Thursday Night Smackdown: It had a really good personality 12 Jun 08

John Stewart: the bald spot is growing, but he’s still damn funny.

So a few weeks ago I randomly left a comment on a post at Serious Eats, the result of which was my being randomly chosen to receive a copy of Paula Disbrowe’s Cowgirl Cuisine. Paula is a French-trained New York-based food writer who removed herself from the big-city rat race to live in Texas, cook on a ranch and write a cookbook filled with pictures of herself. I know we’ve all wanted to flee our humdrum existences to live a life of leisure surrounded by goats in the Texas Hill Country, where “Texas Hill Country” is read as “Tuscan villa” and “goats” as “Italian supermodels.”

Seriously, there are a LOT of pictures of her in the cookbook. And not pictures of her cooking or engaging in Texas-type activities like riding horses, erecting homemade border fences or driving to Mexico for cheap over-the-counter pharmaceuticals; that would make too much sense. Just pictures of her standing around, lying in fields and, I shit you not, stripping down to go skinny dipping (don’t get excited, you can’t see anything).

Anyway, despite all the auto-photography and the terrible, terrible title, I bring you: shrimp-stuffed poblanos with walnut sauce and classic cornbread.

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for….pie. 04 Jun 08

Save the fork - there’s pie!

I’ve been seeing pictures of this strawberry pie from the most recent issue of Gourmet all over the place lately, and it calls to me like a siren. The deep ruby filling. The plump berries. The crisp crust. The billowy whipped cream.

PIE.

I finally got around to giving it a go last night, albeit with some alterations. The whole process was quick, easy and painless, leaving me with very little fodder for a post other than pretty pictures of strawberries, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Thus, in the interest of amusement, I present you with the first ever Mad Libs Blog Post. Get out a pen and paper, call your co-workers ’round call your friends ’round during non-work hours only, and write this post! Maybe you’ll get the real answers at the end! Maybe not!

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A Fuzzy Navel, please - baked, not stirred. 18 May 08

When I’m good, I’m good.

Long before I became fully immured in the foodblogosphere, I was addicted to the archives of Sugar High Friday over at The Domestic Goddess - we’re talking over 3 years worth of sugary, buttery, sticky smooth sweet silky goodness from around the world. Have an excess of figs? Check out #35. Love ginger? Try lucky #19. Wanna get fancy-pants about it? Sugar art, #26. Feeling po-mo? “Desserts in shades of white,” #31.* Dead dentists everywhere are creating elaborate underground tunnels from all the rolling they’re doing in their graves.

When I started the Smackdown, I knew that Sugar High Friday was one of the first events I wanted to participate in. Of course, the first two themes following my crash landing into foodblogland would be pies - which I’m not really into, except for the occasional key lime** - and cooking with candy, which. eh. Ergo, I was excited when Tartelette, the host for this round, announced the theme for #43: citrus.

So to mark this personal blogging milestone, I give you: Fuzzy Navel Upside-Down Cake.

*For the record, I reject food that is extremely po-mo; I prefer my meals to be firmly grounded in the mo.

**To clarify: not into making. But very into eating.

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This post is either about blondies or bipolar disorder. 13 May 08

I took this bandanna off my head because I needed something for the picture and have no cute dishtowels. I’m not sorry if that squicks you out.

Modern science can be a wonderful thing: penicillin, the polio vaccine, tiny cameras that can be inserted into your veins all Innerspace-style, the iPhone. (Of course, I’m still waiting for a cure for AIDS and a rocket car, but I’m sure that modern science is working hard on them.) So I have to give modern science a hand for inventing depakote, a wonderful drug that helps keep me from being crazy. Because the food in psych wards really isn’t up to snuff, so I can’t really see myself going back there. That, and I like my shoelaces.*

An unfortunate side effect of being sane is that I can sometimes be a little tired and don’t always feel like jumping up to make a 7-layer cake for a party I’d promised to bring dessert to, especially when it’s a bucolic spring day and the empty hammock is swinging invitingly in the breeze under the ginkgo trees.** Luckily, that’s what one-bowl blondies are for. They’re dense and chewy and stuffed to the gills with chocolate-y, pecan-y, coconutty goodness, and they pull together in about 3 minutes.***

*I know people have different opinions and different experiences with drugs of the mental health variety, and I deny none of those. Depakote works for me in that it helps keep me from offing myself, which I take to be a plus. As always, if you want to start some kind of Tom Cruise-style argument in the comments? You know what I’m going to tell you: Just say no.

