Category Archives: Cooking

Cooking, Family, Farm Box, Food, General, The Apartment

CSA week 1: Greens aplenty, chicken with tatsoi

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I was in Oregon for a week to visit my parents and go to my cousin’s high school graduation (yay!), and I was going to be in the air en route from Salt Lake to Boston when the hour of the first CSA pickup rolled around. So Ben went. He also took lots and lots of photos of all the vegetables before washing everything* and putting it in the fridge. Thanks, honey!

So! Week 1, 2009:

produce
-1 head of lettuce
-1 head tatsoi
-Mesclun
-Small bunch of arugula
-Very small amount of large spinach leaves
-1 bunch radishes
-1 pint strawberries (!)
-1 parsnip (Did he overwinter in the root cellar? Does he know I hate parsnips? Poor thing.)

Ben took beauty shots of many of the items, so let’s admire the strawberries:

strawberries

And an extremely exciting** development at Stone Soup Farm this year was the acquisition of lots of chickens! So we got an egg share in addition to our veggies:

eggs

Later in the week I used the tatsoi in a simple stir fry with chicken. It would have been even simpler if the greens weren’t quite so organic, because it took me ages to get them completely free of the aphids and little hard-shelled bugs clinging to each leaf. But I would rather clean off pests than eat pesticides.

Tatsoi is an Asian field mustard variety that looks, to me, like a wedding bouquet:

tatsoi

While I cleaned the greens I marinated a couple chicken breasts in soy sauce, grated ginger and minced garlic. I’d sliced the chicken against the grain, which gave it a nice texture. (I’ll spare you raw chicken photos today.)

Then I sauteed the chicken in two batches in my wok. The strips were thin and cooked really fast; at the end I added in the greens and cooked them very briefly, until they wilted, and served the whole thing over sticky rice.

The chicken looks dry in that photo, but it wasn’t, actually. Considering that rice and chicken are the two things I’m not comfortable cooking, this came out remarkably well.

*While rewashing the many, many aphids off the tatsoi I explained to him that dashing the greens under water for a second doesn’t do the trick. Also that it’s better to just wash everything right before you use it. But I appreciated the effort!

**Eggstremely eggciting!

(Help.)

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In other news, I don’t normally talk about books here but… whyever not? Last night I finally read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and it was grand. Lots of fun. I adore epistolary novels (must be the sensation of eavesdropping? And maybe the slight mystery of jumping into something already in progress and getting to know the characters in dribs and drabs), and now I want to reread 84, Charing Cross Road (which is actually not a novel; they are real letters) and Ella Minnow Pea. I was crushed when I first visited London and found that 84 Charing Cross Road is now a Pizza Hut or something similarly hideous. Anyway, if you enjoyed The Guernsey Longest Title Ever, you might check out those two: 84, CCR is the post-WWII correspondence between a writer in NYC and a bookseller in London (similar content and tone!). Ella Minnow Pea is an extremely funny/odd little book of letters by residents of an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina, where the alphabet is being gradually outlawed by the government as letters drop off a statue of the island’s founder, the man who came up with the “quick brown fox…” sentence. Hee.

Oh, and I also painted a little canvas based on one of my photos from Rome. I’m trying to paint the way I sketch in my travel journals; looser and less worried about perfection. It’s in my Etsy shop!

Fiat painting

Cooking, Family, Farm Box, Food, General, Recipes, Travel

What’s for dinner: BLT Salad

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Here’s what I’m actually cooking tonight, despite incredibly chilly weather that makes it a bit inappropriate. It’s also what I made the night we got back from Italy, which is why I haven’t yet found a homemade creamy dressing recipe I like, and am instead trying to use up a bottle of creamy parmesan dressing from Whole Foods.

Ahem. Anyway. Back in March I was in DC reporting a story and I had the pleasure of visiting with my friends Rachel and Jen. We ate dinner at Matchbox, and I basically bogarted the “Matchbox Chopped Salad,” a genius easy-to-eat BLT with pasta subbing in for bread. When I spotted a sale on grape tomatoes at Whole Foods in my post-flight stupor, I grabbed them and happily spent the next few days eating bowls of this salad. (See note at the end for instructions on making it last!)

Here’s the thing. I used a head of organic iceberg for this, and I really do think that crunch and ease-of-slicing is best. Tonight I have regular leaf lettuce or mesclun (from the 1st CSA box of the season!), but in general if you can find iceberg that is more green than white, it’s great here.

