the SIMMER blog

top chef all-stars tomorrow!

YES. So excited for "Top Chef" to start its All-Stars season. I loved the Voltaggio season so much, and then last season was way too much about the personalities (or "personalities") and not nearly enough about the food, and I didn't love it. But now, with the All-Star season about to start, I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces (hootie hoo!) and getting excited about the show all over again.

Some thoughts:

• They sure know what they're doing with that "food fight" theme in the commercials. Do I want to see Tiffani dump a bowl of pasta over Spike's head? Of course I do. (And it only gets better on a repeat, unless those horrible "Top Chef: Just Desserts" commercials where Zac was always trumpeting "My desserts taste like my momma made them and then someone slapped her in the face." My response: "But wait, if she was slapped after she made them, they were already done, how would that change them?" My husband's response: "Sounds like they weren't very good, then.")
• But I digress.
• (Clearly.)
• 18 chefs is a LOT, but at least we know them, so it should be OK. Huge starting casts for "Top Chef" and "Project Runway" are generally a pet peeve of mine -- how are we supposed to keep all those strangers straight?! especially when everyone has a fauxhawk?! -- but I totally understand why the Magical Elves wanted to bring back as many people as possible. We've all got our favorites. More chefs, more viewers. Sure.
• So we've got the people I'm SO excited to see, the people I really dread seeing again, and the "fat middle" of the rest, where I'm meh. And when I actually put them into categories, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many were in the top category.
• DREAD: Marcel (S2), Spike (S4), Mike I (S6), Angelo (S7). I suppose they needed some villain types, but seriously, the mere sight of either Spike or Mike causes me to break out in hives. Angry, angry hives.
• MEH: Tiffani (S1), Stephen (S1), Elia (S2), Dale (S3), Casey (S3), Antonia (S4), Fabio (S5). Most of these folks, I feel like they got their shot and they lost fair and square, so I'm not sure what value there is -- for them or for us -- on a return. But okay. We'll see.
• EXCITED: Tre (S3), Richard (S4), Dale (S4), Jamie (S5), Carla (S5), Jen C (S6), Tiffany (S7). Not only did I feel like nearly all of these people were amazing chefs (I mean, come on, Richard Blais is a genius!), I also feel like they were in some way wronged with a loss, so if anyone in this category wins I'll be a happy camper. And sure, maybe I would've liked to see Sam from S2 or Lia from S3 or Kevin from S6 (who was reportedly offered a slot but turned it down), but I'm not gettin' all het up or anything. This is plenty of awesome to look forward to.

So we'll see how the season rolls out. I've been burned by All-Stars seasons before (I'm looking at YOU, "The Amazing Race") but I have ever reason to be hopeful. And hungry.

mini bacon and cheddar biscuits

You can imagine what it's like around here when the Williams-Sonoma catalog comes. Outbursts of OOH and WOW and OMG as I flip through it with a glass of wine. Not too much wine. My resistance to high-end kitchenware is low enough as it is.

So when I started going through a recent catalog, I managed to resist the actual cookware, but there was one thing I couldn't resist: a recipe.

Bacon and Cheddar Biscuits.

(okay, WS says Cheddar-Bacon, I say Bacon and Cheddar, bacon is verrrry important around here, not that cheese isn't... anyway, po-tay-to po-tah-to, you can see why I had to make 'em)

Unfortunately I didn't remember to start taking pictures until late in the process, but this will give you a general sense of the biscuiting:

 
I made them extra-tiny, since they were for a party. That's maybe an inch-and-a-half ring cutter.

 
Cute, right? Next time I would probably leave them thicker and just make fewer, but they were great nibbly party food, and the misshapen ones that were too shaggy to take to the party were just perfect the next day crumbled up in a cup of chili.

 

(more after the jump)

happy thanksgiving!

Hope you are having a wonderful and festive Thanksgiving holiday with your loved ones and something delicious. Whether you're with family or friends, eating herbed-up turkey or curried tofu or pumpkin risotto or chicken Kiev, may your holiday be happy.

I'm off to visit (and eat with) family -- so no more posts 'til Monday. I can't believe it's almost December, but the weather has changed and we're clearly headed into winter, so get your sunshine where you can:

 

wordless wednesday li

 

first look at recipes from the kitchen daughter

Yesterday, I got what are called "second pass pages" for The Kitchen Daughter. After copyediting, you get a copy of the "first pass pages" to check over the text and layout to make sure all the copy edits have been made correctly. If that's the first pass, from there, you can probably guess what the second pass is for: you're checking that your corrections to the corrections have been made correctly. 

And this is all wonderful stuff. I still get a charge out of seeing the pages laid out formally. Like a real book. Because it is a real book. Wow.

