Not Derby Pie

I don’t know what it is about this place that gets me every time.

Partially, it’s the food. There’s hot, sweet challah in the oven right now, some really beautiful fruit on the counter, and onions and garlic browning on the stove.

It’s also the scenery. It’s 65 degrees, there’s not a cloud in the sky, and the view from our window is enough to make anyone swoon.

It all boils down to this: I’m only here once a year or so, but for some inexplicable reason, Jerusalem feels like a second home. I don’t make itineraries like I do when I’m in other countries; I don’t plan to see special exhibits or even make reservations at fancy restaurants. What’s important to me here is seeing the people I love, soaking in the beautiful weather, eating as much fruit and vegetables as I can get my hands on, and walking around my old neighborhood for as long as my feet will stand. And of course, I’ve got my camera here with me, so I’ll do my best to document my time here and share it with you.

I can promise some really, truly good eats — the kind of local food whose recipes involve measurements by the handful and simply can’t be matched. If I’m lucky, I’ll even have some recipes to share. So tune in, enjoy, and to those of you celebrating today, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

When the New Yorker lands in my mailbox each Tuesday, the first thing I read is the weekly restaurant write-up, Tables for Two. It’s short and sweet, and usually contains a brief description of one or two stand-out dishes. Every once in a while, I hear one of the descriptions and think, that sounds like something I should try to make. Even more rarely than that, I actually get off my derriere and try to make one of the recipes. This is one of those times.

The idea came from The Vanderbilt, a restaurant in Prospect Heights. According to the New Yorker, “the best dish might be the roasted Brussels sprouts, dressed with sriracha, lime, and honey, each bite a perfect combination of sweet, spicy, and tart.” They really did sound perfect, and given a) how simple the ingredient list sounded and b) the fact that I happened to have all four aformentioned ingredients in my house, I decided to give it a go. What better use of a snow day than turning dish descriptions into great food?

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The last several times I saw cheesecake on a restaurant menu, it always listed some cheese other than cream cheese as its defining ingredient: ricotta, farmers cheese, and goat cheese seem to make regular appearances.

This is with good reason: traditional cheesecake is overly sweet and very dense. It feels to me like a 1980’s-era dessert, something that no one really serves anymore. I can eat only a couple bites of it before needing a break from the sugar shock, and while the texture is initially nice, it wears me out after a while. I suppose this is why I’ve made it only once or twice, ever. Inexperience notwithstanding, something about being a food blogger makes me foolish enough to believe that I’ll master a recipe immediately, and so when I got a hankering for cheesecake this weekend, I was determined to make the perfect version.

As often as my culinary hubris has backfired, this time, I’ve gotta say, I think I pretty much hit the nail on the head. I auditioned several recipes beforehand — everything from toffee crunch to chocolate-coffee to key lime — just to make sure I considered all the possibilities. Ultimately, I settled on something akin to New York cheesecake, with lemon juice and zest to offset the sugar. I also drew inspiration from all those restaurant menus, using goat cheese in lieu of much of the cream cheese called for in classic recipes. I like goat cheese’s tanginess, and I also find it lighter and thus more bearable than cream cheese.

I decided to top off my goat cheese cake with a coat of dark, smokey caramel. I added a bit of lemon juice to the caramel topping to echo the lemon in the cake and cut the sweetness, and included a generous amount of salt because I find caramel is no good unless it’s equal measures sweet and salty.

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If it wasn’t obvious from my cookie page, I’ve got something of a permanent craving for bite-sized crunchy/chewy treats. Hanukkah isn’t really a cookie-focused holiday — it’s more a celebration of your deep fryer. But Christmas is just around the corner, and every year, I get swept up in the holiday spirit. This year is no exception, and I’m more than happy to bake off a few batches in honor of the holiday cookie season. Just doing my duty, people.

Tonight’s first batch was my favorite chocolate chip cookies. Everyone’s got a favorite recipe: mine are pretty close to the NYT recipe, only I don’t mess around with the two different types of flour, I use natural sugar instead of bleached white stuff, and I use a mix of ghiradelli chocolate chips and chopped bittersweet chocolate for textural contrast.

