Cookies

So far, my only pregnancy craving is chewy homemade cookies. Which is basically a completely rational regular-person craving, so I'm not sure it counts.

I made the snickerdoodles pictured here today because Will likes snickerdoodles and I'd never made any. They're pretty good. I made some tasty, very classic lemon bars last weekend. I made some cornmeal-lemon cookies. But the best cookie I've made recently is a very simple chocolate chip cookie.

The New York Times Magazine ran a story back in 2006 with different recipes for three different styles of chocolate chip cookies: thin and crisp; flat and chewy; and thick and gooey. The flat and chewy recipe is pretty good -- with several modifications.

I'm not really a fan of the underbaked-cookie thing that's so popular recently -- I like cookies that are caramelized and tan and a tiny bit crispy on the bottoms. But I like them to be chewy at the same time. Never cakey. Not too chocolatey. This recipe hits all the right points. It also has kosher salt and lots of vanilla extract, both of which give it a fancy bakery edge. The whole wheat flour is optional, of course, but I like how it darkens the dough.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 T kosher salt

8 ounces (2 sticks) butter
1 and 1/2 cups light brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 T vanilla extract

1 bag (2 scant cups) chocolate chunks

Whisk together dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar in a mixer, then beat in egg and vanilla. Add dry ingredients until just combined, then chocolate.

Chill dough at least 1 hour. Drop onto cookie sheets. Bake at 325 for 15-ish minutes.

Note: this recipe makes a lot of cookies, especially if you make them pretty small, which I do. I froze half the dough and defrosted it the next week; tasted even better.

Another Lemon Goat Cheese Cheesecake

I made this recipe again for a dinner party last night, and it was better than ever. This time, I made the crust out of gingersnaps (two cups crushed up and 4 T melted butter). I also added another cream cheese package because I used a bigger (9") springform pan. (So, 12 ounces of goat cheese and 16 ounces of cream cheese.) It was very fluffy and delicious. The cat was obsessed with trying to get some for herself.

Lemon Goat Cheese Cheesecake

This is a modified version of a recipe from your Luscious Lemon Desserts book by Lori Longbotham, Mom. It was super tasty even on Day 1; I imagine Day 3 would be excellent. Not too sweet.

The original recipe would have made a very tall cheesecake; I split it more or less in half to make it more reasonable. It served about 12.

Crust:

• 1.5 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 6 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat oven to 350. Mix together butter and crumbs. Press into pan. (I used a regular nonstick deep cake pan, which worked fine. Springform would be good too.) Bake for 10 minutes an set aside to cool.

Put a dry deep pan in the oven and turn it down to 325.

Filling:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/8 cup or more lemon zest (I used the zest from 3 lemons.)

Mix together, or pulse in food processor. Set aside.

• 11 ounces goat cheese
• 1 package cream cheese
• ½ teaspoon vanilla
• ¼ cup fresh lemon juice
• 4 eggs

Beat the cheese together until fluffy. Add the sugar mixture, vanilla and lemon juice and beat until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Scrape into pan. Pour boiling water into pan to come halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. Bake for an hour and a half.

My regular New York cheesecake recipe doesn’t use a water bath, and I may try this without one next time, reducing the heat accordingly.

Rum Cake

Here's the family rum cake recipe. I got it from Lily Gaddis in Hawaii.


Rum Cake

1 cup chopped nuts (optional)
1 package yellow cake mix
1 3 ¾ oz package instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup dark rum

Sprinkle nuts in bottom of 10-inch bundt pan.

Mix all ingredients and beat 2 minutes. Pour batter over nuts in the pan and bake 1 hour at 325 degrees. Cool 10 minutes in pan, then invert and remove to finish cooling on a wire rack.

Glaze:

1 stick butter
¼ cup water
1 cup sugar
½ cup dark rum

Boil butter, water, and sugar together for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in rum. Prick top of cake all over and drizzle and brush glaze over cake.

Successful Dessert Things from the Internet

I was flailing a little on Sunday morning before my piano recital--I have a reputation for serving an excellent dessert buffet after the music, and I had made only one measly (well, okay it serves at least twelve people and has a pound of butter in it) chocolate tart.

It's very dangerous to just grab recipes from the internet and make them for guests, but I did it anyway, and these two were quite wonderful. The pumpkin dessert thing is embarrassingly easy.

Nobody ate the coconut cupcakes that afternoon, but as leftovers--which I have spread around the neighborhood, referring to myself as the Calorie Fairy--they have been very popular.