But I particuarly get a charge out of this, which is new: the handwritten recipes.

 

The recipes are so essential to The Kitchen Daughter, both the story and the book, and one of the most important things is that they're handwritten. So for the final book, after looking at a few iterations of "handwriting" fonts, we decided that real handwriting was the only way to go. So here it is.

And it puts a HUGE smile on my face.

 

how to make dulce de leche

My mom and I joke that we both tell stories about each other to make ourselves look less crazy in the kitchen. She tells people "Oh, this is nothing compared to what my daughter does; she makes crackers from scratch." And when I make dulce de leche, I say, "Oh, no, this is nothing, my mom makes dulce de leche FROM MILK." (Which takes four hours or so on the stovetop, with frequent stirring, in case you were wondering what's so crazy about that.)

I make dulce de leche from sweetened condensed milk. Largely because it's easier for me to find sweetened condensed milk than it is to find dulce de leche in my neighborhood. Plus, it's $3. You can't beat $3.

And I use David Lebovitz' recipe from The Perfect Scoop, which is nice and straightforward. Some people cook it in the can. I am too nervous a cook to trust that alchemy. He has you open the can and pour the contents into a glass dish, sprinkle it with salt, seal it with foil, and put the whole thing in a water bath. After about an hour, you've got dulce.

 
(Water bath in this case means placing the 8-by-8 glass pan inside a 9-by-13 glass pan, with water halfway up the sides. Easy enough, right?)

Let it cool, whisk the pockmarked bubbliness out of it, and you're set to go.

 

Dulce de leche ice cream. Alfajores. Those dulce de leche crispies I made last week.

Easy peasy. And definitely not hardcore. Right? Not over the top at all, right? Or maybe, at least, only a little.

dulce de leche crispies

It's kind of obvious that I love the internet, and I do get a lot of recipes online, but nothing quite replaces the old-fashioned cut-out-of-magazines recipe file. I have several. They are completely unorganized and random and I have to look through every single page in order to find the one half-remembered thing I'm looking for, buried among all the other pages. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

So this one's been in the file for several years. I cut it out of Food & Wine sometime around 2007, and every single time I think about making dessert for a party, I think about making it. Once I even went shopping for the ingredients... only to find that Whole Foods didn't have dulce de leche, and I didn't have time to make it from scratch that day, so I ended up taking a cheese plate instead. But hey. It was a pretty awesome cheese plate.

Dulce de Leche Crispies recipe

So if you buy the dulce de leche, or if you have the extra hour and a half to make it (from sweetened condensed milk - it takes longer to do it if you start with milk, which I've never done), the rest of the recipe is pretty easy. First you toast up some Puffed Rice Cereal Such As Rice Krispies But We Don't Dictate Brands Around Here:

 

Then combine the rice with almonds and dulce de leche. Which is seriously easy, right? Then it gets a little trickier to try to form them, since I wanted to shape them precisely, so I dolloped the mixture into a ring mold and pressed it down with the bottom of an oiled jar. They still spread out a little and lost their edges during the 15-minute baking time, so next time I'll either a) do what the original recipe says and dollop them directly onto an oiled sheet, or b) press harder.

But they were super, super delicious.

 
They were verrrry sticky, so I left them out on the counter to dry out, and they were actually much easier to eat the next day. So I recommend making them the day ahead. 

 

Yummy. Sticky. Nutty and crunchy and very much worth the wait.

wordless wednesday l

 
 
 

a picturecipe

Home. Hungry.

Three things.

One: pasta.

 

Two: cauliflower.

  
 

Three: bacon.

 

Not shown: dinner. Wolfed down. Gratefully. Note to self: go shopping.

fresh ginger cake

With the holidays coming up I was going back through some of my favorite desserts for a crowd, and this one -- forgive me! -- took the cake.

Fresh Ginger Cake from David Lebovitz.

It's a bit of a labor of love. First of all, you have to boil water and blend the molasses, since molasses is all sticky and heavy and it wouldn't blend very well with flour straight out of the jar. So you melt it a little bit, like thus:

 
And then whisk the flour and spices in:

 
The other labor-y part is the grating of four ounces of ginger. And personally, I was afraid to do it in the food processor since I wasn't 100% sure that method would get rid of all the stringy bits. So I did the grating by hand. Which leads to sore fingertips and the occasional frustrated grumble (not shown).

But then you get this lovely, dark, spicy, warm-even-when-it's-not-warm cake out of it.

Also, in addition to lining the bottom of the pan with a parchment round, you'll also want to oil or butter the sides. This cake is serious about sticking.

 
Spicy and delicious and wintry. More stable than a pie, and it doesn't even need frosting. Just serve a big wedge with coffee or tea or, if you do want a bit of a flourish, lemon ice cream.

'Tis the season.