Enjoy your dinnertime.
We are midday through a nice little snowstorm today, a beautiful one actually, with loads of fluffy snow (10″ and counting) and mild temps in the mid 30’s. A perfect snow for a walk in the woods which we may do after lunch. It is also perfect snow for Snow Cream:
Snow Cream
1 cup freshly fallen snow
1 1/2-2T sugar
3T heavy cream
1/4t vanilla extract
dash salt
Stir, stir, stir and enjoy! Multiply and tinker as you see fit.
This is jam packed with red peppers, butternut squash, parsnip, zucchini and eggplant, and feels healthy and filling and cozy. I’m continuing to work through the Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook Plenty and am filled with inspiration and ideas! Let me make this for you soon.
A really nice winter pick-me-up kind of dish here: the barley offers a heartiness, the crunchy celery folded in adds a bite, dill & parsley keep it interesting, and little surprises like allspice and sherry vinegar keep it very bright and playful. The original recipe, from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, called for pomegranate seeds, but I just missed the last batch of them at the market, so I substituted dried cranberries. A feel-good bowl of goodness for you!
What a lovely little dish, thanks to Mr. Yotam Ottolenghi once again. Lightly browned fennel slices, removed from the pan briefly in order to add coarse sugar and fennel seeds, then returned to the pan to caramelize gently. Remove from heat, mix carefully with a touch of garlic and chopped dill, then plate and add goat cheese (excluded here), lemon zest and fennel fronds. It is sweet and salty, tender and crunchy and start to finish took about 20 minutes: an A+ in my book.
These fritters are officially in my rotation! Full of sweet, oniony flavor and light, light texture from various incorporations of baking powder (making the batter fluffy) and warm, lovely spices thanks to the coriander, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon. I altered slightly from the Plenty cookbook but you can find the original recipe here: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/feb/02/recipe.vegetarian Make them soon, or I will make them for you!
This cake comes from the cookbook ‘Jerusalem’ by Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi. The recipe hits all the high marks: great texture & bite, just the right amount of sweetness, familiar flavors (orange & coconut) but with a greater intensity (thanks to marmalade & orange blossom water), yields two loaves (which you will be grateful for) and the kicker: it gets better the longer it rests, so the day after baking and even the day after that, it is still super moist and totally delicious. Great for dinner parties & events & sharing with the neighborhood.
How about a super quick (literally 25 min) and incredibly tasty (has balsamic vinegar ever let you down?) protein for dinner tonight with your salad? A duck breast or two can offer just this: score fat (good, definite markings but not so deep you pierce the muscle), quick braise in bit of olive oil on hot pan roughly 6-7min per side, wrap in foil and put in 250F oven to rest for 5 minutes while you make a sauce, preferably one with a good acid to compliment the luscious duck meat. I personally love cherries and duck, but if someone in your household doesn’t, try a little balsamic vinegar, honey & fresh squeezed lime juice, reduced gently in a pan on your stovetop. Remove duck from oven & foil (it should be medium-rare), add it to plate of your vegetables, drizzling your sauce over and enjoy!
I happily bake gingerbread or ginger cakes all year long, but adding a heady stout to the mix feels like a December kind of thing to do. So after reading a reference to an Irish blog post about an Irish stout gingerbread, I swapped in American made Left Hand Brewery Milk Stout and the results were as you would expect: dark, sweet & delicious. Adding a scoop of vanilla ice cream (ok, or brown-sugar chocolate chunk ice cream) highlights the stout-ginger marriage. May I bake it for you as part of your in-home services? Happily! Please check out my in-home link above. Happy Holidays!
This soup offers the neatest tricks: it is good for you, is easy to make, and has a short ingredient list: butter, celery stalks, onions, apples, celery root, bay leaf, thyme, stock. And if that weren’t enough, when I tasted it for the first time, I thought : ‘oh yes, celery, so lovely and familiar’, but the flavors swirl and show a few more layers and I wanted another spoonful, and then cleaned my bowl, lapped my spoon and proceeded to share samples with a few friends. I am now making another batch this week. Thank you my favorite Dorie Greenspan for this! Here is a 2009 link to her recipe: http://doriegreenspan.com/2009/01/snow-again-soup-again.html
I recently got my first Japanese cookbook and was tickled to have a new list of recommended condiments to acquire. Walking into HMart (our huge and well-stocked Asian marketplace http://www.hmart.com ), one can literally feel transported to another continent in the most wondrous way. Searching for a Japanese soy sauce, I was overwhelmed suddenly by the choices: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese soy sauces, and of course even in just the Japanese section there are scores to choose from. Selecting one in a glass jar about mid priced range, I felt comfortable I had found something my cookbook author, Harumi Kurihara, would approve of (http://www.yutori.co.jp/en/about_harumi/). I also bought sushi rice, sesame oil, mirin, katsuobushi (dried fish flakes), rice vinegar, soba & udon noodles.
Before even starting my first flagged recipe, I had to do a taste test. I had a bottle of a very well-known soy sauce in the fridge and poured a tablespoon of it into a bowl, and in another bowl, a pour of my new one, Yamasa. The one from my refrigerator was classic salty soy sauce. Then the Yamasa: I nearly swooned. It was so clean and fresh, definitely soy but altogether less salty tasting. I had a flashback to my first taste of sushi when I was 19 years old and was blown away. Though I grew up being taught to never throw anything out (especially food), I immediately poured what remained of the old bottle down the drain. I had a new soy sauce.
The same thing happened with my sesame oil. I had a newly opened bottle from a beloved marketplace chain and had used it happily in simple noodle dishes before (read: ignorance is bliss). But again with the small glass bowl taste test: these two items, the old and the new, were not even in the same world. The new sesame oil has a scent that fills your lungs, bold and sweet and utterly lovely.
So, it’s another friendly reminder to be sure your ingredients are not only fresh, but if possible, are as authentic as possible. It can change your whole palate. And probably your onigiri, which are rice balls with ground chicken that are popular apparently with the young and old for their packed lunches and which I will be trying next…
Collier's Market