Recipes

Somehow, this week morphed into breakfast week, so I figured I’d just run with it (in spite of barbecue being a more apt theme). I’m the type of person who needs breakfast to wake up. Coffee is essential. But breakfast forms the other part of my 7am equation.

Unlike at lunch or dinner, at breakfast I’m content to eat the same meal again and again, at least for a time. So far in 2013, I’ve been devouring multigrain porridge, made with plenty of whole milk and a good pour of maple syrup (pictured above). Before that, the open-faced fried egg sandwich had been satisfying me week in and week out. Before that came a phase where perfect grilled cheese sandwiches graced my plate every day.

And then, suddenly, after weeks or months or years, I’m just done. Eggs are out. Toast is out. A bowl of cereal? Laughably unappealing. And right now, I’m breaking up from porridge, though it treated me well all winter and spring. I’m zooming headlong into a breakfast rut, and I’m desperate for morning meal inspiration.

So, I’m curious, what’s your breakfast ritual? (By the way, if the answer is smoothies, I’m dying to hear about your favorite combinations and blenders. I’m a new-ish convert, and, well, you know about the zeal of the convert.)

Do you get in breakfast ruts?

P.S. A birthday breakfast for days when the morning meal must be super special.

Yesterday, in an uncharacteristic move, I served a pair of French toast dishes for brunch. I made two pans of baked blueberry and strawberry French toast, both rich with half and half and butter. Then I made a third pan of dairy-free baked French toast, that one rich with peanut butter and flavorful with bites of brown sugar-crusted banana. Surprisingly, the banana-peanut butter combo was the biggest hit, and friends gobbled it up alongside slices of bacon, roasted potatoes with homemade tomato chutney, and bloody Marys.

Though I’ve long advocated baked French toast as a brunch staple, I rarely serve platters of the rich, carby main. This is because I don’t love sweet breakfasts and brunches, and the host has to eat too.

But yesterday’s gloom and a desire for ease saw me running home from the supermarket two hours before friends were due to arrive with loaves of fluffy Portuguese white bread ready to be turned into French toast. I loved serving the two variations, and though my oven suffered from being overstuffed with pans of potatoes, bacon, and the French toast, brunch came together and we had a blast.

Also, I though I’d mention that I had never made my own bloody Marys before yesterday. But I’m one hundred percent stirring them together for all future brunches. (I followed Ina’s recipe.) Do you have a signature bloody Mary ingredient?

In a small kitchen, you don’t need a lot of equipment to cook great food. Still, you do need some pots,pans, utensils, and dishes–obviously. In the BGSK book, you’ll find a bare bones list of necessary equipment, but I’ve long wanted to bring you a similar resource on the web.

So we’re going one by one, stocking up our virtual pantries and maybe our real ones too.

Today I want to talk about the mini food processor. I own a Cuisinart Mini-Prep Food Processor. It’s one of the first gifts Alex ever bought me, and it’s a workhorse. I use it almost daily, primarily for all these dips, from pesto to homemade mayonaise. It would be worth it alone for making homemade hummus. I have, however, even pulsed together a smoothie in this guy.

The real reason I use the mini prep all the time is because its footprint is tiny. Even though I don’t have much counter space, I leave the mini prep out all the time. It’s cute. It inspires me to blend things. And there’s no lugging a blender down from the top shelf when I’m ready to go.

In case you don’t believe me that you’ll use this guy for everything, here’s a sampling of dishes you’ll make in your mini prep (pictured above, top to bottom):

• Herby Avocado Hummus
• Creamy Habanero & Tomato Soup
• BGSK Peanut Noodles

I know it’s first thing in the morning. But I want to talk about booze. No, not vodka, not tequila, and not gin. Something sweeter and nuttier. Maybe more like breakfast? Or really, dessert. It’s Frangelico, a hazelnut-flavored liquor that’s about to take my chocolate mousse to the next level.

But first, let’s go way back.

Years ago, I interned in the test kitchen of a famous food personality. As the only non-professional chef in the kitchen, I spent my days feeling like Amelia Bedelia, pouring salt in the sugar jar and spilling sugar on the floor.

Now, there is a lot of know-how involved in being a home cook, like understanding how to improvise meals from an empty pantry or what it means to stretch dinner to feed double the number of guests intended (hint: add potatoes), but not knowing how to handle a hazelnut is one of the downfalls of never having earned a culinary degree.