BLT Salad
4 servings

1 small head of good iceberg lettuce
1/4 red onion
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
1/2 lb. pasta, preferably a loose spiral or something (I used what I had on hand)
1/2-3/4 of a pound of good, thick-cut bacon (I used hickory-smoked, I think), cooked
Creamy dressing of your choice, to taste

I quartered the grape tomatoes and diced the red onion:

I cooked pasta and then rinsed it in cold water to cool it down, and added that in:

When you’re ready to serve, chop up the cooked bacon (I bake mine in a 400 degree oven until crispy, so it stays flat) and your lettuce, add them to the tomato mixture, and dress to taste. Hold back a few pieces of bacon to scatter on top. It doesn’t look like much but it is soooo good.

Note: To make this keep for a few lunches, as I did, only dress the portion you’re using the first night, using only that proportion of the lettuce and bacon. Store the pasta/tomato mixture in a tupperware and wrap the bacon and lettuce up separately; it takes 2 seconds to chop up some more lettuce and stir everything together with the dressing at lunch time.

(It really is cold out, though. Maybe I should do a absorption pasta with tomatoes and bacon and a salad on the side? Hmm. Oh! I think we got arugula from the CSA. I could stir that in at the end. But I’m craving the salad. Oh dear.)

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Disasters, Food

Garlic can explode.

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(I am currently in Italy (Venice, today!), but I thought I’d leave a couple entries for you while I’m gone.)

I think a lot of food blogs make it seem like the author is incredibly talented and perfect and never has an off night. It’s hard, when you’re putting yourself out there for the world to see, to present the failures in addition to the successes (and maybe readers don’t care to see the grim results), but posting my pizza disaster was so therapeutic that I thought I’d give you another little window into my less-than-perfect world.

A couple weeks ago the temperature dropped suddenly, and we had a really chilly, wet, clammy day. I was feeling a bit clammy emotionally, too, so I thought tomato soup and grilled cheese would be just the ticket. I googled around a bit to find an easy recipe for tomato soup. One that I found suggested roasted the canned tomatoes with a little olive oil before making the soup, which seemed like a swell idea, so off I went, feeling a little smug and very domestic.

tomatoes pan

I tossed a handful of unpeeled garlic cloves on the sheet pan, thinking roasted garlic would be a nice addition to the soup, put the pan in a 400 degree oven, and went back to work in my office. 10 minutes later there was a very, very loud BANG! in the kitchen, followed by a strong scorching smell. One of the garlic cloves had EXPLODED. Violently. The entire oven was covered in shards of it. I pulled the other cloves out of the oven and dropped them on the stovetop (hot! ouch!), and eventually threw them in while I was softening onions and celery for the soup.

(Picture is blurry because it’s very hard to take a photo of an oven without it being all oven light, plus my hand was shaking.)

If you look closely, you can see that the garlic forced itself up to the lining that rims the outer edge of the door.

Meanwhile the tomatoes weren’t looking remotely roasted at 15 minutes (which was when the recipe said to take them out), so I set the timer for 15 more and walked away. The house was full of burned-garlic smoke, by the way. And then I forgot to come back and check the tomatoes’ progress before the buzzer went off.

When I did pull them out, I found this:

Yum!

The tops of the tomatoes never roasted. The bottoms scorched and welded themselves to the pan. I popped the minuscule unscorched remainders off and tossed them in with the juice from the can, and set the pan to soak for a couple hours. Meanwhile I figured I might as well still make soup.

soup ingredients

Using the immersion blender improved my mood, and thanks to the remaining semi-roasted garlic the soup was plenty creamy without any cream added:

soup

It was kind of bland. I should have grated parmesan into it.

By the way, I had bacon to add to our grilled cheese, and I was so dismayed by the Garlic Explosion that I decided to cook it in the microwave instead of hassling with it on the stove. I have done that before and it works ok, normally (nothing to write home about but fine for a sandwich). Not this time. Somehow all the salt was drained out and we were left with what I imagine those Beggin’ Strips dog snacks taste and feel like. I erased the photos.

soup sandwich

Sigh!

(Hopefully I am eating unbelievably delicious soup Canal-side, as you read this.)

City Life, Cooking, Cooking techniques, Food, Recipes, The Apartment

Ushering in summer: Bulgogi on the porch

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(I’m in Italy right now, but I thought I’d leave you with an entry or two while I’m gone!)

We eat on our narrow but lovely little porch almost every night during the summer, so we were delighted when the weather first warmed up enough for us to dig out the cushions and dust off the table and chairs. To celebrate, I made bulgogi, the unbelievably tasty Korean barbecued beef that you can cook on your own tabletop griddle at Korean BBQ restaurants.

