event, currently scheduled for December 3rd.

Ratatouille
the way I've always made it - three to four servings

one small-to-medium eggplant
one medium-to-large zucchini
one bell pepper (I generally use red, but obviously substituted purple here)
(optional - three oven-dried plum tomato halves)
one clove of garlic
one 14 oz can of crushed tomatoes
olive oil
herbes de provence, either a commercial mixture or a homemade one including rosemary, thyme, marjoram, oregano and fennel seed

Cut eggplant and zucchini into medium dice. Cut bell pepper into short, thin strips. Mince garlic. Heat a generous amount of olive oil (three to four tablespoons) in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat and saute eggplant four to five minutes, until golden and tender. Remove eggplant to a bowl and add zucchini, bell pepper and garlic to the remaining oil in the pan. (Add more olive oil if necessary.) Sprinkle lavishly with herbes de provence and cook until zucchini is tender. Add eggplant back to the pot, along with crushed tomato (and dried tomato, if using). Reduce heat to a simmer, add salt and pepper and taste for seasoning, adjusting if necessary. Cover and simmer for an hour or more, stirring occasionally and adding a small amount of water if the stew becomes too thick.

2011-10-03T19:16:00.009-04:00

My gentleman friend and I went upstate this weekend to visit my family - including my Uncle Richard, who was in town for the weekend. Spending time with my folks is always fun, but this time, I had an ulterior motive - I wanted to get some apple picking done!

My plans were almost foiled, however, when we woke up on Saturday morning to a steady drizzle and an even more depressing forecast - rain, rain, rain! Luckily, us farm folk (and the one Brooklyn boy among us) are made of hearty stock... so we put on some sneakers and headed out to the orchard.

At Stone Ridge Orchards, the trees were bursting with fruit and the place was practically deserted. (Thanks, rain!) Ed and I picked a full bushel, pausing every now and then to munch on a crisp, sweet Empire apple, and then we headed back into Kingston for groceries - and hot apple cider doughnuts, fresh out of the fryer and thickly coated in cinnamon sugar - at Adam's.

Once home, the whole family pitched in to turn our bounty of apples into delicious treats - a thick, cinnamon-laden applesauce; an even thicker and richer slow-cooker apple butter; and an apple pie with a sadly tough and flavorless crust. (Cook's Illustrated, how could you fail me so?! Vodka pie dough sounded like such a brilliant idea, but wound up just being a waste of my mom's fancy vodka.)

But at least the first two projects turned out flawlessly! I am really loving this applesauce, which Ed and I ate for dinner tonight on top of potato pancakes (made with CSA potaters!) with a big dollop of sour cream. The apple butter is also super duper good, and crazy easy to make. You just peel and core about 20 - 25 apples and put them in a slow cooker with about two cups of sugar and any spices you're into (my mom added cinnamon, but I like my apple butter sans additional spice). Put the slow cooker on high for about an hour to break everything down, then turn it down to low and ride it out, stirring every now and then. Proper apple-butter-ization happens somewhere between the 12th and 24th hour. (If yours is particularly watery after around the 8th hour, you can balance the lid half-on, half-off the crock to allow some moisture to evaporate.)

Not all of the apples went into the sauce and butter though - I knew I wanted to bring some home for caramel apples! I'd never successfully made caramel before, though, and I knew it would be a tall order. And a tall order it was, indeed. At first, my caramel looked and smelled delicious, but wound up setting way too thick and hard. (Uh, that's what she said?) It was tooth cracking hard. Almost Werther's caramel candy hard. My apples were ruined! My beautiful apples!

Determined to make it work, I peeled the too-hard caramel coating off the dipped apples and melted it down in the microwave with a little more heavy cream. With a lot of patience and a lot of stirring, I wound up with this:

A slightly-too-sticky and loose but beautifully flavored caramel clinging to a gorgeous, fresh apple. In case you're curious, I used this caramel apple recipe from Martha Stewart Weddings. I'm not really sure exactly where I went wrong, but I suspect that the fault lies with my candy thermometer - I think it tends to read cooler than the actual mixture is. (Boring side note: when I was boiling sugar for the French buttercream in the last entry, my sugar was actually reaching the hard crack stage when the thermometer said it was in the soft ball stage. Clearly, I need a new candy thermometer.)

Finally, a kiss goodbye to tomato season. Red and yellow plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt, pepper and thyme:

And roasted at 400 degrees for 45 minutes:

I haven't figured out what to do with these yet, but I have a feeling they go pretty well with just about everything.

2011-09-24T20:49:00.005-04:00

Fall is here! (Well, more or less.)

I am so ready to say goodbye to subway station saunas, sidewalks that feel like rotisseries and sweaty bangs plastered to my forehead - and say hello to piles of crisp apples at the greenmarket, hot spiced cider with bourbon and finally getting to wear my favorite cozy gray sweater. Oh, and soup!

Like this rich, spicy corn and crab bisque, which made quick work of a ton of CSA ingredients. A bunch of onions, five ears of corn, two banana peppers, one large yellow pepper and two big cloves of garlic went into the bubbling pot of soup - and if I wasn't living with a confirmed cilantro-hater, I might have put some of our cilantro in, too.

The bisque is seriously awesome - with two cups of cream and another two of whole milk, it's definitely not health food, but it is warm and spicy and lovely - exactly what you want to come home to after a cool, rainy day. I made a few changes to the recipe for convenience - substituting chicken stock for fish stock and leaving out the crab boil and Worcestershire sauce. I also added sliced grape tomato for garnish, because while this soup tastes great, it is decidedly un-photogenic and I hoped that a garnish might distract from that. (Did it work?!)

This next photo should be a little easier on the eyes:

Hello, gorgeous! That right there is a white chocolate and raspberry cake I made for a colleague's fortieth-work-anniversary party. As usual, I was besieged by one problem after another while baking this cake - I realized (too late) the recipe I had called for three eight-inch cake pans, while I only had two nine-inch ones; one cake baked up severely lopsided; the top layer of cake basically turned into crumbs when I tried to place in on top of the buttercream-and-jam-filled layers. In the end, though, it tasted brilliant and wound up looking pretty beautiful. The French buttercream frosting was flavored with framboise (for the layers) and melted white chocolate (for the outer frosting) and layered with raspberry jam from the greenmarket. Um... yes, please.

I only rarely have the time, patience or occasion for such elaborate baking, though - which is why I'm glad for recipes like this plum crostada.

It's so easy, especially with a pre-made pie crust. (I dig Trader Joe's, since it comes in a nice flat round instead of pre-tucked into a pie plate.) Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Take about a pound of ripe plums - these are Italian prune plums - and slice them into quarters. Toss with 1/4 c. sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla and a light sprinkle of cinnamon. Lay your pie crust out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and heap the plums into the middle, leaving a two inch border of crust. Fold your crust upwards over the plums, pleating as necessary, then sprinkle crust and plums with sugar and pop your crostada into the oven. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until crust is golden brown and fruit looks cooked. Serve warm or cool, by itself or with some softly whipped cream.

Antipasto Salad

2011-09-07T20:28:00.005-04:00

"What's for dinner tonight?" Ed asked this morning.

"Well, we've got that eggplant and all of those tomatoes to use," I said, "and that jar of artichokes and some leftover salami, so I thought I'd make an antipasto salad."

"JUST a SALAD?" he asked incredulously. "No meat?!"

"I said salami!" I protested. Ed looked dubious, nevertheless.

But when he saw tonight's salad piled up on his plate, he was like, "Oh. Actually that looks kind of great."

And it really was kind of great - crispy fried eggplant, soft mild mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers, chunks of salami, artichoke hearts and super ripe tomatoes, drenched in balsamic vinegar, salt and freshly ground pepper. I wanted one last awesome salad-for-dinner before the fall arrives for real, in all of its slow-cooker stews and warm applesauce glory - and with eggplant, peppers and tomato, this salad is an awesome way to put September produce to work.

2011-09-01T21:03:00.008-04:00

The last few weeks haven't been the best in my kitchen; a week of vacation was followed by a week of post-vacation stress and a giant hurricane. Of course, in preparation for said hurricane, I cranked up the temperature in my fridge and freezer in the hopes that if we lost power, things would stay cool for longer. I didn't anticipate the fact that this would freeze everything in my refrigerator, turning a pound of crisp, gorgeous green beans and juicy red peppers into limp, icy garbage. Sad trombone!

I do have some odds and ends to show you, though.

First up... the inaugural edition of Kathryn Brings Lunch to Work!

This is an heirloom tomato salad with mozzarella, a few slices of salami and some quick pickled onions, which are so great on salad. (Or hot dogs. Or anything, really.) To quick pickle onions, I use David Lebovitz's recipe as a guide and whatever seasonings I have on hand. This time I added bay leaf, peppercorns and some red pepper flakes. Yum!

Next up on the decks we have a carrot soup with greek yogurt and bacon-sea salt croutons from Bien Cuit.

I didn't really follow a recipe for this, which ultimately was a mistake. The soup came out thin and not very flavorful. I'd boiled a bunch of carrots in what was probably too much chicken broth with half an onion and a few cloves of garlic, then pureed it and swirled in greek yogurt. Not such a success. Next time, I'll follow an actual recipe, and I'll probably add a stronger flavor like ginger to give the soup some punch. The carrot-crouton combination, though, is a keeper. (And man, are those croutons good!)

Hurricane preparation kit, Cooking Inside the Box style. Netflix, bottled water... and a delicious swiss chard and wheatberry salad. I've been obsessed with wheatberries lately - they're one of the tastiest whole grains out there, chewy and nutty and great warm or cold - and I thought this salad would be hearty enough to stand up to a few hours sans refrigeration. Even though our power never went out, it was still a good hearty dinner for a rainy evening.

For this particular salad, I cooked down a bunch of swiss chard with a bit of onion and some olive oil, then added in two cups of cooked wheatberries, a handful of toasted pine nuts, nearly a cup of golden raisins, more olive oil, balsamic and salt and pepper. I also made another wheatberry salad last week with sauteed baby zucchini, walnuts, mint and goat cheese. Both salads were definitely keepers!

For dinner tonight, I made this corn spoonbread with my four (!!!) ears of CSA corn. I followed this recipe from Real Simple, which turned out good, but not exactly what I'd expected. I think I was looking for something a little bit sweeter - I might add a little bit of sugar next time, and leave out the thyme. It was pretty good anyway, especially alongside roasted chicken with homemade gravy and an easy salad of grape tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.

Finally, my most successful chocolate cake to date:

Two of my closest friends, B. of Sparrows & Spatulas and her husband Matt, are moving across the country, so a few of our friends decided to throw them a going away party. We did it potluck-style, all the better to show off the culinary stylings of some of our very, very talented friends. (Homemade spanakopita? Corn and basil salad? The best jerk chicken I've ever had outside of Peppa's? Yes please!) My contribution was this cake - devil's food cake soaked with salted caramel, layered with whipped chocolate ganache and frosted with a classic French buttercream.

Baking doesn't come naturally to me, but I really love my sweets, and I'd like to get to a point in my life where I make most of my own sugary treats. (Face it, as much as I love to cook, I'm less inclined to whip up a batch of cupcakes on a Wednesday night than I am to just run to the bodega for some Hostess ones.) The dangerous part of learning how to make, of course, is having the delicious results of one's lessons sitting around in one's refrigerator, tempting one out of bed in the middle of the night for just-one-more-sliver. So a party was a perfect excuse to drag out the massive Baking by James Peterson and make something rich, chocolatey and lovely. (NB to anyone using this cookbook: the professional buttercream recipe calls for 1 1/4 lbs. of butter, then tells you that this amounts to 1 1/2 cups of butter. That is not true. The recipe requires 1 1/4 pounds of butter, though if you - like me - err on the side of less butter and only add 1 1/2 cups, your frosting will be runny but fine.)

So we all gathered on our colleague's beautiful penthouse terrace, and we ate each other's food and we had a little wine, and we watched the children play and we watched the setting sun, and we said goodbye to our amazing, wonderful friends. Of course, it isn't really goodbye - it's really more like, in the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, "smell ya later." We know they'll be back to visit! How do I know?

Because, come on. No one can resist another slice of this cake!

A Pie for Mikey

2011-08-12T19:33:00.009-04:00

This week, my fellow food blogger Jennifer Perillo's beloved husband, Mikey, died of a sudden heart attack. Word of her tragedy quickly spread throughout the food-blogosphere as her friends and fellow bloggers rushed to try to help, to sign up for a homemade food delivery rotation, to ask what they could do to help. Jennie answered that question with this blog post, saying, "For those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie this Friday and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there's no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on."

I don't know Jennifer or her family, but - like hundreds of other people who have heard her story in the last few days - I wanted to join in the chorus of people making peanut butter pies for Mikey. Jennie's request reminds me of the Raymond Carver story, A Small Good Thing. That story has always been a sure-fire tear-jerker for me: I cry not just for the devastated, angry parents of a child who has passed away, but also for the lonely, furious baker - childless, never married, apparently without friends or loved ones of his own. He bakes the cakes for other people's celebrations - the children's birthdays he will never celebrate, the anniversaries and graduations and weddings. And though I have always known how incredibly surrounded by love and wonderful friends and family I have always been... in my loneliest and most self-pitying moments, I have felt like I was the baker. That I was somehow destined to bake the wedding cakes for other people, but never for myself.

In the end of Raymond Carver's story, they come together - the lonely baker, the grieving parents - and in a crescendo of love and forgiveness, the baker serves the couple their first meal since the death of their son. He feeds them hot sweet rolls and coffee, and he says to them, "You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this."

How very true that is. And so I make this pie in hopes that it will be a small, good thing for Jennifer and her daughters. I hope that she will find comfort in its making, and in its sharing, and in the hundreds of bloggers who are coming together today to make a peanut butter pie for Mikey.

And I will share it with my Steady Eddie, a man who not only loves a good peanut butter dessert, but has managed to transform a lonely baker into a woman who believes in love with every bit of her cynical little heart.

Edited to add: Bloggers Without Borders has established #afundforJennie - a place where you can make contributions directly to Jennie Perillo, if you wish to do so. Go to http://glutenfreegirl.com/a-fund-for-jennie/ for more information and to make a donation.

Three summer salads

2011-08-04T19:54:00.000-04:00

My appetite, like most people's, is dictated by the seasons. In the winter, I crave thick, warming stews, big chunks of meat and bowls of creamy soup. In the summer, though, I'm dreaming of salads. These three salads are all relatively quick and simple, and they make use of the season's most gorgeous produce.

Every year, I look forward to corn and tomato salad. When corn comes into season, it's every bit as juicy and sweet as a ripe tomato, and when you combine them with each other... spectacular! It's like everything that's good about August - backyard barbecues, swimming pools and fireflies at dusk... even if you're sitting in your apartment in the middle of the city. This salad can take a lot of creativity, so feel free to change it up. Use different herbs, subtract the bacon, add some cheese, throw some other veggies in... with a base this good, it's pretty hard to mess it up.

Corn and Tomato Salad
serves two

2 ears of corn on the cob, shucked
one large tomato (or two or three smaller ones)
two or three slices of bacon (I like three, cause, you know... baaacon)
fresh oregano
fresh basil
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper

Fry bacon strips until crispy. While the bacon is cookin', bring a large pot of water to a boil and boil corn until it's done. (Four or five minutes.) Remove corn and let it cool off. While you're waiting for the corn to cool off, chop the tomato into small chunks and chiffonade the herbs. Then go ahead and cut the kernels of corn off the cob. Whisk up a quick vinaigrette in a large bowl; I go a little heavy on the vinegar for this salad, so probably a 2:1 ratio of balsamic to olive oil. Mix everything together, season with salt and pepper and voila. You made corn and tomato salad!

I had some CSA beets to use last week and I wanted to make them into a salad slightly more interesting than the classic beet-and-goat-cheese one. Using my awesome Googling powers, I came across a bunch of recipes for beet and avocado salads. Sounds good, I thought, and scurried to the grocery store to pick up an avocado. I started slicing things up for the salad on my butcher block right next to the bowl of nectarines I'd just picked up at the farmer's market, and inspiration struck. Thus, I give you:

Avocado, Beet and Nectarine Salad
serves two

two or three large beets, or an equivalent amount of smaller ones, roasted
one avocado
two nectarines
lettuce or salad greens
1 T balsamic vinegar
1 T olive oil
1 t honey
salt

First, roast those beets in a 375-degree oven for about an hour. Then, in a medium sized bowl, combine balsamic, olive oil and honey and whisk until combined. Mix the salad greens with the balsamic vinaigrette and salt in the bowl, then distribute them to your plates. Top with sliced beets, nectarines and half an avocado. Dinner is done. This could also use some goat cheese, if that's how you roll.

