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Posts tagged ‘cooking’

Homemade pasta handkerchiefs with garlic broccolini and ricotta

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In Spring 2007, Brett and I made fresh pasta for the first time. It was my first year of graduate school, and I lived in a dangerous and isolating part of Los Angeles that meant it wasn’t a good idea to leave my apartment after dark. (And I never did!) Brett was still in Claremont finishing his last year of college, and a complicated combination of our class schedules and the location of our internships meant that each of us separately drove or took transit back and forth between Claremont and Los Angeles every single day, a commute that could take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2.5 hours each way. It was a particularly stressful spring, as we criss-crossed eastern Los Angeles County, as our coursework swelled, and as we both tried to find jobs and decide where we’d get our first apartment together. The weight of the semester began to creep into every moment, and as an escape we began taking on cooking projects. We baked bread for the first time; we made croissants; we made fresh pasta. We took entire evenings off and drank cheap bottles of wine and made recipes we were sorely underprepared to make, lacking the tools, experience, or space required.

The first time we made fresh pasta, we rolled out the dough with a long bottle of cheap riesling, which stood in for the rolling pin we didn’t have (which itself would have been standing in for the pasta machine we didn’t have). We kneaded the dough by hand for what felt like hours and rolled out sheet after sheet on the two square feet of counter space in my kitchen, and by the time the meal was ready to eat, many hours after we thought we’d be eating, we flopped into our chairs utterly exhausted. I have a picture of the meal, and among the time-telling ephemera on the table (flip phone!) I can see immediately how much work it must have taken to make that bowl of pasta. I remember the next time we made it, and based on the apartment and who was there I know it was at least two years later. We again rolled out the dough with that same bottle of whine (which served as our rolling pin for quite a few years), overcompensating and rolling out the pasta far too thin, and when we again flopped into our chairs many hours too late, I remember thinking I’d probably never make pasta again.

But I did, again and again, and these days we have it down. I wish I could go back and tell my 22-year-old self that it didn’t have to be so difficult, and I’m more than happy to transmit that message to all of you right now. Fresh pasta! It doesn’t have to be so difficult. A food processor and a pasta machine make it fairly quick and easy work, and the finished product is absolutely worth the effort. Fresh pasta is rich and buoyant, a completely different experience than the dried grocery store variety – even the high-end brands – and the satisfaction that comes with having made something with your hands can fill in any of the meal’s empty spaces.

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Raised waffles with Patterson Sugar Bush maple syrup

When I wrote a few weeks back about how much I love the slow mornings we try to wrest out of our week, I heard from many of you that you love these mornings as well, and that you too work hard to wrest them out of your weeks. This tells me two things – first, that we need more of the quiet mornings and less of the wresting, and second, that we have a special love for the food we eat in the mornings, whether they’re slow or fast. We each have foods we eat to make our mornings, perhaps in an attempt to steer the rest of the day in a direction to our liking, and we hold these foods with special regard, whether they’re routine or more improvised. As far as I’m concerned, breakfast is the official opening to the day regardless of when it’s eaten, and I generally put a good amount of intention into what I choose.

If you’d like to open the day in a particularly lovely way, these waffles might be the ticket.

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Peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies

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There’s a sort of tragic story behind these cookies. A real lose-lose-lose-lose situation, you might say, and those don’t come about all that often. I suppose there’s definitely at least one win in there somewhere, since in the end there were a few cookies to eat and they were really delicious. And there’s a good recipe to come out of it that I get to share with you, so that’s another win.

But otherwise, it’s a pretty sad story.

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Pumpkin seed mole (pipián verde)

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I realized a few days ago that over the span of my cooking years (the last ten years or so) I’ve inadvertently drifted toward simplicity. I love vegetables, I love eggs, I love simple braises and pasta dishes. I love simple desserts that feature fruits, good dairy, or nice chocolate. I’d generally choose a simple stew and a hand-torn hunk of bread over a meticulously-plated meal of dozens of components, and if a meal is going to take hours to prepare I’d rather it be because it’s braising or roasting away in the oven while I’m comfortably enjoying happy hour or socializing or reading a book or otherwise enjoying myself outside of the kitchen.  I can’t imagine my life without the significant time I invest in food – writing, talking, planning, shopping, preparing – but over the years my feeling about cooking and food seem to have clarified around trying to appreciate and focus on the simple things. The beauty of a poached egg broken open on a pile of perfectly cooked greens; the brightening power of a huge handful of fresh herbs; the allure of caramelized edges; the power of a bit of acid, fat, or salt in transforming something humble into something revelatory. Much of the time, the joy of cooking is about finding opportunities to turn something simple into something really spectacular without adding complicated technique, expense, or effort-intensive time (and that’s exactly what I love to share with students when I teach).

But sometimes, simplicity simply doesn’t cut it. There are worlds of dishes and cuisines that require more complication – even if only because they’re unfamiliar – and those recipes provide opportunities to learn something new, to invest a bit more in a meal to make it special, or to provide yourself with something you can’t otherwise access.

This recipe is one of those. There’s nothing inherently complicated about it, aside from a decent number of ingredients, but if you’re not regularly making mole sauces at home or don’t generally have a good stock of Mexican ingredients (and especially if they’re hard to find), it presents itself as more of an investment. An investment solidly worth it, I might add, but an investment nonetheless.  Read more

Killer spinach risotto with nutmeg and lemon

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Me from five years ago would be skeptical to see me here talking about risotto, since it was only a few years back I took any interest in it at all, and even more wary to see me recommending something with spinach, since even just a couple of weeks ago I wouldn’t have believed I could do such a thing. But here I am, heartily recommending both, and hoping this ends up on your table either for New Years or some time early in the new year. Read more