Pink of Perfection

When we were still in the darkest days of February, Sebastian and I threw a Scandinavian-themed dinner party. Ever since I read this this, I’ve been wishing I were born Danish. Perhaps this would mean I were tall, effortlessly cool, and blond, but it would certainly mean my home was a white canvas of zero clutter punctuated by bright bursts of color. Without a plane ticket to take me to Copenhagen or a time machine to travel back and screw with the family tree, the only way I know how to access the culture of another place is to eat their food. And what more visceral method is there, really?

Our dinner party didn’t give grant me blondness, but it was a chance to drink Aquavit with some of our dearest friends, eat smoked salmon, and revel in one of my favorite dinner party dishes of roast pork with apples and prunes in a mustard cream sauce. My clutter problems didn’t magically evaporate, but we did have a good laugh at the pictures of Max von Sydow demonstrating a skoal in my fantastically musty-smelling copy of The Cooking of Scandinavia procured in a church basement (along with the rest of the complete Time Life cooking series — the find of a lifetime). What more can one really ask from a dinner with friends?

Continue reading “Pork Loin with Apples, Prunes, and Mustard Cream Sauce” »

If the weather’s going to warm up and get all spring-y, I better hurry up and tell you about the last lingering hearty cold-weather recipes before it’s too late. Which leads me, with no ado at all, to a no-holds-barred chilly night dinner of bolognese.

Do you have a restaurant that is your go-to for all sorts of occasions, be it a celebration, lazy brunch, or candlelit dinner? Ours is a little Italian brasserie (is that an oxymoron?) a few blocks down the street. The prices are reasonable enough that we can swing in for lunch or dinner, but the atmosphere is sexy enough to feel like a treat. They have ridonkulously good fries (not quite shoe string, but skinnier than most), a steak that can bring tears to your eyes, and a burger that will make you forget the worst hangover. But for a cold weather lunch, I can’t resist their bolognese served with thick paparadelle. With a glass of wine and a seat on the black banquet across from my husband, I’m in heaven.

There are few things more comforting than shuffling around the house on a weekend with a pot of ragu simmering on the stove. It is the same sensation as puttering around the house with a roast chicken in the oven. The fragrance of a wholesome, sustaining dinner fills the air and fills you with a historic, elemental sense of satisfaction: I have put together this and that and now it cooks away while I sit here and read, you think. How glorious! And it is glorious. Even more so when you spoon out some of the rich sauce on top of a bowl of noodles, and settle down on the couch for a movie (thanks, Margaret!). This is the type of cooking and eating that ranks sky high in the book of satisfaction: nominal effort, slow-cooking, and a deeply luxurious result.

Continue reading “Before Winter’s Over Bolognese” »

There was once a restaurant in our neighborhood where I loved to go on snowy days. Inside, it was what I imagine a Swiss ski lodge is like — all dark wood, tall paned windows, and a roaring fire. I would sit on the wooden bench, wrapped in a scarf, and order a bowl of their French onion soup. At brunch, a basket of sweet, yeasty breads and orange-scented butter would come out first. And then the soup would arrive, crusty with just enough melted cheese to make a point (but not create a stomachache) and I would break the surface and dip down into a rich brown broth. It was, until the restaurant closed a few years ago, one of my favorite weekend lunches.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a friend or foe who didn’t care for French onion soup. It’s one of those foods that’s pretty delicious even when it’s not it’s best (though I’ve never been one to grumble over too much cheese), and it’s blissfully simple to make. I confess I’ve gone into a bit of a panic in the last couple weeks over all the wintery foods I still want to make before the first asparagus crops up. There is the truffle mac and cheese beckoning and the fondue (and do I see a fromagey theme here?), but what I would say to you is: this should make your winter short list. If you’ve never made French onion soup it’s absolutely worth a whirl, and such a comfort on a snowy night when you are hunkered down on the couch this weekend watching Doctor Zhivago.

Continue reading “French Friday: Onion Soup Gratinée” »

In addition to cozy, my love (and yours) of which we’ve discussed at length, I have a thing for wholesomeness. This is why, I think, I find myself so drawn to My Antonia, Anne of Green Gables, and fresh baked cookies. There’s something about them that just seems so guileless and innocent, how could there really be anything wrong with them? Who cares about the loneliness, Matthew’s death, or all that butter?

This is also how I feel about a certain sort of cake. It’s a cake with fruit it in and a dense crumb. The kind of cake that goes magically with a cup of tea on a dreary afternoon. The kind of cake that a mother — real or imagined — ought to bake. And the kind of cake that is just right after a rich and boozy dinner. It will soak up all the wine and cream sauce, brighten the air with citrus, and set things right again. Oh, how I wish at this moment there were still a slice in the kitchen.

Continue reading “Orange Walnut Cake with Greek Yogurt” »

As soon as I saw the page titled “How to Fry” in my Grand Diplôme books, I knew this lesson would really just be an excuse to make beignets. Ever since I sat in the French Quarter late one Friday night in March, my black dress dusted with tell-tale powdered sugar, I’ve collected recipes for these airy pillows of dough. But frying isn’t a cooking technique that gets much play in my repertoire. And so the recipes sat in my delicious account gathering internet dust. That is, they languished there until Super Bowl Sunday, when suddenly I had the gumption and urge to make these. My bravery fueled by coffee, I put on my apron and dug in the cabinets for the splatter guard.

