belly bulletin

biscuits for breakfast

2012-01-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

And now for the exact opposite of my last post: a homemade version of a handheld breakfast you might get at Whataburger. I'm about to use the word "grease" a lot.

Did you know that breakfast sandwiches made of biscuits, bacon, egg and cheese can enter your life through means not involving a drive-thru window? I had no idea until a hot dog restaurant called Frank showed me the light and gave me the idea for making a from-scratch version at home. So that's what Miguel and I did Christmas morning after picking up coffee from our new favorite coffee shop and bringing it home to drink while cooking and checking out our presents. (Like tickets to see The Lemonheads!)

This breakfast worked well as a two-person endeavor. I made the biscuit dough and refrigerated it before we left, then shaped and baked the biscuits while also overseeing the bacon. Meanwhile, Miguel handled the over-easy eggs. A major part of making this a super easy undertaking for a holiday morning was this secret: baking the bacon! After trying that method, there's no reason to go back to watching over grease sputtering from a frying pan and threatening to burn me. More than that, it turns out perfectly: not crinkled and shrunken, not overly browned and dry.

Buttermilk Biscuits 

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Makes three really big biscuits

1.5 cups all purpose flour 

1/2 tsp sugar

 2 tsp baking powder 

1/2 tsp salt 

1/2 tsp baking soda 

6 Tbsp. chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

1/2 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425°F. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in large bowl to blend. Using fingertips, rub butter into dry ingredients until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk and stir until evenly moistened. At this point, you can wrap the dough in plastic and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to bake. Drop biscuits onto baking sheet in whatever size you want, spacing 2 inches apart. Bake until biscuits are golden brown on top, about 15 minutes. Cool slightly. Serve warm.

Baked bacon
From The Kitchn

Use a rimmed baking sheet to catch the grease and line it with aluminum foil. Put your oven rack in the middle position and preheat the oven to 375°. Lay the bacon strips out flat on the baking sheet, leaving space so they don't overlap. Pop the bacon in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. If it's thick bacon that produces a lot of grease, drain the grease halfway through. When the larger grease bubbles subside and smaller bubbles appear on the bacon, you know it's done. If the bacon is already firm in the oven then it's cooked too long. Bacon firms up as it cools, generally. Drain the bacon on a plate lined with paper towels.

Non-fast-food breakfast sandwiches

Freshly baked buttermilk biscuits, sliced in half
Thick slices of Cheddar cheese
Baked bacon
Over-easy eggs
Salt and pepper for eggs

Stack 'em up!

so choice

2012-01-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

It's Jan. 1, and I'm posting a vegan recipe, but I promise this is no cliche post-holiday diet thing. That would be impossible because I'm plowing through my traditional chocolate-covered cherries and various cookie Christmas gifts and showing no signs of slowing down. This recipe choice is about my deep love of peanut butter and my discovery of a blog written with a terrific voice, pleasing pictures and — come on! — sensational videos. It's Bon Appetempt, and I've been spending all of my spare moments reading through the archives.

I love that this blogger, Amelia, so strictly recreates highly styled photos from food glossies — check out these props! — but that her writing style is so loose and easygoing. I believe I'd like to eat lunch with her. Almond tofu (peanut in my case) with snap peas and soba noodles is the first recipe I've tried from Bon Appetempt, and from here on out baking tofu with sauce to imbue it with flavor is my preferred method. It's the first time I've made tofu that's not just an extra flavorless texture in a dish/not incredibly oily from failed frying. Let me tell you, it is so choice.

In the spirit of the source of inspiration... Bon Appetempt's version:

My version:

It wasn't until I went back to Bon Appetempt just now to fetch that tofu/soba photo that I realized how different my version looks, and not just because I added some carrots on top. Looks like I used a lot more snap peas and a lot fewer soba noodles. So Amelia's definitely the winner when it comes to replicating photos. But it's not the proportion of vegetables and noodles that matters most here — this peanut butter-maple syrup-sesame oil sauce could go on nearly anything, and you'd happily call it dinner.

Peanut Tofu with Snap Peas and Soba Noodles

Adapted from Lucid Food via Bon Appetempt

14 ounces extra-firm tofu, drained and sliced crosswise 1/4 inch thick

6 tablespoons peanut butter

2 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons maple syrup

1 tablespoon sesame oil, plus more as needed

5 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for the baking sheet

3 scallions, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

2 cloves garlic, minced

3 cups snow or snap peas, ends trimmed and halved

8 ounces soba noodles

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

1 carrot, peeled then thinly shaved with a vegetable peeler

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Lay the tofu slices on a well-oiled baking sheet and season with salt. [Alternately, this is a great time to use a silicon baking mat.]

Combine the peanut butter, soy sauce, maple syrup and sesame oil and whisk until smooth. Rub 1/2 teaspoon of the almond butter mixture on each piece. Try not to get the sauce on the pan. Bake for 25 minutes. Flip the pieces and season lightly with salt. Rub the second side of each tofu slice with 1/2 teaspoon of the peanut butter mixture, reserving the extra. Bake for 25 minutes more. Let cool.

Slice the tofu lengthwise into strips. Heat a saute pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Add the scallions, cook for 1 minute and add the tofu and ginger. After a minute, add the garlic and 1/2 cup water and stir well while cooking. Spoon in the remaining peanut butter mixture and stir well to combine. Cover.

Put the peas in a colander in the sink. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the noodles and return to a boil, then simmer, uncovered, for 6 minutes, until the noodles are just cooked through. Pour the noodles on top of the peas in the colander and drain out the water. Immediately pour the noodles and peas back into the pot. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil and toss to prevent the noodles from sticking. Stir in the tofu, rice vinegar, cilantro, slivers of carrot and salt to taste.

Serve immediately — with Sriracha if you're bolder than me.

if you know me, you'll be seeing these soon

2011-12-23T15:18:00.000-08:00

Some years, I've gone a little nuts when it comes to making cookie tins for Christmas. Others, I take it a little easier. This year, I'm in that second frame of mind.

You see, I've realized you don't need an entire parade of tree-shaped, red-and-white-striped, bedecked holiday cookies to make a good gift — just one or two really great recipes. For me in 2011, that means chocolate crinkles and pains d'amande. Believe me, they're good. I gave some of each to my two office mates this morning and soon heard an "Oh, girl" come from across the room.

The crinkles strike me as such a classic Christmas cookie. They're snow-capped, dramatic in color contrast and abstract in design — each one comes out of the oven with a unique form. And they taste dreamy. The dough is exactly like fudge, so you can imagine how they bake up. I made double batches twice within the past week, both times with help from my buddy Alex, who somehow always got stuck with the most physically demanding part: stirring the dry ingredients into the wet. (Sadly for her, the recipe says to refrigerate the dough for at least three hours or overnight. So both times she's helped, it's gotten too late to start baking. I think I owe her a batch.) (By the way, as an editor, I think in most cases it's so useless to put things in parentheses. They're so Ann M. Martin. But I can't give them up.) (P.S. That reminds me, this deserves its own parenthetical home.)

Before baking.

After baking. I'm pretty fascinated with the crackling.

When I last made powdered sugar-covered cookies, I followed the instructions and took forever rolling each ball of dough in a shallow dish until it was covered in white. This time I wised up and poured the sugar into a largish plastic bag, then added the cookie dough and shook the bag around. It takes two seconds! This is when I learned there is no such thing as too much powdered sugar. What sticks with this method looks like an overwhelming amount, so I brushed some back into the bag. I was afraid of biting into a cookie and getting a repeat of what happened once when a gust of wind blew a funnel cake onto me at Westfest. The top cookie here shows why you shouldn't do that:

It seems some of the powdered sugar soaks into the dough as it bakes. Don't worry about adding too much. A lot = just right.

As for the pains d'amande, I don't know what I was expecting with these. I sort of just took Food 52's "genius recipe" title at its word, and that was not a bad move. They're biscotti-like and the kind of thing I think my parents will enjoy having with their morning coffee when they get to the point of being overloaded with desserts and candy as gifts, which happens to them every Christmas because they are some of the most popular people I know. Another reason for the overload is that my parents give a box of chocolate-covered cherries to each family member as part of a tradition that started in lean years when buying presents for everyone was a tall order. But the thing is, not everyone likes chocolate-covered cherries, so they (and I) end up with the extra boxes. All that to say: these thin almond cookies are subtle but not ordinary.

They taste like very thin biscotti.

To make sure the pains d'amande were tasty enough to wrap up and give away, I took the advice of some commenters and added splashes of vanilla and almond extracts, and it paid off. The cookies look fairly plain, but a bite tastes just enough of cinnamon, vanilla and almond. Another tip for making these: have a friend over. Step 2 says to wait 30 minutes while the butter and sugar cools, and there are no other steps to do in the meantime. This is a good chance to lean against a counter and talk about college and boyfriends and Ryan Gosling and Big Freedia.

Merry Christmas, folks!

Chocolate crinkles
By way of Bakin' Love
Makes about three dozen cookies

8 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
4 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup chopped pecans
Powdered sugar

In a glass bowl set over a small pot with just a bit of water, melt the chocolate and butter together over medium heat.

Beat the eggs and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla. Add chocolate mixture.

Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Add to chocolate mixture. Cover and refrigerate three to four hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and fill a shallow bowl with powdered sugar. Make 1 1/2 inch rounds with the dough and roll them in the powdered sugar until they are completely coated. Place the balls of dough on the baking sheet about 1.5 inches apart.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until the edges are firm but the centers are still soft. Cool on wire rack.

Flo Braker's Pains D'Amande
From Sweet Miniatures by Flo Braker
Makes about 7 dozen cookies

2 1/3 cups unsifted all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick unsalted butter, chilled and cut into quarters
1 1/3 cups turbinado or raw sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup water
3 ounces (1 cup) sliced almonds

Sift the flour and baking soda onto a sheet of waxed paper; set aside.

