Deb Perelman's Blog, page 42
October 28, 2015
oven fries
I am staunchly of the belief that if you really really crave something — I mean, if you’ve tried very hard to move on or distract that part of your brain/belly that rather rudely interrupts into your thoughts most days at 4 p.m. and screams “CHOCOLATE!” or “CAAAAAKE!” and it’s just not working — you should indulge it. I have no patience for baked doughnuts or sugar substitutes, and you can probably already guess that I cannot abide anything but cream in my hot coffee. Have a salad for lunch the day before and the day after, eat the steel-cut oats for breakfast, make hearty soups a regular part of your dinner rotation, but FTLOG, if you really want that chocolate cake, please, have that chocolate cake and then enjoy every last buttercreamed crumb of it.
For me, said indulgences most often come in potato format. My love of french fries knows no bounds; they are, along with artichokes and bourbon, my desert island foods. Golden, crisp, glistening, glittering with a dusting of fine salt, heaped in a pile, I would eat a mile of baby field greens to have a single plate of the fries we used to get at a restaurant I was convinced used to use horse fat to fry them because I’m a monster and they were otherworldly. And so help you if you serve them with homemade mayo — so help you, because I love you and you will never get rid of me now.
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permalink to oven fries | 16 comments to date | see more: Photo, Potatoes, Vegetarian
October 23, 2015
twinkie bundt
As one does, I first spied a Twinkie Bundt on Pinterest a few weeks ago and immediately became consumed with making my own primarily because it’s spectacularly fun to say, and also call someone, maybe or maybe not as a compliment. [As you can infer, we really like to flex our maturity at the Smitten Kitchen.] The recipe turned out to hail from the talented food blogger and cookbook author Shauna Sever‘s book, Pure Vanilla, but as I am stubborn, I wanted to go in my own direction with it as I have a buttermilk bundt I’m rather fond of and a simple marshmallow frosting that we could use instead of the jarred marshmallow filling suggested.
If only things were this simple! My first step was to find a Twinkie, yes, the snack cake with a reputation for having an indefinite shelf life and I’ve decided that economists need to start something of a Twinkie Index, which measures how fancy your neighborhood has gotten and how hopeless your chances are of ever buying real estate by the presence or absence of this one-time snack aisle staple. I couldn’t find a one, i.e. we are doomed. I went to four bodegas, two drugstores (because in America you buy your candy at pharmacies!) and two grocery stores and found nada. I had to have one ported in from a different part of the city and did you know they contain beef tallow? I digress, I promise this isn’t going to be one of those sanctimonious rants about how gross packaged food is; this isn’t that kind of website and if eating a Twinkie once a decade makes you happy, so be it. This was more of a reminder that some labels are better not read.
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permalink to twinkie bundt | 40 comments to date | see more: Cake, Celebration Cakes, Photo
October 19, 2015
baked potatoes with wild mushroom ragù
Prior to last week, I only liked baked potatoes two ways and the first was so weird, I usually had the decency to keep it to myself. Many years ago, I had an internship a couple blocks from a lunch place with a baked potato sub-menu, full of odd and awesome topping combinations. My favorite involved a marinated tomato-pepper salad, avocado, cheese and — yesss — ranch dressing and it was amazing and wonderful and stop looking at me like that because I have missed and longed for it since. The second way I like baked potatoes is equally troublesome, the classic with “the works” involving heaps of cheese, butter, sour cream, bacon, chives and blood pressure medication. I no longer eat them the first way because the sandwich shop is 250 miles from here and also it has since closed; I usually resist eating them the second way because if I’m going to have all of the fat and calories of a golden, glistening and salted pile of French fries, I’d rather have them in said French fry format.
But last Monday, me, my 3 month-old and 73 month-old fell for some gorgeous 18 hour-old oyster mushrooms at the Greenmarket and, on a hunt to do something special with them, I came across a recipe for a baked potato with mushroom ragù in Food & Wine that sounded delicious and a little fancy and I had to.
