Lady Disdain

Let's try this again

2007-10-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

After a hiatus of a year, I'm going to try to revive the blog in a new location, time and life permitting.

Come visit me at http://ladydisdain.wordpress.com/ to see how it's going.

Cooler Weather Fare: Lima Bean and Corn Chowder

2006-09-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

As the weather turns inexorably cooler and wetter, I begin to crave soup. Later in the year, this will mean heavier soups made primarily from pantry staples, but fortunately, in the transition between summer and true autumn there's a merciful period during which there is still a good variety of end-of-summer produce, like the wonderful fresh limas I got from the farmer's market yesterday. I was originally planning on using them for a salad, but as it was a horrible rainy day, I threw together this pretty chowder on a whim instead.

It's a satisfying blend of fresh and rich, with the sweetness of the corn and the bite of the chile flakes and black pepper cutting through the creaminess of the broth, and the potatoes and limas providing a smooth and substantial mouthfeel. It's also a snap to put together, but tastes like you went to a considerable amount of trouble.

Lima Bean and Corn Chowder
Serves 4-6

2 tablespoons each butter and olive oil
1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes
1 large onion, diced
2 ribs celery, diced
1 orange (or red) pepper, diced
6 cups vegetable stock
4 small potatoes, peeled and diced
1 dry quart fresh lima beans
16 oz frozen corn kernels
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Salt and pepper
1/2 to 1 cup heavy cream

Heat butter and oil in a heavy pot. Add chile flakes, onions, celery and pepper and sweat until softened. Add stock, potatoes, lima beans, corn and seasonings.

Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer until potatoes and lima beans are tender, approximately 20 minutes.

Take off heat and stir in as much cream as desired. Taste and correct salt and pepper, if necessary.

Notes: You could use frozen limas if fresh aren't available, which would make it a great dinner option in the middle of winter, when your vegetable drawer is pathetically bare.

Sunday Night Sweets Blogging: Honey Gingerbread with Apple-Quince Compote

2006-09-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

I am woefully behind on the blogging, and I'm afraid I still don't have the time or energy right now to do this anywhere near as well as I'd like to, but something is better than nothing, right? Anyway, in a (probably futile) attempt to catch up, here is the Sunday project from two weeks ago: Honey Gingerbread, served with a compote of apples and quinces and topped with a generous dollop of sweetened mascarpone. While I love ordinary gingerbread, using honey instead of molasses gentles the cake, letting the spices warm and soothe you instead of being overwhelming, and serving it with the sweet fruit and the creamy cheese turns a humble snack cake into an unpretentious but still elegant dessert that could unapologetically round out a fancy meal.

Since the accompaniments are so simple (just add quinces to your favorite applesauce recipe, and stir a spoonful or two of sugar into a container of mascarpone), I will only give the recipe for the gingerbread. I will, however, encourage you to consider serving it with the garnishes, since the combination of textures and flavors is fabulous. If you don't have access to quinces, you could use a combination of tart and sweet apples instead, but quinces add such a wonderful, exotic floral note to any fruit dessert that they are absolutely worth paying the extortionate prices whenever you can find them.

Honey Gingerbread
Serves 8-12

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 cups honey
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 2 tablespoons warm water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon powdered ginger
Pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 325 F. Grease a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan and line with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, spices and salt.

In a saucepan over medium-low heat, melt together the butter, sugar, and honey. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly, then mix in the milk, eggs and dissolved baking soda.

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix well. Pour into the pan and bake until firm but springy when touched, 45-60 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in the pan before cutting into squares.

Notes: This gingerbread, like any gingery, cinnamony cake or cookie, will only improve if you give it a bit of time to sit. While it's wonderful fresh from the oven, it will be even spicier and more flavorful for breakfast the next day.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Memory Quest Edition

2006-08-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

When we were students, His Lordship and I used to frequent a bakery that specialized in cookies, not high-impact cookies like tuiles or madeleines, but homey, chock-full-of-bits variations on the basic chocolate chip cookie. They were all unassumingly wonderful, but there was one for which His Lordship, who can otherwise take or leave desserts, would take regular detours. It was a honey-apricot-pecan cookie, moist and chewy because of the honey and full of nuts and fruit, and despite the fact that we'd buy a pound of them at a time, they never seemed to last until the next day.

We finished school and moved away, and then the bakery closed, depriving His Lordship of the opportunity to buy them ever again. Since he never stopped pining for them, I decided to try reproducing them at home, and began a long and occasionally frustrating quest for the right recipe. I began by trying to modify a standard chocolate chip cookie with nuts, exchanging some of the sugar for honey and replacing the chocolate with the apricots, assuming that that's what the bakery had done. The taste was fine, but the texture was wrong. His Lordship wanted it to be chewier, and to have a more pronounced honey flavor. Since nothing I could do to a basic creamed-butter dough would produce the level of chewiness he wanted, I decided to switch the paradigm to a modified ginger cookie instead, which had the double virtue of built-in chewiness and one-for-one substitutability of honey for molasses. Using the same basic recipe underlying the five-spice and bourbon-infused cookies I previously posted, I added a cup each of chopped pecans and dried apricots. His Lordship proclaimed the results closer than any of my previous attempts, and they've been a big hit with family, friends and coworkers as well.

I appear to be on the right track, but I'm still not perfectly satisfied. Although the combination of flavors and the level of chewiness are right, they still spread quite a lot, producing a much flatter cookie than the one I remember, and, if not watched carefully, they over-brown and become almost praline-like. I've tried increasing the proportion of nuts and apricots to add more structure, thoroughly chilling (even pre-freezing) the dough, lowering the baking temperature, and making sure to remove the cookies from the oven while just barely golden. All of this has helped, but not enough. I'm starting to suspect that I may need to play around with adding extra flour for additional support. Next time, I will try increasing it by a quarter of a cup, to see if that makes any difference. In the meantime, it's still a damn good cookie, even if it can still use a bit more refining, so I'm putting up the in-progress recipe. Keep watching this space for ongoing installments of the Great Cookie Quest.

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies
Makes approx. five dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup strong-flavored honey
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups pecans, coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cup dried apricots, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt.

Melt the butter and place in a large mixing bowl, allowing it to cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the granulated sugar, honey, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the sifted dry ingredients and stir until barely blended, then stir in the pecans and apricots. Cover the bowl and chill thoroughly.

Scoop out the cookie with a tablespoon-sized scoop and place two inches apart on the cookie sheets. Bake 9-10 minutes, until just beginning to turn golden. Immediately slide the cookies, parchment and all, onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely and set up.

Notes: Next time, I will try increasing the flour by 1/4 cup to see what that does, and I will probably also increase the amount of nuts and apricots again.

The Food of the Gods: Zabaglione

2006-08-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

It is, quite frankly, a little nuts to make zabaglione on a Monday, but I had three leftover egg yolks after making chocolate amaretti (recipe to follow) for the Sunday cookie baking, and they weren't going to get better after another 24 or more hours in the fridge. And really, there is no higher fate an egg can aspire to than zabaglione, the frothy, foamy, heady alchemy resulting from the combination of nothing more than yolks, sugar and wine. Custard is comforting, creme anglaise is elegant, but zabalgione is transcendental, like tasting the rose-tinged golden clouds that accompany the sun as it sets over the wine-dark sea.

I used to be a purist and would insist on beating it by hand just to show off, but even in my pre-soft-and-lazy days, I still wouldn't have been crazy enough to do it the hard way on a Monday. By all means, use a handheld mixer, Monday or not, unless you really want an upper-body workout.

Marsala is my usual choice for zabaglione, but I didn't have any, thanks to the stupid archaic blue laws that infest this part of the country and make even a functional teetotaler like me want to stockpile booze just to avoid making another trip to the state-run store. I used port, but you could use almost any sweet wine or liqueur that you desire, although the advantage to the Marsala, besides the wonderful honey-caramel flavor, is that it won't stain the zabaglione quite as dark as port. Next time, I might even try Kahlua.

Monday Evening Zabaglione
Serves 2

3 egg yolks, at room temperature
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons port

Set a medium-sized pot containing an inch or so of water on low heat. In a bowl just bigger than the pot, combine the yolks, sugar and port, and beat at high speed with a hand-held mixer or a whisk until combined and foamy, then place over the water and beat over the heat until the mixture thickens and triples in volume. Continue beating at high speed for an additional three minutes, until very viscous and warmed through.

Divide between two stemmed wine glasses, and serve with fruit or plain cookies, such as ladyfingers or amaretti.

Notes: Be careful not to let the water boil, since it might scramble the yolks. If it looks like that might be happening, pull the bowl off the double boiler and continue beating while lowering the heat under the double boiler, then replace the bowl once things have cooled off.

Sunday Sweets Blogging: Sour Cherry Crumb Tart

2006-06-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

Cranberries, rhubarb, and now sour cherries. Do we sense a theme here? I appear to have a thing for incandescently red, tart fruit, don't I? I suppose I might as well confess that I love pomegranates and blood oranges, too. I'm sure someone with a psychology background could come up with some sordid reason for my attraction to crimson fruits, but I prefer not to examine the implications too closely and just enjoy the mood-lifting color and the tastebud-stimulating tingle.

Even if you don't share my potentially problematic compulsion to snatch up anything red and tangy, you really ought to take advantage of the blink-of-an-eye season for sour cherries if you're lucky enough to live in their growing area. They're obscenely expensive for the two weeks or so that they appear, and pitting them is a pain in the ass, but their manic color and flavor are so wonderful that it's well worth the pricetag and the trouble. If you do bite the bullet, the best way to showcase them is in a pie, or, if you're not feeling up to working with dough, a crisp or cobbler. You want to let the fruit get top billing, with some plain and sweet dough or crumbly mixture to play the supporting role.

I went a little nuts (literally!) with today's recipe, which combines both an almond-enhanced bottom crust and a crumbly topping, but since they're a once-a-year treat, I thought they deserved the extra effort. As has become another habit, this recipe is an amalgam of components from several recipes: the basic almond tart dough and the almond crumble from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake, and the filling from a Gourmet recipe for sour cherry crostata on Epicurious. The end product is humble in appearance but a shooting star in taste and texture, with a tender cookie-like crust and a crumbly and nutty top layer, sandwiching between them a zingy layer of unadorned fruit.

Sour Cherry Crumb Tart
Makes 1 9-inch tart

Almond Tart Dough
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg yolk, at room temperature
1/2 cup finely ground almond meal
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Sour Cherry Filling
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 quart fresh sour cherries, pitted (approx. 4-5 cups)
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cold water
3 tablespoons cornstarch

Almond Crumble Topping
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup slivered almonds
6 tablespoons butter, melted

Equipment: 9-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom

Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat on medium for 5 minutes, or until fluffy and pale in color. Beat in the vanilla and egg yolk and beat for another 2 minutes, then beat in the almond meal. Sift the flour over the the mixture and fold in gently with a spatula, until no traces of flour remain. Place in a gallon-sized zip-top bag or sandwich between two layers of plastic wrap and press out into a disk approx. 1/4 inch thick. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Melt the butter in a large nonstick skillet over moderate heat, then add the cherries and sugar, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Lower the heat and continue to simmer until the cherries are tender but not mushy, about 6 minutes. Mix the water and cornstarch into a paste, pull the pan off the heat, and stir the paste into the filling. Return the pan to the heat and simmer two more minutes, stirring frequently. Pour the filling onto a shallow baking dish and allow to cool to room temperature.

Place the oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350F. While the oven is heating, prepare the topping by mixing the dry ingredients in a medium bowl, then stirring in the butter until thoroughly combined. Let sit for five minutes, then break the mixture into medium-sized crumbs with your fingers.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and press into the tart pan, making sure the bottom and sides are even and patching any cracks or holes through which the filling might ooze. If the dough heats and softens too much from working it, return to the refrigerator for several minutes, then fill with the cherries. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the top.

Set the tart on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake until the dough and topping are golden and the filling is bubbling, 30-40 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely on a rack, a full hour if you can wait that long, and at least half an hour if you can't.

Naked Pizza

2006-06-24T22:19:00.000-07:00

After half a lifetime spent piling as much onto a pizza as the laws of physics will permit, I have finally come to the conclusion that the Italians have it right after all, and that the ridiculous excess of American pizza is really an insult to the basic form. Pizza, in order to be any good at all, needs to be as minimalist as possible, so that you can taste the mellow yeastiness of the crust, the peppery fruitiness of the oil, the mineral tang of the salt, and the individual characteristics of the very few and elemental toppings you do choose to add. Tons of cheese only dull your palate, sweet and pasty tomato sauces only make the whole experience insipid, and too many toppings not only clash and drown each other out, but also weigh down and wet the dough so much that you will never get a properly crisp crust.

