Deb Perelman's Blog, page 17
April 10, 2020
crispy crumbled potatoes
My love of french fries is vast and well–documented — preferably in a golden, crisp and glittering-with-fine-salt heap with some aioli, an artichoke or oysters and ice-cold, very dry champagne, outside at a bustling cafe in a life that seems a bit distant right now — so I hope you will take this statement with the utmost gravitas when I say that these crispy potatoes are as good as, if not better, than fries.
I first had a version of them at Barbuto restaurant (of the chocolate budino and kale salad fame) nearly eight years ago, and I’ve watched cooks making them in the open kitchen dozens of times since. Cold, boiled potatoes are crumbled directly into a fryer in irregular chunks and not taken out until they’re a deep golden brown. Once drained they’re tossed in a big metal bowl with salt, a lot of pecorino, and a few sprigs of fried rosemary. They are perfect, absolutely perfect.
March 31, 2020
ultimate banana bread
I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me that there are already four banana bread recipes on this site, plus four additional banana cakes, and that’s probably enough, right? Genuinely, I believed I was done too, that the Banana Baked Goods course at SK University* had been completed. But then a few things happened. After creating the pumpkin bread of my dreams and what I hope will be the last zucchini bread recipe you’ll ever need over the last couple years, it began to bother me that the banana bread recipes on the site lacked what these have: a towering height and a crunchy top that will be hard not to lift off in one giant tile and swiftly coat the underside with salted butter. So, I created one and I’ve been keeping it to myself for over a year because, see above: SK is probably at Banana Bread Capacity. But over the last few weeks of, well, not doing a whole lot else, I can’t help but notice that we’ve all been making a whole lot of banana bread. And I think you might like this one instead.
March 25, 2020
carrot and white bean burgers
I’m really enjoying Lukas Volger’s new cookbook, Start Simple: Eleven Everyday Ingredients for Countless Weeknight Meals. It came out two months ago, a positively bizarre time in which we entered and left our homes with abandon, casually hugged friends we were happy to see, and if our nose became itchy, we’d scratch it and not stand paralyzed in panic afterward. What salad days! Volger’s new book wasn’t created with pandemic cooking in mind — what was, really — but it feels just right for right now because each chapter focuses on a staple our local store is miraculously not out of (tofu, tortillas, beans, greens, squash, and more), and the recipes have refreshingly short ingredient lists and unfussy assemblies. Volger’s vegetarian cooking is very doable, the kind of do-ability that comes from the fact that this is clearly the food he cooks for himself at home, so all of the kinks are smoothed out. Everything sounds so good — smoky chickpea salad with olives and lemon and black beans with scallion-lime vinaigrette from the bean section are on my shortlist — you might find yourself wondering why this unwavering simplicity isn’t the goal of every cookbook.
March 12, 2020
chicken, leek, and rice soup
I hope nobody you know is sick right now. I hope it’s, at worst, a common cold, common boredom bred by self-quarantine, or a stubbed toe because you tried some ridiculous workout video you found online. Or, if you’re me, last week, after yet another thing fell out of my chaotic freezer onto my foot (I don’t even get to blame “fitness”) I decided to, what’s that word, it feels so unnatural to type… organize? Right, that. I decided to sift through the freezer and see what was taking up so much space and I realized that Deb Of A Few Months (let’s be honest: probably longer) Ago did a very cool thing and made an excess of chicken stock and froze it in one-quart bags which meant that “wohoo! dinner is sorted!”
I’ve published a few chicken noodle soups recipes to date. I’ve got a quite rushed one and a leisurely one for when you want absolute perfection; there’s a grandma-style cozy on in Smitten Kitchen Every Day, my second cookbook, but one thing I’ve not yet covered is the simplest: a chicken soup you make with already-made stock.*
March 5, 2020
piña colada
In the first world of first world-liest problems, a problem I would love to be having this very week when I’m shivering again (despite many suggestions of spring on the near horizon) is that when in my life I’ve been lucky enough to decamp to a tropical location for a vacation, and wish to do what one does on tropical vacations — I mean, aside from wearing such buckets of SPF that when I return people comment, “I thought you went to the beach?” — and that is ordering a piña colada. Possibly at a swim-up bar. In a hurricane glass with a tacky paper umbrella in it, a fluorescent maraschino cherry, and a creamy-tart balance that is unfettered vacation bliss with each sip. The problem is that they’re very often…. terrible, tinny and artificially-flavored. I mean, I drink it; I’m not a barbarian. But every time I do (daily, at 4:30pm, please), I vow that when I get home, I’m going to make a real and proper and perfect one to set things right again.
