smitten kitchen

In honor of the thirtieth and final day of NaBloPoMo, I dialed up something a little extra-special for you. What, don’t I deserve a break?

Yet, I’ve made it to the finish line and even enjoyed it plus or minus a day or two, but I won’t tell you which ones. Furthermore, I’m exactly the sort of person who likes to pretend that she did this, you know, because she was going to do it anyway and not, perhaps, because she saw an exhausting and difficult challenge, thus I technically started my daily posting a full two days early. God, I’m such a show-off, aren’t I? It also means that I’ve got something on tap for tomorrow and even… well, let’s only plan a day at a time, m’kay? [Did I say that? Just kidding!]

But, I won’t just leave you with just a picture of my dumplings (which were awesome) or my pad thai (which was less so); nope, I’m leaving you with some pictures of my filthy kitchen, with an attempt to class them up in black and white. I actually meant to do this earlier this month, but the level of scrub-down this kitchen will require before being publicly viewable by my obsessive standards really just made me want to take a nap. Today I’ve just given up and you’re going to see it in all of its grimy glory.

We start the tour with my OCD spice rack which, despite the fact that it causes verbalized concern over my mental stability from everyone who steps into the kitchen, I love more than I should. I adore having my spices readily accessible, and the tins protect them from both the bright sunlight and my cleaning wrath, as they all look so nice out there together. I promise, this is the end of the Martha Stewart part of the tour.

Continued after the jump »

I am the last person on the internet to join the Cute Overload train; I mean, I get it, it’s cute. I love cute, you love cute, cute makes the birds sing and the sun shine and the world go round and tra-la-la. I get it. But man, oh man. Sometime in the last two weeks it hit me like a ten ton truck and people, the cute is killing me. I can’t breathe sometimes, the cute is so strong. I’m tag-surfing snorgle on Flickr, sputtering nonsensicals like “piggle snorgle tiny mouf action ohmy gah! Gah!” when Alex asks me how my day was. I want to take bites of the cute, but I know, I know I’d bite down too hard and take a piece out of the ear. When she added an “I shall leeck you” category it was about all the precious I could take and I had to let Alex in on the Overload, my new time-sucking Internet habit; Alex, who like any man with two eyes pulse, quickly found the Cats ‘n’ Racksâ„¢ and let’s just say, it is not just my redonk little habit anymore.

Speaking of redonk, in my predictable language-sponging manner, I’ve also picked up the slang, the cute-’bonics and it’s having a horrific effect on my ability to string sentences this week. Take our dinner tonight; it was just one of the best, most awesome, breathtakingly lovable weekday night dinners we’ve had in ages and I can just tell, these fritters are gonna be yr new BFF, too!!!1! Do you see? Do you see how that sentence just fell from grace when my enthusiasm kicked in? Let’s hope this passes real soon.

Continued after the jump »

I am not a candy maker. Heck, I’m barely a candy eater. Stop laughing; what I mean is, I prefer truffles, buttery cookies and crumbly, fruity things. But for some reason this season, perhaps another foppish attempt at service journalism, I seem to have gotten myself fixated on candy-making. It makes little sense considering the innumerable fantastic confectioneries in this city, but I think that at least part of the appeal is the long shelf life of cooked sugar. I like the idea of that you can give these to someone over the holidays and, if kept properly, they should last through January. Of course, not if you’ve made them well.

This month’s Gourmet magazine’s recipe for Salted Chocolate Caramels did nothing to curb this desire. Alex and I fell head-over-heels in love with salted butter caramel when we went to Paris last spring and friend had told us to go to the Berhtillon glacier (ice cream shop) on Ile Saint-Louis for the express purpose of trying their marron glacee ice cream sold only in only the winter months. Quite shortly, we were informed that they were out of the marron, but I had barely any time to mourn it when the salted butter caramel ice cream caught my eye. Alex and I shared the most miniscule scoop of the most abundantly complex flavor ever to cross our apparently deprived palates; not salty per se, but bright enough to hit all the notes.

I almost fainted with joy when I saw an article in the New York Times Magazine last month about this very pairing. Apparently, like everything else we grow fixated with on this side of the pond, its old news in France as children in Brittany have long snacked on salted caramels. (Well la-dee-da, I say, it took us masters of excess to pair it with chocolate.) My near-fainting spell segued into a gasp for air when I read that Nicole Kaplan, the pastry chef at Eleven Madison Park discovered salted caramel at the very exact same location as Alex and I in Paris. Finally! Someone who could understand our longing.

Even better, the article included a recipe adapted from the lovely Fannie at Foodbeam, which Luisa gave a spin last month. Molly succumbed to Kaplan’s salted caramel ice cream, and oh, what I would have done for a taste. (I hear Kaplan has just left EMP; does this mean no more salted caramel goodness on the menu? I work close enough to “investigate.” More service journalism, indeed!)

From candy to Paris to the New York Times to the food blogosphere, I seem to have gotten off-track. I can’t help it — sea salt has that effect on me. What I meant to tell you was that I made Gourmet’s Salted Chocolate Caramels tonight but I can’t tell you a thing about them yet because they’re still cooling and it seems that they will be for ages. As you can infer from the nearly 500 words before this, I’ve got some mighty high hopes for them, and I hope they serve our memories proud. Until then, it’s bedtime, and our apartment smells like heaven.

