milkshakes

I love milkshakes, but the place we go over the summer is so sweet, so perfect, that I try not to disappoint myself by drinking them throughout the year.

The guy who runs the place we go over the summer-- the place where the pastor goes in the Methodist camp, the place that has not changed since the 1920s-- has an ice cream cone tattooed on his arm and, I like to think, respects our family's stamina when it comes to milkshake consumption.

In one of our daily chats, he offered the secret to his outstanding malteds:

1. A heavy hand with the malt. Duh.
2. Malt syrup. U Bet makes it, the internet has it.
3. High quality ice cream. Just because it is getting blended does not mean you don't deserve the very best.

If you can't get an extra-thick vanilla malted from the source, make one in your living room and stay cool.

plum pie

"If there is one thing Lily is good at, it's making desserts."-- said yesterday, to me, and I guess its true. I spent my formative, learning-to-cook years with above average cooks, and so I think nothing of cowing to a late-night desire for cookies with making cookies or coming home to cupcakes. Frankly, I always thought of myself on the lazy side of dessert development. A cookie here, a birthday cake there. And yet, in grad school, I am the one bringing the pie.


Last time, I overstepped my bounds: lemon-meringue, which was intended as a birthday gift and-- with its watery rim around the edges-- seemed to capture the melancholy of a grey beach birthday in February. This time, the fruits themselves let the sunshine in. 


I think one time, a couple years ago, Mark Bittman suggested the same move in a column: only make a top crust for a pie. Now, Mark Bittman and I share one capital failing: we are no great lovers of pie crust. It must be truly exceptional to inspire me to love it more than sugary baked fruit... and usually my penchant for subbing whole wheat flour or living where it is always hot but then not freezing the butter means that my pie crust, well, isn't. THIS crust, though, is so unfussy, so shortbready, so citrus-zesty! Kedar, no great maker of pies, started hopping around: can we put this on an apple pie? What if we put this crust on top of a pumpkin pie? I went all Marion the Librarian-- "no, because apple pies need a bottom crust because... uh... and this and a bottom crust wouldn't work, because, uh... pumpkin pie has a bottom crust and no top crust, well, because, well..." And as I started to hear what I was saying, I realized, well, there is no good reason to say no to this pie crust.

MY NEW FAVORITE WAY TO MAKE PIE
(in this case, plum-strawberry.)
(originally from Smitten Kitchen, originally originally from Nigel Slater)


Crust:
+ 7 T butter, at room temperature (YOU HEAR ME! ROOM TEMPERATURE! take that, food processor! take that, making room in the freezer for my butter! Take that, crackery piecrusts! Your days are numbered!)
+ 1/2 cup sugar
+ zest from an orange, or half an orange, or a lemon, I suppose, depending on your filling fruit.
+ an egg
+ 1 cup plus 6 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
+ 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
+ 1/4 teaspoon (kosher) salt

-- Oven to 350. 
-- Cream the butter, sugar, and zest with a stand-mixer or hand-mixer or your awesomely-honed-thanks-to-biking-to-school forearms. 
--Now add that egg.
-- Now add the dry stuff and beat until combined. Conglomerate it into a ball, cover with plastic wrap, and freeze while you prep the...


FILLING


+ 2 lbs of fruit: we used a pound of plums and a pound of strawberries.
+ 2 T sugar
+ a shake or two of cinnamon
+ a squeeze or two of whatever citrus fruit you just zested

-- Butter a pie dish-- or, because this has some crumble-like qualities, a crumble dish. Otherwise known as a lasagne dish. Otherwise known as a casserole. I once got into a long supersophistic conversation about what makes a casserole-- isn't it anything baked in a casserole dish? Would that make this pie a casserole? Sure. I just like saying casserole. UH, just go out and buy a pie dish, it's freaking summer and this pie crust makes me want to eat a pie a day.


-- Toss all the ingredients together in the dish.


-- Roll out that now-chilled dough. If you asked for Silpats for Christmas and now have three because everyone you know got you one (uhhh they are oddly expensive you guys)... roll out the dough between two Silpats! No sticking! Otherwise, roll it out on your marble pastry counter. Or your other counter, with plenty of flour. 


-- Place the crust on top of the pie and crimp the edges into the double-thick parts you will fight over, fork in hand. Good luck.