After grocery shopping in the afternoon, I started by making a batch of daikon radish pickles, which were fine but a bit bland.

daikon

The daikon I got from th CSA was less carrot-shaped and much fatter. Different varieties, I guess! Aren’t the patterns in the slices pretty?

daikon slices

I used a basic marinade recipe from AllRecipes, spiked with plenty of sesame (seeds and oil) and soy. The real trick to recipes like this is to freeze your meat for about an hour before slicing it. That makes it to easy to slice nice thin pieces without the meat mushing all over the place. Remember to cut against the grain. (I used sirloin tips, I think.)

sliced steak

I marinated the meat for a couple hours, and when dinner time rolled around I cooked some sushi rice and dished out kimchi and the daikon pickles:

I also washed a bunch of lettuce leaves for wrapping.

The meat was a snap to cook because it was sliced so thin. From this:

to this:

took about two minutes for each batch, on a hot grill. I piled up the meat on a plate, squeezed all the various dishes onto our porch table, and we got to the messy business of wrapping our little rolls, starting with a base of rice, then meat, then the pickles and kimchi:

I’m hungry as I write this, so let’s take another look at that luscious, flavorful meat:

It was a perfect kickoff to summer, lit by the pale glimmer of our new Ikea solar string lights and washed down with gin and lemonade! I’m dying to go do some research at Koreana and make note of more of the little bowls of pickles that they bring over–there are usually about 20 and they are my favorite part. Great, now I’m starving.

City Life, Cooking, Cooking techniques, Family, Food, General, Home, Recipes, Travel, Vintage

Chili, cornbread, and leftovers

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It was months ago that I saw a chili recipe on Oh Happy Day and thought “must make.” And, actually, it was months ago that I made it–oops! Jordan called this “Pepper’s Famous Chili,” and I think it’s a great starting point to play with. I’ve made it a couple times and it is a bountiful and delicious recipe, extremely filling.

“Pepper’s Famous Chili
As seen on Oh Happy Day!

1lb. ground beef
1 (15 oz.) can tomato sauce
1 (15 oz.) can kidney beans with liquid
1 (15 oz.) can pinto beans with liquid
1/2 c. diced onion
1/4 c. diced celery
2 med. tomatoes, chopped
1 tsp. cumin
1 T. chili powder (2 T. if you like it hot)
1 tsp. black pepper
2 tsp. salt
1 c. water

Brown beef and drain liquid. Crumble beef and put into a large pot mix in all other ingredients. Cook over low heat stirring every 15 to 20 mins. for 2 to 3 hours. (You could also use a slow cooker.)”

I bought everything at Trader Joe’s, so the sizes of the cans of beans were a bit varied, but I don’t think it matters. And one time I made it with stew beef instead of ground beef, with moderate success–you need more meat, it turns out, and Tom was visiting and we ran into a bit of a problem while browning the meat (too much liquid, too small a pan), so it wasn’t as flavorful as it could be. Both times, I made cornbread muffins to accompany the chili, first using an Epicurious recipe, then ceding control to Tom for his favorite recipe.

Ingredients:

The fresh stuff livens up all those cans of beans and sauce:

tomatoes onions celery

Honestly the cooking process doesn’t present many opportunities for photos. You brown the beef, then throw everything in together for a couple hours. (Incidentally, I didn’t have chili powder and cumin but I thought I did. I ended up using a taco seasoning mix from the awesome spice shop in Inman Sq., which worked just fine.)

Here’s the result with ground beef:
chili cornbread

Good stuff, easy to make. Not bad! I must say, we were eating leftovers for what felt like a year. I think next time (and it took me two batches to think of it; I am so braindead lately!) I’ll freeze half.

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Oh man, while Tom was visiting we hit the slightly pathetic array of thrift stores in the neighborhood, as per tradition, and the one good find was a  sweet white-enamel 8-inch Copco cast iron frying pan for a couple bucks. It was *filthy* but we soaked it in soapy water and scrubbed it with barkeeper’s friend and fine steel wool, and now it’s in really great shape. Love.

Before:

After:
clean

Fantastic shape—I love the little pour spout.
copco frying pan
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Note: Why yes, I’m posting things I cooked in March, why do you ask? The good news is that I’m hoping to pull together a couple posts to publish while I’m away next week. In Italy. HURRAY! (Also? Panic. I get so freaked out before trips because I loathe packing, never feel like I have the right clothes, and actually never do have the right shoes. I’ve got a fresh sketchbook and some maps, we should be fine!)