And finally, the kind of salad that I always see in those fancy pants farm-to-table sorts of Brooklyn restaurants and always want to order despite knowing I could make it myself at home for like, five dollars. Sorry, Franny's, I love you dearly but... tonight I make my own small plates!

Golden Beet and Green Bean Salad
hazelnut, whipped ricotta, fried zucchini blossom
serves two

two or three large golden beets
half a pound of green beans, trimmed and cut into 2" lengths
ricotta cheese
toasted hazelnuts (you can toast them in the microwave by zapping a handful on high for a minute at a time until them smell awesome, usually less than 2 minutes total)
balsamic vinaigrette, as above
zucchini blossoms
flour
seltzer
oil for frying (vegetable oil works best, though olive oil will do... just be careful, because it gets smoky)

Roast the beets wrapped in foil at 375 degrees for about an hour. When they're done, it's time to get going - cut the beets up into chunks, then steam the green beans for five minutes or so. Mix the green beans and the beet chunks with the vinaigrette, then distribute to their respective plates. Top with a scoop of ricotta and some hazelnuts, which you should probably chop up pretty well. To fry the zucchini blossoms: heat about 1/2" of oil in a frying pan over medium to medium high heat. Then - combine about 1 c. of flour with a roughly equal amount of seltzer and mix well. You want the batter to be the consistency of pancake syrup - thick but definitely liquid. Dip the blossoms in the batter, coating well, then drop into the hot oil and fry those puppies til they're done. Drain them on a paper towel and salt them well, then arrange them on the plate with the salad. Gorgeous! Take that, $14 appetizer!

Tonight's dinner: brought to you by puff pastry

2011-07-30T19:15:00.000-04:00

With each CSA vegetable we receive, there's always a certain point where you've gotten so much of it, you feel like it's just coming out of your ears and you have no idea what to do with it anymore. That's how I felt about summer squash - until I found this recipe for a summer squash tart on a puff pastry base. Sold! I changed it up a little bit, though - adding hazelnuts and thyme, subtracting feta cheese - so I'll post my adapted recipe below. It ended up being really good - though, of course, it's pretty hard for anything on top of buttery, flaky puff pastry to be actually bad.

We ate this for dinner tonight along with a chilled yogurt and cucumber soup with shrimp from Ina Garten via Sparrows and Spatulas. Ed thought it tasted like tzatziki sauce; I thought it was more like something I'd expect to find at an IKEA summer smorgasbord. We both liked it a lot, though - it's exactly the kind of cool, refreshing supper you want to have in the sweltering evenings of July and August.

And then, dessert. I'd bought a bunch of plums at the market this morning, intending to bake them into a moist, rich almond cake. But once I got home and started looking around for recipes, I couldn't seem to find one that I was really excited about. Plum and almond tarts, on the other hand...

These couldn't be easier to make, and they taste almost as good as any fancy bakery tart I've ever had. The plums are tart and juicy, the frangipane rich and sweet and the pastry crisp and tender. A little sprinkling of powdered sugar provides the literal icing on the cake. These will be perfect for breakfast in the morning - if they survive the night, that is.

Summer Squash Tart
serves four hungry people or six people of normal appetite

1 sheet of frozen puff pastry, thawed
1 c. ricotta cheese
1 egg
1 small bunch of parsley
1 medium onion, sliced
2 or 3 medium sized zucchini or summer squash (I used a mix of yellow zucchini and squash)
olive oil
1 small bunch of thyme
1/4 c. hazelnuts, toasted

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together the ricotta, egg and parsley. Add salt (generously) and pepper to taste; set aside. Thinly slice the onion and cook with a splash of olive oil over medium high heat until caramelized - about eight to ten minutes. Slice squash into thin rounds. (I used the largest setting on my mandoline; slices should be less than 1/4" thick.)

Lay the puff pastry on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat and cover with ricotta mixture, leaving a 1/2" border for a crust. Add sliced squash and make a pretty pattern. Now step back and admire your work for a moment. Aww, that looks lovely! Okay, keep moving - pour a bit of olive oil into a bowl and brush it over the top of the tart until each slice of squash is just glistening. Top with stripped thyme leaves and pop it into the oven until the squash is tender and the edges of the pastry are golden-brown, about 20 minutes. Remove from oven and top with toasted hazelnuts. Let cool slightly before serving.

The first BLT of summer...

2011-07-23T16:56:00.000-04:00

Two slices of lightly toasted Bread Alone peasant bread. A handful of lettuce leaves from the CSA. Three slices of salty bacon, cooked crisp. A lavish swipe of mayo. And finally, the star of the show, one ugly, gnarled, oddly colored heirloom tomato, sliced thin and sprinkled with salt.

Assemble into a sandwich, cut diagonally, take a bite and go to sandwich heaven.

Repeat daily.

Cherry bomb!

2011-07-19T22:38:00.000-04:00

It was cherry season, and then it wasn't anymore.

Of course, instead of living in the now of the farmer's market, I spent the first few weeks of cherry season mourning the end of strawberry season and dwelling on all of the pints of strawberry jam I didn't get to can, and strawberry cakes I didn't get to bake, and so on and so forth until last week when I made those two awesome cherry jams. And then I was like, "wait a minute.... I love cherries!"

I spent the week plotting out the bazillions of things I would do with the tons and tons of cherries I would buy at this week's market: cherry pie, cherry ice cream, chocolate cherry preserves... and more! I would frolic in fields full of cherry trees and swim in rivers of pure red cherry juice! It would be cherry flavored heaven! So Saturday morning, I grabbed my largest bag, a ridiculous sum of money and skipped over to the farmer's market to find.....

Blueberries.

Crap.

After inquiring at all of the regular stands, I learned that cherry season was over. Finito. No mas. Oh, well, off to Whole Foods, then, where at least the sour cherries they sell are from Red Jacket Orchards - though they are crazy expensive, which swiftly squashed my dreams of cherry-flavored grandeur. Don't worry, though - I picked up enough of them for a scaled down version of Cherrypalooza 2011, starting with sour cherry sorbet!

This might be the first time that my ice cream maker actually made a frozen dessert that I would happily share with my friends. (Previous attempts have been too shamefully crappy to even discuss in public.) The sorbet was great, though. I used the proportions from Thomas Keller's Bouchon, a beautiful coffee-table cookbook full of perfectly executed bistro classics. Two pounds of fruit, one and a quarter cups of sugar and two tablespoons of lime juice, whirled in the blender, chilled and then frozen in the ice cream maker. So simple and so good. The resulting sorbet is a vibrant magenta color, fairly well-balanced if a touch too sweet, and lusciously textured. If I do this over, I think I'd reduce the sugar to a cup - though I have more of a sweet tooth than most, I crave tart more than sugary in the dog days of summer.

My next project was maraschino cherries. Though I completely adore the awful, neon-red, corn-syrup soaked maraschino cherries one finds in jars, on sundaes and at the bottom of whiskey sours, I can reluctantly agree that red dye is probably not the best thing for me to be putting into my body. (And certainly not as frequently as whiskey sours are consumed in the Cooking Inside the Box household!) So I decided to make my own, with this recipe from the New York Times.

I settled down in front of a Bridezillas marathon (heaven!) with my cherry pitter and got to work. Once I had a pound or so of pitted sour cherries collected in a half-gallon mason jar, I boiled up a cup of Luxardo maraschino liqueur and poured it over the cherries. Three days later, I had perfect cherries for a perfect cocktail.

I'd seen other recipes that called for sugar syrup, almond extract or other types of alcohol - amaretto or brandy or cherry heering - but decided to start with the classic preparation. I totally dig it! The cherries are sweet and boozy, though not cloying at all. I see a lot of extra-delicious whiskey sours in my future.

I also started a cherry bounce, following this recipe from the Runaway Spoon. Bourbon, sugar and sweet cherries - I can't wait to try it! Sadly, though, I've got to wait til Thanksgiving or so - cherry bounce apparently takes a long time to properly infuse. It'll be so cool, though, to open this stuff up in November and be able to taste the summer all over again. And with bourbon, too!

Finally, the final few sweet cherries went into a fruit crisp with those blueberries I picked up this weekend. (Despite my disappointment about the cherries, I still managed to stock up on the berry du jour.) It's deeply purple, soft and sweet, warm and comforting. I try to temper the fruity part of fruit crisp with lemon juice and only a small sprinking of sugar but I really go to town with the crispy topping: gobs of butter, showers of sugar and oats and cinnamon. This stuff is good warm out of the oven but even better the next morning on unsweetened Greek yogurt. Crisp for breakfast? Why not? It's, uh... it's local, right? So it must be healthy!

That's right. Support your local farmer - eat dessert for breakfast.

2011-07-14T18:36:00.000-04:00

Last week's CSA bounty included a single zucchini, which I'd intended to make into Marcella Hazan's zucchini and bacon sauce for pasta. But while I was researching upstate New York restaurant menus - and dreaming of opening my own little farm to table cafe somewhere along the Hudson River - I came across a grilled zucchini, goat cheese and balsamic vinegar crostini that sounded just fantastic. It was perfect timing, too, since I'd just picked up a small bottle of really good balsamic from an Italian imports store in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was itching to try it out.

After a long day of brunching, Smorgasburg-ing and walking around Williamsburg with Emily, I came home with just enough energy left to pan fry the zucchini, smear a bit of goat cheese on a baguette and drizzle some balsamic on top of everything. Finito!

Speaking of Emily, check out this duo of cherry jams that I made! The first, balsamic cherry preserves, is a recipe that I first saw on Emily's blog. She is a jam-maker and canner extraordinaire, and as soon as I saw this, I was like, "Droooool... I have to make this!" And oh, man, am I glad I did! This jam comes out fabulous - deeply flavored and sweet with a bit of a mellow balsamic tang. And as good as it is on jam, I think this would be amazing as a sandwich spread with some savory ingredients - duck breast, maybe, or smoked turkey or a salty, smoky piece of ham.

The brighter jam on the bottom is made with the sour cherries that I'd picked up at the Smorgasburg farmer's market. (Along with this awesome cherry pitter from the Brooklyn Kitchen, which I really couldn't recommend more. It makes the tedious chore of pitting cherries into something approximating fun. Or at the very least, not un-fun.) I also got a little bit cocky and decided to follow David Lebovitz's no-recipe recipe for cherry jam. It worked out perfectly, right down to the tell-tale hot jam on a frozen plate nudge-and-wrinkle to indicate that the jelly had jelled. It is crazy good jam, too, packed full of that bright, tart cherry flavor you get in a really good country diner's cherry pie. (In fact, it was so great that I think I might just make myself a cherry pie this weekend, while cherries are still in the market!)

Finally, check it out: I managed to use my kohlrabi this time! AND my garlic scapes! I feel like I should get some kind of award or something. Kohlrabi are tough, man. Last year, at one of the early CSA pickups, Ed looked at one of those bright purple alien spaceship-looking vegetables and said, "What the hell do you do with this?"

"Mostly I throw them out, " Matt replied. I sheepishly nodded my head in agreement.

But not this time! I'd read a couple of recipes for P.F. Chang-style "Asian" chicken wraps before making my own, and a bunch of those recipes called for water chestnuts. I like the crunch and mild flavor of water chestnuts, but I didn't really want to go buy a whole can of them just to get a half cup of so to mix with the chicken. That's when it hit me - kohlrabi! It has the texture of a water chestnut with a slightly stronger - though still not dominating - flavor... it would be the perfect substitute! And sure enough, it was.

None of the recipes I'd read really called to me, so I kind of improvised my own - I sauteed the kohlrabi and a sliced garlic scape with a bit of oil, then added a pound of ground chicken and broke it up with a wooden spoon as it cooked. After the chicken was fully cooked, I added half a cup of so of a sauce that was basically equal parts rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil and sriracha with a ton of fresh grated ginger and black pepper. I let the chicken mixture bubble for another few moments, then took it off the heat and served it with romaine lettuce leaves, a little more sauce for dipping and a quick-pickled cucumber salad - made with a CSA cucumber, no less! - with rice wine vinegar, sugar, salt and water.

Yum! This was spicy and refreshing at the same time, full of ginger and sweet, cool cucumber. It does take a bit of preparation time and some toiling over a hot stove time, too, but it's still an awesome summer weeknight dinner.

2011-06-27T23:43:00.000-04:00

Readers, I am about to tell you a very long story with a lot of digressions. Stay with me, though, because this is what you get at the end:

Our story begins with a bunch of arugula from this week's CSA pickup. Normally, salad greens like arugula are sort of a relief for me - I don't have to do anything more creative than whisk up a vinaigrette and may throw some cheese or some nuts or some other stuff on top. Boom! Dinner is served. But there's something about arugula that throws me off. I love the slightly bitter taste, but the texture... not so much. Arugula pesto makes quick work of that problem, though - once the slippery leaves are whirled around in a food processor with walnuts and pecorino cheese and a tiny bit of raw garlic and lots and lots of olive oil, they're completely transformed.

Now what to do with this pesto?

I had picked up some cheese tortellini after work on Friday, knowing that I was heading upstate to go strawberry picking on Sunday with my better half Ed, Emily of Nomnivorous and her friend Autumn. We'd all talked about packing picnic food and I thought a cold tortellini salad would be an easy way to make something sort of compact and filling and a little more interesting than a sandwich. I also thought it would be something that would be relatively easy to eat, should we find ourselves running late, needing to haul ass back to Brooklyn to get the Zipcar back on time and picnicking in a Honda Civic. (Which is, of course, exactly what happened. And yes, in case you were wondering, tortellini is very easy to eat while you're going 85 on the Thruway, especially when your partner shoves forkfuls of it into your mouth from the passenger seat.)

So anyway, we set off on this delightful fool's errand for the love of cheap strawberries. But not just strawberries, of course - we spent far more in expenses to get to our $2.75/lb strawberries than we saved, in the end. But oh, what we gained - a lovely morning drive up through the Catskill mountains, an hour and some change in the fields, getting our hands all stained with pink strawberry juice, straightening up to gaze at the ridiculously idyllic meadows and barn with a silo and pond with two geese... and then three heart-pounding, clock watching hours stuck in Sunday afternoon traffic back to New York, during which I made up all kinds of new swear words and used old ones in new ways. Sure, we could have gone to the farmer's market, picked up a few quarts of strawberries and said to the farmer, "Hey, do you mind if I pay you double for these guys?" But it wouldn't have been the same. It wouldn't have been An Experience.

You know what else is An Experience? Making strawberry jam. Don't get me wrong, I totally love the process and the result and I'm sure I'll be doing this once a year for as long as my pancreas holds out, but let me tell you. It is some hard work. I had originally intended to make a whole ton of jam and share with all of my friends and family, but after spending three hours tonight on a batch of jam that yielded three half-pint jars? Yeah, hell no. This shit is not leaving my kitchen. I didn't work this hard studying for the bar exam.

Anyway, about that pie. One thing that you may or may not know about me is that I am very into pie. I know that everyone is now into pie, and pie is the new cupcakes and all of that, but seriously, you can totally ask my mom, I have always been very into pie. Another thing that I'm really into is vintage cookbooks. I try to steal my mom's ancient seventies-era Betty Crocker cookbook every time I'm at her house, but she's learned and now she searches my luggage for purloined cookbooks on my way out. When Ed and I were in New Orleans, we stumbled across this amazing store called The Kitchen Witch or something like that, and it was full of old cookbooks and Junior League recipe binders and stuff like that, and everything was dirt cheap and I absolutely could not believe my good fortune. But I didn't want to carry stuff around so we left without buying anything and all week I was like "WE HAVE TO GO BACK THERE" but we never made it, so now we just have to go back to New Orleans. Which shouldn't be a problem because, hello, New Orleans.

