Deb Perelman's Blog, page 12
June 17, 2021
chocolate ice cream sandwiches
In 2006, mere weeks into launching this internet food blog presence, I shared a recipe for ice cream sandwich cookies that I’d made for a friend’s rooftop birthday party. Oversized, utterly delicious cookies plus a scoop of ice cream on a hot summer day, what could go wrong? Alas, several things. First, regular cookies in the freezer become tooth-breakingly hard. Second, assembled ice cream sandwiches that are not returned to the freezer for several after filling melt way too fast, mostly down your arm, delighting the bugs around you but perhaps nobody else. Do know that none went to waste, but I think we all agreed it was all just too much, both massive cookies and massive messes of ice cream. Not learning my lesson, I tried again several years later with a slightly softer, but still not soft enough, cookie, yet it was still enough work that I’ve not made them since. I’ve also tried them with brownies (better) and salted caramel crackers (wildly delicious) but I still wanted to get the classic American ice cream sandwich right at home.
June 4, 2021
perfect, forever cornbread
Here is my almost-summer wish for us: I think we should bring a pan of freshly-baked, thick, buttery, crisp on top, and plush with a flavor that absolutely reverberates with corn underneath, to your next park/picnic/potluck. It goes so well with summer salads and snacky things. And when cornbread is good, really good, it feels criminal not to share. This is.
If you go way back on this site, you might know I’ve been on the hunt for my forever cornbread recipe for almost as long as I’ve been blogging here. I’ve shared a few over the years that I like very much, they’re good cornbreads, I tell them while scritching them amicably behind their ears. But it wasn’t until more recently that I found the cornbread that will end my cornbread studies. Whatever will I do with my newfound free time? [Yes, write that next cookbook, I know.]
May 27, 2021
chickpea pan bagnat
When I was in high school and we were finally allowed to go off-grounds for lunch, we often went to a local deli where my friends would get various sandwiches with turkey, salami, ham, or all of the above, plus, lettuce, tomato, onions, vinegar and oil and I, a vegetarian in a place baffled by this, would get a the same but with cheese instead. I have thought about this sandwich and what it did well — salt, pepper, vinegar, oil, crunch — and what it did poorly — a stack of tasteless sliced deli cheese as filler — for way too long in the years (and decades, sigh) since because I still love a sandwich full of vegetables, but find most vegetable sandwiches very disappointing, either heavy with cheese (and I love cheese, but not, like, an inch of it) or overcooked, under-seasoned vegetables. Why not avocado and crispy kale? Why not hummus, marinated cucumbers and carrots? Why not… make it for yourself, Deb? Which brings us, as ever, back here today.
May 20, 2021
soy-glazed chicken
It’s a gorgeous spring week in New York City, the windows are wide open, and before I find it impossible to resist the siren call of a full shift to picnic–summer-beach-fresh-everything mode (with some ice cream/pie/cookie breaks, naturally) I wanted to tell you about one last easy weeknight pandemic-era favorite: a soy sauce-basted chicken that my family would be happy if I made once a week forever.
I first made this in the early months, when all the restaurants were closed and we missed takeout*. I’ve made it almost monthly since then because it’s the fastest, easiest non-grilling way for me to turn a package of boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts into a meal that everyone actually finishes. Browning the chicken well gives it a slightly crisp edge, and reducing a mixture of garlic, ginger, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and brown sugar around it while the chicken finishes cooking gives it a lacquered effect.
May 7, 2021
twisty cinnamon buns
Cinnamon buns are perfect — they don’t need disruption, nobody needs a fresh new take on them, and they don’t need refining. I suspect that for most of us, our only grievance is that nobody makes them often enough. Have you ever woken up to the smell of fresh cinnamon buns baking in the oven? Yeah, me neither, but boy does my family have good things to say about it.
