Deb Perelman's Blog, page 46
April 21, 2015
potato scallion and kale cakes
What makes a recipe great? In my head, there’s a list of ten things and eight of them are different ways of saying the first one, which is “It works.”
It works.
For everyone. In every kitchen.
Without requiring an advanced cooking degree or preexisting mastery of obscure techniques.
Or voodoo.
Definitely not prayer.
It explains what you need to do in the clearest language possible.
It anticipates where most home cooks might struggle. If something is a game-changer — i.e. it will kill the recipe if you don’t adhere closely to a step — it will warn you.
Did I mention that it needs to work? Because it doesn’t matter you’re making or who gave you the recipe or how transcendent it was at the Michelin-starred restaurant that night, if the recipe printed in a publication intended for home cooks doesn’t work for most of us at home, it sucks as a recipe. It leads to bad meals, bad moods and take-out. A recipe flop is about the worst way to spend your limited free time. It is a 100% guarantee that you’re not going to feel like cooking next time you have a chance.
But once we get the 8-point plan sorted, there are two additional things that are less essential, but raise the simple act of food prep/nutrient dissemination to something special.
It improves upon what you already thought you knew to expect from a dish, and/or does it in a way that you hadn’t considered before.
It tempts you to make something you didn’t even know you wanted, just because it sounds so good.
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permalink to potato scallion and kale cakes | 8 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Kale, Pancakes, Photo, Potatoes, Spring, Vegetarian, Weeknight Favorite
April 16, 2015
maple pudding cake
There is a whole catalog of cooking devoted to what to make when you peer nervously into your bank account and find the balance lacking — one could even argue that the affordable preparation and dissemination of nutrients has always been the primary goal of cooking, before we got distracted by $700 blenders and organically milled heirloom cornmeal porridge (ahem, guilty as charged). Yet what better time to celebrate meals that don’t weigh heavily on our wallets than in the hours after our annual reckoning with the IRS? From the world’s cheapest protein (eggs, crispy, scrambled, smashed and omelet-ed with potatoes), to the most humble (beans, in soup, in curries, stews and chilis) to inexpensive cuts of meat, cooked and stretched forever (in tacos, over orzo, Jewish-style or in the heartiest of soups), most of the time when we’re talking about budget cooking, we’re talking, understandably, about dinner. But one cannot survive on stews and slops alone or at least one should not be expected to in the third trimester; somewhere it is written, or at least it is now.
I first came across pudding chômeur, or “unemployed person’s pudding,” one of the most popular traditional Québecois deserts, a few years ago and was intrigued. Like most classic desserts, there’s a story to go along with it, and it is said that it was created during the Great Depression as a comfort food by female factory workers with the kinds of ingredients that could still be found on the cheap — butter, cream and at the time, brown sugar although maple syrup has since become the standard. (Alas, less budget-minded here, but we’re going to run with it anyway.) A biscuit-like cake is dolloped into a veritable lake of maple syrup caramel, then covered with sauce, and baked in the oven until the cake puffs and drowns a little in this sticky mess, and it’s all exceedingly sweet and wonderful, especially with a dollop of tangy crème fraîche at the end to pierce through the sugar assault.
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permalink to maple pudding cake | 3 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Cake, Photo
April 13, 2015
artichoke gratin toasts
As someone who claims that her favorite food on earth is artichokes, it’s strange that this cooking website boasts so few recipes that feature them, that the last one was over 5 years ago, and I came to the conclusion years later that I liked it better without the artichokes. Something is not adding up. But while I like to believe that I cook what I want — it’s all about me, me, me, baby — and not solely that which will please a real or imagined audience, the reality is that it’s not much fun to make food that few people get as excited about as you do. It would be like inviting everyone you knew to a viewing party on the latest Science Channel documentary on, say, how rolling luggage is made only to find that all of your friends were simultaneously, apologetically busy that night. (WTH, you want us to return to the dark ages of lifting luggage by hand?)
When it comes to artichokes, most people are divided into a few camps: those that do not like them and are wrong (uh, in my opinion) and those that have tasted their delicious magnificence for what it is. But, even in the pro-artichoke camp, very few people have the patience required for all of the pesky trimming, paring, thorns and fuzzy chokes of preparing them for a relatively small yield of heart for the price. Sure, you can buy prepared artichokes, either oil-packed in jars or brine-packed in cans, but neither taste like much more to me than their respectively slick/tinny confines.