There are therefore two secrets to really spectacular and satisfying pizza: Keep It Simple, Stupid, and do not even bother if you're not going to use a baking stone. I know it seems like the height of yuppified self-indulgence to buy a baking stone, but you absolutely need the porous ceramic texture to wick away the extra moisture and sear the crust to a crackly, caramelized golden-brown. A mediocre batch of dough can be saved by baking on a ripping-hot stone, but even the most perfectly kneaded and risen dough will become a spongy, disappointing mess if you bake it on a regular cookie sheet. There's no point in going to all the trouble (and potential heartache) of working with yeast if you're going to handicap yourself from the start, so you really owe it to yourself to spring the $20 at Williams Sonoma or Bloodbath and Beyond, or even the $3 at Home Despot for unglazed quarry tiles instead (Thanks, Alton Brown!) .

As you can see above, dinner tonight featured my absolute favorite pizza: a white pizza with nothing but olive oil, salt, and thinly sliced onions and garlic. The oil keeps the dough moist and rich, and the onions and garlic turn sweet and wonderful in the high heat, needing only a sprinkle of salt to round everything out. While I do make the dough from scratch on occasion (and, in a particularly industrious phase, even kept a sourdough starter going for months at a time, from which I made weekly batches of baguettes or focaccia), lately I've had neither the time nor the energy to make my own, so I procure the dough from the neighborhood pizzerias or from the refrigerator case at Trader Joe's. If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend Alton's recipe, which, if not fast, is practically foolproof and incredibly flavorful.

Pizza Bianca with Red Onion and Garlic
Makes 2 oblong pizzas, approximately 12 inches by 6 inches

1/2 lb pizza dough, purchased from your friendly neighborhood pizzeria
1 large red onion, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, thinly slices
1/4 cup good olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Equipment:
A baking stone or unglazed quarry tiles
A pizza peel or cookie sheet (turned upside-down if it has a rim), for transferring the pizzas to and from the oven
Coarsely ground cornmeal for dusting the peel or cookie sheet

Move the oven rack to lower third of the oven and position the baking stone on the rack. Preheat the oven at 550 F for at least 20 minutes, to allow the stone to get really hot.

Meanwhile, mix the topping ingredients in a bowl and allow to marinate. Divide the dough into two equal portions and shape into balls, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rest until the oven is ready.

When the oven and the stone are blistering hot, sprinkle the peel or upside-down cookie sheet generously with the cornmeal, to prevent the dough from sticking when you transfer it to the oven. Stretch out the first ball of dough into a long, thin rectangle, approximately a foot long and six inches wide, by pressing, pinching, and even letting it hang down from your fingertips to let gravity do the work. (If the dough immediately shrinks back, cover with plastic again and let it relax for several minutes before trying again.) The thinner you get it at this point, the crispier the end product will be, but don't worry about the precise thickness. If the dough tears, just pinch it back together.

When the dough is thin enough for your liking, lay it onto the cornmeal-dusted peel or sheet, and spread with half the topping mixture, making sure to leave a lip of at least half an inch all around to prevent the toppings from sliding off during the transfer. Gently shake the peel or sheet to be sure the pizza isn't sticking, and then slide the pizzas off the peel/sheet onto the heated stone in the oven with a few quick jerks.

Bake for 10 minutes, or until the dough is a dark golden brown and the onions and garlic are beginning to caramelize, then remove to a cooling rack for a few minutes before eating.

Repeat with the remaining half of the dough and topping mixture.

Notes: If you must have cheese, I'd suggest doing what we did with this batch: Add paper-thin slivers or a fine grating of cheese at the absolute last minute, after the pizza is already out of the oven. (We used Manchego, which was lovely.) If you want the cheese to brown, don't put it on the pizzas before they go in the oven; add it in the last few minutes of baking, once the dough has already set and is starting to turn golden. This will ensure that the crust stays crisp and the cheese doesn't burn or turn oily.

Sunday Night Sweets Blogging: Opera Cupcakes

2006-06-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

We're woefully overdue for another Sunday night sweets entry. It isn't that I haven't been baking; it's just that life has been interfering with blogging time again. The hazelnut chocolate chip cookies I made two weeks ago were a bit disappointing and not worth posting about yet, but I'll try to find time to write up last week's almond-caramel sandwich cookies sometime soon, since they came out rather well.

In the meantime, tonight's mood was in the cake direction. The foibles of my crappy oven aside, I've been really happy since I started using Shirley Corriher's recipe for Basic Moist Sweet Cake from Cookwise for cupcakes. The method is a bit quirky, since you blend the flour and the fat together first, then add the liquid ingredients, but the end product is wonderfully moist, tender, and velvety. I think it might actually work better as cupcakes, since the crumb is so delicate and melting that I can't imagine it holding up particularly well to frosting or slicing as a full-sized cake. As it is, you really need to double-line the muffin cups, or use the stiff mini-panettone molds I used this time, to give the cakes enough support to stand up once you unmold them; otherwise, they just spread and deform in the liners.

Besides the fantastic texture, the other advantage of this recipe is that you can use any oil you like, but nut oils, if you have them, give you an incredibly flavorful end product. Nearly every time I've made this recipe, I've used macadamia oil, which gives the basic yellow cake a wonderfully exotic, round, full flavor. This time, since I'm out of the macadamia, I used hazelnut, which inspired me to go with the coffee-chocolate combination of the classic Opera Cake when it came time to frost. Having both a coffee buttercream and a ganache glaze is probably overkill for cupcakes, but I couldn't decide on one or the other, and I really do love the combination of chocolate, coffee, and nuts.

I'm not entirely happy with the decoration here, because the coffee beans are too small and too dark to make any impact against the ganache. Next time I'd probably use the half-cup of leftover buttercream to pipe rosettes on top of the ganache and then top with the coffee bean, or perhaps a chocolate-covered espresso bean. I'm not going to knock myself out over aesthetics this late on a Sunday, though, and anyway, you really can't argue with the taste.

Opera Cupcakes
Makes 20-24 cupcakes

Hazelnut Cakes
2 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
6 tablespoons plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (1/2 cup total)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup hazelnut oil (or other nut oil, or mild vegetable oil)

Leave eggs, buttermilk and butter out at room temperature until butter has softened.

Place shelf in lower third of oven, and preheat to 350. Set 20 mini panettone molds on a baking sheet, or line two muffin trays with liners.

Sir the eggs, yolks, 6 tablespoons buttermilk and vanilla together in a liquid measuring cup.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, and mix on low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, oil and remaining 2 tablespoons butermilk, and mix on low until the dry ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium and beat for 1 1/2 minutes, until light. Add the liquid ingredients, one third at a time, beating for 20 seconds between additions.

Fill the molds or muffin cups halfway and bake until golden and a tester comes out clean,
approximately 20-25 minutes. Remove from oven and let sit on baking sheet or in muffin trays for ten minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Coffee Buttercream
3 cups powdered sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder, dissolved in 1/4 cup hot water
1 to 2 tablespoons whipping cream

In a standing mixer, mix the sugar and butter on low speed until well blended, then increase speed to medium and beat for another 3 minutes, until light and fluffy.

Add vanilla, dissolved espresso and cream and continue to beat on medium speed for 1 minute more, adding more cream if needed for spreading consistency.

Once the cupcakes have completely cooled, spread 2-3 tablespoons of buttercream over the cakes, creating as smooth and level a surface as possible and leaving at least 1/4 inch of space between the buttercream and the top of the mold/liner for the ganache layer. Refrigerate the frosted cupcakes in an airtight container until the buttercream has firmed.

Ganache
150 grams heavy cream
150 grams dark chocolate, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Lyle's Golden Syrup (or corn syrup)

Heat the cream in a liquid measuring cup in a microwave until near boiling, approximately 1-2 minutes. Add the chocolate and whisk thoroughly, until chocolate has dissolved and the mixture is smooth. Whisk in the syrup.

Pour 1-2 tablespoons of the ganache over the frosted cupcakes, tilting the cupcakes to swirl the ganache over the surface and ensure even coverage of the buttercream layer. (Do not touch the ganache or try to spread it with a spatula or other utensil, as it will mar the shiny surface of the end product.) If desired, add a coffee bean or chocolate covered espresso bean as garnish.

Return to the refrigerator in a covered container until the ganache has set.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Multigrain Anzac Biscuits

2006-05-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

I've been intrigued by Anzac biscuits for some time, because of their somewhat romantic history and their position as the pseudo-national cookie of Australia and New Zealand, and also because the combination of oats and coconut is always appealing to me. Despite the fascination in principle, I'd never actually tried one, so I decided to give it a go for this week's Sunday cookie blogging. It was only after tracking down what seemed to be the most-cited recipe on the web that I realized I did not have any plain rolled oats left, after using them up on last week's rhubarb bars. I did have a multigrain rolled cereal instead - comprising oats, wheat, rye, and barley - which His Lordship likes to have for breakfast on occasion. What the hell, I thought, and decided to give them a try. I also opted to add some ginger.

The recipe was very quick to prepare and left a minimal mess in my kitchen, since you don't use the mixer, making it a good candidate for Sunday-night baking. The cookies turned out rather darker brown than I'd expected, but are very crisp and pleasant-tasting. I'm not sure if you really notice the fact that it's multigrain, but in this context, I think that's probably a good thing. You might be able to sneak some whole grains into your kid's diet this way.

Next time, just to see if I can tell the difference, I think I'll try it with plain oats, use light brown sugar instead of dark, leave out the ginger, and add macadamia nuts, based on one of the other variations I found on my Google trek.

Multigrain Anzac Biscuits
Makes 3 1/2 dozen

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup mixed-grain rolled cereal (or rolled oats)
1 cup dried unsweetened coconut
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 tbsp Lyle's Golden Syrup
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp boiling water
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Combine the flour, cereal, coconut, sugar and ginger in a medium-sized bowl.

In a Pyrex liquid measuring cup, melt the butter and Golden Syrup together in the microwave. Mix the baking soda with the water and add to the butter mixture, then pour the mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Scoop tablespoon-sized balls of dough onto the baking sheet, leaving two inches between cookies. Bake for 15 minutes, or until golden brown and firm.

Cool completely on a wire rack, and store in an airtight container.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars

2006-05-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned previously, one of my finds at the farmer's market this weekend was rhubarb, another later-in-life love. I don't think I ever had it until well into adulthood, but as with cranberries, I fell hard and completely, and when it's in season, I snatch up all I can and freeze some for the rest of the year. For the inaugural rhubarb recipe of 2006, I decided a bar cookie might be nice, with a sweet-tart layer of rhubarb sandwiched between two buttery layers of cookie dough.

In order to develop this recipe, I combined and modified components from two separate recipes. On the one hand, I had a recipe for a strawberry-rhubarb bar in The All-American Cookie Book, but the oat-and-nut-fortified dough from a raspberry bar recipe in my latest cookbook acquisition, The New Best Recipe by the America's Test Kitchen chefs, sounded much better than the plain short pastry dough in the original cookie. I decided to combine the two and hope that the combination of the superior elements would result in a superior bar cookie.

The end product of this tinkering was not perfect, because the filling was a bit too loose and the cookies don't have quite enough structural integrity to cut as cleanly as I'd like. The flavor is great, though, and I like the firm but tender texture and the toasty nuttiness of the dough. Next time, I may fiddle with the amount of thickener, or possibly try a different kind of, or slightly less, jam. With a bit more work, this could go from a very nice but homey cookie to a refined and suitable addition to a springtime tea tray.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Bars
Makes 24 1x2-inch cookies

Filling
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 lb rhubarb, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 10-oz jar (1 1/4 cups) strawberry jam
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Grated zest of one orange

Crust and Streusel Topping
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter, slightly softened, cut into 12 pieces

In a heavy, nonreactive saucepan, stir together the sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon until evenly distributed. Stir in the rhubarb, jam and orange zest and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring frequently, until the rhubarb begins to soften, approx. 6-8 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Place the oven rack in the lower two-thirds position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with two strips of parchment paper or nonstick aluminum foil, letting the strips overhang the edges of the pan to serve as a sling for removing the cookies later.

In a mixer, mix the flour, oats, granulated and brown sugar, baking soda, salt and walnuts at low speed for 30 seconds. Add the butter, continuing to mix on low speed until the mixture is well
blended and resembles wet sand.

Press two-thirds of the dough into the bottom of the pan and bake until it starts to brown, about 20-25 minutes. Spread the strawberry-rhubarb filling over the crust and sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the filling. Bake until the filling bubbles around the edges and the top is golden brown, approximately 35 minutes, rotating once during baking.

Cool on a wire rack until room temperature, approximately 1 1/2 hours. Remove the cookies from the pan by lifting the edges of the foil or parchment, and cut into squares.

