Gougères, or Really Awesome Cheese Puffs

In America, we have Cheetos. In France, they have gougères. France: 1; America: 0.

Maybe that’s not the best comparison, but I can’t think of anything in America that quite compares to gougères. Maybe garlic bread, but then France still wins. Or popovers, which is closer, but not traditionally cheesey, so France still wins. Moral is: start making gougères.

Gougères are magical little creatures — I still don’t understand how the baking chemistry works — that start out as a really sticky dough made from butter, cheese, eggs, and flour, and become puffy balls of cheesey wonder after 30 minutes or less in the oven, with a crunchy outside and a gooey inside. They’re best fresh, but are yummy for days after, and are perfectly paired with a sweeter white wine, but will be happy with any white wine, sparkling wine, or rosé. They are an easy, splendid treat that I am going to add to my party repertoire. In future tries, I plan on pushing the quantity of cheese and black pepper as far as it will go (will report back), but for now, this recipe is pretty classic. And, most important to note, you serve these beauties fresh from the oven — just the right steamy/gooey/crunchy/cheesey way to start a meal.

When Life Gives You Lamb’s Quarter

Another of the wonders of the CSA is occasionally receiving something you’ve never heard of before. Like lamb’s quarter, which I received a few weeks ago and which Wikipedia tells me is a varitey of goosefoot. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Lamb’s quarter, as it turns out, is a plant in the same family as the one that produces quinoa. It’s scientific name is chenopodium album or “white goosefoot” and it makes a mean pesto.

Observe:

Polenta, or: the side dish that doesn’t have to be rice or pasta

Often, when I’m looking for a quick dinner, I try to make a large serving of something typically considered a side but load it up with veggies and proteins enough to make a proper meal.  Read: I’m often eating rice or pasta at home.  While I love rice and pasta, and try to vary what kinds I’m using and what I’m serving them with, I was looking for something different recently.  Bingo: Recipes for Health in the New York Times recently suggested polenta.

I went to Raffetto’s in Manhattan, an Italian-foods specialty store that thank God is cash-only, since I am perpetually cash-strapped, or I would have serious credit card problems there.  Since quick was what I was after, I purchased a bag of pre-cooked polenta that only needed five minutes on the stovetop to be ready to eat.  I also picked up a can of San Marzano tomatoes and a zucchini at a small market nearby, and I was set to make polenta with zucchini and tomatoes.  This recipe is great because it can be fully made in about 30 minutes, or, if you are particularly pressed for time, many parts can be made ahead of time, and can be mixed and matched.

Agriculture-Supported Communities

Today’s post is brought to you by the letters CSA. Say it with me, kids. C-S-A.

CSA is the national airline of the Czech Republic. It’s also the Casting Society of America. And also the Canadian Safety Association, whose logo you see above.

But it’s also Community-Supported Agriculture.

A CSA is a sort of co-op. You pay a lump sum at the beginning of the season, and in exchange, you get a weekly supply of fruits and/or vegetables and in some cases meat and/or dairy as well.

After the jump, some reasons a CSA is a good thing, way more of a good thing than, say, the Confederate States of America.

Oreo-Brownie Cheesecake Extravaganza

This is a "birthday candle" I bought in Switzerland, otherwise known as a firework. Seriously, people use them on their birthday cakes there. Here, they would be illegal in many states. Happy belated 4th of July!

For a birthday a few weeks ago, I received a request for cheesecake. Since I can apparently never resist the urge to tease someone, even when not in my best interest, I of course responded with, “Well, what would you do if I made chocolate cake instead?” He said, only half-kidding, that he would cry. But when I, again teasing, said maybe I’d make a chocolate cake and a cheesecake, his face lit up, and I was promised a very special reward. And so, that is how I decided to make the cheesecake to end all cheesecakes – an Oreo-Brownie Cheesecake Extravaganza.

Recipes for an undertaking like this are surprisingly few and far between. There were a few that came close online, but I wanted to make sure that I not only got the overall technique right (how do you fuse cheesecake and brownie anyway? how do you get the oreos in there?), but also that both components were delicious in their own right. And so, in my first attempt to bake something without following a recipe exactly, I managed to come up with the Incredible Edible Hulk of Desserts. And let me tell you, this dessert is not kidding around.