In a 1 1/2-quart saucepan over low heat, combine the butter, sugar, cinnamon and water. Stir occasionally just until the butter melts. Do not allow the mixture to boil. David Lebovitz recommends not letting the sugar melt thoroughly — the crunchy bits make for wonderful texture in the cookie. (Beth note: That sounds great, but I'm not sure how you'd keep the sugar from melting unless you add it last.) Remove from heat and stir in the almonds. Pour this mixture into a 3-quart mixing bowl; set aside for about 30 minutes at room temperature until lukewarm, about 90 degrees F.

Add the dry ingredients all at once; stir thoroughly until blended.

Press the soft dough into an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pan, preferably straight-sided (such as a 1 1/2 quart Pyrex loaf pan) lined with plastic wrap. Cover surface with plastic wrap and refrigerate or freeze until firm.

Adjust rack to lower third of oven and preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line two large cool baking sheets with parchment paper.

Lift out the firm dough from the pan onto a cutting board. Slice as thinly as you can from the shorter end, aiming for about 1/8 of an inch. Space them 1/4 inch apart on the baking sheets. (The dough slices as though it were fudge.)

Bake, one sheet at a time, for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the undersides are light golden; then turn cookies over and bake for an additional 8 to 10 minutes, or until crisp and honey-colored. Place baking sheet on a wire rack to cool. Lift cookies from parchment when cool.

Stack cookies in an airtight container and store at room temperature up to 10 days.

a nod to mimee

2011-12-05T16:35:00.001-08:00

Geez, Louise, I've got some catching up to do. I've done lots of cooking since that last post this summer, but a new job has left me little time for blogging. Beyond my own cooking, I did a daring amount of eating on a trip to France and Italy in September, and I plan to record that here, too. It was the best kind of vacation: I had ice cream or gelato nearly every day – and sometimes twice.

A Speculoos-flavored cone in Paris. It's ice cream made out of cookies!

But let's start with my most recent kitchen marathon: Thanksgiving! I spent the day at my brother's house, and I brought Parker House rolls, a bourbon pumpkin pie with pecan streusel and a cranberry family favorite. In the kitchen the day before the holiday, I thought about how magazines love to refer to recipes "just like Grandma used to make," hinting at such comforting quilted blankies as tradition and Old World simplicity. But I have to say, that comparison never has rung true for me about my North Texas-bred, non-cookie-baking grandmother.

Sweet as she was, Mimee, my mom's mom, was not much of a cook. Like most women of her generation, she did cook nearly every meal for her household; they just didn't taste very good, to be honest. Still, she sustained four children and her husband and even sewed all of her children's clothes until they were in high school. At that point, my mom and her sisters begged to have store-bought clothes — with tags! — like seemingly everyone else in Fort Worth in the '60s. Mimee responded by ordering a box of cloth labels embroidered with "Mr. Fine of Dallas" — a real brand? I might never know — and stitching them into the necks of their shirts and dresses. No one can say she wasn't resourceful.

Mimee's father owned a bakery. I bet he made great rolls. I used this recipe.

She had her charms, too. One of my favorite of my grandmother's idiosyncrasies was the way she adapted to the invention of the answering machine. She left messages at our house as though she were leaving my mom a note, signing it aloud at the end: "Mother."

This was a SUPER boozy pie. It was more mellow and much better eaten cold. It came from here.

The best thing I can say about eating at Mimee's house is that she was very generous with ice cream. She would stock up on neopolitan from the Braum's down the street when we'd visit from Austin. Otherwise, she made tuna sandwiches that were too wet and served cottage cheese alongside everything. Along with green bell peppers, cottage cheese is one of the few foods I still absolutely can't stand.

But in my opinion Mimee had one shining recipe, a cranberry side she brought to our family's Thanksgiving table every year. It was one of those totally outdated fruit concoctions with Jell-O (flavor: anything red) as the main ingredient, but we all loved it. She made a similar dish with green Jell-O, pineapple, pecans and cottage cheese like the one at Luby's, but the Thanksgiving one was blessedly free of curdy dairy products.

I don't have Mimee's original recipe, and I don't know where she came across it. So the past few Thanksgivings, I've been making a reimagined version that cuts the Jell-O but keeps the freshness. It's uncooked and really quick. It's also something I do by feel each time without a recipe to follow. So this year — only after I'd puckered the mouths of Miguel's family with a too-tart version I brought to an early Thanksgiving dinner the weekend before — I wrote down the measurements of the correctly sweetened version I brought over to my brother's. It's a keeper.

A Nod to Mimee Cranberry Relish

Seems to serve any size group of Thanksgiving guests; with all the other food around, most people take only a few spoonfuls.

12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries

two medium-sized juicy oranges

1/4 cup sugar

Rinse the cranberries in a small colander and toss them into a food processor. Zest one orange over the cranberries. Squeeze in the juice of the oranges, add the lid and let the food processor go until it's pretty much just stirring the tiny bits of slightly liquified berries. Pour it into a bowl, stir in the sugar and taste it. Add in a tablespoon more of sugar if needed. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

pain d'epi

2011-07-06T18:36:00.001-07:00

Just as June ended, I was still reaping the benefits of a lovely Christmas gift from Miguel — cooking classes at the Whole Foods Culinary Center. I went to a class called Basic Breads: Baguettes and Ficelles last weekend. And I made this!

(It's supposed to resemble a wheat stalk.)

The first of three cooking classes was a demo followed by a lunch much fancier than I would normally have on a weekday: panzanella with chicken sausage, garlicky shrimp with arugula pesto over orzo and a slice of lemon pine nut tart. Yum. I took good notes on toasting croutons, an idea for a Texas-style pesto (with cilantro, pecans and jalapeno) and this mondegreen that seemingly everyone in the class misheard during some coaching on the tart: "Get ready, because this involves a lot of whiskey!" Turns out, the instructor had said the filling needs a good deal of whisking. I believe we should be open to both.

My notes on class No. 2 — where I wore an apron and learned hands-on about French cooking Lyon-style — contain this similar bit of marginalia quoting, as it happened, the same instructor: "Quiche — it's based on a cuss word." I was prepared to nerd out over some amusingly raunchy French idiom, but once again, we'd all misheard him. Custard, he'd said. Well, sure.

The bread class was more straightforward. I kneaded while listening to tips on feeding starters called pâte fermentée and poolish that give breads their flavor. And I continued kneading while a brick of Irish butter was set out and we were told about the happy, happy cows it came from. I did a lot of kneading.

Perhaps the best thing I learned was how to give a baguette that fancy leafy look above, in which case it's called pain d'epi. This site describes the technique with step-by-step photos. All you need is scissors!

green beans: boy howdy!

2011-06-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

One busy day last week, I hadn't planned on doing much cooking. But then I made sesame green beans for lunch, mixed up some ice cream after work and, let's say, freshened up some jarred pasta sauce with some sauteed summer squash for dinner. None of this was very intensive, but on a day that I'd figured would allow time for nothing but a bowl of cereal, it felt pretty good.

Not long before, Whole Foods downtown had been making a big deal of a new crop of asparagus. And rightly so — I've been ready for it since reading this recipe. I was loitering in the produce section sampling orange wedges and red grapes when I saw a guy behind a wok handing out bites of asparagus stir fried with sesame seeds. As my dad says: boy howdy. The Asian flavors made it so much more interesting than the relatively plain asparagus I'd eaten before.

This is all leading to the green beans I got in my latest vegetable delivery. They're the same size, shape and color as asparagus and, most importantly, were already in my fridge. So I trimmed, blanched, then sauteed them according to the asparagus recipe when I went home during my lunch break — which means this comes together fast. I didn't have sesame seeds, but the sesame oil on its own does the trick. Again: boy howdy! Scrounging for samples in the grocery store pays off.

Later, I acted on an idea that I think makes me a genius, as I've been telling my more eaterly friends since it struck me. So normally, you buy horchata at a taqueria, you drink it, it tastes like the milk leftover after a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and you love it. My idea: throw it in an ice cream maker!

However, it seems I'm not the only genius to think of converting this flavor into ice cream. And I have to report that I experimented, and my lazy method isn't really worth it — it all turns out too icy. So now I'm trying to figure out how I can turn horchata from El Taquito into really creamy ice cream without too much extra work. Maybe use it in place of milk in that Bojon Gourmet recipe? I suppose that lets me skip toasting the rice but I'd still have to cook the eggs. And I'm going for real laziness. Any ideas?

Sesame green beans

Appropriated from an asparagus recipe from Whole Foods

This recipe is labeled as serving four to six as a side, or halved it serves me for lunch. I learned something terrific at a cooking class I took not long ago, which also happened to be at Whole Foods: you can blanche vegetables way ahead of when you want to use them! Just make sure you dry them and seal them up before storing in the refrigerator for a week or so.

1 pound green beans

Half of a lemon

1 Tbsp. toasted sesame oil

1 Tbsp. sesame seeds

A sprinkling of flaky finishing salt

Trim the green beans and blanch them for two to three minutes. Heat a large skillet on medium high. Sprinkle half of the sesame seeds in a pan for a flash toasting.

Pour in the oil. Add the green beans and cook for two to three minutes, then move them to a bowl. Squeeze fresh lemon over and add salt to taste. Add remaining sesame seeds to garnish.

recipe for a great easter sunday

2011-04-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

It starts the evening before. Make a yeast dough for hot cross buns and let it sit in the fridge overnight. The buns will have to be baked in the morning since you're out of cinnamon and raisins and there's no time to go to the store. There's music to see: Sleigh Bells is in town!

Wake up around 9:30 Sunday after a few snooze hits. The dough's already mixed, so there's plenty of time before the 1 p.m. lunch with family to add in the dried fruit, sugar and spice and let it rise for another hour before 20 minutes of baking time. Except the empty H-E-B parking lot tells you the grocery stores are closed. Oh yeah — it's Easter! Let's see, Farm to Market is way too local to be open. Would a gas station stock cinnamon and raisins? Nah. A warning: this will prompt frustration that results in a harried sweeping of the entire house — because at least dingy floors are a frustration with an obvious solution.

