breakfast
15
Aug 09
I swear I’m not on a buttermilk kick lately, I just have a lot leftover from when I had to buy a quart just to use 3 tablespoons for blue cheese dressing.
As much as I’ve had trouble using up buttermilk, this pancake recipe might just be perfect enough for me to go out and buy it again. I’ve had buttermilk pancakes before, but not like this. They’re thinner than most, and because of the reaction between the slightly acidic buttermilk and baking soda/baking powder (think of 2nd grade science experiments with vinegar and baking soda), they come out impossibly light and airy. Warm, juicy blueberries pop in your mouth just as the pancake melts away into nothingness. These pancakes are not sweet, but you can increase the sugar if that’s your style. Whatever you put on them, be it maple syrup, butter, or (God forbid) Aunt Jemima, these pancakes will shine through with their own complex, utterly delicious flavor.
Make sure not to mix the batter too much, and let it sit for about 5 minutes before you start cooking the pancakes to make sure they get their lighter-than-air texture.
Recipe after the jump…
sauces
13
Aug 09
People tend to divide into two camps when it comes to dipping sauces. Those who oppose dipping wonder why anyone would bother eating something if they are only going to use an overpowering sauce to completely mask its flavor. Those in favor love the fact that dipping sauce adds excitement to even the simplest of dishes. I fall squarely in the second camp, with a couple of caveats:
- I always make sure to eat some bites with sauce and some without. I want to taste my food, but I like the variety that the sauce provides.
- I never smother my food in sauce. Dipping sauces are strong, and a little goes a long way. Besides, the best things to dip are crispy, and overdoing it on the sauce just totally kills the crunch.
With nearly a quart of buttermilk leftover from making homemade blue cheese dressing, I decided to test out the whole brining chicken in buttermilk thing that supposedly makes southern fried chicken so juicy. In order to do this, you just stick chicken in buttermilk and let it sit in the fridge for a day or so. It’s so easy that I successfully completed this step in an intensely mindless state, after working 13 hours straight starting at 3am. All you have to do the next day is take the chicken out and cook it however you like. The theory is that the buttermilk makes the meat juicy and tender when it’s cooked. It actually works quite well.
I opted to just make oven baked chicken fingers (coat the brined chicken tenders in panko bread crumbs, spray them with olive oil and bake at 375-400 until cooked), which are an otherwise boring meal, no matter how interesting buttermilk may be. I recruited the help of 4 easy dipping sauces that take almost no work to make and bring plain chicken to new heights. For a bit of a smoky flavor, I made a mexican style dip with store bought fajita seasoning. Then, I made my own honey mustard (which is literally just honey and mustard, but beats the store bought stuff by a mile). After that, I tried an amazingly simple apricot sauce, and lastly an Indian curry dip with red onions. These sauces are all about contrast: two are creamy and spicy, two are sweet and tangy. None of them took more than 2 minutes to throw together.
Recipes after the jump…
appetizers / main courses
10
Aug 09
I often find myself craving buffalo chicken for no apparent reason. In the heat, it’s the cool and creamy blue cheese dressing that appeals to me, and in the cold, the hot sauce beckons me unrelentingly. Today was one of those days when it was all about the blue cheese dressing. Standing in the grocery store with no idea what to make for dinner, I discovered myself next to the blue cheese when suddenly the craving struck. I wasn’t in the mood to fry up a batch of wings, but the thought of pizza with buffalo chicken, doused in blue cheese dressing had my mouth watering.
I’m sure that pizza dough is quite easy to make, but it’s certainly easier and faster to buy. Store-bought pizza dough is surprisingly good, and because I’d resolved to make my own blue cheese dressing from scratch, I wanted a plain, simple backdrop for the other flavors in my hand–nothing too bold or outrageous.
There are several tricks to make something ordinary into something slightly fancier, but the easiest by far is taking something usually served in a large batch and shrinking it down. This, in addition to the fact that I didn’t feel like making a whole big pizza, inspired me to miniaturize, and my experimentation worked out nicely. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to put together and 12 minutes to bake. That’s less time than it takes to get delivery, and it’s so, so much tastier.
Recipe after the jump…
appetizers / snacks
07
Aug 09
This summer’s weather has kept me mostly indoors. First, it was cold and rainy (for an entire month straight, Don’t get me started.) and I stayed inside to keep warm and dry. Since then, it’s been oppressively hot and humid, and I’ve spent most of my time inside trying to keep cool. Mind you, my cooking has kept the kitchen extra hot, but I sit under the ceiling fan and suck it up, because quite frankly, it’s no better outside.
But every once in a while, we get a perfect warm, but not hot, dry sunny day that tempts me outside with a promise of perfect relaxation. And on those days, heating up the kitchen with a hot stove is the last thing I want to do. In fact, spending time indoors at all seems like blasphemy.
Today was one of those days, and blog posting be damned, I was not going to waste my afternoon chopping, mincing, roasting and sautéing. Instead, I made the easiest, most refreshing snack I could think of off the top of my head, and threw it together in 5 minutes. Tzatziki, that delicious cucumber-yogurt-garlic dip from Greece, sounded perfect, but I wasn’t in the mood for what would inevitably turn into an endless supply of chips and dip. By deconstructing tzatziki, I cut down on chopping and ended up with something that was beautifully suited for a perfect summer day.
Recipe after the jump…
main courses
05
Aug 09
I confess that I have never cooked shrimp before in my life. I grew up in a kosher home, and therefore couldn’t eat shellfish in the house. However, because I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted outside of the house, I was thankfully introduced to a vast array of foods that I would have otherwise never experienced, including shrimp.
