April 2011
21 posts
11 tags
how not to bake, part one: strawberry pie
I am not a great baker. I am good at approximating a seven-part meal for five people and having it done on time. I am (sometimes) good at successfully cooking something I’ve never made before even in a high-pressure situation. But I’m just not good at baking - turning out effortlessly a batch of perfect muffins just like ones I’ve made a hundred times before, knowing exactly how...
11 tags
minimalist steak dinner
My boyfriend is in the midst of finals for law school, which sometimes makes him a little bit…cranky. I’ve found that the best cure for a miserable-holy-terror-of-crankiness-verging-on-panic-attack is a really good dinner. So tonight on my way home from work, I bought him a one pound dry-aged locally raised boneless ribeye (hey, it’s payday).
I’ve lately been reading a...
5 tags
breakfast, actually
I’ve been breaking my cardinal rule of food blogging as of late, which is to never go more than two days between posts. I have excuses: my friend Mary was in town for a few days, and there are lots of exciting things happening at work that require important meetings and much thought-energy. I’ve been cooking, but nothing that hasn’t been photographed before, or never during good...
9 tags
strawberry olive oil buttermilk cake
Buttermilk is one of those ingredients that you always have to buy for recipes in greater quantities than the recipe actually calls for, and then go out of your way to make something else to utilize the remainder before it expires. I bought this buttermilk for the weekend’s cookies-and-cream birthday cake, and used the extra today for a cake loosely based on this smitten kitchen recipe for...
20 tags
bunny cake & meat fish
Last night we belatedly celebrated two birthdays. My friend Melissa, who lives in England most of the time and recently landed a fantastic new job (yay) specifically requested cookies and cream cake, and I’d found a bunny cake mold on sale for Easter. I tried making my own colored writing icing for the first time and used a ziploc as a pastry bag, which worked quite well and is not to blame...
10 tags
matzo brei & french fried potatoes
I felt like a little bit of a jerk for eating all that chocolate-covered toffee matzo yesterday, so I decided to make up for it by cooking Passover food nonstop for the past 12 hours. Last night was flourless dark chocolate banana cake, chocolate-covered matzo, and chicken soup with what was meant to be matzo balls, but when I learned the mix has to sit for at least an hour to solidify, I scrapped...
6 tags
this is just to say
(with apologies to William Carlos Williams, and to my boyfriend.)
I have eaten the kosher for Passover chocolate-covered toffee matzoh that I bought this morning on my way to work and which I was definitely saving to give you when you got home tonight Forgive me it was delicious I don’t think I’m quite getting the hang of this whole sacrifice thing yet
8 tags
passover
Last night at dinner with my boyfriend’s family I ate liver and onions to prove my cred after he asked if I ‘needed help ordering.’ Last year we did eight days of vegan kosher for Passover together (advice: never try to make vegetable sushi with a potato ricer instead of sushi rice) but now that I’m back to omnivorous eating, this year the biggest struggle will be waiting...
22 tags
short ribs, burdock root, chocolate cake & oysters...
It’s my grandpa’s birthday weekend, so most of my family was in New York to celebrate, which mostly meant a whole lot of celebratory eating (we also went to see The Book of Mormon, which lived up to its reviews). Friday night was dinner at Rosa Mexicano (the 1st Ave location), which despite being derided for having turned into a high-end chain restaurant with very strong margaritas is,...
5 tags
oysters redux
I guess we’re on an oyster kick: must be the warm weather. Again with Sarah, at Double Crown. The Thai mignonette was nice.
8 tags
lunch break
8 tags
the mussel pot
If there’s one thing in the world of food and eating I’m not particularly good at, it’s choosing a restaurant for dinner. I’m a natural pushover, and after nearly seven years in New York (plus a lifetime of four or five trips a year to visit my grandparents when we lived in South Jersey), I still haven’t stopped being overwhelmed by the choices - the up-and-coming...
16 tags
macaroni & blue cheese
We are very serious blue cheese fans in this apartment, to the point where a crumble or smear of gorgonzola or stilton is often turning up somewhere it wouldn’t normally belong: in a breakfast omelette, or a tuna melt, or topping a pizza, or, let’s be honest, in a spoon straight out of the container on its way into someone’s mouth. Comfort food that pointedly turns a blind eye to...
15 tags
bagels & lox
Or, reason #8542 why I am the best girlfriend ever.
For the past week, my boyfriend has been dropping hints about being in the mood for lox. So, each morning this weekend, I got up before him and walked to the good bagel place for a fresh-boiled cinnamon raisin bagel, and had ready before he came downstairs his idea of the perfect breakfast: an untoasted bagel with cream cheese, smoked lox,...
9 tags
care package
I can’t explain the extent to which I adore care packages. This past week I sent one to my parents, who are smack dab in the middle of a renovation that has them reeling and coughing on the dust from the walls coming down around them, and courageously, patiently building new ones (when I was six years old, my dad built our four-bedroom South Jersey house from scratch; seventeen years later...
4 tags
what (not) to eat: for whom the red bell pepper...
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls...
13 tags
focaccia
Yesterday was potluck lunch day at work: my first one, my duty to organize, and, feeling a little sure of myself my first day on the job, I’d suggested Italian food as the theme. I’m lucky enough to work with some serious foodies - professional chefs, people who cook for a living, and eat like it’s their job because it is - so it was understandable that I felt a little intimidated. I refused to...
4 tags
steak redux
Tonight I got home from work and my boyfriend made me steak for dinner, Schatzker method: room temperature, patted dry, heavily salted, and seared for barely three minutes per side. With a plate of boiled spinach and our fork-optional policy fully enacted, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lucky.
(I like to reheat the rarest middle parts of the steak at the end, shabu-shabu style....
16 tags
the monte cristo
I maintain that it’s entirely possible to have a craving for a food you’ve never eaten. I fell asleep last night knowing that what I wanted to make for breakfast was a Monte Cristo, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant: I felt fairly certain that French toast and turkey were involved, and a little research revealed that my hankering probably stemmed from memories of...
8 tags
cookie lasagna
You know when you get out of bed, find yourself in the kitchen and start cooking before your brain’s fully woken up? Half-sleepwalking, half still dreaming, I started making cookies at 9 a.m. before anyone else was awake, and barely thought about what I was doing until my boyfriend shuffled downstairs (okay, fine, bounded down like a puppy ten minutes after me), turned on the football game...
16 tags
five napkin burger
Pregamed the Strokes concert at Madison Square Garden with an absolutely fantastic dinner at 5 Napkin Burger: I started going a year and a half ago for the ridiculously good tater tots (basically deep-fried scoops of cheesy, parsley-stuffed mashed potatoes), but kept coming back for the burgers (the veggie are easily top three in the city, but the cheeseburger for two is my new fave).
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