h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

potato leek soup

Feeling a little thick in the waist and thin in the billfold of late, I've been keeping a closer eye on how much I eat and how much I spend. Soup is my favorite way to address both of these concerns. Last winter I felt frugal and slender buying my daily soup at Le Pain Quotidien, where just under $5 buys you a satisfying portion of bright, delicious vegan soup, a piece of baguette, and a slice of brown bread. It's not a bad deal for lunch in midtown, but it didn't take me long to realize that you can make yourself a week's worth of soup for $5 (thereby avoiding, too, the terrible service at Pain Quotidien, which tries my patience even on the cheeriest days). Making your own leek and potato soup is particularly satisfying--how often do two ingredients plus water and salt end up tasting so good?

I recently pitted Julia Child's potato leek soup (from The Way to Cook) against Deborah Madison's (from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone). Julia Child's soup is just boiled potatoes and leeks (though she does suggest that you might stir in some cream at service--not for taste, but because cream is "nourishing"--what a woman!). It's better than you'd suppose boiled potatoes and leeks would be, but Deborah Madison's marginally more complicated (though still absurdly simple) recipe is the hands-down winner.

Chop up 1.5 pounds leeks, white part only (perhaps 4 average-size ones? leeks vary so wildly in size that I always weigh). I like to do this by quartering the leek lengthwise without cutting through the root, rinsing the quarters, and then chopping each quarter into half-inch lengths. Slice 1.5 pounds potatoes (I like Yukon Gold best here) into bite-size, fairly thin (1/3 inch) pieces. Melt 2 tbs. butter in your soup pot over medium heat, add vegetables, and cover. Let sit on the heat for 10 minutes, stirring every once in a while. Add water to cover (about 7 cups) and 1.5 tsp salt and bring to a boil. Lower heat, cover partially, and let simmer for about 30 minutes, until some of the potatoes are starting to fall apart. Serve with salt and pepper, and maybe a splash of milk or a spoonful of yogurt.

French Women Don't Get Fat (the production of which, full disclosure, I was involved with at work, though I would honestly, wholeheartedly recommend it even if this were not the case) has some really great, easy, flexible vegetable soup recipes, too...but I wanted to mention the book becauses it was my introduction to leeks, a vegetable whose acquaintance I am very happy to have made.

monkey cupcakes

Last weekend I went home for a wedding. I judge weddings by the bride and groom's affection for each other and the quality of the bride's cake; happily, this event scored high in both categories.

The night before the wedding, my sister had promised to host a Monkey Ball to welcome me to town. Accordingly, she baked these adorable and delicious monkey cupcakes, as presented by Tailey the kindergarten classroom monkey and Gonzago the owl:

The cake is banana, and the frosting is chocolate. She used chocolate disks for the ears, tiny M&Ms for the eyes, and vanilla snaps (cut in half) for the monkeymouth. Yum! Thank you, Becca!

If you love monkeys, you will be interested in Monkey Day.

double dip: ginger and cranberry ice creams

The good news is that I finally got to make that gingersnap ice cream (um, minus the gingersnaps). The bad news is that no new stars were born in the ice cream firmament this weekend.

The gingersnap ice cream recipe I lifted from the Times was very different from the two Chez Panisse Desserts ice creams I have made, mainly because it used two egg yolks instead of six. It was still good, don't get me wrong, and I loved its pure gingeriness. But it's hard to go balk to two yolks when you've become accustomed to six: this ice cream was noticeably icier and less smooth than its predecessors. (Besides, when you use the six yolks, you save the whites and have a spa-like egg-white omelette for breakfast the next day, so you see, it's actually quite healthy in the end.) I did not add gingersnaps because he who was dispatched for gingersnaps came back with the wheat-free, gluten-free variety. I nibbled at one, trying to keep an open mind, but it was just not the thing, not the thing at all. Luckily, the ice cream's strong ginger flavor made the fold-in unnecessary. I think it would be delicious with all kinds of fruit desserts.

GINGERSNAP ICE CREAM

-Grate two ounces of ginger into two cups of heavy cream. Add 1/4 tsp salt (N.B. I'm not sure why this needed salt; I have seen no other ice cream recipes with salt, but maybe it brought out the ginger flavor; I couldn't tell) and heat over medium low until it begins to steam, about 150 on a candy thermometer. Turn off heat and let steep for three minutes. Strain, pressing on ginger to extract as much cream as possible.
-Whisk two large egg yolks with 1/2 cup sugar until they are pale yellow (about a minute and a half). Slowly whisk in the gingery cream.
-Slowly heat, stirring constantly, until mixture reaches 150 degrees. Cool for ten minutes, whisk in 1 cup of whole milk, and chill thoroughly.
-When mixture is chilled, freeze in an ice cream maker. If you want to add crushed gingersnaps, add them after you've frozen it in the maker but before you put it back into the freezer to firm up. Obviously, you could make amazing, tiny ice cream sandwiches.

