Deb Perelman's Blog, page 29
June 30, 2017
grilled pizza
Before we snuck a grill onto our balcony one glorious day last May, I would regularly show up at friends-with-grills homes with prepared pizza dough and a few toppings in the summer; I love grilled pizza so much that I’d feed a crowd just to get my fix. It was one of the first things I made when we bought our own. The benefits of cooking pizza outside are manifold. With heat circulating all around the pizza and the dough resting on open grates instead of a flat tray, I find that you can get more texture — crisp on the outside but staying stretchy within — and flavor — charred spots that will immediately remind you of your favorite brick-oven pizzeria, without heating up your apartment, pretty much the last thing any of us want to do in the summer. Plus, it’s really quick. Once your dough is purchased or prepared, you could be eating your pizza in 10 minutes; not bad for a homemade dinner after a long day.
I’ve already discussed at length my favorite homemade margherita — my preference is for mozzarella that is packed dry, not the fancy stuff in water (despite what you see in the early pictures; promise you’ll save the fancy, ultra-tender stuff for serving cold and fresh with appetizers and salads, please) and for “raw” sauces, blended from canned or fresh tomatoes with some liquid poured off and then doctored up and seasoned well, for the best flavor — and I follow the same rules here. In the oven but especially on the grill, you must keep your toppings thin, light, and pre-sautéed or they simply will not cook before the crust is done; it also leads to puddled and wet pizza tops, something I’m sure we’ve all experienced.
June 27, 2017
best hot fudge sauce
There are a lot of good reasons to put two small jars of homemade hot fudge sauce in your fridge in approximately 10 minutes and possibly forever:
• Hot fudge sauce is the easiest thing on earth to make, and absolutely nothing from a squeeze bottle compares. Not even the stuff at local ice cream parlors, even the kinds that boast about ingredient origins and write their menus on chalkboard walls, are the same. I’m still grumpy about the time I was a gazillion months pregnant ordered hot fudge sauce and someone poured chocolate syrup over my ice cream. I resisted, however, waddling back there and showing them how to make it correctly. I’m sorry I do not behave as well with you.
• Proper hot fudge sauce is thick and shiny. You pour it over a scoop of ice cream and it quickly slides down the sides to form a fudge moat that scoop onto your spoon along with the melty ice cream around it and it’s intensely chocolaty and downright chewy and never gets old.
• It keeps forever, or at least for the remainder of the summer, even if it probably won’t survive that long.
• No matter how many times you rewarm it (we usually spoon a little in to a dish and microwave it for 10 seconds) and chill it again, it never splits or becomes grainy. It remains rich, shiny, and forgiving.
• It makes amazing host gifts. (That’s what the second jar is for.)
June 22, 2017
zucchini grilled cheese
A highly recommended way to be very unpopular with the people you share meals with is to tell them you’re making zucchini grilled cheese for dinner.
“Like, zucchini as the bread?”
“Zucchini instead of cheese?”
“But I don’t like zucchini!”
“KEENY.”
And so we’re not going to. We’re going to call this a zucchini panini when speaking to the wary and somehow, this causes less distress. Why we are accepting of vegetables inside two slices of bread when we pretend our grilled cheese has gone to Italy is not for me to question. What I can promise, however, is that this is no compromise.
June 13, 2017
easy drop berry shortcakes
A couple weeks ago, and because I admittedly ask my husband to pick up strawberries on his way home far more often than I have an exact “agenda” for them besides, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner — I made the strawberry shortcake recipe in the archives. These famed shortcakes — my version is adapted from Claudia Fleming and Russ Parsons, but this same approach was favorite by James Beard and more, I suspect they all hung out together — are unique in that instead of using eggs or just egg yolks, they use the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs. This allows the yolks to do their wonders (golden color, velvety texture) without ostensibly toughening the dough. It’s all very sound. It tastes very good. And it is the reason that I make shortcakes approximately once every four years.
Shortcakes, in the biscuit/scone category of “bakes” (so help me, I’ve fallen into a GBBO rabbit hole and I never want to leave), are quick things, or they should be. They should take 5 minutes to assemble, 15 minutes to bake, and once they’re cool, they should be split and immediately heaped with macerated fresh berries and an unholy amount of whipped cream. This recipe in the archives — requiring that you’ve already made, cooled, and stashed away hard-boiled eggs — begs to differ. Still, a little extra work isn’t always a deal-breaker if the results are otherworldly, but this time, everything bothered me: the taste of baking powder, which isn’t usually an issue, was overwhelming. The cakes weren’t very tall, but quite crumbly. They didn’t have much of an edge or color to them at all, and to top it all off, I’m sorry to any person I’ve left wanting in the past, but half a pound of strawberries is woefully insufficient for kinds of shortcakes I like to eat and share. I like ones that spill, that cannot and will not be limited to the confines of a biscuit half.
June 11, 2017
stovetop americanos
Last December, I announced to I’m sure at least ten thousand well-deserved eye rolls that after 10 years of food blogging and one cookbook I had finally learned how to make coffee. I mean, yeah, it was melodramatic. I, too, can scoop whatever the Maxwell House can says into the filter and press the on button, as I did most weekend mornings as a kid. What I meant was that I had figured out how to make the coffee I most liked to drink and spent too much money on at coffee shops these days, and I had found this delight with the simplest old-fashioned thing, a stovetop espresso maker.
