Deb Perelman's Blog, page 43
September 21, 2015
oat and wheat sandwich bread
It’s a shame bread has taken a beating over the last decade or so, because there’s little on this earth — I mean, save the obvious stuff, babies in hippo onesies, world peace — that makes me happier than the aroma rolling off a slice from a freshly baked loaf. So when I went on my bender of frenetic-nesting-by-way-of-freezer meals this summer, I also made a couple loaves of sandwich bread to stash away.
I cannot recommend this enough. Even if you don’t have a kid that needed to have a sandwich packed for camp every day this summer, even if you think you’re too old for peanut butter and jelly yourself, even if you’re really trying hard not to eat too much gluten/flour/bread/carbs/or other villian-du-jour, I resolutely believe that if/when you’re going to, you might as well make it excellent.
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September 16, 2015
zucchini rice and cheese gratin
September has always been my favorite month. The grimy, relentless sauna that is New York City in August finally lifts and we can almost always count on a solid week (or more) of impossibly sunny low-humidity days that I consider my personal obligation — as happy repentance for all the above griping — to spend entirely outdoors. My best memories are from Septembers; this may sound weird, but I remember going to work on the morning that nobody knew yet would be 9/11 and thinking it was as clear-skied and gorgeous out as a day could ever be. Two years later, I met my husband on that day. Six years and a few days after that, we met our baby boy, and I distinctly remember checking into the hospital on a hot summer day and checking out three days later when it was unquestionably fall, disoriented.
And yet, the last few Septembers have roundly kicked my ass. Since having a kid, a pattern has emerged of September being back to everything that will continue for a decade or two. This one is especially a doozy — good stuff, all (holidays and baby namings and birthdays and first days of all the things) but still lacking in a single unscheduled, unstructured day. All of this is to say: thank god for freezer meals.* I didn’t make many when I was frenetically nesting in the third trimester. Mostly, I liked the idea of them more than I had the energy to make them happen. Post-baby, my husband was off for few weeks and worked from home for a couple more, making dinner every night (yay) so freezer reserves needn’t be called in. But now, now that we are ostensibly back to “it,” Deb of June 2015, I’d like to thank you.
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September 8, 2015
caponata
I am never a better citizen of the sidewalks of New York than I am when I have a newborn, or at least the variety we’ve been assigned twice now: those that can only be calmed by long walks in the stroller. And so we stroll, even though it’s unforgivably hot out, even though we rarely get out of the apartment early enough to enjoy those brief parts of the day when there’s an actual shady side of the street to hover on, even though we really don’t need anything else from the Greenmarket or anywhere else, we make up excuses so we have somewhere to go. On the best of days, we see people that we know and the neighborhood feels like something out of Mr. Rogers (although his is notably absent of the guy who yells outside my apartment all day about his superstitions and the clouds of secondhand decriminalized smoke we wade through). We bumped into my son’s old preschool teacher a few weeks ago, someone who likes to cook almost as much as me, and she said she’d recently made a big batch of caponata and had been having it with everything — for breakfast with an egg, in sandwiches for lunch and even with pasta for dinner and I thought that sounded absolutely brilliant. I just needed to learn how to make caponata.
I read a lot and I learned several things about this eggplant dish. First, definitely don’t try to exhaust yourself by finding a one/true/authentic version. Just about all are authentic and true and few match, because everyone makes it the best way they know how and that’s usually the way their grandmothers made it and you have to be out of your mind if think I’m going to argue with a Sicilian grandmother. However, I knew a few things: I knew that while I am completely okay with frying eggplant the authentic way that it’s totally cool if you’d like to just roast or sauté it. I wanted to stick to a core list of ingredients — eggplant, onion, celery, tomato, capers, olives, raisins, basil and pine nuts — because while you can add a whole lot of things — i.e. garlic, zucchini, sweet or hot peppers, anchovies — I had a hunch there’s enough going on in the flavor department with the core list that it wouldn’t need much more to taste good.