Lemon Meringue Pie

Sorry about the hiatus here. Other things got in the way of cooking and picture-taking.

Here's a lemon meringue pie I made before the break. I always make one for Christmas, and we usually leave it with Lawson's brother, who is a big fan. This year we felt like we needed a little more lemon meringue pie in our lives, so I made one for us to brighten up the late February gloom.

I use the 1997 Joy of Cooking recipe exactly as written (so I won't reproduce it here), and it's perfect every time. My favorite thing about it is that the yolks go in the filling and the whites in the meringue, so I don't have to figure out what to do with leftover egg components.



The second photo is very instructive in terms of the contents of my kitchen. Clockwise from top left we have: a kitchen scale, some Abuelita brand Mexican hot chocolate, a jar of homemade Tabasco sauce, a roll of yellow duct tape, a homemade shelf built from plywood and glue with the aid of the 1970s book Furniture Without Tools, which houses my collection of David Wade cookbooks and leaflets (possibly the world's most extensive private collection of Wadiana -- much larger than that of the Library of Congress), a bread machine, a wire rack with a pie on it, the edge of the dog's wet food bowl, a tin of anchovies, the lid of a small, yard-sale-sourced Coleman cooler (generally used for transporting beer to private social events), 4 lemons picked off the Moore family Lisbon lemon tree in Tucson, a dish towel, a box with a Paypal address label, and an iron.

I did not put these things on my kitchen table. Things just end up there.

Outrageous Desserts

Nobody says "outrageous" any more. Very dated. I may have gone overboard with my dessert buffet at yesterday's recital. After all, the eight students played for only about 35 minutes (everyone's grateful for a short program, no matter how much they think their kid is a genius). Then there's a flurry of dessert-eating mixed with mutual congratulations and feelings of relief and pride. About 25 people attended, crowding into the room like that famous etching of a Schubertiad.

I make important desserts because I want a feeling of celebration. We had two 16-inch tarts--French Chocolate Cream and a Fruit Tart. I also made a bundt cake based on a mix (sorry) with the addition of dried cranberries, grated orange rind, and slivered almonds. And Cashew Cookies with Browned Butter Icing, and a bowl of grapes. Most things got devoured, along with some coffee and punch.

I delivered some desserts to Grandma this morning. I announced myself as the Calorie Fairy.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

The ex-girlfriend of an old friend of mine used to make chocolate zucchini cakes a lot. She would sit in front of the oven on a stool watching them bake through the oven door.

I don't have her recipe. But Clotilde's version is about perfect with just one addition: 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon sifted in with the dry ingredients. I used a springform pan.

I made one a few weeks ago when I found a giant zucchini hidden under a leaf in the garden. Lawson ate the entire cake within about three days and politely requested I make another one immediately. Unfortunately, that was the week the local food challenge started...and because there is no local cacao source, I didn't make another one until late last week. It's almost gone, too.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler

I saw rhubarb at the grocery store last week (nobody I know seems to grow it) and got to thinking about the rhubarb sauce you used to make when Russell and I were kids. I remember eating it plain, slightly warmed, with a spoon. That was just rhubarb and sugar, right? It was magical.

Then, in one of the many strange food coincidences of the late spring, my pal Kerry sent me a link to this rhubarb pie post.

I also saw that strawberries were on sale, and not knowing whether Lawson was ready to handle plain rhubarb sauce, I then got to thinking about strawberry-rhubarb pies.

But you know what? Pies are too fancy, with their fussy rolling pins and optional lattices and pie weights. So I decided to make a cobbler.

My favorite chapter in the 2000 Joy of Cooking is "American Fruit Desserts." It covers cobblers, grunts, slumps, crisps, pandowdies, and apple brown betty. The linguist in me is ecstatic over this.

I used the Joy strawberry-rhubarb cobbler recipe. It has just a tiny bit of cornmeal mixed into a basic biscuit dough. I used white whole wheat flour instead of white flour. And I made rough blobby chunks of dough the way you used to instead of rolling out the biscuit dough or something else all fancy.

It was delicious. Lawson, who found his one previous run-in with rhubarb pie kind of weird, loved it. So now I have to find out if I can grow rhubarb down here in South Carolina.

Real Plum Pudding

I mean that it's made with real plums, not dried fruit and suet. This may be Swedish in origin, or my grandmother may have found the recipe on the back of a can of plums.

