Cooking for Others

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my sister in Pennsylvania for snowy hikes, quality time with siblings and puppies, and garlic knots. Just before we toured the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, we stopped at the local pizzeria, which was bustling with Friday lunchers. I asked for my slice, then tacked a garlic knot on to my order.

Especially when I’m ravenous, I like to trick myself into considering the knot an appetizer, even though it rarely comes out of the oven before my pizza. A nice little bit of delusion. Anyway, I didn’t regret the decadence, because the Pottsville knot was excellent. As I ate, two things occurred to me.

One, I should make garlic knots at home. And two, garlic knots are perfect Super Bowl food – but I’d never seen them at a Super Bowl party.

So when folks from Pepperidge Farm let me know about a project to showcase their puff pastry in simple but impressive finger food, I accepted their PuffectionTM Game Day Entertaining Challenge, chose garlic knots from the oodles of recipes on their site, and got to work chopping garlic, herbs, and Parmesan. I was going to make my own garlic knots at last – and with puff pastry, so they wouldn’t be all that hard to put together for football-game watching, aka stuffing my face.

I’m really happy to share this video I made with Tasted Channel, an awesome YouTube food and cooking vertical. The show is called Star Chef Secrets – it’s all about chefs sharing, well, secrets for creating great-tasting food. If you watch, you’ll see me make a favorite BGSK recipe, one so classic it even turned up in the book: Moroccan Chicken Stew. (You can find the recipe here, too).

As I sliced four onions for the camera, I found myself shedding buckets of tears. We had to wait 15 minutes for the redness to leave my poor eyes. This near-fiasco led to my favorite line in the video–”nobody but your cutting board has to see you cry”–which also got me thinking about cooking in private (not too stressful) versus cooking in front of others (super stressful!). If you’re hosting Thanksgiving for a crowd, do yourself a favor and finish your prepwork and most of your cooking before anyone else walks into your kitchen.

And now…here’s the video. (You can watch it directly on YouTube here.)

Also…happy Thanksgiving! As much as the holiday is about food, it’s also about gratitude. Thank you, readers, for tuning in and speaking up. Thanks for cooking BGSK recipes and sharing them with friends. You’re one of the biggest things I’m thankful for.

I’ll leave you with a Turkey Reuben, a dream sandwich for your leftover sliced turkey.

The storm is almost here. All day, I’ve been listless. Which is a crazy thing to feel when your favorite way to spend a Sunday is in your sweats, with your husband, cooking, blogging, and watching Downton Abbey – and then Sunday seeps gloriously over into Monday. Most weekend days that I don’t have to leave Brooklyn, I rejoice. But today, a trip to Canal Street almost sounds appealing. I could even handle the tourists!

Yesterday, according to the supermarket cashier, everyone was stocking up on baking supplies. At Fairway with my friend Essie, people were cranky and buying gallons of water. On our drive back we saw guys carrying thirty racks of PBR and Pork Slap. “Hipster water,” Essie said.

I, too, baked. I made peanut butter cookies this morning – they’ll be the fourth peanut butter cookie recipe to go up on the blog. I played with a Naptime Chef recipe and tweaked it so that it’s Thanksgiving-y. More on that soon. I went for a walk in Prospect Park, but a dark sedan with tinted windows drove by and ordered me out after about a minute. There must have been a cop driving, but all I heard was an eerie voice on the microphone. I turned around and walked on Eastern Parkway instead.

Anyway, for all that there’s been nothing to do, it took me all day to write this post.

Mac and cheese makes me think of being a kid and eating dinner when my dad was out. He didn’t like cheese (except for mozzarella on pizza and chicken parm), and so we’d only have mac when he wasn’t around. Likewise, Alex and heavy dairy products. He went hiking with friends over Labor Day weekend, and while he was out of town, I made this casserole dish of ultra-creamy mac and cheese spiked with prosciutto, peas, and pesto. When the cat’s away… Right?

Even though I bet everyone on the East Coast is home tonight, cheese lovers and haters alike, I thought it seemed like a cozy, pantry-friendly dish to share. Have fun staying in! And if you think of any hilarious ways to avoid cabin fever, please share.

For a long time, I thought a lot about finger food.

I ran these huge afternoon teas during my senior year in college where I cooked for 400 hungry students. The two days leading up to the events were blurs of grocery trips and cookie dough and clean-up. In the weeks between events, I’d meditate on ingredients and combinations. Should the sausage in the pastry half-moons be spicy or sweet? Could I pull off frying crepes during the party? Were deviled eggs worth the trouble of boiling and peeling five dozen eggs?

These days, I make less finger food. When I throw dinner parties – for far fewer than 400 people, mind you – I usually spend my energy and money on the main course and dessert. I either skip appetizers all together or ask a friend to pick up some hummus and crackers. Not the kind of hors d’oeuvres that occupy your imagination for days in advance, which is precisely the point.

Happily for my imagination, this main course-centric approach expires right about now. With the holiday season approaching – from Halloween (so soon!) to Thanksgiving (my fave) and then off to Christmas and Hanukkah – cocktail parties will push dinner parties aside. Nothing beats the air of festivity that small bites and drinks lend to a party. Besides, who wants to be in the kitchen basting turkey and mashing potatoes when you could be mingling with your guests over canapés and other little bites you prepped hours ago?