I then promised you a tutorial. It’s been 6 months. I got nervous. It would be a little weird if I were suddenly an expert on something I’d been doing for 7 weeks. I thought I needed more time with it. In these 6 months, I’ve become one of those people who previously baffled me because they said they didn’t like to buy coffee out; they liked theirs at home better. But here we are.
June 7, 2017
crispy spiced lamb and lentils
I made these lettuce cups on a whim for dinner last night and I’m so glad I did because I could see them going immediately into a regular rotation. I don’t know about you, but I think ground meat is underrated in the quick dinner category and am always looking for more things to do with it. This cooking technique, in which you flatten it out in a very hot pan and cook it until it’s browned and crisp on both sides, is like the best part of a Fake Shack Burger, amped to 12. I’m pretty sure, like the time I discovered the crispy egg and could not stop talking about it, I’m only going to want to cook it like this for now on.
It’s then mixed with a larger amount of cooked lentils, which is ideal if you prefer to eat less meat or are hungry enough to eat a few lettuce cups and don’t want to eat a burger and a half along the way. Or if you figure if you’re going to eat a burger’s worth of meat, you’d like to at least have fries with it. Come sit down, you’re among friends.
June 1, 2017
grilled pepper and torn mozzarella panzanella
This salad is not here to break the internet. Even among my friends, roasted sweet red peppers seem to be a perplexingly hard sell, although I hope all roasted pepper resistors are not basing their impressions on the jarred ones — those slippery things shouldn’t even rank. Because it’s the year 2017, I’m sure at least half of the people we know at any given time aren’t eating bread, so that’s not going to go over well either. I’m not sure why people — even my own father — loathe capers, but I bet I will soon find out. I understand that lots of people don’t like onions, even marinated and grilled lovelies, in salads. I know we all agree on mozzarella, at least. (Phew.)
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years writing recipes and sending them out into the world, it’s that not all dishes will stop everyone in our tracks and cause us to reroute our entire day to ensure it ends with this. Not all dishes elicit, or need to elicit, popular fervor.
May 26, 2017
the red and black
For many Junes, this was my favorite cocktail. Yes, I realize that I sound particularly like a weird food writer person and not a person who lives among other people because most normal, sane people do not have a favorite cocktail for each month of the year, even if you agree with me — you do, right? –that a Perfect Manhattan is the ideal way to warm up on the first cold September day and a Porch Swing is the most refreshing way to endure a sultry July afternoon, but hear me out: this is squarely June or the weeks leading up to it because it’s a celebration of strawberries, so we might as well wait until they’re overripe the moment you turn your head and muddle them in a glass.
The core flavor comes from fresh strawberries, black pepper, and lime, a combination I find so likable, I turned it into a popsicle, but at times when you’re not expected to share with kids, you should definitely add some white tequila. The drink was on the menu at Back Forty on Avenue B, an early locavore restaurant that abruptly, and with absolutely no notice, closed and never came back a couple years ago. Like all breakups you didn’t see coming, I’m still a little raw about it. Was it something we did? Something we could have done? But I’m sure they’re not somewhere pouting over us.
May 24, 2017
broccoli rubble farro salad
I’m sorry, I know I have a broccoli rubble problem. But you see, broccoli rubble in itself was a solution to another problem and perhaps we’ve created a monster, but it’s a delicious monster. We are going to keep it.
Let me rewind and explain. Problem: Two children (not the aforementioned monsters, or at least not yet today) who do eat different vegetables at different times but really only reliably both eat broccoli each time. Plus two parents who are growing bored with eating steamed (because they haven’t yet seen the light of crispy roasted broccoli, although they are wrong and we tell them this often) broccoli all the time. Solution: Give it a fine chop (rubble it, if you will) and sauté it in olive oil with a heap of garlic, as many red pepper flakes as we can get away with, lemon zest, salt, and black pepper and then finish it with fresh lemon juice and a fistful of grated pecorino romano (particularly excellent here for its pungent saltiness) for a mixture that’s zinging with enough flavor you’d eat it from a fork with nothing else.
But it’s so good, we prefer to stretch it into dinner as often as possible. We’ve finished it with these pangrattato crumbs and a crispy egg, or when at room temperature, a ball of burrata. (Which is becoming the new #putaneggonit, at least when we find it for a reasonable price.) We’ve tucked it between a piece of toast and slice of provolone for broccoli melts. We’ve put it on top of a slick of garlicky béchamel with torn mozzarella on top for broccoli pizzas. And now there’s this: a farro salad that’s as good warm as it is at room temperature, which means it can be ready for all the weekend picnics and potlucks to come, or for dinner any night of the week. Such as this one.
May 19, 2017
strawberry graham icebox cake
I have expressed in the past — oh, one, two, three, four, five, or perhaps 500 times — my adoration of cakes where the layers are thin and many and you have my word that one day, I will get to all of them so please tell me about your favorite here and now. For many years, I fiddled with ways to make cake layers thinner and thinner until I probably exasperated everyone, so it was just in the nick of time that I realized if I began with cookie-ish layers (say, soft macaroons or icebox cookies the size of cakes), and filled them with something fluffy that would soften them into “cakes” (whipped cream and its variants), it got easy enough that we could make them more often, which, after all, is the goal. Cookies aren’t limited by the number or size of your cake pans. Cookies can break and still stack into an excellent cake.