-- Bake for about 40 minutes. If you want to brush the top with cream or milk and sprinkle with sanding sugar, good for you-- the crust might ripple and tear and bubble with fruit juice anyway, so I figure it has enough rustic charm as it is. Or late-Saturday-night-in-a-now-broiling-apartment-because-of-the-oven urban charm. Either way, I demolished this pie.

date shake

Back from Death Valley and I don't even know what to do with myself. San Diego is a far cry from Gotham, as you, uh, might have heard me say every day sometime over the past two years, but even little San Diego is a far cry from big sky and dusty highway. And even though I know that I am a rhinestone cowboy, something about the planet Earth just makes my heart sing. Also dates. I had one when I was little-- on a playdate, I think, at the bougiest-market-in-the-world Hay Day-- and my mouth got all hivey and that was that for dates for about 15 years. Everyone always told me my allergies would start to disappear, or at least, they insinuated that it somestimes happens, that there is always the off chance... which is when I would butt in feeling mighty defensive about how MY allergies are really really bad and they aren't going away any time soon. Except-- I have never been so happy to be wrong-- they are. I have started eating figs again and even bananas and DATES. Oh, dates, you are the desert in food form. Ice cream in the middle of nowhere is nothing short of a miracle (see Burning Man post) and if that ice cream happens to be blended with dates in milkshake form... well. I guess you could say that I am actually pretty happy to be living in Southern California. Full disclosure: I have never made these in my own kitchen, but have driven far and wide through the desert to sample date shakes... the recipe itself is kind of incidental to the baked mud and fresh air.


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DATE SHAKES
(via the Sunset Magazine Cookbook)

4 dates, coarsely chopped. The dates that inspired my date-bender were Honey Dates from China Ranch, but most recipes call for Medjool.

1/4 c milk

1 1/4 c vanilla ice cream.

In a blender, blend dates and milk until smooth & frothy. Add ice cream and pulse a few times, until just blended.

bread pudding

did you know that in french they call bread pudding "unemployment pudding"?!

such is the spirit of a grad school dinner party. but it was great-- i feel really proud of myself for taking initiative. i spent a lot of last year just kind of waiting for the kind of community that i felt in new york to spring up around me.

HENCEFORTH I ASK NOT GOOD FORTUNE. I MYSELF AM GOOD FORTUNE
-uncle walt.



and there has been a lot of it: laughter, hilarious shortie overalls and the antics they lead to, books and ideas, researching south africa and armchair travel, meeting like minds at conferences, not getting a cold that i thought i was going to get. being both very busy and very quiet and still. om!



so pick up the phone and invite some people over! it's as easy as making this dessert.

BREAD PUDDING (via bittman)

+ 8 slices of whatever bread that you have lying around. I used whole wheat thus making this totally "breakfast food"-- basically the same as toast, eggs and milk AMIRITE?
+ 3 cups milk, skim is just fine if that's what you drink normally. Again-- breakfast!
+ 1/2 a stick of butter (4 T)
+ 3 eggs
+ 1/2 cup sugar
+ 1 1/2 t cinnamon
+ a pinch of salt

-- Oven to 350. Grease your baking pan (I used two loaf pans because I was ALSO making lasagne, so groove as your soul sings) and tear the bread into little bits in the pan.

-- Melt the butter with the sugar and cinnamon and salt and add the milk until it gets hottish.

-- Pour this mix over the bread and let it get soggy for a little bit. Push down the bread that doesn't cooperate. Discipline!

-- Beat the eggs and then stir them into this gloppy mess... you could ALSO break up a chocolate bar and add some chocolate chunks at this point. It would probably be a good idea. I would encourage that. You could also dust some cinnamon-sugar over the top. I didn't do this, actually, but it sounds really good right? I think so.

--Bake for 45 minutes or so. It can be kind of wobbly but should be mostly set. Bread pudding keeps for quite a while (if you aren't eating it for breakfast) too, which makes it even more clutch in the "use of leftovers" department. Which is key if you are basically kind of unemployed.

superlative chocolate cookies

Well, I made it out of the desert unscathed. In fact, some of the best things about Burning Man were moments of food-sharing: a fried bologna sandwich first thing in the morning, getting the last marshmallow and roasting it on the back of a stranger's bike, the guys who brought a SOFT SERVE MACHINE to the middle of nowhere and let me have as much ice cream as I wanted, despite the half-hour line winding around the block behind me. I think I had about four-cones worth of ice cream in my mug, and I ate it as I walked back to camp-- sweaty and exhausted-- while I cried.

First-year exams are in two days. My normal reaction, I guess, to anything, is to prepare foods just in case. Just like during the "great quick-bread frenzy of late August" the oven is again in high gear while my actual work-ethic dwindles... there are worse things, I hope, than compulsive cookery.

