Tag Archives: recipes

Recipe: Pear-Pancetta Tart

30 Thursday May 2013

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Pear + Pancetta = Salty-Sweet Combination of my Dreamzzzz.

Pear + Pancetta = Salty-Sweet Combination of my Dreamzzzz.

It was a warm night in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when I first discovered the magical combination of pear and goat cheese. I was an intern at the Fine Arts Work Center. The world was my oyster that summer. I had gotten probably the worst haircut of my adult life (pixie cut = no), but I wasn’t letting that stop me – I had an internship, a job, a cool town to hang out in, and fabulous roommates to boot.

That night, the night of the pear-goat cheese revelation, I had gone to my boss Dorothy’s apartment for a party. Her assistant, Mark, poured me my first gin and tonic, and once I added an extra lime, I was happy, happy, happy. I was told it was a signature drink in Cape Cod. I quietly sang to myself, “I think I’m gonna like it here.”

Dorothy is a tall woman with big presence to her – she’s friendly, energetic, and has long, curly, red hair. I went into the kitchen to say hello to her, and she was bustling around like a ball in a pinball machine – pinging off of counters and stove, opening and closing the oven door, and generally adding warmth and verve to an already warm kitchen.

As I stood there, feeling slothful, drinking, she handed me a plate of little toasted pieces of baguette, smeared with something white, and then topped with a slice of pear. “Goat cheese,” she explained. “It’s bread, goat cheese, honey, and pear.”

I took one bite of these adorable little snacks, and I was transformed. Sweet pear, tangy goat cheese, sweet honey, perfect baguette. I could have eaten the whole plate of them. And often, when I serve a similar appetizer, I’m tempted to do just that, pushing people away and muttering “my precious” between bites.

The salty-sweet combination is one of my favorites. I look for ways to mix the two tastes whenever I can, sprinkling sea salt on chocolate chip cookies or adding honey to salty cheese on crackers.

In last month’s Bon Appetit, there was a recipe for an Artichoke and Feta tart. It’s made with puff pastry, and it seemed terribly easy, but I also thought it sounded terribly adaptable (a good combination for a food blogger). The recipe below is an adaptation on the tart. Continue reading »

Cute Cakes: Goldilocks Chocolate Chip Cake

15 Wednesday May 2013

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Strawberry Summer Cake, pre-baking.

Strawberry Summer Cake, pre-baking.

A couple weeks ago, in my strawberry frenzy, I made Deb Perelman’s Strawberry Summer Cake. While the strawberries are definitely the star of the cake, I found myself enjoying the cake part of the mixture more than the strawberries (if that’s possible). It is the burden of food blogging that when we like a recipe, we start thinking of ways to personalize it to our tastes – change a few things to make it the dish of our dreams. And so it was with the strawberry cake.

I’ve complained observed that since coming to California, I’ve had to be more conscientious about how much I cook. When I lived in VA, I thought nothing of making a large batch of cupcakes or salsa because I knew I could pawn the excess off on our friends. That’s simply not an option here in California.

In light of that truth, I’ve had to downsize my baking. I often find myself apologizing to Amanda when she comes home to find cookies or a cake cooling on the counter while I’m preparing dinner; I feel I have to legitimize my decision to introduce yet another calorie-filled treat into the apartment. But my feelings of guilt are relieved when I can downsize – make smaller things. Smaller batches, and yes, smaller cake.

Small cakes are cute cakes. Think of the topper of a wedding cake. No one makes a cake that small on purpose (except movita beaucoup, perhaps, but she’s a super legit baking goddess). When I got the Joy the Baker cookbook, I was happy to find a bunch of “single girl” recipes – one-serving recipes for molten chocolate cake and pancakes. But I’m not a single girl either. There are two of us. Two women who can put away some food, just not that much.

Like Goldilocks, I have been searching for the recipes that are not too big, not too small – juuuuuust right.

Sometimes, though, it’s not the recipe we need to look at. It’s the container in which we cook the dish. Continue reading »

The Purple “Anything Cake”

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

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Call it homesickness, or missing my friends. Blame it on not being able to find everything on my grocery list at one single grocery store (I mean, really, who doesn’t carry cans of crushed tomatoes?). Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen rain in several weeks. Maybe it’s everything rolled into one big stressful, exciting, overwhelming life change. The point remains:  I’ve been a little glum lately.