Miguel's dad is visiting, so breakfast is barbacoa tacos. As if barbacoa itself wasn't miracle enough, how about a boyfriend who has the bright idea of driving to Wal-Mart for cinnamon and raisins while he's out picking up breakfast? Yes! The only thing is, after showering and eating and sweeping like mad, there's no time left to bake buns before lunch.

As it turns out, the 16 family members likely to show up on Easter are with the other sides of their families. A giant holiday feast turns into a super casual lunch for three — just you and the parents. You have time to really catch up, talk about Easter and work and the idiosyncrasies of grandmas. And they wouldn't be happy if you'd brought several dozen sticky buns to leave at their house, so it's best that the dough's still at home.

Next, drink a cappuccino and loiter for a few hours with a buddy who works at your favorite coffee shop. (Open on Easter!) Discuss the new indie movie theater opening this week and the recurrent topics of barbecue and The Wire. Decide you've been on hold in the middle of Season 3 for too long, pick up a pizza for dinner and go watch what Omar is up to. Watch one episode while you eat, another while your dough balls rise and a third one while they bake.

Decide not to worry that the eggs in the fridge are, let's say, passé. Make a glaze of powdered sugar and milk that will taste good even if it doesn't hold a cross shape. Finally, buns!

Hey, I tried.

Hot cross buns

From The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Makes 18 buns or many more smaller ones if you've forgotten, like I did, how big a ping pong ball is

Hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on Good Friday, but I have tested and verified the theory that they taste good any day of the week, even post-holiday for breakfast. And even if they're not quite round.

2 cups whole milk

½ cup canola oil

½ cup, plus ¼ cup sugar, divided

1 package (2 1/4 tsp.) active dry yeast

4 cups, plus ½ cup all-purpose flour, divided

½ tsp. (heaping) baking powder

½ tsp. (scant) baking soda

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. cinnamon (plus a few extra shakes because you can't overdo it with cinnamon)

Cardamom, nutmeg and allspice (optional)

½ cup raisins

2 whole egg whites

Splashes of milk

Powdered sugar

For the buns

Combine 2 cups milk, canola oil and sugar in a saucepan. Stir and heat until very warm but not boiling. Turn off the heat and allow to cool until mixture is still warm, but not hot — about 30 minutes.

Sprinkle yeast over mixture. Add 4 cups of flour and stir to combine. Mixture will be very sticky. Cover with a towel and set aside for one hour.

Add half cup flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir until combined. At this point, you can let it sit for a while covered with a tea towel, cover it and put it in the refrigerator overnight or just move on to the next step.

Combine 1/4 cup sugar with cinnamon and whatever other spices you want to use.

Lightly flour surface. Press to slightly flatten dough. Sprinkle a couple tablespoons of the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Sprinkle on about a third of the raisins. Then fold the dough over on itself and flatten again so the dough is “plain” again. Repeat the sugar/raisin process, then fold the dough again. Repeat a third time until all the raisins are used. (You won’t use all the sugar/cinnamon mixture.)

Pinch off ping pong or golf ball-size bunches of dough. With floured hands, quickly roll it into a ball, then turn the edges under themselves slightly. Place on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Cover and allow to rise in a warm place for at least 30 minutes. An hour-plus is better.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Mix one egg white with a splash of milk. Brush onto each roll.

Bake for 20 minutes, give or take, or until tops of buns have turned nice and golden brown.

Remove from pan and allow to cool on a cooling rack.

For the icing

Mix one egg white with enough powdered sugar for icing to be very thick. Splash in milk as needed for consistency.

Add icing to a small plastic bag and snip the corner. Making sure the rolls are completely cooled first, make icing crosses on each roll.

baked goods galore

2011-04-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

Bake Sale for Japan on South Congress Avenue

Holy moly. The Bake Sale for Japan was a terrific way to spend a Friday night of baking and a Saturday morning of fundraising, visiting with Austin bakers and bloggers and buying up homemade treats that look good enough to be in a bakery case. I wish I'd reported back on it here sooner, but this time my slovenly ways aren't to blame for putting blogging on the back burner. It's just been a heck of a busy two weeks!

But don't feel too bad for me — sometimes busy means hiking, ice cream with a new buddy (met at the bake sale!) and late nights with these fine folks. Full days are good days.

So back to the update: the Austin bake sale raised more than $11,500! Donations were given to Americares to support medical and humanitarian aid efforts for people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. One man walking by with his son bought a bag of cookies and said he'd tell his family members in Japan what people in Austin were doing to help. And really, the bounty these bakers provided was amazing. Three long tables were piled high with cookies, breads, cupcakes, tarts, muffins, cake pops, truffles and on and on. There were vegan cupcakes and gluten-free brownies. Potato chip cookies and Star Wars cookies. Homemade pop tarts, plum jam financiers and huckleberry cakelets (these three were my favorites). There was no shortage of generosity.

And because blogs are about sharing, if not always timeliness, I'll post the recipes for the cookies I brought, the ones in that box above. The ginger molasses chocolate chip ones I'd made several times before, but this time they unexpectedly spread out pretty flat in the oven — the same way the batch of cookies I made for my birthday party did. I started to think I'd lost my cookie-baking mojo. Especially when I also had to abandon my super cute plans for the linzer cookies. Picture two rectangular cookies sandwiching red berry jam that's visible through a round hole in the top cookie — the Japanese flag in linzer cookie form! But with a sticky dough that refused to be cut, I once again had to face my inability to cute-ify and just hoped they tasted good. With a recipe that called for three sticks of butter, not tasting good wasn't even an option.

My attempt to get sunlight in this picture means you can see

a bit of the first plant I've ever sustained, a pot of paperwhites!

Mini Linzer Cookies

From The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook via Food Network

Yields 36 cookies

3 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

3½ cups flour

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ cup raspberry preserves (I used the brightest red strawberry jam I could find but something not so sweet would have tasted better)

Confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix together the butter and sugar until they are just combined. Add the vanilla. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and salt, then add them to the butter and sugar. Mix on low speed until the dough starts to come together. Dump onto a surface dusted with flour and shape into a flat disk. Wrap in plastic and chill for 30 minutes.

Roll the dough 1/4-inch thick and cut 2 3/4-inch rounds with a plain or fluted cutter. With half of the rounds, cut a hole from the middle of each round with a small heart-shaped cutter. [Alternatively, to make small discs without the hole, roll out 1-inch balls and flatten them slightly with your palm on the cookie sheet.] Place all the cookies on an ungreased baking sheet and chill for 15 minutes.

Bake the cookies for 20 to 25 minutes or until the edges begin to brown. Allow to cool to room temperature. Spread raspberry preserves on the flat side of each solid cookie. Dust the top of the cut-out cookies with confectioners' sugar and press the flat sides together, with the raspberry preserves in the middle and the confectioners' sugar on the top.

Cookie dough casting dramatic shadows.

Chocolate Chip Ginger-Molasses Cookies

From Molly Wizenberg of Orangette

Yields about 40 cookies

The original version of this recipe from Orangette calls for a half cup of butter and a quarter cup of vegetable shortening, but I went all-butter. And dark molasses and not blackstrap molasses is best here. Also, I've now learned for good how to spell molasses after writing it repeatedly on those labels!

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 ½ tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

½ tsp. ground allspice

2 tsp. baking soda

¾ tsp. salt

1¼ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

½ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

1½ sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature

½ cup granulated sugar

½ cup packed brown sugar

1 large egg

¼ cup unsulphured molasses

½ cup demerara sugar, for rolling (I had turbinado)

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, baking soda, and salt. Whisk well. Add the chocolate chips and crystallized ginger and whisk to blend. Set aside.

In a large bowl – preferably, a stand mixer – beat the butter and shortening briefly to soften them. Add the sugars, and beat until fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the egg and the molasses and beat to blend well, scraping down the sides as needed. Add the flour mixture in two doses, beating briefly after each until the flour is just absorbed. Do not overmix. Use a rubber spatula to give the dough a final stir if necessary; it will be quite firm and stiff. Cover the bowl, and refrigerate for one to two hours.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone liners. Pour the demerara sugar into a small bowl.

Using damp hands, pinch off blobs of dough and roll them into 1¼- to 1½-inch balls. Roll each ball in sugar to coat. Place them 2 inches apart on the baking sheets. Roll only about eight balls per sheet at a time and cover and refrigerate the remaining dough.

Bake the cookies until they are cracked on top but still soft to the touch, about 12 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. Cool on the sheets for one minute, then carefully transfer the cookies – still on the parchment or silicone liner – to wire racks to cool completely. When they are cool, remove them from the parchment or silicone liner.

When the baking sheets have cooled, repeat with more dough.

bake sale for japan

2011-03-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning is going to be great. I'll be sitting out in front of Hotel San Jose on South Congress with more than 20 bakers who have signed up to contribute to Austin Bakes for Japan. So many things about this event strike me as being really special: for one thing, multiple bake sales are happening at the same time nationwide (Austin alone has five locations). Then there's the fact that people who mostly, I'm assuming, don't know each other and won't meet in person until they arrive to set things up are making this happen. Yay, Internet!

And, of course, the cause of this benefit is certainly worthy of attention. I love the idea that getting together to meet neighbors over treats and good will is just a side effect of something that's already worth doing.

I'm bringing ginger-molasses chocolate chip cookies and linzer cookies with strawberry jam. And, it just occurred to me, cash so I can try other people's goodies. Photos and recipes to come!