These cookies are nothing new in the blogosphere, but maybe you haven't made them yet. They are far better than Tollhouse or the How To Cook Everything cookie (my two standbys), even if you only let the dough rest for a few hours. Other than the rest-time, the key is the saltiness (something my mom discovered a long time ago, I have to say), the quality of the chocolate, and the audacious chip to dough ratio. This version-- halved-- makes enough cookies for a weekend of self-indulgent critical-theory-agonizing cookie-monstering.

THE KING OF CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

1 1/2 + 1/3 cup flour (yeah, you do the math)

1/2 + 1/8 teaspoons baking soda (Yeah, sorry. Easier to think it through in fractions I think)

3/4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoons coarse salt

1 1/4 sticks unsalted butter

1 + 1/8 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar

1/2 cup regular sugar

1 egg

1 t vanilla

1/2 + 1/8 pounds (10 oz) dark (at least 60%) chocolate chips, chunks, or feves, as classy as you can afford. So in my case... Trader Joes.

1. Cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add the egg and vanilla. Then add the dry ingredients (making sure there are no unseemly clumps of baking soda!) and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate gently and swiftly.

2. NOW! Cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate as long as you are able. I don't know what it is about aged dough but it does make a difference. 12-72 hours is best but even 2 or 3 hours in the fridge makes a difference.

3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Scoop the dough into golf-ball sized cookies. You might want to flatten them slightly, as the "aged" dough is fairly stiff. Sprinkle the tray with some sea salt-- never a bad idea, actually, in general.

4. Bake about 18-20 minutes, let cool, eat them all.

off the chain good "peanut" butter cookies

Ok, so maybe I am biased because I lived for ten years without peanut butter in baked goods and now that I can have sunflower seed butter my brain has melted. YOU MEAN AS GOOD AS THIS IS IN A SANDWICH IT IS BETTER WITH SUGAR AND BUTTER? You see where I'm going here?

I feel like I am justified in making up lost time... which is also how I feel about my massive consumption of blue cheese dressing, turnips, and vanilla malts. I am not so slowly turning into my dad, which is somewhere between awesome and terrifying. Basically, I have made these cookies 3 or 4 times since March, tweaking the recipe to Ultimate Perfection. They never last more than a day or two.

OFF THE CHAIN SUNFLOWER-SEED BUTTER COOKIES
(adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance, delicious)

+1 cup flour (rock out with your whole wheat or spelt out, if that's your thing... these cookies are so good you will just be like what is that wholesome nutty taste? and not like ew a vegan cookie)
+1 cup oats
+1 t baking powder
+1/2 t salt
+1/3 cup veg oil
+1/3 to 1/2 cup sunflower seed butter or of course peanut butter or some other nut butter, what the hell.
+1/2 cup sugar (white or brown)
+1/4 cup milk or soy milk or even water
+1 t vanilla

OK so preheat the oven to 350.
Mix together all the goopy/wet stuff with the sugar. Add the dry ingedients... the dough should be kind of stiff. Flatten into discs however big you want... Domestic goddess Isa notes that these can be those HUGEASS cookies that people pay good money for at bakesales or fancy stores, so if you want to grab a massive hunk of dough and smoosh it down to a cookie that is the size of your head and 1/2 inch thick, go for it. I usually make them your average cookie size. Bake 8-10 minutes for normal/petite/snack cookies, 12-15 minutes for giant/bake-sale/june gloom cookies. Next step: grinding own sunflower seed butter in NEW FOOD PROCESSOR. Yeah bitches, first an apron and now this.

dutch baby (baked pancake)

Oh my sweet goodness, where has the dutch baby been all my life?

Actually, here's a story. The first time I almost went to school in Chicago, I dragged my family out to visit on the train for spring break. There were a lot of brisk walks and Greek classes and pretentious conversations... The upshot of the whole thing was hanging out with my friend from the suburbs and bumming around and eating at the original pancake house. So, so, so very good. Google now tells me that there are a bagillion franchises-- even one in the S.D.-- but at the time it seemed like a magical, midwestern unicorn of a restaurant.

Oh, right, but the story. So I ate a dutch baby at the original pancake house and it was the first time I had had such a thing and it so filling and delicious that I took my bacon with me in a napkin. And stuck it in my parka pocket. Obviously! Later, we are in the fake coal mine in the museum of science and industry and a bunch of other tourists are like, why does it smell like bacon? And the tour goes on and all of a sudden the whole tour is laughing and wondering about the bacon smell. And that's when I realized that carrying around meat in your pocket is not "what normal people do."