And: 1 more month until CSA time! Thank god.

Cooking, Family, Food, Good stuff, Recipes

Sour cream coffee cake for a happy weekend

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Do any of you get the Zingerman’s mail order catalog? When I was in preschool we lived in Ann Arbor while my Dad was in grad school, and my parents were big fans of the then-new Zingerman’s Deli. They now have an amazing mail order service, and my mom always ordered stuff from them as gifts. I do the same—few things are a more surefire hit than a coffee cake in a wooden hatbox, especially when the coffee cake is a really, really good one. They also have exceptional customer service, with real people on the phone who want to help you. HOWEVER. The prices are a bit steep for personal consumption, which is why I’m grateful for this recipe, which my mom has been making for as long as I can remember. It’s a heavy, dense cake, extremely moist and long-lasting (if you don’t eat it all up!).

Sour Cream Coffee Cake
Batter:
1 C. butter
2 C. sugar
2 eggs
1 C. sour cream
½ teaspoon vanilla
2 C. flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt

Streusel:
½ C. brown sugar
½ C. pecans or walnuts
1 teaspoon cinnamon

* Preheat oven to 350
* Grease and flour a bundt pan; set aside
* Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy
* Add eggs one-at-a-time and mix
* Add sour cream and vanilla and mix
* Sift together the dry ingredients and add, mixing just until incorporated
* Pour half the batter into the prepared pan
* Strew streusel over batter
* Top with rest of batter
* Bake about 60 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean

One thing I’ve noticed (I made the cake twice so far): It might be a bit too much streusel topping. Try to make sure there is cake batter exposed around the edges, or at least not a thick layer of the streusel, so the cake doesn’t end up with top and bottom halves, unconnected to each other.

The tricky bit it adding the second half of the thick, sticky batter, on top of the streusel. Careful dabbing with a spatula seems to work:

I have had some trouble with my oven ever since we bought the Viking. It’s not noticeable when I’m cooking meat, but when baking I sometimes find that nothing is happening after I’ve put the pan in. As in, the temperature has dropped to 150 and the baked goods are just sitting there, flabby and pale and sad. I was on the phone with Mom the first time I made this, so I popped it in the oven and kind of ignored it until about 45 minutes in, when I saw that the batter had set a bit but definitely not baked. It took an additional HOUR to cook. Anyway, that’s my oven’s problem, not the recipe’s. But does anyone else with a gas oven have that happen?

Not the best distribution of streudel on that outing, but still a great cake. I baked the first one for a girl’s weekend a couple months ago, and Bridge declared it the best coffee cake ever! But really, how can you go wrong with 2 sticks of butter, a cup of sour cream, and all that sugar? Soooo healthy.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Food, Recipes

Dubious combo, great results

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(By the way, I went back and added some photos to my last post, including a teensy tiny baby hand, aw!)

If you read Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn, you may have seen a complete rave review of a Jamie Oliver recipe for chicken braised in milk, with lemon, sage and cinnamon. I have been burned several times by classic italian pork-in-milk recipes, but for some reason I had to go out and make the chicken version immediately. The writer, Faith, accidentally misread the recipe and covered the chicken for 2/3 of the cooking time, then tested it uncovered and preferred the covered version, so I followed her lead.

Here’s the recipe, from Jamie.

I think the ingredients look like a still-life–maybe I should paint them!

Though things aren’t as scenic if you zoom out:

The recipe is seriously easy. I hate hate hate cooking chicken, especially whole chickens, but the braising aspect made me more comfortable. The most annoying part is browning the chicken in the butter and oil, since it’s awkward to flip it around in the pan.

In an hour and a half of unsupervised (mostly) cooking, this unappetizing sight:

Turned into this:

I have never had crispier skin on a roast chicken; not sure why. The fat rendered out of it completely. And I’ll add my voice to those of Faith and Jamie in saying not to freak out at that curdled sauce. It tastes amazing. The first night we had shredded meat on rolls, as little sandwiches:

And the next night we had more of it (with that delicious, nasty-looking sauce) with israeli cous cous and sauteed greens:

We ate the meat for about a week, and it was scrumptious hot or cold. I’ll definitely make it again, maybe omitting the cinnamon if I want slightly more versatile leftovers, though it gave a really nice musky flavor. It hurts to use a whole stick of butter to brown the chicken and then toss it out, but I saved mine in a pyrex in the fridge, so maybe I could re-use it? It’s lovely browned butter now; I wonder if it would burn on a second use. Anyway, compared to dry-roasting a chicken, this method was way less stressful and gave really juicy, tender meat. As I said, I followed Faith’s lucky “mistake” and kept the pot covered for the first hour, opening it for the last 30 minutes to crisp up.