Quick, Simple, Cold: The Sandwich to Write Home About, or Tuna Fish v2.0, or Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!

Dear Ah-Yee*,

One of the first meals I remember you preparing for me and my step-brothers is a tuna fish salad with fresh apple chunks mixed in. I was young and it was different, so I thought it was pretty weird. But like our new family, I started to appreciate the combination more the older I got.

This sandwich is inspired by the juxtaposition of savory and sweet, gamy and mellow, chewy and crisp I remember from our lunch table long ago. As with so many other things in my youth, you were right and I was wrong.

Like my tastes and our family, it’s grown up a bit. The white bread has bloomed into organic whole grain, seed-studded, thick-sliced brown bread. The tuna has evolved into low mercury, gloriously fishy, skinless and boneless sardines. The mayo has stepped aside for a smoother, healthier greek yogurt emulsifier. But the heart of it, the apple, remains constant from my childhood.

Thanks for the inspiration, the meals, and the heart.

Love,
***Alice

*My family’s romanization of “step-mom” in Mandarin.

Endlessly Variable Egg Salad

Egg salad is another thing (like coleslaw) that I thought was pretty disgusting until I made it myself. And then I realized that it’s delicious — and easy, and cheap. And endlessly variable. Here are some guidelines: egg salad is best when it’s freshly made, slightly warm, not too mayonnaisey, and served open-faced on a piece of toasted bread. It needs something a little acidic, something a little onion-y/crunchy, and a little spicing.

Another guideline: Egg salad likes to have other things mixed into it, or eaten on top or alongside it. Consider egg salad your canvas! I have listed a couple suggestions for toppings and side munchies below, which I’ve distinguished by whether you want to put them directly on top of your sandwich and eat altogether in one bite (toppings) or whether you want to eat between bites of sandwich, for a change of flavor/texture (side munchies). Side muchies can, I suppose, also be toppings, depending on how adventurous you are.

And, as the last feather in egg salad’s cap of endless flexibility, it should be noted that it can serve as any of the three meals of the day: a savory breakfast, a quick lunch, or a light supper. So get crackin’.

Kale with Peanut Butter

Oh, just shut up and try it.

Kale with Peanut Butter
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 bunch kale, rinsed and chopped
1/3 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup water

Saute garlic in olive oil. (Add chili flakes if you’d like a little heat.) Add in remaining ingredients and cook until kale is tender. Serve over rice and the objections of the uninitiated.

Booze In Your Food: Affogato Corretto

The real ice cream of the Future. Get the hell outta here, Dippin’ Dots.

- Vanilla ice cream

- Espresso

- Ba-da bing

- Ba-da boom

It takes only four, and arguably only two, ingredients to make one of my favorite desserts, affogato al caffe. Italian cooking has a long and illustrious tradition of evocative and hilariously literal food names such as saltimbocca (“jumps in mouth”) and tiramisu (“pick me up”). Affogato hails from the more morbid reaches of culinary nicknamery – you aren’t just pouring coffee over your ice cream, you are drowning, smothering or suffocating it. It means your ice cream sleeps with the fishes. Luca Brasi knowzwhaddamtalkinabout.

The recipe, if pouring espresso over a glass of vanilla ice cream can be called a recipe, is hot and cold, light and dark, sweet and bitter, and a surprisingly impressive and complex payoff for such easy preparation. So if it’s already so simple and elegant, why waste valuable bytes writing about it? POUR COFFEE ON YOUR ICE CREAM! There. Done. Why am I still here? I’ll tell you why: because there’s there no booze in it. Yet.

Finish Your Ketchup

Despite what a good anecdote it makes about the low quality of school lunch, ketchup was never actually declared a vegetable. Hash browns and french fries, however, were:

School meals like this don’t exist because congress doesn’t want to provide our kids with good nutrition – and there are 65 pages of regulations to prove it – but because they only give schools a dollar a day per kid and thousands of pounds of government cheese to do it with. (For how the results of this compare with school lunch around the world, check out this blog.)

Obama is looking high and low to reduce costs in the medical system, and there’s a great one lurking in school cafeterias across the US. If we don’t stem the tide of childhood obesity, its burden on our health care system is going to be titanic. Besides which, a well-fed kid is a happy kid, better able to stay awake and focused in his afternoon classes. To accomplish this, we need to give schools more money to feed kids, remove the stigma associated with eating school lunch, and provide educational programs that teach kids about nutrition and physical activity and encourage them to try new foods.

