Minimalist-ish dal

I saw this post on stonesoup the other day and was immediately drawn to it. I'd had a couple of weeks of not really eating as well as I should be for optimal feeling good-ness (and, to be frank, pants-fitting-well-ness), and have been trying to get back on track (good breakfast, fruit/vegetables for snacks, bringing a home-cooked, healthful lunch to work every day). This very simple lentil dish seemed like just the ticket, especially since I already had everything I needed at home.

With such a non-fancy dish, I decided to take the opportunity to try out this fancy rice mix I'd gotten at Trader Joe's. It's completely awesome. The black barley and daikon seeds pop when you chew them and it's really tasty.
I was a little less pleased with the lentils. They were kind of both harsh and flat tasting. I don't know if it's because I used (homemade) vegetable stock instead of water or if I so rarely eat lentils that have so few other ingredients involved that I don't even know what they taste like plain, but a big spoonful of yogurt and some chopped tomato added after I took the picture helped a lot. I had it for dinner last night and lunch today and there's definitely enough for lunch tomorrow, maybe even one more serving over the weekend. Even with the fancy rice, I'd be amazed if this went over $1/serving. With plain rice, I'm sure it would be under a quarter.

Tomatoes and dates

Faced with a tomato-heavy CSA share a few days before I went out of town, I figured it was time to give these slow-roasted tomatoes a try. I halved the cherry and plum tomatoes, keeping the grape tomatoes to eat out of hand and the big ones to use for other stuff, drizzled them with oil and popped them in a 300* degree oven for two hours.
They came out concentrated and sweet, still juicy and a little chewy. The little ones that I didn't eat straight out of the pan were tossed into a batch of Annie's mac and cheese, but the bigger ones are still in my fridge. I'm going to make a batch of this minimalist dal tonight with some red lentils; the tomatoes may be good chopped up and thrown in with that.

Also of note: I came across fresh dates recently and since I'd never had them, picked up a small branch's worth to try. They're ready when brown and wrinkly and kind of gross-looking.
Eating them gave me the completely weird experience of bringing back a vivid childhood memory of something I'd never actually tasted: in one of the Chronicles of Narnia, someone plants a piece of toffee in the wildly fertile soil of a new world and a tree grows on the spot that bears a kind of toffee fruit that's juicy and sticky and soft. Ripe fresh dates taste exactly the way wee Stephanie imagined that toffee fruit tasting, i.e., awesome.

Screw this summer crap.

Fall is the air! My interest in life and the world around me is returning!

I can get excited about cooking without deeply resenting the fact that I'd have to turn on the stove or oven and I can get excited about eating rich, delicious food without getting cranky that it's too hot to go work it off and I can get excited about reading about food now that the focus is shifting away from stupid grilling and back to normal kitchen-cooking. I don't have a grill, don't know anyone who has a grill, and am afraid of my broiler. Plus, I don't really like big pieces of meat. I only really like meat when it's cured or cooked slowly and in some sort of soup or stew or saucy concoction that one eats over grains.

Things I'm dreaming about eating (looking over this list, maybe I need more protein?):
Carbonnade
Mushroom bourguinon
Roasted squash and sweet potatoes
Brussels sprouts with caramelized tofu
Chicken soup
From-scratch macaroni and cheese
Lamb and prune meatballs with Moroccan tomato sauce
Regular meatballs with regular tomato sauce
Big batches of curry
Figs wrapped in bacon
Shepherd's pie
Short rib soup with leeks and barley
Minestrone
Butternut squash and hazelnut lasagne
Mulled cider, with or without a tot of something

Food goals for the fall:
-finally making decent gnocchi
-recreating my mom's potato soup with kielbasa and serving it to friends with dark, sour bread, a pickle plate, and baked apples for dessert
-something I haven't made before, maybe palak paneer?

I have been knitting all summer, but it's a lot more satisfying to do it when it's cool enough to wear something warm. Or even just cool enough that I don't want to rip my very skin off every single minute. I managed to finish the back and fronts of the Twenty Ten cardigan. It just needs the collar finished and a couple of sleeves.
And I started a new sweater last weekend. I went up to the Berkshires for a friend's wedding (Hi Zoe! You looked ridiculously beautiful!) and knew I'd have hours of being in a car (Hi Martha! Thanks again!) and on a bus (Hi Deb! Great to have company on the ride! Start your blog already!) and possibly hanging around a hotel where I could be knitting but wouldn't really be able to work on anything that took focus on a pattern or the project itself. I didn't have anything underway that fit the bill, so I started a simple stockinette pullover. It has hemmed edges and lots of waist shaping and is knit in some gorgeous cashmere/silk that I rescued from another sweater last year. It's zipping along satisfyingly quickly, so I should be able to wear it this fall.
The sweater that I ripped out was double-stranded and so warm that I could only wear it on the few Arctic-cold days we get each winter. I'm not 100% sure I love the black and pink tweed, but I'll see how I feel when it's done. I can always overdye it in navy or burgandy later. I wouldn't normally dye whole garments, but don't think unevenness would really matter in this case.

