Deb Perelman's Blog, page 34

baked alaska + smitten kitchen turns 10!

Over the summer, my husband and I took turns taking our son to out for dinner one a week night to give him a break from (I mean, not to point fingers or anything) the occasionally yelling/food-flinging dinnertime antics of The Interloper, a.k.a. his younger sister. On one of my evenings, he pointed to the top of one of the many mirror-covered walls at the restaurant with the menu scrawled over it and said "What's a Baked Alaska?"



"Well, son," I began because let's not even pretend I don't live for this kind of stuff, "It's a dessert in which ice cream is wrapped in cake and then covered in a marshmallow-y frosting that's toasted and then they light it on fire..." "CAN WE GET ONE OF THOSE?" Look, I don't know what stuff you're made of, but I consider telling a 6 year-old that ice cream wrapped in cake, frosting and fire exists but not for them is cruel and unusual punishment. And so we ordered it and I tried to warn him that they might not do the fire thing and maybe it won't be as cool as I made it sound and then this happened.

<a href="Over the summer, my husband and I took turns taking our son to out for dinner one a week night to give him a break from (I mean, not to point fingers or anything) the occasionally yelling/food-flinging dinnertime antics of The Interloper, a.k.a. his younger sister. On one of my evenings, he pointed to the top of one of the many mirror-covered walls at the restaurant with the menu scrawled over it and said "What's a Baked Alaska?"



"Well, son," I began because let's not even pretend I don't live for this kind of stuff, "It's a dessert in which ice cream is wrapped in cake and then covered in a marshmallow-y frosting that's toasted and then they light it on fire..." "CAN WE GET ONE OF THOSE?" Look, I don't know what stuff you're made of, but I consider telling a 6 year-old that ice cream wrapped in cake, frosting and fire exists but not for them is cruel and unusual punishment. And so we ordered it and I tried to warn him that they might not do the fire thing and maybe it won't be as cool as I made it sound and then this happened.

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garlic wine and butter steamed clams

One of my favorite things -- although, honestly, it's not easy to choose -- we ate in Portugal was small clams cooked in a garlic wine sauce, usually with cilantro and always only eaten with bread, which I learned when we went to one of those* restaurants on the beach one night where you pick your dinner from what's been caught that day and everyone is a little vague about preparations because they assume you already know. "How are the clams prepared?" "What do you mean? Steamed!" "And they're served with...?" "Well, in Portugal, we eat clams with bread, only bread. Would you like something else?" And so it was.



The dish, called Amêijoas à Bulhão Pato, is named after the 19th century Lisbon poet Bulhão Pato, who was known to be a gourmand. It's usually a first course. And, no, this isn't officially it -- unable to follow the simplest directions, I replaced the olive oil with butter, threw in some shallots, used parsley instead of cilantro because I killed my cilantro already and added red pepper flakes. But we did eat it with bread. And more of the wine (I mean, the bottle was now open so we were basically obligated) and intentionally or not, managed to unlock my new favorite date night dinner, even if you are sharing your table with little people disinterested in wine-steamed clams.

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magic apple plum cobbler

September is my favorite in food, weather and outlook. The number of days above 90 degrees finally peters off. I live for cardigan weather. I love that it goes in with a beach weekend and goes out with cinnamon sticks and warm cider. The markets are still teeming with peaches and plum, zucchini and eggplant, but you can also go apple picking and find some fancy new squash to cook. But my cooking always feels like it's on one team or another -- we're either making caprese or we're baking ziti, little for the in-between days. Where are the intersections of summer and winter squash? Where's the peach and grape pie? Let's fix this.



If you can read about something called a magic peach cobbler that you make more or less entirely in the pan you bake it and not have it in the oven, say, 15 minutes later, you are made of stronger stuff than me. It comes by way of the grandmother of Ian Knauer and if you go way back on this site, you'll find he's also the person behind those exquisite Brown Butter Brown Sugar Shorties, from his days at Gourmet, These days, he's got a place called The Farm Cooking School in Stockton, New Jersey and spoke recently about his grandmother who, with seven kids, had no time to fuss with anything but straightforward recipes like this.

homemade merguez with herby yogurt

I had lunch with Julia Turshen a couple months ago (mostly so I could fangirl out and try to sponge up some curl tips for my moppet) and one of my favorite things she told me was that when she moved from Brooklyn to upstate with her wife her cooking changed because all of a sudden she was doing it everyday. She felt she got better at cooking from her gut, throwing meals together with whatever they had -- it's simply not an option to eat out or order in every night the way she could before so not every meal could be a performance piece. Sometimes it's just chicken on the grill with a good sauce and salad on the side.