Funds raised at this event go to AmeriCares. Find the Austin bake sales at these locations:

Downtown Austin: Woof Gang Bakery

1204 North Lamar Blvd., 78703

East Austin: Nomad Bar

1213 Corona Drive, 78723

West Austin: The Shops at Mira Vista

2785 Bee Cave Road, 78746

Central Austin: Foreign & Domestic

306 E. 53rd St., 78751

South Austin: Hotel San Jose

1511 South Congress Ave., 78704

my name is beth, and i just finished eating barbacoa tacos

2011-03-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

I plan to start making a similar statement after each meal.

garam masala improves everything

2011-03-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

Here's an odd tidbit: last night I dreamed I was rummaging through a drawer of kitchen utensils, then realized whose it was once I saw a tiny fish-shaped cookie cutter mixed in with some spatulas. My unconscious squealed, "I'm in the Smitten Kitchen!"

I told Miguel this in the morning, and he said he'd dreamed about Kevin Nealon guesting on Weekend Update, just like the old days. Then Jerry Seinfeld piped up and said, "I had a dream last night that a hamburger was eating me!"

Well, anyway. I wonder if my dream means A) I spend way too much time reading food blogs, or B) I should make those Pepperidge Farm replicas myself. It could also mean I should diversify my recipe sources, as crazy as I am for well-tested and well-photographed SK cooking. So tonight I cooked dinner from the Whole Foods website: collards with lentils, tomatoes and Indian spices. For once, I already had all the ingredients on hand, thanks to my delivered bushel, of course.

I admit to feeling a little weird while I took this picture of vegetables.

With a cake or finished dish, it's something I made, sort of an accomplishment.

This, I just found on my doorstep. Still, aren't they pretty?!

I used a green onion that came with my delivery and something that could be either collard greens or kale — I'm honestly not sure. First, the onion is chopped and — get this — sauteed in water. Or maybe there's a more precise cooking term for that. (Do you know it?) Whatever it was, I'd never cooked onions and garlic that way before. Later, I looked at the nutrition info given with the recipe and saw that a serving has zero fat and zero cholesterol. When have I ever prepared something to fit that bill? That's what happens when you skip the olive oil, I suppose. I should really make cookies now.

On to the next step. As soon as the garam masala hit the pan, the smell seemed to slow that 20-minute cooking time to a crawl. When the timer finally beeped, it was full of deep color and an even better smell. Not to mention the taste. Made from a few basic ingredients and somehow with no additional salt, it reminded me of this Moroccan dinner. I'd say simple and from the pantry is the way to go.

Collards with lentils, tomatoes and Indian spices

From Whole Foods Market

Serves 4

1 medium onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

2 teaspoons garam masala

1 (15-ounce) can diced tomatoes

1 bunch collard greens, thick stems removed and leaves sliced into 1-inch-thick ribbons

1 cup red lentils

Bring 1/2 cup water to a simmer in a large deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic and cook for five minutes or until onion is translucent. Stir in garam masala and cook for one minute. Add tomatoes and their juices with 1 cup water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir in collards. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, combine lentils and 2 cups of water in a medium pot. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook about 8 minutes or until lentils are tender. Stir lentils into skillet with collards and serve.

it's italian for 'layer'

2011-03-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Loose-leaf lettuces, spinach, turnips, hot house tomatoes,

cilantro, broccoli, oranges, chard and leeks!

In my first few days with Farmhouse Delivery vegetables filling my refrigerator drawers, I learned for sure what I had suspected: signing up to have a lot of vegetables around doesn't mean you're set for groceries. It means buying more accompaniments — cheeses and breads and beans and grains are what turn greens into meals. In case I'm making it sound like it, I should be clear and say this is not a bad thing. See below:

Before being doused with egg.

This is a Gourmet spinach and cheese strata I found by way of Deb. What she calls a do-ahead brunch meal, I'm calling lunch and dinner for the next few days. With the exception of eggs, milk and cheese, the major ingredients (you know, not seasoning and oil) for this recipe came from my bushel bin — my first-time delivery came with a free whole wheat baguette, too!

These remind of a calendar I had that cracked me up daily.

It took a small bit of adapting. For one thing, I don't need to eat six to eight servings of an eggy brunch dish on my own (Miguel's not into quiche-like things, surprise), so I halved it. I also used leeks instead of the onion called for and fresh spinach instead of frozen and sort of guessed at how much bread and spinach I could fit in. I'm pretty sure this is fine because it seems like the kind of recipe you could get away with filling any old way.

I accidentally added all the salt and pepper to the vegetables rather than saving some for the eggnog-like mixture that gets poured over the whole thing, but to no ill effect. It's cheesy and satisfying, the two best adjectives that can go with food, and reheats quite well. While the whole point of the strata was to put fresh vegetables to use — and it is a wonderful way to do that — I have to confess: my favorite bites are heavy on baguette.

Finito!

Next up: what to do with turnips? Any suggestions?

Spinach and cheese strata

Adapted from Gourmet

Serves three to four

1 1/2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

3/4 cups finely chopped onion or leeks
1 large bunch of spinach, roughly torn

1/2 tsp. salt, divided
1/4 tsp. black pepper, divided
1/8 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
4 cups baguette in 1-inch cubes (1/2 lb)
3 ounces coarsely grated Emmentaler cheese (1 cup)
1 ounce shredded Parmesan
Just under 1 1/2 cups milk
5 large eggs
1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard

Sauté onion in butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat until soft, about three minutes. Stir in spinach and add 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and the nutmeg. Continue cooking until the spinach is wilted. Remove from heat and set aside.

Spread one third of the bread cubes in a well-buttered ceramic baking dish. Top with one-third of the spinach mixture and one-third of each cheese. Repeat layering twice with remaining bread, spinach and cheese.

Whisk together eggs, milk, mustard and remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper in a large measuring cup and pour it evenly over the strata. Cover the strata with plastic wrap and chill it for eat least eight hours or up to a day.

The next day, let it stand at room temperature for 30 minutes while preheating the oven to 350°F. Bake strata, uncovered, in middle of oven until puffed, golden brown and cooked through, 45 to 55 minutes. Let stand five minutes before serving.

that's right, vegetable escapades

2011-02-28T20:48:00.001-08:00

Big News, folks. My first bushel from Farmhouse Delivery is set to arrive on Wednesday! Last week, I went with Melissa and Joji to Rain Lily Farm for an in-the-garden happy hour that felt more like a picnic. We had a tasty mushroom pizza baked in a mobile wood-fired oven (hey, check out that endorsement from Addie!), sampled a bite of plum walnut pie (why have I never thought of using plums in a pie?) and walked through the rows trying to identify the leafy tops of what was growing. This one, we got:

There's a good chance that this very butter lettuce could be on my doorstep in two days. I am thrilled about this! I'm also really looking forward to local vegetables already in my kitchen demanding that I find interesting ways to cook them — I'm thinking that home delivery will really cut past my laziness, as well as my tendency to not think about dinner until I'm starving. (Don't get me wrong — I'm usually thinking about dinner. Just not taking real steps to make it happen.) I've followed Melissa's many cooking adventures related to her delivery box, and I'm ready for some vegetable escapades of my own!

valentine!

2011-02-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

At the risk of getting way too cutesy on Valentine's Day, I'm sharing with you these searingly pink desserts I made a year ago. You see, they were made for kids. And kids, I hear, favor searing pink over "rustic," my usual MO.

These dressed-up Rice Krispies treats are among a few baked things (I hope they've been "goods") that I've contributed over the past year or so to an organization called Free Cakes For Kids. It's basically a nonprofit made up of volunteers around Austin who love any excuse to bake, and the best part is that the homemade treats that often make bold use of color are delivered to children who, for various reasons, otherwise wouldn't get a birthday cake.

Miguel wrote a story about the organization when it was first coming together, and the group's director said she received 74 e-mails from potential volunteers by 10 a.m. the day it was published. Free Cakes For Kids has grown a lot since then and now even offers volunteer-led classes on decorating techniques — something I could benefit from since I can barely frost a cake without a crumb disaster.

With hot pink frosting and holiday-colored M&Ms, that dessert was a far cry from the so-called Grown-Up Birthday Cake I discovered just in time to bake for my 30th birthday, which I celebrated this weekend with dear friends I've been lucky to collect over time — perhaps the biggest perk of acquiring 30 years.

I cannot recommend this cake — not pictured because photos taken at midnight in the middle of a birthday party are not the best — enough. I'm even tempted to say it's the tastiest I've ever made. I don't know what role the white wine plays, but I'm pretty sure it's the cup of olive oil that makes it deeply yellow and moist. And I might never make another frosting recipe again — this one was super easy to spread onto the cake, and not one crumb made its way to the surface. It must be magic. If you like magic and moistness and chocolate or just fall for recipe titles as easily as I do, please bake this.

Pink-frosted and M&M-coated or not, I hope your day is sweet!

pour some milk

2011-02-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

361 days of the year, it doesn't matter that I don't own a hat. But Austin's in the middle of this winter's coldest week so far, with some snow expected overnight and a forecast that I'll keep wearing basically the same outfit for the rest of the week, as my cold-weather wardrobe is very limited. My boots and biggest coat are starting to feel less like a fashionable winter uniform and more like I'm Rooster Cogburn. I do much better with summer clothes.

So as an excuse to keep the oven on for a while to warm up the kitchen, I baked brownies. On a recent episode of America's Test Kitchen, the methodical Cook's Illustrated folks took on the challenge of recreating the chewiness of box-mix brownies with the super chocolateness of homemade ones. This challenge involved diagrams of molecules and a very precise ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats (29 percent : 71 percent).

This could be the very nicest kind of mosaic I've seen.

To me, it just looked like a pretty good one-bowl recipe, so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately, I didn't see until after I'd begun that I was out of bread flour and sugar (I know!). The good news is that while my substitutions of all-purpose flour and brown sugar might not please Christopher Kimball, the brownies certainly did please me.

You'll need it.

Chewy brownies

Adapted out of necessity from America's Test Kitchen

ATK's notes: For the chewiest texture, it is important to let the brownies cool thoroughly before cutting. If your baking dish is glass, cool the brownies 10 minutes, then remove them promptly from the pan (otherwise, the superior heat retention of glass can lead to overbaking). Leftovers can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 4 days.