City Life, Cooking, Cooking techniques, Disasters, Food, Recipes, The Apartment

One-stop-shop for amazing messes

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Ok, so. I have spoken before about my unending love for Jamie at Home, and back in February I watched the pizza episode and promptly felt the urge to make dough from scratch. Hurray! It’s so easy! (Note: I had a tremendously bad day leading up to this attempt.)

Pizza Dough
adapted from Jamie Oliver‘s Jamie at Home
7 cups strong white bread flour or 5 cups strong white bread flour plus 2 cups finely ground semolina flour (next time I want to try it w/ semolina)
1 level tablespoon fine sea salt
2 (1/4-ounce) packets active dried yeast
1 tablespoon raw sugar
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 1/2 cups lukewarm water

pizza ingredients

Ok. So you’re supposed to sift the flour and salt together into a mountain on the counter. No sweat! I am a brave person who will go ahead and work straight on the butcher block. No fear! Mountain, ahoy!

flour

Now, that photo does not accurately depict the towering majesty of the 7-cup flour mountain. It was tall and steep. Back to the recipe:

“In a large measuring cup, mix the yeast, sugar and olive oil into the water and leave for a few minutes, then pour into the well. Using a fork, bring the flour in gradually from the sides and swirl it into the liquid. Keep mixing, drawing larger amounts of flour in, and when it all starts to come together, work the rest of the flour in with your clean, flour-dusted hands. Knead until you have a smooth, springy dough.”

Sounds easy enough, and Jamie made it look like a cakewalk on the show. Proceed: Liquids mixed with sugar and yeast:

liquids

Commence whisking, while feeling extremely smug and craftsmanlike:

whisking flour

Here’s the important part: Get cocky and pour in too much liquid at once, collapsing the walls of the too-tall mountain and flooding yeasty-oil-water down the dishwasher and your pants. And socks. And under the baseboards. Stand stock still while it gushes over, before fitfully trying to shove flour into the liquid to stop the onslaught. Grab paper towels to make a moat, then take a photo that doesn’t come close to portraying the chaos:

mess

(Aren’t I brave, giving you the warts-and-all view into my kitchen?)

Take stock, recognizing that you have used nearly all of the flour in the house, all the yeast, and you don’t have an alternate plan for dinner. Decide to soldier on, mixing what liquid is left on the counter into the flour and then adding additional water and kneading until, miracle beyond miracles, the dough pulls together into a gorgeous, silky smooth ball.

Set it to rise while you pry off the baseboards and scrub yeasty flour paste off the inside of the cabinet doors.

Now, back to the original plan!

“Place the ball of dough in a large flour-dusted bowl and flour the top of it. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and place in a warm room for about 1 hour until the dough has doubled in size.

Now remove the dough to a flour-dusted surface and knead it around a bit to push the air out with your hands – this is called punching down the dough. You can either use it immediately, or keep it, wrapped in plastic wrap, in the fridge (or freezer) until required. If using straightaway, divide the dough up into as many little balls as you want to make pizzas – this amount of dough is enough to make about six to eight medium pizzas. “

Fine! The dough rose, though maybe not quite as much as normal:

I froze half and made the other half into four pizzas:

dough balls

It rolled out like a dream, not sticky like store-bought dough:

I made half with flat edges and half with pinched crusts like my mom does, to see which I preferred. (Note: The Food Network version of the recipe doesn’t specify baking time or temp. I cranked my oven to around 450 and just watched the pizzas carefully; I think they took about 10 minutes but I could be wrong.)

Pinched won:

And dinner did eventually get served. Without the 45 minutes of cleaning up the kitchen, it would have been a really easy process.

(BTW I think I’m over white pies, at least with the slightly-dry cheese blend I have been using. The other half of the dough got slathered with various sauces, to be explained in a future post.)

(Also, I’m totally uninspired and haven’t been cooking much. Is it just the late-winter doldrums? Anyone else feeling it, too?)

Cooking, Food, General, Good stuff

(Brussels) Sprout-Fest

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Oh, brussels sprouts, I love you so. The one downside to the CSA was the fact that they didn’t grow (or had bad luck with) sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower last year, and since I was working my way through what they DID grow I never bought any, either. Ben actually accused me of withholding sprouts, can you believe the nerve?

