by rivka
on March 17, 2014
Long overdue, this is the latest in my Indian for Dinner series, where I attempt to spend less money on takeout from Masala Art.
I think I speak for all of us when I say that this weather tries all patients. Some days taunt with 70 degrees and sun, but looking outside, it seems to be snowing, yet again, and here we are, facing another day of lost productivity and frigid air.
The silver lining is that this unpredictable and frequently unpleasant weather has given me loads of time to work on my dal-making skills. I love lentils in all forms, but dal reins supreme.
“Dal” is just the Indian term for legumes. The category of dishes called dal includes crunchy snacks, soupy stews, smooth purees, and mixtures with rice not unlike Mujaddara. My favorite is dal makhani, the smoky, tomatoey preparation of dark lentils. But a couple of recent articles about dal have convinced me to expand my horizons beyond the familiar. That’s how I came upon Khatti Dal, a chunky stew of yellow lentils with heaps of curry leaves and plenty of tart tamarind. I’ve been eating it on and off for the past week, retroactively missing it on behalf of all those times I could have made it but didn’t know to.
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by rivka
on March 14, 2014
It takes a bit of chutzpah to love the hell out of a bakery, gush and gush about its perfect croissants and chocolate rye cookies and baguettes and the rest, pick a hotel based purely on its proximity to said bakery, buy the baker’s cookbooks, and then go doubt one of its recipes. But I couldn’t help myself: I love pretty much everything about Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bakery, and I bake my weekly loaf from his book, Tartine Bread, but I saw a recipe in there for semolina bread, and I’ll confess it: I didn’t believe it would work. How does cream of wheat become a loaf of bread with barely any regular flour in the mix? Seemed a bit like making bread entirely out of oats. I envisioned a wet, tacky blob with no crumb. I actually convinced myself that even though Chad Robertson considered this bread good enough to publish in his award-winning book, I wouldn’t be able to get semolina dough to rise. Arrogant, much?
Fortunately, I threw caution to the wind. Obviously, I was dead-wrong in my doubts. What emerged from the oven last Friday was one of the best loaves I’ve ever made.
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by rivka
on March 11, 2014
A bit later than I’d hoped to share this recipe, but I’m thinking you may have many, if not most, of the ingredients in this recipe on hand. Cream cheese. Chocolate chips. Almonds. Maybe some dried cherries, from that last batch of granola. Yeah? If so, a batch of my new favorite hamentaschen is within reach.
This started when I went to make Deb’s homemade poppy seed filling. My standard regimen is to make one batch of poppy, one of nutella. This year, the nutella was replaced by Nocciolata, which has less junk and a cleaner, more hazelnuty flavor than nutella. (Full disclosure: the Nociolata folks sent me a sample to try.) But for my third batch, I really wanted something fruity, and for once, I didn’t want to use jam.
I thought back to last year’s chocolate raspberry hamentaschen, which I absolutely adored. I wanted something similar. But I also kept coming back to this idea of a hamentaschen flavored like rugelach: some nuts, some dried fruit, some chocolate, all folded up into a pastry – the two aren’t all that different.
The minute rugelach popped into my mind, I was off to the races. Dried cherries, plenty of chocolate, some ground almonds for texture, a bit of orange zest, and then some brandy, because Purim. Don’t forget a cream cheese dough, essential to that rugelach flavor. The result was perfection.
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by rivka
on March 6, 2014
Sometime last year, D and I were invited to take part in a fun tradition that friends of ours had started, wherein they host dinner parties composed entirely of dishes from Yotam Ottolenghi, he of Plenty and Jerusalem and an earlier eponymous book that gets much less attention. (Also of a fantastic column in The Guardian, where this soup originally appeared.)
At the first of these dinners we attended, the table was full of exotic dishes: fava bean kuku loaded with barberries, grape leaf and yogurt pie, and mutabbaq. Everything went together, because everything came from the same brilliant mind. We left stuffed.
For the second dinner, we all went back to the well, digging for recipes that had languished on our to-do lists for too long. Josh made a saffron ravioli served with pink peppercorns. Bryce made the spinach-feta fritters that were a total pain but really delicious. And I finally flipped back to the page of Jerusalem with three soups on it, two of which I’d already made. This time, I made the third: a very green soup made of watercress.
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by rivka
on March 3, 2014
According to my big stack o’ food magazines, Thankgiving is the day for pie, and the December holidays are prime-time for cookies. Since there’s no formal season for cakes, we’ll eat them all year and call it even. Fair?
Early spring brunches bring rhubarb coffee cake; summer calls for double-decker strawberry cake; and I’ve got a slew of French-style no-biggie cakes, peasant and pound, to finish off just about any meal.
But when winter can’t seem to let go, I want something toasty and comforting, something simple and relatively unadorned. The days are so short that I can’t really motivate to make something sky-high and celebratory – plus, after dinners of thick lentil soup and rib-sticking stews, I want a desert to finish things off without overdoing it.
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by rivka
on February 26, 2014
The trendsetters over at Food52 recently told me that I could unabashedly pluRonk a whole cauliflower onto my table and call it dinner. Not just any cauliflower, though: it was this one, simmered in a rich, flavorful broth, then roasted on high high heat until the edges were singed, the whole orb a glistening golden. Then I could plunk it on my table and call it dinner. I needed zero convincing to try this one.
I will confess, though, that I only had one cauliflower in the fridge, and I was nervous that it wouldn’t be enough to feed four of us. Since I’d bought a beautiful fillet of shad the previous day, I decided to roast that alongside the cauliflower. This meant that the cauliflower wasn’t our only main dish, but no matter: it was a pièce de résistance all the same. The inner flesh was soft and flavorful from the broth, and those outer bits, well – I could eat them all day long.
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by rivka
on February 19, 2014
I wanted to tell you this story about how I’ve always believed that Friday night dinner must start with challah, even if we’re having pan-fried dumplings and make-your-own spring rolls, which don’t go with challah at all. I was going to tell you about how sometime a couple years ago, thanks to our smarter-than-we-are friends in DC, we realized that if we’re serving spaghetti and meatballs for Friday night dinner, by all means, we can skip challah in favor of something more Italian. It was a longer story than that, but then it occurred to me that I should just cut to the chase here: doughy, crisp-edged focaccia; singed onions, licked with vinegar and the sweetness of their own caramel; a bit of Pecorino cheese on top. Need I say more? I imagine you are convinced.
And you should be. This is straight-up one of the best focaccia recipes I’ve ever made, and I’m psyched to share it with you.
The recipe comes from Martha Stewart Living, a magazine I do not read. My friend Jana is the Martha expert, and she’s the one who introduced me to this focaccia. It seems like Martha is less keen on crusts than we are, though, because she makes seven cups of flour into just one, very billowy, very doughy focaccia, where I (at Jana’s recommendation) have split the thing in two. The result is a crustier, chewier bread, which I enjoy. To follow queen Martha or little old me? Choice is yours.
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by rivka
on February 13, 2014
Valentine’s Day always seemed a bit unfair. Why must we relegate sweet nothings and romantic dates – let alone heart candies and chocolate – to one day of the year? I love love, but I also love chocolate. I want both all year round.
However. When a day hands you an excuse to make something rich and chocolatey, and then give it out indiscriminately – and eat more of it than you care to admit – in the name of a holiday, you say okay and you do it. So, friends: in honor of Valentine’s Day, I made you these salted chocolate rye cookies. I’m feeling confident you’ll agree to be my valentines, seeing as all the chocolate is on this side of the table. C’mon over.
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