A child can make this dessert. In fact, I think you and Russell used to do it. As for the sauce, it's so easy it's magical. You can use rum or bourbon, but Grandma always uses Scotch because that's what she has in the house.

Give a serving of this to even the crabbiest, bah-humbuggy person, and he will begin to smile.

Real Plum Pudding

1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Sift first four ingredients together.

1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 large can plums, drained, pitted, and diced
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Combine remaining ingredients and stir into dry mixture. Pour into greased casserole and bake at 325º for one hour or more, or until set in center. Serve with Rum Sauce.


My Grandmother's Rum Sauce*

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1 egg, well beaten

Combine first four ingredients in sauce pan. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

3 tablespoons rum, brandy, or bourbon

Remove from heat and stir in liquor. Serve warm.

*Actually I think my grandmother got this recipe from my typing teacher. She was a terrifying woman, and because of her I can still type 85 words per minute. I was astounded to learn that she was human and did normal things like cooking and eating.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

This cake is among the most fun foods I've ever made. It ranks with the peanut butter/raisin/powdered milk logs I made all by myself at age 10. It is that fun.

Lawson's cousin was up from Florida for Thanksgiving and gave us a bunch of wonderful citrus, all of which are threatening to rot at once because, try as we might, we have been unable to eat 40 tangerines in two weeks. So I have been looking for good ways to use them, especially the many, many oranges.

I started thinking about oranges and chocolate and how I like the flavors together and would like to make a cake consisting of the two. Not a single one of my cookbooks had a recipe. But when I looked online I found hordes...and they were all British. Apparently Jaffa cakes, which I had heard of, are chocolate-and-orange flavored, so the taste combination is well established over there. And every British cook from Claudia Roden to Nigella Lawson has a recipe for a chocolate orange cake. I read many recipes, a task made difficult by all the volume and weight and temperature conversions, and eventually narrowed down what I was looking for.

I mostly used this one, with narrative encouragement provided here and further ganache research in the Joy of Cooking. My converted and revised version is posted below so you can avoid all the math yourself.

Here's why the recipe is so fun: you boil WHOLE ORANGES until they are soft, then chuck the entire orange in the food processor. The boiling tones down the bitterness of the pith, just like when you make marmalade. And, in fact, Nigella Lawson's recipe calls for a high quality marmalade instead of an orange. But that would be both expensive and no fun at all.

The ganache is also fun, because it's so easy and looks so fancy.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

- 1 large or two small oranges
Pierce and cook in a covered pan with a few inches of boiling water for 30 minutes. Remove to a food processor and pick out the seeds before processing the whole thing until broken down but still coarse.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8 or 9 inch round cake tin or springform pan.

- 3 eggs
- 1 and 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 cup good canola oil (recipe calls for sunflower, which isn't common or cheap here)
- 4 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into small pieces and melted

Lightly beat the eggs, sugar, and oil. Gradually beat in the pureed orange and melted chocolate.

- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 250g/9oz plain flour
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Sift in the cocoa, flour and baking powder. Mix and pour into the buttered pan. Bake for 55-60 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes, then turn out on to a wire rack.

For the ganache:

- 8 oz good bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into pieces
- 3 fl oz or 1/3 cup cream...or half and half, which is what I had around, which worked beautifully.

Put the chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to a boil in a pan, pour over the chocolate, and stir until melted, then whisk until glossy and totally smooth. Let cool to about 90 degrees F and pour over the cooled cake (which I inverted because it was a bit cracked and domed on the top).

Birthday Dinner Party

We had some friends over Thursday for a pretty simple meal: grilled salmon, ginger-scallion noodles, and steamed sesame broccolini. And because it was a birthday dinner, and the birthday boy (what's the adult equivalent of that term? Birthdayed one? Birthdayee?) can't eat dairy, for dessert we had a dairy-free chocolate mousse cake with lemon sorbet and raspberries.

I made the cake the night before, and everything else was pretty easy to fix after work, so it was a good stress-free night. I wish the food had been a little more interesting, but we had fun. It went well with beer and Jameson.

Every time I take a picture of food, Lawson tries to stick his finger in the frame. So I'll give him this one. Let's hope it doesn't encourage him to greater heights of interference.

And as promised, Mom, here is the beautiful platter you and Dad gave me piled high with noodles. I love it.

Easy Almond Tart

Here's our breakfast fruit from this morning: kiwi, white peach, navel orange. I love this time of year when we're overwhelmed with fruit choices.

Here also is a tart recipe to contribute to your ongoing research. It is rather sweet, but I usually serve just a small sliver with some fresh fruit on the side.

