recipes
photo: sally schneider
Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…
I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.
That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…
The basic method is simple… read more…
01.27.12 |
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in celebrations, copy this!, d-i-y, entertaining, food, how-to, recipes, strategies |
photo: maria robledo
For all the wonderful ice creams that are commercially available, I find myself turning to a simple approach I devised years ago for whipping up vividly-flavored tropical fruit ice creams with much less cream and sugar than usual. When pureed, ripe bananas, papayas and/or mangos achieve the creamy silky texture that quantities of cream and egg yolks normally achieve. The resulting faux ice cream reminds me of the tropical-flavored ice creams I’ve bought from stands in Chinatown or when traveling in Mexico. They make a great antidote to winter blues as well as a fine midnight snack.
The method is simple: read more…
01.20.12 |
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in d-i-y, food, recipes |
Cobalt Violet
One of the biggest rewards of writing recipes is discovering the pleasure they’ve given people, or how folks have taken the recipes and made them their own. I was delighted last month to hear from reader/blogger Lucinda Keller of Cobalt Violet, who has been making my Chicken, Corn and Pumpkin Soup in Chipotle Lime Broth since she first cut the recipe out of Food and Wine Magazine in 1999. She wrote:
“It is my hearty, go-to soup for fall and winter. You can substitute pumpkin for butternut or another sweet squash. It is also hearty enough to skip the chicken (I usually do) or even make it vegan/vegetarian soup with vegetable stock.” Lucinda adds extra garlic and avocado.
It’s a great winter soup so I’m glad to hear it’s resonated over the years. The chipotle lime broth is a fine thing unto itself; you can use it as a base for improvising other soups – say leftover roast pork, spareribs or chicken with grilled onions… or shrimp with fine egg noodles. I’ve been known to poach an egg in it. Here’s the original recipe and the story behind it: read more…
01.09.12 |
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in community, eating, food, recipes |
photo: maria robledo
With the holidays soon upon us, I thought I’d post one of my very best cookie recipes. Or perhaps I should say cookie dough recipes: in addition to being able to fashion it into all sorts of cookie shapes and flavors, it also makes a great bake-ahead tart crust. Fleur de Sel Cookies, Earl Grey Tea Cookies, Coffee Vanilla Bean Cookies, Shortbread Pastry Lids and Shells for Tarts, and Brown Sugar Lime Curd Tart are just a few of the creations it easily morphs into. Once you know the basic thinking behind it, you can improvise endlessly with it. read more…
12.21.11 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, d-i-y, family + friends, food, how-to, recipes, resources, share |
ellen silverman
We switched over to homemade food gifts for the holidays many, many years ago, and each year we find ourselves in the kitchen with the same tried-and-true recipes. But the repetition doesn’t come from a laziness or a lack of inspiration—over the years we’ve found that our friends and family look forward to these gifts, enjoying the tradition rather than hungering for something new. We’re getting ready to make this year’s batch, and hope some of these recipes and ideas serve you (and your loved ones) well, starting with our favorite: alt-malted milk balls (above)… read more…
12.16.11 |
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in celebrations, d-i-y, eating, family + friends, food, gifts, recipes |
photo: helvetia west virginia archive
I know of very few people who don’t get anxious at the prospect of roasting a turkey. Because the breast cooks more quickly than the dark meat thigh, it is often dry and overcooked by the time the bird comes out of the oven. Nobody seems to be certain of what, exactly, the best roasting method is, whether high heat or low, tented with foil, or roasted breast down.
Brining, submerging the bird in a salt-and-sugar solution before roasting it, is one of the most foolproof ways I know of to insure a succulent, flavorful roasted turkey. And the best brine I know of for turkey was created by Alice Waters, the inspired, inspiring founder and guiding light of Chez Panisse in Berkeley California, from whom this recipe was adapted (and published in A New Way to Cook
.) The seasonings in the brine bring out the turkey’s natural flavor, and make it taste more like a farm bird with subtle herbal overtones.
The only problem with brining are the logistics: read more…
11.17.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes, strategies, tools |
Today we got a Comment from a reader about a riff she did on our Roasted Chestnut How-To from last year’s Thanksgiving. OMG, we thought, it’s next week!. If you’re still mulling over what to make – or bring – for your Thanksgiving day…here are are our greatest hits.
As for the inspired chestnut riff, it’s here:
“Well, nearly a year later and I’ve finally tried smoking chestnuts. I scored them sort of randomly (wherever I could get a purchase on the skin- some on the flat side, some on the round, always a crisscross), soaked them, and smoked them on the stove top over apple wood chips and a few dried sage leaves. It took about 45 minutes before the skin peeled back. They’re delicious!”
(To rig a stove-top smoker, read more…
11.16.11 |
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in celebrations, family + friends, food, recipes |
Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times
As we were writing about Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent, Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas
, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”
It was survival, not any particular love of artisan cheese or the notion of self-sufficiency, that motivated her to learn how to raise chickens, grow vegetables and herbs, make her own granola, bread, perfume and cleaning products, harvest edible weeds, and stretch a single piece of cheap meat into a week’s worth of dinners, until she discovered she could and her family could live on $100 a week.
IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. read more…
10.11.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, how-to, outside, paths + processes, people, recipes, reimagine, resources, resources blogs + sites, solutions, strategies |
photo: sally schneider
We were poking around food editor and writer Jane Lear‘s website, when we came across a trove of great articles, including one of her pieces for Gourmet Magazine, where she was its Senior Articles Editor for many years. Called Transformers, the premise is that with 3 eggs and two lemons on hand, you can make 5 terrific desserts. Right up our alley. The recipe that caught our eye was a Dutch Baby with Lemon Sugar, basically a giant popover with pancake overtones cooked in an iron skillet, onto which you sprinkle lemon sugar for a bit of crackle at the last minute. It’s GREAT, easy and made with ordinary ingredients, our favorite combo. (On our second try, we monkeyed with the recipe slightly; see the Note below).
As we were gobbling it, we thought: Couldn’t this also be great savory instead of sweet? We imagined it baked with grated Parmigiano Reggiano, to make something akin to a giant gougere, an eggy, crispy cheese puff usually made in bite-size portions. We we tried our idea out then-and-there. read more…
09.30.11 |
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in food, how-to, recipes, resources blogs + sites, strategies |
photo: maria robledo
My fondness for French fries is ruled by an idiosyncratic logic that, for a while, made them mostly off-limits. It goes something like this: perfectly-fried French fries are rare even in restaurants. At home they are daunting: hours of fry-o-lator air lingering in the apartment, and a quart or two of hot fat to discard. Because they are deep-fried and fattening, they must be really superb to be worth eating….
Those constraints sent me on a mission to find a way to achieve the divine effect and flavor of REAL French fries without either the mess, ‘fry’-ladened air, or the dietary wallop. Even if they weren’t more healthful, I’d take my fries, made in the oven, over most of the fries I find in restaurants any day.
It took me a while to figure out just how to push my oven fries beyond just-okay, half-too-crisp, half-limp ersatz fries that many recipes yield. The secret: Roast them in a hot oven for most of the time, then turn the oven down to dry the interiors out just enough to be truly fry-like. Use the right potato. And the right fat. That’ll give you a truly fry-like fry, perfect alongside a roast chicken or steak, or to dunk in a soft-cooked egg for breakfast.
Here’s the thinking behind, and a recipe for, crisp, deeply satisfying oven fries with lots of opportunities for improvising: read more…
09.23.11 |
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in food, health, kids, recipes |
photo: sally schneider
Our friend Anthony Giglio is a journalist, sommelier, and the author of many acclaimed books on wine and cocktails, including the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 2011
. He travels around the country leading wine tastings and helping people navigate the vast world of wine, cocktails, and “what goes with what”. He does all of this with a sense of humor that borders on irreverent, often shocking connoisseurs with his candor. A great cook, he is also one of the best dinner party hosts we know – invitations to his parties are coveted! – largely due to his ability to put himself in his guest’s shoes and think of ways to delight them from the moment they walk in the door. (He taught us Mama Lucia’s Insalata di Pomodoro, THE best approach to real summer tomatoes, which he’s dishing out in the photo above.)
We’ve been so impressed by his smart, simple strategies for entertaining that we’ve asked him to guest blog for ‘the improvised life’, starting with read more…
08.29.11 |
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in community, eating, family + friends, food, how-to, people, recipes, strategies |
Maria Robledo
In a recent interview on Nowness’ FB page, superstar chef Mario Batali was asked what olive oils he “swears by”. The answer:
“Da Vero from Healdsburg, Primo Olio from Sicilia, Castello di Ama and Capezzana from Toscana.”
We’ve tasted three of the oils he mentioned and they ARE stunning, as well as pricey and not easy to come by, although worth every penny. A good olive oil can MAKE a dish, literally. Along with salt, it can be the only seasoning you need to turn say, a bowl of steamed wax beans from the farmer’s market, or a tomato or a slice of mozzarella, or a piece of grilled or slow-roasted fish into a perfect, ‘complete’ dish.
The world of olive oils is vast. Flavors range from pepper to grassy to herbal and on. A fine place to start learning about them is through Zingerman’s, a mail-order company who offers a wide range of carefully chosen oils, that you know will be in perfect shape. (We have tasted many an esoteric olive oil that was rancid from having been stored improperly.) Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More
is a reliable primer.
The problem for many folks we know is that these oils are just too expensive. What to do then? How to find a well-flavored economical olive oil for everyday use? read more…
08.18.11 |
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in cheap + great, d-i-y, food, gifts, recipes, strategies |
Maria Robledo sent us this iPhone photo of a recipe she’d made by improvising with one of Sally’s and marrying it one a friend taught her. The Sally recipe is a endlessly mutable Brown Sugar Butter Cookie dough made with so much butter that it is SHORT, that is, it melts in your mouth. Maria pressed it into a tart tin and baked it until it was golden. Then she cut up some strawberries she’d bought at the farmer’s market – small, sweet REAL summer berries. She put some in a pan with a bit of sugar, a tad of fine tapoica for thickening, lemon juice and water over low heat to “melt them”. Then she mixed the warm, slightly thickened berry mixture into raw berries. She sliced her tart shell into slices, and spooned the berries on top. Voila, a perfect freeform tart. read more…
08.05.11 |
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in d-i-y, family + friends, food, recipes |
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the author of The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table
, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
Even though we’re telling you about this event after it’s happened, you can actually bring a few of the exhibitions directly to your own home. The Smallholding Festival website features four free pdfs with step-by-step instructions for read more…
08.03.11 |
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in celebrations, cheap + great, community, d-i-y, food, garden, gifts, how-to, outside, projects + play, recipes, resources, resources books + zines, strategies |
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