the SIMMER blog

cookiebar 2011: bring on the world peace

I should have known what was happening last week when I suddenly started to get hits on this year-old report on Dorie Greenspan's CookieBar pop-up.

They're baaa-ack.

Sandwiched neatly between Groundhog Day and Valentine's Day (just like last year), Dorie Greenspan and her son Josh are selling some of the city's greatest cookies out of -- yes -- a hair salon.

And those cookies are glorious.

 

Most of the same cookies are available again, with a few tweaks. This year they added Jammers, a shortbread-jam-crumble concoction that rejiggers pie proportions into a perfect little balanced cookie, tender and crumbly and buttery and just sweet enough. There's a pear-pineapple option or the one we tried, strawberry-raspberry.

 

And of course there are Chunkers. OF COURSE.

 

And the one so glorious it's right up there in the title: World Peace.

 

Get 'em while the gettin's good. Cash-only. Open through this Friday, February 11, in the Mizu hair salon, Park at 59th. Each day they start at 10 and go 'til the cookies are gone.

My guess is that's going to happen faster and faster every day.

 

guest post! partridge in a pear tree

Jael here -- I cannot tell you how SUPER excited I am to have a guest post on the Simmer blog, and most importantly, THIS guest: my mother Lynnea. She's an inspiring woman, an impressive project manager (see below), and a really phenomenal cook. I'm thrilled to be able to have her speak to you directly with her own words and pictures about a recent charity dinner, and a recipe you'll want to file away for next Christmas -- if you can wait that long...

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In our home the Christmas tree always stayed up until at least January 6, which we referred to as Ukrainian Christmas in honor of my immigrant grandparents who would have followed the Julian calendar. Even by today’s calendar, it makes sense when you realize that December 25th is really just the first day of Christmas. You can extend the season by celebrating the 12 days of Christmas and then Epiphany, when the Magi are said to have brought gifts to the Christ Child. (Besides, it gives us a reason to postpone putting the decorations away.)

This year I used the season as an occasion to organize a fund-raising dinner to help support the programs and ministries of our church. Using The 12 Days of Christmas song as a theme, our team of eight prepared a 12-course meal served at a beautiful neighborhood bed & breakfast. We began with 12 Drummers Drumming -- coconut-crusted wild-caught Alaskan salmon “drumsticks” served with a pineapple yogurt dipping sauce -- and ended with A Partridge in a Pear Tree, a deconstructed roasted pear tarte tatin with ricotta almond gelato. 

 
(forgive the blur)

The fun part was planning the menu around the theme; the challenge was coordination and timing. One thing that could be made a couple of weeks ahead was the pastry for the deconstructed tart, which I froze and reheated briefly before serving.

My favorite recipe for pastry crust is the one my mother makes, from an old Betty Crocker recipe. It uses milk and oil and can always be pressed together if you have trouble rolling it out. For eight small tart shells, add about ½ teaspoon of salt to a cup of all purpose flour. Pour 2 T. vegetable oil and 1 T. milk into a cup (don’t stir). Pour all at once into the flour and stir with a fork. I find I have better luck if I’m a little generous with the liquids. It should look like this:

 

 
Press into a ball and roll out between waxed paper. To suggest a partridge wing, I placed sliced almonds on the bottom of the individual buttered tart pan:

 
I cut the pastry to fit, brushed the crust with a bit of sugar syrup, and turned the crust over into the pan, pricked it with a fork, and baked at 450 for about 7 minutes.

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.

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.

book clubs and blueberry boy bait

One of my highest hopes for The Kitchen Daughter is that it finds a happy home with book clubs. I've been in a book club in every city I've lived in since college, including a great group of ladies here in NYC. Last week, we just had our second meeting. How was the discussion of A Reliable Wife? Excellent. How was the food? Off. The. Charts.

Flatbread with leeks and potatoes. Roasted beets with almonds, feta, and green apples. Quinoa. Strawberry-rhubarb pie. And more. Plus wine, of course.

Me? After some very smart advice from a participant on the weekly Washington Post food chat, pointing to my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen, I whipped up a half-batch of Blueberry Boy Bait, an absurdly delicious airy-textured butter cake dotted with blueberries and dusted with cinnamon sugar.

Mmmmmmm.

(My pictures are nowhere near as good as Deb's but I had to give it a shot.)

The recipe's got a few tricks to it -- you can't just toss everything in the stand mixer and hope for the best -- but the end product is so delicious and irresistible that I highly recommend finding somewhere else to be for the 20 minutes after it comes out of the oven. Because letting it cool in the pan for 20 minutes, with that taunting buttery cinnamon smell, is a real test of willpower.

 

(This test, I failed. I couldn't wait. It was so soft I had to take the corner out with a spoon, but take the corner out I did.)

In sum: YUM. Whether you're baiting a boy, or fueling a book discussion, this one works wonders.

