Deb Perelman's Blog, page 33
November 16, 2016
cheesecake-marbled pumpkin slab pie
So, I’m deep in my Friendsgiving planning for this weekend and I think I finally understand — and really, it’s about time, Deb — why Thanksgiving is so daunting, even for people who like to cook: it’s the volume.
I mean, maybe you come from a small family and your Thanksgiving dinner is for 4 or 6 people. That sounds lovely. It’s still a lot of cooking but I bet your one year-old at least weighs less than your bird. (Not to self: photo op!) 20 people or more is completely the norm at our family gatherings and we’re having 16 friends this weekend in our I-won’t-even-tell-you-the-square-footage apartment because you’ll either start clucking your tongue in a completely underserved pity party (woe is us, we live in Manhattan, said nobody you should be friends with, ever) or start sending us house listings in Montclair (coughgrandma). I’m looking at the yield on my usual recipes and then trying to multiply them by three and write a grocery list and it’s basically like: All The Butter Ever Made + A Gallon or Two Of Stock + then I burst into tears, text my husband the list and he schleps everything, in case you were ever wondering who the actual beauty/brains behind this operation actually is.
November 10, 2016
root vegetable gratin
Last year, I proudly announced my intentions to host a Friendsgiving dinner for our crew and we would do it up. About 15 minutes later, I remembered that I had an infant and a zillion other less cute things on my plate and came to my senses. This year, I am a woman unwaveringly of my word, and I have 9 days to get my act together.
Ina Garten (pause for reverence/praise-hands emoji) is here to save me, though, as she has a new cookbook out. Maybe you’ve heard about it? This one is about all the favorites she’s cooked for her husband over the years, which sounds of course terribly old-fashioned and yet, perhaps I’m just feeling a little extra sappy* this week, but it’s hard to find the gesture itself anything less than unambiguously lovely. “There’s nothing more comforting than walking into a house that smells like there’s a roast chicken and onions or a homemade apple pie in the oven,” Ina writes in the introduction, and talks about the way having people around the table creating “a community of friends that take care of each other,” which, for her, is the whole point of cooking. Needless to say, this ties neatly into holiday themes.
November 4, 2016
apple strudel
Because I don’t say it often enough, do know that one of my favorite things about this site is the way your presence, whether active or lurking, quietly provides the encouragement I need every time I want to tackle a dish or recipe that daunts me. Like bagels. Or Lasagna Bolognese. Or Baked Alaska. Or Russian Honey Cake. But I’m not sure that any of these dishes have struck terror in my heart — laced with impending doom over inevitable failure — over a dish as much as this.
Let me rewind a little: I was lucky enough to preview some of the pages from Luisa Weiss’s new cookbook, Classic German Baking in June. It was around my birthday and my mother and I had gone to Cafe Sabarsky, one of my great New York City loves, for lunch. My mother’s parents were from Germany and although they didn’t leave under good circumstances, we both have a huge soft spot for the baked goods of the region. This book — filled with Sachertorte (glaze chocolate torte, which my kid left the book open to this morning, an unsubtle hint) and Mandelhörnchen (almond horns), Amerikaner (the original black-and-white cookie), Butterkuchen, Linzertorte, Bretzlen (soft pretzels) and miles of Christmas favorites — enveloped us with such an intense longing to run to the kitchen, bury ourselves in flour, butter, almonds and yeast and not come out for one to two years, it was clear it would be impossible to choose what to bake first.
November 1, 2016
roasted cauliflower with pumpkin seeds, brown butter and lime
What did you do the last time you bought a head of cauliflower? Steam it? Grind it into rice? Puree it into a heap of hope that nobody will notice it’s not mashed potatoes? Roast it to a crisp, brown oblivion with olive oil and salt and eat it straight of the baking sheet? You sound sane.
I do not. The last time I bought cauliflower was two weeks ago when I fell for four adorable grapefruit-sized heads I had to take home with me. Then I had a whole-day project and didn’t cook them. Then I worked on a speech and ate leftovers for two days and didn’t cook them. Then I went away for three days and didn’t cook them. Then I had leftovers from grandma (thanks grandma) and didn’t cook them. Then I forgot to cook them. Then I wasted another day, indecisive.
October 24, 2016
broken pasta with pork ragu
At the end of July, a generally broiling, sticky month in New York City best experienced somewhere far enough away to catch a breeze not recently emitted from subway grates, I spied a recipe for a pork shoulder braised in chicken stock, aromatics, celery and thyme then torn into bite-sized shreds and tossed with broken-up pieces of lasagna noodles and finished with butter, lemon juice, parmesan and arugula that sounded so good, I had to make it the very next night for dinner. Even though it was 82 degrees out. Even though we’d been to the beach that weekend. I regretted nothing.
