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

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

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!

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!

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!)

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!

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.