When a friend of mine moved to D.C. after taking a new job, she employed what I’ve come to call the Meghan Method:  she hit the ground running and proactively found people to hang out with and things to do. She literally was out running on her second or third day in town and found a bocce ball league, so she promptly signed up.

I admired her for her motivation and her gumption. I told myself that when I got to California, I would employ the Meghan Method:  I would find things to do, and I would make the people who do those things into my new friends.

But I’m not Meghan. And I have discovered that many of the things that I like to do are solo activities. Writing, yes, obviously. But cooking. Before, cooking seemed like a community-oriented thing. I cook things, I bring them to people, we eat together, community happens. But I don’t have anyone to bring food to.

I got upset over all of this. I scoured the Internet like a mad woman, looking for dance studios, literary community, yoga studios, Meetup groups. I have yet to come up with any real results. I’m a Meghan Method Failure.

Beautiful California Meyer lemons!

Beautiful California Meyer lemons!

But the positive side to those solo activities that I like is that, well, I like them. So this weekend, I knew I needed some time to putter in the kitchen. I needed to cook something fun – not dinner, nothing healthy, just fun. I found my first ever Meyer lemons at the farmers market in Ventura on Saturday, and I decided we needed lemon pound cake in our lives. Continue reading »

The Comforts of Home

12 Tuesday Mar 2013

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There’s a moment when you look around and realize several things:

1. You’re getting married in eleven days.

2. Even though you say you’re fine, you’re talking really fast and sort of high pitched.

3. You haven’t slowed down in days.

4. Suddenly things like not being able to curl your hair correctly or forgetting to put dinner in the crock pot are REALLY BIG DEALS.

That’s right friends. That moment. And I’m in it. I’m getting married in eleven days, and shit is getting real.

My latest wedding dream? I’m so glad you asked. I dreamed that Amanda saw a wedding involving a bride who held a cast-iron pot, an officiant who lit a piece of paper on fire inside the pot, and the groom, who extinguished the flame with water from a clay jug. Amanda said we should do something like that, and I awakened after a vision of me holding my cast-iron skillet, smearing a black streak of cast-iron seasoning onto my otherwise gorgeous dress.

This is a fantastic, amazing, tremendously frantic time. We get married in eleven days, and ten days after that, we’re moving cross-country to California. Several people last week pointed out that some of the most stressful, “biggest” life changes are getting married and moving, especially long distances. We’re doing both in the span of a month. Continue reading »

Perfect Granola

25 Monday Feb 2013

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Finally, the perfect granola!

Finally, the perfect granola!

Someone (I can’t remember who and that Tweet is now lost, a needle tossed in the hay loft of Twitter) Tweeted last week that if someone knows a perfect granola recipe, they are duty-bound to share it.

I quite agree. And until last week, I was a girl desperately seeking the right granola recipe.

My roommates introduced me to the wonders of granola a couple years back. Give me some yogurt, some granola, some fruit, and a plentiful drizzle of honey, and I am in business. Though granola can be high in fats and sugars, I credit it with keeping me healthy and helping me trim a few pounds over the past couple years. And my lifestyle is largely unhealthy:  I sit all day, with very bad posture, and I drink too much coffee, too much wine, and don’t exercise near enough. This girl needs her granola. And let’s just say she doesn’t want to pay six bucks a box twice a week to get it. Besides, it’s easy to make. Usually.

You see, I have killed many a batch of granola. Killed it dead. Scorched the nuts and oats even while following the instructions exactly. I tried Alton Brown, Allrecipes.com, and even my own experiments and adaptations. Nothing worked.

Until we got the February issue of Bon Appetit. And lo and behold, I now have in my possession the perfect granola recipe.

Like I said, I scorch granola no matter what, so my standards were pretty low. Not only did this granola not burn, but it’s also delicious. Continue reading »

Putting the Sour Back in Sourdough

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

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Sourdough starter, soon to be named Seymour. The beginning of my quest.

Sourdough starter, soon to be named Seymour. The beginning of my quest.