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permalink to artichoke gratin toasts | 35 comments to date | see more: Artichokes, Photo, Potatoes, Spring, Vegetarian
April 10, 2015
strawberry rhubarb soda syrup
There are a lot of great reasons to make your own soda syrup. You can use real sugar, rather than the HFCS devil that lurks in most bottles. You can make flavors that make you happy, from real seasonal ingredients with complexity and intensity, and you can use up excesses of things in your fridge like, say, the time you assumed strawberries being on sale meant that you were going to eat a few pounds of them before they went bad. You can use the syrup as a foundation for cocktails, because it’s Friday and baby, you’ve earned it, and you can package bottles up as gifts for friends, because you’re just that awesome of a person.
And while every one of these crossed my mind when I made this syrup this week (uh, once my kitchen and bathroom were reassembled), I am not sure any of them are the truth. The truth is not practical, logical or even terribly grown-up; it will never make it into a longform think piece about food and culture, thank heavens: I just wanted something pink, tart and pretty in my life, something that fills your kitchen with the smell of cotton candy, sunshine and popsicles as it simmers away on the stove. I wanted spring, and seeing as the weather was not going to provide it for me, I hoped a weeklong dose of ombré green and fuchsia would suffice.
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permalink to strawberry rhubarb soda syrup | 2 comments to date | see more: Drinks, Photo, Rhubarb, Spring, Strawberries
April 7, 2015
obsessively good avocado cucumber salad
It’s been 29 weeks since I first made this avocado and cucumber salad, which means two things: it predates this news, meaning that all of my theories about this kid making me crave avocado, grapefruit, and chocolate are perhaps completely bogus, elaborate projections on my part. Two, I’ve probably made it 29 times since then and never shared it with you, which is a huge shame. I’m clearly addicted to it, but every time I went to take a few photos and write it out in recipe format, I convinced myself it was too simple to make a big deal of. You know, as if what anyone has ever asked for in their life is more complicated recipes and fewer 5-minute salads worth obsessing over.
I first spied it on the side of a plate on Instagram and my reaction was immediate and three-fold: why isn’t this in my life, give it to me, and I want it now now now. Fortunately, Julia Turshen is not only a talented food writer and recipe creator (nbd, just co-authored Gwenyth Paltrow’s cookbooks, Buvette’s, and has her own coming out next year), but a friendly human being who explained to me that she made the dressing with a mixture of mayo, lime juice and sriracha and I was pretty much in the kitchen before she’d finished typing.
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permalink to obsessively good avocado cucumber salad | 83 comments to date | see more: Avocado, Cucumber, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, Photo, Salad, Side Dish, Vegetarian
March 31, 2015
wild mushroom pâté
Every spring, I promise I’m going to share a recipe for chopped liver. And every year I lose steam, perhaps because there are probably few more divisive foods than organs, or maybe because my instructions on the matter are quite short: just make Ina Garten’s. Ina can do no wrong, and I like to amuse myself by imagining that I’m only eight bestselling cookbooks and three homes in two countries away from basically being her when I grow up. (Sure Deb. Okay.)
But I like this year’s distraction the most, which came from me wondering what a vegetarian chopped liver might entail. The first thing it would need to do is lose the word liver, so not to scare away children of any age. Second, I hoped it would embrace rather humble ingredients like mushrooms that when cooked down to concentrated nubs, pack an unexpectedly fragrant and earthy complexity. And finally, although there are recipes for wild mushroom pâté from one end of the web to the other, I was hoping it would have a Jewish/Eastern European vibe, reminiscent of the promised chopped liver — rich, ample browned onions, making use of hard-boiled eggs, and served on matzo crackers, likely with pickles.
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permalink to wild mushroom pâté | 37 comments to date | see more: Appetizer, Passover, Photo, Vegetarian
March 26, 2015
carrot graham layer cake
It has been 1 year, 6 months and 6 days since I last shared a recipe for a stacked, filled, and unconscionably indulgent layer cake on this site, an unforgivable oversight on my part. I certainly haven’t gone that long without sharing any cake recipes — I’m not a monster — but sometimes you need more than an Everyday Cake. Sometimes you need a great big celebratory ta-da in the center of your table. Sometime like now.
Because the pastel-ed idea, if not the outdoor temperatures, of spring seems to have infected my existence and I’m not even fighting it — my nails are a shade of pink that can only describe as “bunny nose,” I, someone who mostly lives in variations of black and gray, just bought a patterned and brightly colored dress, we’ve had asparagus twice this month, unable to wait any longer for it to emerge from local soil, and my hands are stained orange from all of the carrots I’ve grated into cake week. Around here, these are the harbingers of spring.
