smitten kitchen

Dulce de leche, where have you been my whole life? Oh, sure, I knew what you were and I understood implicitly that you were a good thing. I knew that you were practically the national dish of Argentina and I knew I wanted to be the national dish of, well, anywhere, one day but I hadn’t yet taken you into my arms and my belly. I hadn’t yet really tasted you. I am sooo going to have to make up for lost time.

The thing is, and I know this sounds a little funny, but I love dairy products–like milk and cream, especially when they’re full fat and super-fresh and hormone free. I love the little smell that wafts off freshly steamed milk. I can absolutely taste the difference between skim and two percent, and simply cannot abide the former and only occasionally the latter. And I would rather have one tablespoon of cream over anything–baked apples, swirled into oatmeal–than 14 of something so-called good for me. And yes, I have digressed, but I just wanted to set this up:

Dulce de leche is the embodiment of everything I love about dairy products and everything everyone loves about caramel together. Like one or the other weren’t good enough, let’s just mash this up and die happy. Minus the dying part.

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I can’t believe I haven’t told you yet about this Key Lime Cheesecake; I have some nerve, don’t I? And I suppose I could get into its texture (dreamy), flavor (bright and promising), topping (thin strips of mango tossed in lime juice) but it wouldn’t be honest of me, as I really only made these for one reason last weekend. Take a look at this bottle; could there be a more enticing Wish You Were Here sign? I take one look at it and just want to yell: I’m coming for you!

Alas, it is still quite January outside in New York, this might be the only piece of Key West we’re getting for several months. But not unlike what I was thinking when I made those lemon bars or that anything-but-clementine clafoutis this month, I hoped that a focus on bright, sunny citrus fruits would take some of the drudgery out of mid-winter. Did it work? Perhaps not, but it was delicious nonetheless.

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Sometimes I cook things even though I have significant doubts that they will be in any way delicious. Why is this, how is this so, you ask? Because I live in a mental place I affectionately call Hope. I wish to be surprised. I aspire to be wrong from time to time (though not, as Alex can but probably will not argue, because he is polite, too often, and certainly not if it would make him right) because if the sum of the parts that together comprise the world as I know it is all there is, I’d be kind of bummed. I’d be kind of bored.

Often enough, things exceed my expectations. There are better-than-Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soups, there is Fennel Ice Cream and Red Velvet Cake and, loudest as of late, there is brining.

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I suppose there comes a point in every food blogger’s so-called “career” when she posts her favorite chocolate cookie recipe, but I’ve avoided this point for a long time because, does the internet actually need another chocolate chip cookie recipe? 130,000 times no. But, the thing is, I do have a favorite. And sometimes, sometimes when you’re making a heavy meal full of classics that I’ll get to one by one this week, you want to end on a simple–but not too subtle–note. See, this cookie has what we affectionately call “a lot of chocolate to very little dough,” in fact, when you’re folding all of the ingredients together, it seems impossible that so many chocolate and pecan chunks will fit in so little batter, and the best part is that they barely do.

Who is the crazed, handsome genius who brings us this masterpiece? No, not Alex, though he did bake the cookies while I washed dishes on Sunday (see how we switched it up there? cr-azy!). It is, and really just has to be, the famed David Lebovitz, from his Great Book of Chocolate. And yeah, I was like the last person on earth to buy this but I’ve made up for it by making these cookies more than twice. More than twice. You have no idea how few recipes get even one repeat performance in the smitten kitchen, twice means that you need to print (yup, it’s working again) this post and go make these right now. In 30 minutes, you’re going to be all “Schmoll House who?” and you’ll never look back.

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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.

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