Buttermilk farro salad

I was very happy to see this recipe appear on 101 Cookbooks last week, since I had half a carton of buttermilk left over from my brief infatuation with cucumber/avocado soup and a small bag of farro I'd picked up to try. I knew I'd be getting some vegetables in my CSA pick-up that would work well, so held out until Tuesday night to make it. I used a small zucchini, sliced very thin, a handful of French breakfast radishes, also sliced very thin, and a head of lettuce, chopped. My share also included a small bunch of dill, which went into the dressing.

It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable, though not especially exciting, dish, full of whole grains and vegetables, well suited to bringing to work for lunch. (I'll eat anything if I bring it to work.) It missed the mark for a couple of reasons: This was my first time eating farro and I think I'd prefer it as one element in a mixed-grain dish, rather than on its own. It has a fairly aggressive texture that would be great when mixed with, say, brown rice, barley, and quinoa. It doesn't taste like wild rice, but I had the same reaction to it; a little goes a long way. Also, I substituted red wine vinegar, which I had, for the white wine vinegar, which I didn't, and it was a little vinegar-heavy even for me, who drinks vinegar for pleasure. And the very thin dressing worked well with the grains and crunchy vegetables, soaking in nicely, but left the lettuce limp and sad.

Still, I'm always happy to find new uses for buttermilk (oatmeal season is coming!) and this will be a good dish to keep in the make-ahead-and-eat-for-lunches rotation, as long as I tweak the dressing proportions and am savvier about the vegetables I use.

Coffee "cake"

I was intrigued by this recipe when I saw it last week. I've had coffee jello a few times and don't really love it; I find it a little harsh and too sweet, but I thought that it might be better tempered with the condensed milk layers. Plus: layers! Modern jello mold! Fun! I like stripes!

It came together easily, set up more quickly than I was expecting and looks great. Where it's lacking though: flavor and texture. I should have known better when I looked at the recipe in the first place: make regular-strength coffee then dilute it by half? I mean, I drink my coffee pretty strong, but even so, a robustly flavored dessert that does not make. What it does make is something that tastes overwhelmingly ... neutral. A couple spoonsful of instant espresso added with the hot water would have done wonders. Ditto the condensed milk layer. Cream instead of water and a splash of vanilla next time. Another problem was that the recipe called for the same amount of gelatin in each of the mixtures, despite them being different volumes. So the milk layer is so fully set up that it's almost chewy, when I want it to be meltier, more like panna cotta.

So: good idea, lousy recipe, but one worth revisiting.

Suffering succotash

I have a secret, the kind of trashy, tawdry secret that could get my Certain Kind of Brooklynite membership card revoked.

I don't like being in a CSA.

It's true.

I've had CSA envy every summer for years now and still love the ethos of the thing, but now that I'm actually IN one: meh. Part of it is that I signed up for a half share, but the CSA I belong to has half-share people pick up a full share every other week instead of getting a smaller amount every week. I get it; it would be an organizational nightmare otherwise, but it means that I'm either overrun with produce and I have to gorge myself before it all spoils or the fridge is empty but I don't want to buy more because all I already prepaid a not-inconsequential amount of money for my June-through-October produce, goddammit.

I had gotten into a good rhythm over the winter of planning meals ahead of time, shopping for pantry items infrequently, picking up produce/dairy/eggs more often and just generally being efficient and thrifty, while also eating really, really well. It was a state of affairs that pleased me to no end. Not knowing what I'm getting — my CSA isn't one of the ones that lets members know what to expect ahead of time — and not being able to get and use it on my own schedule is driving me a little bananas.

I know that a lot of people like CSAs because it forces them to try foods that they wouldn't normally, but I actually do that all the time. I nerd out like crazy when I see a kind of apple I've never heard of or some dark, leafy greens that are new to me. And yes, the quality of the CSA produce is very high, but I also belong to the one of best food coops in the country, which carries loads of local, organic produce that's equally good.

