smitten kitchen » Vegetarian

carrot soup with miso and sesame

deb — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:41:23 +0000

I hadn’t meant for this soup to be so quintessentially early January — that would be, virtually fat free, dairy free, gluten free (miso dependent), vegan and the very picture of healthful do-gooding. It’s about one cube of tofu away from earning a halo or at least being surrounded by singing cherubs. In fact, if you advertised a soup to me with all of those qualities, I’d probably run in the other direction because I am a dietary heathen, and I love butter, even if overdoing it in December now requires it in moderation. For the rest of time.

In fact, the reason why I made this soup is because, in general, I don’t find carrot soups all that interesting and wanted to challenge myself to make one I’d love, and eat often. I turned to one of my favorite dressing recipes for inspiration — the ginger-carrot-miso awesomeness most of us know from sushi restaurants — and decided to mash up a miso and carrot soup.

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parsnip latkes with horseradish and dill

deb — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:13:41 +0000

I have this affliction or maybe you could call it a fixation with latkes. And I know you’re probably thinking, potato pancakes? With shredded onion? They’re good, but are they really worth obsessing over? But you’d be using the literal definition of latkes and to me, latkes are not so much a singular recipe with a finite ingredient list but an approach to pancakes; an approach that could include anything that can be shredded and fried. And oh, when you start from this vantage point, they most certainly will.

I’ve made potato latkes, sure. Many times, even. But then I made mixed vegetable latkes with Indian spices and curry-lime yogurt. I made apple latkes, replete with a caramel sauce made from the juice you wring from the shredded apples. (I waste nothing in the kitchen. My grandmother would be so proud!) This past summer, I made zucchini fritters to solve a dinner crisis. And now, there’s this: Parsnips. Potatoes. Dill. Horseradish. Lemon juice.

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dijon-braised brussels sprouts

deb — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:18:28 +0000

Is there anything so dull as a brussels sprouts recipe just days after the brussels sprout-ing-est holiday of the year? No? Phew. Because these sprouts, they’re a long time coming. It took me forever to get them right. I’d originally intended them for the cookbook. I made them six different ways in the fall of 2010, and I never found what I was looking for. It was a year before I could even look at brussels again, and by that time, the book had moved on without them. But I had not.

I wanted a brussels sprout dish that was the opposite of what I’ve been seeing around in the last couple years — that would be free of nuggets of slab bacon, toasted nuts, buttery breadcrumbs, crumbled cheese or individual leaves, deep fried until crisp as potato chips. Do I dislike any of these things? Heavens, no. But they’re all so heavy. And rich. And brussels, with their cabbage origins, are hearty enough. I wanted to cook them in a simple braise, and then finish them with a piercing, heavenly sauce, something that cut right through the leafiness without adding mountains of pork fat. I wanted the cabbage equivalent of our favorite chicken dish.

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cumin seed roasted cauliflower with yogurt

deb — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:48:04 +0000

I do this dreary thing every October where I decide on the first day that requires a scarf and a hustle in your step to keep warm that the long, gloomy descent into winter has begun and soon the world will be brown, gray and frozen and this will continue until April or beyond and I might as well stock up on some farro and root vegetables and climb into my igloo because that’s all there will be for a long time. I am clearly no fun at all, and also a little blind as I declare this while stepping over crinkly flame-throwers of leaves, while the sky is still fantastically blue and generally, without even have stepped through a farmers market. Because the markets? Are actually as pretty as they get all year, tables overflowing with everything from carrots to late summer squash, hearty greens, tiny pumpkins, marble-sized potatoes and great big globes of broccoli and cauliflower. It’s now or never to haul it home.

In the early days of blogging, the phrase Cheese Sandwich Blogs was used to unkindly refer to blogs so dull that their authors would even describe what they had for lunch that day. What we learned, in theory, was that nobody cares what you had for lunch. And yet? I’m going to tell you anyway, because it’s been abysmal: Twice this week already, it’s been cold cereal. Last week was a string of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the kind of bread that I purchased for its extended shelf life. I’ve been passing lattes off as breakfast (it’s French and cosmopolitan, right?) and I think we’ve ordered pizza for dinner three times in three weeks (leading to three next-day lunches of cold leftover pizza). As it turns out, even people who love to cook more or less eat terribly when they’re working around the clock to meet a deadline. Or, ahem, have missed a deadline, not that anyone is counting. But today, today I had this for lunch and the world has so much brighter since.

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roasted tomato soup with broiled cheddar

deb — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:49:02 +0000

Lest you think I spend any part of my days doing Important Things — preparing, and totally not at the last second or haphazardly, for my only child’s second birthday, or for his first week of pre-preschool; assembling warm, wholesome meals for his lunch each day; meeting my manuscript deadline; dealing with the shoe bomb that went off in my closet, etc. — it’s only fair and honest that I tell you that I’ve spent a significant portion of the last year considering ways to merge grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup in a single vessel.

In a way, though, it relates to all of those things (well, not the shoes). There’s something very back-to-school-ish about tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and because it’s still September, if you’re lucky, you can still get some tomatoes worth eating, and if not that, at least worth cooking down. In my imagined intersections of grilled cheese and tomato soup, I dreamed of grilled cheese croutons in one-inch rounds but rejected it for being overly precious. I considered grilled cheese bread bowls, but never worked out the logistics. But it was when I revisited the ne plus ultra combination of cheese and soup — French Onion Soup — this past spring that I knew unequivocally that the very best solution would be to simply broil an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich on top of a bowl of tomato soup. The only thing left to do was to wait (and wait, and wait) for the slim overlap of tomato season, soup season and a gloomy, rainy week. And that, my friends, brings us to today.