My notes: These are the quantities I used to halve the recipe to make an 8-by-8-inch pan of brownies. I used all-purpose flour instead of bread flour and only a quarter cup of the sugar was white — the rest was brown. Still OK. The original recipe called for finely chopped unsweetened chocolate and roughly chopped bittersweet chocolate, but I bought one 4-ounce bar of bittersweet chocolate to cover both.

2 Tbsp plus 2 tsp Dutch-processed cocoa

3/4 teaspoons instant espresso

5 tablespoons boiling water

4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, divided (1 ounce finely chopped and 3 ounces cut into half-inch pieces)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

5 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/4 cups sugar

3/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tsp plus 1/8 tsp table salt

Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Make a foil sling by lining the pan with two perpendicular lengths of foil long enough to extend down the sides of the pan. Grease the foil with butter.

Whisk cocoa, espresso powder and boiling water together in a large bowl until smooth. Add 1 ounce of finely chopped chocolate and whisk until chocolate is melted. Whisk in melted butter and oil. Mixture may look curdled (but mine wasn't somehow). Add egg, yolk and vanilla and continue to whisk until smooth and homogeneous. Whisk in sugar until fully incorporated. Add flour and salt and mix with a rubber spatula until combined. Fold in the larger pieces of bittersweet chocolate.

Scrape batter into the prepared pan and bake until a toothpick inserted halfway between the edge and the center comes out with just a few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer the pan to wire rack and cool for 1.5 hours.

Using the foil overhang, lift the brownies from the pan. Set the brownies on a wire rack and let them cool completely, about 1 hour. Cut into 2-inch squares and serve.

chocolate peanut butter cake

2011-01-31T20:52:00.000-08:00

Sixty is a big birthday, and it deserves a big cake. Though my dad mainly wanted his family gathered together and would have been happy with a tub of Blue Bell or a repeat of the delicious chocolate blob my family requests all the time, I wanted him to have something special to slice into when we celebrated his birthday last month.

Once again — thank you, Deb. I picked her chocolate peanut butter cake because a) it's a combo Dad loves and b) a cake like that will always be a hit.

Photo by Miguel. Beyond the flowing chocolate is my breakfast taco and

a library book on apple pie that I'm hoping to bake from soon.

As far as baking goes, it was nothing too complicated — just lots of bowls to separately mix up the cake batter, peanut butter frosting and the chocolate-peanut butter glaze. I found that I really liked making a three-layer, 8-inch cake that's nice and tall. A birthday cake must have presence! I also felt like this was the first time I'd mastered the technique of slathering on a crumb coat, which was good because the chocolate cake crumbs could have been really noticeable under such a pale-colored frosting. On the other hand, it didn't matter too much in the end because of the dousing of shiny chocolate that goes over the whole thing. Maybe this is a trick I should keep up my sleeve next time a cake's frosting turns out to be less than immaculate. In other words, this could top every cake I make from now on.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

Via Smitten Kitchen and originally from Sky High: Irresistable Triple-Layer Cakes

Makes an 8-inch triple-layer cake

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 1/2 cups sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably Dutch process

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup neutral vegetable oil

1 cup sour cream

1 1/2 cups water

2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 eggs

Handful of honey roasted peanuts or coarsely chopped peanut brittle for topping

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter the bottoms and sides of three 8-inch round cake pans. Line the bottom of each pan with a round of parchment or waxed paper and butter the paper.

Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt into a large bowl and whisk to combine them. Add the oil and sour cream and whisk to blend. Gradually beat in the water. Blend in the vinegar and vanilla. Whisk in the eggs and beat until well blended. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and be sure the batter is well mixed. Divide among the three prepared cake pans.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out almost clean. Let cool in the pans for about 20 minutes. Invert onto wire racks, carefully peel off the paper liners and let cool completely. Let the layers sit in the freezer for 30 minutes so they're easier to handle.

Peanut Butter Frosting

Makes about 5 cups

10 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature

5 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

2/3 cup smooth peanut butter, preferably a commercial brand (because oil doesn’t separate out)

In a large bowl with an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Gradually add the confectioners’ sugar 1 cup at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl often. Continue to beat on medium speed until light and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the peanut butter and beat until thoroughly blended.

To frost the cake, place one layer, flat side up, on a cake stand or large serving plate. Spread 2/3 cup cup of the frosting evenly over the top. Repeat with the next layer. Place the last layer on top and frost the top and sides of the cake with a thin layer of frosting and stick it in the freezer for a while — 10 minutes or so. Then frost with the remaining frosting and put the whole thing back in to chill while making the glaze.

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Glaze

Makes about 1 1/2 cups

8 ounces seimsweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

3 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

1/2 cup half-and-half

In a bowl set over simmering water, combine the chocolate, peanut butter and corn syrup. Cook, whisking often, until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth.

Remove from the heat and whisk in the half-and-half, beating until smooth. Use while still warm.

To decorate with the chocolate-peanut butter glaze, put the cake plate on a large baking sheet to catch any drips. Simply pour the glaze over the top of the cake and use an offset spatula to spread it evenly over the top just to the edges so that it runs down the sides of the cake in long drips. Refrigerate, uncovered, for at least 30 minutes to allow the glaze and frosting to set completely. Remove about 1 hour before serving.

three to one

2011-01-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

Gelato, my favorite walking dessert.

That's the current ratio of sweet to savory recipes you'll find in the Belly Bulletin recipe archive I just created. Want to find some cookies and cakes I liked? The archive's to the right!

happy new year!

2011-01-04T18:51:00.001-08:00

I am a big believer in eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year's Day for good luck in the year to come. I believe in the power of these prosperity-bringers so much that I'm pretty sure they will work their magic just as well if I finally get around to cooking them for dinner on Jan. 3 (and leftovers today). It's a good thing I didn't resolve to stop procrastinating.

So I made kale according to a fast 101 Cookbooks recipe for Garlicky Greens and opened a can of 365 brand black-eyed peas because I'm going to say that passes for following the tradition/superstition of counting and eating precisely 365 peas for good luck each day of the year.

Something with corn feels like just the right match for this Southern combo, so I usually eat it with cornbread. But then! Last week I tried some cheesy grits from the prepared food bar at Whole Foods. (I should say, I like eating there but I'm not crazy about the idea of paying for my lunch by the pound. If cost didn't have me considering the actual weight of my food, I'd definitely be adding more to my plate. I'm not sure this is a lesson I want you to teach me, Whole Foods.) Anyway, the cheese grits were super creamy and tasted of corn more than any other grits I've had. So why not make them at home, where I don't weigh my food or myself?

I assumed Homesick Texan would have a simple grits recipe, and it didn't fail me. But it's really a bit too simple because I wasn't sure what I should look for to know when grits are done. So I combined the elements for extra flavor from that recipe with instruction on basic preparation from a Lee Bros. recipe. And, ta-da! Here's how I make grits...

Cheesy, spicy grits

A combination of recipes from Homesick Texan and The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook

1 1/2 cups stone-ground grits

1 1/2 cups whole milk

3 cups water

2 pinches kosher salt, plus more to taste

1 jalapeño, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 1/2 cups of white Cheddar cheese, grated

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Stir the grits into a bowl of cold water and allow to settle. If you see any corn hulls that float to the surface, skim off the hulls and drain the grits. (I had no hulls.)

In a medium saucepan, bring the milk and the 3 cups of water to a boil over high heat. Add the grits and stir. Reduce the heat to medium, add the salt and cook, stirring occasionally.

Once the grits thicken in about 10 minutes, reduce the heat and continue cooking, stirring frequently and adding water if the grits become too stiff. Cook until the grits are fluffy and creamy, about 35 to 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, sauté the jalapeño and garlic in butter until soft. Once the grits are done, stir in the cheese, jalapenos, garlic, salt and pepper and stir until cheese is melted.

* I haven't tried this yet, but someone named Jim on Chowhound recommends slicing cold leftover grits and frying them in butter. I'll follow up if I do some frying.

I went with 'one of everything'

2010-12-03T20:46:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about getting around to my second Thanksgiving-related post a bit later than planned is that we can pretend I'm just very early in reporting some good ideas for Christmas desserts. All were met with eager forks, so any will do. And my conundrum over which dessert to bake for Thanksgiving was solved by being invited to three meals in one day. Of course, I didn't think twice about accepting every invitation — what's not to love about more friends and food on a holiday?

The sugar jar at the end of a morning of baking.

I was freed from work on Wednesday generously early, which gave me time to go to the grocery store for last-minute ingredients. In these days of sunset before 6 p.m., making a pie dough at home on a weekday with sun streaming in the kitchen windows was a delight. Holiday good feeling No. 1!

I also made cookie dough to inaugurate my brand-new KitchenAid mixer — yowza! — because it was a gift from Miguel and he requested that it produce chocolate chip cookies. It's pistachio!

For some reason, making two doughs — one of them not even Thanksgiving-y — seemed like adequate prep for the evening, so we met up with buddies for pizza and drinks until the wee hours. Then a few wee hours later, I was up and baking.

Meal No. 1

My parents' house

I made this chocolate pecan pie with this, another deal I grabbed during my Williams-Sonoma tenure. I'd considered adding bourbon but after tasting it, I thought it needed nothing more than my chocolate addition. Miguel made a pumpkin pie that was a huge hit — my parents, neither of them big pumpkin pie eaters, said they'd conferred about having a taste to be polite but then gobbled it down in a way that wasn't polite so much as complimentary.

This get-together was notable for being the only one of the day with turkey and children.

Meal No. 2

Lucy's house

Later in the afternoon, we went to a potluck with friends plus some of Lucy's family from New York. We ate her amazing ginger-jalapeno-orange-cranberry sauce and admired Caitlin's table decoration of sprigs of green leaves and berries collected on her walk over, and Lucy introduced me to her dad by saying that if I were an action figure, my prop would be a baked good. I reinforced the stereotype with a cranberry upside down cake.