Well, give or take a couple weeks and half a dozen vacations over a dozen years, I’ve made good on my promise, taking a page from last summer’s frozen watermelon mojitos. I learned while making them that you could forego both the ice that waters down the flavor of the fruit, and the juice, which doesn’t have the intensity I crave, by starting with fresh fruit and freezing it in cubes. It doesn’t take that long and you will not be sad to have a bag of frozen pineapple chunks waiting for you whenever the piña colada craving strikes. While I start with fresh pineapple, don’t worry, I still use classic canned cream of coconut (a sweetened, thicker, syrupy delight that’s to coconut milk almost what sweetened condensed milk is to regular milk) as the second ingredient. I add a little lime juice, because I love it with coconut and pineapple, just enough white rum, and I blend it until it’s creamy and smooth and immediately — even in the cold of a NYC winter — causes a dewy condensation on the outside of the glass. No swim-up bar, no beachy horizon, but I do have a paper palm tree umbrella in my perfect-at-last drink, so I must be doing something right.
February 23, 2020
sweet potato salad with pepita dressing
Good morning and apologies in advance, as I’m again one of those loathsome (that if, if you were shivering somewhere) people who just returned from the beach, where we went on vacation last week because our kids were off from school and we didn’t see why they should have all the fun. Around me were turquoise waves, glittering with sunlight, lapping gently at the silky white-sanded shore and there were no children having tantrums or whining because this was a magical place — and at some of those things are true. However, as will always happen on vacation, while we had some enviable tacos and aguachiles, I was only a few days in when I started to fiercely miss home-cooked food, most especially this salad I’d made the week before.
Listen, sometimes I challenge myself to run distances further than I wish to (that would be: any), sometimes I challenge myself to go to bed at a decent hour for a week and see if it makes me a nicer person (shockingly, yes) and sometimes I challenge myself to do things like this, which is to take something I’m pretty sure I don’t like — sweet potato salads — and create one that I would. Creamy dressings and/or any parallels to summer cookout potato salads were rejected. So were cubes. I wanted it warm or room temperature and I liked the idea of using some Southwestern-ish flavors but not to the point that it basically tasted like these sweet potato tacos in salad form. And I wanted crunch, interest, and acidity, without having a bunch of extra hurdles to get them. The results surprised me. I’d expected, at most, to make it once or twice to iron the kinks out of the recipe; I thought the kids might like it, but I hadn’t expected to be sitting by the beach in Mexico kinda wishing someone would bring me some a full week later.
February 13, 2020
perfect vegetable lasagna
Here is a theory: There are two types of picky people, those that are totally fine just never experiencing a life with, I don’t know, tomatoes or bananas or pickles or raisins (yes, I’ve read your comments — all of them) and then there is the kind that finds their epicurean limitations to constrict like an uncomfortable jacket they’d love to shed if they could figure out how. I, a lifelong Picky Person, am the latter. Over the years creating and sharing recipes for this site, I’ve embraced so many things I once thought I didn’t like [insert basically half the ingredients in anything here, ever], but it turned out I just didn’t like the way they were usually made.
And now the time has come for me to get over my lasagna issues. What are you saying? you might ask. There are two lasagna recipes in the archives. You love them both! And it’s true. What I have struggled with is what I’d call The Usual Vegetable Lasagna. I want something as bubbling, bronzed, and brick-like as a classic lasagna should be, but I needed to fix a few things along the way.
