Deb Perelman's Blog, page 40

blood orange, almond and ricotta cake

Here’s a thing I’ve been doing since the year began that’s made me very happy in the kitchen and it’s so simple, I completely expect you to roll your eyes at how un-revolutionary it is, but it goes like this: Find a recipe that sounds good to you and make it immediately. Don’t put it in the queue; don’t save it on that to-cook-one-day list, just dive in and dig in. So far, it’s been nothing but great; there was a giant egg bake, ugly cookies, green dinner pancakes, a giant cabbage casserole we heaped on coarse mustard-slathered bread and a towering spaghetti frittata. And while all of these things have been delicious, what’s been the most fun about them is getting back to a kind of impulsivity that’s gotten pushed to the wayside in this hyper-scheduled so-called adult life. It’s also led to conversations I want more of in 2016, such as “well, if you’re around anyway, why don’t you stay for dinner and I’ll guinea pig a new recipe on you?”

Which is how it happened that I spied a photo on the Instagram account of Elisabeth Pruitt of Tartine Bakery — someone I’ve long admired for both her baking talent and her refreshingly honest talk about being a working parent — last weekend that may not have normally been the kind of thing that got me running to the kitchen (a gluten-free cake, candied citrus rings, plus didn’t I just recently make a citrus-infused ricotta cake?) but why think too hard about it? And, lo, I’m so glad we didn’t.

... Read the rest of blood orange, almond and ricotta cake on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to blood orange, almond and ricotta cake | 15 comments to date | see more: Cake, Everyday Cakes, Gluten-Free, Italian, Orange, Passover, Photo, Winter

swiss chard pancakes

I read about French farçous pancakes for the first time on Friday morning and by lunchtime I was eating them. As my usual process of funneling the hundreds of recipe ideas swarming around in my head into a single one worth sharing is an exercise in exasperation involving extensive considerations of how I’d like to approach something, ingredient availability, time availability, estimated number of rounds it will take to get said recipe right, scanning my worry meter over all the places I suspect it might flop, number of stores to get to find ingredients, all interspersed with baby feedings, and overdue items on an forever-long to-do list, getting from “yes I want to make this” to “eating it” in a little over an hour alone makes this the best thing I’ve made this year.

It also ticked off several other boxes: Lunch? Dinner? Vegetables? Protein? Quick? Forgiving? Flexible? Fun to eat? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. And a few I hadn’t expected, such as a 6 year-old spying these very green pancakes in the fridge, requesting one, and then another. (I won’t tell him there’s Swiss chard in there if you don’t.) I only poured out about half the batter on Friday, but it keeps just fine in the fridge for a few days, if you’d like to make it over a few days. The pancakes also freeze very well, which is good, as it makes a lot.

... Read the rest of swiss chard pancakes on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to swiss chard pancakes | 16 comments to date | see more: Freezer Friendly, French, Pancakes, Photo, Swiss Chard, Vegetarian, Weeknight Favorite

ugly but good cookies

I am, as ever, a sucker for a recipe with a great name. Bring me your grunts, your bundts, your fools, slumps and sonkers. Take me across the pond and let me feast on jammy dodgers, bubble and squeak, rarebit and rumbledethumps. I hope you know it’s only a matter of time until we take in some scrumptious nun’s farts. And so, for no reasons other than an inherent fascination with great food names plus egg whites to use up after a batch of these evil things, I turned my attention this week to the brutti ma buoni (meaning “ugly but good”), an egg white cookie the hails from Prato, Italy.

In this age of Pin-able envy, lifestyle aspiration, and “elevated” anything (living rooms, personal brands, and soups, apparently) I find it delightfully direct that we get to call these misshapen, homely beige blobs exactly what they are. Everyone knows the prettiest pastries — too glassine and brightly colored, not a dot of royal icing out of place — are the most suspicious, and often the least tasty. Ugly baked goods are, to me, like the one out-of-place item on a restaurant menu, irresistible because it couldn’t be there for anything but the fact it must taste really good.

... Read the rest of ugly but good cookies on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to ugly but good cookies | 35 comments to date | see more: Chocolate, Cookie, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, Italian, Photo

chicken chili

Although I am firmly of the belief that the internet needs another recipe for chicken crockpot chili like your groggy narrator needs another morning of her mini-humans rousing her before 6 a.m., when I went to make my own one night, I was dissatisfied with what I found. It wasn’t because recipes out there weren’t good, or well-reviewed and certainly not because they hadn’t made countless other people out there content at mealtimes, but because they weren’t what I was looking for. And, well, as that’s how we got here in the first place, it seems appropriate enough to step into the year 2016, the year this website turns ten, not fighting this at all.