Meal No. 3

The Treviños' house

I was stuffed at this point. There was no reason to continue eating. Except that this dinner was cooked by two culinary students, my buddy Javi and his classmate. (Bradley? I should remember. He was cool.) I stood in the kitchen doorway to watch them cook in a way that's very different from my own: they unflinchingly use very high heat and toss about professional kitchen warning lingo like "Sharp across" when moving a blade stacked with chopped bits from one counter to another. Javi cooked an elaborate shrimp bisque from notes taken during class, and Bradley later explained the historical usage of the word "bisque." This made me thankful to be in the midst of the type of friends who would have such a conversation. I love it when people unabashedly nerd it up, whatever their interest.

I made a French apple cake that is so easy but turns out looking so fancy and comes out of the oven with a super-concentrated apple flavor. Considering that and the fact that it's so much fruit and so little batter, a better name for it would be Apples in Cake Configuration.

What did you eat for Thanksgiving?

French Apple Cake

Adapted by David Lebovitz from Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan

3/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
pinch of salt
4 large apples (a mix of varieties)
2 large eggs at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
3 Tbsp. dark rum
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 stick of butter, salted or unsalted, melted and cooled to room temperature

Preheat the oven to 350ºF and adjust the oven rack to the center of the oven.

Heavily butter an 8- or 9-inch springform pan and place it on a baking sheet.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Peel and core the apples, then dice them into 1-inch chunks or slices of the same width.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs until foamy, then whisk in the sugar, then rum and vanilla. Whisk in half of the flour mixture, then gently stir in half of the melted butter

Stir in the remaining flour mixture, then the rest of the butter.

Fold in the apple pieces until they’re well-coated with the batter and scrape them into the prepared cake pan and smooth the top a little with a spatula.

Bake the cake for 50 minute to 1 hour, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edge to loosen the cake from the pan and carefully remove the sides of the cake pan, making sure no apples are stuck to it.

Storage: The cake will keep for up to three days covered. Since the top is very moist, it’s best to store it under a cake dome or overturned bowl.

Dessert in a skillet

2010-11-24T19:42:00.000-08:00

Mmm, apples. We're off to a good start.

After a holiday potluck at work last week and an early celebration of Thanksgiving this weekend with Miguel's family, I feel more prepared, cooking-wise, for this Thursday with my family. Get this: I learned how to make gravy! I'm sure someone in my family already plans to take care of this step, as — somehow! — it's always been handled without my help in years past. But if needed in a pinch, I can toast up that flour and whisk in the drippings like a pro. At least, I feel as though I could after watching over the shoulder of Miguel's sister's mother-in-law, who gave her tutorial in Spanish. Another lesson: I now know the Spanish word for "lumps."

Juicy, sliced apples on a stove top? You bet!

There's no way you can go wrong with a flaky crust, right?

I'm also a little more wise about attempting slightly ambitious desserts for such a well-attended occasion. Let's just say it's a good thing that other people brought multiple pies and cakes and fluffy marshmallow concoctions. My tarte Tatin, though intended to be an effortlessly glamorous French take on a traditional apple pie, was not only under-caramelized but also mushy and even a tad green. I blame that one weirdly hued corner on an unripe Golden Delicious.

I'm tempted not to publish such things and save myself from further embarrassment. But I feel a little better being able to point out that it tasted fine — but probably not as good as the one Dorie Greenspan baked in Michele Norris' kitchen — and that one of Miguel's cousins said it was one of his favorites. I guess this is the inherent trouble with upside-down desserts. I think if I try this recipe again, I'll do the caramelizing first and wait until the sugar has become dark before adding in the apple layer.

Oh, my. Hey, the chocolate cake is looking good...

But that tart was only one of many desserts I'll make this week. I am undeterred. The only thing is, I have so many family/favorite/brand-new-favorite-blog recipes I want to cook up for Thanksgiving, I haven't even been able to decide yet what I'll be making. One of everything??

Ersatz but tasty

2010-11-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

My knowledge of Indian cooking doesn't extend too far. I know that it's often heavily spiced and includes what I think of as relief dishes, things like raita and kheer that are cucumber-cooled or sweetly creamy.

It's this contrast that makes me love it, so I figured that's all I needed to know to wing it with Indian spices. I had on hand okra from a friend's garden and a sweet potato that had been lying in wait and I figured I could combine the spicy and sweet in one dish. I had no real plan but I didn't see much chance for failure in roasting vegetables with salt, pepper and some lively spices and serving them over slightly sweetened rice. Whatever the result, I'd eat it and enjoy it knowing that authenticity was not the aim.

And though it didn't end up being as spicy as, say, some curries I've had, a jalapeno (shared from a colleague's garden — I'm a pro at freeloading, it seems) did get the heat going. In fact, I'm typing with one hand right now so I can continue stuffing grapes into my mouth to cool it down. I'm including my recipe here because, hey, look! I made a recipe! And that's what blogs are for. But if you find yourself with random roastable vegetables, rice and garam masala, you'd do well to throw them together any old way without poring over these instructions because that's all I did in the first place.

Boy, reading over this, it occurs to me that I could rename this blog The Diffident Chef. Or how about Eeyore Cooks? Okay, the self-effacing ends here: get out your half teaspoons and don't dare to skip the anise stars — this recipe is perfection!

Really, it was quite good.

Roasted okra and sweet potatoes spiced at random

5 okra pods, cut into half-inch lengths

1 large sweet potato, cubed

olive oil

salt

pepper

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon garam masala

1/2 teaspoon cayenne

1 jalapeno pepper, diced and partially seeded

2 garlic cloves, diced

1 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup water

2 anise stars

1 bay leaf

1 cup rice

sprinkling of cinnamon

drizzle of honey

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and put in a foil-lined baking sheet. Collect the okra and sweet potato bits in a bowl and drizzle them with a quantity of olive oil appropriate for roasting. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and the spices and mix it all up with your hand. (Wash up quickly thereafter or you will be yellowed by turmeric.) Toss in the jalapeno and garlic. Take the preheated sheet from the oven and scatter the vegetables onto it. (The hot pan will start them cooking right away, making roasting faster.) Set a timer for about 20 minutes and turn the vegetables halfway through.

Meanwhile, combine the chicken broth, water, anise and bay leaf in a small pot and bring to a boil. When it gets going, add the rice and cook for 15 minutes. Near the end of the cooking time, remove the stars and leaf and stir in the cinnamon and honey. Ideally, what's in the oven and on the stove top will finish cooking at the same time, ready for you to pile it together onto a plate.

Très chic tres leches cupcakes

2010-09-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

If worrying about a deadline counted for something, I'd have aced all my papers in college and I'd receive piles of fan mail for the stories I write for work. Unfortunately, though in this modern day I don't see why, getting things done is still the only way a deadline will happily slide by and let you get on with what it is you want to be doing. Also unfortunately, doing the stuff I wanna do when I'm supposed to be productive remains one of my rebellious pleasures.

When else is rearranging all the books on your shelf or trimming your bangs as much devious fun?

Today, I'm lounging at home and satisfying my need to do something pointless when I shouldn't by showing you pictures of cupcakes I made. Miguel took these pictures with the Hipstamatic app on his phone so that we can better long for the good ol' days of when these cupcakes were in front of us. They're tres leches cupcakes, which I know translates to "three milks" in Spanish but in a half-French sort of way I believe should mean "VERY SUGARY."

I made them using a Pioneer Woman recipe that I baked in a muffin tin instead of a 9x13-inch pan as she calls for. The main thing to know if you're making this dessert as cupcakes is to use foil liners. This helps you avoid a sticky mess but also turns out being a nice little container that you can eat the sweetened spongecake from with a spoon.

Tres leches cupcakes
Adapted from Pioneer Woman

For the cake:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1-½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
5 whole eggs
1 cup sugar, divided
1 tsp. vanilla
⅓ cups milk
1 can evaporated milk
1 can sweetened condensed milk
¼ cups heavy cream

For the topping:
1 pint heavy cream, for whipping
3 Tbsp. sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray muffin tin lined with foil liners.
Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Separate eggs.
Beat egg yolks with 3/4 cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.
Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.
Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared cups.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let it cool.
Combine condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream. When the cupcakes are cool, pierce each one several times with a fork. Spoon the milk mixture onto each little cake.
Allow the cupcakes to absorb the milk mixture in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until whenever you're ready to serve them.
Whip 1 pint heavy cream with 3 Tbsp. of sugar until thick and spreadable and dollop onto each cupcake.
Slice one strawberry for each cupcake without cutting them all the way through the stem end. Fan the slices out so that they look magnificently fancy but you know all it took was a few seconds with a knife. Plop a strawberry stem-end down onto the whipped cream.

cookie success!

2010-09-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

I made chocolate chip cookies today, and just as I got to the step of adding brown sugar to the butter and white sugar, it became clear that the brown sugar I had would not be cooperating. It had been at the bottom shelf of the refrigerator for a while, a storage solution I'd thought was pretty clever. You can keep flour fresh for longer in the fridge — why not brown sugar?

Because it turns rock hard, that's why. Which sometimes happens with this stuff. But this was incredibly, unrecoverably dry. There was none of the usual feeling of moist sand just revealed by a receding wave — this was more like the dry sand further from the water that gets picked up by the wind and blown into your eyes. And for spite, it won't work in your cookies either.

A rock-hard rock of brown sugar

So Miguel hopped on his bike and rode to Farm to Market, a place down the street that's great for those times you need one lemon and some lettuce to round out your dinner ingredients. Actually, it's better for more than that and probably deserves more of my grocery dollars, and you can probably tell I feel a little guilty about not supporting this local place more. But it sure is convenient when you need a lemon.

Potential Cookie Disaster No. 2 happened when Miguel got back home. After his first bike ride post-Lasik surgery, he was invigorated and full of feeling — and also full of comments like, "I rode slower so I could really look at everything around me!" and "That girl across the street has freckles!" But the new package of brown sugar was no softer than the first.

