smitten kitchen » Elsewhere

white and dark hearted brownies

deb — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:25:26 +0000

White chocolate brownies have it tough. They share a name with a baked good that needs no improving on; their chocolate is rejected by self-titled “real” chocolate eaters for being a pale imitation of the rich, nutty and bittersweet awesomeness of darker chocolates; this same chocolate is so sweet that you must dial back the sugar in your brownies to adjust for it, removing moisture, risking leaving them cake-like and if it couldn’t get much worse, they’re barely white. More like, pale-yellowish-beige. Yum, right?

I was one of those white chocolate rejectors for a long time but I finally made peace with it when I stopped judging it through the lens of chocolate — which is bitter and complex in ways that white chocolate cannot be — and accepted it for what it is, a buttery sweet confection that, when used carefully, plays exceptionally well with others, like mint, berries, nuts and, well, dark chocolate. And since I’d come full circle with my reasoning, I made a batch of white chocolate brownies and a batch of dark chocolate brownies and hadn’t figured out what I was going to do next, only that nothing bad could happen from there.

... Read the rest of white and dark hearted brownies on smittenkitchen.com

espresso chiffon cake with fudge frosting

deb — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:55:23 +0000

Of course, there was also cake. I mean, you didn’t think I’d let my better half’s 35th birthday go by without some homemade, stacked and butter-laden goodness, did you? Right, I didn’t think so.

Now, no introduction to a birthday cake for Alex would be complete without a brief tour of the cakes from years past, when there has been an Icebox Cake, a Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake, a Brownie Mosaic Cheesecake and the cake that you all liked so much, it broke the server’s back for a harrowing day or two last year, the Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake. Did you sense a theme or something? There Will Be Chocolate, Like You Even Needed To Ask.

... Read the rest of espresso chiffon cake with fudge frosting on smittenkitchen.com

slinging slaws + summer salads

deb — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:18:06 +0000

I had a terrific and by no means life-altering discovery this weekend — er, unless you’re me, and the concept of ‘having a life’ is an abstract one, at best — which was that my favorite dead-simple green bean and cherry tomato salad was even awesomer when made with (I hope you’re sitting down this, people) a mixture of green and yellow beans. Really!

And I know, why on earth would I bog you down with my most snooze-worthy discoveries? Because yesterday morning when I received a call asking if I’d like to be on Good Day New York today demonstrating some July 4th-worthy salads and sides, my first thought was, “ooh, I can make the prettiest green bean salad!” Followed, of course, by “wait, I have like three hours of free time today and no groceries a doctors appointment and zillion things to do and even more things to cook and I’m overdue for a haircut and my fingernails look like they’ve been through a paper shredder and not a single cute dress to wear and zomg I am not ready for my closeup!“, or you know, the usual neuroses. I said yes, of course. I am pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to do when a morning show asks you to be a guest, not that my life has given me a lot of practice pondering such weighty conundrums.

Thus, if you’re coming here today because you saw Deb and her double-chins on Good Day New York this morning, welcome! Here’s what else I showed off today:


Watermelon and Feta Salad with Chopped Vegetables	Not Your Mama’s Cole Slaw

Broccoli Slaw	Roseanne Cash’s Americana Potato Salad

... Read the rest of slinging slaws + summer salads on smittenkitchen.com

cherry brown butter bars + new video project

deb — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:07:57 +0000

I don’t know what’s happening to me — maybe it’s third trimester dwindling energy levels and an accompanying desire to get the most bang from my feeble bursts of productivity — but all of a sudden, I find myself saying that I don’t want to cook this thing or that because it’s not practical. Practical! Who am I? Certainly not the girl who baked a wedding cake last summer in her tiny, overheated kitchen. Certainly not a person who has [shh, can't tell you]-making and a 12-layer cake on her summer cooking agenda.

Take this recipe, for example. It was originally a delicious-looking raspberry brown butter tart from this month’s Bon Appetit magazine. And although I usually associate brown butter with winter cooking — hazelnut brown butter cakes, brown butter shorties, pear crisps and brown butter with chestnuts and brussels sprouts, yes please. — and although I’ve never met a dessert tart I didn’t like, all I could think was “these would be so much more practical as a bar cookie!” Practical, there’s that word again. It’s all over for me, isn’t it?

... Read the rest of cherry brown butter bars + new video project on smittenkitchen.com

mushroom bourguignon

deb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:48:36 +0000

When it is as cruelly cold out as it has been this week, beef bourguignon is one of my favorite things. If there is anything better than a symphony of onions, carrots, red wine, broth and a scoop of tomato paste simmered for hours, I haven’t met it. I don’t want to meet it. I already know my favorite.

Julia Child’s recipe was always my mother’s go-to dish for company and back in the day, the smell of it braising in the oven was enough to get me to reconsider my vegetarianism. I cheated more than once, ladling the braise broth over egg noodles, and never felt that I wasn’t missing a thing. In fact, I always argued that most of the things people thought they liked about meat they actually liked about the sauces and braises and spices they were cooked in, which is why I have been dreaming up a vegetable based bourguignon for ages.

... Read the rest of mushroom bourguignon on smittenkitchen.com

raspberry breakfast bars

deb — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:50:41 +0000

We had a decadent weekend in the North Carolina mountains, and I never wanted to come home. The air up there is so delicious and clean, I never realized how cautiously I inhale in New York City, not that you can blame me if you’ve ever gotten a curbside whiff on a humid summer day after a long holiday weekend with no trash pickup.

