smitten kitchen » Intrigue

96 favorites

deb — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:44:27 +0000

Happy New Year!

I had no idea how busy I’d been in 2007–and this is just a subset of what was cooked in the Smitten Kitchen this past year! Dare we top this in 2008?

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our approach to food photos

deb — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:09:09 +0000

As much as it flatters me when I get emails asking what my secret to taking pictures is, I rarely have a good response. I don’t think of myself as a real photographer, I never learned accepted techniques and I barely know what half the buttons on the camera do. If you like my photos, you’ll probably agree you can get far without this information (though I suspect you could get further with it).

The majority of food photography advice I have read boils down to two main points: don’t use flash and style the food attractively. Honestly, these days I rarely do either.

While I of course use available light when it is, uh, available, in the evenings, when most food for this blog is cooked, I’m at a loss. Though for a long time I used a combination of available light/long exposures, a tripod and remote switch for evening pictures, I was only satisfied with the results about half the time. Often less.

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all your questions are belong to us

deb — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:32:31 +0000

I’m not going to lie: I have barely cooked in a week. I’ve been having too much fun being busy, catching up with friends, double-booking every evening, shuffling together some hopeful freelance projects, eating out in fantastic place after place after place, and oh, right, there’s the day job thing too! Fear not, this no-cooking spell will probably not last another 12 hours as not only am I itching for a home-cooked meal but I also want to start in on the goodies I have in mind for our nation’s birthday. In the meantime I thought today would be the perfect time to launch something Alex has been nudging me to add to this site for 11 months now: Q&A.

Anyone who has ever emailed me knows that I am either horrible, I mean, downright embarrassing in my tardy or non-existent responses, or flood you with so much information, it’s really a shame I didn’t just share it with everyone. Namely, or at least publicly, I’m hoping to address the latter and start a new segment for answering questions asked over email. But, while I’m flattered that you all think I’m so smaht about kitchen stuff, I’m actually not, and encourage others to chime in with their answers, as well. We’re all in this together, right?

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arborio rice pudding

deb — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 20:00:07 +0000

The end of a mano? Though my mother bought it for me nearly two years ago as a Bridal Shower gift, I didn’t open my white Artisan KitchenAid until last week. Could I be more ungrateful? Possibly, but in a kitchen with only one tiny counter-top, there is no room for a heavy kitchen tool of limited use, and little reason when you’re an avid devotee of the electric hand mixer.

Oh boy, could I have been more stubbornly wrong? Perhaps what I was really afraid of was the vanilla bean effect, where one use of it would transform my relationship into an torrid love-affair, and there would be no going back. Because people, have no doubt: there is no going back.

Last weekend was the weekend of eggs by the dozen. Twelve yolks needed to be beaten into white ribbons, twelve whites needed to be reformatted as an enormous cloud, and then there were the pavlovas, plural, not to mention the giant vat of whipped cream filling. Just a few weeks ago, my work would have rewarded me with an aching arm and a most-certainly splattered kitchen wall from that moment when I wasn’t paying attention and titled the electric beaters back ever-so-slightly, because you know, that always happens. But this time, my baking left me with a distinct feeling of uselessness. My egg whites, yolk ribbons and whipped creams no longer needed me. Once I put ingredients in the bowl and turned the motor on, I could walk away and attend to other things. Freedom!

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six oddities + one apple glory

deb — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:40:45 +0000

I’m not a huge fan of memes, but Marce is simply too adorable to resist responding to. That said, limiting my food weirdness to six bulleted points was no small feat. I have innumerable food opinions and culinary soap-boxes, as anyone who has ever been stuck in a conversation with me that I have, yet again, segued to food can attest as their eyes glaze over and feet shifting toward the door. I believe that my husband has legitimate concern that I will one day shoot the television the next time one of the Food Network’s “healthy eating” episodes that suggest you make cheesecake with fat-free ricotta but still eat a wedge the size of your head as portion comes on, or when Michael Chiarello seasons his pasta water with a fistful of grey salt.

Come, step into my great tangle of food hang-ups and see if you still like me when you’ve made it to the end:

1. After being a vegetarian for more than 15 years, the thing I took most quickly to was bacon, followed by any sort of pork, mussels and then beefy stews in butter-enriched sauces. Perhaps I wasn’t so much a “vegetarian” all those years but “rebelling against Jewish food.” Meanwhile, I have no love for typically easy-to-love non-vegetarian items such as chicken, turkey and shrimp. I’d pretty much rather eat a beet than a grilled chicken cutlet, which I will insist to my dying day tastes closer to cardboard than something edible.

