Deb Perelman's Blog, page 35

burrata with lentils and basil vinaigrette

Although I will happily eat burrata -- that lush mozzarella-on-the-outside, creamy-ricotta-center cheese from Puglia's Razza Podolica's cows by way of skillet craftsmen -- with a knife and fork, quartered on a plate, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic, flaky sea and pepper with or without a few tiny tomatoes all around and sometimes even some basil from this day until the end of days and never want for anything else, two small things about this will forever plague me: this is an expensive undertaking and when I'm done, I will still probably be hungry for dinner.



What's a girl to do when she likes fancy things but doesn't have the trust fund to support it? I may approach the subject jokingly, but as any of us who has attempted grocery shopping on a budget knows, the struggle is real. Do you save your favorite ingredients for special occasions? Do you save it for cooking-for-one nights, to limit the financial hit of it all? My way is instead to try to stretch things, forever looking for ways to turn luxurious appetizers like this into a full, actually sating, meal.

chocolate peanut butter icebox cake

Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl, happy and in love. He liked chocolate and cheesecake and peanut butter and coffee and she, rather luckily for him, liked to bake. When they'd been married for one year, she made him a chocolate caramel cheesecake on his birthday. Year two, another cheesecake, this one with cubes of brownie throughout. Three, an epic chocolate peanut butter cake. Four, an espresso chiffon cake with fudge frosting. And then a month later a baby came along and it appears she next made him a birthday cake five years after that, and only, from what I can gather, because she was procrastinating and didn't want to pack for their move. I'm not saying that if you like homemade birthday cake you might consider not having kids (gasp!) but I'm also not saying it either, you know?



Things get a little better from there. She did throw together one of these things together the following year, when they had a one month-old no less, equally a testament to the ease of that recipe and also, realistically, the quality of the substitute baby-holders we had lined up. And this year? Well, it was a day late. Fortunately, as this could be their House Gif, nobody minded. Because all days that end with cake are better than those that do not.

chile-lime melon salad

If you go to Mexico City and leave without a pressing, relentless craving for melon, or really just about any fruit, sprinkled with tajín (salsa en polva), a branded seasoning powder comprised of chiles, lime and salt, I think you need to go back because you did it wrong. It feels melodramatic to call this intersection of tangy spice and juicy fruit a national dish, but the spice blend is a staple on tables and at street vendors all over Mexico, and I dare say more popular than ketchup is here. If you go to someone's home and they have a bottle of tajin in their cabinet, it's usually right up front and there's a spare somewhere near because it would be unfathomable to run out. If asked, the person will probably tell you that they had it once over melon, mango, pineapple or cucumbers one time, or maybe in a michelada and they could never eat it another way again. I hope you consider that a warning.




Although in Mexico it's a street snack, as unfussy as can be, but because I'm a no-fun person who hates eating standing up, I've been trying to figure out how to make a salad of it for some time and finally figured it out. Here, the lime juice is squeezed fresh, the chili powder is sprinkled to taste, the salt is coarse and I add other accents -- roasted pepitas, crumbled cotija and chopped cilantro. It works as part a brunch spread (I think all brunch spread need more salad), with some sort of taco-centric meal or as the heat wave salad of my dreams.

peach melba popsicles

When I moved to New York City 16 years ago I am pretty sure that on some level I believed if I went far enough above 14th Street with money I did not have, I'd reenter some gauzy version of New York from the past, you know, stuffy restaurants with tufted leather banquettes, paintings in gilded frames, black and white tiled floors and stories about when Sinatra was a regular. Places where mutton chops, Lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska and things in champagne cream sauce never went off the menu. It's not entirely clear to me why I thought I was moving to 1950 but needless to say, in the actual New York City I moved to, my first years were filled with the typical stuff, a walkup apartment in an illegal sublet, a terrible job, a lot of wine, virtually no hangovers (because: youth) and a lot of five-dumplings-for-a-dollar and $1.50 slices at 1 a.m.