Wow, I digress and we're not even halfway to the pie yet. So Jessica brought me this raspberry cream pie from Briermere Farms on Long Island the other day and it was so good, I can't even describe it. And I want to recreate it SO BAD, because Riverhead is so far away and as it turns out, Zipcars just give me mild anxiety attacks about being charged for late returns, so the likelihood of me getting another pie any time soon is very, very low. So... I Googled. And picked the recipe for berry cream pie which sounded the most like the Briermere Farms pie, though - spoiler alert! - in the end it turned out to not be much like it at all.

Here is where our story all comes together - this recipe for Strawberry Cream Pie is actually from a 1960's era Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. I found the recipe on The Cooking Photographer's blog, and the writer mentions that by the seventies, BH&G had revamped their cookbooks to include easier, quicker recipes for the working woman of that era. I can see why - after a long day at work, shoving pastry cream through a sieve and boiling down strawberries and cornstarch into a glaze - not to even mention the cutting and arranging of the strawberry petals - made me want to go back in time and give Betty Friedan a giant hug. But there's also something kind of cool about making something so labor intensive and retro and ultimately very pretty. I could totally see myself in 1959, putting on a frilly apron and heels and meeting my man at the door with this pie and a cold martini.

In 2011, though, I think I'd better just do the dishes before he gets home.

Strawberry Cupcakes!

2011-06-23T20:50:00.000-04:00

I came across this recipe for Ponchatoula Strawberry Cupcakes on Serious Eats a few years ago... right about the same time I started getting really into local, seasonal cooking. Lucky for me, though, I grew up with an appreciation for the joys of local strawberries - my mom and grandma would never let a June go by without a trip to a pick-your-own strawberry patch and a weekend afternoon dedicated to putting up homemade strawberry jam. And let me tell you, once you go "real strawberries," you never go back to those pale berry imitations from the supermarket.

So I decided to spread the strawberry gospel by baking a batch of these strawberry cupcakes for my coworkers. Of course, with their tender, airy cake and luscious bright pink frosting, they were a real hit! So much so that every time the spring rolls around, my coworkers start inquiring about when they can expect another batch of little pink sugar bombs.

This week, the lucky ducks of cluster 2 - and anyone else fast enough to grab one while the grabbin' was good - got a sweet little taste of sugary summer goodness. My advice? Make this recipe now! Strawberry season is quickly drawing to a close, and when it's done... it's nothing but styrofoam from the supermarket until next May.

2011-06-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

On a warm and sunny day last week, two zucchini sat side by side in my refrigerator complaining about me, their neglectful owner.

"What is wrong with this lady?" one zucchini said to the other one. "What, she can't think of a single thing she wants to do with us?"

"And she calls herself a food blogger," the other zucchini said, shaking his head.

Properly ashamed, I consulted the internet for advice. No, not advice on how to shut the zucchini up - though I probably should have looked into that - but advice on how to make a delicious pasta and zucchini dish. I knew I wanted something without tomato sauce, something more exciting than just "sauteed zucchini with olive oil on pasta," but also something I could make without running to the store. I really hate running to the store.

Mark Bittman to the rescue! This recipe from the New York Times' Diner's Journal was quick, easy and super duper delicious. It really couldn't be easier - while the spaghetti boils and the sliced zucchini fries up in a drizzle of olive oil, you whisk together two eggs and half a cup of grated cheese until it forms a thick, polenta-resembling paste. (Note: the paper of record recommends Parmigiano-Reggiano, but I used pecorino because it reminds me of spring.) Then when the pasta is done, you drain it, return it to the pan and add the egg-and-cheese mixture, stirring with vigor and purpose, until it turns into this luscious, creamy sauce that clings to every strand of pasta. Oh, and then you add an absolute ton of fresh pepper. And the cooked zucchini, of course.

Hello, gorgeous! If this doesn't shut those mean zucchini up, nothing will.

Check out these stuffed peppers, too. Ed made these!

It's a little early in the season for bell peppers, of course, so these bad boys are from the store... but those peas are from the farmer's market, which means that as soon as Ed pulled the peppers out of the oven, I pulled out my camera.

These were so good - warm and fresh, full of soft rice and savory ground beef and smothered in a sweet tomato sauce. What an awesome tease - now I can't wait til pepper season! Someone's gonna have to make these at least once a week in August.

2011-06-04T20:39:00.000-04:00

Tonight's dinner began with a surplus - a massive surplus of zucchini, that is. When I saw the green and golden squash at the farmer's market last week, I started craving the incredible zucchini carpaccio salad I'd made so many times last summer. A few moments with a mandoline, a sprinkle of olive oil, sea salt, pepper and basil, and voila! Raw perfection. But, as is my luck, when I carted all three pounds of zucchini home, I discovered that I had misplaced my mandoline... and was fresh out of olive oil to boot. Bummer!

So there the zucchini sat, gently aging in the refrigerator, until this morning. I knew I wanted to make some of my friend Batya's famous Zucchini-Basil Soup, but even that only takes two pounds of squash. What to do with the rest?

Zucchini bread, natch! I used this recipe with a few alterations: I substituted applesauce for vegetable oil - getting right with my life! - and used half a cup of brown sugar and half a cup of white instead of all white sugar. I really like the depth that brown sugar brings to baked goods, and I think it was a good call here.

And what's that spoonful of lovely crimson goop on the spoon? Why, strawberry-rhubarb jam, of course!

I made it last weekend after going slightly insane buying greenmarket strawberries and pounds upon pounds of rhubarb. The recipe and technique comes from the excellent Canning for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff, and basically involves cooking the two fruits with sugar until they release their juices, then boiling those juices with fresh lemon juice to concentrate and gel them. The resulting jam is a bit runny - probably due to my endemic lack of patience - but also bright, lemony, almost herbal... and never too sweet. It goes just as well on zucchini bread as it does on biscuits.

And speaking of biscuits...

Ed and I went up to spend a weekend with my parents last month, and my mom pulled out all the stops for dessert. She made her family-famous strawberry shortcake, which is exactly as dreamy and spectacular as it looks. Chunks of syrup-soaked jewel-colored strawberries meet clouds of freshly whipped local cream and cascade down the craggy peaks of shortbread. Ridiculous. So good.

Ed liked it, too - a lot! So I decided to re-create it at home for him. I called up my mom for the shortcake recipe, and our call went like this:

Mom: Now you have to promise not to tell anyone this recipe, okay? This is a family secret, passed down from generation to generation.
Kat: Okay! I promise.
Mom: Okay. You got a pen? Because this is kind of complicated.
Kat: I got a pen and paper right here!
Mom: Good. Okay... now you get a box of Bisquick.
Kat: One... box... of Bisquick...
Mom: And you turn it over.... and read the recipe on the back of the box for shortcakes.
Kat: Oh. Mom!
Mom: (giggles)

Anyway... aren't we supposed to be talking about zucchini?

And Batya's famous Zucchini-Basil soup? Which, believe me, was the best possible way to turn my gigantic pile of zucchini into something warm, delicious, filling and delightfully basil-flecked. I used chicken broth instead of veggie because that's what I had on hand, and I doubled the garlic because that's just how I roll. Oh, and I added a dollop of greek yogurt because why not?

As Batya might say: Looove it!

And though I'm out of clever segues - and some might argue that none of them were clever to begin with - I want to show you something.

Peas! Lots and lots of fresh peas!

Peas with tons of butter and a sprinkling of fleur de sel - hands down, one of the best things about June. Along with beach days, backyard barbecues with friends and cold beers in cans, shorts and sunglasses... and that strawberry shortcake. Oh man, is that stuff good.

2011-05-28T11:57:00.000-04:00

I knew I wanted to make a pizza when I saw the 99 cent lump of pizza dough at Trader Joe's the other day, but I also knew that I had that weekend's farmer's market haul chilling in the fridge, begging to be eaten. So instead of tomato sauce and mozzarella, I bought a carton of ricotta cheese and decided to make a pizza primavera!

Once home, though, none of my veggies seemed just right. Snap pea pizza? Radish pizza? Not quite what I was looking for. Asparagus pizza? Seems like the textures might be off... but wait a minute. What if I took one of those delicious shaved asparagus salads that the food-blogosphere has been going wild over and turned it into a pizza topping? Yes! Brilliant! What genius! I'm sure no one has ever thought of that before!

Oh. Except Smitten Kitchen. And Jim Lahey at Co. And I guess just about everybody.

Well, whatever. Genius or not, it was still delicious! I shaved the asparagus with a vegetable peeler and tossed the tangles with olive oil and lemon juice. The resulting asparagus salad went on top of the pizza dough, which was stretched and spread with ricotta cheese, and topped with salt and pepper.

Unfortunately, I was having some camera difficulties so I wasn't able to get a shot of the pizza after it was cooked - but isn't it pretty here? All fresh and green and lovely.

On the side, I made a pared down version of the spring cianfotta that I first made last May. Sugar snap peas, steamed ever so briefly and then tossed with thin slices of radish and a lemon-olive oil dressing.

Hello, early summer!

2011-05-27T20:40:00.000-04:00

You know how Kelly feels about shoes?

That's how I feel about strawberries. When we got to the greenmarket last weekend and I saw the first few blue paper cartons of strawberries for sale, I was like: "Oh. My. God. Strawberries."

The first few handfuls were eaten simply - sliced, in a bowl, with a fork. Real, local, in-season strawberries are hard to improve upon, of course. But I'd also been tempted by the rhubarb at the market, and I knew I wanted to make something warm and sweet with that classic combination of strawberries and rhubarb.

So I made this strawberry rhubarb crumble from Smitten Kitchen. It was really awesome - just sweet enough, though with plenty of buttery crumbles on top.

Served with a gigantic dollop of slowly melting whipped cream, this dessert deserves a song of its own.

Leek Love

2011-04-17T22:10:00.000-04:00

Ed and I have a lot in common - we both love strong cocktails, Eddie Murphy's stand-up routines, novelty junk food (we had simultaneous joy attacks upon discovering Hubig's snack pies in New Orleans) and watching Billy the Exterminator late at night on A&E... but our most convenient shared love at the farmer's market is the humble yet glorious leek.

Braised leeks are a crazy good accompaniment to a roasted chicken. They take about the same amount of time to cook - assuming you're roasting a smallish chicken - and their flavors are totally complimentary. They're also equally easy to make - right after you dress your chicken and pop it in the oven, you can slice your leeks in half lengthwise, wash them really well to get rid of all the sand and dirt between their layers, sear them in a mixture of melted butter and olive oil, then add a generous splash of white wine, a few cups of chicken broth and some thyme and pop them into a 400-degree oven for... you know, a while. An hour, maybe? Then plate them together and dig in!

Tender, yielding, mildly flavored braised leeks next to a juicy, salty roasted piece of chicken? That's love right there. Each piece brings out the best in it's partner - the sweetness of the leeks makes the chicken more savory, and the crunch of a well-roasted piece of chicken skin makes the soft layers of leek even more delicious and amazing.

Speaking of leeks - and love - ramps are back in season! Ramps, those tasty little wild leeks, are once again at the Greenmarket, their leafy green tops heralding the beginning of spring. Last year I made this ramp and poached egg spaghetti dish, which I made again this year for Ed and I on a lazy Saturday evening. (This time, I sprinkled the top of each dish with this super cool red Hawaiian sea salt that my friend Liz gave me. How cool does that look?)

As we sat side by side on the couch, twirling our spaghetti and letting the soft egg yolk coat each strand, Ed was like, "You know what would make this even better? Red pepper flakes."

Reader, I'll be damned if he wasn't right. A little something spicy is exactly what this bowl of luscious pasta needs - something to cut the richness and add a little bit of edge.

And that's love right there, too. A little bit of comfort, a little bit of fire, all in one cozy little bowl.

2011-03-25T11:59:00.001-04:00

Early spring always makes me so impatient. I wake up on a warm Saturday morning, throw on a light sweater and a pair of sunglasses and hike on over to the Greenmarket, expecting to see a huge bounty of ramps and greens and young garlic and teeny tiny baby peas, and maybe even a few strawberries? But when I get there, it quickly becomes obvious that even though today feels like May for us city-dwelling human beings, it's still winter in the vegetable world. Bummer!

But when you cook with the seasons, you learn to make do with what's available. The big pile of wintered-over onions for sale reminded me of this onion tart from Cooking Light magazine. It looked so good and so easy, I just couldn't resist!

White balance, why can I not master you?!

And it was good. I made a few substitutions - full fat swiss instead of light, and no feta cheese - just straight up, onion-soup-style caramelized onions and swiss. I also added a splash of white wine to the onions after they'd cooked for a bit. I think it gave them a little bit of extra flavor. Ed and I shared this tart for a simple weeknight dinner with a chevre chaud salad on the side - greens dressed simply with oil and balsamic and topped with breaded and fried rounds of goat cheese. Along with a glass of white wine, it was the perfect meal to make one feel that they're eating al fresco during springtime in Paris! (Even when one is actually eating on one's couch watching reruns of the Jersey Shore.)

Early spring is also a good time to sneak in those last few hearty wintery dishes like stews and potpies, since pretty soon you're gonna be all, "Stew?! You crazy? There's aspargus in the fridge, you nut! Snow peas! Little baby radishes!"

This shrimp pot pie was an excellent way to clean out my fridge - and freezer - to make room for the spring bounty that I know is right around the corner. The forgotten carrots, the half full bag of frozen peas, the shrimp I'd bought on a whim - they all come together in an onion-y broth with a touch of cream and a "crust" made out of crescent rolls from a can. (One of my many, many guilty processed food pleasures.)

My penance for that shrimp pot pie meal was this spectacular kale salad.

I used to be afraid of kale, until I had a really amazing kale, feta and lemon dish at my friend Beth's dinner party. It was so great, in fact, that I started making it myself at home all the time. And then a funny thing happened - I started actually craving kale. And this salad is a great way to eat it. I think it's the way that all of the different flavors work together - sweet apples, tangy cheddar, tart lemon, toasty walnuts, all jumbled up with earthy kale and olive oil and salt. I made mine with apples and cheese from the Greenmarket, so the cheese was a little bit milder than cheddar, but it still worked incredibly well. Oh man. I am in love with this salad. I want to marry it and have its babies. No joke.

But hey, speaking of love...

I'll leave you with this proof that I actually can master my camera's white balance every once in a while: the chocolate cream pie with heart-shaped sprinkles that I made for Ed for Valentine's Day. It's my sister-in-law's recipe, one that we beg her to make for every big occasion where such a pie could possibly be eaten. (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July... hell, when is it ever a bad time for chocolate cream pie?) Hers always comes out way better than mine did - possibly because I failed to follow the directions precisely. But even slightly messed-up chocolate cream pie is a pretty great thing. Which is appropriate, of course, because my Valentine is a pretty great thing, too.

Chocolate Cream Pie
adapted from a cookbook, but I'm not sure which one, so temporarily presented without proper attribution...

store-bought graham cracker crust
3/4 c. sugar
1/3 c. cornstarch
1/2 t. salt
3 3/4 c. whole milk
5 large egg yolks
3 oz. unsweetened chocolate, melted
2 T butter, cut into pieces
2 t. vanilla extract
1 c. whipping cream

In heavy saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch and salt. With wire whisk, stir in milk until blended and smooth. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until milk mixture has thickened and boils. Boil 1 minute.

In a small bowl with wire whisk, lightly beat egg yolks. Beat 1/2 c. hot milk-sugar mixture into beaten egg yolks. Slowly pour egg yolk mixture back into milk mixture, stirring rapidly to avoid curdling. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is very thick or until temperature on candy thermometer reaches 160.

Remove saucepan from heat and stir in melted chocolate, butter and vanilla until butter has melted and chocolate is smooth. Pour hot chocolate filling into graham cracker crust, press plastic wrap onto surface and refrigerate until filling is set. (About 4 hours.)

When ready to serve, whip cream until stiff peaks form and top the pie.

2011-02-12T14:59:00.000-05:00

Winter in the Northeast is not exactly the most exciting time for the locavore blogger. Today's the first time I've been to the Greenmarket in a month, and even then it was too frigid to spend much time browsing around and finding inspiration. I scampered back to my apartment with nothing more than a pint of cream, a jar of raspberry jam and some honey for winter cold-fighting tea with honey and lemon.

On the bright side, though, being cooped up indoors all day inspires a lot of little projects. Last weekend's little project was a collision of two marmalade recipes: Eugenia Bone's Three Citrus Marmalade, but with a smoked salt twist inspired by Anarchy In a Jar's Grapefruit Marmalade with Smoked Salt.