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permalink to carrot graham layer cake | 78 comments to date | see more: Celebration Cakes, Easter, Photo, Spring
March 24, 2015
baked chickpeas with pita chips and yogurt
Nothing against barbecue-style baked beans, all tangy sauced and full of smoky burnt end drippings — hi summer, get here quick please — but I hardly see why navy beans get to have all of the fun. Where are the baked kidney beans, black-eyed peas and gigantes? Baking is a phenomenal way to cook dried beans and a great way to make something more complex of canned ones; when you start considering flavors, the sky, nay, the globe is the limit. I want these red beans slow-baked in a big casserole, scooped with tortilla chips. I want baked black beans heaped over tostones, braised white beans over Catalan-style tomato bread and I want what we had for dinner last night for the first time all over again, because it was perfect.
In an attempt to wean myself from my ongoing obsessive fixation on all things Tex-Mex — taco, tortilla, fajita and quesadilla — I didn’t get as far as it may seem. Sure, I spiked my baked chickpeas with Middle Eastern spices, but once I’d scooped them onto oven-crisped pita chips, dolloped it with lemon-tahini yogurt sauce, a finely chopped tomato-cucumber salad, well-toasted pine nuts, hot sauce and a fistful of chopped parsley, I realized I’d basically made Middle Eastern nachos. And I’m not even a little sorry.
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permalink to baked chickpeas with pita chips and yogurt | 53 comments to date | see more: Beans, Middle Eastern, Photo, Vegetarian
March 19, 2015
the consolation prize (a mocktail)
In the almost six years since I last waddled around in the name of procreation — I know, I make it sound so glowy and glamorous — to my delight, two things in particular have changed: 1. You can now get maternity pants that have almost all of the dignity of regular ones, thanks to small elastic panels above each pocket that frankly would be as welcome the day after Thanksgiving as they are now that I’m approaching the six-month mark and people no longer believe me when I said I just had a really big lunch. (However, a New York-specific rule remains: you’re not actually “big” until someone willingly cedes his or her seat on the subway for you, by which standards, I must be svelte. Hey, I’ll take it.) 2. More pertinently to the scope of a cooking website, a whole lot of bars are making really great mocktails.
I credit the fact that there’s been something of a cocktail revolution over the last five years, wherein housemade bitters, syrups, fresh-pressed seasonal juices, sodas and fresh herbs are almost the norm, and the bartenders, nay, mixologists that craft them are name-dropped almost as often as head chefs. People who choose not to drink whether due to beliefs, lifestyle, diet or due date are no longer expected to sip a club soda and twist of lime they could have bought at the local bodega for pennies to take part in what I consider one of the holiest social rituals of spring — hanging out with friends at happy hour on one of the first warm days.
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permalink to the consolation prize (a mocktail) | 78 comments to date | see more: Coconut, Drinks, Lime, Photo, Pineapple
March 16, 2015
potatoes with soft eggs and bacon vinaigrette
I was going to offer today a kind of loose apology. “Sorry, guys, for all of the potatoes and eggs and utter randomness of recipes this winter,” and then shamelessly go onto blame this approaching third-trimester (ack, too soon) situation with its still-unpredictable food cravings I’m in but then I realized: this is actually nothing new. There isn’t a recipe in the almost 9 years and 975-deep archives on this site that hasn’t been fueled wholly by hankerings, usually arbitrary ones. Some people have lesson plans and editorial calendars, I have whims. It’s just now I have a tiny thing — a future rock star, if the dance party from 2 to 6 a.m. last night is indication — to blame for it.
Thus, without apology, is the latest iteration of my ongoing obsession with Salade Lyonniase, which I made for the first time here in 2007, when the only dance parties keeping me up at night were my own. Hailing from Lyon, the salad is traditionally made with bitter lettuce (usually frisee, but escarole, other firm lettuces and frankly, whatever you have around that you like to make salad with, will do), a poached egg and a shallot-bacon vinaigrette, poured warm over the salad, gently wilting everything. In 2012, inspired by a riff on it from the sandwich chain ‘Wichcraft, I started putting it on a bun with a fried egg and with the unconventional addition of blue cheese and it’s been hard to remove it since. And now in 2015, I’ve strayed even further from tradition and turned it into a warm potato salad. Je ne regrette rien.
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permalink to potatoes with soft eggs and bacon vinaigrette | 45 comments to date | see more: Budget, Eggs, Gluten-Free, Photo, Potatoes, Put An Egg On It, Salad
