white bean roasted red pepper dip

Today is Alex and my second anniversary.

Some longtime readers might remember that Alex and I met through our blogs–yes, we both used to whine publicly about our laughably bad dating lives and, yes, are really glad that phase has passed. Some newer readers might demand to know why they haven’t been privy to this information and the truth is, though Alex and I have been together for almost three years, I still haven’t found a non-awkward way to say “We met on the internet.” What usually happens is that I try to reduce my own discomfort with the way it must sound by, well, making it sound much worse: “In a chat room!” I’ll add, and then “About kittehs!” and then “No, wait! About polyandry!” Once big mouth strikes again, I can’t shut her up and I talk myself into a deeper and deeper hole: “Just kidding! We met on JDate!” “I mean, through friends!” “Uh, at summer camp!” Without fail, just as my blathering really hits rock-bottom–“Actually, he was stalking me. Isn’t that cute?”–it hits me that the truth, well, it might actually be better than the alternative.

Recipe

double chocolate torte

My in-laws had their 35th anniversary this past week, and if you’ve been taking notes up until now (though why would you) you can imagine that this only created one requirement whichever dessert I brought to a barbeque this weekend: chocolate. Also, if it could have chocolate on top of that chocolate, it would be good too. And did we mention chocolate? Because we’re really into chocolate, and no amount of chocolate would be too much. This guy I married, who thinks that there are few higher kitchen callings than a chocolate-crusted, ganache-coated cheesecake with cubes of brownies inside? He didn’t develop this obsession in a vacuum.

Recipe

stuffed rond de nice squash

Do you RTFR? I used to. I would run through every word of a recipe, then reread it twice to really get in under my skin, create a shopping list and mentally time the dish so I’d know exactly when it would be ready. I’d prep ingredients and place them in little bowls along a spotless mise. We never ate dinner at 10 p.m.

Recipe, Tips

smoke-roasted stuffed bell peppers

Whoops! I hadn’t meant to abandon you like that, we just didn’t have internet connectivity on our last two days of the trip. It was like 1999 or something. I got the shakes. So, where did we leave off?

Recipe

napa, days two & three

In honor of our long weekend in Napa–you know, the trip that you won for us–I have done the unthinkable and brought the laptop in hopes to share snippets throughout our trip. Should we ever leave California, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled cooking next week. But I’m not making any promises.

Recipe

napa, day one

Recipe

plum-almond tart

Even haiku-writing food bloggers get in ruts. We fall back on our old crutches–overused commas and em-dashes. We get lazy with our descriptions, referring to too many things as “awakening,” “a revelation,” “succulent,” and/or “meltingly tender.” Cute turns twee as growing things become “veggies” and delicious is replaced with “yummy.” And find that all of our posts follow the same predictable pattern–there was a previous belief, an eye-opener, a tried-it-at-home and a happily-ever-after with a recipe on top. Fine, I’m just talking about myself, but how am I to grow without owning up to my bad habits?

Recipe

summer loving

Oh, you know me, Miss Always Needing the Next New Thing, Miss No, I Don’t Want To Make That Flawless Recipe That We Loved Again, I’ve Already Made It. But this Sunday, the Union Square Greenmarket got the better of me, and I dug into the recipe archive and admitted that there were three recipes that if not made again, it would be a crying shame. And there will be no crying in the Smitten Kitchen, okay? (Not when there is enough shame about what ever happened to those leftover brownie bits from Friday, ahem, at least.)

Recipe

brownie mosaic cheesecake

Alex’s birthday was Friday, and if there is one thing I think we all know by now about my sous-chef, assistant photographer, sometimes (coughoften) dishwasher and starry-eyed compatriot is that he is the true chocoholic in this family. There is rarely a dish, from strawberry tarts to banana bread, raspberry-filled sandwich cookies to bretzel rolls that he does not insist could be improved by the addition of chocolate. Or cheesecake. Or brownies. But mostly chocolate.

Recipe

mixed bean salad

Adding to my infinite list of gastronomical oddities–I consider meat a side dish, cilantro tastes like dirt to me, I don’t drink tea and the only seafood I can stand is mussels–Alex and I finally ate at Mario Batali’s heroical West Village gastropub, The Spotted Pig, two weekends ago and all I’ve been able to talk about since were the salads.