Easy Almond Tart

Pastry
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 stick butter, softened

1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 ½ teaspoons water

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In food processor, pulse flour, sugar, salt, and butter until mixture resembles coarse meal.

With processor running, add vanilla and water and mix until dough just comes together. Press into 9” tart pan. Bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Remove and reduce oven to 350 degrees.

Filling

¾ cup sugar
¾ cup whipping cream
¼ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon orange-flavored liqueur
½ teaspoon almond extract

1 cup sliced almonds

Whisk together sugar, cream, salt, liqueur, and almond extract until slightly thickened.

Stir in almonds and mix thoroughly. Pour into prepared crust. Bake until top forms a crust similar to pecan pie, 45 to 55 minutes. Cool completely before serving.

Variations: I love to make an Almond Joy variation on this, stirring in shredded coconut and chocolate chips along with the almonds (a total of one cup).

Apple Tart

This weekend I experimented with tarts for a piece I am writing for the Free Times Entertaining section. It's more complicated than what I want to put in the article, but I muddled my way into a really good bourbon-apple tart with vanilla pastry cream.

I wanted to make an apple tart. I didn't want to use cinnamon, because I wanted to get away from the classic apple pie flavor. And when I asked Lawson whether he wanted apple tart with or without a bottom layer of pastry cream, his response was emphatic: more, yes, all of it, please.

I used the simplest tart crust recipe -- the one you posted under Blueberry Tart, actually -- and let it cool. I filled it a vanilla pastry cream using whole milk and 4 egg yolks, though honestly I think a simple cornstarch-based vanilla pudding would have been even better. I chilled that while I sliced up three Golden Delicious apples, two of them peeled, and sauteed them in 3 tablespoons of butter and half a cup of sugar until they were gooey and translucent. I arranged the slices on top of the pudding, then added some bourbon to the pan and reduced all that a little bit before glazing the tart with it. It was so good. I only wish there were someone besides the two of us to eat it.

In other food news, last week I was treated to a fried bologna sandwich from the local Exxon station, unlikely source of pork-based home-cooked local country foods. It tasted, surprisingly, like a good grilled hot dog.

Caramel Coconut Bars

This first picture is Mexican Macaroni, not coconut bars. Last night we had it with chayote, fresh strawberries, and dark chocolate.

The night before, we got some Copper River Red Salmon! We grilled it for Grandma, accompanied by roasted vegetables and a tomato-basil salad. For dessert we had these bars from a recipe I found in the Phoenix paper. Very simple and delicious.

Caramel Coconut Bars

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 cup flour

Combine above ingredients. Spread and pat in a 9x13 baking dish coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.

2 eggs

1 cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup flaked coconut

1 cup chopped pecans

Mix remaining ingredients and pour over crust. Bake 20 minutes longer, or until brown. Let cool before slicing into small bars.

Recital Refreshments and Guisado de Pollo

After my piano students perform in a recital I always put on a dessert buffet for them to make up for the trauma--complete with a lace tablecloth and 100-year-old china. Yesterday's spread included German chocolate cake, cream cheese and blueberry tart, lemon bars, chocolate chip cookies, grapes, and various candies. Continuing with the Valentine theme we had pink lemonade to go with the coffee.

Tonight we are having an old favorite, Guisado de Pollo, which is a Mexican chicken stew. It's light but flavorful and simmers away with a minimum of fuss. I serve it with flour tortillas.

Guisado de Pollo

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
2 pounds chicken pieces (I like thighs)

In large casserole, heat olive oil and brown chicken pieces on all sides.

2 tomatoes, diced (canned or fresh)
2 onions, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 slice (1 ounce) boiled ham, chopped (optional)
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon oregano
2 mild green chiles, cut in strips
1 tablespoons capers, drained
Approximately 1 1/2 cups dry white wine or vermouth
Salt and pepper to taste

Add remaining ingredients, using enough of the white wine to barely cover them. Simmer, covered, for 40 minutes or more until tender. (White meat will cook much faster than dark.) If the sauce is too soupy, remove chicken and boil the sauce to reduce before serving.

Best Caramel Sauce

I'm here today simply to pass on a recipe of my favorite kind--three ingredients and no unnecessary fuss.

Caramel has been near the top of my flavor list all my life. When we were little kids stopping by the Dairy Queen for a treat, I would always order the caramel sundae.