Anyway, I just loved everything about this: the fact that it was easy to make after hours in the car, watching it puff in the oven, nibbling at the sides while standing over the stove waiting for it to cool off. The custardy texture in the middle. Eating something covered in powdered sugar for dinner. Yes indeed, the dutch baby is perhaps the new king of breakfast-for-dinner for one or two people (or breakfast for breakfast! or breakfast for dessert!) which we all know is the best meal in the world. Come to think of it, why don't people have breakfast-for-dinner parties more often? It is basically the easiest and cutest thing. Invite me!

DUTCH BABY

* 3 tablespoons butter, melted
* 1/2 cup flour (whole wheat is delicious here)
* 2 T (heaping? yes I think so) sugar
* 1 T vanilla
* 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1/2 cup milk, room temperature
* 2 large eggs, room temperature
* Lemon and powdered sugar, or some berry compote, or nutella. Or. Mmmmmmm.

Preheat oven to 425. Let the eggs and milk hang out and room temperature-ize for as long as you can stand it. Melt the butter.

Oh yeah, you better be rockin some kind of ovenproof skillet. Scoop out 2/3 of the butter (that's 2 tablespoons for those of you low-scorers. Oof, SAT joke! That hurts. I'm embarrassed for myself) and put it in yer pan and let that heat up in the oven.

Mix up the rest of the ingredients, butter last so it has time to cool. I am talkin about some real deal mixing. Like in a blender or food processor or with a mixer. Or with a whisk I guess. Take a full two minutes even with a machine to really get the batter all congenial.

Now pour that into your pan (hot hot hot!) and bake for 25 minutes, until it is puffy and golden-brown around the edges. Serve with something delicious, like powdered sugar and a squeeze of lemon. So yuuuuummy: tastes like living the dream.

strawberry shortcake icebox cake

I am going through some weird kind of retro, old-school new england/southern comfort thing lately. I think it's that my nostalgia for last year has reached crazy fantasy level, the same kind of nostalgia I feel for times and places I have never been ("Utah", please listen to Act 1 if you haven't), even though at the time it didn't seem all that great at all. But now all I can think about is driving my handsome convertible to the ice cream stand on Long Island Sound and watching seagulls eat french fries and watching people on their yachts. And even though my life right now is pretty awesome and filled with performance art and icebox cakes, I can't scratch this itch for an imaginary manic pixie dream girl summer of empire-waisted sundresses and bbq and pimms cups.

I was really surprised that people hadn't had or heard of icebox cake before. I want to say that my grandmother used to make it but honestly I have no idea. I know my mom has been making it whenever we come home for the last few years now, and it is awesome. The chocolate version, made with these:

tastes oddly like coconut, in a really great way. The basic premise is that the cookies get soft and cake-like and everything is much more magical than the sum of its parts. Just try it. Last week I made a fruity version with graham crackers and it was (kind of to my surprise!) equally as awesome as the chocolate version and way easier than making biscuits for shortcake. I made the strawberries into a compote because that's what a classy lady on the internet told me to do, but you probably don't even have to do that, you could just slice them and throw them in.

STRAWBERRY COMPOTE
A container of strawberries, hulled (and sliced)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 lemon
pinch salt

Get the sugar and juice and the berries a cookin' on medium-low as you soon as you start slicing strawberries. Throw them in the pot as you go, so that some of the intact after letting it bubble for awhile, like 10 minutes. This isn't rocket science, so taste it and see if it needs more sugar or lemon or to cook longer.

STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE ICEBOX CAKE

+strawberry compote, or a bunch of chopped strawberries
+a box of graham crackers
+2 cups of cream worth of whipped cream, sweetened to taste

In a casserole dish or cake pan, spread a thin layer of whipped cream, then a layer of graham crackers. Then a layer of whipped cream AND strawberries. Then graham crackers. Yeah, you get it. End with a layer of whipped cream. Let it chill in the fridge overnight, then dig in.

summer

ah! kind of like the artichoke, this is a no brainer, but strawberries and whipped cream!

final result (icebox cake!) forthcoming, but honestly, just standing around my kitchen at 1 this morning just stirring and eating and tasting and chopping: it's summer. it's summer and derrida can't compare to just slightly-under-whipped cream. i've got several muumuus in rotation and a ukulele. summer's the worst but i'm hanging around.

whipped cream

2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar
1 t vanilla

Pour the cream into a bowl and beat it (mixer purchase is useful here. or a whisk) until it thickens. Add the sugar. Keep beating until it holds soft peaks, then add the vanilla. When the surface just begins to show the designs from whipping, stop and see if it holds stiff peaks. Stop before it gets grainy. Still-creamy whipped cream is part of the magic of making it yourself.

snack cookies

Like with that everyday cake, you should probably not take my nutrition advice. But these are good and easy to grab as you run out the door in the morning, stumble home at night, refill your tea in the afternoon, etc. I guess if you are really an upstanding citizen you can treat them like real cookies, too.