If you're anything like me -- but with a cleaner apartment, I bet -- you're thinking "wait, tell me about the sauce!" because odds are, like the avocado-cucumber salad I spied on the side of her plate a year ago and ran off to tell you about, it's something crazy simple that you didn't realize you knew how to make and now you're 300x more excited to grill chicken and make salad tonight. The good news for us is that Turshen, who previously only hid her cooking talent behind larger-than-life names like Mario Batali, Gwyneth Paltrow, Dana Cowin, Hot Bread Kitchen, Buvette, Fat Radish... seriously, I'm just getting started... finally penned her own book with all the great simple sauces and 400 other things I cannot wait to cook.

chocolate pavlova

Look, no one is ever going to marry me for my pavlova. (I mean, talking about dodging a bullet...) This one was particularly underachieving. First, I thought I'd be clever and try to add the cocoa at the start, mixed with the sugar, so that it would mix the best. Nope! It never fully whipped. With this in the trash, I began my next one, breaking an egg yolk right into the white. I can usually get it all out (tip! use the empty shell as a scooper/skimmer) but not this time. I started a new bowl and, yup, did it again. Finally, with six uncompromised egg whites and cocoa stirred in only at the very end, ensuring a respectably thick, shiny plume of meringue, I began piling my chocolate plumes on a 9-inch round parchment circle, only to realize this wasn't very bright, as the meringue would spread. I cut a new, larger square of parchment and used the old one as a sling/tube-of-a-pastry bag to land the new one in a great, elegant swirl and then fell over laughing (and texting everyone I know with the picture because: all grownup here!) because it looked precisely like everyone's favorite emoji. Smoothed into more of a mound, I baked it at the wrong temperature and it got too crispy and riddled with cracks. Anyone left reading from New Zealand just is doing this right now. (Don't worry, I retested it -- woe is me -- to confirm that the correct temperature and times are indeed correct.)



But I have one thing going for us, and that's that this pavlova is the most chocolaty I've ever had. The apartment air was steeped with eau de brownies, the very best perfume. Even a day layer, this cake of a meringue decadent but not heavy, basically dessert magic. Do not be deceived, as I have been in the past, by the pale beige shade of the outer shell -- inside, it's like a truffle with the impact of and the texture of a pillow.

piri piri chicken

My favorite part of our trip to Portugal is that it was almost accidental. Like we have done almost every summer, in the spring we began looking for a house to rent on one fork or another of Long Island because it us. Frustrated by prices and lack of appealing inventory ("which kid should stay in the dark basement bedroom where we won't hear their screams?" is definitely the conversation every parent wants to have before forking over more than a month's rent for the honor) our friends confessed that they couldn't stop thinking about going somewhere like Spain and Portugal, where we could rent a villa for significantly less money and, you know, go see another part of the world. I said yes. My husband said "but 8 hours on a plane with a baby!" and "she's going to burst into flames on a beach!" (referring to me passing on my unfortunate pallor to our youngest) and then I starting getting all insufferably philosophical about how this is our life and we have two kids and we either learn how to take big vacations with them or we're never going to see all the places we want to see in our lifetime ... and then I said "you can totally blame me if this is terrible." And somehow that did the trick. Let me know when you want me to write that marital advice book, okay?