Despite certain objections to its menu presence, shrimp scampi quickly became a restaurant favorite for me. Frequently, it was disappointing. Restaurants would add too much butter, too much garlic, overcook the shrimp, serve too few shrimp over a veritable mountain of pasta, or otherwise mess up the dish. Side Note: I’m not really sure I philosophically agree with the idea that there can ever be too much garlic, but it has happened on occasion. But then there would be the times when it was made beautifully. Succulent, juicy shrimp seasoned with garlic, in a creamy, silky, yet tangy sauce, atop tender pasta that soaked up all the flavors so perfectly.
It was these times that have kept me addicted to shrimp scampi, and the hope of recreating the experience at home that inspired me to make my first attempt at tackling the enigma that is shrimp. For direction, I turned to the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook, The New Best Recipe, which I recently received as a graduation present. This cookbook promised seriously well-tested, well-thought-out recipes that would work at home, and I wanted my first shrimp-scampi-making experience to be a hit. Their recipe looked delicious, but I wanted to serve it over pasta, so I doubled the amount of sauce, and halved the amount of shrimp (pasta always seems to suck up so much sauce). The result: perhaps not one of the world’s most original dishes, but one that far surpassed my expectations of the delicious classic.
Recipe after the jump…
desserts
03
Aug 09
Making a granita is a legitimate excuse to stick your head in the freezer for a few seconds in the summertime. It’s also a chance to relive your childhood snow cone days while pretending to be classy and sophisticated. This was the first granita I’d ever made, and it was so simple and refreshing that there will definitely be more to come. All there is to do is blend some fruit together, pour it into a pan and freeze it. No special equipment or skills necessary.
Most recipes call for adding sugar to the blended fruit juice for added sweetness. Instead, I opted to add a couple nectarines to the watermelon, which really brightened the flavor and amped up the fruity, summery feeling of the dish.
Recipe after the jump…
drinks
02
Aug 09
Lemonade is a summer classic. On a hot day, drinking a glass of cool, refreshing lemonade is like being transported straight to heaven. The best thing about lemonade is that it only needs to meet three criteria to be great. It has to be
- tart,
- sweet, and
- cold.
Beyond this, lemonade is infinitely flexible; it can tolerate any number of additions from fruits to alcohol, it can be frozen, served with ice, or on its own. It can be strong or weak. Perhaps that’s what made lemonade stands such a staple of childhood; it’s easy, fast, cheap, and it always hits the spot.
When I went to Mexico recently, I was served a glass of cucumber lemonade layered with with grenadine on the bottom. It was such a delicious and unexpected treat that when I found myself with extra grenadine on hand, I decided to try it at home. The result: cool, classic lemonade with a bright, refreshing twist.
Recipe after the jump…
desserts
31
Jul 09
Biscotti are the ideal dessert because they’re incredibly simple to make, but they seem complicated and fancy. You may have always been content to buy them at the grocery store, but once you make them, you’ll wonder exactly why you were paying over $6 a bag for something that costs well under $3 and takes less than 10 minutes of active time to make.
Biscotti means “twice baked,” and thats what these cookies are. First, a whole blob of dough is baked. Then, it’s sliced and baked again in its typical stick shape. Another advantage of making biscotti yourself is that you can choose how crunchy you want to make them, from moist and crumbly to break-your-teeth hard. I’d recommend against the second extreme.
Here, I use sliced almonds, but there are thousands of variations on biscotti. Perhaps some of them are slightly more difficult than others, but this one is dead simple.
Recipe after the jump…
appetizers / main courses
29
Jul 09
I learned my lesson this time: don’t make things that require standing over the stove on a hot, humid summer day. That said, the final product of my sweat and tears was both simple and delicious, and would be a great meal to make on a cooler day in the summer, when zucchini is pouring in like a flood. After all, there’s only so many times you can stick zucchini on the grill, mix it in with pasta, or add it to a salad. Sometimes, you just need a little crunch.
Carrots are almost the opposite. Ever-present, carrots are ubiquitous yet frequently ignored except as a trusty constant in salads and a crisp, healthy vehicle for dip. While people attempt to find different uses for zucchini (even baking it into cakes to add moisture), the carrot is mostly ignored.
Make the carrot fritters first, because they’ll retain their crunch better than the zucchini will. While they’re cooking, you can keep the finished fritters on a plate in an oven set to warm to keep everything hot.
Recipe after the jump…
sandwiches / snacks
27
Jul 09
Growing up, I was never a big tomato fan. On pasta, I tolerated tomato sauce, but preferred garlic and butter (and in my later, more sophisticated years, garlic and olive oil). Even as I get older, some of that still hasn’t changed. I will eat tomatoes, albeit grudgingly, and I’ve learned to enjoy tomato sauce, caprese salad, tomato bruschetta, and all of the finer tomato things. What I hadn’t learned to enjoy was tomatoes on sandwiches.
Until now. These tomatoes are perfect. Roasting gives them sweetness, and also levels the playing field a bit for off-season tomatoes. This means that you don’t need to resign yourself to mealy, flavorless tomatoes in the dead of winter (unless you’re committed to buying local, in which case you might still have some problems). The marinade soaks into the tomatoes, making them melt in your mouth with a rush of fresh, herbaceous, garlicky, sweet tanginess unmatched by anything I’ve ever eaten before.
In short, I love these tomatoes. They’ve officially made a tomato convert out of me.
Recipe after the jump…