Another Legitimate Thirty-Minute Meal: Roasted Asparagus Salad

2006-05-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing valiant quest to present legitimately quick, easy, delicious and nutritious meals, here is what His Lordship and I had for dinner last night, courtesy of our Saturday trip to the farmer's market, where the signs of spring are truly undeniable, as evidenced by the asparagus, radishes, baby greens, scallions, rhubarb, early tomatoes and fresh herbs we picked up. I also stopped by my favorite cheesemonger and picked up some of the lovely and sharp Canadian cheddar he recommended a while ago during a side-by-side tasting with several imports from the UK, during which the Canadian stuff beautifully held its own while costing half the price.

By the time we'd gotten the goods home, we'd already decided to roast the asparagus, and I decided to combine it with the salad we'd also planned to have instead of serving it on the side. Because radishes can be peppery and a little bitter, His Lordship suggested a sweeter dressing, so I threw together a basic honey-mustard vinaigrette, which worked very well with all the components. The cheese shavings on top were not only decorative but gave a nice sharp-but-smooth contrast to the sweetness of the asparagus and the dressing and the crispness of the radishes, to say nothing of adding some extra protein.

This is a really delicious, satisfying, and pretty salad which would make a very nice first course as well as a light main course.

Roasted Asparagus, Radish and Canadian Cheddar Salad
Serves 4 as first course, or 2 as main course

2 bunches asparagus
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons dijon or other smooth European-style mustard
2 tablespoons clover or other light-flavored honey
Salt and pepper
1/3-1/2 cup fruity extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons-1/4 cup sherry vinegar
2 large scallions, white parts only, or 1 shallot, minced

4-6 cups mixed baby greens, washed and thoroughly dried
1 small bunch radishes, finely sliced
The reserved green tops of the scallions, sliced
2 oz Canadian or other sharp, aged dry cheddar, finely shaved

Preheat oven to 425 F. Clean asparagus and use a vegetable peeler to peel away the tough and woody outer layer on the end of each stalk, or bend each stalk gently until the tough lower portion snaps off, saving those parts for soup. Toss the spears with the olive oil, salt and pepper, and lay in a single layer in oven-proof dish. Roast the asparagus uncovered for 15-20 minutes, or until easily pierced with a sharp knife, but not so long that it loses its bright green color and becomes mushy. Once the asparagus is cooked, remove from the oven and cut each stalk into two or three smaller segments.

While the asparagus is roasting, combine the mustard, honey, salt and pepper in a bowl, stirring with a small whisk or a fork until thoroughly combined. Slowly add the olive oil in a thin stream, stirring briskly to emulsify. Once the oil has been incorporated, add the minced scallion and drizzle in the vinegar.

In a large bowl, toss the greens, radishes, scallion tops and asparagus with salt and pepper, then add half the vinaigrette and toss, tasting to see if it's sufficiently dressed. If not, add the remaining vinaigrette to taste and toss again. Divide the salad between plates, and sprinkle over the cheddar shavings before serving.

Notes: Parmesan, gruyere, or another sharp and dry cheese should work equally well here. If you're not a vegetarian, poached or roasted chicken or duck, or perhaps even pork, would be a good addition to round out the salad into a complete meal.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Tinkering with a favorite

2006-04-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since the last round of Sunday night cookie blogging, and since I was nowhere near energetic enough to attempt any confectionary pursuits tonight, I decided to revert to one of my favorite cookies, the molasses spice cookie. Soft, chewy, warm with cinnamon and sharp with ginger, this cookie seems to please nearly everyone, and as an added bonus, the recipe I use most often is a snap to put together at the last minute because you melt rather than soften the butter.

The original recipe, from The Village Baker's Wife, is fabulous on its own, but that doesn't mean I can be trusted to leave well enough alone. I've been tinkering with it in various ways since the second batch, when I added crystallized ginger bits, and this time, I decided to push it even further. A while ago, I wondered what would happen if I added Chinese five spice powder to ginger cookies, and was pleased enough with the results to increase the amount this time from a very conservative 1/4 teaspoon to a full 1/2 teaspoon. I was also intrigued by a recipe for Joe Froggers, which added rum to the dough. I was reaching for the rum when I spotted the bottle of bourbon sitting next to it, and suddenly thought that would work even better with the five spice, since it's more assertive. The product of all this tinkering was an even better molasses cookie, with an exotic complexity from the additional spices and a lovely aroma from the bourbon, which does play exceptionally well with the ginger and star anise. Next time, I will probably add even more ginger, of both the powdered and the crystallized variety, because nothing is ever gingery enough for me, but I think the five spice/bourbon combo is a keeper.

Five-Spice Molasses Cookies
Makes approx. four dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 large egg
1 tablespoon bourbon
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup crystallized ginger bits

1/4-1/2 cup raw or turbinado sugar, for coating

Preheat the oven to 375 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, spices and salt.

Melt the butter and place in a large mixing bowl, allowing it to cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the granulated sugar, molasses, egg, and bourbon, and mix well. Add the sifted dry ingredients and stir until barely blended, then stir in the crystallized ginger. Cover the bowl and chill for at least 15 minutes.

Place the raw sugar in a small bowl or plate. Scoop out the cookie with a tablespoon-sized scoop and roll into one-inch balls, coating each ball with the raw sugar. Place the coated balls two inches apart on the cookie sheets. Bake 9-10 minutes, allowing the cookies to cool on the sheets for several minutes before removing them to a rack.

Notes: I would think that you'd want a good-quality bourbon here, with enough spicy undertones to compliment the spices in the cookie. Since His Lordship is picky about his bourbon, we keep the top-shelf stuff around anyway.

I keep the Ginger People's crystallized ginger baking bits around for cookies and the like, since it's easier than chopping bigger chunks of ginger, which tend to try to glom back into a mass rather than distributing evenly into the cookie batter. If you can't find the baking bits or don't want to bother with an additional product (and I'd hardly blame you), it would be a good idea to finely chop the larger chunks and then toss them in a bit of extra sugar so they'll separate into discrete bits.

If you don't have raw or turbinado sugar, you can use an additional amount of granulated sugar for dredging, but the bigger crystals add a really lovely glittery quality to the finished cookies, as well as a hint of crunch.

Sunday Sweets Blogging: Cashew-Macadamia Hearts

2006-04-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when I get really ambitious on a Sunday.

Inspired by one of my favorite food blogs, which recently featured homemade brazil nut cups, I decided to finally get around to using the heart-shaped molds I'd bought ages ago with the intention of using them for chocolates and other molded treats. I thought about using a plain ganache filling, but since I've been big on all kinds of nuts and seeds lately, I decided to go with a nut butter filling instead. I had tried a cashew butter recipe from Alton Brown last year and liked it quite a lot, so I decided to start with that, supplementing the cashews with macadamias and the macadamia nut oil I've been putting into a lot of baked goods lately. (It's really lovely stuff and works miracles on vanilla cupcakes.) The results are fragrant and tropical and a million times better than plain old peanut butter.

Making chocolates isn't really that hard. It's just a bit time-consuming, and the only tricky step is tempering the chocolate properly, so that it stays shiny and crisp when you bite it, instead of developing a waxy "bloom" or turning brittle. I researched several methods of tempering and decided to start with the "seeding" approach, melting most of it while reserving some for addition off the heat, to bring down the temperature and encourage stable crystals. Unfortunately, I didn't do it well enough, and the chocolate was a bit distempered, so they did develop a whitish bloom, but I can't complain too much, because these do taste wonderful, especially at room temperature, when the filling is creamy and smooth and melds perfectly with the yielding chocolate coating. I cheated a bit for presentation purposes by painting them with additional macadamia oil to make them glisten (a trick I picked up from Jacques Torres, another celebrity chef I decidely don't hate) and dusting the tops with cocoa.

I'll work on my tempering techniques and see if I can't do even better next time by monitoring the temperature instead of using the less precise seeding method, but for now, I'm quite pleased, and I didn't hear any complaints at work this morning, either.

Cashew-Macadamia Hearts
Makes approx. 32 bonbons

1 cup cashew-macadamia butter (see below)
1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1 lb bittersweet chocolate
Cocoa for dusting

Equipment: Clean, scrupulously dry candy molds
Double boiler
A cooling rack set on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper

In a food processor, blend the nut butter and powdered sugar until a firm paste forms. Taste and add additional salt if necessary to balance the sweetness. Set aside while tempering the chocolate.

Chop the chocolate very finely, setting aside 1/3 for later addition. Place the remaining 2/3 in the top half of a double boiler over simmering water and allow to melt, stirring gently. When the chocolate is just melted, remove from the heat and add the reserved third, stirring until the entire batch is melted together.

Fill the chocolate molds with chocolate, swirling and shaking to cover all surfaces, then set upside-down on the rack over the cookie sheet to let the excess run out. Set in the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes to set up. When the chocolate is firm, invert the molds and fill each chocolate-lined cavity with enough nut filling to reach about three-quarters to the top, pushing into the crevices to be sure that there are no air pockets. Seal the bonbons with the remaining chocolate, scraping the tops of the molds to remove extra chocolate and ensure clean unmolding. Return the molds, right-side up, to the refrigerator to set.

When the chocolates have firmed, carefully unmold them. If desired, brush with additional macadamia oil, and dust the tops with excellent-quality cocoa powder sifted through a fine mesh sieve.

Notes: Chocolate will "seize" or turn clumpy and grainy if it comes into contact with water, so be careful not to let steam from the double boiler condense into the melted chocolate, and be sure that the molds and all work surfaces and tools are very dry. Supposedly the best way to keep chocolate at a workable temperature and maintain the temper is to keep it on a low-temp heating pad while you're waiting for the first set, but I didn't have one, so I left it over the still-warm water in the double boiler, off the heat, which kept it warm enough to spread over the filled bonbons and also, oddly, resulted in slightly shinier bottoms on the candies.

Cashew-Macadamia Butter
Makes approx. 1 1/2 cups

8 oz raw cashews
2 oz macadamia nuts
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons macadamia oil (or other nut oil)
3 tablespoons grapeseed oil (or canola, or other very mild-flavored oil)

Preheat oven to 350. Toast the cashews in a single layer on a baking sheet until golden, approximately 12-15 minutes, being careful not to burn them. Let cool.

Heat the honey in a small container in the microwave until slightly runny, about 15 seconds. Combine with the oils in a liquid measuring cup.

Pulse the cashews, macadamia nuts and salt in a food processor until nearly pulverized, about 5 seconds. With the processor running, slowly add the oil and honey mixture through the feed tube and continue processing until a smooth paste forms. Taste and correct seasonings as necessary.

Another Legitimate Thirty Minute Meal: Southwestern Lentil Salad

2006-04-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

Since I'm trying to get back into the swing of cooking, despite still not having as much time for it as I'd like, tonight's experimental dinner was particularly gratifying. When I got home, all I had decided was that I wanted to do something with lentils, but by the time I was finished adding components, I had a dinner that was easy, quick, nutritious, and most importantly, really delicious. The richness of the lentils and the avocado, the crunch of the cucumber and green onion, the sweetness of the tomatoes, the tang of the lemon, and the sharpness of the spices and cilantro all combined beautifully into a simple but flavorful southwest-ish whole. In addition to making a very satisfactory dinner, I think this will be a great addition to the summer barbecue season.

Southwestern Lentil Salad
Serves 4 as a main dish, and at least six as a side dish

1 cup black lentils
2 garlic cloves
1/2 an English cucumber, diced
1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered
3 scallions, sliced
1/4 cup olive oil
Juice of one large lemon
Salt and pepper
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
1 avocado, diced

Place the lentils and garlic in a small saucepan, and cover generously with water. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer vigorously until the lentils are tender, but not mushy.

In the meantime, combine the cucumber, tomatoes, scallions, oil, lemon juice, paprika, cumin, and salt and pepper in a large bowl, and leave to marinate until the lentils are cooked. Once the lentils are ready, drain thoroughly and add to the bowl, tossing to combine. Taste and correct the seasonings as necessary, then add the diced avocado, stirring gently to avoid mashing it.

Notes: You could use any kind of lentil here, but I favor the black or green varieties over ordinary brown lentils when I'm making salads, because they keep their shape much better. If you would like to make it ahead, it should keep very well in the refrigerator for quite some time, but I would not add the avocado until the last minute, since it begins to brown very quickly after being cut open.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

2006-03-20T20:08:00.000-08:00

Just to prove the extent of the addiction I mentioned in the previous post, I've added a list of cookbooks currently in my possession to the sidebar.

(Note the careful use of the qualifying language, "currently in my possession", which accounts both for the fact that I have additional books in storage or in the hands of relatives, and for the inevitability of this list growing thanks to the aforementioned addiction.)

Culinobibliomania

2006-02-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

I have been doing precious little cooking, and therefore precious little blogging, in the last few weeks. (Stupid life, getting in the way again...) That hasn't stopped me from obsessing about cooking, and, if anything, it has caused an uptick in my barely-controllable cookbook buying habit. It's always an exercise of the will to stop myself from randomly acquiring cookbooks, particularly when there are so many used bookstores within easy walks of work and home, but when I don't actually have time to use them, I'm even more desperately tempted to pick up a new treasure. Whether it's to inspire myself to make an effort or just to use the vicarious thrill of reading about cooking as a substitute for actually doing it, I'm not entirely sure.