(Incidentally, I've tagged "book news" for this post for good reason -- I've finally turned in the final version of the manuscript! Yes, I may invoke the word "final" a couple more times -- we've still got copy edits to go, after all -- but this is a big moment of DONE. Yay! Perhaps I should... bake a cake?)

berry tasty: fast strawberry jam

Sometimes, when the fruits of summer start coming in, you just want to eat them straight up. Peaches gnawed off the pit, raspberries popped straight into your mouth, strawberries with nothing but maybe, maybe a dusting of sugar.

But sometimes, you want to mix things up a little. You've got berries, but three or four days from now, they'll be past their prime, and you don't want to let them rot. With nearly any fruit, you can just cook it down with sugar, and keep it in the fridge another week. But if you want something the next notch beyond that, you can mix a little something into your fast jam. Ginger in your cherries. Thyme in your blueberries. 

Preserved Strawberries With Chiles, from Food52. 

I'd been looking for an excuse to use these cascabel peppers anyway... not sure why I bought them, other than I'd never had them before.

Turns out they're not all that spicy. Next time, more pepper. But for this time, I really didn't have much to complain about.

Thick, sweet, glorious jam. A few more days of summer, preserved. Works for me.

 

a leftover snapshot

In the days after a dinner party, in the interest of not wasting leftovers, I generally eat pretty weird combinations of things. Almond gelato mixed with Nutella for breakfast. Tapenade-and-smoked-blue-cheese crostini for lunch. A dinner of short ribs cubed up and smushed in the pan so they render out and then fry in their own fat, shredded and dumped onto a Lean Cuisine mushroom and spinach pizza. Yeah. Things like that.

And I don't generally take pictures of these creations, but when I ran out of things to do with pre-made cocktail toasts and made them into tiny little open-face peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, they were too cute to resist.

 

Next time I might even do it on purpose.

coup de clafoutis

I was muttering on Twitter last week that I was "thinking about making my first clafoutis", or maybe I spelled it "clafouti", because as far as I know both are acceptable, and as uptight as I am about proper spelling I think there's a little more wiggle room with words translated from other languages.

Anyway.

For a dinner party this weekend I made the much-thought-about clafoutis, and it was a great big success. I don't usually do warm desserts for guests if they require stepping away from the table to stir and whip and pour, but in this case, it really only does take a couple of minutes, and if you put it in the oven when you serve the main course, half an hour or so later when people are just starting to wrap up the savories, you've got the sweets more or less ready to go.

It was such a success, I failed to get a picture until after the whole thing was gone.

Clafoutis (klah-foo-tee) is a French dessert, most commonly made with cherries, and it isn't really like anything else I can think of. Denser than a pancake or a regular cake, more solid than a custard. You whip eggs with sugar, then add milk and vanilla, and stir in a small amount of flour. Pour all that over some fruit, bake it, and you're done.

I used the recipe from The Joy of Cooking (mainly because none of my other cookbooks had it... it's kind of old-school.)

The only time-consuming part was pitting the cherries, which I did earlier in the afternoon. And it was extra-excellent served with almond gelato brought by one of the guests.

In my opinion, it's well worth adding a new word to your cooking vocabulary.

 

candied kumquats

You know, it's easy to overthink. To look at eight or eighty different recipes for a thing and say "But I don't know which one to make! What's right? What's best?"

Sometimes, the best path is to get zen about it. I had some kumquats. I wanted to candy them. (They were delicious as they were, tart and sharp and electrifying, but I had other plans.) I looked at a whole bunch of recipes, all of which had different proportions of sugar and water, and different cooking times, and weird things like soaking or piercing holes or chopping some while leaving others whole, and maybe adding clementine juice? There were many, many options.

I took a few different steps from a few different recipes, and the result is utterly, magically delicious. But honestly, I think I could have skipped most of the steps and just gone with the basics: combine water and sugar, put in the kumquats, cook them for a while, and call it a day. Don't get too wrapped around the axle. Zen your food. There is a really, really good chance it'll turn out okay.

Candied Kumquats

• 2 cups whole kumquats
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup sugar

If you have time, soak the kumquats for a few hours in cold water. (According to some recipes, this cuts down on the bitterness.) If not, don't sweat it.

Slice the kumquats vertically and pick out any obvious seeds with a toothpick. Heat the water in a saucepan, dissolve the sugar in it, and drop in your halved 'quats. If the water doesn't cover the kumquats, add a little more water.

Simmer an hour or so (not too vigorous a boil, please). Let the kumquats cool in the syrup.

And if you really want to, leave the kumquats in the syrup overnight and then pour the syrup back into the pan and reduce by half. If you really want to.

(Also, if you want to follow my lead exactly, you could moan about your insufficient camera and worry about leaving your fridge door open for ten minutes in the interest of getting one gorgeous macro shot.)

 
  
(And then you could say: hey, that's something else to be zen about.)