I've always read that the way to combat this is a few seconds in the microwave. We don't have one of those, but two minutes in my small convection oven and some energetic carving with a spoon got me the cup I needed.

The secret ingredient: espresso powder

Even with the sugar problem solved, I kept worrying about the cookie dough through Potential Cookie Disasters Nos. 3 through 7:

3) Before adding flour, the dough almost broke, the way a frosting can.

4) It tasted pretty darn salty.

5) It was runnier and more like a batter than a cookie dough should be.

6) Spooning it on the cookie sheet, I saw that some big brown sugar clumps remained.

7) I forgot the chilling step.

These cookies must be miraculous though, because they withstood seven potential disasters and came out not too salty, not too crumbly, but just right. The proof: a minute ago, Miguel's dad called out from the kitchen with a full mouth, "You got a winner here, Beth!"

Disaster-proof chocolate chip cookies

Adapted from The Pioneer Woman

2 sticks butter, softened

1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

½ cup white sugar

2 whole eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2-¼ cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon (heaping) instant espresso granules

1 teaspoon baking soda

1-½ teaspoon salt

1 bag semisweet chocolate chips

Handful of pecan pieces

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a bowl, beat together butter, brown sugar and white sugar until combined. Add eggs and vanilla and beat together.

In a separate bowl, stir together flour, instant espresso, baking soda and salt. Add to wet ingredients in batches, stirring gently after each addition.

Stir in chocolate chips and pecan pieces.

Press plastic wrap against the dough and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Drop balls of dough on a cookie sheet and bake for 11 to 13 minutes. Let cool for a minute on a baking rack, but not for too long: they're best enjoyed warm.

vacation and catching up

2010-09-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I told someone that I keep this blog and update it "very periodically." What I meant was "only infrequently," so apparently I'm not always a good blogger or a good word user. But not to fear — things are in the works! Meanwhile, here's a photo of a jolly brunch in California over Labor Day weekend.

This meal was significant for its obvious good times with good, Jon Stewart-quoting company but also because it's the last time I ate Sabra hummus, something that tastes so creamy and flavorful, you wouldn't guess it's made with only about three ingredients. For some reason, I'd taken note of this small mention of it by someone who makes everything from scratch but casts it as something so good it's worth buying readymade. And she was right! But sadly, as far as I can tell, this brand isn't sold anywhere in Austin.

So, what the heck, how about more vacation photos? I was in Malibu, where I was barefoot most of the time and took my first-ever nap in a hammock.

I also kayaked for the first time.

That's me paddling toward the horizon. Photo by my lovely friend Rebecca.

And jumped around with glee!

And because this is a food blog, we'll play catch-up with some tasty things I cooked but probably, if we're being honest, won't find time to write about. So here are two Smitten Kitchen recipes I made and loved.

This is a zucchini side I adapted and ate over pasta to make it more of a full dinner. I think having the vegetable and the pasta cut into roughly the same shape makes for good eating.

And here's a meal that lead to a detailed text message conversation from the grocery store on pancetta vs. prosciutto when I couldn't find what the recipe called for.

I totally recommend both!

so square

2010-07-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

It's so easy to find gifts for friends — the people with whom I have so much in common. It's a pretty safe bet that they'll like the same stuff I like. It's almost a good thing I'm not more well-to-do. If I were, my splurges likely would just junk up my friends' houses with pretty Anthropologie miscellany that nobody really needs but I feel for that moment in the store that they shouldn't live without.

And Dana would own every cute oven mitt that crossed my path. Because remembering that time she had no oven mitt and no choice but to wad up her T-shirt to take cookies out of the oven in our dorm kitchen never stops being funny.

Not to sound like a terrible person, but in a certain selfish way, this gift-picking ease is also kind of a bummer. I had one lovely evening of melting chocolate and cooking caramel with the Baked cookbook before it was wrapped up as a birthday gift and made its exit from my kitchen. Melissa, I will have to come to your house to visit it and gaze at its pictures. Expect for me to do this often. But you'll be there, and you do have a kitchen. So really, maybe it's not such a bummer! I've read that the Sweet & Salty Cake and all its elements are an all-day affair. Get ready.

Getting there. The sugar boils furiously but likes to stay right at about 200 degrees for a long time.

Finally, the soft ball stage!

After my first-ever caipirinha pre-birthday, I came home and made the book's Peanut Butter Crispy Bars to bring to the next night's birthday dinner. I chose it because it wouldn't require a late night of baking (so maybe not the best representation of a book called Baked's contents?), and the bars turned out deliciously. I have to say, I'm most proud of the precise, Deb-worthy corners on these little squares.

Hey, look — turns out she's made them, too!

My only reservation about this recipe is that the bars were unmitigatedly sweet without enough of that contrast you usually get with peanut butter and chocolate. But this could be because I was accidentally heavy-handed with the chocolate that goes in the PB layer. Still, it could benefit from some salt. Maybe flakes sprinkled on top? Or what if you added salted peanuts to the crisp bottom layer? Yum. Melissa, don't be surprised when I come over with candy thermometer in hand.

Peanut Butter Crispy Bars

From Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

For the crispy crust

1 3/4 cups crisped rice cereal

1/4 cup sugar

3 Tbsp. light corn syrup

3 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

For the milk chocolate peanut butter layer

5 ounces milk chocolate

1 cup creamy peanut butter

For the chocolate icing

3 ounces dark chocolate (60 to 72 percent cocoa)

1/2 tsp. light corn syrup

1/2 stick unsalted butter

Make the crispy crust: Lightly spray a paper towel with nonstick cooking spray and use it to rub the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square baking pan.

Put the cereal in a large bowl and set aside.

Pour 1/4 cup water into a small saucepan. Gently add the sugar and corn syrup (do not let any sugar or syrup get on the sides of the pan) and use a small wooden spoon to stir the mixture until just combined. Put a candy thermometer in the saucepan. Cook over medium-high heat and bring to a boil; cook until the mixture reaches the soft ball stage, 235 degrees F.

Remove from the heat, stir in the butter and pour the mixture over the cereal. Working quickly, stir until the cereal is thoroughly coated, then pour it into the prepared pan. Using your hands, press the mixture into the bottom of the pan (do not press up the sides). Let the crust cool to room temperature while you make the next layer.

Make the milk chocolate peanut butter layer: In a large nonreactive metal bowl, stir together the chocolate and the peanut butter. Set the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and cook, stirring with a rubber spatula, until the mixture is smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and stir for about 30 seconds to cool slightly. Pour the mixture over the cooled crust. Put the pan in the refrigerator for one hour, or until the top layer hardens.

Make the chocolate icing: In a large nonreactive metal bowl, combine the chocolate, corn syrup and butter.

Set the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and cook, stirring with a rubber spatula, until the mixture is completely smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and stir for 30 seconds to cool slightly. Pour the mixture over the chilled milk chocolate peanut butter layer and spread into an even layer. Put the pan into the refrigerator for 1 hour, or until the topping hardens.

Cut into squares and serve. The bars can be stored in the refrigerator, covered tightly, for up to 4 days.

a gigantic pile of corn husks is just out of view

2010-07-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

That and this scene are sure signs it's SUMMER!

Though, arguably, these images are also pretty convincing:

Miguel cooling off in the mist outside the LBJ Library

The world's cutest baby — to whom I'm a pseudo-aunt — after her first swim

I stuffed myself with cherries, and now it's time to do the same with peaches, corn and tomatoes. I made this protractedly named Shell Pasta With Corn, Tomato, Caramelized Onion and Basil for the first time three summers ago after finding it at Not Eating Out in New York, and since then it's been the first corn-and-tomatoes recipe I cook to ring in the season.

I have the recipe saved in my e-mail and found in the thread this excited note to my brother, written after I'd first had it for dinner. I hope you won't think less of me.

"this was so delicious when i made it the other day, i was actually shocked. the trick is getting a fresh ear of corn (which is like 30 cents!) and shaving off the kernels with a knife. the day i made this, i had been to h-e-b three times for separate things, so when i got home with my ear of corn and unhusked it to find a dead worm (!!!) burrowed into the top of it, you know what i did? you betcha. i whacked that end off and used the rest. i was tired of waiting in line at h-e-b, and i sure wasn't going to go back for trip #4. he probably died a nice death though. the corn was really sweet."

I'd also included this equation made up of Cathy Erway's photos to prove how easily he too could enjoy such a meal.

This recipe is seriously magic, and it must be in the caramelized onions. There's no garlic! There's no cheese! (OK, I added cheese. Parmesan never hurt anything.) It also has the fabulous step of stirring in a blob of butter at the end. I felt pretty smart when i remembered to scrape the back of my knife down the stripped corn cob, a trick for getting the last bit of that sweet, milky corn goodness into your meal. But I was getting ahead of myself because a moment later I dumped out all the pasta water, forgetting the step to save a cup or so.

Still, it turned out well. And it felt like a bit of a rescue recipe — I haven't been in the mood to cook for a few weeks now. In fact, I'd had the ingredients for this pasta sitting around since the beginning of this week but hadn't felt up to slicing and chopping. Even as I've been reading My Life in France and longing to taste buttered-up fish in a tucked-away spot in Paris, I hadn't ventured into the kitchen. This summer humdinger brought me back. More to come!

'member? you 'member.

2010-06-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

I know the mystery of the plated, edible version of that freshly dug fennel bulb I was handed a few weeks ago has kept you guys breathless. It was awful of me to keep it from you this long. Exhale. You can relax knowing it turned out deliciously.

I went with the Ina Garten recipe, mainly because all I had to go to the store for were tomatoes. It was tasty, but a little deep in dressing and escaped tomato juice, so I made it into a regular salad by adding spinach and carrots and tossing it all around. (The decorative-looking carrots pictured were of the bagged and presliced variety. I wouldn't want you to mistake me for someone unlazy enough to crinkle-cut vegetables.)