This is from Bon Appetit November 2006. It was intended to accompany an apple tart; I stuck the leftover jar in the freezer and brought it out twice to serve with warm date bars and French vanilla ice cream. It didn't separate or get grainy. I suspect it would make a great drizzle over a dark chocolate brownie.

CARAMEL SAUCE

1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter

Bring ingredients to boil in a heavy medium saucepan, whisking constantly until sugar dissolves. Boil gently, stirring often, until sauce coats a spoon thickly, about 10 minutes. Serve slightly warm.

Roman Food

Last night I made:

- pork chops marinated in rosemary, vermouth, and vinegar and then grilled
- roasted beets with lemon juice and olive oil
- piadina stuffed with sauteed beet greens and garlic
- lemon pudding souffle

Piadina is a Roman flatbread made with a small bit of lard and cooked in a dry pan, like a flour tortilla. You can cook it flat and plain, or make crimped half moons around a bit of sauteed greens and cook it that way, empanada style. This is a Marcella Hazan recipe that I make regularly. I like that there's no cheese or sauce and it still tastes full and rich.

This was the first time I'd ever made beets. I didn't use a recipe other than reading about how to roast them. Lawson was dubious -- he hadn't had beets in years, and wasn't very excited, and I didn't know what to expect either, but they were wonderful. He had several servings, and we both peed pink all night.

Did you know that beets and chard are the same species? Beta vulgaris. It's just that chard is bred for better and more leaves, and beets are bred for tastier and bigger roots.

The lemon pudding souffle is actually called Lemon Pudding Cake in the 2000 Joy of Cooking. It's very odd and light and fluffy -- very delicious. Try it next time you need something new to do with all your lemons.

My giant months-long project at work got cancelled, so I have been enjoying a brief vacation. Tonight we're having hamburgers, because I recorded all day and am starved.

Bad Cooking

I made dinner last night for the first time in almost a week, and it was pretty bad! I had a bunch of broccoli rabe that I needed to use up, and looking through cookbooks and online I found several mentions of a traditional recipe involving broccoli rabe, orecchiette, red chiles, garlic, anchovies, olive oil, and sometimes sausage. And lo, I had all those things, including a small amount of Italian sausage I also needed to use up.

The problem wasn't in the recipe; it was in the execution. I added way too many anchovies and red chiles-- I didn't know such a thing was possible, but the dish was far too salty, and the chiles blocked the other flavors. I think sweet Italian sausage would have been better, too -- broccoli rabe is so intense and bitter that it needed something else for balance. The broccoli rabe soaked up all the anchovy salt and was almost inedibly bitter and salty. I managed to finish off the dish at lunch today, but it was not very good.

Fortunately, I made your lemon bars to go with it, and they were phenomenal. That is a perfect recipe. I used up the last two Meyer lemons you sent, and tried to use one off our sad little indoor tree, but it was large and bitter, not at all sweet.

The proposal I'm helping write at work has gotten huge and scary, and today I found out I might not have any weekends off for the next month -- just Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That means I won't be cooking much. That makes me sad.

Italian Cravings

We planned to take Grandma to our favorite Italian restaurant on Sunday night, but it wasn’t open! The yen for Italian food didn’t go away over the weekend, so I tried to make up for it a home. First we sat outside around the chiminea and had a margarita—okay, that’s all Southwestern so far—but when it got dark, we came in for our first course of prosciutto and melon. It’s rare to get a great honeydew melon, but we were lucky. “Monica’s Pride” from Mexico, the label said. There must be something wrong with me, because that label always makes me think of boobs. With it we had whole wheat focaccia with walnuts, sage, and parmesan.

Our main course was chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes; penne with pesto; and broccoli. Dessert was Meyer lemon bars. I have tried to make a lemon tart with this recipe, but the 9x9 Pyrex works better.

Here are Classic Lemon Bars:

1 cup flour
¼ cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest
Pinch of salt

1/2 cup butter, cut in cubes

Butter a 9-inch square baking pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Process first four ingredients to mix. Add butter and process until mixture resembles coarse crumbs, then begins to come together into a dough.

Press into baking pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until light golden brown. Set aside to cool slightly while making filling.

1 ½ cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs

3 ½ ounces lemon juice
(7 tablespoons, about 2 large lemons)

Mix dry ingredients and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat eggs at high speed for about 2 minutes. Add dry ingredients, mixing just until combined, and then stir in lemon juice.

Pour over crust and return to oven for about 20 minutes, or until the filling is just set in the center.

You may sprinkle with more powdered sugar before cutting into squares to serve.