Deb Perelman's Blog, page 36
July 15, 2016
July 14, 2016
welcome to the shiny new smitten kitchen 2.0
9.85 years ago, I decided that I was going to start a home cooking blog and that I would design the site myself, which is hilarious because my HTML and CSS skill level is equivalent to that thing you do when you don’t know which circuit on the panel blew so you just flip them all up and down until the right thing comes back on. I made the logo in Microsoft Paint — I’m not even a little bit kidding — with a font I downloaded from a free font website, and that was until an hour ago the same file being used today. I’d expected this food blog thing to last maybe six months and instead I’m still here (hooray!) and this site, aside from some server changes and software upgrades, was still “coded” the way it was that first day in 2006. It was the design equivalent of these outfits. Font: tiny and terrible. Paragraphs: justified. Mobile responsiveness? 2006 doesn’t even know what these words mean.
But today is at last a new day. Here are a few things we’ve a talented team of developers have changed or improved:
We didn’t dare touch the “Surprise Me!” button. It should be easier to find than ever.
The site looks awesome on a mobile or tablet. The site looks awesome on a mobile or tablet. The site looks awesome on a mobile or tablet. (Yes I wrote that three times. It brings me that much relief-tinged joy.)
The Recipe Index is so much better. You can still view recipes by category as a list, or by pressing that little grid icon up top, change it to by image.
Don’t want to read all of my blather up top? I am not offended, heh. Right below the title of each recipe, you can jump right to the recipe or the comments. Previous-next navigation arrows are ghosted into the top image so you can keep browsing if that recipe wasn’t your thing.
The number one complaint about the comments on this (and really every recipe site) is about ones that don’t tell us how the recipe went. Now, when you leave a comment you have the option to let us know whether your comment reflects your experience making the recipe or if it’s just a question and it will then sort itself under a tab where you can only read those comments. Want to read all the comments as you always have? Just go to the main thread, which is where comments that don’t fit the other two categories will go. [All comments are still, as always, welcome.] Threaded comments, i.e. being able to reply to specific comments? We’ve got that too.
There’s a contact form. Recipes print neatly from your browser (i.e. Cntrl-P, not just from a button). The logo got a little refresh by, like, a professional. Links are in a color you should hopefully be actually able to see. Into newsletters? This one is fun, full of a recipe ideas and I enjoy putting it together weekly. The field should be easy to find (but not a popup that you must close to read the site! I’d never do that to us.)
There were two rather buried side blogs on this site, one for Baby food (it was short-lived and this newer child mostly throws food so there’s been little opportunity to increase the recipe database) and a Tips blog; they’re now integrated. The latter is the one that I’m excited about because I have an avalanche of assorted bits of cooking advice I’ve been eager to send out into the world.
Finally, the site has now been migrated to a heftier publishing platform, WordPress VIP, the same used to publish sites like, uh, the New York Post and Fortune and ESPN so lord only knows what I’m doing there. In time, though, it will make adding new features even easier.
Note: There are things that have landed a little out of place — older posts where the photos aren’t yet resized, categories that need re-sorting, and the vast majority of recipes aren’t yet in this hellacious thing called “shortcode” which allows fancier formatting. We’re taking note and fixing them all as soon as possible; do leave comments as you find broken things and we will add them to “The List.” It will take a bit of time to get all 1000+ recipes and posts to date in tip-top shape. But I would never make you wait that long for caaaaaaake! That, my friends, is coming up next. I’m so happy to be back.
June 21, 2016
funnel cake
For one week every spring the local Catholic church, an otherwise unassuming dot on the landscape of my suburb, turned their property into magical kingdom of lights, music, cotton candy and so many rides it was impossible to remember that all other weeks of the year it was just an empty field next to a parking lot. I was obsessed with this carnival… from afar. My parents, citing such horrifically dull things as having their children live long, healthy lives, questionable safety practices and clearly a focused interest in ruining everything, refused to let my sister and me go, even though my best friend, who went to school there and ostensibly had parents also invested in keeping her safe, got to go every night. Worst weeks, ever. This story should end here but as we drove to my parents house last month and I saw the carnival all set up again, I realized two things: 1. I wasn’t remembering it with rose-colored glasses, it’s actually, objectively amazing. 2. This miiiight be the source of my ongoing obsessing with carnivals.
I can’t help it. I haven’t met a balloon race, ali baba, bumper car, ferris wheel, haunted house, carousel, mini-zipper, graviton or hurricane I didn’t like. Give me all the strung lights, popcorn in red and white boxes and musical reels that haven’t changed in 50 years. I delight in the vague creepiness of clowns and it’s basically no surprise that only one days into summer, we’ve already taken the “kids” (sure, okay) to Jenkinson’s and Coney Island.