The resulting marmalade is a lovely, bright spread with the sweetness of Meyer lemons, the tartness of grapefruit and a slight bitterness that's balanced by a mild smoke flavor. Neither too bitter nor too sweet, I've been eating this every chance I can get! And I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to make another batch sometime very, very soon. Even though citrus isn't local, it certainly is seasonal, and I want to make sure that I'll have enough of this perfect marmalade to keep my pantry stocked all year long!

And what could possibly make this marmalade better? Homemade buttermilk scones, you say? Well, don't mind if I do!

Three Citrus Marmalade with Smoked Salt
adapted from Well-Preserved by Eugenia Bone

2 grapefruits, pink or red
4 oranges (I used navel)
3 Meyer lemons
4 to 5 cups of sugar
1/2 t. unsalted butter
1/2 t. smoked sea salt

Peel the skin off of one orange and two lemons with a vegetable peeler and use the back of a knife to scrape off as much as you can of the white pith. Cut the cleaned rinds into thin matchsticks, then put them into a saucepan with 3 cups of water and cook over medium heat until tender. (About 20 to 25 minutes.)

Meanwhile, peel the remaining fruits. Cut them in half through the middle to remove seeds, then coarsely chop the oranges and lemons. For the grapefruit, cut supremes by slicing the flesh from between the membranes with a sharp paring knife. Measure the resulting fruit pulp and juice mixture - I had about four cups altogether. You'll want to match the amount of sugar to the amount of pulp; so for four cups of fruit, use four cups of sugar. If your yield is closer to five cups, use five cups of sugar.

Add the pulp, sugar, softened rinds and their cooking water to a large, heavy pot. (I used my IKEA dutch oven.) Cook over medium low heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer. (The original recipe suggests that this will take about 30 minutes; I found that it was more like 45 minutes, and required the heat being turned up to medium during the last 15 minutes.)

When the marmalade reaches 220 degrees, remove it from the heat and add the smoked sea salt. Continue to stir for three or four minutes while marmalade cools to insure proper distribution of the peels and pulp.

This recipe yields a little bit more than four half-pints of marmalade. If you're heat processing your marmalade for shelf-stability, jars should be processed for ten minutes. Otherwise, refrigerate cooled marmalade and eat within a week.

2010-12-08T20:55:00.000-05:00

The CSA may be over for the season, but the farmer's market is still going strong! Sure, it's a little bit chillier - or, a lot chillier - but the stands are still full of lovely local produce, and it seems extra important to support our local farmers now.

And it's extra extra important for me to be full of lovely local produce now, since I've jumped back on the Weight Watchers bandwagon. WW just revamped their program to put a greater emphasis on the importance of fresh fruits and vegetables for healthy diets, and I'm totally thrilled. Because, you know, I love vegetables!

Unfortunately, I also love cooking vegetables in massive quantities of fat, which is not exactly gonna help my caloric bottom line (or my actual bottom) so I've got to start learning new ways to turn the same old veggies into healthy new recipes. A good place to start? Well... Weight Watchers, apparently.

Remember this post about butternut squash pasta? I came across a WW recipe that was shockingly similar, except with whole wheat pasta instead of regular, part-skim ricotta instead of full-fat and a conservative sprinkle of toasted walnuts and really good Parmesan for flavor. Delicious! I think the changes actually wound up improving the finished dish. Parmesan shavings pump up the umami without being quite as in-your-face as bacon bits, and I liked how the ricotta stayed in creamy little pockets in the casserole. Oh, butternut squash! You're delicious even without a stick of butter. Who knew?

I plated the pasta with a seriously amazing red cabbage and apple stew. My mom used to make this cabbage dish when the weather got cold. The cinnamon and apples make the house smell so warm and cozy, and the cabbage just sort of melts into this soft, tangy purple lusciousness. I couldn't find any red cabbage at the market this week, so I picked it up from the supermarket, but the apples are crispy Granny Smiths from the greenmarket. I snuck a couple of "test slices" while cooking and wished I'd picked up more apples - even this late in the season, they were crunchy and tart.

And red cabbage stew keeps well in the fridge, too! Behold, the red cabbage leftovers topped with chicken apple sausage from Trader Joe's.

Barely any WW Points and barely any cooking? Dinner is done.

RED CABBAGE AND APPLE STEW

1 small head red cabbage, shredded
2 crisp, green apples (Granny Smiths are great) thinly sliced
2 T apple cider vinegar
2 t sugar
1/2 t pumpkin pie spice
1/2 t cinnamon

Combine all ingredients in a medium pot. Cover and cook over low heat, 30 to 45 minutes, until everything is nice and soft. Add water, a splash or two at a time, if the pot starts getting dry. Serves: a lot of folks.

2010-11-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

The first cluster dinner party, no one thought to bring a camera. The second one, I brought a camera but forgot to charge my battery. This year, I brought the camera and charged the batteries, then promptly got tipsy and started taking incredibly out of focus pictures. I apologize in advance for my shoddy camera work. Maybe you should go have a few cocktails yourself before you read this entry? Adding some blur to your vision can only help!

Anyway, the dinner party was a great success! It was our most ambitious yet - six courses, eighteen people. But except for leaving the smoked salt at home, which left my brussels sprouts swathed in marmalade but bereft of smokiness, it all went off without a hitch.

The first course was a crowd favorite: chicken liver pate topped with bacon jam and chopped green apples.

I think this might have been my favorite course, too. It's a gorgeous little fat bomb, the rich chicken liver fighting with the smoky sweet bacon jam for unctuous domination, before the crispy and tart green apple comes in and smacks them both down. Booyakasha!

Next up, my dad's super secret turkey garlic minestrone!

Every year after Thanksgiving, my pops simmers the turkey carcass into the richest, most golden turkey broth you can imagine, then freezes it until Christmas morning, when he turns it into a garlicky minestrone, slicked with olive oil and full of escarole. The whole thing is topped generously with shredded Parmesan cheese and served with fresh baked bread. I made Dad's recipe a little less hearty (keeping out the beans and pasta) and skipped the side of bread, but other than under-salting the broth a bit, I think I did it justice.

The third course was leek and dried cranberry bread pudding with a creamy mushroom gravy.

The bread pudding was basically just my adaptation of the leek bread pudding from Ad Hoc at Home, but with cranberries added before baking. The gravy was simple - just crimini mushrooms cooked with butter, olive oil, thyme and white wine then added to a roux of butter, flour, cream and milk.

Fourth course was the piece de resistance: confit turkey leg with mashed parnsips and baby brussels sprouts with marmalade.

Turkey gets such a bad rap, but when it's well-prepared it can be so delicious. Brining helps and so does sous vide cooking, but for those of us without massive immersion circulators, turkey leg confit is definitely the way to go.

I followed this recipe fairly faithfully, save for the overnight salting. (And I replaced vegetable oil with olive oil in the hopes that olive oil would contribute a little extra flavor to the turkey.) After cooking and cooling and de-boning, I popped everything into the fridge with a bit of extra duck fat on top. At the party, I melted the duck fat, chopped the confit into small pieces and re-heated the turkey chunks in the duck fat. So. Freaking. Good.

The parsnips were easy - a quick simmer in chicken stock, then they get drained and mashed with obscene amounts of butter and cream, salt and pepper. Parsnips are so underrated. They're not all that tempting in the grocery store, but once cooked, they have a surprising sweetness without any of the starchy heaviness of mashed potatoes.

And the brussels sprouts were easy, too - I heated some butter and olive oil in a skillet and let the sprouts cook in there for about five minutes. After they're a bit browned, I added half a cup of water and popped a lid on the pan - that way, the sprouts can steam in the middle but still retain some of that caramelized, buttery goodness from the initial saute. After they were tender, I stirred in a few scoops of orange marmalade and a sprinkle of sea salt. (I would have used smoked salt, but I left it at home. Womp womp!)

After this course, people were all, "So, what's for dessert?" and I was like, "one more course before you find out!"

A salad course, that is. Field greens and radicchio in a maple-balsamic dressing, maple-roasted rutabaga, green apples, pumpkin seeds and a sprinkle of truffle salt. All of the important tastes were present: sweet, salty, bitter, tart, earthy. And aren't those colors gorgeous together? I think the finished product was a little bit over-salted, perhaps because of the super-salty pumpkin seeds, but with a lighter hand on the sodium, I think this was one of the best salads I've ever made.

And finally, dessert: a cinnamon meringue with pumpkin mousse and pomegranate seeds. Sort of like a pavlova and a pumpkin pie got into a fight.

I was shocked that the meringues came out as well as they did, since it was raining on both of the days that I was baking them. I attribute their success to the relentlessly dry heat of New York City apartment radiators. Antiquated heating system, I couldn't have done it without you!

And that was the dinner party! At least the food part of it. The best part, if course, wasn't the bacon jam or the parsnip mash - it was the people who came and made it amazing. My colleagues are the best ever, and everyone got up and pitched in at one point or another, pouring wine or collecting dishes. As always, though, Jenny and Danielle were the best "sous chefs" a lady could ask for, chopping veggies and expediting plates. No one can pull this off solo. I'm lucky that my friends are so willing to come together and put in work to make every dinner party we have a truly amazing evening.

Cluster 2, you da best!

2010-10-31T23:22:00.000-04:00

I just read Michael Pollan's excellent Food Rules - it's a quick read, and full of the kind of sensible nutrition advice that we should all abide by. One of his "food rules" was: eat all the junk food you want... provided that you cook it for yourself. It takes a lot more time and energy to make a batch of ice cream than it does to dash out to the bodega for a pint of Vermont's finest, so you probably won't be inclined to whip up a batch of mint chocolate chip more than every once in a while. (Which, of course, is about how often one should be eating ice cream.)

While I'm definitely not ready to follow all of Michael Pollan's advice to the letter, I think he has an excellent point with the cook-your-own junk food thing. I've been on a Kraft mac and cheese jag lately, and it's really not good for anyone. (And especially not for anyone who's hoping for leftovers, since I can totally dust one of those boxes by myself with astonishing speed.) Solution? This homemade broccoli mac and cheese, which requires barely more time or effort than opening up a packet of neon orange cheese powder.

I set a small pot of water on the stove, then cooked the shells in the boiling water while the broccoli steamed in the steamer insert. In a separate pot, I whisked together a few teaspoons of butter and a tablespoon of flour to make a roux, then added a few cups of milk, a generous pile of shredded cheddar, four slices of American cheese and some salt and freshly ground pepper. By the time the cheese melted and the sauce came together, the pasta and broccoli were both done. Ta da!

And the best part? This is so satisfying and filling, there were actually leftovers to tuck away in the fridge for a hungry boyfriend. Homemade junk food, more satisfying than the "real" thing? Michael Pollan, I think you're on to something!

2010-10-31T14:55:00.001-04:00

A simple weeknight dinner: brussels sprouts cooked in bacon grease and olive oil, topped with shavings of ricotta salata and a runny poached egg. This could also be an awesome brunch dish - I'm pretty sure that Maialino serves a similar dish for breakfast, and it covers all the important brunch bases: eggy, cheese-y and bacon-y.

And another one: homemade chicken fingers, maple-glazed carrots and mashed fingerling taters. These carrots were gorgeous - all purply-orange and bright yellow. The awesome purple color didn't survive the peeling and cooking process, but whatevs - they're still pretty, right?

2010-10-22T23:33:00.000-04:00

Where the hell did October go?

It's crazy... one day we're sitting in front of fans and air conditioners, sipping iced tea and eating gigantic, juciy red tomatoes - then, all of a sudden, it's fuzzy blankets, fall jackets and root vegetables as far as the eye can see.

I get really excited about fall vegetables, though. The first cabbage of the year might not inspire quite as much excitement as, say, the first ramps of the year... or the first heirloom tomato... but I really love our fall share. Squash and beets and carrots and yukina savoy... fall veggies have such lovely, intense flavors - and many of them are so versatile. Check out this pasta - just rotini, a bit of ricotta, some mashed butternut squash, a little salt and pepper and dinner's ready. I topped this with some bacon bits, but I think the bacon was actually a little distracting. Next time, I'll leave it off and just enjoy the sweet, creamy squash and ricotta by themselves.

Butternut squash is also delicious just by itself, with a little bit of butter and salt. And oh man, check it out - brussels sprouts! We didn't get any from the CSA this week, so I picked these up at the greenmarket. I tossed them with olive oil, smoked salt and maple syrup and then braised them in the oven with half a cup of water. (For some reason, I find that brussels sprouts come out best when they're cooked with oil and a bit of water - they get tender without becoming waterlogged.)

Ed is responsible for that gorgeous, pink pork roast. You think I could cook meat like that? Ha!

Though I can cook meat like this... a chicken breast, butterflied and dipped in egg and breadcrumb then fried in vegetable oil. I love chicken prepared like this, but it begs for a towering pile of vinegary greens on the side. Seriously. A chicken cutlet without a salad is like a Jersey Shore episode without Snooki.

And on the side, a leek and delicata squash risotto. This amazing recipe for risotto from Cooking Light magazine is always my basis for risotto adaptations. I've made it with tomato sauce and seafood, with mushrooms and truffle oil, with saffron and peas, and it's always spectacular. The recipe replaces some of the rice in a normal risotto recipe with chopped leek, which both lightens up the calorie count and provides a reliable way to use up the lone leek in our CSA delivery. This time, I added two peeled and roasted delicata squash and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Autumn, hell yeah!

And one final treat... I've been lusting over this Lenox pattern, Chirp, basically ever since it came out. I dig my cheap IKEA plates and all, but... OMG birdies! Flowers! Watercolors!

Lenox is just a bit out of my price range, though... so I figured these plates wouldn't be seeing the inside of my cabinet for a very, very long time. But then the other day, while I was slogging through the chaotic aisles of my local Marshall's, I came across a treasure trove of Chirp plates. Half price! I snatched up a set of two dinner plates and two salad plates and ran for the registers as fast as one can run when one is carrying four pieces of bone china that, together, cost more than her entire current set of dishes, flatware and glasses put together.

But my heart still leaps every time I see them, and would you look at how pretty they make an apple look? Best investment ever.

2010-10-02T16:57:00.000-04:00

Thomas Keller's fabulous Ad Hoc at Home is one of my two coffee table books. (The other one is the French Laundry cookbook. Yeah, in case you couldn't tell, I have sort of a thing for Thomas Keller.) Keeping it in the living room, rather than banishing it to Cookbook Alley in the kitchen, serves two purposes: distracting many of my guests (since this cookbook is like foodie crack) and insuring that I flip through it often enough to keep the recipes in the front of my mind.

Looking through it this morning, I noticed a leek bread pudding that would make excellent use of the single leek in my CSA share, as well as the half loaf of white bread leftover from last week's meatloaf dinner and the cup of heavy cream leftover from last night's ice cream sundae craving. (Come on, if you're making a chocolate sundae, you might as well do it right and whip your own cream. Am I right?) Anyway, I didn't have a ton of bread - or a desire to be eating leek bread pudding all week - so I reduced the recipe by about half, and added some caramelized onions and sage to make it nice and Thanksgiving-y. (You could totally get away with serving this instead of stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner. I couldn't get away with that, though, since my mom's corn stuffing makes folks drive across the country just for a single spoonful. It's spectacular, for real.) I also swapped out the Comte cheese for Parmesan, since that's what I had.

Leek Bread Pudding
(adapted from Ad Hoc at Home)

8 slices of white bread, sliced into cubes
1 c. heavy cream
1 c. whole milk
2 eggs
salt and pepper
one leek
half of an onion
2 T butter
2/3 c. grated Parmesan cheese
3 large sage leaves
small bunch of chives

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Slice leek into 1/2 inch rounds. Slice onion lengthwise into strips. Melt butter in a small saucepan, then add onion and leek and cook over medium-low heat until caramelized.
Put the cubed bread into an 8 x 8 baking dish. Add 1/3 c. cheese and the chopped herbs. When onion and leek mixture is done, add it into the dish and mix slightly.
Combine the cream, milk and eggs with salt and pepper in a bowl. Pour this mixture over the bread cubes and let everything soak for about ten minutes. Then add the other 1/3 c. cheese. Pop it into the oven and cook for about an hour. The pudding is done when puffy and golden-brown.

We got the cutest little baby carrots from the CSA this week, which I peeled and cooked with brown sugar, butter and a bit of water until the carrots were tender and glazed. Alongside the leek bread pudding, they made an awesome little early-fall Saturday brunch.

