matzo ball soup

A confession: In spite of my current, ongoing, seeming-like-it-will-never-ever-end condition, I don’t like traditional chicken soup. Obviously, boasting such sacrilege, I am undeserving of your sympathy. Obviously, this is why, four days in, I am still on the sofa on my second box of tissues, chugging down my 20th Brita pitcher of water, my nose as red as a rail-thin starlet at 4 a.m., the bitterness of having a SuperBowl party of one only slightly mitigated by the fact that the Giants triumph–I do not embrace everyones’ grandmother’s sworn-by home remedy.

Recipe

candied grapefruit peels

This all started with Homesick Texan. No wait, this all started with last year’s orangettes, to this day one of the most popular posts on this site. No wait, this all started with a lifelong (can you say that? when you’re just 31?) love of grapefruits. My favorite way to eat them is the same exact way my mom showed me, halved in a bowl with each section loosened with a arched, double-serrated grapefruit knife. First, I’d pop all of the sections into my mouth in probably under two minutes flat. But then, then came the “grapefruit soup,” I’d call it. Mom would help us scrape all of the residual grapefruit bits into the bowl, then squeeeze every last bit of juice, discard the empty shell of a peel and this, this my friends is the best grapefruit juice you’ll ever drink in your life. You must drink it straight from the bowl. I could live on it, and it alone.

Recipe

rigatoni with eggplant purée

Seeing as I am never short of opinions on anything–most especially when it comes to the many Food Network chefs that so often grace my television set (Alex calls the Sunday noontime shows my “stories”) I can’t believe I haven’t said a single word about Giada. Let me redress that right now: I really want to like her — and no, not in the way that my husband might (busted!). I’ll see her cooking something and it always looks pretty good and like it could be tasty, but I so rarely feel the need to make it myself because I’m not convinced that, say, adding mint to a basil pesto is going to make it more interesting or that adding crushed almond cookies to an ice cream sundae for an “authentic Italian flavor” is any of the things described. Does this actually improve it, or just make it different?

Recipe

key lime cheesecake

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!

Recipe

leek and swiss chard tart

What’s on your list? You know, the running one you keep in your head, in a series of Post-It notes spread across all surfaces of your life, or if you are particularly ~~scary~~ kooky, on a spreadsheet? Me, I’ve got several lists. There’s the Apartment Want This list, because, oh, how I covet the home furnishings; the Go Here list, which holds my in- and outside NYC destination dreams; the Read This list, which I pretty much avoid, and the Listen to This list with all of the music I would like to download and shake my booty arrhythmically to were I not fascistly opposed to DRM.

Recipe

anything-but-clementine clafoutis

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.

Recipe

coleslaw and mac-and-cheese redux

Since the beginning of 2008, there has been one eensy change after another: we’ve bought some new furniture, so our living room looks largely different. I’ve changed both my work and personal computers, so finding files, editing pictures and even, say, learning control-alt-delete in Mac-ese has been a time-consuming task. We’ve (mercifully) switched gyms to one with–get this–a pool, thus I think I’ve spent a good amount of the last week (blissfully, kickily) underwater. And at work–yes, the place I hang out when I’m not having more fun with you–I’ve taken on a whole new coverage area, which while much more interesting for me seems to mean that work takes at least an extra hour each day, and that dinner at 9:45 p.m. doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. Last but in no way least are all of these major site changes we’ve been trying to put together in our ‘free’ (ha) time, including the one that, most unfortunately, took the site offline on a day I had no time to address it.

Recipe

fried chicken

Did you miss me? We here at the smittenkitchen are terribly sorry about this week’s downtime; I’ll do better to warn you (oh, and myself) next time. However, it was all in the name of, in Martha Stewart parlance, a “very good thing” which is a long-overdue migration from a hosting system whose customer service was nonexistent and whose servers we’d apparently long outgrown to a new, shiny and already more helpful one. There are still a few kinks being worked out, and there are still people (probably about one-third of you) for whom this site is not fully back up, but by the end of the weekend this will hopefully just be a blip on the radar screen of the complicated world of DNS propagation.

Recipe

chicken caesar salad

[2018 Update: I’d never have seen it coming in 2008, but this recipe has become a star of our meal routine, especially in the summer, when we can grill the chicken, or when we are coming off week of heavier foods. The kids like crunchy lettuce and grilled chicken; throwing in croutons seals the deal. We often put it out unassembled so they can make their own bowls. So, I’ve given it a refresh with tighter recipes and more details.]

It has been almost a year since I told you that I don’t like boneless, skinless chicken cutlets, I never had and I never would. Furthermore, I did not understand the American obsession with them (in sandwiches! on pizza! in pasta! on salad! in 54-packs at Costco!). “They have the texture and excitement of pressed sawdust,” I believe were my exact words, and even though I knew I was in a distinct minority on this, I knew I couldn’t rest soundly until I got it off my chest.