By way of illustration, these are the books I've acquired over the last two months. Three of them were holiday gifts, but there's really no excuse for the other five, not that it stops me from trying to rationalize the purchases anyway. The Batali book was because I have sadly few Italian cookbooks, and such a glaring lapse must be remedied. The two baking books are, of course, because my existing resources are really not good enough if I'm going to try to bake-and-blog every Sunday. I owe it to my many (by which I mean probably half a dozen on a good week) readers to provide variety, don't I? The sad part is that I'm pretty sure I haven't made a single recipe out of any of them yet, unless you count the hot chocolate recipe in the Steingarten book -- and I wouldn't, because I acquired the recipe way before I acquired the book.

I suppose, as addictions go, this one is pretty harmless (although His Lordship curses it soundly every time we move, and he has to risk a hernia with each overfilled box). Still, I ought to make more of an effort to use them, or at least to stop picking them up on auto-pilot and then letting them sit on the coffee table, mocking me with my own imprudent impulsiveness. Is there a twelve-step group?

And Now for Something Completely Different...

2006-01-30T18:44:00.000-08:00

Between the holidays and my birthday last week, I've been eating so many sugary treats for the past two months that I finally burned out. Since I'm currently eyeing salads with the same longing I usually reserve for chocolate, I really couldn't face cookie blogging last night, and decided to go with something more wholesome instead. I decided that what I really wanted was something with whole grains, dried fruit, and breakfast appeal, and settled on jazzing up my favorite bran muffin recipe with dried cherries.

The beauty of this recipe is that it has a wonderfully light and tender texture, unlike the usual leaden, splintery or greasy nature of most bran muffins. The recipe also makes a huge number of muffins that freeze beautifully, so I can have a ready supply of on-the-go healthy breakfasts, which is very handy during my periodic attempts to reform my breakfast-skipping instincts. The original recipe called for figs, but I substituted dates very early on and found that I really preferred their moistness and the way they combine with the honey to give the muffins an earthy sweetness. You can use any dried fruit you like, although I'm a much bigger fan of cherries than of raisins, and I liked the way their sharpness contrasted with the dates. Next time, I might even try cranberries.

These are healthy, but not masochistically healthy. A nice change of pace.

Cherry-Date Bran Muffins
Makes approximately 30

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 cups wheat bran
1/2 cup pitted, chopped dates
1/2 cup dried cherries
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 large eggs
2 cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 400°F. Line 30 muffin cups with muffin papers.

Whisk flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl to blend. Combine bran, dates and cherries in another bowl, mix in 1 cup boiling water, and leave to stand while preparing the batter.

Beat the butter in a mixer until creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar, then the honey, then the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the buttermilk and flour in alternating additions, three of each. Fold in the bran mixture.

Divide the batter among the lined muffin cups, filling halfway. Bake muffins 20 minutes, or until firm and springy to the touch or a tester comes out clean. Turn muffins out onto racks and cool.

Special Guest Blogging: Restaurant Review by His Lordship

2005-12-27T20:25:00.000-08:00

Since the parental units and the baby brother are in town for the holidays, we've been eating out a lot, and tonight, we tried a recently-opened tapas restaurant my dad had read about in the tourist magazine at his hotel. I thought the meal, while pricey, was very good indeed, and my family seemed pretty pleased as well. The significant other (who shall henceforth be known as "His Lordship", to avoid the inherent potential confusion with Jehovah caused by my earlier references to "the Lord") also enjoyed the meal quite a lot, but he also had such strong opinions about the price point of a certain menu item that he was moved to write an online review on CitySearch to get it off his chest. However, since CitySearch ruthlessly caps reviews at a meager 150 words, he did not get to do real justice to his deeply felt beliefs, and had to settle for a hopelessly truncated version.

I should observe that nothing, but nothing, makes His Lordship crankier faster than a bad or overpriced meal. He has very exacting standards regarding quality to price ratios, and while he's willing to compromise on quality if the price is low enough, and, conversely, to gladly pay good money if the quality is high, there is a decided point at which the perceived cost/value disparity is so great that he'll go postal. I'm not talking about being a bit peeved; I'm talking about a surly, argumentative funk so palpable that I will do nearly anything to jog him out of the ensuing dark humor. While the rest of this meal was good enough to stave off that particular demon, there was one thing that really set him off, and since his restaurant rants are, after the funk, usually rather entertaining, I thought it would be nice to give him a forum in which to fully express himself. Thus, in his own words, here's His Lordship's full review of tonight's meal:

All right, you've seen the prices as you walk past this new restaurant front in Center City. We know that you will be paying a pretty penny for some tasty food, but come on, $12 for ONE empanada? (Description: "Amada's Empanada: Spinach, Manchego & Artichoke") I asked the server about this after taking one bite and he proceed to tell me that the $12 empanada had aged Manchego and plantain dough. Let me get one thing straight, the food was excellent and as long as I have the perception of value (through ingredients, taste, amount, presentation, etc...) I am going to be game, but $12 for ONE empanada (see description again)?! Download the menu and compare the prices and the price for that small empanada will jump out at you (I admit that it said empanada singular and not plural, as my friends pointed out to me).

Okay, enough about the empanada (it was small too, about 2-4 bites worth). The service was good and the ambience was a bit loud but not too overbearing. The feminine drink I had (All About My Mother), a lavender grape gimlet, was a great start to the meal but the white wine sangria, according to my tablemates, was a bit wimpy. Service was knowledgeable and attentive, and was always ready to bring more bread. (Take note from other reviews: make sure you request bread...)

My friends who have been to Spain also pointed out (as other have here) that this "high concept" restaurant atmosphere is not authentic tapas, but in America it seems that tapas has been mostly available only in "elite" status.

Okay, I have been complaining and possibly nitpicking at what was all in all an exceptional dining experience which was highlighted by the lamb chops, which were possibly the best I have ever had (tender, juicy, perfectly seasoned). The sea bass was also memorable (crispy, flaky, served with clams on the side with the best sauce of the night, an herb cream sauce). The traditional octopus was tender and perfectly cooked. The baked goat cheese was creamy and slightly smoky and the tomato sauce was just sweet enough to balance the tanginess of the cheese (but I could probably make this at home easily) and the fava bean salad was nicely seasoned and a fair size. For those looking for value, the roasted pork over beans is a large portion although does not rise to the preciousness of most of the other dishes. Try the crema catalana with the cinnamon under the brulee and the hint of rosewater. I agree with previous reviews that with each bite, you truly get a taste experience that you can savor and you only need a few bites to experience the essence of the dish.

The next time I have clients to take out and can expense the meal, I will take them to Amada.

By the way, I strongly suspect that "$12 empanada" is now going to be the gold standard and ready shorthand for any overpriced item in the foreseeable future.

Holiday Cookie Blogging, Part I

2005-12-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

I'm in the middle of the holiday cookie baking frenzy, having already made three kinds of cookies in the past week. One was an experimental batch to use the snowflake cookie cutters I bought in a holiday-induced bout of temporary insanity which made me forget that I have insufficient patience for cookie cutter cookies. The other two are going to be mailed out as holiday gifts, so I'm not going to post the recipe yet, so as not to spoil the surprise.

In the meantime, there has been some demand for the recipe for the cookies I sent out last year, an almost laughably Californified but still addictively yummy shortbread that combined two wonderful flavors abundantly found in California gardens: rosemary, which grows like kudzu and is used as cheap ground cover, and Meyer lemons, which are intoxicatingly floral and aromatic, but often difficult and expensive to find if you don't grow them yourself. Since I had to leave my beloved Meyer tree behind (along with my kaffir lime, which I miss nearly as much) when we switched coasts, I have to make do by mixing some orange zest in with ordinary lemon zest, which evokes some of the same magic and is far better than lemon zest alone.

Rosemary-Meyer Lemon Shortbread
Makes about 4 dozen

1 1/2 cups butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons very finely chopped fresh rosemary
3 tablespoons freshly grated Meyer lemon zest (or 2 tablespoons regular lemon zest and 1 tablespoon orange zest)
2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt

Cream together the butter, sugar, rosemary and zest in a mixer until very light and fluffy. Add the dry ingredients and mix until incorporated, taking care not to over-mix, which would make the cookies tough.

Divide the dough into two equal blocks, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm, at least 1-2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 325.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out each block to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Cut the dough, using square or round fluted-edged cookie cutters approximately 2 inches across, and place the cookies on parchment-lined cookie sheets. Place the cookie sheets in the freezer or refrigerator briefly to firm and cool the dough again and avoid spreading in the oven.

Bake in the center of the oven for 12-14 minutes, or until pale gold but not browned. Let the cookies cool on the sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Notes: The amounts of rosemary and zest can be varied according to your tastes. I wouldn't add much more of the rosemary, but you can decrease it at will, and you can also increase the amount of zest if you prefer even more lemony cookies. Also, you can gather the scraps after the first cutting and roll out another batch, although the quality will decrease a bit from the first. They will still taste lovely, but the texture won't be quite as meltingly delicate.

Oooof.

2005-11-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

Overdid it? Feel like fasting between now and New Year's? Vowing to everyone in sight that this is the last time you will participate in this appalling national orgy of gluttony?

Yeah, me too, which is why breakfast today consisted of my sure-fire morning-after remedy: lemon ginger tea. The ginger aids in digestion, and both ginger and citrus will quickly settle an upset tummy. You can make ginger tea just by steeping a few slices of fresh ginger in hot water for a few minutes, with perhaps a spoonful of honey added for sweetness, but I really like the combination of ginger and lemon, and I think it works a little faster than ginger alone. I suppose you could even add some fresh mint, if you really want to hedge your bets.

I've been using candied or crystallized ginger rather than fresh lately, because it keeps forever in the cupboard, is easier to carry along to the office or while traveling, and because the sugar in the ginger sweetens the tea by itself. If you don't have any, use an inch-long piece of fresh ginger, sliced (no need to peel it if you don't want to), and a teaspoon of honey.

Ginger-Lemon Tea
Serves 2

Equipment: A small teapot, or two cups or mugs

4-6 pieces candied or crystallized ginger, roughly chopped
1/2 lemon, sliced
2 cups boiling water, or enough to fill the vessel you're using

Place the ginger and lemon in a small teapot, or divide evenly between two cups. Cover with boiling water and allow to steep for five minutes. Stir before serving.

Notes: You could also serve this over ice, with some additional fresh lemon juice and a shot of simple syrup.

Pie? Meh, but Cupcakes I Can Get Behind.

2005-11-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

We never had pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving when I was growing up. While my mother adopted Thanksgiving with a vengeance when she first discovered it as an immigrant, her nearly-wholesale appropriation stopped short of the dessert course. She never cared for pumpkin pie, probably because she dislikes cloves and allspice, so we usually had some variation on apple pie (pie, strudel, even tarte tatin) instead. As an adult, though, I've thrown off my mother's aversion to the spices usually found in pie, and I've also become really fond of pumpkin as a dessert medium, although pie is still not my favorite use for it, partly because really good pie dough without hydrogenated fat is my personal demon and constant nemesis, and partly because there are so many more interesting possibilities for pumpkin.

For the past few years, I've been alternating between the flan/creme brulee end and the cake ends of the spectrum. This year, I decided to follow the example of the very inventive Chockylit at Cupcake Bakeshop, because, in addition to being cute, leftover cupcakes would be much easier to take to work than a partially-consumed cake. I used the same recipe for the cakes, but I'm just not convinced by the combination of pumpkin and chocolate. I opted for a mascarpone and cream cheese frosting instead, based on a recipe I'd seen on Everyday Italian (yeah, she's annoying, but at least she does have a legitimate grounding in terms of both training and Italian cuisine). The results were both yummy and attractive, although next time I might double the amount of frosting, since there was only enough to cover eighteen cupcakes, and not particularly generously, either.

I won't re-post the cupcake recipe, since I didn't modify it at all (although it made twenty-four rather than thirty in my muffin tins, probably because I always resist underfilling the cups), but I'll post the frosting recipe, since I added vanilla and since the Food Network pulls recipes after a while.

Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting
Makes enough to lightly frost 18 cupcakes

3 oz cream cheese
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/3 cup mascarpone cheese
3 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Let the cheeses and butter come to room temperature, then beat together the cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Beat in the mascarpone until combined, then the honey and vanilla extract.

Chill until firm.

Hiatus

2005-11-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

No blogging for two weeks, as I'm off on a business trip to Thailand.

