10. Standard Baking Co. Pastries
Feb 2, 2014
Chocolate Biscotti
This cookbook was gifted to me at my bridal shower by lau; the first thing I made from it was the excellent cheddar scones, in the kitchen of our seaside cabin while on our honeymoon. The first meal my new husband and I cooked together. Since then, this book has mostly served as a guide for making croissants, which require the dedication of an entire weekend, but are totally worth it. But both of those were accomplished before I started this 101 challenge, so I needed somethign new in order to keep this cookbook on my shelves. I recently had one of those break-a-tooth rock hard sorry excuses for biscotti in a cafe. Like a raccoon washing its food, I had to soak in coffee until it turned to mush in order to eat it. I remembered that biscotti isn’t really supposed to be like that. Years ago, a co-worker’s Italian mother sent a care package with homemade biscotti in it, and when I tasted it I realized that all of those bland, crunchy logs served in cafes didn’t represent biscotti any more than hershey’s represents chocolate. Properly made biscotti has crunch, and is delicious dipped in coffee, but it also has a softness that gives way when you bite in to it.
The Standard Baking Co Pastries book has two biscotti recipes – one almond-flavored and traditional, the other chocolate walnut. The chocolate recipe was described as being “almost cake-like” because of an unusually high fat content. I liked the sound of that, so I skipped over traditional almond and went straight for chocolate. They came out exactly the way I wanted them to be. Crunchy, but not break-a-tooth crunchy. Would benefit from a quick dip in some coffee, but only to enjoy the flavor and temperature combination of the coffee-against-cookie, not to make it edible.
I brought these to a super bow party and when I set them out, someone asked, “ooh, are those, like, brownie sticks?” The answer is yes, they are basically over-cooked brownie sticks. Delicious, overcooked brownie sticks.
Make it again? Definitely. I might try to combine the almond flavoring of the traditional recipe with the butter-fat structure of the chocolate one. Maybe.
Jan 8, 2014:
Mom’s Mac and Cheese
My mother’s mac and cheese is probably the first recipe I learned to make, and its one of those recipes I can make without measuring. But I basically stopped making it at home once I discovered Homeroom, the Mac + Cheese restaurant in Oakland. We used to meet up with my brothers there for dinner occasionally (okay, any time we could all end up in Oakland at the same time). While Homeroom serves a dozen gourmet riffs on mac and cheese, I noticed that my brother matt and I both always order the version that was closest to what our moms made. Sharp white cheddar, with broccoli and toasted breadcrumbs. Last fall Ben and I were eating there on a trip back to California and discovered that they’d published a cookbook. We immediately bought two, one for each of my brothers. And under the Christmas tree this winter there were three copies – Matt and Carrie bought us one too. It was the Year of the Homeroom Cookbook.
So all of this is to say that I decided to use the cookbook to check in on the quantities of the recipe I’ve always been making. Turns out, the Vermont Sharp White Cheddar recipe just about exactly what my mom makes.
I made a vat of mac and cheese to serve 12 people at work. It was declared a success.
Jan 6, 2014:
Mushroom Risotto
Ben gave me this cookbook a few years ago. It’s more of an encyclopedia of cooking science than an actual cookbook, but there are recipes scattered throughout. It’s an excellent reference. Curious about the maillard reaction? Want to know why baking at 325 is completely different than baking at 350? This is your book.
I used the basic risotto recipe as a place to start on this mushroom extravaganza, but here are the details of what I made. So I can make it again, because, yum:
– generous glug of olive oil
– 3/4 large white onion, chopped
– 3 cloves garlic, pressed
– 1 cup risotto rice
– 2 cup mushroom broth (see below)
– 1/2 lb button mushrooms. half of them sliced, and half cut into quarters or 1/2″ chunks.
– 1/4 lb shitake mushrooms, sliced. if dried, soak them in hot water for 45 min first.
– butter. lots of butter.
– 3/4 c grated parmesan. or more. there’s no such thing as too much, really.
– salt and pepper to taste
– fresh or dried thyme and rosemary, finely chopped
– dash soy sauce
– dash worchester sauce (not vegetarian, FYI)
saute onions and garlic in olive oil until onions are soft. add rice and stir until rice is coated and warm. begin adding scoops of mushroom broth, stirring until the liquid is absorbed before adding more. stir and stir. continue adding liquid until rice reaches the desired consistency. overdo it and it’ll get gloppy, so stop when you like it.
meanwhile, saute mushrooms in butter until released liquid is nearly all evaporated. then add to the pot with the rice.
stir in seasonings, cheese and butter. serve immediately.
mushroom broth:
– 1.5 lb button mushrooms
– 1/2 onion
– 1 carrot
– 2 stalks celery
– 3 smashed cloves of garlic
(or whatever other veggies you fancy)
– salt to taste – go easy, you can always add more salt when using the broth in a finished dish later
rough chop everything and throw into the biggest pot of water you have. Simmer for 90 minutes. Drain and discard vegetables. Return pot to the stove and continue to simmer until the stock is reduced to your taste, 20 min or so. I like to freeze it in 2-cup quantities in plastic baggies for easy use later.
7. Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables
August 28, 2013:
Curried Cauliflower
This is the cookbook from our CSA Farm, Angelic Organics. It includes a vegetable identification guide, to help hapless CSA subscribers to not only identify rarities like celeriac and sunchokes, but also know how to eat them. The book is organized by vegetable, so when you have a lot of cauliflower you can turn to that section and find a variety of things to do with it, and the vegetable chapters are ordered according to the season, so you could cook your way through the book from start to finish, if you wanted to. It’s also full of snippets of wisdom and philosophy from Farmer John, snapshots of the farm, shareholder letters and comments, and, randomly, margin notes consisting of overheard conversations that seem to bear little relevance to the rest of the cookbook:
YOUNG WOMAN: I was having trouble with my roommate in college — communication problems. I kept eyeing a dead tree outside my dorm. After a week I brought the dead tree into our room and set it up between our beds. Every day I hung another dirty sock on a branch.
ACQUAINTANCE: What did she say about that?
YOUNG WOMAN: Nothing. She never said a thing.
ACQUAINTANCE: Did she know it was there?
YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah, she knew. A couple of the branches went right into her closet.
In vegetables, are on the cusp of the season change, when our CSA box is full of the long-awaited summer tomatoes but also the early fall vegetables like cauliflower. Consequently, last night I turned beautiful yellow heirloom tomatoes into 101 Cookbook’s Golden Tomato Sauce and tonight I roasted cauliflower. When I was a kid we used to eat cauliflower by boiling it and then covering it in cheddar cheese sauce or butter and parmesan. Delicious, but in either preparation the cauliflower was merely a vehicle, and tasted like nothing at all. Learning to roast vegetables, rather than boil them, was a game-changer.
This almost doesn’t count as a new recipe from a new cookbook, as I used it more for inspiration and riffed freely, but hey, this is my 101 list, my rules. I selected this recipe mainly because of the spice mixture. We have this box of Indian spices that I was itching to use and didn’t want to settle for a recipe that only called for curry powder. Not when I have turmeric and black mustard seeds and toasted pomegranate powder and fenugreek, whatever that is. The tricky part is that I have ZERO intuition for Indian spices, so it’s hard to actually select a recipe based on the flavor profile. So I just looked for a recipe that called for several of the items in my box. I combined the spice mixture from this recipe with the the oven roasting technique from Smitten Kitchen’s Cumin Seed Roasted Cauliflower (which is also very good, btw, and requires fewer Indian spices on hand).
Make it again: totally. In fact, I’m going to record what I did here so I can remember later:
Curry Roasted Cauliflower
Serves 21/2 head cauliflower
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sea salt flakes
1/2 tsp crushed coriander seeds
1/2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 c greek yogurt
cilantro
fresh lemon juice
crumbled feta– Clean and chop cauliflower. It doesn’t matter if the florets are all the same size – a variety of sizes results in a variety of textures when it roasts.
– Combine 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (ghee would probably be way tastier) and the spices.
– Toss the oil mixture with cauliflower until it is fully coated.
– Place on a baking sheet or roasting pan. Roast at 425 degrees 20-25 minutes, turning every 5 min.
– While the cauliflower is roasting, combine greek yogurt with a squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch of salt, and dice the cilantro.
– Serve cauliflower topped with a sprinkle of crumbled feta, chopped cilantro and the yogurt alongside.
6. The Bread Baker’s Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum
April 26, 2013:
-Pizza Dough
i was on a quest for a pizza dough that i could mix, rise and bake all in the space of one afternoon. most recipes have you make it the night before, since a 12-hour nap in the fridge improves the depth of flavor. i knew it existed, and the first one i landed on was, surprisingly, tucked in between the excessively complicated multi-step, multi-day recipes of Beranbaum’s Bread Bible. most of the recipes in this book require that you book your entire weekend around the completion of just one (unless we’re talking about sourdough starter, in which case you may as well go ahead and clear all your appointments for the next month and warn your husband you’ll be in the kitchen with your science experiment until further notice). her recipes are delicious but needy. (haha, ‘needy’ breads…)
so back to pizza dough. there were some red flags when she insisted that only unbleached white flour could be used, and that instead of using a dusting of cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking to everything, it uses olive oil. so it’s a strange, soft, oily dough that wants to tear if you even look at it wrong, and tossing it into the air was right out considering that it was bathed in olive oil that would have flung to the far corners of the kitchen. instead of rolling it out she has you sort of press it into the corners of the baking tray. from where it springs right back. i spent about 10 minutes trying to coax the small lump of dough into two 7″ round pizzas and finally gave up and allowed it to be two 5″ amoeba-shaped pizzas.