We regret nothing and I'd be lying if I didn't say that the fact I didn't make dinner once wasn't part of the charm. We'd manage breakfast and lunch at home but found the restaurants to be very kid-friendly, almost all having an official or unofficial children's menu.* Plus, there was a natural kindness and patience with children that is less the norm here -- you know when you're waiting for the check and everyone is tired and your kid is about to scream their head off on your shoulder and then they start giggling because a stranger behind you is making faces at them? That was every day.

plum squares with marzipan crumble

We are still in Portugal, which means, look away now. We are total blissed-out bores. The ridiculous truth of this vacation is that all the planning of it went down with the other family we are with when I was neck-deep in a book deadline and my husband had a bit of extra free time earlier this summer so I outsourced 100% of the decisions to them. Thus, I knew extremely little about Portugal upon arriving here and now every turn is a surprise and I don't want to leave. This place is stunning. The architecture is unbelievable. The people are so nice, and so kind to our rugrats. The beaches... don't even get me started. I feel like it will take another three vacations to even see half of what we should. I want you to know that I'm up for the job.



I obsess over benign details: how the eggs, butter and milk are kept on the counter, how dark the yolks are, the flaky swirl underneath a custard tart and how I'm ever going to recreate it, the remarkably smooth gray stoned streets, how much better gelato tastes basically anywhere in Europe, all the blissful formats of fried potatoes we've been served, the way it feels like not a single opportunity to make something even prettier than it already is was missed, the fact that a dinner setup like this isn't even unusual. I like the way grownups can stay late over dinner and all the kids can find other kids to play with on the beach below, where we can see them but are freed from hovering. Also, I mean, I was just lamenting that we were out of berries for our fruititarian child when we realized there were blackberry bushes in the backyard. Stuff like this just doesn't happen at home, but New York, feel free to step it up.

how to julienne

I enjoy chopping things but have no notable knife skills, no tuck, no game, but no shame either. I've always found julienning fruits and vegetables to be difficult, just a lot of very precise cutting that's not going to come easily to someone who didn't mince their way through hours of knife skills class in cooking school. When a recipe wants me to julienne something, I sign, inwardly groan and usually take out either this slicer and then spend 32 minutes looking for the julienne blade or I use this peeler, which is fantastic but limited to long skinny strands.

Here's my a-ha moment: If you can slice a vegetable, you can julienne:

even more perfect blueberry muffins

[Get the recipe for Even More Perfect Blueberry Muffins right here]

Since we rolled out the redesign, I've been flagging recipes in the archives I can't stand looking at the pictures of anymore with plans to reshoot them. The perfect blueberry muffins were on this list except on my way to prettying them up, I made four other recipes first. Why make four other batches of blueberry muffins when you already have a favorite, is a pretty reasonable question, only if you've never shopped for jeans before even while wearing the pair you like most... or ordered steak at a restaurant besides the place you think makes it best. What I mean is, when a lot of people say "but the steak/jeans/cake here are amazing!" it's hard not to wonder if maybe they're onto something. What if they were just my favorite blueberry muffins at the time and there's better out there that I didn't know about yet? It's been eight years. Maybe it was time for a re-review. [Note: The prospect of a re-review with outside sources every few years is not recommended to be applied to spouses, children or hairdressers.]

eggplant parmesan melts

A thing I have learned over the last 10 years (!) here is that people have fairly bifurcated opinions of eggplant. Some find it to be the greatest, especially when it is at its most eggplant-y, others don't care what you do with it, they're never going to be converted, but even the most eggplant-equivocal agree on one thing: eggplant parmesan is the bee's knees. I am, however, the one that's ambivalent about it. To take beautiful coins of eggplant, batter and fry them to a profound and well-seasoned golden crisp just to bury them in texture-killing amounts of sauce and melted cheese feels wrong to me, disrespectful of the labor involved and calories embedded in gloriously deep-fried foods. (I feel the same way about fries smothered in sauces and gravies. Unfollow me now!)




All of these concerns go out the window when making a sub, however, which is what we called hoagies/heroes/grinders in my half of New Jersey growing up. The eggplant parm sub is in a way-too-small category of Great Vegetarian Sandwiches*, and I don't know when they went out of style, but I don't see them around very often anymore. The eggplant's texture is less compromised than it gets in casserole form, and so much extra from a seeded roll (it must be seeded; don't even ask), I find you can even make compromises with the eggplant itself (baking instead of frying breaded eggplant or roasting coins without breading at all) and not feel like you're missing a thing.