Impromptu Autumnal Celebration Feast

2005-10-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

I really do love fall produce. Yesterday, I snatched up two pounds of quinces, two pints of fresh chestnuts, a large knobby celery root (celeriac) and a half-dozen Yukon Gold potatoes. Today I added one of my favorite varieties of apples, the newly-available Honeycrisp hybrid. I may use the quinces to make jam, since I'm getting perilously close to the end of last year's batch, but I'll probably keep them around for a while to perfume the house and look festive.

The rest of my haul got used in tonight's dinner. All I had planned to make was a simple and comforting dinner of soup and bread, but I found aged Mahon cheese on sale when I bought the apples, which added a first course. The chestnuts I had roasted and peeled last night had to get used for something pretty quickly, and I remembered that the chestnut paste I had made for the chestnut risotto in The Olives Table had been much tastier on its own than in the risotto, so I thought I'd experiment with making it into a spread to have with the soup. I also remembered while roasting the chestnuts that I had two unused roasted sweet potatoes in the fridge, and, having been tempted by a pumpkin pie while buying bread, I decided to throw together a brulee-like sweet potato custard baked in ramekins (because I was too lazy to bother with pastry).

Bit by bit, without even intending to, I managed to put together a meal so full of fall flavors and so unpretentiously grand that it could easily count as a feast. I've spent three times as long on Thanksgiving menus less well-rounded than this. As a matter of fact, I may use some of these elements for Thanksgiving this year. This dinner was a lovely way to wind down the weekend and ring in the season, and I didn't even break a sweat. Don't you just love it when things work out this well?

A Celebration of Autumn

First Course
Honeycrisp Apples and Aged Mahon Cheese

Main Course
Celeriac and Yukon Gold Potato Soup
Thyme-scented Chestnut Pate on Toasts

Dessert
Sweet Potato Brulees

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Celeriac and Yukon Gold Potato Soup
Serves 6-8

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, finely chopped
2 large shallots, finely chopped
4 ribs celery, roughly chopped
1 large celery root, peeled and diced
4 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced
6 cups vegetable stock
1 1/2 teaspoons salt, or to taste (depending on saltiness of stock)
Half a dozen grinds black pepper, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground celery seed
1/2 cup to 1 cup half & half

Heat the butter and olive oil in a large pot until the butter is melted. Add the onions and shallots, and saute until softened. Add the celery and continue cooking for two minutes. Add the celery root, potatoes, stock, salt, pepper, and celery seed, and bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat to maintain a simmer until the celery root and potatoes are soft, approximately 30-40 minutes.

Puree the soup with an immersion blender or food mill until smooth. Stir in enough half & half to thin to desired consistency, correct the seasonings, and serve.

Notes: Leeks would certainly work well here, but I only had onions and shallots on hand.

Thyme-Scented Chestnut Pate
Makes 2 cups

1 1/2 cups chestnuts, roasted and peeled
1 onion, minced
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup vegetable broth
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all the above in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer gently until the chestnuts are tender, approximately 20 minutes. Puree in a food processor until smooth, adding additional cream if necessary. Season to taste and serve with good bread, preferably toasted.

Notes: Since this made way more than the Lord and I can reasonably finish in the next few days, I'm thinking of freezing it and using it later as a filling for ravioli, as suggested in the recipe notes.

Sweet Potato Brulees
Makes 4 large brulees or 6-8 in ramekins

2 large sweet potatoes, baked and mashed (approx. 14 oz)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3 large eggs
1 cup plus two tablespoons half & half
2 tablespoons rum
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Coarse sugar for bruleeing

Preheat oven to 375F.

Whisk together the sweet potatoes, sugar, and dry ingredients until smooth. Whisk in the eggs, half & half, rum and vanilla, then pour into brulee molds or ramekins. Place on a baking sheet lined with a towel, and pour in enough hot water to thoroughly soak the towel, being careful not to splash into the custards.

Bake the custards until no longer jiggly in the center when shaken gently, approximately 20 minutes. Cool completely.

Just before serving, sprinkle the tops of the custards with a thin, even layer of sugar, and brulee with a kitchen torch or under the broiler until bubbling and caramelized. Once the sugar hardens, serve with whipped cream or ice cream.

Notes: The spices were a tiny bit heavy in this recipe, which I modified from last year's pumpkin pie. While you don't really expect to taste much pumpkin flavor in pumpkin pie, I do like the taste of sweet potatoes and I would have preferred that their flavor had been a little more prominent here. Next time, I'll probably cut the spices by at least a third, and use bourbon instead of rum for a more Southern note.

I didn't actually brulee them, since my torch is out of butane, but I definitely would have if I'd had the gas. Besides the fact that I just love playing with the torch, I think the crunch of the sugar would make a nice contrast with the smoothness of the custard.

Brownie Manifesto

2005-10-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

If the chocolate chip cookie is the quintessential All-American Cookie, the brownie is its somewhat edgy and disreputable but tolerantly adored younger sibling. The chocolate chip is crisp and buttery and enjoyable, but no amount of tinkering with a chocolate chip cookie will make it seem anything less than wholesomely straightforward. The brownie, on the other hand, even in its plainest, most unadorned form, is flirtatiously naughty as it flaunts its mahogany cocoa depths. You know, when you're sinking your teeth into a brownie, that it's more than an afternoon snack; it's an indulgence. The only people I know who don't love brownies are the (if you ask me, somewhat suspect) individuals who don't care for chocolate at all, and while there is plenty of room for a disappointment if you're buying a commercial product, there are few pleasures more reliable than a fresh-from-the-oven brownie -- even, I have to admit, if it's just from a mix.

That said, opinions on what a really good brownie should be are bitterly divided. The Fudgy and Cakey Camps are as far apart as the Montagues and the Capulets, with recriminations and scorn awaiting anyone who dares to set foot in the enemy's territory. This cold war is even at play in my own household. The Lord is adamant that the only good brownie is a cakey brownie, and he will actually turn up his nose at anything else. While I love him dearly and respect his solid and sound judgment in a great many things, he's dead wrong on this point. A good brownie should be dense and sinful, dark and chewy beneath a crackly top crust, redolent of butter and so heady with cocoa solids that you can practically feel the tropical sun and smell the verdant fields of an equatorial cacao plantation with every bite. A good brownie should recklessly skirt the dangerous line between cookie and flourless chocolate cake, not stray into the murky no man's land between cookie and insipid devil's food cake. The only ground I'm willing to concede on this point is on the question of additions: I'm a walnut fan, but I can respect those who insist that nothing should sully the purity of the chocolate experience.

There are a lot of very good recipes for brownies at the fudgy end of the spectrum (many more, I think, than on the cakey end, since every time I look for a recipe more to the Lord's taste, nothing I try ends up satisfying him). My standard recipe lately is from Ghirardelli, although I'm not blindly loyal to it and will happily try any others that look promising. The nice thing about Ghirardelli's is that it's simple enough to throw together with very few ingredients and half an hour of time, and it responds well to tinkering. Tonight, I increased the amount of vanilla to use up the last of one bottle, threw in a spoonful of espresso powder, and added both nuts and white chocolate chips.

(I know, I know, white chocolate is an abomination, but I bought them for a recipe and have been trying to finish the bag ever since. This seemed like a benign place to put them, and they really are fine as an adjunct to something genuinely chocolatey.)

These are dense, fudgy, rich in chocolate flavor, and practically effortless to put together. If they're not the absolute ideal of brownies, they're close enough to count as...

Manifesto Brownies
Makes 1 8 x 8 pan of brownies, or approx. 16 brownies depending on how parsimoniously you slice them

4 oz high-quality semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
1 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon espresso powder
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cut walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 350F. Line an 8x8-inch pan with parchment paper so that the edges hang over the sides to form handles for lifting out the brownies later, then butter and lightly flour the pan. Cut the chocolate and the butter into roughly one-inch pieces and combine in a large microwave-safe bowl. Microwave until just melted together, checking frequently and stirring often. Let cool to room temperature.

When the chocolate mixture has cooled, stir in the brown sugar, espresso powder and vanilla. Add the eggs, mixing very well.

In a separate bowl, sift or whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Fold the flour mixture into the chocolate mixture until well-combined, then stir in the chips and nuts.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top, and bake for 25-30 minutes, until the top is firm and a tester comes out mostly clean. (Underbake slightly if you want a really fudgy texture.) Let cool, then pull the brownies out of the pan with the parchment paper handles, and slice into squares.

Crimson Madness

2005-10-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

Damn that real life, getting in the way of blogging. Here's hoping it will be more respectful in the future.

While I was gone, autumn officially arrived. Oh, sure, it's getting colder and wetter, the days are shorter, and the leaves are turning, but that isn't what makes it official. What makes it official, for me at least, is the sudden onset of my own particular brand of Seasonal Affective Disorder: the Cranberry Craze. I love all the fall produce, from pears to pumpkins, but I lose all sense of reason or proportion when the cranberries start appearing in the stores. I'm like a moth drawn to the flame, helpless to resist the siren call of these little garnet beauties. I'll buy two bags at a time, every single time I go to the store, until well past Thanksgiving, until my freezer resembles a gumball machine, until Ocean Spray starts sending me personally signed letters of deep and sincere gratitude. I don't have nearly enough recipes to use up all those berries, and I'll end up freezing cups and cups of cranberry sauce (the default option), but it doesn't matter. All that matters is snatching them up and finding some way, any way, to show off their perfect ruby gleam.

It's a recent infatuation, this mad passion for cranberries. I hated them for years, never understanding the point of the sour, acerbic, weirdly gelatinous stuff Mom insisted on setting alongside the turkey. Something odd happened when I moved to Boston, though. Overnight, without even realizing it, I tossed aside those years of contempt and fell head-over-heels in love with them, and with the bogs they grow in. There's just something about how cranberries grow, the sandy, swampy place of their birth, and the way that they're harvested, that just struck me as wonderfully romantic and so perfectly symbolic of New England itself. What moors were to the Brontes, cranberry bogs are to me, and although I loathe those soul-sucking endless winters and never want to be subject to another one ever again, I might actually be tempted to move back if it meant having my own cranberry bog. It's a strange little sickness, I know, but there you are.

So you see, with that level of weakness, it was a given that I would buy a gigantic container of fresh cranberries when I saw them at Trader Joe's this weekend. When I got them home, I flipped through cookbooks and Googled madly, looking for some new and interesting way to showcase these beloved little gems. I finally decided to try a recipe for Cranberry Nut Bars, from Ocean Spray by way of an article in the Detroit News, mostly because I was feeling slightly lazy after spending a good amount of my Sunday baking reserves making scones that morning for breakfast. Since this recipe involved melting the butter and quickly stirring things together, it seemed a great candidate for Sunday baking, and since it wouldn't use up all the cranberries, I figured I had nothing to lose if they turned out awfully. I went in with low expectations, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised. These bars are simple and quick, but also quite tasty and rather pretty in their craggy, fruit-and-nut-studded poundcake-like austerity, and they were a huge hit with the coworkers this morning. I will probably tinker with the recipe a bit, since I can't leave well enough alone. I think a few spices and some orange zest, and perhaps a slightly higher ratio of walnuts and a few more berries, would make it even better. I would probably also toast the walnuts first, to bring out more of their flavor and crunch. Still, it's an effortless and very auspicious start to the season of cranberry-induced temporary insanity.

Cranberry Nut Bars
Makes 16 bars

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 1/4 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and grease an 8-inch baking pan.

Beat eggs in medium mixing bowl until thick. Gradually add sugar and beat until thoroughly blended, then incorporate the melted butterl.

Gently fold in flour, then add cranberries and walnuts and mix just until evenly distributed.

Spread batter evenly in the pan. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Cool and cut into 16 bars.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: How Not to Be a Domestic Goddess

2005-10-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

Do not try to bake when you're so tired that you can barely string two coherent thoughts together. It will lead to fun developments like leaving the brown sugar out of the cookies, which would be fine if you're making dog biscuits, but not so great if you're trying for something for human consumption.

I haven't made a mistake like that in years. I really should have known better, since I wasn't even lucid enough to pay attention to Mystery. I'll try again during the week, along with the promised installment of Celebrity Chefs I Hate.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Kitchen Crapshoot Edition

2005-09-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

No matter how skilled you are (and I make no claims to being anything more than an enthusiastic and fairly competent amateur), cooking is always a crapshoot. You increase your odds by having the basic skills down, choosing your ingredients well, and using reliable recipes, but some element of chance always remains. Sometimes it's happy serendipity and you get an outcome even better than you anticipated, and sometimes it all goes disappointingly wrong. Today, I got lucky.

For this week's cookie blogging, I tried to re-create a biscotti recipe my mother used to make when I was a kid, but has long since lost. They were walnut biscotti with the sharp, earthy bite of a significant quantity of black pepper, which sounds very odd but, in fact, worked wonderfully well. I've madly Googled "walnut pepper biscotti" and endless variations thereon for months, but none of the recipes I've uncovered have gotten the "eureka" from Mom, so I decided to try winging it to see how close I can get. Having had good results with the last batch of biscotti from a Todd English recipe, I decided to modify the recipe for Cardamom Almond Biscotti from The Figs Table. I figured cardamom and pepper were similar enough that they could be swapped 1:1, and almonds and walnuts are equally easy to exchange. Although I knew the original recipe did not have espresso powder in it, I decided to leave it in, just to see how the combination would work.