The time for this is now and our best opportunity is the renewal of the Child Nutrition Act pending in congress. Time for Lunch is leading the charge for this important change, and I encourage you read about their work and join the fight to get real food in schools.

Read on for a letter from the campaign, and please consider supporting this important effort.

Go See Food, Inc. Try Not to Panic.

“You’ll never look at dinner the same way again,” promises the movie poster for Food, Inc. Well, I saw it on Saturday night, and let me tell you — in the immediate aftermath, I never planned on eating dinner again. That might be an exaggeration, but it’s close enough. The movie is brutal. One of my friends cried throughout the entire thing. And not in the way you cry when Mufasa is run over by a herd of stampeeding wildebeests, but deep down you know it’s just a cartoon, so the crying is kind of cathartic and lovely in its own way. No, no. This was the kind of crying (I shed a few tears here and there myself), when you’re confronted with graphic image after graphic image of feedlots, soundbites of pigs squealing on their way to slaughter, plus helpless illegal immigrants, bankrupt farmers, and a dead child (from e. coli poisoning), to boot. And none of it is Disney animation.

You know the food revolution has really taken off when a movie like Food, Inc. can get made and distributed. And that’s a good thing, and it’s a good movie — an important movie, and an informative movie. It’s easy to get confused about what’s going on with our food supply, and reading the many many books on the subject helps gather more information, but doesn’t necessarily clear things up. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and the sound of those pigs squealing may in fact be worth a thousand pictures.

Comrade Avocadovitch Milkshakeski

Milkshakes are the next front of the food revolution in this country. Hear me out on this.

We’ve had the sweet dessert: the cupcake fad is kind of out of control, though I’m not going to badmouth it too much since my sister is completely nutso over the little bastards, so I guess yay for cupcakes.  The point is you can find so many different kinds of cupcakes out there now that people are devoting whole bakeries to this little nugget of tooth decay.   There’s no escaping so you might as well join in.

We’ve had the savory sandwich: Not only have people been screwing around with burgers and hot dogs for awhile now, but there’s the insanity over banh mi, the mind-numbingly delicious Vietnamese sandwich that everyone seems to be eating or selling in New York these days.  Don’t get me wrong on this one, folks, I am a firm believer in this part of the revolution. There may have been a lot of crap that came out of the French colonization of Vietnam, but there was a whole lot of good food too.

What we’re missing now is the drink portion of our uprising, something to wash down those tasty morsels of mutiny as we march on toward the fat and happy climax of our dietary habits.  That vessel, comrades, is the milkshake.  And not just any milkshake will do.  No, vanilla is way too vanilla and chocolate hasn’t undertaken any coups in the food world since the 1950’s.  In fact, I think the last time anybody said anything good about a milkshake was when a greasy-haired John Travolta was sitting across from a rather spooky Uma Thurman in a thoroughly overhauled Cadillac, talking about overpriced food.  And they were both stoned out of their minds.  No, what we need is a hero.

Enter the mighty avocado.

Oh, the Things You’ll Grill: Grilled Pineapple, Bananas, and Avocados

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Grilling!
You’re off and away!

You have coals in the pit.
You have fire at the ready.
Grill whatever you want
Just keep the heat steady.
You’re on your own. And you’ll do what you will.
And YOU are the gal who’ll decide what you’ll grill.

Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing

This one, ladies and gentlemen, is a keeper. One of those recipes that go in the mental repertoire to serve as a reliable fallback for any occasion, provided all the hungry mouths in need of feeding eat bacon.

And there are certainly plenty of people who can’t, don’t, or won’t eat bacon for plenty of very good reasons, and it is a point of pride for me to accommodate the dietary needs of the people I cook for.

But that just makes for all the more enjoyment when I do get to pork it up a notch.

Blackberry Popsicles

How are today’s recipe and Pablo Neruda different? Though the fruitful handicraft of both Latin American pops can be enjoyed on a beach this summer, one is a poeta and the other’s a paleta. (http://www.instantrimshot.com)

This version of the popular Mexican popsicle contains only three ingredients: milk, sugar, and blackberries.

The handful of blackberries (read: 20) leftover from snacking in my fridge yielded only a single popsicle, but the recipe below should make five or six.