In response, I bought two pounds from Trader Joe’s and went to town. Herewith, a window into how food and leftovers live out their lives Chez Girl Reporter.

The first night, I roasted all two pounds.

brussels sprouts

brussels sprouts 2

roasted brussels sprouts

I won’t lie, I don’t have the roasting quite perfect. I feel like they get smooshy by the time they are cooked and not bitter. Maybe next time I’ll parboil them? Actually, next time I’ll shred them in the food processor and then roast them on high heat like Greta does. Oh god, that’s good.

Anyway, we ate them with polenta cakes and sausage.

sausage dinner

Now, two pounds is a lot of brussels sprouts, even once you’ve trimmed about a third off. The next night Ben was at a meeting, so I was on my own. We had some no-knead bread that was bordering on stale, so I toasted it up, heated up some sprouts, and fried an egg in olive oil. Truly an awesome dinner.

fried egg brussels sprouts

The next day at lunch there were still a few left. Also, two rounds of polenta. I don’t have a photo of the cold brussels sprouts (sue me) but here’s what I ate on the side while I fished them out of the pyrex bowl, still cold and more delicious than ever:

polenta

Ok, so Ben, who was so concerned about Sprout Deprivation, only got to eat them for one meal and I ate them for three. But I also cleaned them all: fair’s fair!

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I finally caved and joined Twitter, after watching Aileen …tweet….things all weekend. If you are interested in scintillating stuff like what I’m eating for lunch or what the squirrels outside my office are up to, I’m here.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Food, General, Recipes

Love and baked goods

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Ben has moved on from breakfast pancakes or oatmeal on weekend mornings, and has discovered the connection between organized personalities and the joys of baking. In addition to churning out no-knead bread for his lunch sandwiches, he has recently started baking biscuits.

Our downstairs neighbor, Jean, is a lovely lady who hails from North Carolina. At her annual pre-Christmas tree-trimming party, she serves about as much food as a table can hold, but the highlight is the delicious ham accompanied by basket after basket of tender buttermilk biscuits. This year we asked for the recipe, and not only did she e-mail it to me, she brought us back a bag of biscuit flour from her holiday trip down South! Now that is neighborly.

Ben and I made the biscuits together the first time, but since then he’s been making them before I wake up on the weekend, including Valentine’s morning. I strongly equate love with baked goods (don’t we all?), so it was a wonderful start to the day!

BEST BISCUITS
(From Jean)

Cut together 2 cups self rising flour with 1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter (I use unsalted) until well blended. Add a pinch of salt if you want. I do this step in the food processor, then dump it into a bowl to add the buttermilk.

Add 3/4 cup buttermilk and gently mix until moistened. Do not overmix

Turn out on a floured surface and knead very gently a few times (pat it, really) until the dough forms a coherent ball. Do not knead vigorously like you would knead bread.

Pat out to about 3/4 inch think, cut with a round cutter, and bake at 450 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

The biscuits will be better if you use Southern Biscuit or White Lily flour –something about soft wheat, I think. But they will be good anyhow.

This was the first batch, a bit raggedy because we were so careful not to overwork the dough. It does need (ha!) a few kneads to pull together.

One of Ben’s finished batches, complete with lovely presentation!

Topped with my mom’s raspberry jam, they are unspeakably good. Sadly, we used up the last of the jam in the biscuit mania.

Not bad, right?

Now, as if waking up to fresh biscuits weren’t the way to a girl’s heart, Ben made me dinner for Valentine’s day. But not just any dinner. I ordered him to take photos, but I had no idea what he was making, and he recreated the meal I always always order at my favorite restaurant in NYC, Inoteca. At least, what I always ordered: On my last visit it came to light that they have changed the fantastic romaine-raddichio-ricotta salata salad that I’ve loved for years. Good thing we started making it at home a while ago.

Ben’s perfect salad (he added a couple drops of truffle oil for good measure):

TRUFFLED EGG TOAST!!

I have meant to make that at home for years but never did. There was a slight mis-reading of the recipe (you’re not supposed to use whole eggs, just egg yolks), but on the whole it was a swoonily romantic and delicious gesture. Best Valentine’s ever! (He even got cupcakes for dessert.)

Here’s what he made Sunday morning:
french toast

He’s making meatballs again as I type. I think Ben has spent much more time in the kitchen than I have lately, and I’m not complaining.

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Stay tuned for brussels sprouts (and creative use of leftovers) and an epic mess.