Some readers may remember that during the summer, I made my first ever sourdough starter. The starter is essentially a blend of yeast, flour, and water, which is aged in a warm place for a couple of days until it is bubbly and has grown a bit. Then it is used in a sourdough bread recipe. The remaining starter can be kept in your fridge, and it will last you years (decades! centuries!) as long as you feed it regularly and keep it happy.

After I read Omnivore’s Dilemma and found out that bread sold in grocery stores usually has about 87 (slight exaggeration – more like 40) different chemical ingredients added to the bread, I went into a bread frenzy. We were NOT buying bread. Except French baguettes. Those exist outside of my current skill level and the abilities of my oven. Other than baguettes, which are necessary so that I can kill an entire wedge of brie in one sitting, I was making bread from there on out.

And I’ve been pretty good about that. I’ve found many great recipes for sweet Amish bread, grainy flax seed, and tender oatmeal. But the sourdough has been rough. Here’s the thing:  my sourdough has never tasted like sourdough. I’ve given bits of the starter to other people, and they agreed:  it’s good, it makes nice bread, but it doesn’t taste sour.

That’s a problem. But I felt defeated, so my starter, which I’ve named Seymour (think Little Shop of Horrors), went along helpless in the back of my fridge.

Last week, on Top Chef, the cheftestants had to work with sourdough bread, which they made from 30 year-old starter donated by a family in Alaska (where they’re filming). And I thought, you know what, enough. It’s bread. It’s dough. It’s science. Surely I can beat this.

Or really:  surely someone else has beat this and can tell me how.

And that’s why I love the Interwebs. Because someone had. And her recipe is flawless. Continue reading »

Oatmeal Evangelism

08 Friday Feb 2013

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Steel Cut Oats | Pic from wikihow.com

I grew up in an evangelical Southern Baptist church. I spent much of my teen years evangelizing. It wasn’t uncommon to find me slipping religious tracts in my friends’ lockers like they were notes between friends. People probably came to fear me on Wednesdays when I invited everyone I knew to church with me. “There’s free pizza,” I’d say, hoping to entice them, “and Cokes. And a raffle.” And just when you least suspect it, just when you’re chowing down and your mouth is full of pizza:  bam! Jesus.

When friends asked me to lay off, to give it a rest with the evangelizing, I got indignant. “If I had the cure for cancer, and you had cancer,” I would ask them aggressively, “wouldn’t you want me to tell you the cure?” Who can argue with those pubescent logical gymnastics?

But I’m not here to evangelize about the Bible today. Today, I’m here to talk to you about oatmeal, friends. Be prepared for your life to change.

My friend (and former Sunday school teacher, as it happens), Mina, recommended trying this recipe on my last failed attempt at overnight oatmeal in the crock pot. The last attempt was a disaster. Weird texture, flavorless, and no amount of adding sugar, Nutella, peanut butter, soy milk, or dried fruit would help.

So Mina said the name that really sort of equates with the gospel truth of culinary endeavors:  Alton Brown. Continue reading »

Can we make muffins the new cupcakes?

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Behold! The muffin.

Behold! The muffin.

I told my students in the fall that I knew it to be true that doughnuts were the new cupcakes. Several of them looked at me as if this idea were absurd:  how could I know such things?

Because I have a Master’s degree, kiddos. And my ear to the ground. And my friend Andrea told me so.

But I had a thought the other day:  wouldn’t it be wonderful if muffins were next? If beautiful, reasonably-sized muffins were suddenly popping up in boutiques with cool new flavors? If the work of Seinfeld could be reversed and the muffin as a whole (rather than just the top) were celebrated? And wouldn’t it be awesome if I was the revolutionary who took muffins to that next glorious level?

Muffins have become a bit tired. Bran. Morning harvest, all chock-full of seeds and berries and tree branches. Yes, good, healthy, whatever. Banana-nut. Chocolate chip. Double chocolate (glory be). From fiber-full to deliciously sweet, muffins are wonderful, but I think that in the grand scope of American baked goods, they’re a tad overlooked.

Which is a shame. And I’m not just saying that because I’m constantly singing the muffin top song from 30 Rock. I love a good breakfast pastry, and few things outshine a perfect, heated muffin, buttered and perfectly paired with my coffee. Continue reading »

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