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zucchini fritters

deb — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:47:52 +0000

Everyone’s got their superheroes; I’m sure when I was younger they were things like Super Grover and later, Jem but these days, they’re decidedly more humble: I admire the hell out of people who manage to put homemade meals on the table everyday, as this has never been my strong suit. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve spent the last year or so developing recipes for very specific things — a side dish, a salad, a tart — that don’t exactly add up to be a dinner, and that NYC makes it quite easy to order in whatever parts of your meal you haven’t made at home. I’m a terrible multitasker — really, no fan of it at all — and when I’m making brioche, I’m making brioche, and not brioche with a side of a pot of beans with something braising in the oven, no matter how much I wish I were.

It also means that more often than not, I have a 4 p.m. panic as, whoops! someone will soon be hungry and I have no idea what’s for dinner and true to form, this happened last Tuesday. For the better part of two days, I’d been elbows deep in a truly epic cake I was making for the book but it turns out that even when you’re the grown-up in the house, cake does not equal dinner, which of course crushes all of my earlier hopes and dreams about adulthood. Often we’ll have something around that can become dinner — eggs for omelets, vegetables for salad or even flour for a quick pizza dough — but we’d just returned from vacation and the fridge was sparse. For once, however, what I scratched together exceeded my expectations, in the form of zucchini fritters from the zucchinis that seem to be growing in my fridge this summer; I never remember buying them but they’re always around.

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charred corn tacos with zucchini-radish slaw

deb — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:58:00 +0000

I would not say that previous to the last year, we were not taco people. I can think of several carnitas that have brought me nearly to tears (and definitely to tears when they stopped delivering) and we’ve been doing an egg-tortilla thing for years. But at some point in the last six months, I got bit with the taco bug bad and now I can hardly think of anything else to eat. Saturday afternoon and the toddler is napping and suddenly we’re hungry? Black bean tacos! Nothing but a couple zucchini in the produce drawer? Roasted zucchini tacos for dinner! I’m about thisclose to becoming the sort of person who puts peanut butter and jelly on a taco. The taco has become the answer to all questions.

It’s this obsession that finally got me to unearth a dish I’ve been meaning to put my spin on for two years. That’s more than a lifetime, if you’re this guy, and even he doesn’t know why it took me so long. The dish is called esquites and from what I understand but have sadly not yet experienced yet in person, it is a street snack in Mexico. Corn is cooked in butter with onions, garlic, chiles, an herb called epazote and salt. It’s then seasoned with lime juice, chile powder and served with mayo in small cups. Oh hi, are you still here? I’m not, because every time I read that description, I run to JFK and book the next flight to Mexico.

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linguine with pea pesto

deb — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:58:31 +0000

Even though I have a lot of book left to write (unless you’re my editor, in which case, just kidding, almost done!) and deadlines both before and after that one requiring my attention, endless paperwork, emails and all sorts of tiresome things on my real-life agenda, I’ve decided to focus my daydreaming on something more aspirational: what to cook on a lazy summer night.

We rented a beach house for a week last year but were surprised to find that 11-month olds don’t always sleep in foreign locations. At all. We staggered through the week and ate out a lot. I’d like us all to do better this year. In an area full of farm stands and wineries, with a kitchen bigger than a shoebox, with a grill and a deck, it’s a shame not to be cooking at home as much as we can. But leisurely, with as few ingredients as possible and at least one of them straight off the farm.

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roasted peppers with capers and mozzarella

deb — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:09:56 +0000

Most of the time, I don’t choose the recipes I share here, they choose me. I’ll be bumming around, reading my epics, keeping to myself when suddenly the urge for rhubarb muffins will come upon me, and I will have no choice but to address it, or remain distracted until I break down and, you know, address it. Other times, the market controls me, as will happen when you live in a climate that deprives you of field-fresh produce for over half the year, leaving you to go completely berserk and overdo it in the months that you’re graced with it, bringing home buckets when you only have enough stomachs in your family to require a small armload. But with a 20 months of parenting under my belt, I’m long overdue to introduce a new reason to cook: my toddler; he’s got cravings too.

It started one night at Motorino when he was in the middle of another of his ~~hunger strikes~~ ~~conscientious dissenting against his mama’s cooking~~ phases where he’s just not that hungry and we ordered both the roasted pepper salad and appetizer meatballs in hopes to quietly tempt him into ~~eradicating crankiness through the consumption of life-sustaining calories~~ enjoying good food. And lordy, he went nuts for the peppers. Slurp, slurp, slurp, it was hard to believe that just hours before he’d overturned his lunch in disgust. A week later, we returned (I’m currently fixated on a certain pizza, you see) and the peppers elicited the same reaction. And so it only made sense that I would recreate the dish at home.

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spring salad with new potatoes

deb — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:20:17 +0000

I think that if we’re going to continue to be grand old friends, you’re going to have to admit that you at least occasionally wish you could have potato salad for lunch any day of the week. That you think it’s kind of lame that potato salad is relegated to backyard barbecue indulgence; packed up in Tupperware, saved for 3-day weekends, eaten with apology to the swimsuit you’ll wear the next day. If nothing else you might admit this so that I can feel my habits are less cuckoo. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?

And of course, I’ve been craving potato salad like a madwoman for the last week and who can blame me? Summer Is Coming* and picnic season is nigh. But given my need to not groan any further when bathing suits are required, I wanted to swap the standard mayo-assaulted potato salad for something with different proportions — a salad with potatoes, rather than a straight-up potato salad. I let the market dictate what to fill the salad out with — this week in New York is all about asparagus, sugar snaps, radishes and spring onions, and so is this salad, but in another month, I think it would be equally welcome with some cucumbers and green beans.

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