Deb Perelman's Blog, page 11
December 3, 2021
new york sour
If you created a mood board that accumulated all of my cocktail interests — whiskey, lemon juice, succinctness, and some kind of niche New York spin [see: Fairytale of New York, Perfect Manhattan] — you might also wonder why it’s taken 15 years for us to talk about the wonder that is the New York Sour. Let’s waste no more time without it. The New York Sour is, in fact, a classic whiskey sour — whiskey, lemon juice, simple syrup, and an egg white, if you wish, for a more dramatic texture — with dash of red wine that, ideally, should float atop creating distinct layers that integrate as you sip. I had thought that rye is more common than bourbon, because rye can come from New York, but have yet to find that corroborated. Regardless, you can use what you have, as I did.
November 11, 2021
cranberry pecan bread
Last week, in a continued effort to get my fridge back to inbox zero after it was groaning under the weight of the extraneous contents of a few shoots here this fall, I decided to take my surplus of cranberries, oranges, and pecans and turn them into a cranberry bread. Except — wait — I don’t have a recipe for cranberry bread. Why did you guys let me go 15 years without a cranberry bread recipe on this site? How did I go 1300 recipes deep in the archives and never find my forever version of one of most classic late fall recipes everyone deserves in their repertoire? Let’s fix this right now.
Along the way to this final cranberry bread — which yes, predictably required purchasing more cranberries, pecans, and oranges for testing and retesting, as if I’d misunderstood the assignment — two things happened that shocked even me.
November 3, 2021
fall bliss salad
We had friends over on Saturday for a Please Help Me Clean Out The Fridge dinner. Between a cookbook shoot (coming next fall!) and filming new YouTube episodes (coming next week!), my already-overtaxed kitchen spaces have been groaning at the seams. As someone who weirdly delights in an empty fridge — my version of a clean desk, clear mind — I needed to clean the slate before starting on anything new. Fortunately, some friends selflessly stepped up to the plate and we now have two fewer lasagnas, one less mega-pie, and one fewer neglected winter squash holding up progress.
October 24, 2021
old-school dinner rolls
I have a serious soft spot for dinner rolls: small, buttery, plush rounds that I have, to this day, never actually eaten with dinner, you know, warmed in a basket. (But I hear it’s great!) At the bakery where I worked in high school, they’d come out of the oven in a big pan, fully kissingcrusted and that part where you pull two rolls apart and a few feathery filaments of bread that couldn’t decide which roll they’d like to adhere to when separated are absolutely my favorite part. A warm roll, split and spread with salted butter or jam or both was my breakfast so many mornings. When I make them at home these days, I’m equally likely to use them for small egg sandwiches for breakfast, slider rolls for pulled pork, or even alongside a bowl of soup on a chilly day like this.
October 14, 2021
winter squash and spinach pasta bake
I am in awe of people who can make a meal plan, repeating many favorite dishes weekly or several times a year, knowing that they love what they love. Because I’m not: I like shiny new recipes. My favorite thing to cook will always be the last new thing I made. All attempts to be a responsible sort of person with a plan are consistently jettisoned by a sparkly whim that landed in my head in the last day or two, like a Big Apple Crumb Cake. Or, in this case, an Ottolenghi recipe from The Guardian I apparently bookmarked over three years ago and forgot about until this stunning image flashed across my screen a few weeks ago and all of my best-laid October plans were kicked to the curb. I haven’t a single regret.
October 7, 2021
big apple crumb cake
This is the bouldered and dramatic intersection of two of my favorite things: cinnamon baked apples and a thick crumb cake. I don’t know how they make crumb cake where you are, but here in New York, and where I grew up in New Jersey, crumb cake isn’t a genteel cinnamon-ribboned or finely streusel-ed coffee cake, but a hefty square that’s 50% crumb topping and 50% a golden, sour cream-enriched cake and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Thanks to brown sugar and cinnamon, the crumb topping is always a dark stripe, and a snow-cap of powdered sugar isn’t optional. Fruit is, but this is too good with fresh apples to skip them.