So, I won't be rejoining this one, but if I move away from the coop and into a different CSA's territory, I'd reconsider.

I haven't been blogging much about cooking, partly out of CSA-related demoralization and partly because it's been too hot to cook anything, but I did make a succotash-ish dish Tuesday night that turned out pretty well. My distribution on Tuesday included five ears of corn, which is one of those foods I insist on eating immediately because refrigerating it destroys all of the good flavor chemicals and leaves it fit, basically, for cattle feed. (There. That should ensure that I don't lose my Entitled Brooklyn Asshole status for a while.) So I cut it all off the cobs and sauteed it in butter with green beans and a huge tomato, both chopped into manageable pieces. I cooked about a cup of orzo and added that too with some of the pasta water. Two changes I'd make next time: I would have preferred a pasta that was not the same size as the corn kernels for some additional textural contrast, but I didn't have anything else on hand except linguine, and would have finished the dish with a bit of cream, but mine had gone bad, so I used buttermilk instead, which tasted good, but didn't thicken up the way I wanted it to.

Salvage operation: deviled egg toast

I've gotten in the habit of keeping hard-boiled eggs around. They're easy to make (eggs in pan, cold water to cover, bring to a boil, cover, let sit for 12 minutes, cool in a bowl of ice water) and handy for mid-afternoon protein boosts at work or when the occasional craving for deviled eggs hits, like it did last night. When I set about peeling a couple I had in the fridge, I realized that I had screwed up the timing with the most recent batch and had half a dozen gorgeous CSA eggs with yolks that were barely set and whites that were jellied and, truth be told, a little gooey.
I figured they'd still work for egg salad though and mashed them up with a big spoonful of grainy mustard, a handful of chopped cornichons, dollop of mayonnaise, paprika, and salt. Creamy and flavorful, spread on wheat toast and sprinkled with more paprika, it made a mighty fine light dinner, maybe even more delicious than a plate of deviled eggs would have been.

Easy apricot jam

Quart of apricots, 2 c sugar, juice of a lemon, apply heat, spread on toast.

I feel like superwoman. :)

Summer soup

In a blender, combine a little garlic, a peeled and seeded cucumber, a chopped avocado, pinch of cayenne, juice of a lime, a few scoops of plain yogurt, dash of salt, and buttermilk to cover. Cool and creamy, with a gentle bite. It's my new favorite.

My new favorite summer treat

A little bit of sweetened heavy cream poured over a very tart granita.

DUDE.

It's one of those things that magically turns out to be far more than the sum of its parts. The granita is all crunchy crystals, but the cream settles around them and refreezes, softening the edges, while still maintaining the essential structure. And it tastes pretty fantastic.

You start by making a granita out of whatever juice you like. I've only tried it with the kind of thick, tart juices I wouldn't want to drink straight — black cherry, concord grape, some kind of blueberry/pomegranate concoction — but I bet something more mellow, like pear, would be good too. There are nice step-by-step directions here, though I don't add extra sugar to the juice. When it's frozen and you're ready to eat, pour a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream into a ramekin, add a teaspoon or so of sugar, and stir until the sugar dissolves. This should also thicken the cream a bit, though not to the point that it'll hold peaks. Pile some granita into a little dessert cup, pour the cream on top and give it a minute to merge. Magic.

Out of context, this photo would be totally gross.

Cajeta

My supply of Fat Toad Farm goat's milk caramel is running low. It's splendid stuff, but at nearly $8 for that size jar (not that I begrudge them! they have goat maintenance to pay for!), I figured it was something worth trying to make for myself. I've made not-very-exciting dulce de leche in the past, but thought that it was worth having a go at a goat's milk version.

I used this recipe, though I halved it (except for the vanilla. because in all the excitement of looking to see if I had any vanilla beans left and realizing I didn't, I forgot and threw in a whole tablespoon of extract. lord knows that keeping track of four whole ingredients is awfully taxing) and added a cinnamon stick while it cooked. And it turned out pretty well! It took a lot less time than that experiment last year, just about an hour and a half. The color is pretty close to the Fat Toad stuff and while it's a little bit thinner, I noticed that they list cornstarch in their ingredients so they're helping things along a bit. I think it would have been better with half the vanilla, but it's a minor quibble and easily corrected next time.

