2008 - Year in Pics Part I

Homemade cinnamon buns, using Nigella's recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess.


Lunch at St. Mary's in Oxford.



Borough Market, London. It has been a food market since ROMAN TIMES!!



Fruits de Mer stand at Shampa's market on rue Lecourbe. Baffling array of oceanic delights.


Standard Parisian cafe fare.


My grandmaman's labneh doused in olive oil.


How my grandmother serves an avocado. Awesomely good. Sliced in half with lemon and a drop of olive oil and a pinch of salt. A serving suggestion which, perhaps, justifies buying these.


Standard roast chicken, no twine.




Bio bakery, Paris.




Also from Nigella's Domestic Goddess, the chick pea and phyllo pie. I added sesame seeds to the internal mixture.


Decadent dinner of both cheese and fondue bourguignonne with friends.

Yankee Swap Success

Look what I won during our office's "gourmet" Yankee swap:




CUTE! It's blanc de blancs in a can. Happy holidays!

Home-made Granola

Seeing as it's the holidays, I've been making a million and one sinful things, but then I came across these pictures, and in the time of cookies, cakes, puddings, and trifles, not to mention turkey, goose, ham, and turduckens, maybe a little granola recipe makes sense.

This is delicious, easy, and it makes the house smell great. And between all of the foil-wrapped chocolates, glasses of eggnog and stray bits of cake for breakfast, you may feel like something crunchy and wholesome.

Store-bought boxed granola falls in one of two categories to me. There is the fat-free, sugar-free Swiss muesli that spills out of the box like sawdust, and creates a cloud of fine powder above the bowl before you pour the milk. Tasteless.

Then there is Kellogg's Low Fat Granola, chock-a-block with sugar. It is more tasty than the muesli, but so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt.

Whole Foods presents an alternate to boxed granola with their fresh kinds. It is a decent alternative, but I still find it too sweet, and in some cases, very greasy. Oats are delicious when cooked in butter (see English flapjacks), but I don't particularly want it as my healthy start to the day.

The granola I make is somewhere between all of these - not fat-free (but only because I add nuts to it), not sugar-free, and very crunchy.

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla
squeeze of honey

6 cups oats (quick or old-fashioned)
1 or 2 cups of chopped nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, peanuts are all delicious options)

sprinkling of dried fruit to add after baking

This time, I made it with maple syrup instead of the brown sugar and honey.

Preheat oven to 275 degrees. Line a baking sheet with wax paper.

Combine water, sugar, and vanilla in a large pot on the stove. Heat until the sugar dissolves and the water begins to boil at the edges. Turn off the heat. Pour all six cups into the pot and mix thoroughly until all of the oats have been moistened, forming clumps. Mix the nuts in as well, trying to coat them.

Spread the mixture over the sheet to the edges. Bake for one hour or until the oats have gone brown.

Add dried fruit to taste.

Chocolate Chip Cookies - A Story in Photos

My husband really earned his stripes as the official blog photographer the other day. I bring you this story of my chocolate chip cookies in photos.

I have read a lot of chocolate chip cookie recipes in my time, and have even published a recipe as a part of the Curious George 8 x 8 books + activities. I started baking chocolate chip cookies when I was 12 when my mother bought an amazing Nestlé cookbook, and the recipe contained therein was not the Toll house recipe but one containing nuts and oats as well. After misplacing that book, I have spent years searching for a similarly delicious recipe and stumbled upon this recipe inspired by the Doubletree Chocolate Chip Cookies, which, if you have never had them, are decadently gorgeous and usually available in the gift shop.

After making the recipe as written, I omitted some of the ingredients, changed some quantities, and am left with the following:

1/2 cup oats
2 1/4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cinnamon

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts

The cinnamon adds a musky warmth to the cookies that really differentiates them from other chocolate chip cookies (and does remind me of the Doubletree version).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Put the 1 cup softened butter into the bowl of the mixer fitted with the paddle attachment:

Add sugars (3/4 cup brown, 3/4 cup white):

And vanilla (1 1/2 tsp):

Mix until combined:

Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Half cup oats:

2 1/4 cups flour:

1 1/2 tsp baking soda:

1/4 tsp cinnamon:

Add dry ingredients to the mixer bowl:

Add 2 cups chocolate chips:

And 1 cup chopped nuts (walnuts in this case):

This fun article from the Times suggests that the real secret to the most delicious chocolate chip cookies is letting the dough sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours.

So if you have the willpower, wrap it up and put it away!