Carrot Ginger Cookies inspired by 101 cookbooks and carrots languishing in the crisper

1 cup (whole wheat) flour
1 cup oats
1 cup finely shredded carrots (2 hefty ones)
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 cup veg oil
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, maple syrup, or agave
2 t real (!?!) grated ginger (otherwise these would be boring as all get out, I suppose if you don't keep a knob of ginger in the freezer for times like this you could just dump in a bunch of pumpkin pie spices and do okay for yourself)

Oven to 375.

Mix it all up, dream about summer. Oh yeah, mushy baked good dough, it is almost like being on an island somewhere with Paris Hilton singing island tunes in your ear. That's hot.


Press them into pretty flat discs, since they don't collapse on their own. Bake for about 10 minutes-- they won't really brown, so watch closely.

mad casual chocolate cake

Well, I don't recommend making this cake EVERY day. But I love when cookbooks call something an everyday cake, as though grown-ups have people over on weeknights and pull out a chocolate cake with some powdered sugar on top. In my world, of course, this translated to making this cake in the AM on St. Patrick's Day to "celebrate" during last finals period and eating it all day while clacking away like a crazy person and cursing the quarter system. It's next in the installment of you-wouldn't-know-it-but-its-vegan (minus the Baileys) baked goods... which means that its cheap as dirt and made of stuff you have in your house at all times. So you can make one, you know, every day.

Mad casual chocolate cake from Cheap Healthy Good/Where's the Revolution/The Internet

1 cup flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour (or more regular flour)
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1/3 cup neutral oil
1 cup cold water (or 2/3 cup cold water, 1/3 cup booze. Hello, Baileys)


+ Oven to 350. Prep out a cake pan all grown-up style, as though this is for company and not just going to end up getting ham-fistedly shoveled into your gaping maw.

+ Dry ingredients in a bowl. Then make little wells for the wet ingredients-- a little vanilla volcano, a vinegar volcano, and an oil volcano. Now dump a bunch of water and Baileys on top, mixing with a few swift, decisive strikes.

+ Pour the batter into a pan. Actually I bet you could even mix it IN the pan, if you are really too lazy to do anything but eat cake. Bake for about half an hour.

spicy hot chocolate snickerdoodles

Hot damn were these good. They were the first vegan cookie I have ever made, and the first vegan baked good I have ever liked. It just took reading and re-reading vegan cookbooks for school, I guess, to drill the wonders of vegan baking into my thick skull. Or my, uh, allergic mouth? I want to go out and buy whole-grain vegan cookies like the best of them, but the inevitable mouth-hives and fear of impending death just kind of kill that do-gooder buzz for me.

But enough about me! More about these cookies! They are just straight-up delicious, easy to make, presentation-worthy. All the things you would want from a cookie. And vegan, so you can look your cat or other animal friends straight in the eye, if that's your thing.


These cookies can be made with what basically everybody has in the house, if you bake sometimes, which is awesome. No pictures exist since I took them to a potluck and everybody ate them all, but I think that's a good sign. They looked exactly like the PPK version... the first recipe ever where my rendition looked as pretty as the picture. Gah! What are you waiting for! These are so fast and east it makes my head hurt! Maybe I should make another batch right now? Yes? No?

Spicy Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles

1/2 cup canola/ veg oil
3/4 cups sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup (I used corn syrup. Nutrition fail!)
3 T non-dairy milk, or water if you are not a hippie. It works out.
2 t vanilla extract (you could sub out chocolate extract, which I am told exists, or maybe even peppermint extract to make a thin-mint version minus the spices! somebody try this!)
1 2/3 c flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 t chile powder/cayenne
I also threw about 1 t total of ginger, cloves, and cardamom in there. I am easy for "pumpkin pie spices." I don't know if it made the cookies more interesting, probably not. Also I read in the Cosmo in our bathroom (thanks Missy!) that MEN are easy for pumpkin pie spices. Somebody dissertate that ish.

