la crème de la crème, literally

Today, I was innocently going about making ice cream for a little project* and I noticed, as I often do, that the pull-seal under the round spout of the heavy cream container I was using had a film of thicker cream underneath it. I know that cream can sometimes separate a little but do you know what I’ve never done? I’ve never fully opened up the carton and looked within. Had I, I’d have discovered tablespoons of thick cream lining the carton at the top that gentle shaking hadn’t loosened, the kind of thing that in another time, one of our grandmothers might have spooned this off of the fresh milk delivered in glass bottles into their coffee (siiigh). A normal person might have said, “Huzzah! Look at all those calories I never ingested after all!” but not me; I was devastated. Think of how much richer our whipped and heavy cream confections could have been over the years if we knew this was lurking? La crème de la crème is a thing that literally exists, and most of us have been missing out on it.

So, for now on: When using heavy or whipping cream, open up the carton in full, and scrape any thicker cream that may have separated into whatever you were making. Not all brands** may have this, but if it’s there, as a rule, nothing used to describe “the best of the best” should ever be missed.

* A lie, by the way, ice cream is not innocent and the project isn’t tiny, so eat all the vegetables you can this week before I set it upon you, hopefully in a week’s time.

** I was using Organic Valley brand heavy cream.

Recipe

slow-and-low dry rub oven chicken

Five years ago, I fell in love with dry-rub barbecue. Prior to the summer of 2008, I naively believed that the only way to make ribs deliciously on the grill was to mop them with copious amounts of a wet, tomato-based barbecue sauce. I know, I know, silly Deb, but what can you really expect from a Yankee?

Recipe

peach and pecan sandy crumble

If you think about it, isn’t it strange that we’ve nominated pie as our iconic summer dessert? Do understand, I say this as someone who frequently daydreams about going around the country and teaching people to make pie with a bare minimum of fuss, because I think the only thing standing between you and someone who effortlessly throws pies together because you heard someone was coming over is someone talking you through it once or twice… But I will also fully admit: pie is a pest. It requires very cold fat to be carefully worked into a floury mix until the pieces are exactly the right size. Too small, your crust is flat and crunchy. Too big, butter pools out and burns, leaving sad, tough flakes for crust. Too warm, the bits go small and absorb into the flour. Too cold, good luck rolling it out! And before you even know if the trouble will be worth it, you’ve got to roll out your crust with no holes or tears or your fruit filling will leak through and permanently glue pie-to-pan. And the fruit! Too thick, your pie cuts freakishly like Jell-O; too thin, it spills out everywhere, leaving a hollow crust in its wake. And don’t even get me started on lattice-tops. They’re for really sick people.

Recipe

pickled vegetable sandwich slaw

If you’re one of those people who saw the word “pickled” in the title and said “Ugh, no, sorry, not for me,” do know, I was the same not too long ago and encourage you to fight the good fight for as long as you can, because once your tastes cross over to the vinegar side, there’s little going back.

Recipe

espresso granita with whipped cream

One of my favorite desserts on this planet (yes, we’re going for High Melodrama today, also, it’s that wonderful) is affogato, which translates from Italian as “drowned.” The lucky drowner is top-notch vanilla gelato, and it is draped in a single shot of freshly-pulled espresso. I see you arching your eyebrows and you are full of questions, aren’t you? Isn’t that horribly bitter? Doesn’t it melt the ice cream? How can it be your favorite dessert if it has neither butter nor chocolate with it? All are legitimate concerns but the thing is, when it’s done right — and there really is a magical balancing point between the volume of ice cream and the amount of espresso, that is, sadly, rarely achieved — the resulting mess is a semi-slumped mound of cold and sweet vanilla cream with a trench of faintly bitter latte around it. It is the ultimate grownup dessert — sure, you get the ice cream you’ve been angling for after dinner since you were 3.5, but you also get a bracing hit of espresso, just enough to keep you up past your bedtime, you know, when all the fun begins.

Recipe

bowties with sugar snaps, lemon and ricotta

So, I didn’t really know how to tell you this earlier, but we’ve gone to roam. I mean, we are in Rome, here, for a week and a half. Why so long? Why Rome? Does it even matter? The itch for travel that was more than an overnight book trip to one city or another was intense, as I remember a time pre-kid when we used to go places all of the time, just following the promise of cheap airfare passable-enough hotels to Vienna and Prague and Paris, just because. But we were scared of travelling with a three year-old because I don’t want to wreck the reputation of the one that’s been assigned to us, but you see, as normal as this makes him, he doesn’t always listen. Sometimes he yells? He’s not so good at airplanes. Or fancy restaurants. But I knew there would be a point where the inconveniences incurred by travelling with a preschooler would feel less of a burden than spending another minute taking a serious family vacation somewhere we’ve always wanted to study up close, to linger in long enough that it might almost feel routine after a few days, and here we are. At last.

Recipe

rhubarb cream cheese hand pies

A few weeks ago, I retold the sad tale of the late rhubarb meringue tart that met its end when it slid off the plate and managed to coat nearly every part of the open fridge I’d intended to put it into with smears of curd, puffs of meringue and crust of crumbs. Rhubarb, although not to blame, and I took a break after that, and it might had continued longer had I not been haunted by an Instagram commenter (hi!) who urged me to try my hand at a rhubarb cream cheese danish. I imagined the tart pink rhubarb against a lemony slick of cheesecake, enveloped in a puff of orange-scented pastry and I could not bear it.

Recipe

lobster and potato salad

One of the aspects of my personality that I should probably be less proud to admit to is that I can be a tad bit lazy. I often consider doing many things when I could be doing fewer things a bother. Much praise may be given these days to the pursuit of busyness, and days jam-packed with frenetically fun activities, but I’m more protective of time that could be spent daydreaming/staring slack-jawed into space and letting disparate thoughts knit together in my head.

Recipe

two classic sangrias

Last Friday, we had 17 people over for dinner. No, we haven’t moved to a larger apartment. No, my kitchen hasn’t grown to the size of a normal one (though some mornings I tiptoe in, hoping it will surprise me). No, I hadn’t really expected almost all of my friends to be able to make it when I invited them, but I wasn’t the least bit sad when I found out they’d all come, mostly because my vision of the ideal apartment gathering resembles the party scene from Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And boy, we get closer every time.

Recipe

greek salad with lemon and oregano

Recently, I attempted to roughly outline the parameters of the gap between the recipes you see here on this site and what I might have made for dinner last night. In the first category, we’ve got words like aspirational and exceptional or unusual and best in category or just seriously we all need to make this right now. It’s fun, noteworthy stuff. Sure, it’s also our dinner, you know, on the days such exciting things come to pass in my kitchen, but it’s the second category — staples, comforts and easy wins, things that miraculously make all three people around the table happy at the same time — that dominate our table the rest of the time.