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August 31, 2015
corn chowder salad
We’ve rented a house at the beach this week, but we haven’t seen it because why would you leave your house if it had a pool like this in the backyard? Between this, and other things the only delight pathetic city people — the giant (charcoal!) grill, a washer and dryer and an entirely separate floor just for bedrooms, meaning that adults can converse at a notch above a whisper after children go to sleep — we have zero regrets. Plus, 7 week-olds, as everyone lies when they say, are so portable! I mean, they physically are, but our sardine-packed car on Friday with everything from a folding bassinet, crib, tub, reams of burp cloths, swaddling blankets and the most sigh-worthy collection of tiny rompers might tell a different story.
Beach house cooking — the kind fueled by good farmer’s markets but the notable absence of whatever ingredient you needed most, forcing you to be clever — is my favorite. To wit, it’s only day three and we’ve already eaten our body weights in grilled meat, caprese, and my favorite new hack on this avocado-cucumber salad (with ample lime juice, olive oil, sea salt and small amount of finely slivered jalapenos and red onion), and this six-ingredient corn salad I made last week is hopefully next for a repeat.
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August 27, 2015
crispy peach cobbler
I cannot resist a recipe that promises an odd outcome. To wit, prior to stumbling upon this curiosity in the wonderful A Boat, A Whale and a Walrus, an assembly of recipes and stories from restaurants on the other side of the country that I am now extra-sad I haven’t been to (yet! Like maybe in 5 or 18 years or so?), I understood cobblers to be more or less baked fruit topped with a soft cake batter or plush biscuit, while crisps had clusters of oaty and sometimes nutty cookie-like crumbs giving them their namesake texture. [Let us save comparisons with crumbles, grunts, fools, pandowdys, sonkers, bettys, buckles and slabs for another delicious day.] Crisps were not soft; cobblers were not crisp.
But not this one. Here, in technique that Renee Erickson, the author and chef, says she was handed down from the original owner of one of her restaurants, The Boat Street Café, a rather simple flour/butter/sugar/milk batter is beaten for longer than any proper cake recipe would usually advocate, spread thinly over unpeeled peaches that have been dressed only with lemon zest and juice — no thickeners, spices or sugar — coated with more sugar and then drizzled with hot water. In the oven, the batter develops a crisp lid that is as fun to impatiently tap your way through as the best crème brûlée.
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August 24, 2015
angel hair pasta with raw tomato sauce
The internet might be loaded with a ga-jillion recipes, but finding the great ones can still be a little bit of a needle in a haystack. My favorite way to find new recipes is to ask a random person what their cult favorites are. Bonus points if they claim to hate cooking, because these are the people who are only going to be excited for dishes that work with airtight reliability that are unquestionably worth your time. I have found so many gems this way; Marion Burros’s Purple Plum Torte (which, if you have not made yet, shut this browser tab and get to it, please), Cook Country’s Chicken and Dumplings, Jeremiah Tower’s Raspberry Brown Sugar Gratin, this crazy simple beef braise and Ina Garten’s Lemon Cake. (If you ask me about mine, I might also up this curious tuna salad from the New York Times Magazine, this zucchini and almond saute). In more recent memory, it’s from asking around that I learned a lot people have a very deep fondness for a raw tomato sauce for a 2006 issue of the late Gourmet Magazine.
I, however, had my doubts. I am very particular about pasta; I want not too much sauce and I want it to be slurped up by very thirsty al dente pasta with a splash of reserved cooking water in the last minute before you eat it, so that they become as one. I couldn’t imagine raw tomato sauce being anything but slippery, wet and probably nothing you’d see in Italy, right?
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August 19, 2015
frozen hot chocolate
At the outset of this summer, I had only a few things on my agenda: a baby (check!), a garden (check!, but oof*) and as many frozen desserts that do not require an ice cream maker as possible. And sure, from toasted marshmallow milkshakes to swirled berry yogurt (breakfast) popsicles, saltine crack ice cream sandwiches, strawberry cheesecake ice cream pie and raspberry crushed ice, it’s been a good time. But as summer isn’t over, I’m not done yet either.