February 7, 2020
new classic wedding cake + how to
In the months before my wedding, I periodically suggested I might like to make our wedding cake (because most giant wedding cakes are terrible) and was swiftly shot down by everyone who heard it. “You’re crazy.” “It’s too much work.” “Do you want to spend your Special Day covered in frosting?” And so I relented and our wedding cake tasted like processed awfulness and it bothered me so much that I volunteered to make the wedding cake for friends a few years later, in 2008. At the end of this fun but exhausting endeavor, I declared the accounting of terrible and wonderful wedding cakes in the universe to be infinitesimally more in balance and making wedding cakes to be “completely out of my system.” That lasted about nine years, when one of my oldest and favorite-est friends got married in 2018. However, I waited completely until the last minute to start it and while we loved it in the end, the absolutely-my-fault stress/chaos of the project definitely set the clock back on me making another wedding cake for at least another nine years. But a mere year and a half later, another fabulous friend got engaged to another wonderful guy and that brings us up to a couple weeks ago: wedding cake three. Three wedding cakes in, I’ve learned a lot of stuff that doesn’t fall in your usual wedding cake baking guide and since I’m definitely never making another wedding cake (“I mean it this time!” I say with such thin resolve it’s clear even I don’t buy it anymore), I think we should start here.
January 27, 2020
roasted squash and tofu with ginger
I didn’t mean to disappear on you. I’d intended to start the year with soup, as I always do. I made a lovely-but-not-lovely-enough winter minestrone and then a red lentil situation but neither really seemed spotlight worthy and it can be hard sometimes but I really don’t want to publish anything here I don’t want to sing from the rooftops about. All of our time is worth more than that. While I was debating my next soup move, my friend texted and said “Can u believe the wedding is two weeks away??” and I bolted straight up in bed because, well, no. I could not believe it at all. I mean, I knew I’d told her I’d make her wedding cake. We’d discussed the headcount and flavors they liked. I had a loose idea of it in my mind and looked forward to really getting started on it… in a couple weeks. Needless to say, this is where the rest of January went and I’m going to tell you all about it next week — it’s going through some rigorous retesting and is going to be worth the wait because it’s probably one of the most delicious cakes I have ever made. But still, let’s never go on a break again.
The other kind of thing you miss very much when you’re three Kitchen Aid bowls deep in buttercream is vegetables, especially those coated in salt, acid, and heat. and I received the wonderful Diana Henry’s (she of the Bird in Hand and How to Eat a Peach fame for highly cookable recipes) most recent cookbook, From the Oven to the Table, full of sheet pan-ish meals, last fall and my favorite thing happened: I immediately bookmarked four dishes. This is what we always hope will, that we’ll instantly shake off a cooking rut we may not even have realized we were in at the suggestion of something new. I made the salsiccia con patate e pomodoro (wonderful), melting baked onions (I think I undercooked them but the potential is definitely there), toad in a hole with leeks and cheddar (soon!), a Persian-spiced spatchcooked chicken (ditto), and now this.
December 30, 2019
banana toffee cake
For absolutely no reasons other than I Wanted It and It Sounded Good and Also I Had Two Sad Bananas and Didn’t Want To Make Banana Bread, earlier this fall I got really caught up in making sticky toffee banana puddings, except by pudding I mean British for cake or sometimes a steamed cake and sometimes just the dessert course entirely (did I do this right? please help your confused American friend). Sticky toffee pudding is usually made with dates and almost every person I’ve ever told that to who has had it but doesn’t peruse recipes for fun and entertainment (crazy!) has found that baffling, but indeed, there are dried dates that have been soaked and blended until smooth and added to a lightweight brown sugar and butter cake that is ladled — I mean, truly soaked — with a warm toffee/butterscotch sauce and an enormous spoonful of unsweetened whipped or clotted cream and sometimes sprinkled with a few flakes of sea salt and it’s just unbelievably, unforgettably decadent.
This is that, but for bananas. Yet this is resolutely, indignantly not banana bread. There is no cinnamon nor nutmeg. I wanted this to taste like a cozy winter cake so there’s dark brown sugar, vanilla, and even a spoonful of molasses or treacle for extra gravitas, trust me, it works here. It’s blissful with the sauce and the cream and, no matter what else you make on New Years Eve, be the only thing people are still talking about the next day. (I mean, unless your behavior is particularly legendary, in which case, the cake will happily cede the spotlight.)