I love how there’s a lot of make-ahead finger food out there. But not all of it is elegant. Enter Athens Foods and their Mini Fillo Shells. The shells are made of phyllo and come already baked into the shape of mini muffins, which means you don’t have to deal with finicky phyllo as you’re straightening the apartment and getting dressed. They’re the perfect vessel for your favorite filling, a filling which, I should mention, the shells will render elegant even if it’s as comforting as onion dip or ham and cheese.

For today, I’ve sought inspiration from Greece, land of phyllo dough. To make these Shrimp Phyllo Cups, I tossed cut-up shrimp (I bought them pre-cooked to save time), with a raisin-sweetened dill-and-almond pesto and some tangy, salty feta. The pesto is as pretty as it is delicious, turning the little phyllo shells into gem-like little bites. A squeeze of lemon brings the shrimp together with the sauce and the cheese – and the flaky crusts.

You can also make these little guys with a shrimp, ginger, and mango filling, and find lots more recipes from Athens here.

I wrote this sponsored post  in partnership with Athens Foods, in order to spread the word about how awesome their Mini Fillo Shells are for entertaining. And they are! I only ever share sponsored content when I really love it. (You can read my affiliate disclosure here if you’re interested.) Athens is also offering readers $1 off a box of 15 Mini Fillo Shells: click here to claim. Thanks, Athens!

You don’t mind if I stick some candles in this tagine, right? Today’s my birthday – the big 28!

There’s lots going on to celebrate: these, dinner out, and this cake from the weekend. But now that I’m in my late twenties (sheeeesh), I figured I should be practical about this whole birthday thing. Instead of a cake or cupcakes or even pancakes, I’m posting about a make-ahead stew that feeds a crowd, keeps your kitchen pretty damn neat, and tastes and smells fantastic. If you’re the type who like to cook so much that she ends up hosting her own birthday party (know anyone like that??), then you’ll want to put this one on the list.

A couple years ago, beef stew graced my birthday menu – so the late twenties haven’t done a number on my tastebuds just yet. What’s great and different and notable about this tagine, made with a big hunk of not-too-pricey American lamb shoulder from a co-op in the Pacific Northwest, is that you don’t have to brown the meat, which saves time and angst and splatters and scents–all elements you can do without when you’re about to host a dozen friends for dinner. Moroccan tagines get their flavor from spices and slow cooking. They act, in other words, like they were reared in a small Brooklyn kitchen.

Alex and I visited Morocco a couple years ago, and after we fell in love with tagines there you might think I’d have cooked them nonstop. But I haven’t – til now. So there’s one birthday wish: to delve into my stock of inspiration and cook adventurously. I think I just told you about my wishes for the year, so I’ll spare you the sweet nothings I’ll whisper to my birthday candles later today.

So happy birthday to me! Having this space with all you guys here is one of the best gifts I could think to ask for. Thank you!

My elbow is the color of baba ganoush. After I slipped on the stairs leaving a friend’s dinner party last week (thanks to tread-less sandals and tiredness from an epic day at Alt Summit) and landed on my arm, my poor right elbow turned the ugly purplish gray of baba ganoush. I’m not afraid to say that my favorite eggplant dip of all time is ugly, though we could call it sexy ugly, if you prefer that.

Now for your baba ganoush to achieve the purple-brown-gray hue of an elbow bruise, you have to go through a couple of steps. First, gas kitchen burners stand in for a wood fire, charring the eggplants on all sides, and putting your cooking soundtrack in jeopardy of  being replaced by the fire alarm. In addition to turning even the most beautiful violet eggplants black–though you’ll scrape off the skin later–this step adds a subtle smokiness to the baba ganoush. That smokiness turns out to be one of the dip’s essential flavors. For baba ganoush is no mere eggplant spread. It has to be smoky, creamy, and rich.

For a while, I’ve been looking for an alternative to the make-your-own taco buffet. And the peanut noodle bar is a prime contender.

I know you’re thinking, is she crazy? Why would anyone stray from a meal that includes oodles of guacamole, chips, and chorizo or slow-cooked pork or scrambled eggs, not to mention the chance to eat with your hands and spritz sour cream down the front of your shirt?

I love the taco buffet. And I love listing the merits of the taco buffet, so I’ll run through them right now, right here.

One, almost all the elements can be made ahead.

Two, it’s beyond easy to accommodate every dietary restriction, without making a big deal of it. Vegans can skip the sour cream, cheese, and chicken. Vegetarians can fill their tacos with black beans. Friends who don’t eat gluten can use corn tortillas instead of flour. Light eaters can make skimpy tacos; hungry guests can feast on six overloaded plates.

Three, you can make your spread as extravagant or minimalist as you have time and money for.

Chicken, black beans, cheddar, and sour cream constitutes a taco buffet.

So does chicken, steak, shredded lettuce, chipotle crema, guacamole, tomatillo salsa, pico de gallo, pinto beans, roasted peppers and onions, queso fresca, and homemade tortillas.

And four, almost any of the condiments can be prepared by a complete idiot, so if you’re cooking with a group, you can always delegate the job of pouring sour cream into a bowl to one friend and grating cheese to another, while you assume the much more important role of taco buffet CEO and grill master.

Miraculous, apparently irreplaceable. But we’re moving beyond the taco buffet, because every CEO has to have a couple of tricks up her sleeve.