A few weeks ago, we picked up a real bounty of husk cherries from the CSA. I love these little things - they look like miniature tomatillos in their husks, but they taste intriguingly like vanilla and pineapple. I ate tons of them out of hand, but I knew I had more than I could just take down on my couch, so I preserved them in a medium syrup and stuck them in the fridge. They taste super delicious on vanilla ice cream; something about the vanilla and the creaminess really brings out the flavor of the husk cherries. And aren't they pretty?

And finally, a really simple salad: roasted beets, diced apples and crispy bacon in a mustard and herb vinaigrette. Bacon makes everything better. So do beets. And so do these crunchy, tart Greenmarket apples. Apparently we've been having a fabulous year for apple growing - every local apple I've had in the last month has been really uncommonly great.

Sometimes the simplest stuff really is the best.

Cooking with Ed

2010-09-24T22:14:00.000-04:00

Cooking isn't really as much fun without someone to share with. A meal is an ephemeral thing - it takes time, thought, preparation and creativity, but at the end of the day.... it's food. We eat it and then it's gone. So the best thing to do is share it. Work together with someone else to prepare a meal and the process is twice as fast - and a zillion times more fun. And some meals are just made for two people to enjoy together. Splitting a small chicken might mean fewer leftovers, but it also means that the meal is enjoyed at its best - warm and crackling from the oven.

I'm lucky to have met my culinary match in Ed. That's right, ladies, swoon with jealousy: this dude knows his way around the kitchen. He's made so many delicious dinners for me that I've gotta bring my A game every time I cook for him. These pizzas? At the very least, they get an A for effort. And probably another A for awesome.

The margherita pizza started with Trader Joe's pizza dough - though we sometimes just pop next door to the pizza shop and buy a ball of dough from them for a couple of dollars. On top, whole basil leaves, a light schmear of homemade tomato sauce (made with tomatoes I'd canned and basil I'd frozen earlier in the summer along with garlic and a bit of olive oil) and slices of fresh mozzarella. Ciao bella!

The second pizza was topped with the same tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella and sauteed red peppers and leeks from the CSA. We also shredded some of the Parmesan Formerly Belonging to Jessica on top, and I meant to put red pepper flakes on, too, but I.... flaked. (Ba dum chhhh!) Mama luna!

Ahhh, homemade pizza and cold beer on the couch. What could be better?

Oh, I dunno. How about coming home after a long day of work to this?

A perfectly brined and roasted free range chicken, surrounded by your CSA share of potatoes, onions and herbs, all warm and yummy smelling and juicy and amazing, and served with these:

Ed's delicious green beans and potatoes in a rich tomato sauce, slicked with olive oil and fragrant with herbs. I can't even tell you how good these were. If you're jealous of the above picture, you should be. I'm jealous of it myself. Sweet baby Jesus, those were good.

Cooking for two? I highly recommend it. Especially when the cook is Ed!

Comfort Me With Dairy Products

2010-09-24T19:18:00.000-04:00

It's been a rough couple of weeks at Chez CookingInsideTheBox; nothing too tragic, but between a bit of moderate apartment-related turmoil (including two weeks without a stove after a gas company snafu) and a fair-to-middlin' amount of work stress, I've been reaching for the takeout menus even more often than usual these days.

Even the dopest sag paneer delivery, though, can't compare to the soul-soothing abilities of a home cooked meal made with super fresh veggies. Accordingly, these last two weeks have been all about the three C's of comfort food: creamy, cheesy and crunchy.

First up, creamed corn. I saw a recipe in the NY Times for a sophisticated version of creamed corn and thought, hell yeah! But I don't like gorgonzola, I was fresh out of pine nuts and the four ears of corn in the fridge were on their last legs after a week waiting for the gas to be turned back on. They weren't about to wait for me to make a Sahadi's run. It was corn time. Stat.

A quick search of the fridge revealed that there was no heavy cream to be found, either. Ruhh roh! (Side note: it's kind of worrying how often there *is* heavy cream to be found in my fridge. I really gotta get right with my arteries one of these days.) But the internet came to the rescue: adding cornstarch to half and half would approximate the thickening capabilities of proper heavy cream. Ta da! Sweet, al dente yellow kernels bathed in a thin, creamy sauce. Eaten out of a bowl in front of the television, it requires no accompaniments - but would match almost any entree.

Creamed corn
serves at least two, probs four

4 ears of corn
2T butter
1/3 c. half and half
about a teaspoon or so of cornstarch
salt and pepper

Cut the kernels off the cob. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the corn, stir for a minute or two. Add the half and half, then sprinkle the cornstarch over the whole mess. Stir it around, add salt and pepper, cook for about five minutes. Om nom nom.

Next up: the return of Trader Joe's burrata!

This summer has been incredibly generous to us, at least as far as tomatoes go. Last summer, our CSA's farmer had a problem with tomato blight; we all got a few tomatoes, but nowhere near the embarrassment of tomato riches we'd been looking forward to. We realized, of course, that we'd taken on the risks as well as the benefits of farming as members of the CSA. But we were all crying on the inside. Crying for tomatoes. Big, red, juicy, sloppy tomatoes.

This summer's bounty has more than made up for last year's drought. We are practically swimming in tomatoes this year: Yellow! Green! Pink! Zebra striped! We've made caprese salads and BLTs and panzanella and tomato and bacon salads and... and... oh man. I think it's finally happened. I can't believe I'm admitting this, but....

I'm a little bit sick of tomatoes.

But hey, you know what I'm not sick of? Burrata! Our local Trader Joe's, always an excellent source of cheap burrata, had stopped carrying it earlier in the summer. "Noooooooo!" I cried, "What shall I do without 24/7 access to delicious mozzarella cheese pouches full of mozzarella cheese scraps and cream?!" Then I picked up a couple of packages of Trader Joe's French macarons and a six pack of Simpler Times lager and things got a little better. But still. I drifted past the cheese section every time I visited, hoping against hope for sweet, sweet burrata.

As you can guess, this story has a happy ending. See above: burrata, which has the magical ability to make even one's hundredth tomato salad of the year a thing of ethereal beauty.

And finally, tonight's dinner was inspired by Smitten Kitchen's creamed chard and spring onions recipe. I had to figure out something that would go with the mushroom ravioli I'd picked up on a whim earlier this week. I was thinking beets and walnuts, but the beets were taking forever to roast and I knew I'd better use up the chard before Ed comes over this weekend. (Before last week's CSA pickup, he'd texted me, "No chard this time, ok?! Please?") And there was one sad little leek leftover from last week's haul - a perfect substitute for spring onions, right? Oh, and that amazingly salty and crumbly two year old Parmesan that Jessica had given me a few weeks ago would be spectacular shaved over the top of this!

Friday night in the kitchen. I pour myself a glass of wine and get to chopping. In barely more than twelve minutes, this:

becomes this:

One more glass of wine and a brand new copy of the new Sophie Kinsella novel - which is even cheesier than this pasta, and just about as delicious - and all is right with the world. At least for tonight!

2010-08-09T22:44:00.000-04:00

Everyone who thinks that a tomato is a perfectly acceptable dinner, raise your hand!

Well, not just a tomato, of course. Even in this heat, I need something a little bit more substantial than just a tomato to make a meal. But not a whole lot more. Take this tomato and bacon salad, for example.

Ten minutes in the kitchen and dinner's ready. Above, we have two lovely ripe tomatoes - one heirloom, one not - sliced and topped with a few slices of crispy bacon, a handful of sliced basil and a quick vinaigrette made from bacon fat, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and honey. It's great - sort of like a low carb BLT, infused with smoky bacon-y goodness in every bite.

Not that I have anything against carbs, of course. Check this regular-carb BLT for proof:

Toasted Bread Alone peasant bread (shouts to Boiceville, NY, home of my elementary school and the original Bread Alone bakery) spread with a slightly obscene amount of mayonnaise and filled with a sliced tomato, crunchy thick-cut bacon and this weird dark purple lettuce from the CSA. As both a tomato snob and a serious admirer of the BLT, I really only eat these things from July until September - prime tomato season - and so I cram as many of them into my life as possible during these three short, sweltering months.

(Honestly, I'll take the 95 degree subway platforms in the morning as long as it means I get to eat as many tomatoes as my little Italian heart desires.)

Speaking of Italian - and of late summer delicacies - here are some fried squash blossoms and, underneath, some zucchini and squash fritters. A week or so ago, I went over to Nicole's with a Ziploc bag full of Lynnhaven Farms goat's milk ricotta, an egg and some parsley. We piped the ricotta mixture into some of the above blossoms, twisted their little tops, dipped them into a batter made with flour and seltzer and quickly fried them. Oh, bliss! I thought the goat ricotta might wind up being a little too funky, but it wasn't - it was so creamy and sweet and perfect with the mild floral bite of the blossoms.

I wanted to repeat that evening's success for a weekend dinner with Ed, but I wound up getting a little too creative. I had a bunch of zucchini and zephyr squash in the fridge that I wanted to use up, so I figured I'd dice them up, saute them and add them to the ricotta mixture. Squash stuffed squash blossoms! Brilliant, right?

Yeaaaah... until the watery cooked squash hit the ricotta, egg, parsley and basil mixture.... and melted everything into a soupy mess, completely unfit for stuffing anything. Uh oh.

"How's it going in here?" Ed asked, coming into the kitchen to investigate.
"I think I fucked it up," I said, glancing towards the takeout menu drawer.
Ed thought it over for a moment, then said, "It'll be fine. Just add a couple of tablespoons of flour and you can make fritters instead."

Ricotta and zucchini fritters? Brilliant, for real! Flour added, crisis averted, and minutes later, we were sitting at the table, eating crispy battered blossoms and piles upon piles of fluffy squash fritters and licking the grease and salt off of our fingers.

And finally, a quick Friday night dinner with Jessica. There were some Italian frying peppers left over from that week's CSA share that I had no real idea what to do with. So, dear readers... I stuffed them. With saffron risotto and mozzarella cheese and peas. And then I covered them in garlic and crushed tomatoes from a can and I baked them for a really, really long time. (During said time, Jessica and I were like totally starving and were reduced to eating piquillo peppers out of a jar and Manchego cheese. Oh wait, actually, the peppers and cheese were awesome. But whatevs, we were totally just killing time til the peppers were done.)

They were good. They were really, really good. I just don't have any pictures of them. Which is probs for the best, cause baked stuffed peppers? Not particularly photogenic.

Anyway, I do have a picture of the plum upside down cake that I made for dessert! Two, actually.

I thought it actually came out a little bit dry... so this obscene amount of whipped cream was totally necessary to the overall integrity of the dish. Totally necessary. Not overboard at all. Really, I was there. Trust me.

This is what happens when I get too ambitious at the farmer's market. Two pints of sugar plums sound like a totally aces idea in the moment! But a week later, they're getting soft in the fridge and I'm still snacking on pretzels at happy hour instead of plums after the gym. At that point, there's only one option: make a cake and attempt to foist slices onto all of your friends. Starting with Jessica.

Mission accomplished!

2010-07-20T22:16:00.000-04:00

Adventures in Cooking Meat: Episode Steak. I've been craving red meat like crazy lately, but I'm also trying to be a little more thoughtful about where my meat is coming from. Grass-fed, locally raised beef sounds a lot better than a big old slab of artificially-red steak from Key Foods... but it's also quite a bit more expensive. Compromising, I bought this london broil from one of the meat vendors at the greenmarket - a cheaper cut than the strip steak or porterhouse I might splurge on at the supermarket, but not super intimidating.

Sure, I had to ask some more seasoned chefs de boeuf for advice, but it was actually pretty easy to cook - a quick marinade in olive oil, vinegar and rosemary, then a super-hot quick sear and a ten minute rest. Upon slicing, I was greeted by lovely, perfectly pink beef - feral and minerally and so exactly what I wanted.

Alongside, some nutty zephyr squash sauteed in a bit of butter and swiss chard topped with a slice of pistachio and honey-flavored goat cheese. Oh, hell yes.

Oh, and those pickles from last week? Amazing. Dill-pickled kohlrabi in the back, smoked salt-pickled turnips at the front. They're crisp and sweet and refreshing, a great foil to anything rich and savory, and a pretty awesome snack just solo.

"What the frig is quinoa?" says just about everyone who doesn't know what the frig quinoa is. (For the record, it's a seed that's sorta more like a grain - full of protein and fiber and all of that other great stuff that makes nutritionists excited, but also tasty and versatile.) This warm quinoa salad was a great clean-out-the-pantry meal: quinoa, beet greens, garlic scapes and feta cheese with lemon and olive oil dressing.) The feta cheese was leftover from a kale, feta and lemon saute - no pictures of that, though. Sorry, Prentice!

This mint iced tea is probably not as visually exciting as it would have been with actual mint leaves floating around. Rest assured, though, it was full of refreshing minty goodness.

This is the second Beth-inspired recipe in today's blog. (The first was the kale and feta concoction.) Beth's nearly-vegan dinner party blew my mind on many levels, but this zucchini ribbon salad was the one dish that I've become absolutely obsessed with. It's so simple but so sophisticated - you run a raw zucchini through the thinnest setting of your mandoline, making paper-thin zucchini ribbons which you then heap on a plate, drizzle with olive oil, sea salt, pepper and herbs - and then you eat it. Avocado slices are optional, but obviously make everything even better. This is the kind of dinner you make when it's eight o'clock at night and eighty-four degrees in your kitchen and all you wanna do is stop being hungry so you can take a cold shower and go to bed.

Except you never just want to stop being hungry - if that was the case, you could just grab a floppy slice of pizza from next door. No, you want to be sated. You want to be full of fresh, local vegetables. You want something worth savoring. No ovens involved. This salad? It's exactly what you want.

Also great for those no-cook nights? Heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. With lots of salt. Lots and lots of salt.

And finally, I leave you with this komatsuna and egg scramble, served on buttered Bread Alone sourdough. Komatsuna is a Japanese mustard spinach that I keep calling Korematsu by mistake. (Which is probably funnier if you went to law school or have some other reason to know about Korematsu vs. United States. Oh, law nerd jokes on a cooking blog!) Anyway, the lightly bitter greens combined with the rich, unctuous yolks of the local eggs, the sweetness of the butter and the slight sour tang of the bread made this perfect little lunch treat. I know it's really ridiculous and corny, but as I ate this, I thought about how lucky I am to be able to enjoy my food so much - that I have so much access to so much good food and that I'm able to eat it with such pleasure.

So, thanks, Prospect Heights CSA and Brooklyn greenmarkets and friends who throw dinner parties and folks who know how to cook a steak properly and officemates who remind me to buy tomatoes! Y'all make this little quasi-locavore* very very happy.

(*I can't call myself a locavore with a straight face. Real talk, I ate KFC for lunch today. And there is a 50/50 chance that I will eat Arby's for lunch tomorrow. Every time someone mentions Horsey sauce, it sets a little alarm clock inside my brain: must eat Arby's within 72 hours or else!)

2010-06-24T22:26:00.000-04:00

Oh man, I really love pickles.

I love pickled cucumbers and pickled beets and pickled cabbage. I love making jokes about my pickled liver. I still haven't tried pickled eggs, but I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen some time this year. Seriously, I am so fully committed to pickle adoration, I even named my cat Pickles. That's love, right there.

In my fridge right now, there are three kinds of pickles. (Four, if you count kimchee.) There's a jar of Claussen dill pickles, the gold standard for supermarket pickles, a plastic bucket full of the amazing Israeli pickles from Mimi's Hummus in Ditmas Park... and now, homemade pickled turnips.

(Well, I guess they're not quite pickled yet. Give 'em three or four days though.)

Someday I will remember to adjust my white balance when taking pictures. Today is not that day.

The turnips are from the CSA; the pickling recipe is from the Momofuku cookbook. I totally flaked, though, and forgot to buy kosher salt, so I had to improvise with what was in my cupboard: two teaspoons of Himalayan pink rock salt, half a teaspoon of flaky smoked salt. (Lucky for this recipe, I love salt almost as much as I love pickles.) I also threw a couple of peppercorns into each jar cause, you know, why not? It's Thursday. It's a party. Everyone's invited!

