Deb Perelman's Blog, page 55
March 20, 2014
sizzling chicken fajitas
Fortunately, for like nutritional balance and all that boring grown-up stuff, we did not entirely subsist on double-chocolate banana bread for the last few weeks, tempting as it may have been. We’ve also been making chicken fajitas like it were the early 1990s and they were all the new rage again.
I don’t mean to mock the dish. I have fond memories of going to Tex-Mex restaurants in strip-malls (New Jersey, represent!) in high school and college, the kind of places that served slushy margaritas in cactus glasses and had waiters hurrying loud, sizzling skillets of meat and vegetable fillings from swinging kitchen door to various tables. But once the dish cooled, expectations usually did as well. Mounds of extras (chopped fresh onions, tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro were the standards) turned them into passable tacos, but without the fixings, they were deceptively dull despite their dramatic entrances. I never imagined a future where hacking the dish to our satisfaction would be probably the only meal we’ve ever eaten four times in three weeks; we’re a little addicted and it’s amazing how well it works on a weekday night. [Or where I'd make my own corn tortillas for it, but that for another day, when I've returned to my sanity.]
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March 17, 2014
double chocolate banana bread
I have a theory that Mondays are for repentance, for undoing whatever damages to your liver, psyche or saddlebags you’ve done over the weekend. They’re for getting back on the gym horse, resuming those eight glasses of water again, and going to bed early. They’re for kale salad; they are not for chocolate cake. But, guys, those bananas that are one day from fruit flies are not going to eat themselves, and they must be addressed, which brings us to this.
I joked earlier this year that I had a new mantra to address all future cooking indecisions: WWAE (What Would Alex Eat?), because my husband rarely chooses wrong. Thus far, it’s had spectacular effects: hazelnut-nutella linzer hearts, a chocolate-peanut butter cheesecake, and a dijon and cognac beef stew. (Don’t worry; my interests haven’t been fully occluded, see also: fennel and blood orange salad and stuck-pot rice — you know I can hear you snoring, right? — oh, right, and morning bread pudding with salted caramel.) And for years, he’s been angling me to put chocolate in my banana bread. “But why?” I’d demand to know. “Banana bread is perfect the way it is. Can’t there be one dessert that’s not improved by the addition of chocolate?”
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permalink to double chocolate banana bread | 121 comments to date | see more: Bananas, Chocolate, Everyday Cakes, Photo
March 11, 2014
broccoli, cheddar and wild rice casserole
Although my parents claim to have loved us, there were all sorts of delicious foods that my sister and I knew our friends got to eat in their homes that we were denied in our own, glorious meal-like substances such as shake-and-bake chicken, hamburger helpers, sugar cereals with colorful marshmallows, and popcorn in that thing that unspirals itself and expands in the oven, like, whoa. Childhood was tough! Even now as (theoretically) an adult, I routinely hear about wondrous foods that I have never even once experienced, such as the broccoli-cheese casserole that someone (was it you?) requested I try my hand at earlier this year.
Unfamiliar with the dish, I asked around and it turns out, I really do seem the only person who has never had it. That said, among people I’ve interrogated, reviews are mixed. One friend gushed that it was the only way he’d eat broccoli growing up, another asked me to please bring it back in style, but the girl at the coffee shop this morning said it “smelled disgusting and was often made with Cheez-Whiz,” (sigh, another magical food on the Denied list). And it would be journalistically irresponsible for me not to mention that the dish was called out by name by Cook’s Illustrated founder Chris Kimball in a New York Times op-ed in the days after my beloved Gourmet magazine folded as an example of the web failing to live up to its promise. “Google ‘broccoli casserole’ and make the first recipe you find,” he challenged. “I guarantee it will be disappointing.”
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permalink to broccoli, cheddar and wild rice casserole | 219 comments to date | see more: Broccoli, Photo, Side Dish, Vegetarian
March 6, 2014
kale and quinoa salad with ricotta salata
It’s not my best quality, but I have a hard time talking about kale or quinoa with a straight face. When an ingredient is everywhere, when it is treated as if it were the answer to all food questions — what might feed us dinner/a kid be tricked into eating in muffins/be juiced for longevity/and possibly even save the earth — I can’t help but want to rebel against it and both of these ingredients, these darlings of the farm-to-table circuit with their ubiquity on nearly every restaurant menu in lower Manhattan and upper Brooklyn, make easy targets. I know, I know, I should grow up and stuff.