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permalink to baked potatoes with wild mushroom ragù | 6 comments to date | see more: Fall, Mushrooms, Photo, Potatoes, Side Dish, Vegetarian, Weeknight Favorite, Winter
October 15, 2015
salted peanut butter cookies
I have never been particularly interested in recipes — or, if we’re being completely tactlessly honest, people — defined by what they are not, which is probably why you don’t see a lot of recipes with flour/dairy/gluten/meat/sugar-free, no-bake, one-bowl, hand-whisked or the like in recipe titles here, although we have plenty of all of the above. My favorite foods in this category are accidentally what they are; it’s a perk, but not the purpose. I’d rather talk about what a recipe does have, like flavor, or texture or an appeal that makes it almost painful not to make it in the minutes after you read about it.
But I am not immune to the charms of ingredient absences. Many years ago, I assembled some easy after-school snack recipes for a magazine — something I couldn’t have been less of an expert on then, pre-kids, or, frankly, now (an apple and a cookie, maybe?) — and it gave me a chance to audition a three-ingredient peanut butter cookie a friend had told me about that was curiously absent in flour, butter, baking powder or baking soda and even salt. The results were, I mean, okay. It was peanut butter and sugar, it couldn’t possibly not be delicious. But they weren’t exceptional; they merely fit the bill.
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permalink to salted peanut butter cookies | 9 comments to date | see more: Cookie, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, Photo, Quick
October 13, 2015
the broccoli roast
One of my probably most annoying insistences in the 15 years that I didn’t eat meat was that I suspected people didn’t really like it as much as they thought they did. Take bacon, no doubt the first thing that comes to mind when some leaf-horfing former vegetarian has the audacity to suggest that you could live without flesh. You love the way it’s smoky and salty and crispy and fatty, right? But how much of that has to do with the actual taste of pork belly, versus the way we’ve treated it to make it even more amazing? How much of Korean short ribs are about the unseemly delicious marinade, how much of Southern fried chicken is about that shattering crust, comprise mostly buttermilk, flour and grandma love? How much of barbecued ribs is about the gloriousness of the meat on the bone versus the long tenderizing, smoking and the sweet-salty-spicy stuff we mop or crust on top? [Sorry, I have to stop this paragraph right here so I can eat it.]
And while it pretty much only took me one pregnancy, the one where I craved burgers nonstop to understand that yes, there is perhaps more to meat than the sum of its seasonings and cooking methods, I still get more excited about vegetables being treated like big ol’ slabs of meat than I do about that what they’ve mimicked. Any restaurant should know how to cook a rib-eye medium-rare; but can they make broccoli steaks?
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permalink to the broccoli roast | 25 comments to date | see more: Broccoli, Budget, Fall, Photo, Quick, Vegetarian
October 8, 2015
cannoli pound cake
Why did I make this cake? Was it a birthday, a dinner party, or a pot-luck brunch? Was I testing recipes for a new cookbook or auditioning one that I fell for at a bookstore? Did I see this recipe online and found it irresistible? Was it a Friday treat to relieve the pressure of a long week? For someone who might never run out of “excuses” to make cake in this lifetime, you’d think I’d come up with something more exciting than the truth, which is that I could only find a big tub of ricotta at the store when I made ziti last time, and forced myself to find a clever way to use it up. Alas, I rather enjoy a challenge and so it’s cake o’clock again; rejoice!
But, if I’m being honest, I really wanted a cannoli, I mean, the good kind, the kind that’s in a hand-formed shell that’s been deep-fried to a crackly crisp and is filled only once you order it so the outer crunch remains intact. A proper cannoli, with orange and lemon peel and a whiff of Marsala, chopped pistachios and always, always, always with the miniature chocolate chips.
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permalink to cannoli pound cake | 7 comments to date | see more: Chocolate, Everyday Cakes, Fall, Photo
October 5, 2015
my old-school baked ziti
The night before I went to the hospital to have this little nugget, in one last burst of frenetic nesting — a tornado of focused, effective energy I sorely miss in these early months — I decided to do something so practical, I’m still patting myself on the back for it: I made a big volume of lazy baked ziti and divide it into three dishes, two that went into the freezer. I have not been this productive or effective since.