The raw dough was lovely to work with, very pliable and easy to shape, and because you don't have to soften the butter, it's great for impulse baking. It was also very tasty, buttery and warm from the coffee and pepper, with a slow cumulative burn rather than a nose-tingling initial bite. I sneaked a few bites of the still-warm dough after the first baking while I was slicing it for the second round, and it was even better. The end product is fantastic. It's almost nothing like the taste I was originally going for, because the original did put the black pepper front and center, but it's absolutely great in its own right. Here, the coffee marries with the pepper, the vanilla, the orange, and the walnuts to make a full, deep, round combination that is much more than the sum of those parts. I am really pleased. I can even see these becoming something of a signature cookie, if I can come up with a sexier name than "Black Pepper Espresso Walnut Biscotti". (Maybe something like Indonesian Biscotti, since black pepper and coffee are both grown there.)

Here's the recipe:

Black Pepper Espresso Walnut Biscotti
(Makes 4 dozen)

1/2 cup cold unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 extra-large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon dried orange rind (available through Penzey's), rehydrated (or 1 tablespoon fresh orange zest)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

In the bowl of a mixer, beat the butter and sugars together until well blended. Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating thoroughly, then mix in the vanilla and orange zest.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, espresso powder, and black pepper until homogeneous. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture in two or three batches, mixing just until combined. Stir in the walnuts.

Divide the dough into two equal batches. Shape one half into a log 12 inches long by approximately 4 inches on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until evenly golden brown and slightly cracked on top. (While the first half is baking, refrigerate the remaining half.) Set aside to cool, and repeat the baking process with the remainder of the dough.

Lower the oven to 300 F. Using a serrated knife, slice the mostly-cooled logs on the diagonal into 1/2-inch thick slices. Place the biscotti on an ungreased, unlined cookie sheet, flat side down, and bake for 20 minutes, flipping the cookies halfway through. Allow to cool completely on the sheet, then store in an airtight container.

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I had these biscotti for dessert tonight, along with the leftovers of an equally experimental mascarpone-based mousse I threw together on a whim yesterday. Since that showed definite promise but still needs a little tweaking, I won't post the recipe yet, but I hope to perfect it very soon. Since coffee was also a major flavor element in the mousse, it went beautifully with the cookies, which provided a lovely crisp contrast to the cool richness and creaminess of the mousse. I think combining the two elements with a third (perhaps poached pears or something similar) might make for a really elegant special-occasion dessert.

Just to show that not all my experiments go that well, I'll also share my most recent cooking faux pas. Two weeks ago, I bought a beautiful basket of fresh purple figs. As I always do when I buy figs or similarly pricey, relatively rare, short-season produce, I got ambitious. I decided to try for something like a spectacular dessert I had several years ago at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco (thankfully, on someone else's dime), a napoleon made with fresh figs and a honey mousse. I knew I wasn't going to be able to reproduce that recipe, but I thought I might make something evocative, if simpler, by baking the figs with port and making a frozen honey mousse I'd been eyeing for a long time in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The mousse was very simple: egg yolks, honey, and cream, with some flavorings and pistachios mixed in before freezing. Since the recipe called for a strong-flavored honey and I only had very mild varieties at home, I went to the honey vender at the farmer's market, and asked for a strong one for cooking. He gave me a smartweed honey that was almost molasses-dark, recommended for baking. When I got it home, I opened it and gave it a taste while preparing the rest of the ingredients. It was strong. Really strong. A little alarm went off in my head, that while this might work in baked goods because it could stand up to the heat, it might be too medicinal for use in that recipe. I didn't listen to that instinct, though. I figured all the fat and the freezing would dull the flavor, and that I should just give it a chance.

Well, I was wrong. Even after mixing with the egg yolks and the whipped cream, even after freezing, it was way too pungent for even the most assertive fig. It had an almost menthol-like top note which, although it did fade after the initial taste, still killed the flavor of the fruit. We didn't even finish the batch, and I had to toss out the remaining half. The moral of the story? Cooking is as much about listening to your instincts as it is about honing your skills. If it doesn't smell or feel right, don't trust the recipe to fix it for you.

Next weekend, schedule permitting, we'll have another installment of Celebrity Chefs I Hate.

Sunday Night Cookie Blogging

2005-09-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I always develop a mad desire to bake on Sundays. Maybe it's a desperate attempt to stave off Monday for a little longer, or perhaps it's just that Sundays are the only day of the week I really have the leisure to bake, since Saturdays are usually taken up with errands and eating out and movies and the million other things you feel you have to cram into your two days off. By Sunday night, you've given up on having the time of your life, and you're happy to settle for the small and quiet pleasures you can fit into those last few hours.

Since even I am not ambitious enough to bake a cake or eclairs at the last minute and for just two people, it's almost inevitably cookies that I end up making on Sundays. Cookies are fast, easy, and endlessly varied, so I can usually indulge whatever particular craving I have with ingredients I already have on hand. The other nice thing about cookies is that I can bake as many as I think the Lord and I will actually eat, and put the rest of the dough in the freezer for another day. Most of the time, I end up freezing half the batch and taking all but about a half-dozen of the baked cookies to work with me on Monday, which provides the dual benefit of getting all of those calories out of the house and ingratiating me to the coworkers.

(I'm a firm believer in the power of bribery through baked goods. I have shamelessly exploited my ability to bake on many an occasion, and I'm convinced that it was a flourless chocolate cake made with an entire jar of Nutella that really started the ice breaking with Lord Disdain's extended family, which had previously spent a long time pretending I didn't exist. If, like me, you are lacking in a certain degree of social finesse, you can't go wrong by getting in the habit of bringing attractively-packaged homemade carb-loaded treats to gatherings.)

Tonight, I felt like chocolate, so I flipped through my latest favorite baking book, The Village Baker's Wife, and found a recipe for Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies: chocolate cookies with pecans and semisweet and white chocolate chunks. Since I'm not a great fan of white chocolate, I decided to substitute the Guittard butterscotch chips I bought a few weeks ago on a whim, thinking that the chocolate, pecan, and butterscotch combination would be reminiscent of turtle candies. The raw dough was absolutely divine; it tasted like a very thick chocolate cake batter or buttercream frosting. The baked cookies are very fudgy and brownie-like, especially if you underbake them slightly. They're really, really rich, though, so the three dozen I've baked so far will be going to work tomorrow, and the remaining half of the dough will be portioned out with my miniature ice cream/cookie scoop and put into freezer bags for the next time I have last-minute guests or a frantic chocolate craving that the cocoa recipe can't satisfy.

Turtle Cookies
(makes approximately 6 dozen)

7 oz semisweet chocolate
1 cup butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
8 oz semisweet chocolate chips
8 oz butterscotch chips
1 1/2 cups pecans, toasted and finely chopped

Preheat oven to 325F.

Chop the 7 oz of chocolate with a serrated knife and melt, either in a double boiler or in the microwave. (If the latter, use 20-second increments and stir between blasts to make sure that you don't burn the chocolate.) Let cool slightly.

Cream the butter and sugars together in a mixer until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating the first one thoroughly before adding the second one, then the vanilla and melted chocolate, mixing until blended.

Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together, and add it to the creamed mixture in two or three batches, being careful not to over-mix. With a spatula or spoon, stir in the chips and pecans.

With a spoon or cookie scoop, drop 2 tablespoons of the dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets, leaving two inches between scoops. Bake for 13 minutes.

Notes: Next time, I might reduce the quantity of chips and chop the pecans more coarsely. I prefer a cookie with chips in it to a mass of chips and nuts bound by a web of dough, and this recipe is pretty close to my overload point. I bet kids would love the fully-loaded version, though. One advantage to being so chip-heavy is that the dough doesn't spread very much, so you don't have to be overly scrupulous about spacing with these cookies.

This recipe makes a huge amount of dough. You could probably get away with halving it if you're not in the mood to feed an army or stockpiling for a cookie emergency.

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Last weekend's Sunday cookie was almond macaroons, because I had three egg whites left over from making an egg yolk-based frozen honey mousse (about which I'll blog separately when I have a moment, as it was an object lesson in Choosing Your Ingredients Carefully ). These cookies, from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat, come in handy whenever I have egg whites to get rid of immediately but don't want to bother with meringues, pavlovas, or anything else that will require getting out the Kitchenaid. They're also great last-minute lazy treats, provided you have ground nuts on hand.

Almond Macaroons
(makes three to four dozen)

2 1/4 cups ground almonds
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
3 egg whites
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons almond extract
Slivered almonds or blanched whole almonds for decoration

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Combine the ingredients into a thick paste, and drop with a small cookie scoop or two spoons onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Press a few almond slivers or a whole blanched almond into each cookie, and bake for 20 minutes, or until set on the outside but slightly soft when pressed. Allow to cool on a rack before eating.

Notes: Trader Joe's now carries ground almonds (and, sporadically, ground hazelnuts, which also work beautifully here if you substitute vanilla extract or Frangelico for the almond extract), which makes this recipe practically effortless. If you can't find pre-ground nuts, you can make your own in a food processor by processing whole nuts with a few tablespoons of sugar, taken from the quantity required in the recipe, until finely ground. The sugar acts as an abrasive and makes sure the nuts maintain a flour-like consistency, preventing them from turning into nut butter.

The original recipe used two egg whites. I've scaled it up to three, since I had three whites to use up.

Obligatory Puppy Picture

2005-09-11T12:58:00.000-07:00

Between the horrors in New Orleans and a rough week at work, I haven't felt much like food blogging in recent days. I may report on what I'm making for dinner tonight (a Nicoise salad and a dessert recipe from Deborah Madison), but in the meantime, I thought I'd provide a little spiritual nourishment of a different variety. This is my baby, when she actually was a baby.

It may not be chocolate, but it can still fix a crappy day.

How to Fix a Crappy Day Without Getting the DEA Involved

2005-08-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

I didn't actually have a crappy day, but when I do, this is my drug of choice. This, my friends, is the World's Best Hot Chocolate.

No, don't dismiss it so readily. When I first read about this hot chocolate, I said, "Yeah, big deal. It's hot chocolate. How special can it be?" Then I tried it, and I would have been more than happy to swallow not just those words, but also the first folio of the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary, if only it could be dipped in this hot chocolate. This is not the stuff you make from the powdered mix when you're camping. This is not the stuff you pay $4 for at the top of the ski slope. This is not even the stuff you stand in line for 45 minutes for at Ghirardelli Square while you're freezing your ass off waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks to start. (Which I did, and yeah, it really is good cocoa. Just not as good as this.)

This stuff is, quite simply, the Platonic Ideal of Cocoa. If you ever read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, closed your eyes, and imagined what it would be like to dip a mug into Wonka's chocolate river and drink deep, this is it. It tastes exactly like drinking the perfect bar of dark chocolate, melted. It will repair your darkest mood, put a broken heart on the road to recovery, and, single readers, I'm convinced that learning how to make this stuff will do wonders for your love life.

The recipe is a simplification of Jeff Steingarten's Chocolat Chaud recipe in It Must Have Been Something I Ate. The original called for whole milk diluted with spring water, and required 5 minutes of blending in order to create froth. It also made way more than even the most determined chocoholic could consume. As written, the recipe made four six-ounce cups, but this stuff is so rich that you can only drink it in demi tasse-sized doses. I've cut the recipe in half, which still serves four beautifully when served in espresso cups and accompanied by a couple of cookies. (It also allowed me to use exactly one of the small 2 oz bars of Scharffen Berger dark chocolate per batch.) I substituted 1 or 2% milk for the whole milk with water, since he was already diluting the whole milk, and I eliminated the frothing step altogether, because I tend to be lazy when I want a last-minute chocolate fix.

Try it. Seriously.

World's Best Hot Chocolate
(Serves 4 on a normal day, or 2 on a truly abysmal day)

1 1/4 cups lowfat milk
2 tablespoons sugar
2 oz (50 grams) dark chocolate (use the good stuff)
2 tablespoons good quality cocoa powder (I use Ghirardelli)

Optional: cinnamon, nutmeg, powdered chiles, vanilla or almond extract, or espresso powder

Chop the chocolate with a serrated knife, and combine with the cocoa and any spices or the espresso powder, if using.

In a small saucepan, combine the milk and sugar, and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Once it simmers, pull it off the heat and add the chocolate mixture, whisking thoroughly. Return to the heat and bring back up to a simmer, whisking vigorously until the chocolate is dissolved and the mixture is thick and homogeneous.

(If using vanilla or any other extract, add it at the last minute, off the heat, to preserve the flavor.)

