Deb Perelman's Blog, page 38
March 31, 2016
caramelized brown sugar oranges with yogurt
Just in case there was anyone still out there mistaking me for some sort of domestic diva, or even a moderately skilled at being domestic, you should know that it has taken until the spring of the year 2016, nearly a full decade after starting a food website where I’ve had the brass to coax others along in the kitchen as if I had some sort of innate greater understanding of it, for me to learn how to use my broiler. Prior to
I’m only a little bit joking. Last summer, trying to return to a level of normalcy in the weeks after bringing the sweetest potato home from the hospital, Alex and I spent a week Netflix binging on the first season of Chef’s Table and I fell head over heels for cooking I will probably never experience in my life, that from Francis Mallmann, the Argentine chef whose specialty is wild, open-fire cooking — everything over wood fire, usually in an open pit, on cast iron planchas and parrillas, and sometimes in the ashes too. And his food looks out of this world — even something as simple as a cheese toast made with a log of goat cheese you can get at your local Stop & Shop is transformed in a griddle over open flames into a crisp, golden-brown crusted melt that I would climb through a television screen to get at. The episode ended and I declared it time to get a fire pit. My husband cited fire codes and other pesky side effects of living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I sulked.
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March 28, 2016
spring chicken salad toasts
If taking cubes of chicken and other things chosen for their ability to hold up in a deli case and suspending them in a thick dressing of mayo and seasonings is the winter coat of chicken salad, this is the cardigan, which is to say, I hope everyone is as happy to see it as I am. I live for cardigan weather.
While I don’t have any tremendous gripe with traditional chicken salad (yes, even with mayo; I save my contempt for curry powder and raisins), I have forever had little love or tolerance for white meat. The archives here are thick with my referring to breast cutlets as pressed sawdust and worse; it could never be argued that I don’t know how to form an opinion. Thus, it surprises nobody more than me that I want to eat these everyday for the rest of my life, or at least the next month, and all it took was shifting the way we usually emphasize ingredients.
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March 22, 2016
eggs in purgatory, puttanesca-style
If the theme of late here is simple, cozy meals we can assemble even when we’re not, perhaps, having the most well-rested, worry-free weeks ever, we are unquestionably overdue for a conversation about eggs in purgatory, aka Italian-style huevos rancheros/shakshuka. Plus, what could be more appropriately uplifting during Holy Week than a dish that celebrates hell, or the imminent threat of it? What, you say, one that also celebrates the oldest profession? Oh honey, we’re in.
I first mentioned having cooked eggs in tomato sauce nearly eight years ago on this site; it was a surprisingly excellent fast dinner. About half the commenters said “You just made eggs in purgatory” and the other half said, “You need to make shakshuka.” I went with the latter and have felt little need to err from that glorious recipe for six years now. But poking around on Nigella Lawson’s website the other day, always a wonderful place to find any cooking inspiration that eludes you, the photo with her eggs in purgatory recipe was stop-me-in-my-tracks stunning, and I suddenly needed it in my life very badly.
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March 18, 2016
apricot hazelnut brown butter hamantaschen
Let me be the first to admit that the only reason that the hamantaschen archives on this site aren’t stronger are that I’m completely stubborn and generally a pedant and this gets in the way of what I know needs to be done to achieve hamantaschen perfection. If you read that sentence and thought “I know what some of those words mean but maybe not in that order,” don’t worry, you’re not alone. Hamantaschen are triangular cookies traditionally eaten during the Jewish festival of Purim (think: Jewish Mardi Gras) that falls next week. Haman, the villain in the biblical story, was said to wear a tricorne hat — with the brim turned up on three sides, something that was wildly fashionable in the 1800s which means it’s due for a hipster revival any day now — and this is where the cookies get their shape.
While I’ve made them a few times before — really, what is there not to love about filled cookies — mine tend to flop open and leak because I find the traditional ones floury and dull, and prefer those that are like tiny open-faced fruit tarts or galettes — light, flaky and tender with inspired fillings. [This is probably what happens when you have a mother that made french onion more often than matzo ball soup, beef bourguignon instead of roast chicken, not that we minded one bit.] These little fruit tarts are high on delicious but low on structural integrity.
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March 16, 2016
sesame soba and ribboned omelet salad
In times of lots of worry and little sleep, like most of us, I return to my comforts and staples: avocado toast, a great pot of meatballs, and as many ways as I can find to intersect noodles and eggs. While I am fairly certain I could live off this fiery, crunchy spaghetti pangrattato with crispy eggs for the rest of my life, as bits of spring have been in the air, I am always ready for fresh takes on cold noodles.
Flipping through Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Near & Far a few weeks ago, I became entranced with the cold soba salad in part for the ingredients but really it was the footnote at the end that stayed with me: “Serve topped with a poached egg or an omelet sliced into a whispery-thin chiffonade.” Whispery-thin chiffonade. Could anything be so lovely? I imagined the strands of eggs tangling with the strands of noodles, punctuated with a sesame-seed flecked sauce and crispy raw vegetables and I needed it in my life.