Wild food upstate

When I was upstate a couple of weeks ago, I took my mom out foraging one morning. I was mostly looking for milkweed florets, but we also found some ripe blackcaps in a few sunny spots, as well as enough unripe ones to keep her in berries for weeks as they ripened.
We picked close to two pounds of milkweed florets, and that was only taking one or two from each plant. Lots of milkweed near her place, is what I'm saying. Much of it was on a hillside that it shared with densely growing thistles, but that's what long pants and hiking shoes and slow, deliberate movements are for.
I was surprised and pleased to find a big elderberry bush in full flower too, so we picked a bunch for elderflower fritters and for my mom to try her hand at putting up some elderflower champagne.
I sauteed about half of the milkweed to have with dinner and left the rest for her to have later. It was nice to have enough to eat my fill, rather than just having a taste. I decided that it tastes more like asparagus than anything else. Good stuff.

The elderflower fritters were ... less uniquely delicious. I read a couple a recipes and made a simple batter of flour, egg, milk and a little lemon juice. I dipped the flower heads in the batter and fried them in canola oil until they were brown.
They just tasted like fried dough. Neither of us could distinguish any flavor at all from the flowers, so we scrapped them and ate strawberries instead.

Switchel

I have a feeling this is going to be a post about something that nobody likes but me, but I'm okay with that. It starts, as so many things do, with me reading Laura Ingalls as a kid. I remember being mildly intrigued by this line from The Long Winter:
"Ma had sent them ginger-water. She had sweetened the cool well-water with sugar, flavored it with vinegar, and put in plenty of ginger to warm their stomachs so they could drink till they were not thirsty. Ginger-water would not make them sick, as plain cold water would when they were so hot."

Somewhere in the intervening years, I read about switchel, the "haymakers' punch" of sweetened vinegar water, and when I spied that bottle of Bragg's vinegar drink at a fancy bodega last weekend, I snatched it up. I loved it, though I think it's fair to say that Jenn was grossed out — willing to give it a try until she smelled it. The only listed ingredients were water, cider vinegar, and honey, all things I had on hand at home, so I've been playing around with it all week and finally hit on the proportions that taste good to me. I like the flavor of honey, but have been using maple syrup simply because it's easier to stir into cold water.

The ginger tea I mention here is something I make a batch of weekly-ish. I make it strong enough that I can't drink it on its own, so it's more like ginger concentrate. It's good mixed with water or seltzer or heated up with honey and lemon. Just slice a large piece of ginger fairly thinly into a saucepan, fill the pan with water, bring it to a boil, cover and let it cool to room temperature, then strain into clean bottles and store in the fridge. My current favorite cooking/drinking white wine that I can get close to home for under $10 (it's a Chilean sauvingnon blanc with a greenish label and is on the bottom shelf of the wine store; that's all I know about it) comes in screw-top bottles, which are really handy for this kind of thing.

Switchel
2 T. maple syrup
4 T. Bragg's cider vinegar
very strong ginger tea
water
Mix the maple syrup and vinegar in a pint glass. Fill glass roughly halfway with ginger tea and the rest of the way with water. Stir.

Prospect Park foraging

This past weekend, I took a fantastic foraging tour of Prospect Park with Leda Meredith. She shares information in a very low-key, effective manner that's more like taking a walk with a very knowledgeable friend than the spectacle of shtick that another (also knowledgeable, harder to take) local foraging educator puts on. Plus, in a move I was extremely charmed by, she brought a snack for everyone to share at the end of the tour that used some of the plants we'd just talked about, a dip with daylilies and peppergrass. I'd highly recommend one of her future tours if you can make it, or either of her books.
Here she is, showing off some wood sorrel. This is a plant I have a soft spot for, since I used to pull it out of our lawn to munch on when I was a kid. (How I knew to do this, I have genuinely no idea.)
I have several pages of notes in the back of my Moleskine of the dozens of plants we found and talked about, but the highlights for me were:

• Goutweed, the leaves of which have an appealing herbal-celery scent and flavor. I can see myself throwing a handful in the pot when I make stock.

• Sassafrass, the roots of which I've used to experiment with making homemade root beer (medium success; the flavor was right, but I didn't brew it strong enough). I didn't realize that the leaves, dried and blitzed in a coffee grinder, make filé powder, the traditional thickener for gumbo. I've never made gumbo, but that's not to say I never will.

• Elderflower blossoms. I have a real fondness for St. Germain and most elderflower-scented and -flavored things, so being able to identify and collect it for myself is splendid. I started a batch of Leda's elderflower champagne that night and want to make a few bottles of elderflower-infused simple syrup for using in summer cocktails.