... Read the rest of funnel cake on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to funnel cake | 27 comments to date | see more: Doughnut, Photo, Summer
June 17, 2016
corn and black bean weeknight nachos
I’m currently in a swarm of many behind-the-scenes things that I genuinely couldn’t be happier about even if it would also be okay if they didn’t all fall in the next few weeks (the deadline on the next cookbook, the launch at-last-so-overdue-hooray site redesign, a hopefully very cool new project or two, the first birthday of this fiesty love, all of the end of the year chaos that comes with a school-aged kid), that if there were a textbook definition of Bad Times To Take a Vacation, my June might be under it. Thank goodness I am not married to anyone burdened by such trivialities. Thus last weekend, when he surprised me with a birthday weekend away in Mexico City, a place I’ve been telling him I wanting to go to for the better part of a decade, but briefly expressed concern that this wasn’t the “best” time to get away, I was like “SHUT UP WHICH AIRPORT I ALREADY CALLED AN UBER.” The more dramatic the mess, the more dramatic the escape hatch required, right?
But seriously: Maybe this could be a new life rule. Because of instead of working bleary-eyed through the weekend and diligently ignoring the big birthday in the middle of it, I sipped mezcal, ate all the tacos (also panuchos, tostatas, flautas), the actual nectar of the gods (not just a saying, apparently), ate fruit in every color of the rainbow, wandered old streets, saw ancient ruins, and ate a tlacoyo that had been kneaded from blue corn masa right in front of me minutes before, and was back in time to take the kid to school and resume my chaos exactly where I left it on Tuesday morning. I’m a lucky, lucky human.
... Read the rest of corn and black bean weeknight nachos on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to corn and black bean weeknight nachos | 6 comments to date | see more: Corn, Peppers, Photo, Summer, Tex-Mex, Travel, Vegetarian, Weeknight Favorite
June 9, 2016
strawberry milk
Did you know drinking buttermilk is a thing? I wasn’t aware until a few years ago when I took a baking class and remarked to the teacher that buttermilk is pretty amazing in baked goods for something that smells so rancid and he told me that his mother drinks a glass of it warm every afternoon. Like, by choice. I may have said something polite but as I didn’t get the nickname Deb No Poker Face Perelman for nothing, I doubt anyone missed how revolted I actually was. I have little doubt that I acted equally maturely in high school everyday when I friend of mine would get not a normal drink, like ice tea or lemonade with lunch, but strawberry milk. You know, the bright pink stuff that smelled like a melted Jolly Rancher. Why on earth would you drink strawberry milk if you could have chocolate milk? And yet, inevitably, here we are.
It turns out strawberry milk when homemade under the bossy guidance of Gabrielle Hamilton is unbelievably good, like a milkshake but one (if you mom is as awesome as I am, obviously) you can pass off as breakfast. Hamilton’s method has you macerate strawberries in sugar until all of their liquid is drawn out and they’re very syrupy. She insists that you use the best strawberries (i.e. the kind that are in season now) and says “don’t compensate with [rhymes with bitty] berries with more sugar, please.” Then, you take this glassy red bowl that smells like cotton candy, sunshine and joy itself, blend it until smooth, mix it with a combination of milk and buttermilk and let it steep overnight. In the morning, any of that remnant yogurt flavor of buttermilk is gone, leaving you with an ice-cold pitcher of slightly thick, creamy, lightly sweetened deep pink happiness.
... Read the rest of strawberry milk on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to strawberry milk | 69 comments to date | see more: Drinks, Photo, Snack, Strawberries, Summer
June 7, 2016
charred eggplant and walnut pesto pasta salad
Pasta salads get a bad rap but I find that the more I think of them as room temperature summer dishes and the less as mayo-slicked bowls of suspicion and dread, the more inviting they become, not only for cookouts and picnics, but (ahem) a gorgeous Tuesday night.
Two things help a lot, first, I like starting with a salad dressing we’ve loved and building it from there. We talked about this walnut pesto [pesto di noci] for the first time way back in 2009; it’s from Jody Williams and it’s a longtime staple on crostini at the shoebox wine bar Gottino in the West Village. Don’t be put off by its unassuming appearance — this combination of toasted walnuts, olive oil, thyme, parmesan and a dab of minced sundried tomatoes is a triumph of flavor, I’m not surprised Frank Bruni once called it one of the best crostini in town and likened it to “crunchy peanut butter for grown-ups.” [But oh, I think it’s even better.]