While I’m hardly aspiring towards the Texas Gold Standard of chile con carne — chunks of beef, lots of chiles, and ftlog, no beans — I think there’s something to a fairly straightforward, excellently-seasoned chili. I could overlook the instant tapioca, jars of salsa, cinnamon, chocolate, onion powder, garlic powder, taco seasoning mix and celery on the front page of Google’s results that might be someone’s thing, just not mine, but I kept getting stuck on one point: if were going to run the slow-cooker for 5 or 10 hours, or simmer a chili on the stove for 3, why start with canned beans? Dried beans are more economical, more flavorful and will plump up splendidly in either of those cooking times without any presoaking nonsense.

... Read the rest of chicken chili on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to chicken chili | 59 comments to date | see more: Beans, Photo, Poultry, Slow Cooker, Stew, Tex-Mex, Weeknight Favorite

fudgy bourbon balls

I closed out 2014 somewhat exasperated (and quietly anxious and queasy because I was first trimester-ing this bunny) that I had so much I’d wanted to cook and tell you about that year but couldn’t fabricate the time. Then I added a new tiny wonderful human to the mix and needless to say, the song has not changed. So, I’m going retune it. It’s better to have too many ideas than too few, after all, I’m sure there will be a time when these kids don’t call (sob) and the apartment is finally clean and organized and there are no items left on my tumbling to-do list when I’ll maybe even miss the chaos the chaos of feeling like I was barely keeping afloat. Plus, seriously, this was such an unquestionably excellent year, from impending babies, actual babies, missing front teeth, a new weekly digest newsletter, and even crazy milestones, like the 1000th recipe on this site (my favorite cocktail, go make yourself one, I’ll wait). How could I want to change a thing?

Most Popular Smitten Kitchen Recipes of 2015: Savory

mushroom marsala pasta bake

my ultimate chicken noodle soup

obsessively good avocado cucumber salad

tomato and fried provolone sandwich

baked chickpeas with pita chips and yogurt

oat and wheat sandwich bread

oven-braised beef with tomatoes and garlic

broccoli cheddar soup

perfect corn muffins

zucchini rice and cheese gratin

spaghetti pangrattato with crispy eggs

cornmeal-fried pork chops + smashed potatoes

caramelized onion and gruyère biscuits

takeout-style sesame noodles with cucumber

herbed summer squash pasta bake

fake shack burger

Most Popular Smitten Kitchen Recipes of 2015: Sweet

pecan pie

salted chocolate chunk cookies

the ‘i want chocolate cake’ cake

key lime pie

carrot graham layer cake

butterscotch pudding

salted peanut butter cookies
liège waffles
black bottom oatmeal pie
pull-apart rugelach
very blueberry scones
cannoli pound cake
crispy peach cobbler
strawberry cornmeal griddle cakes
the browniest cookies
chocolate chunk granola bars

... Read the rest of fudgy bourbon balls on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to fudgy bourbon balls | 14 comments to date | see more: Bourbon, Candy, Chocolate, Photo

feta tapenade tarte soleil

Fully preoccupied with coming up with fun new shapes for my favorite cookie a few weeks ago, I went deep into a YouTube cooking show rabbit hole and emerged somewhere in France, where a twisted pastry that goes by the name tarte soleil stopped me in my tracks, and zipped itself right to the top of the Must! Cook! Now! list.

It looks like it would take tweezer-level pastry cheffing to pull off, or at least some advanced mathematics. You’d imagine that this recipe would begin with a bracket of instructions labelled “Day One:” and you’d close the tab immediately. But you, like me, be forgetting that most French home cooking is remarkably simple (intentionally leaving the souffles and quenelles for the white tablecloth-ed establishments) and if you can find puffed pastry worth eating in the freezer case and leave it in the fridge overnight, you could be bringing this to a party an hour later. Trust me, I leave everything to the last minute and still got this out of the oven and digitally recorded with available light before the sun set at approximately 3:22 p.m. yesterday.

... Read the rest of feta tapenade tarte soleil on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to feta tapenade tarte soleil | 37 comments to date | see more: Appetizer, French, Tarts/Quiche

gingerbread layer cake

For the last seven Christmas Eves, I have made the gingerbread cake Claudia Fleming made famous during her time at Gramercy Tavern. The first year, I was so excited about it that I made it twice, first, for the holiday and then so I could tell you all about it because I think we all know that a Deb-fitted torture chamber would be me making some awesome cooking discovery and not being able to run to the internet to tell you about it immediately.