Or...wrap some of it up for the purposes of scientific experimentation, and bake the rest! My favorite way to bake them is mounded up high, and refrigerated for 10 minutes or so before baking so that they maintain their shape (and don't splodge all over the pan and stick to each other in a big cookie sheet):

Serving suggestion=cookies and eggnog. Yum.

Recipe of the Day

A few weeks ago, I was stuck with that ubiquitous and hugely boring ingredient - boneless, skinless chicken breasts - and was plum out of ideas.

But when I googled Recipe of the Day, it was my lucky day. One of the first responses was this Spicy Coconut Chicken Curry from the Food Network. I used butter instead of ghee, curry powder from a jar, and the results were incredible. This dish is fragrant, fruity, spicy, and pretty easy. These quantities also make a lot of leftovers, so I started packaging it up and bringing it to work.

The problem with these leftovers, though, are as follows:

1. It smells up the whole office and everyone feels like they have something to say about it (generally "Yum, that smells delicious," which is all well and good, but you cannot eat this meal in peace).

2. The chicken pieces, which have been cooked in the sauce, have a tendency to explode in the microwave. Maybe this is not very serious, but it's embarrassing and they do sort of still popple and crackle after you've heated up the dish. I do not want a piece of chicken to explode in my mouth.

As leftovers are one of my favorite reasons for cooking things in vast quantities, I needed a solution.

I started using sweet potatoes instead of chicken. The curried fruitiness of the sauce is a perfect match for the soft mushiness of the sweet potato.

Instead of cooking the potatoes in the sauce, I make the sauce separately and microwave the sweet potatoes according to these guidelines.


Peel the sweet potatoes, cube them, and add them to the sauce.


Serve with basmati rice and yogurt.


It makes a terrifically luscious vegetarian option.

What's in your cupboard?

Inspired by Alice Waters' list of things-to-have-around-to-whip-up-delicious-food-at-a-moment's-notice (from The Art of Simple Food), here's what I always have in the kitchen:

onions
garlic
lemons
olive oil
butter
3 cheeses - hard yellow (cheddar, parmesan), softish white (brie, camembert), really soft white (goat or sheep's milk cheese)
eggs
jams
Nutella
tahini
loaf of Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread in the fridge, which makes it last forever
rice - arborio, basmati (white and brown), pearl
pasta - long noodles, short noodles, soupy noodles
chicken stock - I love Better than Bouillon
sweet potatoes
flour - cake, all-purpose, bread
sugar - brown, granulated, confectioners, demerera or turbinado
chocolate - bittersweet and semisweet baking chocolate, Ghirardelli chocolate chips

Canned:

beans - kidney, black, cannellini, and chick pea
tomatoes - peeled, pureed, sauce, paste

In the freezer:

peas
ground meat (normally turkey)
gyoza
a whole chicken
molokhaya
pitas

Things you can whip up using the above include hommos, full-on chili con carne or vegetarian chili, wonton soup, risotto with cheese, peas, and onions, lemon-garlic roast chicken, pasta con pomodoro, chocolate sandwiches brushed with confectioner's sugar, or these killer New York Times brownies.

What's in your cupboard?

That's What Makes the Gravy Grander*

Towards the end of every week there comes a point when I open the fridge and it's empty. We've cooked all of the fresh food, we've munched all the leftovers, and we're not going to the supermarket until the next day.

Time to scrounge.

Last time this happened, I unearthed frozen Johnsonville brats and a few potatoes. It was a start. But there was something about a plate of sausages and potatoes that struck me as unbearably bland (albeit hearty). I needed to add a little something to make it a meal I actually wanted to eat as opposed to a we're-out-of-fresh-food-so-deal meal.

So I diced up an onion and started making some home-made gravy.

I fried it in a mixture of butter and oil until it was translucent. I threw in some flour to make the roux, and it blackened immediately. I thought my gravy alchemy was all over, that the flour was burnt, but after adding chicken stock, the gravy was an appealing golden-brown color.



To finish it, and add a little tang, I dropped in a teaspoon of Grey Poupon Dijon Mustard.

I boiled the sausages, then sliced them lengthwise and seared them cut-side down.

My husband parboiled and broiled the potatoes, we made a salad, and the end result was hearty and delicious.



Dinner was saved.

*Post title changed! I asked for input as follows:

Ed's note: Um. I know this title [From Bland to Grand] is dorky. And I love myself a dorky title (see Stewed Drupes) but seriously, I need help. Any suggestions? Kthxbye.

Thanks Emma!