... Read the rest of charred eggplant and walnut pesto pasta salad on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to charred eggplant and walnut pesto pasta salad | 27 comments to date | see more: Eggplant, Grilling, Pasta, Photo, Salad, Summer, Vegetarian
June 3, 2016
the consummate chocolate chip cookie, revisited
If you’ve been following Smitten Kitchen outside this url recently, you might have noticed that a terrible, dangerous thing has happened: I revisited the epic, consummate even, chocolate chip cookies from David Leite via The New York Times, mostly because I was tired of looking at the unpalatably blueberry-ish photo of them atop the 2008 post, and eight years later, in basically the rom-com of cookie sagas, realized the thing I wanted most in a chocolate chip cookie was was there the whole time.
What, I wasn’t in love with them already? I mean, they did not go to waste. We are not monsters. They just felt too over-the-top to me to actually make a regular part of my life. They used expensive chocolate, demanded planning ahead and were in every way the very opposite of this salted chocolate chunk cookie, which I have since considered my go-to. For weekdays and such.
... Read the rest of the consummate chocolate chip cookie, revisited on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to the consummate chocolate chip cookie, revisited | 40 comments to date | see more: Chocolate, Cookie, Photo
May 31, 2016
chicken gyro salad
Last week, because we are edgy, rebellious and pretty much the dictionary definition of renegades, we broke the law. We decided we’d had enough of having an outdoor space and no fire-breathing apparatus to exercise our American-given right to burn food on in the summer months and brought home the tiniest, safest and most docile grill ever manufactured, basically the fluffy kitten of the barbecue landscape. As I figure we’re going to be asked to remove it any moment now, all of my previous summer goals have be redirected to the following: enjoying every second of it while it lasts. We are going to grill everything. I am halfway to fulfilling my fantasy of setting all my food on fire.
We started with chicken, however, because in real life I am not exactly Francis Mallmann (I’m sorry to disappoint). We had a small crowd for dinner last Thursday (in advance of this guy’s guitar recital) and because we are officially at a point when I find cooking anything extra, no matter how wiped out I am, still more appealing than finding a restaurant that can accommodate 6 grown-ups, a 6-year old and a 10.5 month old fireball. I bet the restaurants thank us, too.
... Read the rest of chicken gyro salad on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to chicken gyro salad | 75 comments to date | see more: Chicken, Cucumber, Greek, Greens, Grilling, Onions, Photo, Salad, Summer, Tomatoes, Weeknight Favorite
May 26, 2016
cucumber yogurt raita salad
If you needed another reason to add to the list of why you’d probably never want to be cornered at a party with me, I should tell you I’m more than a normal level of fascinated by the intersection of tomatoes and cucumbers in salads around the world. And I want to talk about it.
Because, seriously, can we go on a cucumber-tomato salad summer world tour? From the classic Greek salad (horiatiki), to the Palestinian/Arab/Israeli salads in their infinite variations, their close cousins, the shepherd’s salads (shirazi in Iran, çoban salatası in Turkey, shopska in Macedonia and Bulgaria), plus the kachumber in India and all of the variants, like fattoush and I’m going to need one of each. I was particularly struck by what Ottolenghi said in the intro to the fattoush salad in his Jerusalem cookbook, that freshly chopped vegetable salads like this are served with every meal and that friends visiting London often complained of feeling like they ate ‘unhealthily’ because there weren’t fresh salad with each meal.
... Read the rest of cucumber yogurt raita salad on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to cucumber yogurt raita salad | 3 comments to date | see more: Cucumber, Indian, Photo, Picnics, Salad, Summer, Tomatoes, Vegetarian
May 23, 2016
almond rhubarb picnic bars
One of the primary pieces of advice my grandmother imparted on me — besides the fact that she thought I should be a writer, an absurd idea I promptly ignored — was that one should always leave the house looking the best they can. I realize this might sound a little old-fashioned and possibly even oppressive — I Exist As More Than A Decorative Object, thankyouverymuch — but I took it to heart nonetheless because I know she didn’t mean high heels and rollers, but mostly that looking more with it than you might actually feel sometimes can trick you too.
I apply it in the kitchen as well. Thus, while if we’re being completely honest, life is currently a swarm of getting recipes ready for the next book (eee!), a to-do list for this month as long as the remainder of this year, kids waking up way too early, mama going to bed too late, an apartment that has yet to clean itself and let’s not even talk about what’s going on in the produce drawer — i.e. real life, and not even a bad one — rather than dwelling on the chaos, I think we should cook for the life we want, not for the life we have. Thus: I choose picnic bars.
... Read the rest of almond rhubarb picnic bars on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to almond rhubarb picnic bars | 25 comments to date | see more: Bars, Cookie, Photo, Picnics, Rhubarb, Spring