But every year after that, it’s given me a hard time. At first, I shrugged it off — a chunk stayed behind in the pan, I pasted it back on and showered the cake with an extra blizard of sugar “snow.” Two chunks stayed behind, we teased it for its lopsidedness while eating it with no-less-diminished vigor. But it didn’t get better from there. I assumed it was my greasing technique; maybe this cake was no match for my beloved Baker’s Joy? I doubled-down on the buttering and the flouring and was rewarded with the cake equivalent of a gap-toothed 6 year-old. I did the same but gave it 20 minutes to set in the freezer; it mocked my efforts. I switched to the Crisco my mom swears by for pan release; the hungry hungry bundt still ate a third of the cake. I questioned the half-life of factory-applied nonstick coating, but it was hard to ignore that the same coating was mighty effective at releasing other cakes. Finally, I pulled in the big guns, this mix of shortening, oil, and flour many more talented bakers than myself swear by; the situation was so bad that year, I had to make this cake at the last minute instead.

... Read the rest of gingerbread layer cake on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to gingerbread layer cake | 35 comments to date | see more: Cake, Celebration Cakes, Christmas, Photo, Winter

the browniest cookies

I have, for forever and a day, looked for a chocolate cookie I could crown with what I considered the highest honor one could bestow on it, declaring it the browniest cookie. I just didn’t expect it to take me so long to find what I was looking for. Along the way, I met cookies that suggest brownies; ones that are weakly chocolaty, better emulating mediocre brownies; those that promise soft but deliver chewy; and even versions that are a great chocolate cookie, but have little to do with the glorious puddles of square-baked halfway-between-cookie-and-cake batter I love to the point of distraction.

To me, the browniest cookie would be everything that we expect from a great brownie — a slight crackly exterior, a plush, fudgy interior — but formatted as a cookie with a piled height that doesn’t spread too flat in the oven. To bite into it, there would be no question as to what it aspired to be. The most ridiculous part of this story is that after trying dozens of iterations of so-called brownie cookies over the years, I found the perfect one in my favorite brownie recipe, i.e. it was here, all along.

... Read the rest of the browniest cookies on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to the browniest cookies | 29 comments to date | see more: Brownies/Blondies, Chocolate, Cookie, Photo

eggnog waffles + a few favorite kitchen things

I’ve always been a little wary of commercialism here*; I don’t want to be yet another person telling you how to spend your hard-earned money or indicating in any way that there’s a correlation between buying fancy things and being a great cook. Nope, nope, nope. Because of this, we’ve only had one “gift” guide to date, a very basic one, a budget-minded kitchen starter kit populated with the stuff I find it hard to cook without; that was six years ago.

But, as you can imagine, I make a few kitchen- and cooking-related purchases a year. (Cough cough SPUTTER, don’t mind my husband over there; must be this dry air!) It goes with the territory; some of them consume me with regret and I want to shout from the rooftops my contempt for the baked good-ruining parchment paper, the mixers I’ve hated or the stupid pots and pans that never mentioned they weren’t dishwasher-safe (but I’ll behave). Others I want to write love letters across the sky to because either because they were such great investments from the kind of hard-won knowledge one picks up when they spend too much time in the kitchen, or made me exceptionally happy in an absurd way, and thus might make someone you know’s holiday. For something different, let’s dish about these today:

... Read the rest of eggnog waffles + a few favorite kitchen things on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to eggnog waffles + a few favorite kitchen things | no comment to date | see more: Breakfast, Gift Guides, Photo, Waffles

tres leches cake + a taco party

[image error]

After coming to our senses about our dream of a Friendsgiving dinner party last month versus the reality of life with two kids, two full-time jobs, a small oven and a worrisomely low inventory of forks (seriously, where do they go?) we decided instead to have a Taco Dinner Party last weekend. Among our friends, in a tacos vs. turkey throwdown, tacos will always win. This might be why we get along so well.

The menu* is one of my favorites and it’s incredibly simple: A big brisket goes in the slow-cooker the night before and in the morning is transferred to the fridge where it can rest for the day so it can be easily de-fatted and gently rewarmed and shredded before dinner. [Recipe here.] A pot of black beans, which can also be handed off to the slow-cooker, is essential. [I use the Black Bean Ragout from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, but this soup with less liquid isn’t a bad place to start.] I make a giant batch of Lazy Taco Slaw and Pickled Red Onions [recipes outlined at the bottom of this post]. My friend Ang brought over tomatillo salsa from her deck garden [but this one is a great place to start]. I raided the Mexican bodega in my neighborhood for corn tortillas, extra hot sauce, pickled jalapenos and crema, although the grocery store varieties of each work just as well. We juice a lot of limes and make a pitcher or two my go-to 3:2:1 margarita (3 parts tequila, 2 parts lime juice and 1 part Cointreau) [but if you can get blood oranges where you are, do yourself a favor and make these]. And then we made a lot of queso, because I sometimes delight in making food snobs clutch their pearls.

... Read the rest of tres leches cake + a taco party on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to tres leches cake + a taco party | 23 comments to date | see more: Cake, Celebration Cakes, Everyday Cakes, Photo, Tex-Mex