OK! Are you ready for Formula 1 fast cookies?

+ Preheat the oven to 375
+ Dump all wet or sweet stuff in a bowl (oil, sugar, syrup, vanilla) and beat it up
+ Add everything else and mix it up until it is doughy.
+ Pour some sugar and cinnamon on a plate, pull off little balls of dough and roll them around in the sugar-mix, then press them flattish on the baking sheet. Give them room to spread, like 2 inches on each side.
+ Bake for 8-12 minutes. Mine were done in 10. They should be kind of crackly on top. Let cool on the sheet for about 5 minutes before bringing them to a potluck, making everyone eat them, then announcing like a douchebag, "AND THEY'RE VEGAN!" Or before eating them, they are better once cooled.

Compost cookies

Soon I will be back in New York, where I can eat the food I love with the people I love. Is there anything better than that? And I know that I will go to Momofuku Milk Bar and get some cookies, because they are made of magic and whimsy. My previous attempt to recreate the Cornflake Marshmallow cookies was pretty lame. Way too much flour, they turned out puffy. But apparently the compost cookie recipe was on Good Morning America, and I made a hybrid with the leftover marshmallows that have been sitting in my cupboard for 6 months. Disturbing! But not disturbing enough to keep me from eating so much of the dough that I could not bring myself to try one fresh out of the oven because I felt sick. Beware!

These. are. awesome. There are some sneaky things that I didn't figure out on my own, like the fact that you use corn syrup/ glucose syrup to get that undercooked thing going on. And that you cream the butter, sugar, and eggs for a really long time. I don't know what the point of that is, but I do feel like I have earned my hand-mixer-impulse-purchase so that's good. Apparently my resistance to consumer capitalism plummets when kitchen wares are involved.

Compost Cookies

3/4 cup butter (a stick and a half)
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 T corn syrup
2 T coffee grounds
1 t vanilla
2 eggs
1 3/4 cup flour
2 t baking soda
2 t salt
1 t baking powder
3 cups of random crap. Original has oats, pretzels, potato chips, butterscotch and chocolate chips. I used: 1/2 cup marshallows cut into bits, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, 1/2 cup oats, 1/2 cup crushed cheerios, 1 cup crushed tortilla chips. Obviously, they were super good.

+OK, rev up that slightly overpriced but oh so convenient mixer. Cream together the butter and sugar things.

+Now add the eggs and set a timer for TEN MINUTES while you beat the crap out of your cookie dough. Apparently this does something to the sugar crystals to make these cookies completely irresistible to those who work at home and have no willpower. Hypothetically. Do some sweet squats around your kitchen to prepare your body for the onslaught of sugar that will soon course through your veins.



+Add the flour, coffee grounds and dry stuff. Don't overmix here, otherwise your cookies will NOT BE CHEWY. Heaven forefend!

+Add the junk food/baking ingredients, stirring until just blended. Now cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge for an hour or overnight. They need to rest, just trust the process. Imagine the fat stack of two dollar bills piling up in your pocket that you are not spending on each single one of these cookies. That is worth at least an hour of your patience. OK.

+Preheat the oven to 400. Scoop these out, leaving a couple inches on each side to spread. Bake for about 10 minutes. Count the days until the semester is over (14!)

persimmon tea cake

Well, before making this cake the only thing I knew abut persimmons was from this video:



Suffice it to say that I was skeptical. As soon as I bought some at the market and did a little online research, I became even more skeptical. How to tell if my persimmon is Fuyu or Hachiya? Was I going to poop my pants if I did chose wrong? Is this like some kind of whack-ass farmer's market Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Holy Grail? Well, anyway, I think I screwed it up and used the squat kind you're supposed to use in salads (Fuyu), the good news is that it was delicious. I ate half the loaf in one day. Seriously.

The recipe comes from Beard on Bread, kind of, except I halved the recipe but forgot to halve the sugar. I then added more flour, but make no bones about it: this is a cake. A cake that you eat for breakfast. Because you are a grown-up.

Persimmon tea cake

2 1/2 cups flour (I started with 1 3/4 but the batter was too thin because I screwed up and added some whole wheat until it looked like zucchini bread batter. 2 1/2 cups seems right. Use some whole wheat flour at your discretion)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg
shake of ginger and cloves, too.
3 persimmons, chopped up (I'm pretty sure that if you're cooking them, it doesn't matter if they are the crunchy Fuyu or mushy Hachiya kind)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup (one stick) melted butter
1/3 cup water (or bourbon or cognac-- I didn't have these)
Optional: some dried cranberries or raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 and butter a loaf pan

Dump all the dry ingredients in the bowl and mix in the wet ingredients.