The concept of Frozen Hot Chocolate was made famous by a restaurant on East 60th Street** that I’ve only been to once in my 15 years here, when I was pretty underwhelmed by the signature dessert. As it boasts a cringe-worthy spelling [“Frrrozen” Hot Chocolate] and presentation [it’s intentionally overflowing, as it to shame you with sticky fingers for touching it], all from a restaurant with no shortage of things to make you wince [it’s a 2007 Guinness World Record holder for the Most Expensive Dessert, a gold-leafed sundae clocking in at $1,000 and in 2012 for Most Expensive Burger, a $295 number with three different formats of truffles], I probably should have seen this coming. The massive goblet they brought to the table managed to be excessively sweet, bland and overpriced, like the Overhyped Trifecta. Ahem, not that I need to learn how to form an opinion or anything.
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August 11, 2015
raspberry crushed ice
Among frozen summer desserts, granitas are a hard sell, not matter how you rename them. A coarse, grainy sorbet, they’re the shaved ice of the Italian food world. Sure, they’re insanely refreshing, require no churning and are probably the kind of thing you ought to be cooling off with on a very hot day, but who’d choose them over hot fudge sundae cakes, toasted marshmallow milkshakes, saltine crack ice cream sandwiches or key lime pie popsicles? Nobody we’re going to be friends with, for sure.
Except, my friend Ang, who freely admits that she’s not a dessert person — and is therefore inherently suspect, I know — makes them all the time and every time she does I wonder why I don’t more often. We were halfway out the door after her crab boil last weekend with two almost melting down children* when she insisted I stop to at least try the golden raspberry granita she’d made and it was so good, I kind of wanted to run away with it.
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August 4, 2015
takeout-style sesame noodles with cucumber
Is there anything more inspiring than a farmer’s market at the height of the summer, piled high with funky heirloom tomatoes, eggplants from fairytale to freakishly large, crinkly peppers, bi-color corn as far as the eye can see and stone fruits in every color of the rainbow? Wouldn’t this be a great time to cook with all of them? Isn’t it almost a moral imperative to fill our systems with as much of summer as we can before it passes and we spend the rest of the seasons pining for its return? Probably, I mean, yes, of course. But cravings are cravings, and what I’ve really been dreaming about is so-called Chinese food, like, the terrible stuff that comes unceremoniously in white boxes with an embarrassment of chopsticks (because they thought you were ordering for a dozen people, and not just the three of you). I’ve long accepted that if I don’t at least occasionally indulge cravings, they’re never going to pass.
The irony of craving unfancy takeout in a sleep-deprived, no-energy-for-cooking period of time that would normally be full of it is not lost on me. If a combination of a few freezer meals plus grandma deliveries of everything from soup to lasagna to Vegetarian
July 29, 2015
tomato and fried provolone sandwich
Last November, I finally got my chicken noodle soup exactly the way I always wanted it but when I brought it to the table, I couldn’t eat it. This happens sometimes. Sometimes I just spend too much time working on a dish and I’m rather sick of it by the time we eat it, in only the way that a person with first world problems can be. I chalked it up to that. I did not chalk it up to the pregnancy I’d found out about approximately 15 minutes prior, because my mother never had morning sickness with either me or my sister, I never had morning sickness with my son, and certainly didn’t think it was going to happen because of a 16 day-old rapidly dividing and already beloved cluster of cells.
The next night, the leftovers, wasn’t much better. How had I ever liked something so revolting? “Slippery noodles… soft chickeny bits of celery… sweet supple carrots… everything buttery and swaddling and rich…” I tried to explain to my husband who cracked up at how I could make even the most delicious things sound like a shortcut to the vomitorium. The problem was, my son went nuts for it. Every day he came home from school and hopefully asked “Are we having chicken noodle soup for dinner?” and every day, was crushed to hear the word no. My husband finally took pity on him a couple weeks later and made it from my recipe. I hid in the bedroom until the smell was gone. And so it went for the next 38 dreary weeks. Food was uninteresting or downright terrible. I was gloomy because I never realized how much my motivation here is driven by hunger and a now-elusive appetite. I wondered if it would always be this way.
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