See these lovely, ruddy cranberries? I turned them into an oddly foamy, pepto-bismol pink ice cream that muffled their tartness under a blanket of cream. It was OK, but let's just say that I made the ice cream last weekend, it's Thursday now, and there's still some hanging out in the freezer (I realize that I should be inclined to like it because it's a wallflower dessert--apropos of which, was everybody else pained by the moment in the Martha Stewart Apprentice last night when Alexis said, "Dawn, I like you, because I'm always the person everyone on the team likes least"?). I should have taken the hints in Chez Panisse Desserts that this is really a novelty ice cream for the holidays. Oh well. What interested me was that it had NO eggs in it: it's just cooked cranberry puree (from a 12-oz bag), 2 cups of cream, a cup of milk, and a cup of sugar. Because I don't have a food mill, I pureed the cooked cranberries by forcing them through a strainer with a wooden spoon, which made me feel pretty hard core. Grrr. But I think next time we'll try something more conventional, like . . . CHOCOLATE!

Nigella's pear ginger muffins

It has never seemed to me quite right that Nigella Lawson should write for the New York Times. I understand why they'd want her, and I understand why she'd want to do it, but she's so vibrant and seductive, and the Times is . . . not. Nevertheless, my Nigella-worship is such that I'll take her where I can get her, so I was happy to see her back in the food section last week. [Although--I am always surprised to read these "don't be scared of baking" stories, because I thought that even people like me, who will look at a recipe for tomato sauce (seriously), were comfortable following a recipe for cake or brownies. And it's much easier to measure, dump, and stir than to cook a piece of fish just right. Anyway.]

This weekend I celebrated Nigella's return by making her pear-ginger muffins. Andrew liked them very much (I believe the word "toothsome" was used). I thought they were good, with a few reservations: the brown-sugar-crunchy tops were wonderful, and the heat of the ginger was nice, but I don't like chunks of fruit in my muffins, and I thought they needed a pinch of salt.  Four days later they were still moist and fresh-tasting.

-Preheat oven to 400.
-In a large bowl, mix 1.75 cups flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1 tsp ground ginger.
-In another bowl, mix 2/3 cup sour cream, 1/2 cup vegetable oil, 1 tbs honey, and 2 large eggs. Fold into the dry ingredients. Fold in 1.5 cups peeled pears cut into 1/4 inch dice.
-Divide batter among 12 muffin cups. Sprinkle 2 tbs total brown sugar over tops of muffins and bake for 20 minutes.

Greenmarket haul and Zuni roast chicken

This weekend's Greenmarket purchases (= $37):

-one 3-pound chicken (feet attached!)
-a dozen eggs
-2 red bell peppers
-2 zucchini
-a butternut squash
-small red potatoes
-thyme
-cilantro
-leeks
-some onions
-carrots
-15 apples (red delicious, johnamac, and mutsu)

Could that possibly be all? I am trying to keep better track of where the food money goes.

Having decided that it was time to try the famous Zuni Cafe roast chicken with warm bread salad, Saturday night I salted my chicken, whose terrifying claws I could not lop off because I had taken my only real knife in to be sharpened. It had to be laid in the bowl curled up in the fetal position, otherwise the legs would have poked wantonly straight up in the air.

Strolling back from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to the subway on Sunday, Andrew and I passed an adorable food store with bread in the window. We went in to buy a loaf of bread and left with coffee, cheese, crackers, olive oil, and white wine vinegar. It was hard not to buy more because everything was so beautifully, temptingly displayed. They had the Italian bouillons for which I vainly searched uptown and down when Nigella was my bible. It is called Blue Apron Foods, it is on Union Street just above Seventh Avenue, and it makes me wish I still lived in Park Slope.

Back home, I roasted the chicken and made the bread salad, a nice, lazy Sunday night meal. I think I like Ina Garten's chicken with croutons just as well (because of those onions that cook under the chicken!), but I did like the results of the pre-salting method here. As Judy Rogers suggests, I roasted it in a preheated cast iron skillet instead of a roasting pan, and I used the convection feature on my oven for the first time--perhaps these also contributed to the lovely crispness of the skin.

I'll get you, my pretty!

double dip: vanilla and coffee caramel

DID YOU KNOW that Russians are great fans of ice cream? Morozhenoe, it is called, and you can buy it on the street even in November. I once spent five months in St. Petersburg and knew everything was in order the day I walked down Nevsky Prospekt licking ice cream in my long underwear, a turtleneck, two wool sweaters, a babushka shawl, and the beautiful but thin black greatcoat my host mother had laughed at when I arrived ("This is your coat?"). It's not the best ice cream you've ever had, but it will do (as ice cream usually does). A popular flavor is plum.

If you love ice cream, you must try making your own. It is so delicious, so easy, and even if you use expensive ingredients like vanilla beans, it is still cheaper than premium store-bought brands.

