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

cinnamon sugar palmiers: do it!

"It is hard to describe how sublime homemade palmiers are," Jane Daniels Lear writes in this month's Gourmet. Even more than the tantalizing pictures, this sentence convinced me that I had to make these palmiers, and soon; if J.D.L. wasn't even going to try to render their tastiness in words, they had to be pretty good. Besides, I had been wanting to try my hand at puff pastry (ok, modified, easier, less time consuming puff pastry) for a while.

"Do you like a recipe that you have to get out the ruler for?" Andrew teased; yes, yes I do. I had a lot of work to do on Sunday, and I found that I enjoyed the rhythm of going back and forth between the work and the pastry: work for an hour, roll out dough, chill; pay bills and deal with paperwork for an hour, roll out dough, chill; make dinner for an hour, roll out dough, chill; it went by pretty quickly. I really am a pastry chef at heart. There were a few hairy moments with folding sticky dough, but thanks to my silicone mat and my pastry scraper everything came out fine.

It's extremely gratifying to see the crumbly flour-butter-salt-water that you worried wouldn't come together turn into a smooth (and strangely elastic?) sheet of dough. It's even more gratifying to peek into the oven and see that the unpromisingly skinny little dough slivers with which you populated a cookie sheet have puffed up into hearts, just as they should.

A school of palmiers, just out of the oven. This is the first batch, which got a little burned but still tasted mighty fine. I had gotten the hang of it by the second batch but had also lost my patience with food photography!

Here is the recipe. I didn't tweak it at all, and my only complaint is that it's not fun to grate frozen butter. (I wonder if you could put the dry ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and grate the frozen butter in with the grating attachment without spoiling the texture of the dough? It would definitely be faster, so more butter would be more frozen when it hit the flour, surely a good thing.) I'm pretty sure my puff pastry wasn't perfect, but it was fantastic nonetheless. These cookies have a wonderfully pure butter-cinnamon-caramel taste that is not overwhelmingly sweet. (Wondering whether my fondness for butter and cinnamon sugar could be more easily stoked, I made cinnamon toast with some of the leftover cinnamon sugar, half expecting it to be just about as good as the palmiers. Silly girl. No comparison at all.) A good chunk of the pleasure of eating them is their texture; something about their light crunch invites compulsive eating because you (ok, I) want to experience that firm flakiness over and over again.

I know this close-up is blurry, but seriously, imagine sinking your teeth into those layers. Homemade palmiers, you and I will meet again.

Even though I made these not for Christmas but for my own greedy self, I'm sharing them virtually witih Food Blogga for her amazing Christmas cookie roundup. They'd make a terrific addition to any Christmas cookie plate or package (and for some reason I am obsessed with the idea of serving them with ice cream...maybe a good holiday dessert for those of you in warm places). Thanks, Food Blogga!

Two other things I am excited about: the Wintermarket downtown (via wonderful Manhattan User's Guide). And TasteBook (via wonderful Heidi). I have been wanting to figure out how to organize all my recipes in an internet-accessible way, and TasteBook seems perfect, though I am worried there is something I'm not getting about it (am I going to be required to order a book at some point?). I got started last night. That is all.

Bread

Last week Not Martha posted about her experiences with Cook's Illustrated's "No-Knead Bread 2.0" (the recipe is buried in the comments for a different post). I can't wait to try this. I didn't make the famous bread myself until this summer, but I've made it many times since. The dough has looked different every time, and when it's especially wet and slippy, I worry that it won't work out. One time I realized after the 18 hour rest that I had absentmindedly added about 1/2 cup too much water, and I worried that it wouldn't work out. But it has always been delicious. I know you all know, but it's like magic.

When I was in grade school my mom and I would bake soft, delicious bread in a teddy bear shape, so I'm not sure why adult-me has been spooked by yeasted breads until now. Inspired again by Not Martha, who drew her inspiration from the Amateur Gourmet, last month I finally baked Nigel Slater's Really Good and Very Easy White Loaf from Appetite, a recipe I had eyed longingly for years. It's true--it's really good and very easy. I cut the recipe in half, which makes a loaf about the size of the one yielded by the no-knead recipe. Its crumb is denser and whiter than no-knead bread; I think it would be better for sandwiches, and I can tell you that it makes amazing toast. I made it again for my family after Thanksgiving, and they seemed gratifyingly impressed.

Newly cocky, last week I tried the focaccia recipe in The Art of Simple Food. It revealed that my baking skills are, alas, not terribly advanced. I probably didn't let the yeast-water-rye flour sponge get bubbly enough. Then the dough felt all wrong from the start, tough and rubbery. I should have added some water when the flour sucked the initial allotment right up, but I wasn't confident enough to fiddle with the recipe. Once baked the focaccia was not pillowy and tender; it was, like the dough, tough and a little dry. On the third or fourth bite I realized what it reminded me of: bad pizza crust. (To make matters worse, I had tried to roast kale in the oven as the focaccia cooled; Michael Pollan mentions doing so in The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I was intrigued. It sounded easy enough, but I ended up with a steaming mass of kale that was soggy in the center and charred at the edges.) Luckily we were hanging and trimming Christmas wreaths as all this was going on, so I couldn't waste too much time on disappointment.