So what is this? Well, these are cinnamon rolls with a little update, exactly what I said nobody needs, but it turns out… I do. This is the exact recipe, down to the last teaspoon, I use to make cinnamon buns at home, which I’ve tweaked and tweaked over the last few years until it was exactly the way I wanted it: no separated eggs, easy-to-remember measurements, a plush, rich dough wound with the perfect cinnamon bite. But — maybe this has been written about somewhere else, not sure — but we’ve been home a lot over the last year and when I’m home a lot, I start tinkering. I applied the kind of twisting we use for a krantz cake-style babka and stuffed four of these twists in a pan and let them expand and bronze in semi-chaotic ribbons in the oven and I found three things that these do even better than cinnamon buns.
April 29, 2021
quick, easy salsa
I had a very good reason for making this, in fact, the very best reason, the only reason I ever really want to cook anything on busy weeks with no other gravitas-adding forces at play: I wanted it. Last week I had an intense craving for the kind of salsa you get in a jar, that we went through buckets of when I was in college, the kind of salsa that you’d get on a table at a Mexican restaurant that may or may not sell margaritas in caucus-stem glasses and I wondered why I didn’t have a go-to recipe for making it at home. Isn’t that, like, my purpose here? Isn’t that what I do here, week after week for nearly 15 years, share recipes I hope will become your go-tos as much as they’ve become mine? Where was my seasonless* salsa recipe?
April 23, 2021
classic shortbread
At some point in the swamp of time that has been this past winter, my husband convinced me that we should watch Ted Lasso and, despite my skepticism about a dad-joking American football coach who gets a job coaching professional soccer in England’s ability to hold my interest, I begrudgingly agreed. It turned out to be… kind of delightful? Objectively enjoyable, really. Don’t worry, I will not be discussing sports today and there won’t be any spoilers, but do know that homemade shortbread cookies have a recurring role and that is where our story begins.
The moment the season ended, my hunt for the actually-most-delicious* shortbread recipe began. My platonic ideal of shortbread has always been Walkers brand shortbread fingers and I know this is going to upset some people because of course there’s so much better out there, especially homemade, but I live quite far from the shortbread motherland of Scotland in their defense, these packaged cookies have have the exact same ingredient list as homemade (butter, flour, sugar), and when does that ever happen?
April 15, 2021
spring asparagus galette
I know it’s too early for asparagus, at least in New York, but I’m tired of waiting, a feeling that both encapsulates my cooking right now and my mood about [waves hands] everything. I am sure I’m not alone in being ready for summer, for outside, for all of my friends to get vaccinated, for my kids lives to normalize so they can be off screens all day, and I know you do not get things by stamping your feet and demanding them (I may have tried) but if there’s one thing on this list we can safely take an advance on, it’s spring vegetables. Grocery store asparagus is lovely and here for us until the freshly-plucked Greenmarket stuff emerges and I say we embrace it with abandon.
April 8, 2021
sheet pan chow mein
Here’s a really fun dinner I made recently, the sheet pan chow mein from Hetty McKinnon’s, new cookbook, which is a love letter to all the vibrant Chinese food she grew up eating plus many of her other Asian favorites. You — we, if I may be so presumptuous — love McKinnon’s vegetarian cooking because she’s so creative, as we saw in this chickpea and kale shakshuka, and yet it’s all so practically-minded, clearly having been vetted in the chaos of real life family dinners.
April 2, 2021
lemon potatoes
Is this a good place to admit that I almost never ate potatoes growing up? I tell my Russian husband this and he’s baffled. Mashed? No. Roasted? No. Fries, only at restaurants. Tater tots, from the freezer on a too-rare occasion. Baked potatoes were definitely a dinner menu item and I don’t think anyone had anything against potatoes, just not a strong pull towards them. Needless to say, if the archives here are any indication, my kids will not be saying the same. And yet despite the gratins, the crispy crumbled, the melting, the brown butter mash, the kugel, twice-baked and the Anna, I still crave potatoes in ways I have yet finetuned a recipe for, and this brought me to a surge of lemon potato studies over the winter.
