Deb Perelman's Blog, page 9
June 15, 2022
summer ricotta with grilled vegetables
Letter of recommendation: Make ricotta this summer. I was originally going to write “Ditch the burrata and make some ricotta this summer,” but neither wish to besmirch burrata nor do I plan to go tomato season without it. Should a burrata tree (it grows on trees, or must based on the frequency in which it appears) spontaneously appear on my terrace, I will be the happiest and most popular girl in all of the Lower East Side this summer. But since like most of us, I’m still buying it at stores where it’s quite expensive, spoils quickly, and is only sometimes spectacular, I’m here to make the argument that homemade ricotta is not only rich, delicious, and a cinch to make, but that in almost all of the places we’re serving burrata, ricotta* would be deliciously welcome too.
June 2, 2022
strawberry brita cake
I first read about brita, pardon me, Brita-Kakku, cakes — described as a typical Finnish summer cake with a based of a butter cake with a meringue baked onto it, whipped cream, and fresh berries — a few years ago and was instantly mesmerized by not just by the delicious promise of these ingredients but because, forgive me, the mess of it. In image search after image search, I drooled over charmingly lopsided cakes with raw edges, whipped cream with no regard for boundaries, meringues that wobbled and crumbled as they pleased, berries tumbling free, and I wanted it. I realize that there are more practical ways to approach it, such as a single-layer cake, but I didn’t want practical, I wanted berry cake chaos.
May 26, 2022
poolside sesame slaw
I am very excited* to announce the opening day of what we call slaw season at the Smitten Kitchen. There is nothing better than a crunchy, lettuce-free, wilt-resistant salad in the summer, and I don’t just mean cabbage swimming in mayo. It could be broccoli or cauliflower, vegetables fine and pickled on sandwiches and tacos, and honestly, if it’s a vegetable, I feel confident I could slaw it, despite absolutely nobody requesting that I do.
May 16, 2022
double chocolate chip muffins
Something I joke about when introducing a new muffin recipe (not this one!) in my new cookbook out this fall is the gap between the muffins we gaze at in a coffee shop case and those we make at home. Why is one towering, glossy and plush and the ones I make for breakfast so… beige? I mean, I do know. When I’m the one baking the muffins, I balk at all of the refined sugar, flour, and oil needed to make them that pretty. So I stuff them with oats and dried fruit and whole-grain everything and then yes, they’re heavy and beige. But as I was staring at these beauties at my local bagel shop the other morning, I decided: enough.
May 5, 2022
smitten kitchen keepers
In early March 2020, I signed a contract to write my third cookbook because it felt like just the right moment: calm, unfrenzied, kids happy settled in school and activities… stop laughing. My timing is impeccable. But, there’s nothing like a tremendous amount of time at home with an almost boundless need for homecooked meals to get me asking the big, important questions about my own repertoire: Where is my forever pound cake? What would the perfect quiche look like? Why does roasting chicken this way change everything? I realized how much I wanted this book to be a collection of recipes specifically written with making them forever in mind. Three years, I finally get to show you what I’ve been up to.
Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics For Your Forever Files will be released on November 22nd and I cannot wait to share it with you. I hope it leaves you brimming with inspiration and with a stack of new essential recipes you’ll want to make again and again. As of today, you can preorder Smitten Kitchen Keepers almost everywhere books are sold:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Indiebound | Apple Books | More Stores | Amazon (Canadian Edition) | Indigo (CA)
April 28, 2022
simplest mushroom pasta
Lately I’ve been trying to take as many stupid walks for my stupid mental health (a funny/wonderful TikTok trend from over the winter) as possible because if the last two years have taught me anything, it is that outside time is a very key ingredient in me being a warm, upbeat, charming person, the kind of person who never hits her snooze alarm four times and then wonders why she’s always in a rush. Okay, fine, it’s not an exorcism, but it does feel surprisingly close. More often than not, I end up swinging through the Greenmarket, which leads to me bringing home whatever looked good that day — most recently, spicy arugula, pinto potatoes, fresh flowers, and a bag of fresh cremini mushrooms. A few days after that, almost without fail, I realize I have mushrooms to use and I’ve landed on a wildly simple pasta preparation that, in a rare moment of mealtime harmony, everyone eats willingly. Honestly, I should have led with this mic drop.
April 20, 2022
snacky asparagus
You are fully invited to roll your eyes at the simplicity of this recipe. It’s not even a recipe. It’s more like a plating, a way of getting asparagus from market to table that I’ve been hooked on for over a year.
Here’s what makes it perfect: I love sauteed, roasted, and grilled asparagus, especially when the spears are sizzling hot and have crackly, charred spots, a mix of textures. But each of these methods has a tiny flaw, and that is timing. Roasted and grilled asparagus are amazing piping hot off the flame, but shortly after are a bit soggy. Still good, sure, but it goes further downhill the longer you wait to eat it. Poaching asparagus and popping it in an ice water bath preserves this perfectly-cooked, crisp-tender, bright green moment in time… for days.
April 12, 2022
chicken liver pâté
I started hosting Passover seder four years ago. My dad had just passed away and my mother, who usually hosts, appreciated the relief. I don’t usually host holidays — well, they let me have Hanukkah — because our space is so small and the traffic, so terrible, but I must have done too good of a job because I haven’t stopped since. This means I have a secret archive of Passover recipes I’ve been keeping from you, and it’s rather rude. Here is one.
April 8, 2022
lemon cream meringues
I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like lemon curd. You, in turn, might choose not to trust anyone who makes bold, sweeping, and questionably necessary proclamations, but if I were to pick a completely superfluous soapbox to stand on, it’s currently this. Everyone loves lemon curd. The only thing better than lemon curd is lemon curd against a pillowy meringue and a plume of softly whipped cream. These three flavors together are the basis of so many desserts, including a chaotic one I call a Lemon Meringue Pie Smash in my second cookbook. It was while working on this recipe that I got my go-to lemon curd down to a simple formula that never fails, and also came to appreciate the culinary harmony of a dessert that doesn’t leave us with leftover stray egg whites or yolks.
March 22, 2022
simple chicken tortilla soup
Many Sundays, I share on my Instagram feed a little rundown of what we ate for dinner the week before. I call these Real Life Menus, as there’s nothing aspirational about them. There’s takeout; there’s burnout; there have been quick bean quesadillas almost once a week recently simply because they’re low-effort and they work. There’s there’s jetlag, flops and frozen pelmeni, and there are some ambitious meals I bring to the table while telling my family how grateful they should be for me (they laugh, which is deserved).
These round-ups have also led me realize that there are a lot of recipes I make fairly often for dinner and never mention here, such as this soup. My gut feeling was that there are many very authentic recipes out there for sopa azteca or sopa de tortilla and this is absolutely not even close, or trying to be. What’s a girl to do? Well, not clutter the internet with another pale imitation of a great dish, I suppose. But comments on these menus are causing me to rethink this a bit. Maybe this is the one that will work for you at the near-to-last minute on a Tuesday night, as it always does for us, providing a meal that feels balanced, delicious, but also highly doable. Maybe this, too, is a worthwhile space to take up.