I haven't figured out how to take a good picture of my wreaths, but I did figure out what to do with my unappealing leftovers. The focaccia was more than edible over the next day or two when I toasted it and dipped it into minestrone soup. I chopped up the kale and cooked it with garlic and canned tomatoes, and we ate some of it on top of pasta. On the fourth day, with half the focaccia and about two cups of kale left, I was yearning to make pizza but didn't want to waste my leftovers. So I turned on the broiler. I sliced the focaccia in half through its thickness, ending up with very thin pieces, and heated the kale in the microwave. I put the halved focaccia on a baking sheet on the top rack right under the broiler for 2 minutes; then I removed the baking sheet, spread the kale over the bread, and put it back under the broiler for 2 minutes. I grated some Parmesan cheese, sprinkled it over the kale, and broiled 1 minute more. It wasn't pizza, but it was actually quite yummy and comforting.

Winter Minestrone Soup

(with the usual apologies for soup's utter lack of photogenaiety)

Last Sunday I was planning to cook a pot-au-feu and figured that as long as I was chopping up lots of vegetables and keeping an eye on a simmering something, I might as well make soup at the same time. Despite having had a disappointing experience the night before with the focaccia in The Art of Simple Food, I settled on its recipe for winter minestrone.

It turned out very, very well. There’s a lot to love about this soup. Most of the vegetable soups I make are meant to be pureed, which is fine with me but not really to Andrew’s liking; this one is quite chunky and therefore full of different tastes and textures. It doesn’t call for stock, so I don’t have to feel guilty about not having a freezer full of it. It’s very satisfying and even felt a little luxurious (we’re talking about boiled vegetables here) when drizzled with olive oil and Parmesan. It’s quite healthy, and it keeps well—I’m eating the last bowl for lunch now, and it still tastes delicious.

Winter Minestrone Soup with Turnips, Potatoes, and Cabbage
adapted from The Art of Simple Food

I had to use pinto beans instead of cannellini beans because my Whole Foods (Columbus Circle) doesn’t seem to stock its shelves for people who actually cook (what’s the story with that, Whole Foods? Why weeks at a time with no restocking of cumin, baking soda, or dried garbanzos? And why did you stop carrying Goya brand plain beans? To be fair to the store, judging from my fellow shoppers' habits in the store, they are much more interested in their Blackberries than in baking a cake or cooking beans from scratch). For once, I cooked the beans to a perfectly delightful texture, neither dry nor waterlogged. In the future I might try pureeing a cup or half cup of beans, vegetables, and liquid and stirring it back into the soup to thicken it up a bit. I did something similar once in this recipe and liked the results very much.

-Cook 1 cup of dried beans, preferably cannellini or borlotti. Do not discard the cooking liquid.
-Chop ½ of a green cabbage into bite-size pieces and simmer in salted water until tender, about 3 or 4 minutes.
-Heat ¼ cup olive oil in a soup pot over a medium flame. Add a finely chopped onion, 2 finely chopped carrots, and 2 finely chopped celery stalks (my dice was ¼- 1/2 inch, I think). Cook, stirring often enough, until golden brown, about 20 minutes.
-Add 4 chopped garlic cloves, 5 thyme sprigs, 1 bay leaf, and 2 teaspoons salt. Cook and stir 5 more minutes. Add 5 or 6 cups water and bring to a boil. [The original recipe said to add 3 cups of water, but that just wouldn’t have worked…maybe my cabbage was too big!] When the water bubbles, add a diced small leek (white part only) and cook for 5 minutes. Then add 1 pound turnips, peeled and chopped into bite-size pieces, and ½ pound yellow potatoes, unpeeled and chopped into bite-size pieces, and simmer for 15 minutes.
-Taste for salt. Add the cooked beans, 1 cup of the bean cooking liquid, and the cabbage. Simmer 5 minutes more.
-Serve drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with grated Parmesan.

secret cure for gout!

Should I be worried that Google is targeting me with ads such as "Like cake? Are you a fatty? Take our quiz and find out" and "Secret cure for gout"? [Update: latest query from Google: "Do you have a fat belly?"]

Gout or no gout, I am having trouble thinking about anything but the recipe for palmiers in this month's Gourmet. To be tested soon, I assure you.

stuffed cabbage

In August of 1998, a few days before Russia defaulted on its IMF loans and the ruble collapsed, I landed in St. Petersburg for a semester of study. I was baffled by the bucking exchange rate and by the fact that three years of college Russian had not truly prepared me for interactions with real live frequently surly formerly Soviet interlocutors. In the beginning, it was a lot like having a pair of floaties in the ocean; by the end, when New Year’s (not Christmas!) decorations had gone up and the sun was hanging around for only about 6 hours a day, I had fashioned a little raft of language skills that was fairly dependable, though sometimes difficult to navigate through squalls of fast-talking, unfriendly strangers.