For such a loud and attention-demanding cake (I’m still talking about cake, I think?), no delicate slice or dice of apples will do so I use here a full pound of thick wedges snugged so tightly they barely fit in their confines, an all-too-accurate New York real estate story. Squeezing your crumbs in small handfuls before breaking them over the apples created more boulder-like pieces. Baking this cake for almost an hour at a slightly lower temperature gives the apples enough time to get tender, their juices bubbling. Your kitchen will smell, at minimum, like a blissful epiphany of apples, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and at peak melodrama, the absolutely best decision we’ve made yet in October.
August 9, 2021
baked farro with summer vegetables
If things seem a little quiet around here this summer, do know that it’s less because I’m out having a hot vax summer and more because I’m in my own personal quarantine-for-a-good-cause: finishing up my third cookbook, which will be out next fall. Although I’m somewhat (“somewhat”) panicked by the vanishing weeks between now and the deadline, I am so excited about this book and I can’t wait to tell you more about it, you know, should I survive the photoshoot and edits. (If you’ve spent some time on this site, you know what a forbidding task the copyeditor has ahead.)
But I can’t let another week go by without telling you about the most delicious, pinnacle-of-summer baked grain dish that has ever existed in my kitchen. The origin of this recipe is pasta bake that a favorite* reader named Marcia sent me several years ago from a Williams-Sonoma catalogue. It’s a summer staple for her and she thinks it’s fantastic because all of the ingredients are easy for her to get fresh and local. If you have a CSA or garden or farmers market access right now, boy, would they like to sell some corn, tomatoes, and zucchini! The first time I made it I used penne, as the recipe recommends and it was spectacularly delicious. So why do I use farro instead here? Because the sauce is so good, it doesn’t want to share the spotlight with big pieces of pasta. Farro, small, nutty and slightly chewy, is a fantastic supporting cast member, while adding a heft that makes it clearly dinner-y.
July 19, 2021
deviled eggs
I will never find it again [please send me a link if see the original], but a few weeks ago a TikTok* went through my feed in which a woman is invited to eat half a dozen eggs and she says “Oh no, that’s too much.” “But what if I scoop them out, mash it with mayo, and stuff it back together?” “Thanks, I’ll have the whole tray!”
I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the intended effect, but I’ve been craving deviled eggs since. I know we often think of them as a holiday party food, so this might make little sense, but I absolutely love them in the summer, especially when it’s too hot to cook anything real and I only want to eat, like, two cold salads and a handful of potato chips for dinner. Deviled eggs — basically egg salad with less gloop (my food writing chops are legendary, I know) — are the perfect piece to round out the meal. I like to keep hard-boiled eggs in the fridge anyway, so it’s just a matter of peeling, popping out the centers (why is this so fun), mashing them up, and spooning them back in.
July 5, 2021
frozen strawberry daiquiris
Of course, violins are not made small enough to express the woe that is ordering a sub-par drink at the kind of resort with palm trees, beaches, and a daily agenda of luxuriating as lazily as possible. But, have you ever ordered a good strawberry daiquiri at a bar? I have not. As neither the holiday weekend nor strawberry season are over yet, this seems as good a time as any to make it right.
June 24, 2021
zucchini butter spaghetti
I am a little bit obsessed with this spaghetti. If we’ve spoken recently, I didn’t let you not asking me about it keep me from going on about its simple summer dinner bliss. I have been fixating on the idea of this spaghetti for two delicious summers and I am almost sad that the recipe is done, as it now transfers into the category of Things I Already Know How To Make, which always gets bumped when there are so many Recipes That Aren’t Done Yet for a little manuscript due at the end of this summer.
It started with a zucchini butter recipe I once spied on Food52, but was traced back to Julia Child’s Grated Zucchini Sautéed in Butter and Shallots. Over rounds of tweaking, I eliminated several things, not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t suit my needs here: the shallots (added too much sweetness), the partial addition of olive oil (I was promised butter, after all), salting, draining, and wringing the zucchini (so much work, all for a shriveled pile of zucchini that dragged in the pan), adding a little more butter (it helps when stretching it across a big bowl spaghetti), and a not insignificant amount of garlic, pepper flakes, basil, and parmesan and I realize that this now relates to Julia Child’s zucchini butter about as much as I relate to being a morning person, but this paragraph is about about what set the idea off, and this next one is about where I hope it goes:
