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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Recipe

our favorite chocolate chip cookies

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.

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Recipe

crunchy baked pork chops

I don’t know what has happened to me since we were on vacation in Aruba (what feels like a hundred years ago), but I seem fixated on one food, and one food only: Meat. Yeah, I hardly know me either. How could this have happened? The former vegetarian? The person who considers meat a side dish, and nothing else? She who could live by quiche alone? This road I’m walking down scares me. How long until I start craving Bistro Burgers? Gnawing on the bones of demolished lamb chops, then vacuuming them of their marrow? I’ve always seen carnivorous cravings as a slippery slope.

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Recipe

lemon bars

January is always the time of year when most of us get caught up in the winter produce doldrums, fueled by the dearth of flavorful fruit and the overabundance of hard, starchy vegetables. But I find if I set my mind on citrus, I can carefully sidestep most bouts of Farmers Market Mourning. There are few things teeming with more promise of a sunnier tomorrow than sour-sweet piercing members of the rutaceae family, and I’ve got an archive full of margarita cookies, lemon bundts, orange chocolate chunks, grapefruit loaves and key lime tartlets that should assure you that you need not feel that you are missing out just because the peaches and berries have gone into hibernation.

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Recipe

goulash

If you’re like most people at the tail end of this frigid first week of January, you’re likely torn between wanting to “do good” for yourself by cooking healthy foods with your eye on the long-off prize of bathing suit season (no matter how improbable it seems as your fingertips numb after spending only half a block exposed) and wanting to “hibernate” with indulgent food that sticks to your ribs, promising to keep you warm and padded until spring comes, and sadly thereafter.

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Recipe

viennese cucumber salad

My first day back to work after New Years started with my laptop flatlining, having to clean the office pantry microwave after my oatmeal blew up in it, finding myself completely and frantically over my head in a new bit of work I personally requested the week before and a wind-tunneled trip to the new Apple store to gaze at the shiny brightness. In short, I had hoped to be gently eased into 2008, but since that wasn’t in the cards for me, I ended it with a dinner of French Toast. What? Tell me that you’re not jealous.

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