Luckily for me, my host mother and father were a gentle older couple with a history of taking in American girls. They spoke slowly and clearly and were very patient and kind as I strung my sentences together. In their three-room apartment (bedroom, den, kitchen), I was given the bedroom, which meant that they folded out a sofa in the den every night. I felt terribly awkward about this, but it wasn’t the first time they had turned their bedroom over to a student, and they seemed to regard it as normal.

Marina Nikolaevna, my “mother,” was meant to serve me breakfast and dinner every day. I hate hot cereal and had to struggle mightily for the right to keep eating cornflakes as the cold got more and more bitter. She insisted that I would catch my death of cold without oatmeal or breakfast kasha. I was pretty sure pneumonia didn’t work that way and held firm. But I never objected to her dinners, which always began with soup (vegetable, barley, borscht) and then featured meat with potatoes, kasha, or noodles, and some good black rye bread on the side. (I don’t recall any green vegetables, which, at the time, suited me just fine.)  Often the “meat” was delicious pelmini or stuffed cabbage.

I was at school all day and out most afternoons, and so I never saw her cooking; everything seemed to come together effortlessly. No doubt some of it (for instance, the pelmini, maybe the soup, definitely the bread) was store-bought, but it couldn’t all have been; that wouldn’t have been in the budget she was given to feed me. She was a retired geologist (as was her husband), and she just knew how to run her little house smoothly, everything in its place and always neat as a pin. All day long she would sit at the kitchen window, gossiping on the phone and watching her neighbors come and go on the street. While I ate dinner she would chat with me about my day and, with a little prodding, about her life. Her twenty-year-old granddaughter was pregnant, and it was probably high time I (21) got married and started a family, too. They didn’t understand why American girls were so slow about these things. She laughed girlishly when she remembered how she and her friends would sunbathe on the banks of the Neva as soon as it began to melt every spring, and she puffed up with pride at the memory of exams she had aced five decades earlier. As a young geologist she was sent on a state-sponsored holiday to the Crimea; at night they watched movies in outdoor theaters on the beaches of the Black Sea. She got dreamy when she explained to me how beautiful the stars were there. Now I get dreamy when I remember what it was like to wander quintuply layered and still bone-cold around St. Petersburg, looking at the pastel buildings in the odd winter light, buying rolls stuffed with cabbage from carts on the street, discovering monuments to Pushkin at every turn and visiting the Hermitage at least once a week.

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls with Sweet and Sour Tomato Sauce
adapted from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook

Chestno govoriyat (honestly speaking), this is not at all like the stuffed cabbage I ate in Russia, which was much meatier. I wasn’t really a fan of this sweet and sour sauce, but then, sweet and sour is never my favorite flavor profile; Andrew, as usual, surprised me by embracing this dish enthusiastically. It was supposed to include crushed gingersnaps, too, but that sounded like a disaster to me and I wasn’t willing to risk dinner on it. This recipe, then, is significantly adapted to what I was willing to do and what I had in the cupboard. Making the cabbage balls is fun, and hey, they look like little brains. Maybe this is good for a kids' Halloween party!

-Bring 4 quarts water and 1 tbs salt to a boil. Core a 1 pound green cabbage (I used Savoy) and pull off about 18 of the outer leaves, being careful to leave them intact. When the water boils, cook the separated leaves for about 3 minutes, until they begin to wilt. Remove them to a colander (with tongs—do not discard the water), then add the remaining cored cabbage to the pot. Cook for 3 minutes and remove to the colander Add ¼ cup white rice to the boiling water and cook until tender, about 13 minutes. Drain, rinse with cold water, and leave in a colander to drain thoroughly.
-Combine the cooked rice, ½ onion grated on the large holes of a box grater, ¾ pound mild turkey sausage [original recipe calls for ground beef], ¼ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper.
-Take the individual cabbage leaves and slice out any tough stems (just at the bottom, without slicing the leaves in half completely). Lay 2 tablespoons meat stuffing on each leaf just above the “v” where you cut out the stem. Fold the two sides over the stuffing and then roll each leaf up into a tight little bundle.
-Shred the boiled cabbage heart and spread half of it in the bottom of a large Dutch oven (I used a  5.5 quart round). Lay the cabbage rolls atop the bed of cabbage, seam side down. Spread the rest of the shredded cabbage over them.
-Combine an 8-ounce can diced tomatoes (including juices), a 14.5-ounce can tomato puree, 1 cup water, 1.5 tbs brown sugar, 1.5 tbs. lemon juice, and ¼ tsp salt in a bowl. Pour it over the cabbage. Peel an onion and stick it with 6 cloves; submerge it in the pot. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook gently for 30 minutes.
-Then discard the onion. Add ¼ cup raisins, if you like (Andrew did not like the raisins; I did). Simmer, uncovered, about 1 hour more, until the sauce begins to thicken.