The brine is really simple: hot water, rice wine vinegar, sugar, salt. It's weird, being forced to wait a couple of days before the fruits of one's labor can be taste-tested. Was smoked salt a mistake? Are the peppercorns gonna ruin everything? Only Future Kathryn knows for sure! (And Future Matt and Future Batya, cause one of these turnip jars belongs to them.)

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of the Pickled Turnip Experiment!

2010-06-21T21:18:00.000-04:00

Week two of this year's CSA pickup, and things are lookin' good!

This is Ed's quiche, which is technically Paula Deen's quiche, but seeing as how it was prepared by Ed and all... Imma call it Ed's quiche. This week, we got gorgeous swiss chard and spinach from the CSA. And what could improve on fresh, healthy leafy greens? Oh, right. Bacon, eggs, cream, cheese and a flaky pastry crust. Damn, Ed. Your spinach and chard quiche is aces. (And makes an awesome breakfast.)

But hey, my homemade ranch dressing is pretty great, too! Especially on this all-CSA salad (save for the farmer's market fava beans) with radishes, snow peas and romaine lettuce. Mayo, buttermilk, a bunch of young garlic, a squirt of mustard, salt and pepper and lots of parsley and basil = holy moly. I have to restrain myself from eating this dressing for breakfast. With a spoon.

And just in case anyone was concerned that my cardiovascular health was toooo good? Here's the sandwich component of tonight's salad and sandwich dinner: whole grain bread with melted Brie, prosciutto di Parma and fig jam.

Yeah. There are no words.

2010-05-16T20:22:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, I met up with a couple members of my GTFU crew to take a nice, long walk around Prospect Park. Unfortunately, just as we all assembled in the gazebo, laced up our sneakers and got ready to head out, the skies opened up and it poured. Not like a light sprinkle or a delicate mist... this was a torrential downpour. We waited it out for a few minutes, then all agreed that we each deserved an A for effort, but that this walk was not gonna happen. Lucky for me, I had my umbrella with me, so I decided to brave the rain and get my shopping on at the Grand Army Plaza farmer's market.

(Oh, side note! I just signed the lease on an awesome apartment just a few blocks away from Grand Army Plaza and its fabulous greenmarket. The place is really nice, but the best part? It has a nice, big kitchen with lots of cabinets and counters and... drumroll... a dishwasher! I cannot wait to get in there and start cooking... and washing dishes.)

Anyway, standing in line to buy a few bunches of sorrel, I saw a bin full of dark blue potatoes and immediately thought, blue potato chips! (My next thought was "Jetblue!" I've spent many a long flight wedged into a tiny seat, happily munching on Terra Blues, drinking tomato juice and watching trashy television on my own! Personal! In-flight entertainment system!) Anyway, two blue potatoes, sliced on a mandolin, tossed with a teaspoon of olive oil, baked at 400 degrees then sprinkled with salt and herbes de Provence = the tasty little snacks you see below.

They're not quite as greasy and salty and delicious as the Terra Blues, of course... but there's a bonus: I get to eat them while sprawled out on the couch watching my own personal in-apartment entertainment system.

This is a great big salad of red leaf and... oh, I forget... some other kind of lettuce, pea shoots and two different kinds of sprouts. Pea shoots are so amazing. I like them cooked, I like them raw... I like 'em any way I can get 'em.

(I had to use the flash to get this picture, cause it was dark outside and I was hungry and didn't want to wait while I fiddled with my desk lamp and sheets of paper to light everything properly. I like how ominous the picture is, with the shadow of the lens and everything. It's like a fifties B horror movie... It Came For the Salad!!!)

Oh, and hey... in case you were wondering, "whatever happened to that sorrel Kathryn bought in the first paragraph?"

... here is the answer. Potato, leek and sorrel soup! Two leeks, one potato, a bit of garlic and thyme, three or four cups of chicken broth and the leaves (no stems!) of one bunch of sorrel = lemony, herbal, tangy deliciousness. (Especially when garnished with a plop of low fat Greek yogurt.) It certainly isn't the most appetizing color, but the taste is really lovely.

And finally, a picture of Jack curled up in my bathroom sink. I'm going to miss a lot of things about this apartment. I have a feeling that Jack is only gonna miss this one.

2010-04-18T20:08:00.000-04:00

Sunday morning, Brooklyn style.

Wake up to text messages from brunch partner. "You up yet?" Oy... not quite. A quick shower, then navigating the awful weekend subway system up to Cortelyou. Brunch at the bar at Farm on Adderley: red flannel hash, beet mustard, a fried egg. A bloody mary or two and some strong coffee.

Then a wander through the small farmer's market. Hmm... fish for dinner? The fish seller has a few filets, a bunch of whole fish... a little bit too intimidating for a novice fish-cooker. But ooh, those scallops look great! Five of those, please. And some of those crispy Fuji apples at the Red Jacket stand... and half a dozen eggs at Knoll Crest...

Then the food co-op just down the block. Oh hey, they have pea shoots! I've been meaning to make that recipe from the Ad Hoc At Home cookbook... no chanterelles, of course, but shiitake will do beautifully. A little thyme... some dried navy beans for chicken chili later on this week... time to check out and make my way back home.

Then home, to watch a "16 and Pregnant" marathon on MTV and prepare some food for the week. Pork tenderloin brined and roasted.... white beans soaked and boiled... and then it's time for my treat. A lovely Sunday dinner: mushrooms, pea shoots and thyme and scallops with a sweetly caramelized sear. Wow... Thomas Keller definitely knows what he's talking about! The mushrooms and pea shoots are perfect together, bright and savory at the same time.

It's the end of the weekend; time to stretch out on the couch with the cats and eat blackberries straight out of the carton and get ready for Monday. But, you know... I kind of am ready.

2010-04-17T20:44:00.000-04:00

I was planning to cook some pork tenderloin for dinner tonight, with wild rice and asparagus on the side, but the pork was still frozen solid at seven o'clock. (I really need to get the hang of this whole freezing/defrosting thing.) Uh oh! The grocery stores in my neighborhood close long before sunset, and delivery food was really not an option. Porkless and bereft of any other animal flesh of the non-frozen variety, I looked through the cabinets to scramble together a Plan B.

What I came up with: a Barley Melange! Happily for me, it incorporated the last bunch of asparagus in the fridge, the impulse-buy delicata squash on my counter and the last of the cranberry and walnut trail mix in the cabinet. I dressed the salad in a vinaigrette made with olive oil, balsamic and some of the maple syrup I'd brought back from Montreal last month. It was great - the maple and cranberries added sweetness, the pearl barley gave everything a hearty chewiness and the asparagus and walnuts were nice and crunchy.

Two very enthusiastic thumbs up! And now I have leftovers for lunches this week. (I bet this will be even better alongside a couple of slices of that pork tenderloin... whenever it decides to unfreeze itself.)

Impromptu Barley Melange

3 1/2 c. cooked pearl barley
1 delicata squash
1 bunch asparagus
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
1/2 c. dried cranberries
1 T olive oil
1 T maple syrup
2 T balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper

Cook the barley according to instructions. Roast the squash at 375 for about 30 minutes. Steam the asparagus briefly, then blanch. Whisk the ingredients for the dressing together. Combine everything in a big bowl. Serves four as a main course, probs more like six as a side.

2010-04-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

Oh hey! It's spring again!

When I was in college, I knew it was springtime when people started congregating in the main square to play guitar, skateboard, sketch, form impromptu soccer games, blow bubbles and flirt with each other. Now that I'm (allegedly) a grownup, I know it's springtime when I start getting really excited about reading Lucy's Greenmarket Report. Purple asparagus? Pea shoots?! Oh my god. I'm on my way.

This week has been pretty crazy, but I managed to make a couple of yummy veggie dishes. The first one was steamed asparagus with sauteed oyster and hen of the woods mushrooms and ramps, topped with two gorgeous Knoll Crest eggs, over easy. Let me tell you, it was as beautiful as it was delicious; the thick, orange yolk of the eggs oozing out to mix with the rich brown hue of the mushrooms and the bright green asparagus. Unfortunately, I had just gotten home from yoga and I scarfed it all down the moment it hit the plate. No time for photos. Sad face.

But hey, I did take pictures of this!

Hello, gorgeous! I got the idea for this dish - a spring cianfotta - from the Dishing Up Delights blog. My version subtracted the spearmint, subsituted regular garlic for green garlic and added radishes and a Meyer lemon vinaigrette. I made a big batch of cianfotta to bring to a GTFU dinner party that night, and it got great reviews!

What's GTFU, you ask? GTFU stands for Get The Fuck Up! And it's the official motto of a group of awesome Brooklyn-ite (and Manhattan-ite) ladies who I met via a Twitter tweet about forming a Weight Watchers gang. We've been going to WW meetings together, sending encouragement via email and tweets and throwing healthy dinner gatherings... and this new health kick will definitely mean good things for this blog, not to mention this blogger. The more veggies I eat, the happier I feel... and the less room there is for nachos.

So au revoir, parsnip soup with tons of butter and heavy cream... and bonjour, farmer's market! Good times!

Dinner party for fourteen!

2010-02-07T18:32:00.001-05:00

I haven't been cooking as much since the CSA ended. I'm planning to join again for next season, but I've definitely fallen back into my usual cereal-or-takeout dinner routine. Ugh.

But... I did cook an awesome five course dinner for a bunch of my friends last weekend! Fourteen of them, to be precise. I was planning on taking pictures so I could finally update this blog. Unfortunately, my camera wasn't fully charged, so after a couple of introductory pictures, it completely crapped out. Boo! But I still think the meal was worth writing about... and so, here it is!

"Sous chef" Jenny in the foreground and "chef de cuisine" me in the purple sweater, making the parsnip soup.

After a round of Dark and Stormys to start the evening off, Jenny and I got down to business and started making the first course: parsnip soup with a mushroom "mousse." The parsnip soup was out of control. I peeled, chopped and sauteed ten parsnips and a shallot in half a stick of butter until they started to caramelize, then added five cups of vegetable stock and a bit of sea salt and blended it all up with an immersion blender. Once it was nice and smooth, I whisked in another stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream. (I know, I know... saturated fat city, but we only served a quarter-cup portion to each person. The next time I make this soup for an actual meal, I'm definitely gonna cut down on the dairy fat. But for an amuse-bouche sized portion, it was delish.)

Zach approves of the heavy-cream loaded refrigerator.

The mushroom mousse was a total improvisation. I wanted to have something mushroom-y and creamy that would get all nice and melty on top of the warm soup, but all of the recipes I was finding called for gelatin and chilling and molding and I was just not feeling it. Instead, I sauteed a few handfuls of finely chopped oyster, shiitake and portobello mushrooms, mixed them with a bit of marscarpone and then added the mixture to about a cup of freshly whipped cream. It worked out beautifully - the fluffy, creamy mushroom mixture slowly melted into the soup and gave it just a touch of earthy flavor.

The second course was a salad and cheese course: baby arugula, tossed with olive oil and smoked sea salt, piled on top of sliced beets and sprinkled with pulverized pistachios. On the side: a crostini topped with truffled ricotta cheese - white truffle oil whisked into incredibly fresh ricotta - and topped with a drizzle of honey. Simple, easy, delicious. My guests thumb-wrestled for the extra crostini.

(Note: I'd never had truffled ricotta cheese - never even contemplated it, in fact - until visiting Woodwork BK a few weeks before this dinner party. Their truffled ricotta is spectacular, especially when accompanied by a jar of their pickled cherry tomatoes. It was so good that I flagged down the bartender and was like, "I am totally stealing this for my dinner party next week!" My crostini were dope, but their entire menu is doper than dope. If you live in New York City, get thee to Woodwork post-haste!)

The third course was probably the most labor-intensive, and thus the most impressive. It was developed as an homage to (or total rip-off of) Eleven Madison Park's incredible Knoll Crest farm egg dish. I'd started this course the night before, following the Momofuku cookbook's instructions for slow-poaching fourteen eggs in their shells. (Actually, I guess I technically started it on Wednesday morning, when I woke up at an obscenely early hour to trek into Manhattan and purchase two dozen eggs at the Knoll Crest greenmarket booth. Their eggs are just incredible. Oh man, that runny orange yolk...)

I also wanted to add a foam component, as the parmesan foam on EMP's eggy masterpiece is a perfect example of how culinary foams can really make sense in the gestalt of a dish, rather than just be a superfluous and showy addition to it. I didn't really want to shell out the bucks for a whipped cream charger, though, so I figured my egg would have to go foam-less... until I found a recipe for a culinary foam stablized with lecithin and created with an immersion blender. Whoo hoo! One short trip to GNC later, I was making lecithin foam like a pro. Well, not exactly a pro. I'm sure that professionals don't show their pound of lecithin granules to everyone who enters their office for a week while screeching "LOOK AT ME, I'M GONNA MAKE FOAM!"

So anyway: course three was an assemblage of mushroom, asparagus and tarragon topped with a beautiful runny egg, two spears of asparagus, a parmesan foam and a parmesan tuile. It didn't even approach the level of unctuous perfection that Chef Daniel Humm plates at Eleven Madison, but it was pretty freakin good, nevertheless.

Fourth course was "peas and carrots" - penne pasta with a simple sauce of peas and shallots sauteed with butter and blended with cream and topped with strips of proscuitto, and a carrot and saffron risotto with a bit of marscapone topped with shrimp. Matt loved it so much, he proclaimed it "the best goddamn plate of food he'd ever had" and went back for seconds. Yeah, it was pretty good.

And for dessert? Tyler Florence's cracked chocolate earth cake, served with Ciao Bella's unbelievable blackberry-cabernet sorbet, served on a little bit of "chocolate dirt" - really, just a bunch of chocolate animal crackers crushed up in a Ziplock bag. A bunch of us took turns beating up the bag of animal crackers. Participatory dinner wins!

The whole dinner, in fact, was a lovely participatory event. Pulling off a dinner party for fourteen is no joke, and I couldn't have done it without everyone else's contributions. Dan brought extra chairs, Matt brought the table, Nicole was our bartender, Jenny and Danielle helped with all of the cooking and cleaning. (And there was plenty of dish washing, believe me.) Every single person who attended did something to help, and by the end of the evening, we were all drunk, happy and duly rewarded with a belly full of delicious food.

I can't wait for our next dinner party! But next time, I'm gonna charge the camera battery first.

Vegan Potato Leek Swiss Chard Soup!

2009-10-31T08:33:00.000-04:00

This is going to be a picture-free post because, quite frankly, pictures of potato and leek soup are generally disgusting.

It's the end of October, and our CSA is winding down. No longer in the warm, heady days of summer, our farmer has been sending a lot of carrots, celery, potatoes and dark, leafy greens. This week we got a couple of leeks, too, so last night's recipe was pretty obvious: potato, leek and swiss chard soup.

Matt and Batya invited Nicole and me to their place for dinner last night. It was a lovely autumn meal on a beautiful, warm mid-autumn evening. We started out with Batya's zucchini fritters - crispy little pancakes full of feta and dill and dipped in a tzatsiki sauce - and some of the cheese Nicole brought back from Vermont - a soft, creamy and sharp horseradish cheddar and a firmer, milder sage cheddar. Yum!

Batya made a delicious salad out of this week's lettuce, apples, thinly sliced red onions and Annie's goddess dressing. Everyone raved about it - apples in salad are so good. They add just enough crunch and sweetness and... I don't know, awesomeness. Trust me, the salad was good times all around.

Second course was the soup. I'd looked at a bunch of recipes, but most of the traditional ones wouldn't work for one reason or another. Nicole and Batya are both vegetarians, and Nicole can't have too much dairy, so a traditional chicken-stock-and-milk recipe was not going to cut it. I found this recipe online and used it as a basic guideline to bring our soup to fruition.

The initial saute in the dutch oven combined a carrot, some celery, an onion and three cloves of garlic with some olive oil and a little bit of dried thyme. We let them brown a bit and get soft, then added three very small leeks, one very large mutant leek and about four cups of brown-skinned potatoes, scrubbed and peeled by the fabulous Sous Chef Matt Berman. A few more minutes of cooking passed, then we added five cups of water and five veggie bullion cubes, a bay leaf, some fresh thyme and a whole bunch of fresh dill and let it all bubble away for forty minutes or so while we drank some wine and chatted and played with Matt and Batya's six week old son. (Cutest baby ever, by the way!)