Cook for an hour, mine took an extra 15 minutes or so.

Curl up some tea and a good book. Or a not so good book that's due tomorrow. Any book will do.

ricotta

Homestead dream complete! Remember the last year and a half when all I wanted to talk about was how plan B was to learn to make cheese on a mountain in New Hampshire? But I never did it? Then when I pined for classes at the cheesemaking institute at UVM that were about a thousand dollars above my budget? Those days are over.

As the internet testifies, making your own fresh cheese is pretty much the easiest thing in the world. All you need is some cheesecloth or old tights and a big container of milk. Here's for ricotta-- paneer and queso blanco are basically the same thing but unsalted and strained a bit more.

So here we go. Take half a gallon of pasteurized (not ultra pasteurized) whole milk and put it in a pot to boil. You want some space on top in case it boils and starts to foam, which happened one time I made this cheese but not the other. Enh. Anyway, if your pots are too small then just scale the "recipe" down accordingly.

Ok, when the milk is just thinking about boiling softly, stir in a tablespoon of salt and three tablespoons of lemon juice. Turn the heat down until the cheese starts to form curds. Yum, cheese curds! Don't stir, just let the milk simmer for 5 more minutes or so until the curds really separate and you can see the whey, which is watery and yellow.

Line a colander with cheesecloth and strain the cheese, pouring some cold water over the top to cool the curds and rinse off some of the lemon flavor. For soft ricotta, just a few minutes in the colander is plenty. For a firmer cheese that you can cut into blocks or crumble into tacos or what have you, tie up the cheesecloth and let it hang from your faucet for an hour or so.

Recipe for my bootleg palak paneer to follow, ricotta is delicious all by itself... or with some jam or honey.

Happy halloween, everybody!

guest post: dad's chocolate ice cream

Dictated by the great ice cream Kahuna himself. Editor's note: we have an electric bucket style ice cream maker like this:


that works really well. Previous attempts at using an "indoor style" freeze-the-bucket ice cream maker led to ice cream that never really set. If you are young and urban and ice-cream-maker-less, David Lebovitz has a great write up about how to make ice cream without one here. Note well that this recipe makes a ridiculous amount of ice cream. If you want a less ridiculous amount of ice cream, half it.


CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM

1 quart half and half
1 quart heavy cream
2 cups sugar
2 tsps vanilla
8 egg yolks
cocoa powder (always Ghiradelli, here)

Scald the half and half and set aside. If a thin layer of you know, stuff forms, remove it with a wooden spoon. Whisk the egg yolks until they become pale yellow. Add the sugar to the yolks. Slowly add the scalded half and half, a little at a time to the yolk/sugar mix. It is important to do this tempering very slowly so that the eggs are not cooked. This happened once when I added the whole quart at once but if you go slowly, there won't be a problem. Now add the chocolate. Our family goes by the color rather than scientific measurement. We add enough chocolate to produce a light brown color. But it's all in the tasting. When the flavor is exactly what we like, we have achieved our goal. We like it not quite as chocolatey as hot chocolate. It tastes kind of like a Frosty.

Add the quart of heavy cream to the mixture. Now add the vanilla. At this point we add additional Hersheys syrup to make sure that it's chocolatey enough. The key to good ice cream is putting the mixture in the fridge for as long as possible. Overnight yields excellent results because the colder the mixture, the less time is required in the ice cream maker. The result is a creamier ice cream.



At this point, transfer the cold mixture to your favorite ice cream maker.



When the ice cream is done, we consume some of it right away in a soft-serve consistency. The rest we place in plastic containers and put in the freezer where in an hour or two you have a consistency of hard ice cream.

beer milkshakes

While he ate his sandwich and sipped his beer, a bit of conversation came back to him. Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, "You love beer so much, I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake." It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it. He finished his sandwich and paid Herman. He purposely didn't look at the milk shake machines lined up so shiny against the back wall. If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn't known - they might call the police.

--Cannery Row



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The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer have arrived. All I want to do is read, sleep, and drink cold things. Milkshakes. Like Doc from Cannery Row, I have been fixated on beer milkshakes ever since drinking a beer milkshake-like concoction at Radio Bean in Burlington, VT.


