Archive for February, 2009

to make you happy

02.13.09 // Comments:10

iced lemon cookies

It has been said that some people don’t like chocolate, which is very strange, I think. It gives me the same feeling as when my dog barks at 7:30 AM, while he looks at empty grass from his perch atop the sofa. The same feeling as when people say they don’t have time to read books or watch LOST. There’s something very not right about it—No sense. It’s hard to trust those kind of people, if you know what I mean.

And come Valentine’s Day, it’s also hard to believe them—especially when there are things like Maria’s chocolate-mint brownies, Joy’s layered devil’s food cake with raspberries and, oh my gosh, Nick’s chocolate lava cakes floating around the Internet. It’s true that I like my desserts chocolate—the more fudgey the better, most of the time. I would eat the New York Times chocolate-chip cookies every day if it weren’t for the preliminary planning that’s required of the three-day chilling period. And all it took for me to make my grandma’s oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies this weekend was a quick message from my friend Lan, who said she’d made them, and, immediately when I read it, I do not exaggerate, I went down to the kitchen and pulled out ingredients.

But just to show there are no hard feelings for those of you who still swear you don’t like chocolate, here’s something you will appreciate. If you’re looking for a reliable stand-in for the endorphins brought by chocolate or, say, a romantic holiday coming up tomorrow, you should look to lemons. Did you know they are proven mood enhancers? It’s true. Lemons make people happy. And these cookies? Lovely and lemon, with no chocolate at all, filled with sweet and tart flavor, topped by shimmering vanilla icing: Suddenly the word happy doesn’t seem strong enough.

Freshly glazed, these buttery cookies are soft and almost creamy, melting in your mouth as you bite in. A few days later, they stay that way, and, really, I thank the 1/2 cup of lemon juice.

ice lemon cookies on blue

Here’s another fact about lemons, which, true, are wonderful mixed with garlic on baby potatoes or smothered on slow-roasted chickens: lemons do something almost magical to baking.

The zest, scraped off in flaky, curly bits, gives concentrated flavor and a fresh, citrus smell, and complemented by the juice, squeezed fresh from the lemon, makes these cookies just as moist as they are fragrant. How else can you explain that three days after I made them, when I pulled one out of the sad little plastic baggie it had been relegated to, almost forgotten, it was just as soft and succulent as the day it had been baked?

Truly, this is a victory for non-chocolate-lovers everywhere. After eating a couple of these, the rest of us will start to understand.

Sam’s Glazed Lavish Lemon Cookies & Vanilla Glaze
Lightly adapted from Carole Walter’s Great Cookies

These are named Sam’s for Carole’s granddaughter Samantha, who says she l-o-o-v-es lemon cookies. I see what she means. Even if the shimmering white icing and fragrant lemon scent aren’t enough to tempt you, I bet the rich, buttery flavor of the dough will.

Ingredients for the cookies:
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
1 cup strained cake flour, spooned and leveled
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, slightly firm
2 Tablespoons freshly grated lemon zest (I used some Meyer and some regular)
1 1/2 cups sugar*
4 large egg yolks*
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (don’t skimp: this is the best part!)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Ingredients for the glaze:
2 cups strained confectioners’ sugar, spooned in and leveled
3 Tablespoons hot milk
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Directions for cookies:
Strain the all-purpose flour, cake flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt together three times. Set aside.

Using an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the butter with the lemon zest on medium-low speed until creamy and lightened in color, about 2 minutes. Add the sugar in a steady stream, mixing again for 1 to 2 minutes. Blend in the egg yolks, mix for 45 to 60 seconds, then pour in the lemon juice and the vanilla, scraping down the bowl as needed.

Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the dry ingredients in three additions, mixing just until blended. Transfer the dough to a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap and chill for an hour.

Before removing the bowl from the fridge, position the shelves in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Working with one half of the dough at a time, place it on a floured surface. With lightly floured hands, shape the dough into a disk, coating it with a light dusting of flour. Using a dough scraper or a sharp knife, divide the dough into eight pie-shaped wedges. Flour your hands again and shape each wedge into a ball, being careful not to overwork the dough. Place the balls on a cookie sheet 3 inches apart (six balls per sheet) and, using the heel of your hand, gently flatten each into 3- to 3 1/2-inch disks. Repeat with remaining dough to form eight more disks.

Bake the cookies for 18 to 20 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown. To ensure even browning, two-thirds of the way through baking, rotate the sheets top to bottom and front to back. Remove the cookies from the oven, let stand for 5 minutes, then carefully loosen with a large, metal spatula. Transfer the cookies to cooling racks and set over waxed paper.

TO MAKE THE GLAZE:
Place the confectioners’ sugar in a large bowl and add the remaining ingredients. Stir with a small whisk or spoon until very smooth. The glaze should pour from a spoon in a steady stream. Use additional liquid sparingly – a little goes a long way. While the cookies are still warm, spoon the glaze onto the cookies using a spatula or the back of
a spoon. Set aside and let the cookies cool/air-dry until the glaze hardens.