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March 11, 2016
chocolate peanut butter tart
Definitely one of the best things about having a 6.5 year old is that he now has classmates that can bestow upon us The Annual Gift of the Thin Mint Cookies. If there were any other Girl Scout Cookies worth celebrating, I knew nothing about them until pickup earlier this week when I saw other parents scurrying off with boxes of curiosities like Samoas and Tagalongs and launched a full investigation. Seriously, why did nobody tell me about those crispy chewy rings of caramel, coconut and stripes of chocolate? Was there always a cookie with both peanut butter and chocolate in it or is this some millennium baby voodoo? Making up for time lost to Thin Mint blinders begins here and now.
The other awesome thing about elementary school kids is genuine excitement over math-y holidays such as this coming Monday’s Pi(e) Day, something that I previously only celebrated sarcastically, because I was a terrible person with a life bereft of wide-eyed wonder. Thus, when I spied a Tagalongs-style peanut butter pie on Tasting Table this week and realized that it was easy enough that I could pull it off in my current sleep-deprived fugue while also filing the vast peanut butter pie-shaped hole in the archives, it was a done deal.
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March 8, 2016
nolita-style avocado toast
That sound you hear is the reverberating cacophony of a thousand unfollows. I get it. A great many people rightfully find the avocado toast trend — that is avocado, smashed onto a piece of toasted bread, then discussed as if it were notable — both baffling and exasperating. But I believe there’s a time and place for everything and for me that time (currently a sick no-sleeping baby, thus no-sleeping parents, leading to utter cooking apathy and a near-clinical fixation on avocado toast on my part) and a place (a Nolita cafe that makes it better than anyone else) is right now.
Depending on your perspective, Cafe Gitane, a French-Moroccan shoebox on Mott Street, is to be lauded or booed for launching the avocado toast trend in the 90s, but I came to it later, mostly thanks to you because for as long as people have been kind enough to order custom signed copies of the first SK cookbook from McNally Jackson in Soho, I’ve been sneaking around the corner when I’m done for a little toast-shaped luxury.
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March 3, 2016
churros
Prior to a few months ago, the full extent of my understanding of churros was:
They’re long cake dougnuts.
They must be very difficult to make or they would be everywhere at all times.
They cannot be near me.
This week, set out to disprove all three. Well, the first notion began to unravel a recently as we chomped through a plate of them at Rosie’s, a newish restaurant in my neighborhood, when I realized for the first time that these long, ridged doughnuts weren’t your usual cake or yeast doughnut texture inside, but something else — almost custardy within, very crunchy outside, as if they were made from an eggy, puffy dough. Google confirmed my a-ha moment: did you realize that churros are basically long, piped and fried eclair/cream puff dough?
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February 29, 2016
roasted yams and chickpeas with yogurt
If one was ever to question their lifetime of unwavering devotion to New York City, February would the month to do it. It’s cold and has been for some time. It’s cold and will be for some time. And somewhere out in California, a “friend” — but really, are they if they torture you so? — is welcoming their first strawberries. You get strawberries in New York, too, but for about 5 minutes every June and they cost about as much per square foot as real estate in a neighborhood with multiple pour-over coffee outlets.
So, yes, February is the month. But this February? I never thought it would be the one. This is, by every measurement known, the mildest winter we’ve ever had, and the shortest too. I am, by almost every measurement I can invent, the most loyal and content New Yorker you’ll meet (but not the shortest, although close). But every night for the last week, I’ve pestered my husband with talk of Los Angeles, a mythical place where it’s warm and sunny all year round, where the tacos are unparalleled, where the avocados are exceptional, where you apparently don’t need to be a millionaire to have a home with more than two bedrooms. This is probably what happens to even the most stalwart New Yorker after too long without a vacation.
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February 23, 2016
everyday meatballs
If you’d told me as a spaghett-and-meatballs loving kid that in Italy, these two things are never served together, I wouldn’t have believed you. What’s next, no pepperoni pizza, fettucine alfredo or rainbow cookies? No Italian dressing? At least we know those jars of Italian seasoning are the real deal (phew).
Don’t worry, however, I am not here to chasten you, myself or my spaghetti-and-meatballs loving kid for eating food you/we/he exactly the way you like it. Smitten Kitchen is a sanctimony-free zone. I only mentioned this because when, as an adult, I began to consider the meatball as something apart from the flavor-anchors of spaghetti and a busy marinara sauce, I realized I wanted much more out of my meatballs. I wanted them to be good enough to fly solo as a dish, whether or not there was bread, or roasted potatoes, polenta or, yes, even spaghetti on the table. And I couldn’t stop fiddling with them.
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