I still love those old-fashioned places, though, and I have yet to find peach melba on a menu. It's too bad; I realize it sounds dreadful, like something an ancient aunt named Melba would eat or worse, something someone snuck melba toast into (fair enough, as they're named after the same person), thinking we wouldn't notice, but as it's in fact a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a poached peach half and a cascade of tart raspberry sauce, it's probably the most August dessert, ever. Escoffier created the dessert in 1892 for a dinner party to honor the opera singer Nellie Melba, who was performing in Covent Garden. Wikipedia says that an ice sculpture of a swan, which had been featured in the opera, carried peaches that rested on a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with spun sugar but was later replaced with raspberry purée.

summer squash pizza

Stop what you're doing. Dinner tonight is the very best kind there is: it has five ingredients including the ones to make the pizza dough. It's seasonal, which means you can use it to decimate your CSA pile-up. And it doesn't care what else you had in mind; recipes like this exist to disrupt the best-laid meal plans and that's my favorite thing about them. It is, in fact, pretty much the only thing I want out of any dish, for it, at least for a time to be the thing you have to eat next because now nothing else will do.



I, too, had a plan, something involving these summer squash but with pesto and burrata and maybe some beans or farro? It hadn't quite come together yet when I death-wished over to Sullivan Street Bakery last week to pick up a sourdough pullman for the blueberry bread and butter pudding and ended up walking out with six things not on my list, as will happen when you go to an amazing bakery: this crazy pastry and five squares of pizza, which made a fantastic and surprisingly light weeknight dinner miles better than anything that delivers (the irony not lost on the person doing the miles and the delivering). The mushroom was funky and delicious; the cauliflower was speckled with heat; the potato pizza was such a perfect match for this one, I was really proud of myself until I remembered that it's the same recipe (it's okay, I'm rolling my eyes too); the pomodoro was loved only by me either because I appreciate simple things that need no adornment (my theory) or because I'm a bore (others') but the zucchini pizza with heaps and valleys of deer bed-like shreds? Whoa. I had to get to the bottom of it.

blueberry bread and butter pudding

For some of us, classic French toast -- not particularly French or toasted, to be honest, unless we're speaking of pain perdu -- is sufficient on a weekend morning to make it feel exceptional. For others, it's casserole-style or bust because baking it in one big pan is vastly more enjoyable than dipping and frying on repeat while people who are not cooking come by and steal slices before you even get to sit down. But I'm going to make the argument that once you have Brit-style bread pudding casserole, uplifted by the tiniest step that is buttering the bread before fanning in out in a pan, there's no other way.



Typically, the bread is then scattered with raisins and the custard has a little nutmeg or other warm spices in it, but Casa SK has a bit of a blueberry situation right now, and her name is Anna. It doesn't matter how many we put in front of her or how slowly we encourage her to eat them, within a minute of them landing on her high chair tray, they've been hoovered into her tiny maw and she's banging angrily on it and screeching for more. [Side search: Emily Post board books...] Because we're a little scared of what happens if we run out, we've ended up with a oversupply of blueberries in the fridge, but even if you don't have the same problem, you should go ahead and create it because if you haven't yet tucked blueberries sprinkled with lemon sugar between slices of buttered bread and poured a vanilla custard over the whole mess and baked it until the blueberries leak, the center is luxe and the top is crisp and bronzed, you're in for a very lucky weekend.

eggplant with yogurt and tomato relish

This is not a recipe for eggplant caviar, but caught up in an adoration of July eggplants too lovely to roast just to grind up, it is loosely inspired by it. If you're unfamiliar with eggplant caviar, well, you need to come over to my in-law's where it is never not on the table, or basically anywhere else my mother in-law goes, because she's not allowed to show up without it. Just to confuse you, there's also caviar on the table and they have nothing to do with each other, although this is a matter of argument. The Joy of Cooking and others liken eggplant caviar to a "poor man's caviar," a tasty substitute for those who could not afford the real stuff, but actual Russians will tell you that caviar was affordable in the Soviet Union and everyone was poor.