*My sincere apologies that the sugar and eggs were somehow omitted from this original post. THANK YOU, Molly, for letting me know!

Comments:10 Click here to comment! Categories: before the 2009 diet change

what’s on the mind

02.10.09 // Comments:14

puff pastry with spinach

This is going to be the one of the fastest post I’ve written here: I’m giving myself 20 minutes, start to finish. GO!

OK, so that picture above—the one of the beautiful puff pastry?—is from Ina Garten, one of those people I wouldn’t mind being more like. She’s so classy, isn’t she? I love watching her and her husband, Jeffrey (she dedicated at least a couple of her books to him, each time a different way, and I love that, too). They’re like the affluent, educated, good-eating aunt and uncle I wish I had. If Ina were writing this post, she’d probably have something much more interesting to say, unlike me, who, I’m embarrassed to tell you, still (STILL!) has very little else on my mind than the weather. (THE GORGEOUS WEATHER!)

If you’ll permit me: This morning, I drove to work with my windows cracked open, fresh, crisp air whipping inside my little Jetta, and I wore my bright-green spring jacket, not the parka or even my dressy wool coat. Everything was so perfect temperature-wise that I actually left the house early so I could stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and pick up coffee, as a celebration. I’ve decided it’s good to celebrate things like these, which might seem small to other people, just an increase in temperatures and some melting snow, so what? But to me, while I cruised through puddles, Ella Fitzgerald crooning, this was possibly the best day ever.

In the office, where we still haven’t turned on A/C (hello? it’s February?), we had to plug in the upright fan and point it on us while we worked, donning short sleeves and sipping ice water. At lunch, I swear, I was sweating when I got back into my car. The weatherman said it reached 61 degrees today, two short of the record. But let me tell you, walking down my street, you’d never have believed it.

Anyway, while I was driving home tonight (and there was hardly any traffic!), I realized that days like this are the good stuff worth savoring. After all, I’m too eager to tell you when my commute doubles or the snow makes me late. Shouldn’t I rejoice a little when everything’s completely wonderful?

And that brings me to now, when here I am, sitting at the computer, trying to think of what to tell you about the puff pastry, which is really lovely, but all that comes out is weather. What can I say?

puff pastry with spinach, closer

I must focus. Here is what you need to know about this pastry: It uses a grocery-store shortcut to eliminate the hardest task (well, the only hard task, I should say). Rather than making your own dough (oh, gosh, remember my pie crust?), you just buy good old Pepperidge Farm frozen puff pastry. As for the rest of the work: you’ll chop, mix, assemble a little—but largely, you take the golden, flaky creation out of the oven to eat and enjoy.

I think it’s very pretty, which is another plus. But then I am partial to spinach in terms of food appearance. Look at that rich green poking out from inside the dough! Mixed with the Gruyere and Parmesan, infused with the garlic/onion butter, the filling is very creamy and very spinachy, and I mean that in a good way. I also like that it’s from Ina’s Barefoot in Paris cookbook, which, by the way, I picked up at the library on my almost-failure of a day off last week. Eating this, I like to think I’m in France—or at least I did when I made it—Right now, I don’t want to be anywhere but here. After all, I have this weather and this pastry. What else could I want?

Spinach in Puff Pastry
Adapted from Ina Garten’s Barefoot in Paris

With this pastry, you’ll want to eat it hot out of the oven, if at all possible. You could microwave slices the next day, in your lunch, let’s say, but the dough will get a little gummy, and that’s hardly appetizing. Of course, I’d suppose you could also stick it back in the oven the next day, if you’re more patient than I tend to be and, you know, at home where there’s an oven. If you do, let me know how that turns out, would you?

Ingredients:
4 Tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups onions, chopped
1 Tablespoon chopped garlic (around 3 cloves)
1 14-ounce bag of frozen chopped spinach, defrosted
1 cup Gruyere cheese, grated
3/4 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1 Tablespoon bread crumbs
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoons pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
2 sheets (1 box) frozen puff pastry, defrosted in refrigerator overnight
1 egg, beaten with 1 Tablespoon water, for egg wash

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Heat butter in saute pan and cook the onions over medium-low heat for 5-7 minutes, until tender. Add the garlic and cook for 1 more minute. Meanwhile, squeeze most of the water out of the spinach and place it in a bowl. Add the onion mixture, Gruyere, Parmesan, eggs, bread crumbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg and pine nuts. Mix well.

Unfold one sheet of puff pastry and place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Spread the spinach mixture in the middle of the pastry, leaving a 1-inch border. Brush the border with the egg wash. Roll out the 2nd sheet of pastry on a floured board until it’s an inch larger in each direction. Place the 2nd sheet of pastry over the spinach and seal the edges, crimping them with a fork. Brush the top with egg wash but don’t let it drip down the sides of the pastry won’t rise. Make three small slits in the pastry, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake for 30-40 minutes, until the pastry is lightly browned. Transfer to a cutting board and serve hot.

This can be assembled a day in advance, refrigerated, and baked before serving.