But up there, everything is a delight. We hiked, we played with the sweetest Schnauzer there ever has been, we ate proper vinegar barbecue, the best peaches in the world (from South Carolina!) and even hit some stores and a craft fair. And oh, how we cooked. Alex and I get a little hog-wild when we see a kitchen bigger than 60-square feet with not one, not two but three large counters and a grill that resides outside. Like, on a giant porch and everything! It took a mighty amount of restraint to not take a tour of the entire smittenkitchen.com archive, but we did make a good dent in just 72 hours, with the kefta kebabs, dimply plum cake, napa salad with buttermilk dressing, pork tenderloin and noodle salad, grilled eggplant with caponata salsa and even the big crumb coffee cake, updated for late summer with a blueberry filling, made a showing.

Actually, it stole the show. I am currently angling an excuse to make it again. Like the fact that it’s Tuesday and I haven’t had lunch yet.

... Read the rest of raspberry breakfast bars on smittenkitchen.com

spicy sweet potato wedges + five etceteras

deb — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:50:31 +0000

Five Bits of Housekeeping

After a series of unfortunate kitchen mishaps over the last week, I decided to give up cooking for at least a couple days and focus my efforts instead on mixology at my friend Jocelyn’s Oscar Party on Sunday night. I guest-blogged Dove Cocktails over on her site today, though I prefer to call them Pomegranate Margaritas. [Dove Cocktails at Pixxiestails.com]
Earlier this month, Alex and I took some photos of two of our favorite chocolate shops in New York City, Li-Lac Chocolates in the West Village and Jacques Torres in Dumbo. You can see them on Priceless.com. [Jacques Torres on Priceless.com, Li-Lac on Priceless.com]

... Read the rest of spicy sweet potato wedges + five etceteras on smittenkitchen.com

robert linxe’s chocolate truffles

deb — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:19:58 +0000

My obsession with Robert Linxe’s truffles started as a matter of coveting. My roommate at the time had more suitors than she could count on two hands and both feet, thus I didn’t even bother trying to keep up, but there was this one–and I never met him, but still called him my favorite–who insisted upon “borrowing” her for the afternoon of her birthday and at Metropolitan Museum presented her with two items: Kissing in Manhattan and a box of chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat.

Kissing in Manhattan was gorgeous–the rare book in Alex and my towering bookcases that we both, two years later, came with a copy of–but the truffles were something else. Not only were they the most rich and hands-down putting to shame any and every chocolate I had ever encountered previously in my life, they were painfully expensive. It just wasn’t fair.

In an effort to build my karma they became my go-to hostess gift and it was because of this that I learned one year at a holiday dinner where a Gourmet editor was a guest that the secret of the Robert Linxe’s La Maison du Chocolat Truffles were not sealed in an offshore vault along with the original Coke recipe and the location of Jimmy Hoffa but free for the clicking on Epicurious.com.

... Read the rest of robert linxe’s chocolate truffles on smittenkitchen.com

elsewhere: dumplings and cake

deb — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:35:48 +0000

It’s a fun, fun day at Smitten Kitchen–did you know that? Today I am presenting you with not just one new recipe but FOUR. Four recipes! Someone is trying to be the valedictorian of food blogging NaBloPoMo, huh? Valedictorian, medalist and also winner, mind you.

Funny story about that, actually.

Mom: So, what is this nablop thing? Is it a contest?
Me: NaBloPoMo? Oh, it’s just a Thing, mom.
Mom: A thing that you win?
Me: No, a thing that you do. To do. Because the other kids are doing it.
Mom: But why?
Me (totally irked because I am realizing I don’t get it either): It’s obviously too complicated to explain.

Right, so the four recipes! One catch: none of them are here.

The first three are in my most recent Kitchen Window column on NPR all about one of my favorite topics: dumplings. Yes, my dumpling obsession has actually outgrown this site, and it’s gotten so costly that I had to offshore it to India. Also Korea and Italy. Hm, I suspect that this joke is only funny to me. Nevertheless, over at NPR I talk about dumplings of the world, and include recipes for spicy lentil-potato samosas that can be baked or fried, beef-tofu mandu and spinach-ricotta agnolotti. I hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

The fourth recipe–my mother’s sour cream cinnamon chocolate chip coffee cake–may be familiar to some of you who have been around for a while, but today it is in the Boston Globe, a sidebar to an article about, well, this site and little old me. Thanks be to Jonathan Levitt for making me sound coherent.

And just to keep you at the edge of your seat (my sense of self-importance is staggering, no?), tomorrow I’ll tell you about one of my favorite recipes from this batch, the one that didn’t make the cut. So you come back now, you hear?

Elsewhere:

One year ago: Ganached Guinness Goodness

spicy soba noodles with shiitakes

deb — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:44:15 +0000

Alex has been narrowing his eyes at my ever-growing periodicals stack lately, and I don’t blame him. How did someone whose life so fully revolves around the Web end up with so many subscriptions to print magazines? Hint: I am only paying for one of them. Hint: Most of them are available ink-free on the Web.

That said, he has a point. When you’ve got (at best) 660 square feet of floor area, and (at best) 20 square feet of table/counter area, it is less than ideal to give up any of it to dead tree media. So, I finally caved, or more like focused my attention span long enough to quickly breeze through pages this weekend, and Gourmet? I’m sorry. I hope the sixteen pages I bookmarked over three issues will compensate for my allowing you to collect a thin layer of dust. Your photography still makes me whimper with envy.

... Read the rest of spicy soba noodles with shiitakes on smittenkitchen.com