The Archives
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12.24.08Waterloo du patisserie, le premiere part.It's so nice to officially be on vacation, to be able to stay up late, sitting by the twinkly Christmas tree, taking the time to reflect on a day spent puttering in the kitchen with Christmas baking - I cozied up with the KitchenAid, sifted and whipped and piped, sang along to the best version of "Jingle Bells" (Sinatra), and failed utterly to produce a single correctly-formed macaron. God, I love the holidays. Also, on Christmas - which, if you don't know, is tomorrow - I turn 31 AND I discovered several new gray hairs along my part today. Why ...
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12.12.08Thursday Night Smackdown: Put a little puddin’ in your popI think you all should know that I just saw a commercial for Pizza Hut's new product, the "PANnormous Pizza." Which leads me to believe that there is some kind of law of thermodynamics stating that as Apple devices grow ever smaller, franchise pizza products must grow proportionally larger.* None of that has anything to do with these warm lemon pudding cakes from Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America. Which apparently would rather have you pay $30,000 to attend their baking and pastry program than actually bake at home, because this recipe? Kind of sucked. *Exhibit B: The ...
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11.21.08Thursday Night Smackdown: I’m a grown up and I do what I wantAnd that includes eating Sticky Toffee Pudding for dinner. Which I just did, and I could not possibly be less sorry. In fact, I'm feeling so magnanimous after eating it that I'm willing to overlook the ridiculous length of this book's title AND the fact that (as listed on Amazon) it has TWO COLONS: Desserts by the Yard: From Brooklyn to Beverly Hills: Recipes from the Sweetest Life Ever, by Sherry Yard (GET IT?), official pastry chef of Wolfgang Puck's Spago empire. I Wonder: Are all the colons necessary?: A grammatical conundrum: That I can top: Suck on that. Wow, ...
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09.19.08Thursday Night Smackdown: Girlfriend in a (sugar) comaMy nuts are salty, yet sweet. I had big plans for tonight. Big. Huge. I left work at a reasonable hour - 4:30! A train was leaving just as I got to the subway station. I was all set to get home around 5, scour the cookbooks for a recipe that would use up all my CSA tomatoes and tomatillos and the pork loin I had defrosting, smack it on down, and then make cupcakes for the admin assistants at my office who've proofread 300 pages of copy for me this week, because I am a fucking sweetheart. ...
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09.14.08Yeast Unleashed in the EastThe Moon has one-third less gravity than your Earth. I don't know if you can understand that, but our vertical leap is beyond all measurement. Although the weather has still been largely gorgeous this week, there's been a slight dip in temperatures that heralds the beginning of fall. The brisker evenings prompted an urge to do something warm and homey, like bake bread. I'm slowly overcoming my fear of yeast, and want to start trying different styles of yeast dough. Of course, after I decided to do that and got to work the temperature abruptly shot into the 80s, and ...
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08.28.08You say tomato, I say to-WHOA, Nellie.I would have invited you over for dinner, but I couldn't find your phone number anywhere, I SWEAR. I'm a little sad tonight, because I've just learned that I've wasted 30 years of my life not eating delicious, delicious tomatoes. You see, I always thought I didn't like tomatoes. Tomato sauce, sure (as long as there are no visible tomato chunks), tomato soup, okay, tomato ketchup, acceptable. But a whole, raw tomato? No, thank you, I'll pass. You can imagine how much this endeared me to my mother and nonna and zias. As it turns out, I DO like tomatoes. ...
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08.22.08Thursday Night Smackdown: Blintzkrieg!How is this dinner, and not dessert? Not that I'm complaining, but come now, Jews. You're pulling my leg, right? Where did I leave off? Oh, right, with an aborted attempt at blintz casserole and my gradual descent into the gaping maw of madness. I'm back to my standard non-psychotic level of insanity, and that can only mean one thing: I can stop throwing dozens of hours of my life away watching Olympic beach volleyball in a drug-induced stupor.* Also, baked cheese. *Although I did like how they played the cock rock in between serves, to make ...
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07.16.08Cheap Ass Wednesday: Il pane della NonnaI ate too much of this. You will, too. I was really excited about the meal I was prepping for Cheap Ass Monday when my cheap ass glassware sliced through my priceless right hand and incapacitated me: potato focaccia with onions and a warm white bean and spinach salad. Aside from being delicious, simple and cheap potato focaccia is one of my all time favorite foods. It's only recently that I've realize that the bread I know and love is actually focaccia; my nonna, who made it in a wood-fired oven off the kitchen of the two-room shack she ...
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06.12.08Thursday Night Smackdown: It had a really good personalityJohn 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 ...
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06.07.08In which people get the animal fats they want and deserve.All cow fat, all the time. Let everyone's collective panties be unbunched: tofu doesn't live here any more. I'm not giving up on integrating more vegetarian or vegan meals into my repertoire, but I am giving up on frankenfoods like tofu. It's still not in the same category as truly unearthly "foods" like quorn, but my kitchen doesn't need it. Healthy vegetarian foods are easily assembled using whole, fresh ingredients. That's not what this is about, though. Well, at least the "healthy" part: this is real deal mac and cheese, the kind made with a classic butter-and-flour roux, milk that ...
...as of late
- You are so not off the hook
- 2008, Over and Out
- Weekend Frig: Yes, I am 12 Years Old
- Waiting for Santa
- Waterloo du patisserie, deuxieme
- Waterloo du patisserie, le premiere part.
- Cheap Ass Monday: Cuddle up with a big bowl of Cheerios
- I didn’t have a single drink, ocifer.
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