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

easy salty caramels

I am not completely insensible to the appeal of chocolate, but what really tempts me in the dessert department is butter and burnt sugar. Nine days out of ten I’d take apple crisp over warm chocolate cake. Making my own caramel always seemed a scary prospect, right up there with deep frying in terms of potential injury to person and property, but last year I made a few baby steps toward caramel self-sufficiency: I made a very light caramel sauce for sticky buns; when that went off without a hitch, I tentatively made caramel for coffee caramel ice cream; and with that under my belt, I produced a creamy caramel to top the caramel-pecan cheesecake from the holiday Chow. All this meant that when Amanda Hesser and Mark Bittman both published recipes for caramel candies in one week, I was ready to fill a saucepan with sugar and go.

What I was not ready for was the salty caramel’s crack-like addictive properties. Curse you, Amanda Hesser! This substance is easily produced in your home—more easily than you’d ever guess, if you have a candy thermometer—and irresistible. You can taste the butter and the salt (at moments, I thought, even the cream), and their chewiness is indescribably satisfying. Please note that my chocolate-oriented friends pronounced my caramels 1)“disgusting, how can you put that into your body,” and 2)“yeah, those are okay,” so not everyone was as smitten as I was. It must be admitted, too, that after being cut into sharp, glossy ranks of delicious caramel squares, they sloooowly collapsed into formless (but still-delicious) caramel puddles—so you’ll want to cover them in chocolate or wrap them up in neat little packets instead of leaving them to their own devices as I did.

--Line an 9-by-9 inch pan with aluminum foil, making it lap over the sides, and grease with vegetable oil.

--Bring 1 1/3 cups heavy cream to a boil in a medium-sized saucepan. This is not as scary as it sounds. Add 2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup light corn syrup, and 1/3 cup honey; stir constantly with a wooden spoon until it boils again. Cook, stirring occasionally (we stirred only very occasionally and it was fine), until the mixture reaches 257 degrees on a candy thermometer, which will take somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes.

--Remove the pan from the heat and, being careful about splattering, stir in 6 tbs butter in cubes, 1 tsp vanilla and 2 teaspoons fleur de sel or sea salt. Adding these things to the hot sugars will make the sugars hiss and spit, so wear oven mitts and long sleeves if you are nervous. Pour into the prepared pan and let cool.

--When the block of caramel is completely cool, turn it onto an oiled cutting board, oil your knife, and cut it into squares of a pleasing size.

for better or for worse

Like, I suspect, most stovebound homebodies, I strongly prefer to stay home on Big Nights. I greeted 2005 warmly with steak and champagne at Andrew’s house. This New Year’s Eve we planned a feast for mine: gougeres, tomatoes stuffed with bitter greens, potato-crusted salmon, chocolate cakes, and caramels. We had been out to dinner the night before at Blue Hill, where, before the crab salad and lamb with chickpeas and roasted pears, he had, as it happens, asked me to marry him. So we were aglow with affection and good fortune as we began preparing the last dinner of the year, trusting Jean-Georges and Mark Bittman to get us through to morning.

I made the gougeres already described and a dish of caramels so sublime they deserve their own post. Andrew spent a long time chopping vegetables for the stuffed tomatoes.

When he declared his weariness, I smoothed his hair and said I loved him and told him to devote himself to the 24 marathon on TV. I grated potatoes to coat the fish as Andrew boned the salmon without removing his eyes from Kiefer Sutherland’s plight. Feeling unwell, he left cooking the fish to me.

Meantime, the oil around the baking tomatoes had begun filling my apartment with acrid smoke, and the dish had to be removed from the oven halfway through the prescribed cooking time. I tried to cook the first batch of fish in a pan too flimsy and too hot. My frustration mounting as I inhaled the insalubrious fumes from oily tomato-baking and fish-burning, I had, I’m afraid, a bit of a fit. Andrew smoothed my hair and told me we were getting married and said dinner would be wonderful no matter what. I had to take a deep breath and agree. I finished up the fish, which worked fine once I switched to a cast-iron skillet: fish coated with hash browns, right at your own kitchen table! Brilliant. Just pat shredded potatoes onto a half-inch-thick filet and fry in a generous amount of fat.

After making a completely forgettable sauce, I plated the food

(still not my forte) and tore Andrew from the sofa, where he had been growing quieter and quieter and less involved. Flinching a bit at the sight of his plate, he bravely took a bite of salmon. “Mmm,” he said unconvincingly, “This is good. It has a nice texture.” Mine was overcooked and far too firm, and I said so. “I think I’m going to throw up,” Andrew said. I thought that was a bit drastic, but before I could answer, he was off to the bathroom, where he stayed for the next 8 hours. Some awful bug had chosen to ring in the new year in his stomach, poor thing. Either that, or his body was violently rejecting the idea of marriage, you know, one or the other.

