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.

Houston travel advisory: Shipley donuts

For me, donuts mean SUNDAY and DAD (inexplicably, since mom was surely there, too, when we ate donuts; he wasn't serving them for dinner in her absence or anything like that). We always bought donuts from Shipley's; even as a small child I maintained intense brand loyalty and looked down on Dunkin, I knew not why. Now I know that Shipley Do-Nuts (that hyphen kills me!) is a little local chain that eventually spread through the south, not a national giant. I've lived away from Houston for years, during which time I have eaten donuts only rarely--Entemann's in college, maybe a Krispy Kreme in Penn Station, sublime Polish donuts in Greenpoint, wet cardboardy Dunkins in moments of desperation--but I visited this summer and discovered the most delicious variety Shipley's has to offer: glazed plain cake.

This donut is utterly irresistible: a delicious, tender, spice-flecked interior that melts in your mouths enclosed in a thin layer of glaze that softens the donut's crust but also offers a slight, pleasing resistance to your bite. I have had other glazed cake donuts before, but none hold a candle to this (though the ones in Greenpoint are not at all bad). Forget some spongy cake...this is the real angel food, as far as I'm concerned. Now I have to eat them every time I go home, on top of all the Mexican food and barbecue. Sigh.

(I should mention that I've never liked glazed donuts, though I did eat them from time to time during the Krispy Kreme kraze. Shipley's glazed donuts are very, very good, for those of you who like that sort of thing. But this glazed plain cake is the true queen of the display case.)

If you find yourself in the south, stop into a Shipley's, and try a kolache, too, while you're at it. N. B.: that link is well worth following--there's a recipe there for bread pudding made with day-old donuts. !

potatoes roasted in duck fat

My lack of a working camera is devastating at the moment, for last night I made the most gorgeous roast potatoes I have ever seen (and that includes potatoes roasted by professionals). But wait, you say, handsome is as handsome does—how did they taste? Well, they did taste quite handsome, too. Last night I roasted potatoes in duck fat.

The story begins this summer, when I bought a Greenmarket duck on a whim. Duck is one of my favorite meats, but I had never made it at home. After consulting several cookbooks, I decided to follow the French Farmhouse Cookbook’s method, which calls for the duck to be roasted simply in a pan with a couple of inches of water in it. Other books offered many more complicated options involving pre-poaching, air-drying, constant basting, and worse, but this simple way worked beautifully—crispy skin, tender meat, no fuss.

Before the duck went into the oven, however, I had to trim away its globs of excess fat, which wouldn’t do the roast any good. Several books advised me to render the fat for later use. Even though all you have to do is heat the fat in a skillet until it melts (20-30 minutes over medium heat, stir intermittently) and then strain it to remove crisped-up skin and other solids, and even though it would keep in the refrigerator for months, I was skeptical. I worried that rendering fat would mean that I had taken this home cooking thing too far. Did I really want to have a little jar of animal fat in the refrigerator, its solid milky opacity making it impossible for me to ignore what it would eventually do to my arteries?

Yes, I did want. I rendered the fat, strained it into an old mustard jar, labeled it “DUCK FAT” with a Sharpie and, I'm sorry to say, some smug self-satisfaction, and gave it a prominent spot on the refrigerator door.

Last night I finally got around to using it for the first time, to roast potatoes according to Nigel Slater’s instructions in Real Food. Cubed potatoes tossed in olive oil (and maybe some spices) and roasted in a hot oven are a dinnertime staple for us, but this is a different matter entirely. Cut larger, given a quick boil, and then tossed in a dry pan to rough up the edges a bit before roasting, these potatoes turned a lovely caramel color in places, stayed prettily blond in others, and were quite creamy on the inside and delectable throughout. I braised some cabbage, too, beginning with duck fat instead of olive oil, but it didn't make much difference. The potatoes—the potatoes were the thing.

Potatoes Roasted in Duck Fat
adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Food

-Preheat the oven to 400F. I roast my potatoes in a jelly roll pan and put it in the oven to heat up while I get everything else ready.
-Melt 1/4 - 1/2 cup duck fat. I think I used about 1/3 cup.
-Peel 5 potatoes about the size of your fist. Mine were Yukon gold and weighed about 2 pounds total. Chop them up into pieces too big to eat in a single bite. Maybe you want a few 1-biters to get extra crispy, but the larger ones get a lovely crust, too, and are full of creamy flesh. Put them in a saucepan of cold water with 1 tsp or so salt, bring to a boil, and boil gently for 5 minutes. Drain in a colander, toss the potatoes back in the pan, and jerk it around a bit to rough up the edges; this is important for the texture of the finished potatoes. (The boil-before-roasting may sound like a pain in the neck, but it’s not that bad, and I do think it made a difference.)
-Remove the pan from the oven, pour the melted fat in, and tilt to coat the pan evenly. Add the potatoes to the pan, toss them in the fat, and roast for about 45 minutes, stirring only once.  (I added 3 cloves garlic—skin on, crushed—to the pan and don’t think it made much difference.)
-These needed a lot of salt since they were not salted before roasting: I used 1 tsp sea salt, crushed in a mortar and pestle. A few grindings of black pepper are lovely here, too—the hot, simple potatoes enhance its fragrance mightily.