**I acknowledge that this might have less to do with depakote than it does with my excessive love of napping in hammocks.

***Sorry about all the asides lately.

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Strawberry Shortcake After Dark 29 Apr 08

Hey you…you like-a the berries?  Come closer, I give you a berry.

I was not in Whole Foods today to buy strawberries, I was there to buy a pork product for this Thursday.  No, I will not specify beyond that; I’ve already said too much and will now have to reach through the internet and kill you.  But as I was walking through the produce section, the berries launched a full-on nasal assault with their sweet fragrance to which I succumbed instantly.  Because strawberries are the shit.

I knew immediately that I wanted to make a quick but grown-up strawberry shortcake: black-pepper buttermilk biscuits, strawberries macerated in balsamic vinegar and honey-sweetened mascarpone.  Can I get a hell yeah?

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And this quiche did my taxes. 22 Apr 08

Actually, it didn’t. This quiche had no fucking initiative.

Work is busy this week and Brian is out of town at a conference for work*, and that usually adds up to one thing: cereal for dinner every night. On top of that, part of me doesn’t want to move on to a new post because the feedback from the last one was so lovely and it sparked memories for so many of you; I especially appreciated the universal disdain for pink kitchenware. But eventually you have to move on from the schmaltzy shit and make a damn quiche.

Okay, I’m not quite ready to move on, so this’ll be a short one.

*In New Orleans. And I happen to know that at this exact moment, he’s out at a concert at the House of Blues. I ask you, what kind of “conference” is this? Your tax dollars at work, people.

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Thursday Night Smackdown: Redemption Burgers 27 Mar 08

I relish the thought of this week’s Smackdown! Ahoy-hoy! Rim shot!

I thank you all from the bottom of my shriveled little heart for all your commiseration following last week’s trouncing at the exacting hands of Thomas Keller. I am still coping with my sense of shame and loss, but my therapist assures me that it will only take a few years to work through. Yay!

This week, we decided to do a 180 from the French Laundry: burgers and fries. It may not sound like Smackdown material, but you’ll have to trust me on this one. Cindy Pawlcyn’s Big Small Plates brings us mini burgers with pickled onions and roasted pepper relish on black pepper biscuits, and papas bravas (fried potatoes with a tomato-chili-smoked paprika sauce). It has a lot of moving parts, but they all work together to produce a harmonious whole. It’s like what Jesus would make, if he were doing a burgers-and-fries Smackdown. Or maybe Rube Goldberg.

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tacogate ‘08: the final chapter 19 Mar 08

There is no picture, because this item had been COMPLETELY CONSUMED by the time I was able to reach for the camera. There are only these 4 words, 4 words that should be more than enough, 4 words that under the transitive property of cake are themselves equivalent to a picture that is then equivalent to 1000 words.

Tres Leches Rum Cake

It is ooey. It is gooey. It is sticky and sweet and moist and creamy and delicious. It embodies the spirit of ten million drunk puppies playing with ten million drunk kittens in a field of cottonballs under gumdrop trees, takes that spirit and condenses it into one boozy, wondrous bite. And you make it like this…

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My Darling Clementines 24 Feb 08

Clementines refresh the palate… and the loins.

I’ve always wanted to try the Nigella clementine cake, the flourless one with the whole boiled and pureed clementines. Nigella is sometimes too precious for me; she uses phrases like “give a blitz” and “ferrous tang” while I’m more likely to give instructions like “fry that shit up in a pan,” or “fuck you.” Still, there’s no denying the comforting yumminess of many of her recipes (she also looks like she would give a good hug, if you were the huggy type), or the fact that clementines are all over the place right now, or the fact that I really like some frigging cake and I’ve been kinda cranky this week. So: clementine cake.

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Buttercream Quickie 20 Feb 08

I did not leave my cake out in the rain.

Last night I baked a dark chocolate-espresso layer cake for a co-worker’s 80th (!) birthday party today.  She’s a completely amazing - she still rides her bike around New York City, and is constantly flying around the world speaking at fancy-pants conferences - so she gets a completely amazing cake.   We tried to surreptitiously find out what her favorite flavors are, but she immediately saw through our pathetic ruse (did I mention she’s a genius?) and cornered me in the office kitchenette to announce that her favorite flavors are coffee, chocolate and lemon, and that she would be bringing something lemon-flavored herself.  I like her non-nonsense demeanor and the fact that she looks adorable in a bike helmet, so I made her a dark chocolate-espresso cake with vanilla buttercream and raspberry preserves.

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