I plowed through as much of the ridiculous mountain of leftovers as I could over the next few days, eating surreptitiously because Andrew couldn’t manage anything but ginger ale, Gatorade, saltines, and chicken broth (and barely even that). I think it will be a while before we take on another marathon cooking challenge.

gougeres

When I was given a very nice bottle of Veuve Clicquot rose champagne for Christmas, I heaved a sigh of relief (New Year's Eve champagne all taken care of) and, in a matter of seconds,  resolved to make gougeres to go with the bubbles. I think I first heard of gougeres in a review of the restaurant Artisinal. I never made it to Artisinal, but I couldn't stop thinking about the hot, delicate cheese puffs they served at their bar, as described by the reviewer. They sounded impossibly heavenly. Finally, in December 2004, Per Se served me a gougere with a flute of champagne as I looked over the menu. It was good, but that Times reviewer (was it you, Grimes?) had done me a disservice, making me dream it into something greater than any cheese puff could possibly be.

Still, I wanted to make my own--even brought down to earth, a cheese puff is still pretty good. I used Ina Garten's recipe from Barefoot in Paris, which was easier than I expected. First you make a kind of roux, then you pulse that in the food processor with cheese and eggs. You can make the puffs with a pastry bag, but, finding myself bagless, I shaped mine with spoons. Unfortunately, I felt as if I had been cooking all day and so was not patient enough to make them quite as small as they should have been. The photos will give you an idea how outsized they were. Ina seemed to suggest you bake two trays at once, and so I did. Since they baked completely unevenly, I will do one tray at a time if I do it again. The one change I made (besides my lazy shaping) was to substitute cayenne pepper for nutmeg, which I do not keep around (though I'd like to).

What's great about gougeres is how light and airy they are--they won't spoil your appetite at all. (I think this might be my secret objection to them, too; somehow I want them to be more substantially cheesy. Bad American.) In fact, they are hollow in the center. Thinking this was a result of some error of mine, I went to my Larousse, which informs me that baked choux dough, which is what a gougere is, should be hollow. (It's the same kind of dough you use for cream puffs and eclairs; you just pipe the hole full once the puff is baked.)

No, I didn't eat the whole tray of gougeres (and yes, I am dressed for preteen day camp on New Year's Eve...it was a night of strenuous cooking that took a turn for the worse, as I will relate in the fullness of time). Ina says you can freeze them, then reheat at 425 degrees for 5 minutes. Now I have a bag full of frozen gougeres waiting for lucky visitors.

-Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
-Heat over medium heat 1 cup of milk, 1 stick of unsalted butter, 1 tsp kosher salt, 1/8 tsp black pepper, and a shake of cayenne pepper until just before the milk begins to boil. When your psychic powers tell you the milk is just about to boil, dump in 1 cup of flour and beat it with a wooden spoon until everything comes together. Cook over low heat for 2 minutes, stirring all the time.
-Dump the flour ball into your food processor. Pulse in all at once 4 extra-large eggs (I used 5 large, which was fine), 1/2 cup grated Gruyere, and 1/4 cup grated Parmesan; pulse until incorporated into a smooth, thick dough.
-Pipe or spoon dots onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper. The dots of dough should be 1.25 inches wide and .75 inch tall. Brush the tops of the gougeres with a wash of 1 egg beaten with 1 tsp water. Sprinkle a little extra grated Gruyere on top. Bake for 15 minutes, until golden brown.

new year, new shoes

My sister and I each got a new pair of shoes while I was back in Houston for Christmas. You'd never guess which girl lives in New York and which in Houston...or maybe you would, if you'd seen all the girlies running around New York in their cowboy boots and miniskirts.

I have had my old cowboy boots for fifteen (fifteen!) years. They began life as my mother's, but I appropriated them pretty quickly. A few dozen too many tromps through the rain and snow have pretty much worn them out; thank goodness for these new ones, which feel practically like they have orthotics in them compared to the others.

This is my sister enjoying Thanksgiving dinner in 2004:

This is the Hot Damn! schnapps she spent this Christmas urging me to take shots of (for the record, I think I caved at 5pm on Christmas day, and it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me):

And this is the nut she left out for Santa on Christmas Eve:

We did some nice cooking, but I was just kind of enjoying being home, so you'll have to take my word for it.