* This was really only enough for 2. Two pounds of potatoes may sound like a lot for 2 people, but trust me, we would have eaten more if there had been more. Of course, potatoes and cabbage were our whole dinner…as a side dish this might feed four, but you’d better prepare something divine for the main event or everyone will just be longing for more potatoes. To eat these potatoes with a green salad for dinner would be, I say, very heaven.

Middle of the Night Molasses Cookies

In the past few years I have decided that one of the major advantages of adulthood is freedom to bake. Maybe you don’t have long, lazy summer vacations any more, and maybe you miss slumber parties, but you can make cookies any time you please, and you can sneak as much raw dough as you like.

(Some of you may have had baking freedom as children, but no one in my family was overly friendly with the oven. In fact, my sister and I once adventurously made a batch of cookies while my parents were out, and the reward for our intrepidness was an oven floor covered with dough that was literally blazing, having spilled off the baking sheet. We turned off the oven and let the fire burn itself out, but the lesson we learned about the dangers of following your sweet tooth was not so quick to die.)

Baking cookies makes me feel as carefree and mischievous as a child and as powerful and self-determined as a woman. They’re so easy: crave a cookie at 9pm on a lazy Sunday and you can have a freshly-baked specimen in your hand by 10. Maybe they’re too easy: when I bake a really good batch, I feel obliged (in a life-is-short kind of way) to give in and eat as many as I want. But somehow the mediocre batches seem to disappear pretty quickly, too, and it isn’t all Andrew’s doing.

I have a secret, actually: I’ve started eating cookies in the middle of the night. This is New York, and my kitchen is one wall of the living room, which is also the only room. Essentially we live in a kitchen from which a bed is separated by French doors. When I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble across the apartment to the bathroom, I cannot avoid passing the cookie jar. Sleepily scarfing one down before falling back into bed somehow seems less crazy in the dreamy dark, however sheepish I feel in the morning. I wish I could blame this on Ambien or some other drug, but it’s just acute cookie madness. And let me tell you, my tummy is not looking so acute any more. I’m going to give you a wonderful cookie recipe, but please exercise your right to bake responsibly. Bakers with little willpower, beware!

Mary Jones from Cleveland’s Molasses Cookies
from Sunday Suppers at Lucques

Makes about 20 big cookies

These are big, flat, soft, and spicy, just like the Archway molasses cookies I loved as a child and gave up in my 20s because they were full of transfats and other nasty things. I was first thrilled to find the recipe in Suzanne Goin’s reliably wonderful cookbook and then shocked to see that it calls for shortening, which I just don’t use. I had learned from America’s Test Kitchen that creaming sugar with melted and cooled butter (instead of merely softened, room-temperature butter) yields a cookie that is chewy instead of crisp, and so I substituted melted butter for the shortening. The results are outstanding.

-Preheat oven to 325. Melt a stick of butter (1/2 cup) and allow it to cool while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
-Sift together:

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp ground ginger

And then stir in ½ tsp salt.
-Cream together ¼ cup molasses, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1 extra large egg, and the melted butter. (Suzanne Goin recommends 3 minutes on medium in a stand mixer fitted with the whisk, but my stand mixer is too inconveniently stored to haul out for something as easy as cookies. I use the handheld mixer and beat for 3 minutes on high.) Mix in half the dry ingredients on low speed; scrape down the sides; and mix in the rest of the dry ingredients.
-Chill the dough for 15 minutes. Suzanne Goin rolls the dough out to 1/8 inch thickness and uses a cookie cutter, because her cookies are destined for ice cream sandwiches. I can’t be bothered with this and instead deposit 1.5 tablespoon lumps of dough on two parchment paper lined baking sheets, then flatten them to about ¼ inch with the bottom of a glass dipped in water. Sprinkle with turbinado or granulated sugar and bake 12 or 13 minutes, depending on how crispy you like your cookies.

Chipotle Black Beans and Rice and Sweet Potatoes

I felt a little off today...I'm trying to start running again, but I still feel really weak and lacking in willpower. (Did I mention that instead of the freshman 15 Andrew and I have both gained the newlywed 5? Is it the end-of-workday beer? The fact that we're both 30 now? The passion for baking? Curse you, no-knead bread!) Thank goodness I had already defrosted four cups of beans to use for dinner. I love cooking beans myself instead of using cans. It makes me feel ultra-frugal, it leaves me with lots of easy dinners, and it doesn't actually take much time at all.