October 17, 2016
winter squash pancakes with crispy sage and brown butter
There comes times in every cookbook author’s life that they have a very specific kind of gift to bestow on unsuspecting others — tasty, deeply loved dishes that were dismissed/ejected/left homeless in the editorial process because they didn’t make the cut. The reasons may be myriad; the ingredient, format or flavor felt redundant with another dish or, as happened here, something else about it gnawed at me until I decided it was best to move on without it.
I believe we call these rejects. I, however, prefer to call them displacements, and I’m not even sad because this means I get to share it with you sooner. These are my most favorite dinner pancake to date and I loved them as endlessly when I made them for the first time two years ago (it’s true, I am this slow at book-ing) as I did when I revisited them last weekend. Here you use any roasted, mashed winter squash — I’ve made this with both kabocha and butternut but you can use whatever you have or can get — and you whisk it into a quick, thick batter with sour cream or buttermilk, flour, eggs and then, instead of the predictable sugar and pumpkin spice, we add salt, pepper and gruyere or parmesan, if you’re feeling it (no surprise here: we always are) and spoon them into a frying pan just like you were making pancakes on a Saturday morning, if you are the sort of person who does such things.
October 13, 2016
pumpkin bread
One of the terrible things that well-intentioned food people do all of the time is get bored with things that everyone loves. Because there’s a there’s a near-constant stream of food media coming in, with time the “hot takes” on apple pie begin to feel monotonous, the “cool new thing to do with sweet potatoes” can cause inward groans and pumpkin/pumpkin-spiced things? I’ll let them tell you: “Pumpkin spice has ruined pumpkins,” says Alton Brown. “America has gone entirely too far in its pumpkin spice devotion,” says Eater, with a fair amount of evidence backing it up. The Washington Post likened pumpkin spice lattes to “liquefied fall-scented potpourri.”
I, too, fell into this trap, something I hadn’t realized until I Snapchatted* making pumpkin bread a few weeks ago and have never received so many recipe requests. I didn’t get it at first — I mean, pumpkin bread is the most basic thing, right? And Google claims 5.7 million ways to make it. What could I possible add to the conversation?
October 7, 2016
russian honey cake
From time to time when someone learns that I’m married to a Russian, they’ll ask me if I can come up with a recipe for a Russian dish they’ve had, which is hilarious because I have never been to Russia, have probably only picked up 20 words (by generous estimation) in the 13 years we’ve been together and of the maybe five Russian dishes I’ve made, I’ve simply done them my mother in-law’s way. It’s almost like people might know that I have a tendency to get really obsessive when I decide I want to crack the code of a recipe and they’re hoping I’ll apply it to a long-lost loved dish they want to make a regular part of their lives again? Nah, that would be ridiculous.
Enter: medovik. Or maybe smetannik. Guys, if you’re ever looking for a sign that a recipe is going to be a doozy to unpack, definitely aim for a dish that nobody even agrees on the name of.*
October 4, 2016
skillet-baked pasta with five cheeses
September is like gateway or fake fall, appropriate considering that the season exists officially for only one-third of it. But October — and especially so this year, ushered in with a week of gray rainy (which I just typed as grainy, also somehow fitting) weather — almost without fail sets off the following things in the following order:
* I spy the season’s first interloper.
* All of a sudden the children need to wear socks again and there are no socks anywhere. Ever.
* I spend approximately one week extoling the virtues of cardigan weather before I remember it’s here to stay until June of next year and worry that I chose poorly.
* We get all Fall Cute and plot afternoons of apple picking, hayrides, corn mazes, apple cider doughnuts, leaf peeping, posing for pictures in pumpkin patches and pretend we do it for the kids.
* I immediately crave soup, chili, roast chicken, caesar salad, grilled cheese sandwiches and hearty baked pastas. Let’s waste no time getting to that last part.
September 27, 2016
indian-spiced cauliflower soup
It's not even October yet and my friends were already expressing pumpkin spice fatigue yesterday. I have just the antidote: ginger, turmeric, cumin, coriander, fennel, some lime juice and a chile. Who's in?
I have only one cauliflower soup recipe on this site -- I shared it over 10 years ago. It's so good and so simple, no updates have been warranted. But flipping my way through Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India for ways to sate my steadfast Indian cravings, I knew this would be the next addition to the category. A close cousin to these potatoes and cauliflower (aloo gobi) but formatted as a soup, this is my favorite kind, one that doesn't expect you to have a quart of homemade or boxed stock at the ready, the kind that trusts it is intensely seasoned enough that just water will stretch the flavors into a full soup. More of these, please. (Here's another, by the way.)
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