Archive for January 2010

EVENT: Alex’s Birthday
VENUE: Cara’s Apartment, Park Slope
TIME: 2:30am, January 17th
MENU: 7-inch, Dairy-Free Carrot Cake

I may be a decent baker, but I’m not so good with surprises. So when, for Alex’s birthday, I determined I’d make him a cake, I didn’t have the wherewithal to kick him out of my studio apartment while I did so. He claims to have guessed at the nature of my concoction long before the scent of the cake wafted out of my kitchen to the desk where I’d exiled him, eight feet away. It was…

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TYPE: Out-of-Town Weekday Working Lunch
MAIN INGREDIENTS: Chard, Chickpea, No Knead Bread

It’s a rare treat that Cara and I actually get not only to eat together but also to prepare a meal in the same kitchen. Even if the opportunity did readily present itself to cook in tandem, our apartment kitchens are not so conducive to sharing, especially when one of us is on our home turf and in a hurry–or just an only child, like myself.

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COCKTAIL HOUR MENU: Chips with Mexican Dip and Chipotle Mango Salsa; Black Bean Cakes; Cinnamon-Mocha Dulce De Leche Bites
ONE YEAR AGO: Lightly Fried Tilapia with Caper Brown Butter and Lemon-Shallot Orzo

Come wintertime, I really miss the bright, fresh salads that were a staple of my summer diet. When this craving hits, I’ll often find myself resorting to frozen or canned corn combined with some other less seasonal ingredients. For Caitlyn’s Mexican-themed birthday over the summer, I made quesadillas two ways, one with this Curried…

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DISH: My Weekly Bread
MAIN INGREDIENTS: Flour, Yeast, Salt, Water

In November of 2006, when no-knead bread was sweeping the internet cooking world, I was living in a dorm room. I had no oven, no place to keep flour, and no covered pyrex or cast iron pot for baking. Even if I’d heard about the phenomenon, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to do much to hoist myself onto the rapidly expanding bandwagon.

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Phoebe and her bandaged thumb, post exploding wine glass incident

Last week, we asked readers to tell us about their greatest (worst?) cooking failures. People responded with some pretty epic disasters.

Both Sarah and Stephanie had brownie trouble: Sarah forgot eggs and tried to mix them into the cooking brownies. They scrambled. Stephanie, on the other hand, was out of eggs altogether. She mixed dollops of mayonnaise into her brownie batter. It melted, burned, and cracked.
Callie, taking Cara’s older sister Jill’s advice that green onions (aka scallions) were the same as yellow onions, made

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VEGETARIAN DINNER MENU: Free-Form Samosas; Potato Pea Masala; Spinach Paratha
ONE YEAR AGO: Carrot Raisin Cookies

I know a lot of people who love raita nearly to the point of obsession. For them, the condiment can even eclipse whatever else is on the table–flavorful curries, fluffy dishes of rice, hot-off-the-grill flatbreads–to the point where it doesn’t really make sense to classify raita as a condiment. It’s taken off, become its very own dish. Same goes for tzatziki, et al.

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EVENT: Kate’s Birthday Brunch; Winter Visit
VENUE: Salima’s Apt, Flatiron; Whitney’s Apt, London
PARTY SIZE: 12; 3
TYPE: Sunday Morning Girly Brunch
MENU: Creamy Mushroom Tartines with Chive Scrambled Eggs; Lemony Smoked Salmon Scramble

I’ve been cooking for others a lot lately, but for whatever reason, the occasions seem to have fallen more and more before the hour of 1 o’clock in the afternoon. And when faced with a crowd, large or small, after just having rolled out of bed, there’s nothing I would rather make than…

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EVENT: New Year, New Cold
TYPE: Healing, Small Kitchen Friendly
MAIN INGREDIENT: Chicken Thighs

I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions this year. I was too sick to: I woke up on the morning of Friday, January 1st with a throat that felt like it was closing in on me. This progressed, on January 2nd, to sinus pain and a headache, on January 3rd to a nose that wouldn’t stop running, and on the 4th to a permanent feeling of having to sneeze but being unable to, with the result that my eyes just teared all the time. It was not the best conditions in which to start a new year.

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MENU TO HERALD IN A NEW YEAR: Merguez Sausage with French Lentils; Beet and Arugula Salad; Kourabiedes

ONE YEAR AGO: Celeriac Frittata

I’d been wanting to make these cookies for a while. In many ways, they’re quite similar to the Snowballs, that confectioners sugar-coated ball of pecan goodness. Both cookies are based on nuts and flour, and both have a minimal amount of sugar in the dough; the sweetness comes from layers of confectioners sugar sifted over the cookies as soon as they are out of the oven. As soon as I began to

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Raspberry Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting
Adapted from Rose’s Heavenly Cake
Makes 1 two-layer cake

This cake is really cool because the raspberries cooked in the middle of each layer make it resemble a four-layer cake when you’ve only made two.

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