• Mugwort, which can be used as a seasoning or tea. Or, since it has muscle relaxing properties, steeped into a bath. I made a cup of mugwort tea Saturday night that was ... vaguely palatable, especially once I added some honey. I like the way the raw plant smells, but once it sat in the hot water for a few minutes, it had a hint of a slimy-greens-left-too-long-in-the-crisper scent that I find off-putting. It's an invasive weed and Leda said that the roots exude a substance that discourages other plants from growing nearby, which is fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint, but kind of terrifying, especially since once I knew to look for it, I saw it freaking everywhere in the park.

• Juneberries, which were one of my favorite discoveries of the day. They're delicious, like slightly milder blueberries, and have seeds that taste like almonds. And holy! crap! I just googled "juneberry cyanide" to see if that's where the flavor comes from (it is, but not enough to be an issue) and learned that juneberries are the same as saskatoon berries, which I've read about as being a great delicacy in, um, places closer to Saskatoon than I currently am and had filed them away on the list of Things I Must Eat Someday But Which I Cannot Get in New York, Like Mangosteens.And here they are, literally right in what might as well be my backyard. Color me gobsmacked.

• Chokecherries, which are awfully pretty, all glossy and blue-black. I really like the flavor too, sort of a cross between cherry and grapefruit, though you might need an affinity for sour things to eat more than one out of hand.

I do have an affinity for sour things, but I wanted to play with them a little more. I made a syrup with these by boiling a cup of the fruit with a cup of water and 3 T sugar for probably longer than I should have — kept waiting for them to burst like cranberries, but they never did — then pushing as much liquid as possible through a fine sieve. It was a fair bit of effort for not much syrup, but it was tasty mixed into some seltzer and drizzled over a bit of ice cream. Very similar in flavor and consistency to pomegranate molasses, which I love. I also happen to have a large bottle of it in my kitchen already, but this would make a handy locavore substitution, if one was looking for that.

I think the most amazing thing for me though (up until a few minutes ago — high five saskatoon berries!) was learning that many parts of the milkweed plant are edible. I grew up with milkweed plants everywhere. We made Christmas ornaments out of the dried-out pods in elementary school. I remember trying to make glue out of the sticky sap. When I learned to spin, I embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful milkweed-floss-spinning endeavor (I have enough experience at this point to know that the problem was that I was trying to spin it on the wheel like wool; treating it like cotton might work, especially with an ultralight spindle). Learning that I could have been eating it all along blew. my. mind. There weren't very many of them that hadn't flowered yet, at least in the part of the park where I was, and I didn't want to take more than one bud cluster from each, so I just brought a few home with me to test out.

Leda had said to treat them like broccoli, so I browned them in a little butter and sprinkled them with salt and enjoyed every bite. I described them to a friend earlier today as a bit muskier tasting than broccoli, almost like a cross between broccoli and an artichoke.

Seriously delicious. And by happy coincidence, I'm heading upstate this weekend, far enough north that they're a little behind Brooklyn in the growing cycle. There's a fair bit of marshy wetland near where my mom lives and I have a sneaking suspicion that she'll get as much of a kick out of eating milkweed as I did.

Caramelized onion and kale pizza

Since it's finally cooled down enough for me to be willing to turn on the oven and I had a friend coming over for dinner last night, I made a stuff-in-the-fridge-that-needs-to-be-used pizza that, happily, turned out really, really well.

I started with some really good whole wheat dough that they're carrying at the Coop. I've made my own dough in the past, but have never been happy with it — usually it's been a pain to stretch out, always wanting to slither back into a safe little ball, which results in a thicker crust than I like. This stuff was really easy to work with and delicious. I caramelized two onions that I had halved and then sliced as thinly as possible and spread them over the dough to serve as the sauce-ish (and saucy!) component. If I'd been thinking, I would have sprinkled some crushed red pepper flakes over them.
After I'd taken the onions out of the pan, I filled it with some of the cleaned, chopped kale and mustard greens I had ready to go. Not sure of the quantity, maybe four or five cups uncooked? There was enough oil left in the pan from the onions that I just gave them a quick drizzle and moved them around with tongs until they were, um, not cooked exactly, but flexible. I piled them on top of the onions.
Then I dotted the greens with some gorgonzola that needed to be eaten soon. I could have skipped it though or should have used more since I couldn't really taste it.
Then I sliced up about half of a small ball of fresh mozzarella and distributed that as evenly as I could.
450F for about 20 minutes and done.
To go with it, I cut up a medium-sized jicama and a bunch of carrots and some extremely pretty radishes, filled a cereal bowl with each and put everything on the table to pick at while we caught up over a bottle of wine. I really like this kind of flatbread/pizza preparation. I have a feeling I'll be making a lot more of them in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed that the heat holds off for long enough for me to get sick of them...