anyway, the useful takeaway from this recipe is that it pays to cook the pizza crust for a few minutes BEFORE adding toppings — it helps the crust actually set up, and keeps the vegetables/cheese from turning mushy/rubbery before the crust has even considered cooking through.
and the whole point of this exercise was to try cooking pizzas on the gas grill outside. why, exactly, when i have a perfectly nice pizza stone in my oven? well, because i could. and it was finally warm enough and light enough at 7pm that we could find our way to the grill in the backyard for the first time since we moved in.
cooking the pizza on the grill was awesome. i will totally do that again. it had a nicely browned, crisp crust on the bottom, softer and doughier on top. it reminded me a bit of naan. strangely enough, this crust actually asks for a light smattering of toppings, not a giant mound of melty commercial mozzarella. i didn’t know such a thing was possible until we tried it, but it might honestly be because the dough was so good that the cheese got in the way of fully appreciating its many textures. and amazingly we didn’t destroy the cheap cookie sheet i used on the grill. (Beranbaum’s grill instructions call for a ‘black steel pizza pan’, of course but i just checked that my old Farberware non-stick was good up to 500 degrees and hoped for the best).
the only gripe about the grill pizza is that the top layer of cheese didn’t really brown much, but i’m not sure if we had left it on longer if it would have caught up, or if it always needs a quick spin under the broiler anyway.
make it again: i’d use this dough recipe only if i was in a hurry, or if i was trying to recreate naan. otherwise i’d rather use a recipe that didn’t shun cornmeal or wheat flour or rolling pins. but i will definitely cook pizza on a gas grill again, especially in summer when it’s too hot to turn on the oven.
5. Super Natural Everyday, Heidi Swanson
April 23, 2013:
-Weeknight Curry
i finally made a curry! i’ve made a few attempts at curry before and it was always a miserable failure. now i can’t really tell why, because this was so easy, but whatever. going up in boise, idaho in a household with a severe peanut allergy, i wasn’t exactly raised on the flavors and techniques of south east asia. (but just watch me improvise a cream sauce). so it’s taken some time to catch up.
anyway, my one complaint about many of the recipes on 101cookbooks is that they take about three steps and three pots too many, particularly for a weeknight. but this one was surprisingly simple, and has the added advantage of being a ‘back of the fridge’ recipe, adapting to whatever leftover vegetable are languishing in the crisper drawer. which in this case were mushrooms, potatoes, onion, asparagus, red bell pepper, broccoli, cauliflower, and tofu. and we have dinner for tomorrow, too.
btw, it’s worth noting that the photography in Heidi’s book is at least as beautiful as her food. this is one cookbook that i actually feel bad about spilling on as i work. (usually i think that just gives them a patina that indicates their usefulness).
make it again: yes, but trust the recipe when it comes to vegetable-simmering time. and be less shy with the thai curry paste. and this curry isn’t really right for potatoes. better to stick with vegetables and not have to cook them so long.
4. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, Deb Perelman
April 13, 2013:
-Kale, Caramelized Onion and Wild Rice Gratin
so, a little preface here: the whole point of the cook-one-recipe-from-each-cookbook assignment was that around the 190th time i moved apartments, and lugged at least two insanely heavy book boxes dedicated only to cookbooks around, i made myself a promise that i could only buy a new cookbook once i had either made something from, or given away, every cookbook i already owned. that was like 3 years and 3 moves ago, and i’m still not done. but a handy little loophole is that the rule doesn’t prevent anyone from GIVING me cookbooks. enter birthday gifts. M & C sent me the Smitten Kitchen book for my birthday last week and holy food p0rn batman, the closeups on peach “breakfast” cobbler are enough to make me wonder why we’ve been eating kashi and greek yogurt all this time if we are, in fact, grownups that can do whatever we want.
so i’m a little disappointed that the first thing i decided to make from this cookbook came out kind of meh. i’d make it again, but with a significant set of adjustments. it’s not really the cookbook’s fault, it just wasn’t my favorite set of flavors. i had conveniently forgotten that i don’t like the sweetness of caramelized onions.
make it again: yes. with adjustments. and not on a week night – B would eat one of the cats waiting for this dish to finally be ready.
next time:
– make a half recipe – we’ll be eating this all week
– double the kale
– cut the kale “ribbons” into short lengths, otherwise the dish turns into a tangled yarn ball when you try to scoop out a serving
– cooks beautifully in the cast iron skillet – do that again (only use the 8″ one)
– mix some parmesan in with the swiss cheese – it needs more saltiness. particularly if you’re using homemade stock/broth.
