mighty russian morsels

Bored of tapas? Over at NPR, I have a guided tour of Russian hors d’oeuvres, called zakuski, each as unsubtle, garlicky and brined as you should expect from my husband’s pickled-crazed people. It includes recipes for my mother-in-law’s famous eggplant caviar, Georgian kidney bean salad, salted mushrooms and the most complex, flavorful best black bread I have ever eaten. I hope you love it as much as we do.

Elsewhere: Mighty Russian Morsels

Recipe

italian bread

A few weeks ago, in my ninth entry into my bread category, I expressed my desire to take this whole yeast/flour/water/tada! thing a step further, and begged for some cookbook guidance. At the end of it, with almost equal votes for Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Bread Bible and Peter Reinhart’s Bread Maker’s Apprentice, I was still torn, changing my mind back and forth until the final seconds of my order, eventually settling on the latter. On the day it arrived, I tore into it, certain that something would jump right off the page, and I’d be up to my elbows in flour, once again, that night. Instead, the opposite happened—I froze with terror. Bigas and poolishes and oh my god, all of these steps and seriously, are there any breads you can make in just a few hours and really, it was very humbling. And just like that, my fairy godmother of cookbooks found a way to deposit Berenbaum’s tome on my front step, equally intimidating. I was certain that I was completely over my head, silly to think that taking something one step further wouldn’t be such an involved process. What did I think it would be? One, two, three and then you’re Poilane?

Recipe

strawberry rhubarb pecan loaf

I should apologize for the lewdness of this title—or perhaps you should, for that gutter mind—but I’ve always been endlessly amused by the “put some South in your mouth” logo painted on the wall of the Carolina BBQ joint and frat-boys-living-out-their-glory-days haven, Brother Jimmy’s. Really, it’s just about the only thing I enjoyed about the place the innumerable times a certain ex-boyfriend of mine with a ACC basketball bent dragged me there under duress or pleading. The bar’s menu consists things like fried pickles, green tomatoes and corn fritters and something frightening called a “flaming pig pick,” and while I am not one to argue that these are indeed Southeastern flavors, my associations have always been in sweeter, homier places: berry pies, cobblers and pretty much anything that has known, been adjacent to or looked at a pecan in it’s life.

Recipe

sav’h

Every time, and really, it’s never often enough, that I escape the ankle-deep slush and relentless face-paralyzing gusts of wind that New York City is so fond of thrusting at us for warmer climates, I’m always bewildered when I arrive. Wait, it is spring here? It’s usually like this? Did the weatherman just say to take out your winter coat because it’s going to be 50 today? And then, there’s always the great undressing, so much less exciting than it sounds unless you were me on Saturday, stepping outside without a sweater, tights, tall boots, scarf, hat, gloves and thick down jacket for the first time in months, light as a feather, happy as a clam, albeit with the skin cast of someone who had just crawled out from under a rock. Ah sunshine. How we’ve missed thee.

Recipe

spiced cauliflower and potatoes + more

Considering that I was on a two year extended Indian cooking kick before I started this site, I find it odd that I have included but one Indian-spiced recipe in the time since. I’m not sure if others do this, but I tend to go in and out of food crazes — currently, the absolutely only thing I want to eat after the gym is tofu pad thai, which doesn’t sound so horrible until you consider that I hit the gym three times a week, and no doubt reverse its effects just as often. I’ve gone through similar phases with poached eggs (atop anything), dinners of asparagus and roasted tiny red potatoes (only), dumplings, and for two torturous months of Alex’s life, a certain Belgian Endive and Grain Mustard salad of Nigella Lawson’s I fiended for, even first thing in the morning.

Recipe

vanilla bean pound cake

The truth is, I bought my very first vanilla bean only last week when I was making rice pudding. It’s not that I didn’t know how fantastic they are in all of their clarity of flavor and little-goes-a-long way charm, I was just both too cheap to buy them, and too afraid to go down that slippery slope whereby no extract would do ever satisfy me again.

Recipe

fusilli with baked tomato sauce

Note: I first made this baked tomato sauce from Nancy Harmon Jenkins in 2007, after being tipped to it by Luisa Weiss, who’d found it nearly a decade earlier in The Best American Recipes 2000. But despite finding it to be “one of the best tomato sauces I’ve ever eaten,” I didn’t make it again for some time. I blame the fact that I was on a homemade pasta kick at the time and the idea of this being dreamiest with homemade fettuccine got permanently linked. So, when I made this — a friend reminded me that she loves it and I realized it had been too long — in the summer 2017, I was shocked to realize that the reality of this dish is exactly the opposite: this is a 25-minute dinner and one of the better ones in the category.