When everything was nice and soft and combined, we stuck the immersion blender into the pot and blended it all up into a delicious, veggie-full puree. The swiss chard was chopped into thin ribbons and added, along with salt and pepper, for a quick wilt into the soup. We served it up with slices of sourdough bread to good reviews all around! (I still think it could have used some butter and a splash or two of half and half... but that's just my love of dairy fat speaking. Even vegan, the soup was delicious!)

Dessert was cheesecake and chocolate covered strawberries, picked up by Batya in honor of Nicole's birthday. Aww! Happy birthday, Nicole!

I'm going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so this week's CSA delivery was one of the last for me. I'm gonna miss it over the winter, but I'm definitely looking forward to next year! I'll continue to update the blog with adventures in wintertime Greenmarket cooking... celeraic remoulade, anyone?

2009-10-08T23:31:00.000-04:00

Quasi-drunk food photography. We've all been there.

CSA dinner tonight was at the other Nicole's place... we can do this first-grade style and call her Nicole M for purposes of this blog entry. Nicole M and her partner, Rhonda, live in a gorgeous brownstone in Prospect Heights that gives me the kind of real estate - and especially kitchen - envy that can only be dulled by three glasses of wine and a nosedive into the leftover pumpkin whoopie pies from One Girl Cookies. Nicole M is Nicole R's share partner, so for tonight's cooking endeavors, we decided to get our CSA sharing team together for a cookout on their deck! (We were short one Matt and Batya, but since they've got a three week old baby, their absence can be excused. This time.)

Damn, these two are amazing hosts. Look at that cheese plate! We sliced up CSA apples and pears to team up with the cheese. Those gorgeous, bright orange CSA carrots were used to scoop up some otherworldly tuna salad, and Rhonda grilled some halloumi cheese for our second cheese course.

Oh yeah. I said it. Second cheese course. If you're not jealous right now, you're just wrong.

But we were just getting started...

Dinner consisted of deliciously grilled chicken, again courtesy of Rhonda, who's a master at the grill. Seriously, she has a silver James Bond-esque case just for her implements of grilling. I think I have a new best friend.

Moving on... we cut up our assorted potatoes, wrapped them in foil with olive oil, rosemary and thyme and plopped them on the grill. The green beans were lightly cooked and combined with caramelized red onion, feta cheese, fresh dill from the garden and a lemon dijon dressing.

And those yummy cobs of corn were just thrown onto the grill in their husks. We rolled them in butter at the table, just in case there wasn't enough dairy fat in the meal. (Can there ever be enough dairy fat in a meal? I don't think so.) But on the off chance we were skimping on the cheese portion of the evening, there was a third cheese dish: this beautiful Caprese salad.

Aren't those little basil leaves the cutest? I just want to take them home and snuggle up with them. And then eat them.

By the time dessert rolled around - pumpkin and chocolate whoopie pies, assorted cupcakes and eensy weensy little palmiers from One Girl Cookies and a Trader Joe's apple pie - we were all too full to even contemplate eating more food, let alone taking pictures of it. We eventually made room for the eating part. Or at least I did.

There's always room for frosting.

2009-10-07T02:30:00.000-04:00

Hey look, corn and slow-cooker barbecue chicken!

Last Thursday, Nicole and I weren't really sure what to expect in our CSA haul. Even though we're firmly into October, we've still been getting things - like corn and tomatoes - that I sort of associate with late summer, and so far, we haven't gotten any of the root vegetables that we're still dying to bake into warm, yummy gratins and casseroles. We also felt like a challenge. So we made Indian food!

Here are the veggies we started with... hello, beautifuls!

Neither of us had ever attempted something quite as intimidating as Indian food before, so I scoured the Internerd for appropriate recipes. We hit up Sahadi's for spices before heading to the CSA. Turmeric, cardamom pods, cumin... and some garam masala that exploded in my bag on the way home, giving my shiny new apple haul a light dusting of garam masala that may or may not accidentally infuse the applesauce I'm planning to make tomorrow.

The recipes seemed easy enough, so I got a little cocky and didn't really follow any particular recipe to the letter. I couldn't find a mixed vegetable curry recipe that felt right, so I just sort of made it up as I went along, following the basic proportions of onion, garlic, ginger paste and spices to mixed-up veggies. We had the most gorgeous orange and yellow carrots, some wax beans left over from last week, some strange flat green beans and a couple of Japanese eggplant. I tossed in a little extra chili powder to make it spicy, and stirred in some yogurt towards the end to make it creamy, and in the end, it was tasty - if a bit too spicy.

Since we'd already bought the spices, and since Jessica and I are both suckers for it, we also made chicken korma with the same basic ingredients, sliced almonds, some butter that I didn't bother to clarify, a can of coconut milk and some more yogurt. The korma was definitely underspiced, but... you know, whatevs. I tried!

Served over basmati rice, we wound up feeding five hungry Brooklynites - and stuffing a couple of sample bites into a sixth - with leftovers a-plenty. I'm definitely not opening up an Indian restaurant any time soon, but I think we were all pretty happy with the results!

Veggie curry on the left, chicken korma on the right

Extreme closeup! This is actually kind of gross. I have to stop
photographing food after three glasses of wine.

This Thursday, we're planning on a goodbye-warm-weather barbecue at Nicole 2's place. I'm hoping for some eggplant to throw on the grill... and maybe some turnips for that gratin, finally.

Cooking with Nicole, part deuce

2009-09-27T15:44:00.001-04:00

Last week, Nicole's friend Courtney joined us as we tried to figure out what to do with the gigantic, two foot long summer squash that my friend Beth gave me. Besides whacking each other over the head with it, of course.

We eventually decided to make a stuffed squash. I found a recipe that involved portobello mushrooms, quinoa and ricotta cheese... but Trader Joe's was sold out of the latter two, and we wanted to add whatever we'd gotten in our CSA pickup, so we wound up just mixing together some couscous, some strange, chewy grains from TJ's, tomato, green pepper and onion from the CSA, portobello mushrooms and queso blanco from the bodega. (Oh, and an egg to bind everything together... and a bunch of red pepper flakes... and some other spices I found in Nicole's cabinet.)

It reminded me of the kind of hippie meals we used to have at the co-op in college. Veggie- and grain-centric, cheap and tasty. It was good, especially for something that we basically just made up as we went along.

Dinner with Monica this week started out with Nicole's warm Brie and hot pepper jelly on crackers - an indulgent appetizer before a lighter main course. We got beets and tons of apples this week, so Nicole and I decided to make an apple, orange and beet salad with toasted walnuts and a side of corn. I roasted the beets, sliced everything up and drizzled it with olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper. Yum...

For dessert, the pendulum swung back to indulgent: warm, cinnamon-y apple crisp. I think I went a little too heavy on the brown sugar, so none of us could really clean our plates... but I think it'll be a good topping for some oatmeal later in the week.

I've still got last week's pears kicking around, so sometime this week, I'm going to follow Nicole's lead and make some pear-applesauce. (Her version was sooo good.)

2009-09-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

Dinner at Matt and Batya's: five courses of CSA awesomeness. First up are homemade jalapeno poppers. Like a moron, I sliced the jalapenos with bare hands and promptly rubbed my lips. Whoa, homemade collagen injection! The rest of the meal was eaten through my newly puffy Olsen-twins-style lips.

We stuffed the CSA jalapenos with a mixture of cream cheese and super-sharp cheddar cheese, dipped them in egg wash, rolled them in breadcrumbs and fried 'em up.

Soup course next: Batya's spectacular vegetarian red pepper soup. I had absolutely nothing to do with this so I don't know the recipe, but I've definitely got to get it out of her ASAP. That evening, we ate it with a slice of sourdough bread, but she says she usually serves it with grilled Gruyere sandwiches, which sounds like heaven in a bowl.

Fresh corn, tomato and herb salad. Super simple, super fresh, super tasty.

Eggplant and caramelized onion pizza with mozzarella and pizza dough from Monty's. We cooked these on Matt and Batya's pizza stone.

And finally, Batya's famous chocolate chip blondies. I could eat these every day for the next five hundred years and still want more.

Now for some picture-less menu bragging! A few days ago, my friend Adam and I hosted a farmer's market-focused dinner for a few of our coworkers, to rave reviews all around. Adam suggested that we just go to the farmer's market on our lunch break, pick up whatever random stuff looked tasty and figure out what to make out of it. This is what we came up with:

Heirloom tomato, peach, pancetta and basil salad with bacon-balsamic viniagrette
Corn, wild mushroom and cilantro salad with seared scallops
Grilled eggplant and fresh mozzarella stacks with homemade pesto
Potato, onion and red pepper frittata with garlic aioli and chorizo
Apple upside down cake and fresh whipped cream

It wound up being a totally lovely meal, served slowly and in courses and with lots of wine and laughter and compliments to the chefs. Cooking for friends is so nice - we not only get to be creative with the menus and flex our culinary skillz for an audience, but we also get to enjoy a fancy-pants meal with our friends for a fraction of what it would cost in a restaurant. We can't wait to do it again! But next time, we'll be sure to take pictures.

2009-09-13T23:23:00.000-04:00

The last few days of summer have been good to us. Our CSA share this week is full of corn; heirloom, non-heirloom and grape tomatoes; onions and potatoes and collard greens and lettuce. Even our fruit share is exciting - bunches of nectarines and plums have replaced the endless parade of undersized peaches. The bags of veggies have gotten so full, it's hard to haul them home!

It's been years since I've been in school, but Sunday nights are still kind of icky. I love my job, but I'm always a lot happier on Friday nights, with two whole glorious days of sleeping in, socializing and sloth lie ahead, than Sunday nights when you know the next day is gonna be full of alarm clocks, long commutes and to-do lists.

All the more reason, though, to have a lovely Sunday dinner. For this evening's fancy meal, I cooked the strip steak I'd ordered through the CSA's naturally-raised meat delivery service. It was a beautiful steak, unfortunately cooked by someone who really has no idea what to do with a nice piece of meat. Ten minutes, two smoke-detector alarms and three open windows later, what I thought was going to be a medium-rare steak was basically still moo-ing. So I sliced it up, tossed it back in the pan for a couple of seconds on each side, and wound up with a bunch of less-attractive - but perfectly pinky-red on the inside - slices of steak. On the side - buttery corn off the cob and a really simple salad of sliced tomato, parsley, salt and pepper.

Unfortunately, I forgot to charge my DSLR's battery this week, so I wasn't able to get a decent picture of dinner. I suck. Instead, please accept this picture of the delicious peach and plum crostada that I made for dessert:

And also, the picture of the sliced nectarine, butter and maple syrup on Trader Joe's whole-grain waffles that I had for Saturday breakfast:

(Those nectarines aren't fluorescent in real life... only in the flash of my point and shoot. Though I guess if I hadn't been too lazy to pull out the Nikon on Saturday morning, I would have realized the battery was dead long before Sunday dinner.)

Coming soon: a full accounting, with pictures, of last Thursday's CSA feast at Matt and Batya's! Homemade jalapeno poppers, whaaat?!

Cooking with Nicole

2009-08-29T13:22:00.000-04:00

Me and Jessica getting silly in the kitchen...

For the past two weeks, my friend and fellow CSA member Nicole and I have been going back to her apartment after veggie pickups to make dinner. It's fantastic - all of the benefits of going out to dinner with your friends without the massive bill coming to the table at the end of the evening.

Last week, Jessica joined us for arugula and tomato salad and a pesto dish that I recreated from the memory of the trofie with pesto that Jason and I had first encountered on a long-ago trip through Cinque Terre, Italy. We ate our feast on Nicole's couch, paired with a bottle of cold pinot grigio, and chatted for hours.

This week, Matt came over and we made a corn and heirloom tomato salad and a terrific roasted eggplant and carmelized onion pizza, served with a sparkling shiraz. (On a side note, can I just say how much I love sparkling red wines? Nothing says summer like a chilled Lambrusco or its equivalent.)

No pictures were taken, save for one iPhone snapshot of me giving the thumbs up and wielding a pizza cutter next to our eggplant creation, but trust me when I say that everything looked as lovely as it tasted. The recipes follow, but since we mostly cook with our senses, the amounts are not precise. Experiment!

Pasta Cinque Terre

(This is traditionally made with trofie, a Ligurian pasta made with flour and water and shaped into little, tapered squiggles. Since we didn't have any on hand, and didn't feel like searching them out, we substituted tricolored rotini. You can use any short, thick-ish pasta - penne would probably be good, too.)

medium sized box of pasta
leaves from one or two bunches of basil
small handful of arugula (parsley works well, too)
olive oil
pine nuts
Parmesan cheese
two cloves of garlic
about a cup of potatoes, cut into one inch chunks - we used fingerlings, since that's what the CSA provided, but you could use whatever's around.
a big handful of green beans, ends snapped off

In a blender or food processor, combine the basil, arugula, about 1/4 cup of pine nuts, two cloves of garlic and a generous splash of olive oil and combine. You might have to add more olive oil, but it's cool - just remind yourself how great it is for your heart and your skin and hair and keep drizzling it in. When it's all combined into a slightly thin paste, add a quarter cup or so of grated Parmesan and stir it around. Set aside. Boil the pasta according to directions. In a separate pot, boil the potato chunks until tender. Remove the chunks, set aside, and blanch the green beans for two or three minutes. In a big bowl, combine the pasta and the pesto, stir together and season with salt and pepper, then add in the green beans and potatoes. Garnish with a sprinkle of pine nuts and/or extra Parmesan cheese, and serve.

Corn and Heirloom Tomato Salad

(This is one of those dishes that's only as good as its ingredients. If you don't have an awesome, perfectly ripe, in-season tomato, then don't bother. But if you do... definitely make this.)

one gigantic tomato
three ears of corn
olive oil
vinegar (we used red wine vinegar, since that's what we had, but you could totally use balsamic. I'd avoid white vinegar, though.)
parsley
whatever other herbs you've got lying around, especially basil

Boil the corn until tender. Slice the kernels off into a large bowl. Dice the tomato and mix it into the corn. Add a bit of olive oil, a splash of vinegar, some finely chopped herbs, salt and pepper and stir. Done!

Roasted Eggplant and Carmelized Onion Pizza

(We were far too hungry to make our own dough for this recipe, so we went to the pizza place down the block from Nicole's apartment and bought a ball of dough off of them for three bucks. You could make your own dough if that's how you roll, but I think it's much easier - not to mention more fool-proof - to just buy it from the professionals.)

a ball of dough
half of a standard sized block of mozzarella
half an eggplant, thinly sliced into circles
three onions, thinly sliced
butter
olive oil
banana peppers, if you're feeling frisky... or if you just got a bunch in your CSA box and you don't really know what else to do with them

Pick a baking surface for your pizza. We used two smallish cookie pans, but if you have a pizza rock, I'd totally go with that. Grease it up with some oil and sprinkle with cornmeal to avoid sticking. Stretch out the dough, making sure to patch any rips or tears, until it's fairly thin. Set all of that aside and start cooking the veggies. You want to cook the onions over medium-low heat with a pat of butter and a splash of olive oil, stirring every once in a while, until they get soft and caramelized and they smell so good that everyone will be hovering behind you, forks poised, eyes glazed with a manic hunger. This is probably a good time to serve your salad course.

After the onions are done, set them aside and start frying up the eggplant. Add a small pat of butter and small splash of olive oil to the pan and lay the eggplant down so that it forms a single layer. It's usually easier to cut the rounds in half... you can fit more in the pan that way. Cook over the same medium-high heat until each side is lightly browned, then set aside while you cook the next batch. While you're doing this, you can shred the mozzarella and sprinkle it across the resting pizza dough.

When all the veggies are done, distribute them evenly across the pizza. If you're using the banana peppers - and we hope you do - now is the time to slice them and add them to the pizza. Then stick the whole mess into the oven at 400 degrees and cook until you can't stand waiting any longer... or about twenty minutes, to be a little bit more precise. Cut it into slices and serve to your hungry friends, then pour another glass of wine and wait for the compliments to roll in.

(Trust me. They will.)

2009-08-17T23:27:00.001-04:00

Oh man. You know who has two thumbs and sucks at updating her blog?

That's right. This girl!

As summer gets hotter and I get lazier, I've taken to eating most of my CSA share out of hand. It's pretty boring... and I'm definitely not going to take any pictures of myself sacked out on my couch, gnawing on a cucumber or eating a tomato like an apple... thus, no updates. :(

Here's to changing that, though!

