the SIMMER blog

Q&A and recipe and giveaway!

Oh, this is fun! The wonderful and talented cookbook author Domenica Marchetti (her latest book is The Glorious Pasta of Italy, YUM) interviewed me for her site recently. And not only can you read the Q&A on her site, she has also adapted and posted the recipe for Midnight Cry Brownies, and she's giving away a copy of the book! So if you don't have The Kitchen Daughter yet, or you want one for a friend, here's your chance -- just comment on her blog with the name of your favorite piece of food-related fiction.

Click here to read, enter, and enjoy.

tomato panzanella

So here's one of the great ironies of cooking for other people: sometimes I end up making things I don't even like. Not because they're not good, but because I'm actually a surprisingly picky eater for someone who loves food so much. The list of things I don't care for is awfully long -- all kinds of melons, cucumbers, eggs, fishy fish, chicken salad, canned tuna, most hams, and most definitely tomatoes, among other things.

But I'm not allergic to any of those things, I just don't like them. So if I think something would round out a meal, I'll incorporate it anyway, and that is most definitely true of summer tomatoes.

 

In this case, the main course of my five-course corn menu was rich and heavy, and I knew a slightly acidic, fresh-tasting vegetable counterpoint would be great. 

 

So I cut up a few pounds of multicolored tomatoes and got them ready to go.

 

Then I added glugs of olive oil and red wine vinegar, chopped up a couple shallots, and seasoned with salt and pepper and fried capers and red pepper flakes. And then I called in my trusty sous chef, to whom I am married, to tweak the flavors until they came out right. Then we let it sit for a couple hours as the time for the dinner party came ever closer.

 

As is so often the case, there was one more step to complete at the last minute, and I am notoriously bad at remembering to take pictures at the last minute. But you finish this off with a cubed and toasted loaf of bread -- croutons, basically -- which can be any kind of crusty bread, but in this case I used onion foccacia. That tomatoey-acidic-oil juice gets soaked into the bread and the result is delicious.

(Or so I hear.)

auction for a good cause

A few weeks ago, food blogger Jennifer Perillo lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. Jennie is well-known and much-loved in the food blogging community -- I got to meet her last spring when we were on a panel together at Eat Write Retreat and she is thoughtful, warm, and insightful. She is also now faced with raising two daughters alone on an irregular income. So Bloggers Without Borders is running a number of fantastic auctions to raise money to help. And I'm thrilled to have The Kitchen Daughter included in a package of 50+ cookbooks and magazine subscriptions that will go to one lucky bidder, with the proceeds going to A Fund For Jennie (or, if you're Twittercentric, #afundforjennie). 

Click here to see the full list of books and bids.

Bidding runs til noon this Monday, August 29.

wordless wednesday liv

 

corn dinner part 2: smoked salmon on corn blini

So here's another post in the five-course corn dinner series -- this was course number one.

It's a fairly simple appetizer, and can be done mostly ahead, although the blini are especially good if they're still warm when served. The creme fraiche and smoked salmon are purchased, so that part's simple. And making these blini is as easy as making pancakes. I only tweaked the recipe a tad -- scallion greens instead of chives, just because I couldn't find any chives that day -- although next time I might thin the batter a little bit so the blini come out a bit flatter.

(And we tried adding wasabi powder to the creme as recommended in the recipe, but liked the flavors better without.)

 

say yes to michigan!

Just a quick note for those of you in the great state of Michigan -- I've got a couple of appearances this week (so much fun!) in your neck of the woods. Click below for more info:

Thursday, August 18, 7pm at Ann Arbor District Library (downtown branch)

Friday, August 19, 5pm at McLean & Eakin in Petoskey

Hope to see some of you there!

apricot and cherry kaiserschmarrn

Okay, so, before stumbling across this recipe in Food & Wine, I had never in my life heard the word kaiserschmarrn. But it sounded pretty tasty, and stone fruit is very much in season, and I thought it'd go pretty well with the sweet corn ice cream I had planned, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Of course the market dictated a few changes -- the apricots looked better than the peaches, and ditto the cherries over the blackberries -- and a lot of this had to be done at the last minute, making it not an ideal choice for dinner. Then again, it serves at least six people (we served it to eight) so it's a bit much if you don't have a big group over.

And how pretty are these little guys?

 

Cook the apricots in butter, sugar and lemon juice just until they soften:

 

Ditto with the cherries:

corn dinner part 1: sweet corn ice cream

Yes, it's telling the whole story out of order to talk first about the last course of a dinner -- but, to be fair, I did make the ice cream first. I usually do. Which is one of the most awesome things about making ice cream for a dinner party. Get it done and out of the way the day before (which leaves you plenty of time to sweat about the other things.)

So I used this great recipe from Always Order Dessert, just as written. Unfortunately, I didn't get gorgeous pictures of the finished product like Alexandra did, but here are a couple of process photos.

Corn steeping in milk and cream:

 

Slicing the steeped corn off the cob afterward:

 

 

Straining the liquid to take out all the solid bits:

 

Verdict: delicious stuff. Next time I might try doing a custard-based ice cream, as this one wasn't quite as rich as my favorites, but it certainly went well with its pairing partner, an apricot and cherry pancake called a kaiserschmarrn. (About which more tomorrow.)

 

 

charleston cooks!

We spent last weekend in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a very, very, very good place to eat. I had shrimp for six out of seven meals, with four of those including straight-up shrimp and grits. Of course, there was also pimento cheese. And blue crab. And peach cobbler and black pepper biscuits and benne seed rolls and bacon jam and buttermilk dressing and corn pudding and coconut cake and... well, it's a good thing we did a whole lot of walking, I have to say.

And as part of the weekend, I did something I'd never done before on vacation: I went to a cooking class.

 
They happened to be having a Lowcountry Cooking Class while I was in town, and while I'm much more interested in hands-on classes than demo classes here at home, I figured a demo class would be just fine for vacation. So I paid my $25 and pulled up a chair and watched a nice young lady make Lady Baltimore cupcakes with seven-minute frosting, and what else? Shrimp and grits.

And at the end we each got our own bowlful.

 

Deeeeelicious. I learned about the definition of the lowcountry, the five cuisines that contributed to its development, tricks for making stock and browning bacon, something called "Willie's Hog Dust", and countless other little tidbits. An hour and a half well-spent, to be sure.

And how were the shrimp and grits?

 

Really excellent. Actually, let's rank all the Charleston shrimp dishes I consumed:

1. Hominy Grill shrimp and grits
2. Husk cold poached shrimp with buttermilk dressing
3. grilled shrimp with peach butter at Peninsula Grill
4. cooking class shrimp and grits
5. Husk shrimp and grits (too rich, really, but everything else I ate there was amaaaazing)
6. Slightly North of Broad (SNOB) shrimp and grits (nothing to write home about)

Five out of six I'd eat again. Mmmmm, shrimp. And it probably won't surprise you at all to know that one of the purchases I toted home from Charleston was a 2-pound bag of grits. Lowcountry dinner party, here I come!

wordless wednesday liii