After a few of those were in the oven — for D, of course, just wanted to please my lady — I moved onto batch number two: hazelnut shortbread. Less sweet but just as buttery and full of toasted nuts, these shortbread are chocolate chip cookies’ sophisticated sibling. They come together in a flash, and can be baked in any number of ways. If you’re in a rush, roll the whole pile of dough into a log and stick them in the freezer for slice-and-bake action later. If you have more time, form them into little individual log cookies. Either way, dunk the finished shortbread into shiny melted chocolate (or just drizzle the chocolate on top using a fork), and roll in toasted nuts on top for some truly elegant December desserts. Oh, and by the way: they make a lovely holiday present.

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Christmas season is upon us, and the obsessing about presents is underway. I’ve seen about 15 gift guides, some food-specific, some not, with ideas for the food lover, the wannabe foodie, the horrible cook, the cool-chef-dad, the apron-clad mom, and everyone in between.

This isn’t really a gift guide — it’s really just a haphazardly-compiled list of things I’d love to have. But all the same, here goes:

Cookbooks

Michael Symon’s Live to Cook

This is the first cookbook from Cleveland chef Michael Symon. I haven’t seen the book, but the one recipe I made from it — tomato blue cheese soup — was hands down the best tomato soup I’ve ever had. If the rest of the book has recipes like that one, I’m sold.

David Chang’s Momofuku

By now you’ve all heard me wax poetic about David Chang’s New York restaurant empire, Momofuku. The food at these restaurants — and I’ve been to three of them — is some of the best I’ve had in New York, and you know it’s good when, in a city with as cut-throat a restaurant culture as Manhattan, the man’s managed to open up five joints in no time, all of which frequently have lines at the door. This cookbook (which I’ve peeked at several times) brings Chang’s mastery of flavor into the home. His proportions are spot-on, and he makes deliciousness from such simple ingredients. I made his soba with scallion dressing, and what looks like a big pile of scallions with brown sauce all over them turns out to be a phenomenal bowl of noodles. I’m hungry for more.

Canal House Cooking, Vol. 1

This is the first in a series of what will be four cookbooks, one for each time of year. The books are written by Christopher Hirsheimer & Melissa Hamilton, who are as skilled in the art of food photography as they are at developing damn good recipes. I’ve peeked in these cookbooks at BN, and they’re just gorgeous. The book evokes that feeling I get toward the end of a lazy summer weekend afternoon, when the sun is setting over my neighborhood and the air is cooling off, and the most important thing I have to do is sip a good glass of wine.

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Yet another installment of my Weekday Lunch series, where I share recipes suited for home or the office.

Last Wednesday night, a colleague of mine had a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving party. The idea is brilliant. Since most of us spend Tday with anyone from parents and siblings to in-laws and cousins twice removed, might as well take the night before to be with friends and surrogate family members, and to toast the holiday in style. And that’s just what we did. We ate butter chicken (spicy!) and Brussels sprouts with apples and the most trashy-chic tater tot casserole; we pigged out on pecan bars (from yours truly) and bread pudding and phenomenal ricotta cheesecake; and we washed it all down with lots and lots of bourbon. There truly is no better way to usher in Thanksgiving.

The next day, having landed in Detroit to spend the weekend with D’s family, those Brussels sprouts were still on my mind. They were perfectly caramelized, much softer in the middle than I usually make them, and speckled with little chunks of roasted apple, which provided the perfect sweet, tangy contrast to the smoky and just-barely-bitter sprouts.

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Part of the fun of food blogging is that my kitchen rarely sees the exact same dish twice. Driven by the need for new content, I’m always in search of the next great recipe. I abide some serious duds along the way, but they’re a necessary evil in this business, and well worth the pain when you consider that experimentation is the only way to unearth the new best recipe.

Folks, this is the new best recipe.

The minute I started to make it, I knew it’d be something special, and frankly, I’m a little shocked that in 26 years of eating mostly vegetarian food, 8 years of cooking for myself, 5 years of being really interested in food, and over 2 years of food blogging, I never came across this sublime combination. The minute the cauliflower hit the heat, I knew I’d struck the jackpot. Consider the nutty, sweet sides of cauliflower; you can imagine how brown butter might amplify that nuttiness. It plays the perfect foil to the sweetness as well, letting it come out without overwhelming you. A hit of lemon zest at the end of cooking brightens the flavors and cuts the richness, and a quick confetti of grated Parmigiano Reggiano adds that perfect amount of salt. Seriously, this is the best tasting thing I’ve had in so, so long. I made it twice in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, and I just bought more cauliflower to make it again. It’s perfect. If you don’t trust me, you can check out this NYT recipe and be just as weirded out as I am that Julia Moskin and I had the lightbulb moment at the same time. How bizarre.

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