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Hip young people, weird old people, a cardboard cactus, wipe the snow off your glasses and swill a frosty Guinness with espresso and maple syrup in the middle of the day. Winter vacations are the best thing in the world, followed by the state of Vermont, followed by beer milkshakes.

Beer milkshake:

-- 1 tall can Guinness / stout
-- 2 generous scoops ice cream (vanilla or Dublin mudslide, please)

Blend.

Quickie ice cream roundup

Folks: I haven't tried this... actually, I'm not even sure if we own a blender, but it sounds SO GOOD. Judging by the quality of Alex's frozen raspberry sauce last weekend, this is a winner.

5 minute fruit ice cream in a blender

Linked in the side bar:

Little diner "ice creams"

WHAT? AWESOME.

Also, ever since I saw this commercial on TV I've been meaning to make this:

chocolate pudding

Making your own desserts is awesome and way better than sitting around eating a whole bag of milanos. Making cookies take a long time. Blog readers of the world: make your own goddamn pudding.

PS-- wouldn't you know it, it is kind of HARD to find good chocolate pudding recipes. Some are based on pots-de-creme: egg based. those require cute cups and a cooking savvy I just don't have. The trick: the pudding you are thinking of in your head is filed under blancmange-- which is like your basic cornstarch pudding recipe. Upside: while it is not a heavenly thing of glory you would pay like 8 bucks to eat in a restaurant, it is pretty damn close and also INSTANT GRATIFICATION.

Oh-- you know what I want, pudding. Ok, stir some milk, bloop bloop blooop, DONE.

CHOCOLATE PUDDING

2 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 chocolate bar (semisweet)-- to taste really. I think the recipe said 4 oz and I put in a good 10. Especially if you are going to make it spicy, it's gotta be chocolately.
2 tbs cornstarch
1 tsp vanilla
(moving to San Diego edition-- 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp allspice)

Pour 1/4 cup of the milk (give or take) into the cornstarch, slowly. Go through the groovy ooblek phase into the weird watered down viscous milk stage. No lumps, now. Add the sugar to this concoction. And whatever "Mexican" spices suit your fancy.

Heat up the rest of the milk and vanilla and the chocolate broken into chunks over low heat. Now slowly pour in the cornstarch goop. Cook and stir the future pudding so that the cornstarch loses its "raw flavor"-- now, I don't know what that is, but I've never had a cornstarch pudding taste really bad so just, you know, cook it and then in the end you'll have pudding. Take it off the heat when its looking pretty firm (like 10 minutes?) and pour/glop it into little cups, wine glasses, a bowl, whatever. Stick it in the fridge.

It's pudding tiiiiiime.

red velvet cupcakes

geez! two weekends ago (already?) i went on a total baking bender. red velvet cupcakes were the first adventure.


our story begins... in january i ditched out of an awkward fundraiser that i helped plan to get cupcakes. and lo! the cupcakes were the best that i've EVER had.


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after months of fantasizing about them, i tried my hand. oh, red velvet cupcakes. why is something merely "food coloring" flavored so absolutely enticing? it probably comes from the same part of my brain that genuinely loves waffle house and little people, big world. the kitschy, happy, slightly dumb part.

anyway, these are pretty cheerful suckers and delicious to boot and if i had more foresight (sat word, sadly enough) i would have made them for valentines day.

RED VELVET CUPCAKES
from better homes and gardens via the internet

3 cups all-purpose flour
3 tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
¾ tsp salt
3 large eggs, at room temperature
¾ cup butter, at room temperature
2¼ cups granulated sugar
1½ tsp vanilla extract
2 tbs red food coloring
1½ cups buttermilk (or add 1 tbs vinegar per 1 cup milk, let it get all groovy for a few minutes. home science!!!)
1½ tsp baking soda
1½ tsp vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder and salt. Set aside.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter on medium speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar and vanilla; beat until combined. One at a time, add eggs; beat on medium speed after each. Bet in food coloring on low.

4. Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk to egg mixture; beat on low-medium after each just until combined. Stir together baking soda and vinegar. Add to batter; beat just until combined.

5. Fill cupcake liners two-thirds full. Bake 15 to 17 minutes, or until toothpick inserted near centers comes out clean. Cool pans on wire racks for 10 minutes. Gently remove cupcakes from pans; cool.


i made marshmallow frosting but it was a pretty bootleg endeavor and hardened kind of nastily (don't get me wrong, i snacked on these puppies all week). in hindsight, i probably just should have made seven minute frosting. its in the joy of cooking, or any cookbook, or here.