Speaking of laziness — and, at the same time, moving on to regret — I'm wishing now that I'd found this fennel recipe sooner. What's easier than walk-away instructions like "soak" and "roast"? Or I could have gone with this awesome-sounding broccoli/fennel salad; it's basically two vegetables and some flavorful liquids. In case it's not clear, a lot of my hunting for weeknight, feed-me-now recipes is steered by my desire to get to the eating part quickly so I can start slacking off on the couch as soon as possible. I don't want to keep track of a lot. I have important things to do, like get peppy with Jessica again. And I need to have time allotted for rifling around food52.com, possibly my new favorite website. It's user-submitted content with all the crap weeded out! And a lot of what's there has made it through the filter of being tested in Amanda Hesser's kitchen!

Let's wrap this up with a few of the dishes this site has me itching to try:

Strawberry refrigerator cake

Lazy Mary's lemon tart

Roasted bagna cauda broccoli

Andouille and dijon polenta

Ancho chili-cinnamon chocolate bark

Plus, holy moly, photos like this are the norm over there. It reminds me of that time I went to a macaroni art party and saw one well-lit paper plate bearing an egg and tiny piles of flour and salt. It was entitled "Origins."

Sarah Shatz photo courtesy of food52.com

Sticky business

2010-05-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

If I had a husband and four children, perhaps then I could have a cherry tree in my back yard. Though I'm doing just fine without a full house right now, this crossed my mind as I pitted about 3 cups of cherries for a cobbler Friday afternoon. About 1 cup in, I was already tired of it and wondered who could possibly do this with cherries by the tree full.

Then I thought of the only cherry tree owner I know personally, a woman named Kitty. She's my friend Dana's mother-in-law and she has a husband and four children — a household equipped with enough pairs of hands to pit bushels of cherries. In my imagination, the cherry tree (perhaps even trees?) and the four children are all part of the same life plan, because how else could you handle so much fruit? Now that all those kids are grown, I hope she has neighbors who don't mind getting sticky.

I've never seen this tree because it's in Pennsylvania. But I have eaten its fruit, coincidentally, almost exactly five years ago now. It was the weekend of the wedding where Dana became Kitty's daughter-in-law. And Andrew's wife, of course. You know how I said weddings demand cake? That's not completely true. This wedding was an all-pie affair, which made it a thrill dessert-wise. It was thrilling in lots of other teary and moving ways, too, but one thing I loved about the reception was that instead of one tall vanilla tower of cake, a whole table was dedicated to all kinds of fruit pies. Really: pie after pie after pie.

And get this: the pies were on tiers Dana's dad built. Picture one of those wire cupcake trees but with nooks large enough to hold pie plates. And because he's a dad who loves nothing more than functionality, the welded stand was set on caster wheels. Mobile pies! Which makes me think of the pie trailer down the street... whoa. Did Cedric foresee Austin's food trailer boom??

The rehearsal dinner the night before was topped off with pie, too. Cobbler, actually, but lattice-topped, which to me is just about enough work to earn the title of pie. The cobblers were made with cherries from Kitty's own back yard, brought all the way to New Mexico. (Dana, remind me: Did she bring the cherries in and do the baking in Ruidoso, or did she bring the pies already baked? Also, how? Either way, I'm amazed.) Not only was it delicious, but entirely personal and memorable.

The other thought I had at my kitchen table was that people who have cherry trees probably also own cherry pitters. I don't. And let me tell you, it's slow going without one. Especially with the method I chose: a paperclip and a trick I learned on Youtube. I ended up with cherry juice running from my hands all the way down my arms and dripping — cascading — off my elbows and onto the apron I was soon thankful I had tied on.

So all this to say that when I sat down in my now juice-stained apron with a bag of cherries, I wasn't planning for my mind to wander to that wedding weekend in the mountains. But I'm pretty sure I can't eat a cherry now without thinking of lovely friends and all the fun we had. Dana and Andrew, happy anniversary. And thanks for getting married at the height of cherry season!

Congratulazioni!

2010-05-14T16:10:00.001-07:00

I had a little thought today. Part of what I love about baking is that it's so often tied to a Big Occasion. Weddings, birthdays, graduations, Mothers Day — they require cakes. The moment demands it.

I am not a great froster. But congratulazioni anyway!

My thought was this: Whipping up lemon cupcakes and an owl-themed cake for a graduation party is fun — it beats the heck out of washing the dishes to come — but it's also kitchen time that's like active anticipation. Cracking eggs and zesting lemons become ways of proclaiming, my friend is smart and accomplished and we're going to celebrate her with all this sugar! Also: moms are terrific!

The other magical part of dessert-making happens when there is no big to-do in sight. When it's a weekday and we want something sweet.

So this one time, Melissa and I were making broccoli slaw with buttermilk dressing and something else I can't remember now for dinner, and she said this thing. She said, "Hey, you have leftover buttermilk. And sugar and butter. Why don't we make a cake for dessert?"

And then, get this: we did!

Now, I know there's plenty of time after work for cakes to be baked and enjoyed soon after. But even so, I always plan out my baking. I know in the morning what I'll be doing later and look forward to it all day. I never simply have the thought of making a cake, then have ingredients combined in the next five minutes. Doing so was a revelation. This is just one more part of Melissa's diploma-worthy genius.

Chocolate Bouchons

A Thomas Keller recipe from the packaging of my bouchon mold

As delicious as the weekend's lemon desserts were, these chocolate bouchons — which means "corks" in French — are up there with the most amazing brownies I've had the joy of putting in my mouth. I have this special doodad for baking them, but I'm sure a small muffin tin would work just as well.

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
3 large eggs
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 sticks unsalted butter, melted and just slightly warm
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
Powdered sugar for sprinkling or frosting for writing

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter your tin and set aside.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder and salt into a bowl; set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the eggs and sugar on medium speed for about three minutes or until very pale in color. Mix in the vanilla. On low speed, add about one-third of the dry ingredients then one-third of the butter and continue alternating with the remaining flour and butter. Add the chocolate chips and mix to combine.

If using a bouchon mold, put it on a baking sheet. Fill each well nearly full — within an eighth of an inch from the top. Place in the oven and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, turning midway. When the tops look shiny and set like a brownie, test one cake with a toothpick. It should come out clean but not dry (there might be some melted chocolate from the chips).

Transfer the bouchons to a cooling rack. After a couple of minutes, invert the mold or tin and let the bouchons release, then turn them right side up to cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar.

Around town: In the garden

2010-05-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

This weekend was yet another that's made me happy to live in such an active city. Austin felt lively with an arts fair on Sixth Street, a May Day rally at the capitol, an accordion competition and the opening of Yellowbike's new and totally impressive headquarters.

Another instance of this: a few Saturdays back, the calendar was filled with one of many spring 10Ks, a crawfish jamboree, a psychedelic music festival and a tough choice between Yeasayer or Vampire Weekend — this place is great! Mind you, I'm not a runner and I don't listen to much psych rock, but I wholeheartedly appreciate the scope of interesting things happening around here seemingly at all times.

Part of this past weekend's fun was dropping by the Blackshear Neighborhood Garden, which was one of 11 stops on a citywide community garden tour. It's on a lot across the street from Nathan and Caitlin's house. Along with some other friends who live nearby, they got the garden going by securing a grant from the city so folks in the neighborhood have a place to pitch in and grow vegetables together.

The space has really come along thanks to their hard work; neat rows of broccoli plants sit right at the entrance and narrow pathways meander through the beds of garlic, kale, artichokes and tomatoes. Not only that, but they've got the community-building part of this project covered, too. While other folks weeded and shoveled dirt, I helped squeeze lemons for lemonade and chatted with a neighbor named Fay, who I'd guess is in her 70s. She pointed out the corner house as her own, saying it's also where she was born. She told me about the gravel roads the neighborhood had until East Austin's streets were paved in the 1960s. She said her grandfather once owned this lot that's now a garden and that Zavala Elementary, just a few blocks down, became an integrated school once her children enrolled.

I loved talking to someone who knew this city before it was an epicenter for fests. I kept thinking, I need a neighbor like this, someone to tell me the backstory of my own street's small houses and the people who have made homes there. Our street could use a grandmotherly figure whose conversation flows easily from Austin's civil rights history to a secret she learned for keeping her couch cushions clean.

Fennel: awkward to photograph

Just before we left, my friend Willard plucked some broccoli — the greenest I've ever seen! — and a few of the plant's leaves, which he said could be cooked like collards or any other sturdy greens. He also dug up a fennel bulb for me to take home. Here's where we take this garden's community cultivation online: help me figure out how to prepare this thing! I don't think I've eaten fennel before, and I certainly haven't cooked any myself. Anybody out there have a suggestion? As it stands, I'm choosing between these...

• Ina Garten's tomato fennel salad

• Pizzeria Bianco's fennel and apple salad with cider vinaigrette

• Molly Wizenberg's celery root and apple salad with hazelnut vinaigrette Although A) this sounds too wintry and B) hazelnut oil would be absent in my version. As my barista buddy likes to say, I'm not what you'd call a powerful consumer.

• Another Molly Wizenberg recipe, this one shaved fennel salad with mushrooms and Parmesan. Pluses for this one: I have all the ingredients except mushrooms, and it comes with one heck of a Julia/Alice pedigree.

What to do?

P.S. More bounty: bonus Yellowbike photos just because I was so dazzled by the place!

card catalogue of parts

wall of forks

As if I could love KUT any more

2010-04-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

Lunchtime music! It's not packaged as such, but all week I've been catching food-related songs during my midday break. Something about the process of a DJ selecting tunes to eat by really tickles me. Boy, I love radio.

A taste:

She's Puttin' Something in My Food — Bobby "Blue" Bland

Everybody Eats When They Come to My House — Cab Calloway

The Whole Tzimmies — David "Fathead" Newman

You guys have any favorite meal-time music?