This was supposed to be the summer of ice cream for me. In late May, when the air was finally warming up and my apartment was close enough to completion that I allowed myself to start thinking about what it would be like to live there, I ordered a hand-cranked Donvier ice cream maker just like the one my grandmother gave me when I was a little girl. I also ordered Chez Panisse Desserts, which was said to be full of delectable ice cream recipes. Despite my intense (undying, really) devotion to vanilla, I looked forward to inventing new flavors, specifically cilantro sorbet and gingersnap ice cream. The machine arrived; the book arrived; and best of all, the contractors finished up and I moved in to my apartment.

My plans to make vanilla ice cream for my very first dinner chez moi were foiled when it turned out the cooktop did not work and so I could not make custard. I tried to make a frozen strawberries and cream dessert; I tried to make mint ice with great bunches of mint from Andrew's parents' garden; I tried a no-cook vanilla ice cream recipe. It wasn't the same, though, and the summer of ice cream was simply not to be. To add insult to injury, the Lee brothers published a piece in the Times about the joys of making ice cream at home, and they included a recipe for gingersnap ice cream. Boy, was I hot under the collar that summer day.

They finally got my cooktop working in September, so on the second day of fall, I finally got to make my ice cream. When I first tasted it, straight out of the maker, I worried that it was too eggy; when I took it out of the freezer the next day, it has frozen rock-solid, and I worried that it was full of watery ice crystals; but when I let it soften just a bit that second day, it was just right, with a marvelous flavor and a satisfyingly smooth, pliant texture.

VANILLA ICE CREAM from Chez Panisse Desserts

-In a medium saucepan, gently warm 1 cup of half, 2 cups of heavy cream, and 2/3 cups sugar, into which liquid/sugar mixture you have scraped the seeds of a 4-inch piece of vanilla bean [DOES ANYONE HAVE TIPS FOR SCRAPING OUT VANILLA SEEDS? I have done this twice in the past month now and fear that I am ending up with $1 worth of pricey vanilla beans in the trash or under my fingernails. Alton Brown must have some brilliant solution]. Throw in the scraped pods as well. Warm, stirring occasionally, until sugar dissolves.
-Whisk 6 egg yolks just enough to break them up (save the 6 whites for breakfast the next morning, so you can feel less guilty about the ice cream you had no idea was so yolk-rich until now). Whisk in a splash of the warm cream mixture to warm the eggs.
-Add the now-creamy yolks to the cream mixture in the saucepan. Cook over low heat until the mixture reaches 170 degrees F. Supposedly you can do this by checking whether the mixture "coats the spoon," but I feel so much better with a thermometer (which you can buy at K-Mart, Martha Stewart Everyday, for not much money). "Coats the spoon" means that when you run your finger through the custard on the back of the spoon (with which you have been stirring constantly so as to ensure that you are not making scrambled eggs), it leaves a clear trail. This is a distinction too subtle for me, and I prefer the thermometer.
-Once your custard is ready, strain it to remove the little bits of scrambly egg you have probably accumulated. Put the pods back into the custard and chill thoroughly. Once it is chilled, remove the pods and freeze it howeveryour ice cream maker tells you to.

Gosh, that was good. I know I'm no longer alone in saying this, but the phrase "plain vanilla" has never sounded right to me. Is there anything more luxurious than those bitty black beans? But this weekend, I had to try another flavor, one I had been dreaming of since my Chez Panisse Desserts book arrived. I hadn't planned ahead (like David Lebovitz, I do not grind my coffee at home, and I had no half-and-half), so this is a modified recipe (thank you, Mark Bittman). Andrew thinks it could use a dusting of spice, but I think it is amazing and perfect the way it is. I even overcame my fear of homemade caramel to make this...

COFFEE CARAMEL ICE CREAM

-Warm 1/2 cup ground coffee in 1 cup of 2% milk and about 2 cups heavy cream (I had just under 2 cups heavy cream). When tiny bubbles appear around edges, cover and steep for about half an hour--until the coffee taste pleases you.
-While the cream is steeping, put 1 cup of sugar in a smallish-medium saucepan with 3 tablespoons of water. Cook over high heat until it turns a light caramel color (mine developed a honeycomb of thick-looking bubbles before turning color; is this right?). When the color is right, put the pot in your sink and quickly pour in 1/4 cup of warm water. THIS WILL SPATTER AND HISS. Then it changes consistency. Cook to dissolve the caramel.
-Strain the coffee grounds out of the cream mixture; then stir caramel into cream mixture. Splash a bit of this into your 6 lightly-whisked egg yolks and put creamy yolks back into the cream. Heat to spoon-coating consistency as described above (170 degrees). Add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Chill thoroughly and make ice cream.

This ice cream did not freeze as hard as the vanilla--the caramel kept it chewy, even when it was dead frozen. It is very rich and, I think, extraordinary. I did not even notice the substitution of 2% milk for half-and-half, which leads me to believe that some more experimenting is in order.