One quiet afternoon in the test kitchen, we were testing recipes and a chef handed me some extra pie dough to play with. With the freedom to fill my pie crust with any of the kitchen’s gourmet wonders, I kicked around ideas, finally deciding on a chocolate mousse filling with hazelnuts. The crust baked up fine, and the mousse set. Feeling good, I toasted the hazelnuts, failed to remove their papery skins, scattered them across my tart, offered slices around the kitchen, and drooped home after the entire test kitchen staff declined to taste my tart.

“You know you have to remove the skins before you serve them?” the head chef finally said.

Obviously I hadn’t known. Right then I knew, though. Lesson learned.

So when I got the chance to work with Frangelico, a hazelnut-flavored liquor, I knew my recipe was going to be the story not just of hazelnut liqueur but of redemption. Make that crustless redemption.

You know how when you learn a new word, you suddenly hear it everywhere–in books, articles, and coming out of people’s mouths? Or how, when you make new friends, you don’t know what you spent your Saturdays doing before you met them? When I was in school, I loved the convergence of different subjects, how what you were learning in math could somehow become relevant in history class.

Since I’ve been exploring Middle Eastern food, I’ve noticed newly learned techniques pop up everywhere and flavor combinations that first seemed improbable appear completely sensical. Had I missed the fact that you could temper yogurt with egg or flour and use it to make a creamy soup? Is sumac the new smoked paprika?

Yet the more I read, taste, and cook, the more I notice continuity between what I already enjoy and what’s eaten in Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, and Egypt. In fact, the third time I read about that yogurt soup in Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, I realized it bore a similarity to one of the first dishes I ever got in the habit of cooking for myself, a pasta dish I wrote about in In the Small Kitchen, which uses egg, yogurt, and pasta water to create a creamy, slightly tangy, no-cook sauce for pasta. In fact, one version of the soup actually has vermicelli noodles in it.

Taking inspiration from the convergence of an old favorite and a new-to-me technique, I made a 2013 version of my old favorite yogurt pasta. I cut down on the Parmesan cheese, three tablespoons of which has always seemed so comforting, and ramped up the flavor with herbs–mint and thyme–and scallions. I used fresh versions but you could use dried.

When I was a kid, I would perch on a kitchen chair to help mom cook. On weekend mornings especially, my sisters and I could be found flipping pancakes, scrambling eggs, or ducking out of the way as mom pulled hot popovers from the oven. I don’t remember a lot of direct instruction–more learning by doing. Mom made cooking an end in itself, and baking was an activity to look forward to on snow days or lazy Sundays. Eventually, the desire to experiment in the kitchen became second nature.

Later, in high school, we would help mom plan out meals for the week. With long shopping lists for recipes from The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen and Sunday Suppers at Lucques, we headed to the uptown Fairway, then to Whole Foods when the first local branch opened in Englewood. All week, we helped cook.

Our latest cooking project is canning. For the last two years, mom and I have had a date in September to can tomatoes, and this summer we’re aiming to preserve a little fruit, too. She also taught me to love simple things: grilled cheese, chef’s salads, black bean soup. Above is mom pictured making a summertime panzanella one day in the kitchen.

I know I’m a lucky gal to have grown up with a mom like mine, and it made me curious: what did your mom teach you about food, eating, and the kitchen? And, if mom didn’t show you how to cook, was there a mother-like figure who did?

P.S. Mom’s Hot Raisin Bread and Mom’s Chocolate Cake.

The other Tuesday night I did the thing where I invited friends over before thinking about what I would serve them for dinner. Four and a half years after moving to Brooklyn when everyone I knew lived in Manhattan, and a year after I wrote about these Brie and Red Pepper Crostini as bites I could serve to people stopping by unannounced–except for that never happened–we live in the midst of friends close enough to come over for an impromptu Tuesday night dinner. Lucky!

Only I didn’t have much to serve these friends, and I invited them for about a half hour too early to get deep into cooking anything. As I sprinted home on my bike, I mentally scanned the contents of my fridge and pantry imagining what I could whip up, and fixating on certain ingredients – extra asparagus from these, pre-grated cheese from a taco party, a lot of basil from a filming project we’d been working on over the weekend, and a container of the salad dressing I can’t get enough of. By the time I lugged my bike into the basement, I had a plan.

The centerpiece of dinner, the quesadillas, might not hide very well the fact that they were invented by necessity. The ingredients do appear a little hodgepodge. But as soon as you take a bite you’ll see why I’ve made these repeatedly in the weeks since Tuesday night’s dinner. The creamy chipotle spread brings a kick and a luscious richness. As the cheese melts, it glues the quesadilla together and enrobes the asparagus stalks, which are a nod to the season and balance out a the otherwise indulgent mix of ingredients.