smitten kitchen

Come on, be honest. Is there anything better than a homemade quiche? I could eat it with a pile of baby greens for dinner every night of the week. Or lunch, brunch or a post-gym snack. Is there anything more versatile? Oddly enough, I didn’t have a proper quiche pan until yesterday, when a trip to my beloved Bowery Kitchen Supply put me face-to-face with one for ten bucks. (Alex’s favorite kitchen name, ever, is Fluted Removable-Bottom Tart Pan, followed by Reamer. What, you didn’t know I was married to a twelve-year-old?) I was actually there to get my knives sharpened (mwa-ha-ha, it sounds so sinister, right?) and to look at pasta-makers (this excitement for later, but yes, I can barely contain myself, too), and within 2.5 seconds, I knew we were having quiche for dinner.

Unable to decide between Julia Child’s leek quiche and her mushroom variety, I opted instead to use a little of both. She suggests you braise the leeks for 30 minutes with a little butter, water and salt and you should listen to her. Remember those brown-braised pearl onions from the coq a vin? Well, they’ve got competition. She has you cook mushrooms in a way I haven’t before, but it will now be my go-to method for sautéed mushrooms because it was divine: a pat of butter, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of port, cooked low with the lid on for eight minutes. How does she do that? How does she take something you’ve done your whole life and convince you each time you could have been doing it better because they’ve never tasted this good?

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A couple months ago, I briefly mentioned making a wild mushroom soup from Gourmet magazine that was, you know, good, but also, eh. But shame on me, really, because last year we found the perfect, best-ever, fail-proof, tastiest recipe so why did I fall for the shiny new thing? Isn’t that the point of all this trial-and-error, anyway? I’m always trying to catalogue Recipes That Work, also called Recipes to Share you know, the ones that you try and you think “This is it. This is everything I have ever wanted from a [insert beloved grub here],” even if yes, I know, most people probably do not share my fanaticism about beloved grub. Lemon cake? Done. Banana bread? Found that too. Easy-peasy rustic loaf? Yup, and hooray for that. Chocolate cookies so good, it may bring tears to your eyes? That’s for tomorrow, because I am a tease, and also because I think about them again, I might eat five. Best-ever mushroom soup? I will never doubt you again.

What was missing from the bland mushroom soup was bulk. So many varied soup recipes come down to a similar process: a sauté of onions, leeks or garlic and herbs, a pile of vegetables simmered in stock until soft, then pureed and topped with cream, grated cheese or a splash of booze or if you’re super-lucky, all three. But if you want to make it taste like more than watery vegetables, you’re going to need some volume. Balthazar’s cream of mushroom soup has over two pounds of sliced mushrooms with a relatively small volume of broth coaxing it gently into soup form — there’s nothing more worthy of your spoon. You might, ahem, even determine that it tastes so good, that no, you will not share it and will instead eat it standing over the pot, hungry husbands be damned, even when they catch your selfishness on film. But then again maybe not, as you’re probably a nicer person than me. One can only hope.

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My in-laws had a cocktail party on Saturday night and in case you are new here, what this meant was that there was so much food, just the of plating of the appetizers took four people nearly an hour. (It also means that although there was much conversation and liveliness, I captured none of it. “Alex, what are they laughing at?” “He told a joke.” “What was it?” “It was funny.” “Thanks.”)

This would be but half the magnificent spread, not including the Cheese Table, which was not, mind you, a slew of cut-your-own cheese wedges and loose grapes but actual cheese-showcasing appetizers.

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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.

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Less than six degree’s separation from my absorption with diminutive baked goods is an almost equally powerful obsession with all forms of stuffed dough, from wontons, gyoza and pot stickers to tortellini, ravioli and turnovers. I am a woman obsessed with eating every type of dumpling this big world has to offer; something about the possibility of biting into something both mysterious and fantastic gets me every time, and forgives the fact that no matter how easy a filling is to whip up, one will inevitably be stuffing, crimping, folding, pressing, deflating and sealing up the little guys up for an hour.

Last night we welcomed dumpling season with a lazy girl’s wild mushroom pirogies, lazy because although pirogi/vareniki dough is quite simple to make, it’s got nothing on the simplicity of tearing open a packet of wonton wrappers. I couldn’t resist cutting them into their proper round shape, however, and with a scalloped-edged cutter to boot so they ended up looking as festive as our wine-drenched spirits felt. Their deep, earthy flavor has little in common with the more-popular potato, meat or cabbage varieties, but this doesn’t mean that you should skimp on the butter-fried onions, vinegar if you are Alex and sour cream if you are me. (Though I have been known to top mine with all of the above, drawing disapproving clucking from the Russians.)

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