– add mushrooms. always mushrooms.
– try with sauteed but not caramelized onions (and cut the quantity in half)
– surprisingly, go easy with the breadcrumbs on top. they kind of overpowered the rest of the flavors
– pick (or make) a high wild rice-to-regular rice ratio. i picked a mix that only had a decorative amount of wild rice and the result was a mushy texture. the chewiness of the wild rice would have been nice. and since the rice is cooked and then gets thrown into the gratin and has more liquid added, the rice can be a bit undercooked going into the final assembly.
3. Bake the Bread, Buy the Butter, Jennifer Reese
April 7, 2013:
-Crème brûlée
i opted for this particular recipe because it was the simplest of the crème brûlée recipes i could find, and i had a hangover from the previous night’s birthday revels, and only so many hours before dinner guests were going to arrive. why didn’t i just go out and buy some cookies for dessert, you ask? well, because three months ago i started making my own vanilla extract (from this same cookbook) and it was FINALLY READY so of course i needed to make something to show off the wondrous $59 billion dollars worth of vanilla i had created at home for 12 cents worth of supplies (there’s a post forthcoming about this).
so, first-timer’s crème brûlée, with a hangover. what could go wrong?
first let it be said that hangovers don’t usually me sick, or even headachy. but they do make me spectacularly slow and stupid. but the ingredient list was encouragingly short: eggs, cream, sugar, and whatever flavoring you might wish for (i chose vanilla and cardamom). it turns out its all in the technique. suddenly i had cream approaching boil on the stovetop, only half the eggs separated, the sugar not yet measured, and wait, what’s that about a water bath? and how many crème brûlée pots do we have? 4? but we have 9 people coming to dinner tonight.
amazingly, it all came together. ben saved the day with a beautifully-timed birthday gift of two of the cutest little teeny tiny Le Crueset pots, (and we made all the couple share a dish — romantic, right?) somehow i managed to not curdle the eggs even though i didn’t really read any of the chemistry behind custard-making until AFTER the brûlées were in the oven, they were completed with enough time to chill for the proscribed four hours before serving, and we didn’t even burn the house down braising the tops.
the texture was smooth and creamy just like it should be, the top nice and crusty caramelized, and so the only disappointment was that we could hardly taste the vanilla or the cardamom. it was mostly just rich fatty eggs/sugar/cream. which is great, but misses the entire point which was to show off my homesteading ability to make my own vanilla extract.
make it again: yes. with a hangover? maybe not.
for next time: double the recipe to get 9 servings (they were a little skimpy at 1.5 times the recipe), use approximately 4 times the vanilla and much fresher cardamom (also maybe simmer cardamom pods in the cream rather than just using ground cardamom of indeterminate age), and continue to ignore the internet’s insistence upon a water bath; as long as you stick to 225 degrees and a long slow cooking time, there seemed to be no need.
2. Tassajara Dinners and Desserts, The San Francisco Zen Center
March 11, 2013:
– Mushroom Ragout, served over
– Parmesan Polenta
accompanied by sauteed greens, it was a bit ambitious for a weeknight, but so delicious. and it has completely changed my mind about polenta. i’d only ever ‘made’ it at home by slicing open the prepared tubes of yellow goo from Trader Joe’s. it turns out it’s so easy (but does require a fair amount of stirring time) and so much more delicious when made fresh. i used coarse ground cornmeal from the bulk section at Whole Foods. so much more flavor than the prepared stuff, and it and cost about 10 cents per serving. win-win.
make it again: yes, not on a week night.
1. Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, Jeff Hertzberg, Zoë François and Mark Luinenburg
March 10, 2013:
– Whole wheat sandwich loaf
despite singing all the praises of my no-knead artisan loaf, i’ve kind of been wishing for a loaf-pan-shaped loaf lately for making sandwiches. this came out pretty darn well for a first pass. i cut the honey by half since i don’t like sweet breads, and i wish i’d had some nuts and seeds to add for more textural variety. not the best bread i ever ate [but then again, wheat bread never is], but still tasty, healthy, and it held together even when sliced thin and toasted. B expressed muted enthusiasm, which i take to mean he likes the artisan bread better but he’s smart enough to know that when one’s partner is baking fresh bread, one doesn’t complain lightly.
make it again: yes, with modifications