Serve in demi-tasse, espresso, or other small cups, with a couple of good cookies. (Ladyfingers, shortbread, Mexican Wedding Cookies, amaretti, meringues, or other fairly plain, non-chocolate ones work best.)

Leftovers, if there are any, keep perfectly well in the fridge for at least a day and can be reheated in the microwave.
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If the situation is really, really dire, I would recommend adding a stiff shot of Kahlua, Amaretto, Frangelico, or Bailey's.

Incidentally, this is a perfect diet food. No, I'm not kidding. For those brief and shining moments when I'm trying to stick to a healthier eating plan, I use this as a guilt-free dessert. Since it's so incredibly rich and flavorful, a tiny cup of it will satisfy me completely, and then I won't go rampaging through every cupboard, eating half a dozen things I really didn't want in my effort to find the one thing I did want. Better to head the whole process off and have one small thing I'll really enjoy, I think.

I'll Give You a Thirty-Minute Meal

2005-08-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

This is what a genuine thirty-minute meal looks like.

Dinner at the Disdain manse this evening was a colorful, healthy, economical, and realistic dish of whole wheat pasta with chard and toasted pine nuts, prepared in twenty-nine minutes and change. It did not involve any wacky uses of convenience foods, nominal dressing-up of prepared items, juggling a dozen products between the cupboard and the stove, or bacterial cross-contamination. With the exception of the chard, which I bought at the farmer's market over the weekend, all of the ingredients are cupboard staples, and since it's just me and the Lord (I mean Mr. Disdain, not Jehovah), there is enough left over for us to have tomorrow's lunch taken care of as well. And I only have one pasta pot, one wide saute pan, a pair of tongs, a ladle, a cutting board, and a chef's knife to clean up.

Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Rainbow Chard and Pine Nuts
(Serves 4)

8 oz whole wheat spaghetti or other pasta

1 bunch rainbow chard (regular or Swiss chard work fine)
3 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
Kosher salt to taste

Start a large pot of water boiling for the pasta. Once the water boils, salt generously and add the pasta.

Meanwhile, chop the stems of the chard thinly, and slice the leafy part into ribbons. Mince the garlic.

In a wide saute pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat and add the chard stems, garlic, pepper flakes, and two good pinches of salt. Saute until the stems begin to turn tender, then add the shredded greens, in two batches. Continue to saute until the greens begin to wilt, then add the balsamic vinegar and a large ladleful of the water from the pasta pot. Stir occasionally until the greens are tender, adding more pasta water as necessary. Once the pasta is cooked, remove it from the pot with tongs and drop it into the saute pan, stirring over the heat until all the liquid has evaporated.

Add the pine nuts, toss again to combine, and serve.

Notes: The balsamic vinegar may sound like a weird addition, but greens really like a bit of acidity, and it's perfectly traditional in Italian cooking to go for the agrodolce (sweet and sour) effect that way. I frequently emphasize the effect by adding some golden raisins, briefly soaked in hot water while I'm preparing the other ingredients to soften them a bit.

Comments

2005-08-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Now that I'll be blogging more semi-regularly, I decided to turn Comments on. I initially thought to restrict it to Blogger users, to avoid "How can you hate Random Annoying Celebrity Chef?! He/She ROCKS! You're only jealous because you're not as cute/can't properly fillet a marmot/are an insufferable snob/etc. Your recipes suck! You're so meeeeaaan!" blathering, because I have a low troll tolerance and, frankly, have never been a champion at taking criticism (what, you expected otherwise from a self-professed snarky bitch?).

However. Having learned the lesson through other blogs I frequent that comments are what make blogs living, breathing, entertaining things worth reading, and that refusing to take feedback kills the spark, I'm opening comments up to "the whole wide world", and, absent actual abuse or active imbecility (unless it's entertaining imbecility), I won't interfere.

The only problem is that it isn't retroactive, so that already-posted entries can't be commented on. Feel free to sling whatever insights you have on my prior random insignificant musings after this post instead!

Biscotti From a Celebrity Chef I Don't Hate

2005-08-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

As an antidote to the previous post, I thought I'd post a modified recipe from a celebrity chef I don't hate: Todd English.

Known for his Mediterranean-inspired cuisine and his string of restaurants in Boston, Todd English has co-authored a couple of cookbooks: The Olives Table, a nice collection of fairly fancy but still inventive and doable recipes, and The Figs Table, a slightly more informal and family-style book. The books are both highly usable and very readable, my main criteria for decent cookbooks. Besides clearly knowing what he's doing, he's kind of cute and seemed like a decent guy (by chef standards) the couple of times I've seen him on TV.

The basic biscotti recipe in the Olives cookbook was quick, easy to modify, and a huge hit with my coworkers. I would absolutely use it again. Here, as inspired by Todd English, we have:

Walnut-Chocolate Chunk Biscotti
(Makes approx. 4 dozen cookies)

1/2 cup walnuts
2 oz. dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon each grated lemon and orange zest
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Toast and coarsely chop the walnuts. (I used a frying pan to toast the nuts, but if you have the time and patience, the oven gives much more even and idiot-proof results.)

Combine the nuts, chocolate, flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a bowl.

In a mixer, cream the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs, one at a time. Add the zests and the vanilla, beating well to combine.

Add the flour mixture and mix thoroughly, but take care not to over-beat the dough, which would make the cookies tough.

Shape the dough into two 8-inch logs on the parchment-lined cookie sheet, leaving several inches of space between them (chilling the dough thoroughly before baking will help reduce the spread). Bake until the logs begin to turn golden, about 20-25 minutes.

Let the logs cool just enough to handle (don't let it cool completely, or you won't get a clean cut). Thinly slice the logs on the diagonal, into 1/2 inch or thinner slices, then lay the biscotti cut-side-down on the cookie sheet. Bake the cookies again until crisp and golden, then cool on racks. (The original recipe said 5 minutes per side, but it took ten minutes per side followed by turning the oven off and leaving the cookies in there to cool to get a proper biscotti texture.)

Store in an airtight container.

Note: You could easily exchange the walnuts for almonds (the original nuts in the recipe, and most traditionally Italian), pistachios, macadamias, or any other nut you like. You could leave out the chocolate or substitute any other kind of chip (milk chocolate, white chocolate, butterscotch, peanut butter, etc.) or dried fruit. You could use almond extract instead of vanilla (also very traditional), and leave out the citrus zests entirely or boost the citrus flavor with lemon or orange extract, as you like. You could add ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, mace, or even finely ground black pepper, as my mom used to do. As long as you don't mess with the butter-egg-flour-leavening ratio, it's pretty much wide open.

Getting Down to Business

2005-08-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the gap in blogging. It isn't that I haven't had plenty of random thoughts; it's just that I was still in the middle of sorting through the detritus of careers, not to mention a cross-country move. Now that things have started to settle a bit, it's finally time to live up to my initial promise.

As I said in the first entry, the noble, great and overarching purpose of this blog is to have a place to put my random thoughts (and the occasional cute picture of my dog). Since I'm of a sarcastic and cynical turn of mind, and I've been obsessed with food since, oh, birth, there will be a heavy snark-and-food leitmotif, thus the blog name and motto.

In the spirit of bringing the two together, I have decided to establish an ongoing series of food-related snark, entitled Celebrity Chefs I Hate. This will serve the dual purpose of providing catharsis for me and offering the important public service of identifying which insufferable hacks to avoid like a bad case of botulism.

And now, without further delay, let's meet our first contestant!

Which "celebrity chef":

a) is actually not a trained chef;

b) has full-bore overblown When-Harry-Met-Sally orgasmic reactions to everything she eats; and

c) is so maniacally giggly and pathologically perky that you want to force-feed her a Ritalin/Valium cocktail and ship her off to Siberia until she calms the fuck down?

That's right, it's Rachael Ray!

(You thought it was Nigella Lawson until you got to c, didn't you?)

The Food Network has a profoundly annoying habit of relentlessly overexposing their latest "It" Chef (and I use the term 'chef' so liberally as to break the definition) until you're so thoroughly sick of him or her that it wouldn't matter if that 'chef' were the second coming of Escoffier, you'd still want to sic the health department's angriest and most disgruntled employee on them. They've surpassed even their usual standards of inexplicable overexposure with the spastic Rachael Ray, however.

Even if she didn't have an irritating-as-hell persona and pretty close to nothing of substantive value to offer, I'd have to hate Rachael Ray for getting not one, not two, but FOUR shows. We have: 30-Minute Meals, the only actual cooking show, wherein she attempts to cook time-constrained meals in her manic, giggly, untrained way; $40 a Day, wherein she gets paid to travel the globe on a laughably artificial budget and annoy the locals; Inside Dish, wherein she gets paid to play sycophantic homage to some celeb or has-been quasi-celeb over a restaurant meal and/or the celeb's own (underused, I'm sure) kitchen; and the new one, Tasty Travels, which starts next month. In this final one, which may or may not be replacing $40 a Day, she appears to be getting paid to travel without the artificial budget but, one presumes, still annoy the locals.

What on earth could possibly have possessed the Food Network people to think that this speed-crazed cheerleader of a non-chef deserved that many shows? From what I can tell, Rachael Ray seems to appeal to three basic groups: men who want to do her, inexperienced and basic-beginner cooks who find her safe and unintimidating, and really pressed-for-time parents with young and/or unadventurous children. Since I'm in none of those categories, she annoyed the crap out of me even before the unprecedented-even-for-Food-Network overexposure.

She has neither training nor inherent talent, so she has nothing to offer me culinarily. I don't absolutely require a trained chef in order to consider a cooking show worth watching. One can be a good cook and have a contribution to make without having attended the Cordon Bleu. Alternately, one could be a mediocre cook, but be entertaining enough to watch anyway. Rachael Ray is neither.

It is, theoretically, possible that Rachael Ray could have a decent recipe up her sleeve. I don't have any actual evidence of that, since every episode of 30-Minute Meals I've ever seen has been about half-assed ersatz versions of legitimate dishes that really can't be made in thirty minutes or bizarre chain-restaurant-inspired creations aimed at the frat boy and fussy kindergartener demographic, but being a fair-minded snarky bitch, I hate to preclude the possibility entirely. But even if she weren't utterly useless as a cook, there's the inescapable matter of her personality. Any purely theoretical positive is completely obliterated by the incessant inane giggling, the laughable squinty-moaning orgasmathon whenever she puts anything in her mouth, and the mind-numbing repetition of her whole "Yum-O!"-"How great is THAT?"-EVOO-garbage bowl-chop&drop tagphrase schtick. It gets tiresome even before you've finished watching the first episode, and if you've seen one episode of 30-Minute Meals, you've pretty much seen 'em all.

No culinary skill to impart and a grating demeanor that makes you want to smack her silly, then. Did I also mention she gets paid to travel and eat? OK, there's no small degree of petty resentment on my part, but Tony Bourdain also managed to sucker the Food Network and the National Geographic Channel into paying him to travel and eat, and I can't hate him. He's so delightfully acerbic and bitter that I can only admire him for the accomplishment, while following his adventures with interest and amusement. It also matters that he obviously makes an effort to understand, appreciate and communicate with the locals, unlike Rachael, who instead bombards them with her merciless and stereotypically American self-centered perkiness until they give her a recommendation just to make her go away. She gets away with it because she's still young enough to be treated as cute, but she's about six years away from the "Get away from me, crazy American lady" stage.

While just hearing her laugh is enough to send me into a screaming rant, since I am a fair-minded snarky bitch, I don't expect you to just take my word it when I claim that she's hateworthy. I feel I need to justify my hatred with some concrete examples, so let's take a closer, critical look at her oeuvre. In the interest of documentation, I recorded one episode of each of her current shows, at random, based on which episode appeared first on the TiVo list. Here we go...

Show the First: 30-Minute Meals.

Featuring "Better Bar Food", namely "Mashed Super Skins with Steak and Pepper Hash and Buffalo Popcorn Chicken Bites".

We start the show with the trademark epileptic hand gestures and grand-mal-seizure facial expressions, as Rachael explains what food she's going to violate and why you should stay tuned. Now, as I mentioned, I come from an Italian background, so expansive hand gestures are just a routine form of punctuation as far as I'm concerned, but good god, she can't say a word without flailing about like a gasping trout on the bottom of a boat. It makes me want to duck and flinch, or at least make her lie down with a pencil between her teeth.

As for the food we'll be violating today, this particular show is in the chain-restaurant-gimmicky food genre, so we'll be witnessing her "take-off" of potato skins and Buffalo wings. As usual, "take-off" means "nothing remotely like", so potato skins, which are traditionally fried or baked potato wedges with gobs of sour cream or cheddar cheese or bacon or the like, are being replaced by skin-on mashed potatoes and a hash of steak and peppers. Aside from the fact that potatoes are involved, the two dishes don't have anything to do with each other. She might as well have called it Upside Down Shepherd's Pie or something. The Buffalo bites at least have something to do with the original dish, being deep-fried battered chicken served with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks, which is not to say she won't find a way to do something inexplicable to it.