Fortunately, I took what should be clear from the preceding paragraph was probably an overdue mini-vacation this past weekend, someplace warm and sunny, someplace that involved flip-flops. Do you mind if we take a brief but gratuitous mid-article daydream break?
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permalink to kale and quinoa salad with ricotta salata | 2 comments to date | see more: Grain/Rice, Kale, Photo, Salad, Vegetarian
February 28, 2014
morning bread pudding with salted caramel
We should really talk about this. Promise you won’t get mad, okay? I came across this for the first time twelve years ago. I’ve been blogging here for almost eight years, which means I had ample time to tell you about and just didn’t. (I kinda feel like a kid right now who forgot to mention that they were flunking Spanish until report cards came out. I’m sooo grounded.) It gets worse. I finally made it on New Years Day for brunch and it was promptly declared one of the best things I’ve ever made, which is kind of rude. I mean, the lasagna bolognese can hear you! I still didn’t tell you about it, reasoning that it is Not Acceptable to talk about carbs, fat and refined sugar in the time of Resolutions. And then, late in January, we had another brunch and I made it again and still I held out. Sheesh, even I think I’m kind of a jerk right now.
Enough is enough. If you think it about it, it was always just a matter of time before two of this site’s great loves — French toast, or if you wanna be fancy, morning bread pudding, and salted butter caramel — got together to become something greater than the sum of their parts. This is basically French toast destiny.
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permalink to morning bread pudding with salted caramel | 60 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Photo
February 24, 2014
dijon and cognac beef stew
I don’t mean to shock you, I mean, I do hope you’re sitting down for this, but it turns out that when I asked my husband to choose between a caramelized cabbage dish, mushroom tacos, or a beef stew whose ante had been upped with butter, bacon, Dijon, cognac and a splash of red wine as his ideal homemade Valentine’s meal, he chose the beef stew. I could hardly believe it either. I mean, between my delivered flowers, his cufflinks and the kid’s heart-shaped candies, I might have to mix things up next year just to rage against predictability.
This isn’t just any beef stew, however. This stew is fancy. It’s luxe and lush and so intensely flavored, if you’re anything like me, after one bite you’ll forget every crock pot attempt that yielded thin broths, tough meat, weak flavor and, always, unevenly cooked vegetables (potato mush and still-rubbery carrots, sigh), or at least I did. It will an excellent consolation prize for a winter you’re totally ready to be done with, pretty as it can occasionally be.
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permalink to dijon and cognac beef stew | 61 comments to date | see more: French, Meat, Photo, Stew, Winter
February 20, 2014
stuck-pot rice with lentils and yogurt
I once read that if you ask a guy what his favorite item of clothing is, he would pick the oldest thing he owns — some t-shirt he’s had since high school or nearly threadbare sweats. And if you ask a woman, she usually picks the last thing she bought. [Nobody mentioned four year-olds but obviously: fireman hat.] Gender stereotyping copy aside,* when it comes to recipes, this has me down to a T: my favorite thing to cook is usually the last thing I made. Because of this, I fail 100% of the time at “content-planning strategies” [or as it sounds in my head when I read phrases like this: blargle-blargle blargle] because while I’m supposed to be telling you about this great dish I made last week for Valentine’s, I only want to talk about what I made for dinner on Tuesday night. Because it’s my new favorite everything.
When I first read about stuck-pot rice many years ago, I guffawed a bit, because who needs a recipe for that? I come from a long line of cooks that cannot make rice without burning it; any night where rice is on the stove ends with a gunked-up pot soaking overnight in the sink. It’s tradition; one day I will teach this guy too!