These miniature peaches...

plus a pint of blueberries, a pint of raspberries and one glug of maple syrup, cooked over low heat for ten minutes or so...

...becomes the yummiest waffle topping ever.

And this onion and scallion?

They were clearly born to be mixed with some Yukon Gold potato and roasted in the oven for a while with butter and olive oil and some herbes de provence. The fancy organic chicken with the crackly skin was just as good. Love you, too, CSA meat delivery!

And finally... no salad dressing? No problem.

At least not when you have the following things in your cupboard: vegetable oil (eek, ran out of olive oil!) and balsamic vinegar, honey, salt, pepper, herbes de provence. Whisk it all up and pour it over your all-CSA salad:

(Well, all except the goat cheese.)

Introducing guest blogger Batya!

2009-07-04T11:53:00.001-04:00

The lovely and accomplished Batya von Berman - the better half of the other half of our CSA share - has done it again! This is her first guest appearance on Cooking Inside the Box, but hopefully not her last. All pictures and text by BvB... enjoy!

Guest Blogger Batya "Chef de Cuisine" (von) Berman nee Stepelman.

La Trouchia (Green Chard Omelette/Fritatta)

http://rosajackson.blogspot.com/2008/01/la-trouchia-swiss-chard-omelette.html

This was so delicious I can hardly believe it came out of my own kitchen.

I found this recipe and made it without a mis-step. I tweaked it only slightly.

Wash the green chard (about 5 HUGE leaves) - see picture- and then soak them in water and a pinch of sea salt for about 30 minutes. Put leaves into a salad spinner and remove all excess water.

Cut the chard into long thin ribbon strips and set them in a large mixing bowl. Add some flat leaf parsley and basil. I took fresh herbs from my "roof" garden (which was recently attacked by a squirrel, but is now making a significant comeback!)

In a separate bowl mix: 6 eggs. One tablespoon of organic sour cream. 2 oz of organic Parmesan (grated). Black pepper and sea salt to taste. Whisk away.

Add the mixture to the ribbons of chard.

Coat fry pan with 2.5 tablespoons of olive oil. Add all ingredients. Cover tightly with lid.

Flip after 15 minutes. Cook bottom side for another 10 minutes and serve. Delicious!

Bon Appetito!

2009-07-03T14:31:00.000-04:00

This week's haul looked especially gorgeous laid out on Matt and Batya's kitchen counter, post share-divide. We got more kale, chard, crispy snow peas, gigantic cucumbers, radishes, the last of the garlic scapes and deep red cherries. Oh, and another kohlrabi! Actually, two this time, so we each get a whole one. I swear I'm actually going to cook something with it this time!

I'm still feeling lazy on my first day of stay-cation, so lunch today was simple: pumpernickel bread, spread with softened butter and topped with sliced radishes and sea salt. (The other little sandwich there is prosciutto and goat cheese... surprisingly not as tasty as the radish one!) I'm not sure if I'm digging the pumpernickel - I think next time, I'm gonna replace it with a baguette - but the radish/butter/salt combo made up for whatever the bread was lacking.

And meet today's breakfast: cherries. Served with cherries. Garnished with cherries. Why fiddle around with perfection?

2009-06-29T21:14:00.000-04:00

I've never been much of a fish-cooker. In fact, I'm not particularly good at cooking any kind of meat. I was a vegetarian for many of my formative culinary-skillz-learning years, so while I can whip up a lot of veggie dishes, I can also mess up a perfectly lovely steak like nobody's business.

It's time to start learning, though. Fish is tasty and light and full of protein, and it's kind of ridiculous that the full extent of my fishy knowledge is what kind of sushi I like to order. So I found this recipe for prosciutto-wrapped halibut that looked not only yummy (hello, pork fat!) but also pretty hard to mess up.

The asparagus puree was so not going to happen, though. By the time I got home from work and the gym, it was already eight, my tummy was growling, and I wasn't about to drag the food processor out of its hiding spot just for the vegetable portion of the evening. Instead, I sauteed my CSA's swiss chard with a little bit of garlic scape and some shallots. It was great - there really is a difference between super-fresh chard and the supermarket kind. It just tastes... I don't know. Green. In a really good way!

The empty spot on the plate was reserved for some maple-glazed turnips. Unfortunately, I only had one saute pan.... and I kind of timed everything wrong... thus, no picture of the turnips. (You're not missing much. Just visualize a bunch of white chunks covered in dark-brown syup and you've pretty much got it.) They were awesome, though, and they arrived on my plate after most of the fish and chard were gone, making for a sort of sweet, vegetable-based dessert.

Mmm... sweet vegetable-based dessert. Great, now I'm craving sweet potato pie. Thanks a lot, maple-glazed turnips!

2009-06-25T21:34:00.000-04:00

Christmas morning at my parent's house is always something I look forward to. The lights, the tree, the presents... the mimosas! Christmas breakfast, on the other hand...

My parents, like any good Italian-Irish parents, go nuts on the holiday food. Christmas Eve dinner is always a feast of seven fishes, Christmas dinner always involves my dad's spectacular garlic and turkey broth minestrone with plenty of beans and escarole, but Christmas breakfast has, for as long as I can remember, featured a sausage, cheese, bread and egg concoction that the rest of the family calls "strata" and I call a holiday disaster.

It's not that the premise is bad. Strata is like a savory bread pudding - egg and milk soaked bread baked with cheese and meat. What could be bad about that? I think it's the sausage that pushes it over the line for me. I like every single kind of meat in the universe - except breakfast sausage. Maybe it's the fennel, or the inevitable fake maple syrup flavor. Whatever it is, though, it makes me kinda queasy whenever I get a whiff of it. So every Christmas, I gorge myself on homemade cinnamon rolls and scrambled eggs while trying to dodge the wafting strata fumes.

I digress. Strata is a great idea. It uses up all of your leftovers and it tastes really good, when it's not chock-full of Jimmy Dean. By the time I made this on Tuesday night, my chard was getting kind of wilty and the sell-by date on my chicken sausages was rapidly approaching. But mixed up in a casserole dish with some bread that had seen better days - and some brand-new milk and eggs from the bodega - my veggies became a tasty dinner that was even tastier for breakfast the next day.

It kinda freaked me out, though. Putting chicken sausage in an egg dish. As I was pouring the eggs in the casserole dish, I was like, "Eggs... meet your mommy!"

Sick, dude.

Chard and Chicken Sausage Strata
serves six

one bunch of chard
clove of garlic
scallions, if you got 'em
olive oil
three chicken sausages (I used Italian-style, but you can use whatever you feel like. Veggie sausage might make the whole chicken and egg thing less creepy, too. Or pork. I have no objections to pork.)
four big slices of white bread, or five smaller slices of white bread
nine eggs
a cup and a half of milk

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, if you are the kind of person who can remember to preheat your oven. (I'm not.) Saute the chard and scallions in olive oil and garlic until they're all wilted. Then take the greens out of your pan and add the chicken sausages. Cook them until they're done. Mine were pre-cooked so I just cooked them til they got a little crispy. Dump the sausage in your casserole dish. Chop up the bread into big chunks and put that on top of the sausage. Then put the chard on top of that. Mix up the eggs and milk with some salt and pepper and pour it into the casserole, making sure to smush the bread down a little so it all gets soaked. If you are me, this is the point where you will remember to turn your oven on. It's okay. The bread will just soak a little extra while you wait for it to heat up!

Anyway, cook the strata for 50 to 60 minutes. You'll know it's done when it gets all browned and fluffy and a knife to the middle comes out clean. It's tasty hot or cold, on cozy winter holidays with your family or on rainy summer days while you're scrambling around getting ready for work.

2009-06-22T21:09:00.000-04:00

Tonight's dinner began as a pork tenderloin special at Garden of Eden about a month ago, during the height of swine flu panic. I'd ordered a quarter pound, saw the price, did a double-take and asked for a few extra cuts. (I can't remember what it was now, but I think it was something totally insane like $2.99/lb. Hot damn!) I stuck the miscellaneous pork in the freezer, feeling totally thrifty and proud of myself.

When I saw the bok choy in this week's CSA pickup, I knew that my frozen pork had finally found its companion. I came home from work late today, after a bridal shower gift buying excursion that somehow turned into a shoe shopping excursion, and all I wanted to do was flip open my phone and order a bucket of sweet and sour chicken. But the bok choy and defrosted pork chunk were calling me instead.

"Eat us! We're dying in here!" they said. (Well... not dying so much as wilting. Or... defrosting. You know, whatever it is that food does that makes it important to eat it really soon.)

I obliged. Ten minutes - and a little bit of mysterious "stir fry sauce" - later, there was pork, scallion and bok choy stir fry on the table... and all was right with the world.

2009-06-21T22:53:00.000-04:00

I know that some people will disagree with me, but I think that the reason we have Sunday mornings is so we can have brunch. Starting the last day of the weekend with a strangely-timed and inevitably indulgent meal sets the tone for the whole day. Some weekends, I crave complicated egg-y scrambles, fancy little mesclun salads and strong cocktails somewhere loud and busy and fun, but this weekend was all about comfort food, eaten at home in my jammies on the couch right next to Pickles the cat.

I still had some buttermilk from last week's strawberry cupcakes, and some blackberries from last week's trip to Fairway. Both were nearing the end of their useful lifespan in the fridge, and so they were more than happy to jump into a mixing bowl with some flour and egg and baking powder and become my breakfast.

Dinner was a bit more veggie-centric. I roasted a chicken breast with some of the mystery herbs from the CSA, sauteed the zephyr squash with a little bit of olive oil and butter and drizzled some honey over the world's tastiest caramelized brussels sprouts. A friend who's also in this CSA pointed out that the squash tasted kind of nutty, and she was right! It's really good - there's less mushy seedy stuff than in a regular summer squash, and there's a definite nuttiness to it.

Maybe the nuttiness is why I liked it so much. I can relate.

2009-06-21T12:20:00.000-04:00

Yesterday started out with a field trip to Woodside to have lunch with Jamey and his sister at Sripraphai. The food there was fantastic - just as spicy and complex and yummy as zillions of reviews have promised - but we probably couldn't have consumed more deep-fried, sugary or heavy food if we'd tried. (We just couldn't resist the crunchy, deep-fried watercress salad with tofu and mushrooms and cashews, though! Or at least, I certainly couldn't.)

After such a late (and calorie-tastic!) meal, a lighter dinner was in order. I'd previously Googled "garlic scapes," trying to figure out what to do with them, and came across an article in the Times that suggested blending them into a simple white bean dip.

And so, I did. I had a can of white beans in my cabinet that weren't getting any younger, so I put them into the blender with both scapes, a big splash of olive oil and some salt. Thirty seconds later, my hummus was born! Scooped up with some sliced (and decidedly non-CSA) bell peppers, it was a tasty and healthy dinner.

It might not have been the best thing to eat before going out dancing, though. Unless my dancing partners were really into garlic breath. Next time, I'd just use one scape to one can of beans. Those suckers are strong!

2009-06-18T21:20:00.000-04:00

June 18th is finally here! Matt and I left work at five, both exhausted and grumpy after a long and rainy day. By the time we got to the pickup spot, though, our bad moods gave way to ridiculous excitement... our veggies were here!

I'm too tired to start cooking tonight, so here are some glamour shots of my half of the haul. The crazy curlicue above is a garlic scape... I've never had one before, but a bit of research has suggested that they're delicious sliced up and sauteed in butter. I'm thinking bruschetta...

These are zephyr squash! They're pretty small - and my picture of them is pretty out of focus - they're about the size of one of my fingers. We got seven of these to split between us.

I loooove bok choy. Super excited about sauteeing this with some sliced pork and soy sauce. There are weird little holes in the leaves, but I'm kind of whatevs about it. Maybe some bugs were munching on it... who can blame them? I'd be munching on it, too.

Herbs! In a little pot of dirt! I'm not entirely sure which herbs they are. One of them smells like oregano.

These strawberries are out of control. So red and perfectly ripe and sweet and tart and delicious. I doubt that they will survive the evening.

This freaky, alien-looking vegetable is apparently kohlrabi. I have no idea what to do with it. I bet Google will know, though...

And finally, the greens. To your left, we have some kale... scallions in the middle... and a big bunch of lovely chard on the right. Since it seems boring to just chop 'em up and cook them up with some garlic, I think I'm gonna make a strata with some of the greens and some chicken sausage.

Oh man. I have to go. It's strawberry time!

2009-04-27T21:24:00.001-04:00

Our first CSA shipment comes in on June 18th... which seems like forever away! I'm ready to cook up some awesome local veggies now! So I woke up absurdly early on Saturday morning, tossed my fancy little canvas shopping bag into my purse and set off for the Union Square Greenmarket.

Many veggies were bought, but none brought me quite as much joy as the pricey little bundle of ramps I picked up.

Ramps, for those who haven't been introduced to these yummy little stalks of April goodness, are wild leeks. Their season is short, their collection is labor-intensive, and their flavor is incomparable. Well... that's not true, it's definitely comparable, but definitely awesome. They're sort of like a combination of garlic and onions, and are delicious either pickled or lightly sauteed and added to pretty much anything. On Sunday morning, I sauteed a single ramp in some butter, scrambled in a couple of Knoll Crest Farm eggs and then melted some goat cheese into the whole mess. Verdict? Om nom nom times a million!

Sometimes, though, you just need a big bowl of pasta. Tonight for dinner, I was inspired by What I Like's ramp spaghetti recipe. I don't really dig mint so much, so I left it out and instead tossed in a bit of the young garlic I'd picked up on Saturday. Here's the sauce cooking:

Hello, butter and olive oil! I love you!

This dish is insanely easy to put together. I just added some cooked spaghetti, stirred it around, poached an egg and plopped it atop the tangle of noodles and added salt and pepper. After a good fork-pokin', the bright yellow yolk oozed out into the pasta, making a rich and gooey sauce for the garlicky pile of spaghetti and ramps. And about ten minutes after I'd started cooking, I was getting comfy on the couch with my big plate of tasty carbs. Cheaper than takeout, and about a zillion times more exciting!

Tonight, I'll be making a spinach frittata to bring to work for lunch this week. It sounds like a great way to use up some of the massive - and cheap! - bag of spinach I picked up this weekend, as well as some of last week's leftover goat cheese and this week's dozen eggs. I'll let you know how it goes...

2009-04-23T21:29:00.000-04:00

You've got to love early spring. The days are getting longer, crocuses are blooming in people's front yards, I'm stocking up on flip-flops and getting my bike tuned up... but even better than all of these things combined, it's finally pea season! Pea greens in a salad, chilled pea soup, freshly shelled peas steamed with a little bit of butter... I say, om nom nom to all of the above!

I haven't come across fresh peas at the farmer's market yet - though I've got my fingers crossed for this weekend - but I just couldn't resist the bag of sugar snap peas at Trader Joe's on Monday. Together with the big, lovely bunch of asparagus next to them on the shelf, they're the best part of the awesome spring-y salad I've been eating all week.

I chopped up the asparagus stalks and quickly blanched them, along with the sugar snap peas, then tossed them into a Ziplock and into the fridge. The lettuce base for the salad is butter lettuce, radicchio, organic microgreens and some chopped up fresh dill, all tossed together and popped into its own Ziplock. In the morning, I combine a bit of each into a salad-size container, add olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt, a few slices of luscious, soft chevre and a sprinkle of walnuts. Voila! I may be lunching under the fluorescent lights at my desk, but I'm eating pure springtime.

Intro

2009-04-21T19:59:00.000-04:00

Whoo hoo! My officemate, his wife and I just got word that our applications for a spot in our local CSA were accepted, and that - starting in mid-June - we can look forward to lots of fresh, local fruits and veggies coming into our kitchens. We're all really psyched, and I can't wait for the deliveries to start coming!

Excitement aside, I know myself and my history of letting even the yummiest of produce linger, uneaten and abandoned, at the back of my fridge while I order takeout for the umpteenth time this week.... so a little bit of motivation is in order! And since I really dig reading food blogs, trying out new recipes and sharpening my amateur photography skillz, what better motivation than a blog?

So from June to November - and maybe beyond? - I'll be cooking up the contents of my CSA box and miscellaneous greenmarket additions and blogging about the results. Here's hoping that it's awesome...

Yay veggies! Yay locavores! Yay community supported agriculture!