Originally from the Caucasus, versions exist today everywhere from Russia to Greece because it's delicious although I don't think you'll ever find two that are alike. Not for the faint of heart, my mother in-laws version [recipe over here] is aggressively zingy with garlic and vinegar; it should come with a warning, but it's too much fun to watch newbies arrive at the table and ladle it on, not realizing it was going to taste almost as much like a pickle as it does eggplant.

blackberry cheesecake galette

That was close. We almost went half the summer without a new pie recipe. I do solemnly swear to never let that happen.



Common cooking theory goes that galettes are a lazy person's pie, except one person's lazy is might just be another person having life priorities that do not include lattice-weaving, I'm just saying. Galettes don't need to throw shade to be awesome. They're no frills, no fuss and you cannot mess them up. Leaky? No, pretty. Lopsided? You mean inviting. Barely sweet? Breakfast!



But if there could be a singular limitation of galettes, it's volume. Because they're baked flat on a sheet, you can't fill them too much of anything. They are not a cup; they cannot hold water. However, when working the kinks out of a cookbook recipe this spring, I realized that if you take you galette and drape it inside anything with walls -- a pie plate, a cake pan, a tart pan, anything, you create just enough wall that you can pour in a slightly messier filling and have a good chance of your galette holding onto it through the baking time. Uh, "Doesn't that just make it a pie Deb?" you might ask. But you're still skipping the trimming, the crimping, the parbaking and lid-having noise so yes, you're still coming out ahead.

corn, bacon and parmesan pasta

Oh, hi, I am ready for summer now. What did I miss?

Because the first half of this summer was so busy -- a manuscript due, a redesign set off into the world, a birthday, and a zillion other bits of happy work/life chaos -- I'm in this funny position of looking up for the first time mid-July and realizing that no mysterious person has arrived while I was buried in winter recipe testing and font fine-tunings and filled my freezer with popsicles, put a bowl of heirloom tomatoes on the counter, ready for their caprese closeup [realistically, this doesn't happen even if I had been paying attention, but let me enjoy this rose-colored Pinterest fantasy just the same] and beach? Hadn't seen it since May. I have about seven weeks left to catch up, except I know at least five of those will be buried under recipe testing and book edits, which basically means it's now or never to do all the summer things I haven't yet.





Beach? Check. Swimming? Check. Grilling? Check, check, check. Scheduled 7-hour flight with 4 adults and 5 children to a faraway beach town in the name of vacation? I'm scared but: check! Do everything I can with sweet summer corn while it lasts? Let's get to work!

corn bacon and parmesan pasta

Oh, hi, I am ready for summer now. What did I miss?

Because the first half of this summer was so busy — a manuscript due, a redesign set off into the world, a birthday, and a zillion other bits of happy work/life chaos — I’m in this funny position of looking up for the first time mid-July and realizing that no mysterious person has arrived while I was buried in winter recipe testing and font fine-tunings and filled my freezer with popsicles, put a bowl of heirloom tomatoes on the counter, ready for their caprese closeup [realistically, this doesn’t happen even if I had been paying attention, but let me enjoy this rose-colored Pinterest fantasy just the same] and beach? Hadn’t seen it since May. I have about seven weeks left to catch up, except I know at least five of those will be buried under recipe testing and book edits, which basically means it’s now or never to do all the summer things I haven’t yet.

Beach? Check. Swimming? Check. Grilling? Check, check, check. Scheduled 7-hour flight with 4 adults and 5 children to a faraway beach town in the name of vacation? I’m scared but: check! Do everything I can with sweet summer corn while it lasts? Let’s get to work!

We had some leftover corn on the cob after Father’s Day and I shaved it off the cob and sautéed it in the renderings left behind from crispy bits of bacon (also tangentially related to Father’s Day), tossed the two with al dente pasta and a bit of cooking water with parmesan, chives and basil and it was really lovely and very summery and, because this is 2016, took a picture of it and posted it on Instagram and promised to share the recipe later and three weeks later, here we are! I am sure everyone was at the edge of their seat. Let my ridiculousness not hold you up: this should be a new summer staple, so easy, happy, kid-friendly and welcoming of all matter of laziness (you can decide to make this 20 or so minutes before you eat it) and adaptations (bacon not your thing? add some diced tomatoes at the end).