This meal was colorful and felt healthy-but-not-punishing. The beans are adapted from a Deborah Madison recipe. Of course, the logical complement of Negra Modelo renders it somewhat less healthy...as does my breakfast of tarte tatin! But with the way the ALCS is going, it's a good thing I have the beer for Andrew.

Today I learned that gypsies cook pheasant by packing it in soft clay and then roasting the whole thing, so that a sealed clay pot bakes all around the bird. That is all.

-Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Start a pot of brown rice (1 cup rice, 1.75 cups water, dash of olive oil, dash of salt). Wash and peel 4 sweet potatoes. Chop into roughly 1 inch dice. Toss with 1 or 2 tbs olive oil, salt, and pepper and bake for 30 minutes.
-Prepare chopped cilantro and crumbled or grated feta (I used ricotta salata) for garnish. Finely chop a small onion and a fat clove of garlic. Chop half a 28 oz can of tomatoes (or less...I used what I had left over, which was half a can). Chop a chipotle chile packed in adobo.
-15 minutes before the sweet potatoes are finished, saute the chopped onion in 1 tbs neutral oil in a pot large enough to hold the beans and tomatoes. Saute until soft, about 5 minutes; add the chopped garlic clove and stir for 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes, chipotle chile, 4 sprigs of cilantro, and 4 cups of black beans with some of their cooking liquid (or 2 cans of black beans, rinsed). Season with 1.25 tsp salt, bring to a simmer, and simmer 15 or 20 minutes.
-Everything should finish at about the same time. Serve the black beans on top of brown rice, garnished with cheese and cilantro. Serve the sweet potatoes on the side. This made enough for our dinner plus 1 large or 2 small lunches tomorrow...if I had doubled the rice it would be enough for two lunches.

Tarte Tatin

Wow, so, it's been an awfully long time. When Andrew and I got engaged, I dropped blogging to make room in the schedule for wedding planning. I didn't drop cooking, though; and in fact, when I cooked especially delicious things, I felt kind of anxious about the fact that I wouldn't be able to take their picture and write them up. I was afraid I would forget. Now that we're an old married couple, I'll start again, I think, and I'll do it tonight instead of waiting for the perfect moment that never comes.

I was moved to action in part by The Art of Simple Food, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday. It is so lovely, to look at and to read, that I had to cook from it immediately. Last night was braised chicken legs; tonight, tarte tatin, something I have never eaten before but have always, always wanted to make--caramel! apples! crust!

I had enough dough for an 11 inch buttery crust in the freezer--Ina Garten's crostata dough, which I thought would do--and last weekend at the Greenmarket Andrew had thoughtfully bought twice as many apples as he was supposed to. Because I'm a slow worker, it took me 35 minutes just to peel and core the apples. The finished product was lovely to look at (um...in a rustic sort of way; my camera battery is dead and the charger is nowhere to be found, so lucky for me I will not have to substantiate this claim with a photo). It tasted straightforward and not supersweet; I liked it (and Andrew did, too, to my surprise...I didn't think it would be his kind of thing), but I guess I was expecting the caramel to be thick and sticky. Instead, it seemed to have gone liquid, softening the apples and suffusing them with flavor. Next time I would try to get the caramel a little closer to burnt, I think, or add a more generous pinch of salt; mine was very dark but could have used more flavor. I would also use firmer apples, as suggested.

Still...I am very excited about this book, which is the book I've been waiting for: everyday food from Alice Waters.

-Roll out sweet tart crust into an 11 inch round. Refrigerate until ready to use.
-Peel, core, and quarter 3.5 pounds apples. I used Macoun and Cortland instead of the recommended Granny Smith. Don't worry if they start to brown...the caramel will turn them completely brown in the end anyway. Preheat the oven to 400.
-In a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat, combine 2 tbs butter and 6 tbs sugar. (Recipe called for a 9 inch skillet, but I used my 12 inch because that's what I have. It seemed to work fine, and in fact, I was not able to fit 3.25 pounds of apples into my 12 inch skillet.) Swirl and stir the butter and sugar until you have a bubbly, dark brown caramel. You want it to get as dark as it can without burning. When it has reached that point, remove it to a rack to cool while you further slice the apples. I gave my caramel a very very scant sprinkle of fleur de sel at this point and would use a little more next time.
-While the caramel cools, halve the apple quarters lengthwise. Arrange them, round side down and wedge pointing up, in two concentric circles in the caramel skillet. Then fill in the spaces between the apples with apple wedges pointing down.
-Lay the dough on top of the apples, tucking it between them and the skillet. Make 5 little slits in the dough with a knife, so steam can escape. Bake 35-40 minutes, until the crust is golden brown.
-Let rest 5 minutes on a rack, then invert onto a plate. We did not have whipped cream, but I wish we had, or maybe some cinnamon ice cream.