This recipe makes a lot of beignets. As in, you will certainly be tired of flipping dough balls in oil before the dough is all gone. But you should soldier on, cause who wants to waste 7 cups of bread flour? These would be great to make at a brunch party where you could hand off the frying job. What I learned about frying is that it takes no real skill. It’s just a matter of keeping a close eye out for a deepening golden color, and then flipping.

Because I’m not a regular fryer, I didn’t have a thermometer to hang on the side of the pan. This proved to be no big deal and please don’t let it stop you from trying these. I remembered the advice of a Southern friend and kept the gas at medium or medium-low. I decided the oil was hot enough to start frying when a flick of flour sizzled when it hit the surface. I didn’t crowd the pan, and if things seemed like they were getting too intensely sizzly, I dropped the heat a touch more.

All I have to say is, thank heavens for book club. If I hadn’t been able to send six women home with a grease-stained paper lunch sacks filled with these powdered sugar stomach bombs, I don’t know what might have happened. Frankly, I might not be here today.

Continue reading “How To Fry: French Quarter-Style Beignets” »

I have realized in the past several months that so much about the economy of cooking at home is about volume and frequency. With a constantly rotating list of ingredients in the household (leftover parsley from one recipe, leftover ginger from another), you have at hand a greater array to work with (and to experiment with) than if you are always buying ingredients for one or two recipes a week. Unfortunately, it seems to me one would have to eat a lot of chickens to have the means to make stock for all the recipes that call for it. That’s why I’m not a purist when it comes to stock. If a recipe calls for a cup or less, I use Better Than Bouillon, but if I’m making a stew or soup, I”ll use up the homemade stock I have frozen in 4-cup portions.

Growing up it seems like there was always a chicken carcass simmering away (the Silver method below) in a tall stockpot on the Russian fireplace. And as children often do, I kept making stock just the way my mama taught me until I learned how to cut up a chicken. Turns out, making stock from the leftover backbone (Gold) makes a super flavorful broth and is now my favorite method.  I’ve never made stock from whole chickens (Platinum), though I hear it is irrefutably the best. Each household just has to find the method that’s just right for them. But undoubtedly, the best tip I ever got about the process beyond the chicken itself came directly from all of you: keep a stock bag in the freezer and stuff it with papery onion skins, carrot nobs and peels, and odds and ends of vegetable scraps. Since I can’t compost in my little apartment, this achieves that prairie girl desire to have zero-waste.

Do you make stock with one of these methods below, or some other way? Do tell!

Continue reading “4 Ways to Make Chicken Stock” »

At first, I held Thanksgiving responsible. Who would make a grocery store run for perishables that will sit in an apartment crisper when they know four days in the country are ahead of them? Perhaps I bragged too much about my ability to s-t-r-e-t-ch a food dollar over the weekend. As we walked out the door, my mom thrust a brown grocery bag into my hands filled with cheese, crackers, wine (”that’ll take care of tonight”), four cans of tuna, a box of whole wheat penne, 5 clementines and a bag of chocolate chips.

Then, upon returning from the long holiday weekend, I was taken hostage by a cold. My days filled with sleeping and The Up Series, there was hardly time or energy to make it to the grocery store. I did find some mangy looking celery — my first site of greenery in days! — which was thrown into a garlicky chicken soup for the patient. But my desire to make use of what’s at hand has gotten, well, a little out of hand. Adults do not eat repeated dinners of elbow macaroni and butter unless they are nursing a broken heart or feeding the blues.

My devotion to pantry suppers started quite valiantly, I must clarify, with this lovely brown rice risotto. I snagged a 1-ounce bag of dried mixed mushrooms when I saw them at Trader Joe’s for cheap. When you’re watching your pennies, dried wild mushrooms aren’t usually a good bet (they can be priced sometimes between $4-7!), but if you do see them on sale or at a discount store, they’re worth having on hand for nights when you don’t want to brave the grocery store but are feeling too together for a bowl of elbows and butter…again.

Continue reading “Pantry Supper: Wild Mushroom Brown Rice Risotto” »

Allow me to introduce you to a new very special someone in my life…

To answer your unasked but anticipated questions: yes, it is as wonderful as they say; yes, it is absolutely the heaviest item in our entire household; yes, I feel rather lucky and pretty spoiled to be the recipient of this thing. But guilt aside, having this mixer on my counter feels like crossing a sort of threshold. I think I have just entered the realm of Fancy Baker Type. More importantly, if I ever needed a push to whip up more cookies and cakes (I didn’t), this is it. I’m positively chomping at the bit to feed people desserts.

Which is why last weekend you could find me in the eye of a floury storm. First up was banana bread. Now, I know people have staunchly held beliefs about what they want from their banana bread, and I wouldn’t dare to call this the best banana bread. But in terms of what I’m looking for — a tender crumb but not cakey, a pronounced banana flavor without other distractions, and a relatively healthy composition — this is it.

I served this to a highly discerning friend (the type who can actually identify notes of cassis and butter in the wine you serve her) on an overcast Saturday afternoon. She came over wearing a plaid shirt and suede boots, tucked her legs under her on the couch, and declared this banana bread delicious. That out of the way, we poured the tea, and the real talk could commence.

Continue reading “My Best Banana Bread” »