smitten kitchen » Winter

mixed citrus salad with feta and mint

deb — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:44:57 +0000

Like many New Yorkers, I have a healthy fear of the Upper West Side’s Fairway Market (the Harlem one isn’t so bad, but the Pulaski Skyway is technically closer to my apartment). Sure, they sell everything in the world, but from my rough estimation, the store contains everyone in the world at any given moment and it turns out, the quickest way to turn me into the kind of person with plumes of smoke pouring from my ears as I white-knuckle a shopping cart is to ram into the back of my ankles with yours. Ahem. So yes, I don’t shop there very often.

But last weekend! Last weekend I went to their new store in New Jersey… ah, New Jersey with its wide-open spaces and aisles wide enough for two shopping carts in opposing directions and acres upon acres of refrigerated produce space. I about lost it when I saw more than a dozen varieties of citrus and suddenly this citrus salad idea that I had been kicking around in the back of my head became The Next Thing I Absolutely Had To Make.

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vanilla roasted pears

deb — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:35:27 +0000

I think this should be your new favorite way to show off. If your dinner parties are anything like mine, dessert arrives with more of a whimper than a bang. Oh yes, that trifle looks lovely, that cheesecake is most certainly the bomb, most people are probably thinking, but I just crawled out of a vat of deeply braised short ribs and I’m gasping for air. Doctor, gimme an apple, stat! I forgot what fresh food looks like.

Except, what was that you said about butter and sugar? Oohkay, sure, I’ll have a little bite. I mean, what’s a meal that doesn’t end with a sweet note? None that I want to be part of, to be honest. But when you want to unlock sweetness’s hold on richness, oh friends, please do this.

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gingerbread apple upside-down cake

deb — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:32:39 +0000

I know everyone says that this whole early-baby thing “goes by so fast” and “blink and you’ll miss it” and I believed them, I really did. But I hadn’t prepared to take a bite of this cake last week and push it away disinterested because it’s “too fall/wintery for right now”, look at the date on my phone and realize that, holy gingerbread (see how baby-friendly we’re getting here at SK?!), it’s freaking November already. And not early November, but days before Thanksgiving, thus, late November. And forget November, what happened in October? I remember nothing, not one single thing save a vague recollection of an overlarge can of Crisco.

Despite my protestations, it turns out this gingerbread-spiced molasses-heavy caramelized apple upside-down cake is perfect for the holiday-decked winter months whether I’m ready for them or not. It’s intensely flavored, dark and coppery and goes about as perfectly with some barely sweetened, softly whipped cream as I imagine it would with a dark beer or hard cider (as in, why did I not think of that sooner?).

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whole lemon tart

deb — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:46:17 +0000

Everyone has a favorite lemon tart, don’t they? I think of them as one those pastries that people obsess over to the point that crafting a great one is practically considered a higher calling. And I’d joke about this (okay, well, just a little) but if you’ve ever had a good, nay, great one, you totally get it. An awesome one will blow your mind. Some are filled with only a simple lemon curd, others with a creamier lemon filling, some are studded with fresh raspberries or have bits of candied lemon peel inside and the rare one even has a chunk of a fresh lemon segment within. I have never met one I didn’t like.

But I do have a favorite, and it is so ridiculously simple that when I made it last week I actually kicked myself for waiting so long since the last time I gave it a spin. Where are my priorities? Seriously. I won’t slip up again.

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flaky blood orange tart

deb — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:50:13 +0000

Have you ever lost a recipe? A couple years ago, a reader emailed me, sending me a link to a delicious-looking blood orange tart that she thought I might enjoy. The photo that accompanied the recipe was startling — fiery, purple and magenta coins of oranges with burnished edges laid over a rustic tart base and if ever a photo could reel me in, that one was it.

Unfortunately, nearly as instantly as I fell for the tart, I lost it. And I know what you’re thinking: how do you lose a tart you’ve never made, never eaten and that is fully available on the internet? But somehow I managed to, and spent the next two years Googling it to no end, stumbling onto hundreds of blood orange tart recipes and never finding That One again. When I saw that blood oranges were once again in season this year, I vowed that this time, I would not leave my computer until I found it and it worked! Do you know where I found it? A totally random and very obscure Web site called Food & Wine.

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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.

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clementine cake

deb — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:40:50 +0000

Last year, when I made that dud of a clementine clafoutis a whole bunch of you brought Nigella Lawson’s Clementine Cake to my attention. But, by that point in the winter I was tired of clementines and filed it away to try the following year.

It was a long wait. When you know you want to make something but the item is out of season, it seems like its time will never arrive. Last week, I came upon an artichoke recipe that is clearly designed to blow my artichoke-loving mind but are artichokes (that you’d want to buy, not that one with a fuzzy pelt I saw last week) anywhere? Nope. And tomatoes… flavorful, non-mealy tomatoes. I can’t even think about how far off they are. It makes me weep.

Nevertheless, I suspect that each and every one of our households has adopted one or ten of these crates this winter. I think we’re on box four or five, which is kind of frightening when you realize there are just two of us. So I don’t think about it.

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braised beef short ribs

deb — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:33:41 +0000

[Braised Beef Short Ribs with Potato Purée, Swiss Chard and Horseradish Cream]

The first time I made short ribs, I freaked out. Lifting their lid after a multi-hour braise just as our guests arrived for dinner, I discovered a mess. “The bones fell out! Help! Did I ruin them?” I cried just as my mother walked into the kitchen, and because she’d never made short ribs before said “I don’t know, maybe?” But then Alex’s mother swooped in and said “That’s a good thing!”

And so it was, so much so that going forward, short ribs instantly became my favorite dinner party meal. They require very little effort, they’re fairly inexpensive and it is really hard to mess them up. You can doctor up the braise with one or a dozen herbs or spices, you can simmer them in almost anything, from wine or beer to stock to hoisin or tomato sauce or any combination thereof but the real magic is this: you can make them in advance. Short ribs are astoundingly flexible in their cooking time and taste even better the next day. (And if all this doesn’t sell you on their genius, this article will.)

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winter fruit salad

deb — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:12:16 +0000

Are fruit salads one of these things that I assume everyone in the world makes, but really, it is just my family? It could be, but I still think they’re essential. There is nothing better to break up a brunch of cheesy baked eggs and breakfast bread puddings, and dessert courses that seem to be a chain of pies, gooey brownies and cakes than than a big bowl of fruit. Of course, a bowl of whole fruit rarely works as anything but a centerpiece, and this is where the salad part comes in.

In the summer, it is a cinch–berries are flawless and everywhere, not to mention mangoes and cantaloupes and watermelon. But unless you want to buy imperfect, frighteningly overpriced berries with thousands of food miles on their backs, fall and winter can make something as simple as chopped fruit kind of dull.

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meyer lemon and fresh cranberry scones

deb — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:58:01 +0000

The fresh cranberry gets no love. I can’t tell you how many recipes I have sifted through recently that boasted cranberry in their titles only to find out that they were actually calling for those shriveled and over-sweetened dried ones. Why must fresh cranberries be “the neglected stepchild of the season“? It is totally undeserved.

Fresh cranberries are prettier. They’re impressively hardy, keeping for weeks in the fridge and even longer in the freezer with no noticeable aging. And even though I think this is what puts people off, they have a tartness that makes everything they touch better. Because when you put something tart against something sweet, you get a fantastic contrast and this complexity, my friends, is a very good thing.

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