So we're off, and we start by boiling the potatoes for the not-potato-skins. She instantly demonstrates her complete lack of competence by leaving the pot in the sink to overflow while she's yammering about all the ingredients she's taking out of the cupboard in her also-trademark how-much-can-I-carry-in-one-trip routine. Why is that supposed to be cute? I keep hoping for a catastrophic spill, resulting in a gigantic mess of smashed glass and smeared ketchup and billowing flour, but no dice yet. I guess, miraculously, she hasn't annoyed her producer enough for that take to make it to air.

Finally having gotten the potatoes going, she starts on the chicken. I notice she's using half a dozen bowls, three pots and an endless assortment of utensils for two dishes. What's the point of crunching your cooking into a half hour when you're going to end up spending three times as long cleaning up the mess? This show ought to be called 30-Minute Meals, Followed by Ninety Minutes at the Sink.

As I predicted, she puts a bizarre and totally unnecessary spin on the dish by using water-added pancake mix to batter the chicken. Packaged tempura batter I could understand. Shake n' Bake, I could understand. But pancake mix? She claims that the sugar in the mix will balance out the hot sauce she initially tossed the chicken bits with, but I think she purposely looked for the craziest convenience product she could think of, and that it's going to taste like chicken bits wrapped in flapjacks.

After drowning the chicken bits in batter and dropping them in the oil, she commits the second act of kitchen incompetence: she rinses the chickeny batter off her hands but doesn't use soap, and proceeds to handle the butter and other ingredients for the potatoes with her contaminated fingers. Mmmm! Nothing seasons a dish like a nice dose of salmonella!

Before we cut to commercial she's freaking out because, midway through chopping the peppers and slicing the steak for the hash, she realizes there is still chicken in the oil. Sure, things are under control.

On return from the break, she smashes the "potato skins" into a blobby, chunky mass with sour cream, milk, and the garlic-and-salmonella-infused melted butter, dumps it onto a plate, and covers it with the "hash", which would be better described as an overcooked stir-fry of beef and peppers. She then plates up the chicken she rescued from the oil, pontificating about the acceptability of using premade items such as the jarred blue cheese dressing, provided you add your own "personal touch" to "make it your own". The personal touch in question? Flinging sliced green onions on top of the jarred dressing. We toss on a few pre-julienned celery sticks, have the obligatory screaming climax over a bite of each of the dishes, and close the show with the claim that she is "taking bar food to a whole new level". Yeah, if by "whole new level" you're referring to the spectacular-heights-of-mediocrity level.

Ubiquitous Rachael Ray-isms appearing in this episode: "Yum-O", "How good does THAT look?" (twice), and pornographic overreactions to what must taste like overcooked dorm food. Her mania for catchphrases and abbreviation is in full effect, as the garbage bowl, the only idea of hers I've ever thought is reasonably useful, is now the "GB", and the "super skins" rapidly devolved into "smashers".

Missing from this episode: a story about her Italian-American mom, who grew up in a household with a gazillion siblings and a father who grew twenty-nine different crops and took seventy-two hours to make one of his famous dishes; her Cajun dad, who likes everything spicy; her charmingly quirky baby brother; or her "sweetie" (god help him). Also, no mention of "EVOO" (Extra Virgin Olive Oil, made into an irritating acronym that she still insists on spelling out immediately after using it, which negates the whole point of using an acronym.) or her total inability to bake. I guarantee you'll get all of those by watching one or, at most, two more episodes of this show, since she rehashes the same themes more reliably than Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I've suffered enough, though, so let's move on to the next show...

Show the Second: $40 a Day, in Florence.

First of all, this was filmed in 2002, when the Euro was still lower than the dollar, making the budget 45 Euros. Good luck getting by on $40 now.

She starts off her day by skipping breakfast in favor of having coffee and a pastry at a cafe. Her advice: Ask for the complimentary breakfast to be taken off your hotel bill, stand at the bar because table service is more expensive ("There's a good tip for ya", wink), and tax/tip is already included in your bill so feel free to stiff the staff (first insane giggle of the show).

Following a montage of Florentine statues and architecture (second insane giggle over the fact that the David statue she's photographing is not the original), she tries to get a lunch recommendation by dimpling at a dozen young Italians sitting on the steps of the Duomo. Getting nothing, she blows them off and resorts to "something I read about", a trattoria owned by the waiters and cooks, which "keeps the prices down!" She somehow gains admittance into the kitchen, where the cook carves and grills beef for her steak lunch (third insane giggle of the show, over "I want that one!", followed by maniacal grins and arm-pumping while waiting for it to be cooked). We then get the first orgasm of the show: one bite of steak, followed by "THAT is the BEST STEAK I have had, EVER". (Fourth insane giggle.)

On to the requisite shopping interlude, during which she asks a salesperson for a "pizza joint" recommendation and pronounces that "pizza is to Italy what apple pie is to America". Whatever. She uses an appallingly bad mixture of English and butchered Italian to order two items, which she eats in front of a fountain (second orgasm of the show and fifth insane giggle). More shopping on the Ponte Vecchio follows, followed by harassing a jewelry merchant whose goods she has no intention of buying for directions to a trattoria she's read about, whose owner keeps the long queues happy with free cheese and wine ("That's all I need to know!", sixth insane giggle.) She orders the house special (a three-soup platter), flirts with the waiter, engages in the third orgasm of the show, then pronounces: "Ask the locals and look for the lines! You can get seated at an empty restaurant, but it's empty for a reason, know what I mean?" (Seventh insane giggle.)

With $4 left, she wants dessert. She heads to another restaurant she "read about on the Internet", she takes a carriage ride that makes her "feel like a fine lady!" (Eighth insane giggle.) Pointing to the dessert sampler on the menu, she speaks to the waiter in English, who lists the items in Italian, which she clearly doesn't understand, nodding anyway. "Holy cat!" she exclaims, when her order arrives. (Holy cat? Who the hell says that?) Fourth and final orgasm, accompanied by the ninth round of insane giggles. She comes in fifteen cents under budget (probably thanks to stiffing on the tip at breakfast) and ends the show with a tenth installment of insane giggles after wishing you "Sogni d'ora" (not, in fact, "sweet dreams", but "golden dreams", proving she knows as much about Italian as she does about cooking).

This is a typical example of the show, all of which follow the same formula: breakfast, sightseeing, annoying the locals for a lunch idea, lunch, shopping, annoying the locals/surfing the net for a dinner idea, dinner, and dessert or a cocktail, all punctuated by insane giggles and multiple orgasms. The annoyance factor is a little higher than usual, because I have been to Florence, would love to go again, and now feel that I have to find every Florentine she encountered and personally apologize the next time I'm there.

The only positive thing to be said about $40 a Day is that it offers much better cooking ideas than 30-Minute Meals. Why? Because she's not doing the cooking. It's local chefs cooking authentic local food, which is why I've actually gotten one or two decent ideas from this show. Not enough decent ideas to outweigh the effect of all her ticks being in full force and aimed toward poor unsuspecting locals, but it's still more than I can say for her first show.

Let's move on to the next show, the one I can't, for the life of me, find a point to, let alone understand how she conned the Food Network into giving it to her...

Show the Third: Inside Dish with Rachael Ray.

Bonus! The so-called celebrity she will be pathetically fawning over in this episode is Adam Corolla, who I also despise!

Two-for-the-price-of-one hatred!

She invokes the first wave of nausea by calling Adam Corolla, a leading purveyor of the males-as-unrepentant-jackasses school of humor, a "Renaissance man". Right. Being a comic, handyman and restauranteur (he co-owns an Italian restaurant, Amalfi, in L.A., where the episode takes place) makes you Leonardo Da Vinci. Apparently, Rachael and Baby Brother are huge fans of his seminal works, "The Man Show" and "Crank Yankers". My practically non-existent respect for her reaches a new nadir.

They chat at the bar over glasses of wine. She agrees when he claims he's "refined" and goes nuts laughing over a lame joke about how he mispronounced "Amalfi" for the first six months. While giving her a tour of the restaurant, he drinks her wine while carrying both glasses, and she doesn't even blink. Instead, she teases him about having a gas-powered fireplace even though the restaurant has a wood-burning oven.

They sit down to lunch. She explosively agrees when he insists that you have to order the fizzy mineral water in restaurants in order to be sure that it's worth the $6 a bottle, instead of tap water in a fancy vessel. The waiter then serves them still water. (Coincidence? I don't think so.) She pitches a talk-to-the-hand hissy fit and demands that the peon bring Pellegrino.

Over dessert (punctuated by the obligatory foodgasm), Adam Corolla launches into a dissertation about how diners should not have to pay a tip on top of the exorbitant price of a restaurant meal. Instead, owners should pay a decent wage. Inconceivable! Adam Corolla and I actually agree that service people should get paid a working wage! But wait, does the Renaissance Man restauranteur actually pay his Pellegrino-slinging waitstaff a living wage? Does Rachael Ray actually think to ask? Of course not! From her perspective as a "former waitress", she puts up a feeble and easily-quashed fight over the need to tip as a recognition of a job well done, then instantly caves and agrees with his point of view. I'm pretty sure he could have launched into a Pat Buchanan-style rant on how the invasion of the brown people is ruining American culture and she would have swallowed it right up.

Amazingly, I actually hated Adam Corolla a little less by the end of this show, since he managed to remain remarkably subdued (is he on Xanax?) while Rachael was slobbering over him like a hyperactive Mastiff puppy. Since she fawns over everyone and everything and wouldn't ask a real question if you held a gun to her head (the closest she gets to actual "journalism" is briefly pouting over his reluctance to talk about the woman who would actually marry him), the only reason this show is on the air is so that she can give actors ego-fellatio over expensive meals. The Food Network is actually paying her to do this. Some idiot with an MBA genuinely thought this was a good way to spend the network's money. It boggles the mind.

All right, to sum up: culinary ineptitude, Rain Man-meets-Valley-Girl mannerisms and verbal ticks, pointless sycophantism, and more overexposure than Courtney Love's crotch. I think that's enough to justify Rachael Ray's inclusion in Celebrity Chefs I Hate! I hope my hatred was not just amusing, but educational as well.

That's it for this installment. Stay tuned to find out who's next on my hit list!

The Zen of Aglio Olio

2005-03-15T21:51:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's my Italian blood, or perhaps it's just the carbs, but there's something wonderfully calming about the ritual of preparing and eating a plate of spaghetti aglio olio (spaghetti with garlic and olive oil). It's so easy to prepare that it's my standard mid-week I-can't-deal-with-cooking dinner of choice, but I still never get sick of the silky, smoky tangle of noodles, although I do add variety by throwing in halved cherry tomatoes one night, a handful of chopped basil another night, a sprinkle of incendiary red pepper flakes yet another night, or a generous scattering of crackly golden pan-fried bread crumbs still another.

The only two tricks I've discovered to preparing it properly are 1) you must not, under any circumstances, burn the garlic, and 2) you must slightly undercook the noodles and finish them off in the pan you warmed the oil and garlic in. I learned the secret of both from Lidia Bastianich, one of the least irritating of the celebrity chefs, and so like my grandmother that I feel completely comfortable whenever I watch her. Lidia's method is to warm several thinly sliced cloves of garlic and several tablespoons of good (but not necessarily extra virgin) olive oil in a large, shallow pan on low heat while the pasta is boiling on another burner. When the garlic starts to barely turn golden, drop several large ladlefuls of the pasta water into the pan, which will stop the garlic from getting any darker and also provide just enough liquid to finish cooking the pasta and serve as a vector to carry the garlic flavor into the pasta, instead of just leaving an oily film on the outer surface. When the pasta is almost al dente, scoop it out of its pot (I use tongs) and deposit it into the pan, turning up the heat a bit and stirring it gently until all the liquid is absorbed.

This entire procedure takes less than twenty minutes, and can be done on autopilot after the worst possible day, but I try to concentrate on the flow of it all the same, turning it into a meditation that nourishes the soul as well as the body.

Allow me to introduce myself...

2005-03-14T13:58:00.000-08:00

I have been on the 'Net almost as long as there's been a 'Net, and I swore many years ago that I would not put up yet another "This is me, this is my dog/cat/iguana/rock/pet-du-jour, this is my random insignificant thought of the moment" page. Well, you finally broke me, 'Net. My need for a place to put my random insignificant thoughts has overcome my principles. I'm starting a blog.

What I'm doing: Sorting through the detritus of one career as I move on to the next.

What I'm listening to: The World on NPR

What I'm making for dinner: Risotto cakes

What I'm enjoying: The gorgeously sunny, mild California spring weather.

What I'm pissed about: The fact that I couldn't use my first choice of blog names because someone who hasn't posted in two years already used it.