And time! OK, I went over 20 minutes, but not by much, and I hope the post didn’t suffer too much. I’ll give you all more time on the next one. Right now, I have things to go savor.

Comments:14 Click here to comment! Categories: before the 2009 diet change

summer around here

02.09.09 // Comments:14

stracciatella ice milk

I can’t stop talking about the weather, which I guess isn’t very new to you all. I tend to do this a lot, and I think maybe I should have been a gardener or a botanist or something. I am so aware of what’s going on outside. The two years I belonged to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, I literally went every week, sometimes more than once, just to be outdoors, away from big buildings and heavy traffic, to sit in grassy fields with a book or walk through forests of fallen leaves. I’ll admit too that I feel this insane sense of wonder at the changing seasons, that watching days of rain and gusts of wind turn autumn into winter amazes me every year and that the first warm days of spring, which hint at winter’s end, are enough to make me powerfully optimistic in areas of my life that have no connection whatsoever to the weather. Even though I know what’s coming in some sense, the fact that it does and that I have absolutely no control over it makes me feel hopeful, happy to trust that which is greater than I.

Here in Chicago, we are having the most gorgeous February days I can remember—warm breezes, melting snow, the need for light jackets and not hooded parkas. I drive down the street to people jogging—wearing shorts, no less! And even though I know this can’t last, I also know we’re near the end. We are climbing down the hill of winter, with much more momentum (or at least more daylight), and I am thrilled. It’s enough to make me waltz into the produce section of the grocery store and pick up two celery roots, having no idea what their price was, let alone what I’d do with them (and then later just to chalk it up as a learning experience that one was rotted). It’s enough to make me clean and organize a bunch of files on a Saturday afternoon. And that same Saturday, while I wore a tank top and jeans and sat next to an open window, it was enough to inspire me to make ice cream.

I recently came into possession of an ice cream maker, complete with its instructional guide, and I don’t know what I was expecting, other than that it would be difficult to use. It wasn’t.

chocolate chip ice milk

For this recipe, I was aiming for gelato—using a Serious Eats recipe that didn’t require eggs, as I only had one left. I am notorious for choosing recipes based on what I already have in the kitchen, and I substitute things much more than I should. So when I took a bite of this dessert, where I used skim milk instead of whole and coffee creamer instead of dry milk powder, what I tasted wasn’t gelato; it was ice milk. Do you remember ice milk? It used to be fairly common, a less expensive sister to ice cream but with less dairy fat, more icy and much lighter. My grandma used to keep a carton of it in her freezer, next to the orange sherbet and not far from a cabinet behind the kitchen’s swinging door, where I’d often sneak into her secret stash of cones.

I haven’t had ice milk—or really thought much about it—in years. You can’t buy it anymore. In fact, when I zip through the frozen foods section of Dominick’s or Whole Foods, I see gelato and frozen yogurt and dozens of versions of ice cream, but no ice milk. According to Wikipedia, it disappeared in 1994, when the FDA changed the rules of terminology, turning ice milk into low-fat ice cream—maybe a more marketable term, yes, but, in my opinion, much less charming. Over time, as manufacturers tried harder and harder to make low-fat ice cream taste like regular ice cream, the texture of ice milk became more and more obscure, and now, it’s just not available.

This icy, refreshing stracciatella (from the Italian for “torn apart,” like the chocolate bits in this) mixture isn’t as creamy as regular ice cream, but it’s also not as heavy. Eating a bowl of it, you feel refreshed, not overloaded. Think the flavor of chocolate-chip ice cream meets the texture of a frozen slushy or Italian ice. As you spoon dollops of it into your mouth, the strongest sensations are cold and sweet—just the way frozen desserts should be. And while it was perfectly lovely on Sunday, a February day when I drove with my windows down, the wind blowing in my hair, it’d also be wonderful in the heat of summer as an ideal way to cool down or, heck, even in the blizzards of March, which I suspect are just around the corner for some of us. After all, just because it’s technically winter doesn’t mean we have to eat like it. With stracciatella ice milk, it’s summer, at least in my kitchen, and I like it that way.

Stracciatella Ice Milk
Recipe Adapted from SeriousEats

Ingredients:
1 quart (4 cups) skim milk
3 Tablespoons light corn syrup
1 pint (2 cups) heavy cream
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup coffee creamer
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted

Directions:
Combine the milk, corn syrup and heavy cream in a large saucepan. In a medium bowl, stir together the sugar, gelatin and coffee creamer. Whisk the dry ingredients into the milk-cream mixture, and bring to barely a simmer, stirring constantly over moderate heat.

Remove the mixture from heat and cool. Stir in the vanilla. Chill the mixture in the refrigerator, at least four hours or overnight.

Freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. As the ice cream is churning, combine the melted chocolate and the oil. Drizzle into the ice cream for the last few minutes of churning.

Transfer the mixture into a metal loaf pan and freeze. When ready to eat, defrost for 10 to 15 minutes before attempting to scoop.

Comments:14 Click here to comment! Categories: before the 2009 diet change