Update: Panic! Stress! Help!

1. They really didn’t get as hard as I thought they would. Then again, how hard should they be? This would be a terrible time for me to admit I have rarely even eaten caramel candies in my life. They’re like fudge right now, they hold their shape but feel too soft to wrap in pieces of waxed paper — doesn’t that seem a little sticky? I wholly confess to buying the cheapest candy thermometer on the planet last night. I was looking for that lovely OXO clip-on one and when Bowery Kitchen Supply didn’t have it (Isn’t OXO headquartered upstairs? Can’t they just call up for a refill? Hm, maybe not.) I just grabbed a $5 to hold me over until I found the better one. Makes sense, right? But, I haven’t used a candy thermometer before, and my pot was big enough that only the tip of the thermometer got covered with candy. It was supposed to take 15 minutes for the temp to get up to 225 degrees but it lingered and lingered at 150 while seemingly getting hotter. Finally, I angled it a little more sideways, splashed some caramel on it, and bam, it shot up to 225 and I took it off the heat immediately. Did I wrongly manipulate the thermometer? Am I an embarrassment of a candy-maker? (By the way, Mark Bittman says your caramel candies should register 236 degrees before you remove them; is 225 too low?)
2. Ecch, that salt does not belong on top. Salt, as I have quickly learned, belongs in not on confections. Or, at least to please my tastes. It’s a shame, because they’re otherwise a tasty candy. A tasty sticky candy. Ugh, I’m going to brush my teeth now.

Update the Second: Not news, but I’m a moron.

255! Two-fifty-five. FIFTY. Not 225 degrees. I misread the recipe’s final caramel temperature. I have no doubt that with an additional 30 degrees, the caramels would hold their form much better. The recipe has been added, below. They are delicious, but consider yourself warned about the salt. Fin.

Continued after the jump »

1. Unrelated, off-topic and out-of-context, but when Alex and I came home (I was going to say stumbled up the stairs but it seems that joke isn’t funny — yet.) from our liver-pickling party on Saturday night, we found the most wonderful news in the mail, which is that we will be able to stay in our apartment another year. In fact, they’re barely raising our rent at all. Excuse me while I kiss the skylight. I’m sure most of you don’t know why it should be a Chrismukkah miracle that the hyper-trendification of west Chelsea over the last two years hasn’t priced us out to Ronkonkoma — yet — but considering the low-down, scummy process we were forced to wade through to get this place at all, I think I’ve lived in a fairly rightly-placed fear our time in this sunny apartment with the sunset view would be cut short. Just think: a whole ‘nother year for me to master those stairs. Eh. Also, my comedic timing.

2. More good things: Havalina on my iPod as I walked through Madison Square Park this afternoon. An attempt to return to the gym for the longest and most torturous 10 minutes on the recumbent bike, ever, only to realize that I had completely misread it and been on for 33, ohthankyoulawd. Picking up the delightful Donna Hay magazine for the very first time. A range of motion so rapidly improving I actually got my hair into a half-assed ponytail for the first time today. Consoling the sore shoulder that ensued, as well as falling prey to the Cyber Monday demons with some on-sale cashmere accessories. Finding a bundle of dried lanterns for less than $20 on the way home.

Continued after the jump »

I spent a good chunk of this morning, nay, afternoon supine on the sofa moaning. Noooo, baaaad. Really, how did I not see this coming? Pink champagne. Two old-fashioneds. Baileys. Wine. Margaritas. Champagne again. Mmmmmeeeeehhhhh. Uch, remember when four or five glasses of water, some greasy eggs and potatoes and two aspirin did the trick? I’m soooooo oooooold. Alex turned on my Stories for me, that would be the hour of the Barefoot Contessa and Michael Chiarello during which I shall not be disturbed or else don’t complain about what happens when your Giants game is on. Nothing worked. Whhhyyyy meeee.

Eventually, this badly lit and shaky camera-ed new vision of the left side of Nigella Lawson’s face appeared on screen (no really, does anyone else feel utterly claustrophobic watching her new show?), the last thing I needed in my surely vertigoed state but there she was all ochre-lit with her smashing peas, golden olive oil drops from a kettle, scraped tins, lusty eggs, cooking for two although she has no intentions of sharing and insisting you eat certain dishes right there, from the pot, over the stove and I had this vision of cubes of crisped bacon and whisked eggs tangled up and knotted around steaming pasta then showered with parmesan and grindings of black pepper and I knew, I finally knew what could pry me off that sofa.

But first — a walk! Sure, it was already 3 p.m. but a 60 degree day in the last week of November is not to be wasted on the, well wasted. We headed downtown along the Hudson, the sun in our faces and delicious fall air in our lungs, passing first one then another Soprano less than a mile apart and we were almost down to Battery Park when I realized I’d forgotten to put my sling on. Tsk! I must be cured. On the way home, we hit the store for not Nigella’s but Florence Fabricant’s fettuccine dish I’d bookmarked some weeks back, and just an hour later it was in our bellies. The pasta pits meaty porcini against smoky pancetta broken up with discs of garlic and then brings the whole thing back together with an egg. A half recipe was the perfect amount for the two of us without feeling excessive, because god knows we had enough of that last night. But, it didn’t mean I didn’t wish we’d picked up some red wine. I never learn.

Continued after the jump »