It goes like this: pour a glug of olive oil in a 9×13-inch dish. Halve a pound of ripe cherry tomatoes and arrange them cut side-up. Stir together some plain breadcrumbs (2007 Deb tells you they should be fresh*; 2017 Deb wants you to know that panko works great here), that you season with garlic, sharp cheese, salt, and pepper and sprinkle them over. Drizzle with more olive oil and bake this for 20 minutes. While it bakes, boil a pound of pasta. By the time it’s al dente, the tomatoes are bubbling with concentrated flavor and lightly browned on top. Mash them lightly with a fork, toss in the drained pasta — that’s right, the baking dish is your assembly pan and serving dish, hooray — a bit more olive oil and fresh basil, turn to coat it all evenly with that same fork and dinner is made.

This method yields the sweetest, most complex sauce. A perfectly reasonable reaction to trying this is to swiftly realign all of your food priorities to a single one: accumulate cherry tomatoes so you can make this as often as you wish (weekly at minimum) for as long as tomato season lasts.

* “I insist that you use fresh breadcrumbs here — that sawdust from a can probably won’t cut it. But fortunately, that’s as easy as grabbing a single cheapo bakery roll from your grocery store, slicing it into discs, drying it in the oven for 10 minutes or so (hey, you’re preheating the oven anyhow) and pulsing it in the food processor. Even the flavor of the most generic roll is miles ahead of the stale, pre-packaged alternative.”

Fusilli with Baked Tomato Sauce

Servings: 6
Time: 25 minutes
Source: The Best American Recipes 2000
Print

While 2017 Deb likes to believe she’s more laid-back in the kitchen than she was when she was a fresh new home cook, afraid of coloring outside the recipe lines, but this is not entirely true. I pretty much only want to make this with fresh, local tomatoes these days but do know that 2007 Deb insisted that the best part was that “you can even make it with those cherry or large grape tomatoes that stay eerily fantastic — I try not to question it — through the winter.” All of this is to say: it works with both but is extra-lovely in the late summer.

5 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound very ripe cherry tomatoes, halved
1/3 cup plain dry bread crumbs, panko works great here
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
2 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino cheese
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 pound dried fusilli (corkscrew) or farfalline (butterfly) pasta
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, torn or sliced

Heat your oven to 400°F. Pour 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in the bottom of a 13-by-9-inch baking dish. Arrange the tomatoes in the dish, cut side up.

In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs, cheeses, and garlic and toss with a fork to mix well. Sprinkle the bread-crumb mixture over the tomatoes, making sure that each cut side is well covered with the crumb mixture. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then the 1 more tablespoon of the olive oil. Bake until the tomatoes are cooked through and the crumbs are starting to brown on top, about 20 minutes.

While they bake — as in, right away — bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until one minute shy of done. (If you can, try to time the pasta so it finishes cooking about the time the tomatoes are ready to come out of the oven.)

When the tomatoes are done, add the basil and use a fork to stir and lightly mash the tomatoes into a rough sauce. Drain the pasta and immediately transfer it to the baking dish. Add the last 2 tablespoons olive oil and mix well. Serve at once, right in your baking dish.

Recipe

vegetable dumplings

In case I haven’t broadcasted this loudly enough in the 114 entries prior to today, I tend to get a little obsessive in the kitchen when trying to find “perfect” recipes. “Perfect” is always some approximation of an ideal that got etched in my tastebuds in some other time and place — there’s salted butter caramel (Paris), bretzel rolls (a Fresh Direct discovery), frisee with poached eggs (Balthazar, 2003) and one day soon, those truffles from La Maison du Chocolat, as my wee Valentine’s Day supply has rapidly diminished. I know better than to try to go back to such a place and expect the same experiences time after time, but it doesn’t mean I can’t have warming fits of nostalgia when I find a lost flavor on my dinner plate.

Recipe, Tips

for beaming, bewitching breads

For months now, my obsession with bread making has snowballed, leaving me eager buy a bread-specific cookbook to further fill our apartment, and my idle hours, with kneaded deliciousness. I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m extraordinarily conservative about the cookbooks I buy. On one hand, it’s a space issue — isn’t it always? — but considering that this hasn’t kept me from buying a pasta-cranker, too many baking pans and, most insanely, six varieties of flours, it’s hard argue that an stuffed apartment is truly a deterrent. More accurately, I find it impossible to make decisions. Berebaum’s Bread Bible? Silverton’s La Brea Bakery? Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice? I always thought I wanted this book, but how can one ever know for sure? Thus, I delay and delay, as if owning two bread cookbooks would be a crime against humanity. (Please, speak up if there is a bread book that makes you swoon.)