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permalink to stuck-pot rice with lentils and yogurt | 77 comments to date | see more: Beans, Budget, Gluten-Free, Grain/Rice, Middle Eastern, Photo, Vegetarian
February 13, 2014
chocolate peanut butter cheesecake
This birthday cake was assigned to the side of the family whose dessert preferences can be roughly summarized as chocolate + anything else, but if that “else” were cheesecake, coffee, peanut butter or raspberries, all the better, thank you very much. Non-chocolate desserts are regarded politely, like curiosities at a zoo; perhaps something another family might enjoy? Their dessert formula can be thanked for all sorts of archive wonders, such as the Chocolate-Caramel Cheesecake, Double Chocolate Layer Cake, Espresso Chiffon Cake with Fudge Frosting, Brownie Mosaic Cheesecake, Double-Chocolate Torte, Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake and Cappuccino-Fudge Cheesecake.
And now this, too, which is like the last two cakes got together and made an even better version of themselves for the next generation. If you remember seeing this in the 2013 year-end roundup, it’s true, I did make it over six months ago, but nothing about summer through early winter screamed a cake that looks like a Reeses peanut butter cup to me. A blizzard on the day before Valentine’s Day? I say that since we’re inside anyway, bring it on.
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permalink to chocolate peanut butter cheesecake | 107 comments to date | see more: Celebration Cakes, Chocolate, Peanut Butter
February 6, 2014
chocolate hazelnut linzer hearts
I’m sorry. These are really, really cute. Borderline twee. And it gets worse, too. You see, there was a parent event at my son’s preschool this week that included a cookie swap and I hadn’t much considered what I would bring until my apparent reputation preceded me and the other parents started to ask with a tone that suggested they expected something grand. Oops. And so I enlisted what I’ve decided will be my strategy for all future cooking indecisions: What Would Alex Eat?*
I’ve come to the conclusion after eight years of marriage that my husband simply orders better than the rest of us at restaurants (and, I mean obviously in life partners, right? …hello?). I’ll be pushing some kale salad and winter squash thing around my plate and he’ll be eating a garlic butter drenched surf-and-turf. I’ll have fallen for the insanely-too-rich egg-stuffed ravioli in cream sauce and he’ll be eating a pork chop with crackling shishitos. I suggest mushroom tacos; he suggests brisket. So, rather than go through my usual lines of cookie rationale — a gingersnap meets a snickerdoodle meets salted peanut brittle plus brown butter! — I instead tried to dream up the Perfect Alex Cookie, and it’s really no surprise that it required the purchase of a jar of Nutella.
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permalink to chocolate hazelnut linzer hearts | 58 comments to date | see more: Chocolate, Cookie, Photo
February 3, 2014
fennel and blood orange salad
This salad improves winter morale. It’s for times when all of the usual charms of winter — snow that’s fallen like a cashmere blanket over the city overnight, reducing all of the usual ruckuses (trucks, sirens, deliveries and your own child’s tantrums, which you may or may not have discovered last week you could hear from a full city block away) to the decibel of thick socks padding over hardwood floors — have waned on you; when the “snow” is, in fact, two inches of gray muck, when you are convinced that it will never be warm again and when you fear the next hunt around the apartment for where the snow mittens/hats/scarves/boots were last scattered will be the end of you. Whereas most cold winter comfort foods are soft, rich, carby and white, this is everything but: brightly hued, crunchy and piercingly fresh. It cuts across everything that’s lost its charm; it will be even brighter in your social media feed than the photos of those so-called friends who have abandoned you for sandy shores and island blue skies. This salad has your back.
It falls into the all too thin category of Great Winter Salads. Kurt Gutenbrunner wrote an article about his favorite ones for the New York Times in 2002 that I go back to every winter when I need a reminder that many of my favorite foods are excellent year round — cabbage, fennel, celery root, cumbers and potatoes. I’m not surprised that this one is clearly still one of his favorites (it’s in his recent cookbook and we even spied it on the menu at Blaue Gans on Saturday night) because it’s perfectly balanced. The refreshing fennel is dressed with lemon for brightness, then tossed with blood orange segments (though I think any orange or grapefruit segment would work), toasted hazelnuts (though he calls for walnuts) and mint leaves. The dressing is just the juice from the blood oranges and olive oil and it’s all so pretty, it’s nothing short of a sun lamp beaming forth from a salad bowl.
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permalink to fennel and blood orange salad | 37 comments to date | see more: Fennel, Orange, Photo, Salad, Vegetarian, Winter