I’ve said this before, but there’s honestly very little reason you need to cook in New York City. You can get everything and anything you want, even healthier fare, delivered hot, often at a reasonable price with no advanced planning. So, if you’re going to be crazy like me and cook, you’ve got to have another reason to do it. Previously, I’d made the argument that a really great reason to do so is out of inherent persnicketiness; to pick the dish nobody else makes the way you like it and set out to master it at home, so you can eat what you want most of all. But upon coming home from the hospital with this easily-reheated, unequivocally comforting and loved by the whole family dish in the freezer, I found a new reason: normalcy. Sure, we’d upended my son’s life with an invader, sure, nothing would ever be exactly the same again, but there we were, sitting at the same table with the same people at 6 p.m. a few days after she was born, eating the same food we had a few days before she was born, and it kind of felt like we might just pull this whole thing off. (And we did again! Like, two months later, oof.)
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permalink to my old-school baked ziti | 19 comments to date | see more: Freezer Friendly, Greens, Italian, Meat, Pasta, Photo
October 2, 2015
s’more cupcakes
Is there anything more passé than cupcakes? It’s like 2006 up in here. Even the macaron parlors that were the “next cupcake” and the doughnut-croissant hybrids that were the “next macaron” are old news. And s’mores? My goodness, they’re so trodden, they halfway to becoming a potato chip flavor.
Thank goodness we, as I hope it has been relentlessly established, are hopelessly uncool here at the Smitten Kitchen, as nothing hastens you along the path to being the dorks you remember your parents as faster than having wee ones of your own. We think having a second drink with dinner cutting loose. We consider being woken up at only 6:45 a.m. a triumph. We say things like “eat your broccoli” so often, I swear if you shook me awake in an emergency, this would come out of my mouth first. And when it’s my kid’s birthday, I bring in totally unhip cupcakes for his class to share, and I even enjoy it. (This is when they’ve won. Or, ideally, when you’ve stopped becoming that insufferable parent trying too hard to seem cool.)
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permalink to s’more cupcakes | 52 comments to date | see more: Celebration Cakes, Chocolate, Photo
September 29, 2015
broccoli cheddar soup
For reasons I cannot — for once, I mean, good riddance — articulate, I spent half the summer, the half I was gestating this tiny moppet, with a nonstop craving for broccoli cheddar soup, something I’d never actually eaten before. I think a comment got it started and even though I can no longer find it, I’ll never forgive it. Sure, I had heard of the soup, but it always seemed to be in that category of foods it was better not to investigate. I mean, just consider all of the ways our lives have been ruined by finding how ridiculous brown butter and sea salt flakes are in crispy treats, or what happens when you make saltine crack into an ice cream sandwich, or butter in tomato sauce. I didn’t want to know why a cheddar cheese soup base was an obsession of so many people.
But once it got in my head, no amount of earnest effort could distract me for long. So, I got to Googling and mashed up several well-rated recipes with overlapped ingredients and brought to the table that night something that was basically a rich cheese sauce with a few flecks of broccoli — i.e. almost cruelly delicious but seriously, if I want a cheese sauce, I promise, I will always just make one. (Regardless, we all slurped it up.)
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permalink to broccoli cheddar soup | no comment to date | see more: Broccoli, Fall, Freezer Friendly, Photo, Soup, Vegetarian
September 25, 2015
the perfect manhattan
Welcome to the 1000th recipe on smittenkitchen.com. One. Thou. Sandth. Didn’t I just start this thing? Wasn’t it only supposed to last six months? How did we let things get so out of hand? Wait, do I finally have an answer to the ever-present question “What do you do all day?” that’s not “Read The Awl and try to figure out what it means that most of my life goals look like this?” Hm, probably not.
Instead I’d like to talk about the Perfect Manhattan, which, to me, is currently the most glaring oversight — yes, yes, except the Russian Napoleon and/or Coconut Cream Pie, I got your email and they’re going to happen this winter or you should definitely fire me already — in the archives right now.
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permalink to the perfect manhattan | 50 comments to date | see more: Bourbon, Drinks, Fall, Photo