2. As the above should suggest I’m really quite the curmudgeon about food; cooking allows me to hide this: I hate beets, green peppers on anything but pizza and even then not really, find cilantro (the green, not the powdered spice or seed) distasteful, as well as most teas, broccoli rabe and kale,all chais, cardamom, caviar, cheese-stuffed or coated items, dolma, minestrone, coconut curries, mustard that looks like yellow paint, the vast majority of fruit juices, nectars and smoothies and the vast majority of California cabernets and chardonnays I have tried. Another wildly popular thing that bores me: molecular gastronomy. Please, don’t make me eat foam.

3. Discussing dieting makes me want to stick pins under my fingernails.

4. I will make bread, pasta, sauces, candy, you name it, from scratch but I find soaking my own beans too tedious to be worthwhile. That said, I used to feel this way about homemade pasta, and considering how currently enamored I am with it, I am eager to be bean-soaking converted, like if someone could convince me the flavor really is vastly superior.

5. I will defend Rachael Ray until the bitter end.

6. I am really, really not in the mood to cook tonight and hope this doesn’t mean I am broken.

But wait, there’s more: It took me a whole 24-hours to break down and make the Sow’s Ear Baked Apple Pancake Luisa posted about this weekend and truly, I shouldn’t have even waited that long. Oh puffy, buttery, apple-y gloriousness, I have such plans for more formats for you: Strawberries! Blueberries! Bananas! Pears! This is not hugely different from the German Pancake/Dutch Baby I made a couple months ago, albeit with fewer eggs, more milk, slightly less flour, a little more butter and of course those sauteed apples, and, sigh, I just don’t know how I ever liked it without them. Go. Make this and convert yourself, too.

utterly true

deb — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 17:33:42 +0000

The way I see it, you’ve got almost two days to make some resolutions and so I’d like to gently bug you about one thing: have you made the no-knead bread yet? I suspect that you haven’t. I suspect that despite swarming hoards of eager testers praising its armor-like crust and skyscraper heights of flavor, you are still thinking “Its yeast. It must be scary.” Well, I think that resolutions of eating less and this time you really mean it, reading books which really do bore you and to say more nice things about your people you don’t like is truly overrated, and not that you asked, but I think we should all instead choose to treat ourselves better, that we should seek out richer, brighter and more satiating experiences. I hope you have an excellent new year.

On the wall was a dress that I had embroidered. It said “Ich habe genug.” Which is a Bach Cantata. Which I thought meant, “I’ve had it, I can’t take any more, give me a break.” But I was wrong. It means “I have enough.” And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. But I will go out and buy a hat. — Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty

where the magic happens

deb — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 04:09:45 +0000

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.

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latticed and loony

deb — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:53:38 +0000

On my old iVillage.com site, someone once asked me what the trick was to making those lattice-topped pie crusts fusspots like me hold in such high regard. I admitted that many years ago, before the Food Network was the behemoth it is today, the adorable Sarah Moulton once showed her audience a method of criss-crossing those pieces so simple, I haven’t struggled with torn pieces since. Even Alex quickly learned the Moulton Method, and remains unintimidated by pie season, which is great because you know, one of us has to roll out the doughs next week!

People who have been reading this site since ever before the iVillage year might remember my sad-but-true affection for Microsoft Paint when I need to explain something but lack the language, an all-too-common state for me. Well, I’ve done it again, and I’m going to present it without comment except to say that I hope you find this helpful in either pie-making or resting assured, once and for all, that I’ve gone off the deep end.

[Best viewed at full-size.]

But wait! There’s more!

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summer

deb — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 21:33:27 +0000

Sarah Brown once said she had a theory that for every single person on the planet, there’s a sentence that if it were said to them by the right person or at the right time with the right words, everything in their life would right itself from that point forward. (If I remember correctly, my sentence was “Wow, you don’t dance like a white girl at ALL.”)

But, being the food-obsessed type that I am, I wonder if that sentence could be a taste, or that taste a smell. I believe that there are sensory experiences that get tucked places we forget about, and we wander around looking for things to lure them back into the present. We just want it back — for even a split second — because things in the moments that follow seem to fall more smoothly into place.

... Read the rest of summer on smittenkitchen.com