Redesign: Thank you for all of your feedback. I’m sorry we’ve had some glitches (notably, an email newsletter that went out blank save some tacky ads, obviously, I hope, a mistake I hope we’ve now fixed). Do know that I am going through your concerns one by one and making adjustments, yes, including that ad on top (soon). In the meanwhile, there’s a search bar back in the sidebar, seasonal links are back there, the In Season tab should be working now too, and the comment form is back up at the top so you don’t have to scroll through. Soon, soon, we will have everything right and well again. In the meanwhile, happy cooking!

One year ago: Very Blueberry Scones and Look What Else We Baked!

Two years ago: Brownie Ice Cream Sandwiches and Easiest Fridge Dill Pickles

Three years ago: Grilled Bacon Salad with Arugula and Balsamic and One-Pan Farro with Tomatoes

Four years ago: Bacon Corn Hash and Peach Pie

Five years ago: Flatbreads with Honey Thyme and Sea Salt and Whole Wheat Raspberry Ricotta Scones

Six years ago: Mango Slaw with Cashews and Mint and Thai-Style Chicken Legs

Seven years ago: Watermelon Lemonade, Light Brioche Burger Buns, Blueberry Boy Bait and Lemony Zucchini Goat Cheese Pizza

Eight years ago: Zucchini Strand Spaghetti, Project Wedding Cake: Mango Curd and Swiss Buttercream

Nine years ago: Quick Potato Pirogi, Ratatouille’s Ratatouille, Red Bean Chili and Double-Layer Chocolate Cake

And for the other side of the world:

Six Months Ago: Butterscotch Pudding and Mushroom Marsala Pasta Bake

1.5 Years Ago: Chicken Pho and Pear and Hazelnut Muffins

2.5 Years Ago: Gnocchi in Tomato Broth

3.5 Years Ago: Carrot Soup with Tahini and Crisped Chickpeas and Ethereally Smooth Hummus

4.5 Years Ago: Carrot Soup with Miso and Sesame and Apple Sharlotka

Corn Bacon and Parmesan PastaServings: 3 to 4Time: 30 minutesPrint

Think of this as a close cousin to the bacon corn hash in the archives. I think this would also be delicious with farro or another grain instead of pasta. If you’d like a creamier pasta, a big spoonful of mascarpone stirred in at the end would be otherworldly; use a little less pasta cooking water if so.

8 ounces dried pasta (I used spirals here and radiatore in the past)1/4 pound bacon, ideally thick-cut, diced2 ears corn, shucked and kernels cut from cobSalt and freshly ground black pepper or red pepper flakes3 scallions, thinly sliced1/3 cup finely grated parmesanFistful of fresh basil and chives, chopped

If you’re hoping to pull this all off in one pan, cook your pasta in a large deep saute pan* until al dente, or 1 to 2 minutes before it is done. Reserve a cup of pasta cooking water and drain. Wipe pan dry if using for the next steps, otherwise, you can get started in a large frying pan.

Scatter bacon in pan over medium-high heat, no need to heat the pan first. Cook, stirring, until evenly browned and crisp. Use a slotted spoon to transfer bacon bits to paper towels to drain. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon bacon fat from pan (save for other fun stuff, like frying eggs) and add corn to it. Season corn with salt and pepper and cook, stirring for 1 to 2 minutes, until crisp-tender. Add pasta and a couple splashes of the cooking water and half the parmesan and toss, toss, toss the pasta with the corn, seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed and adding more cooking water if it doesn’t feel loose enough. Add scallions and stir to warm. Stir in bacon and transfer to a serving bowl. Sprinkle with remaining cheese and fresh herbs. Dig in.

* this is my go-to for a lot of things these days because it is both shallow saucepan with a lid and and a big deep frying pan