In lieu of knitting, a cat. Plus, ice cream.

I did a fair bit of knitting this weekend, though I've decided to keep the particulars under wraps for now, since it's something I'm designing and I haven't decided what I'm going to do with the pattern once I'm done.

HOWEVER, as a ploy to distract you from how genuinely annoying my smug secret-keeping really is—I could have just not mentioned it—here is a CAT:

And a recipe for very, very good chocolate ice cream.
Very, Very Good Chocolate Ice Cream
adapted from Nigella Lawson in one of her books, possibly the domestic goddess one

2 egg yolks
1 egg
2/3 c. plus 2 T sugar
1/4 c. cocoa
2 c. milk
3 1/2 oz. semisweet chocolate, melted

Whisk the eggs and 2/3 c. of sugar in a bowl until thick and creamy. Whisk in cocoa. Bring the milk to a boil and add to the egg mixture, pouring slowly and beating all the while. Whisk the melted chocolate into the eggs and milk. Set the bowl over a pan of simmering water and stir until everything is smooth and amalgamated and beginning to thicken.

Put the remaining 2 T sugar into a saucepan and turn the heat to high. Heat until it's dark brown and molten, then whisk into the chocolate custard. Cool and thoroughly chill the mixture, then freeze in an ice cream maker.

Oatmeal not-raisin cookies

I was walking through the greenmarket on Saturday with a friend who raved about the chocolate chip oatmeal cookies from one of the stalls. They were sturdier than I like my chocolate chip cookies — I fall on the barely-holding-together-globs-of-dough end of the spectrum — but also ... nice. There was something almost wholesome about them, and they got me thinking about sturdy, wholesome cookies, something that would fall between a cookie and a homemade energy bar, kind of decadent but in a good-for-you kind of way. I started with Mark Bittman's oatmeal cookie recipe and added all sorts of stuff, with the notable exception of raisins. I hate those little bastards. People are always adding them to stuff and ruining everything. They're sticky and gross and taste like the bottomless pit of despair that comes of being the kid at school with the lamest snack at snacktime.

The cookies, however, worked out pretty well and have been called into service as both breakfast and the kind of snack any little anklebiter would trade their Twinkies for. Oddly, as I've been eating my way through the batch I keep wanting them to have sesame seeds and coconut too. Next time...

Oatmeal not-raisin cookies
adapted from How to Cook Everything

1 stick butter, softened
½ c. white sugar
½ c. brown sugar
2 eggs
1 c. all-purpose flour
½ c. whole wheat flour
2 c. rolled oats
½ c. oat bran
3 T. ground flax seeds
½ t. cinnamon
pinch salt
2 t. baking powder
½ c. milk
½. t. almond extract
½ t. vanilla
½ c. dried cherries
½ c. ground walnuts
½ c. dried apricots, chopped

Preheat the oven to 375F. Cream the butter and sugars; add the eggs one at a time and mix until well blended.

Combine the dry ingredients except nuts and fruit in a separate bowl. Add the vanilla and almond extract to the milk. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the milk, stirring by hand after each addition. Add the nuts and fruit.

Drop by teaspoons or tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets and bake until lightly browned, about 10 min. Cool for about 2 minutes on the sheets before transferring to a rack to finish cooling. Store in an airtight container.

Meyer lemon curd: best thing ever

Meyer lemon curd
via Epicurious

3 to 4 Meyer lemons (about 1 pound)
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces

Finely grate enough zest from lemons to measure 2 teaspoons and squeeze enough juice to measure 1/2 cup. Whisk together zest, juice, sugar, and eggs in a metal or pyrex bowl and add butter. Set bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and cook, whisking, until thickened and smooth. Force curd through a fine sieve set into another bowl. Serve warm or cover surface of curd with wax paper and cool completely.

I was a little skeptical of the fact that this recipe used whole eggs and only two of them at that, considering that most of the other recipes I looked at contained six or even eight egg yolks, but it had rave reviews on epicurious and I figured it was worth a shot. And holy crap, this might well be my go-to curd formula going forward. The flavor was outstanding and it's lighter and somehow creamier in texture than other lemon curds I've made. Plus, I didn't have to do the thing where I freeze all the whites out of guilt and never do anything with them. Not to mention that that little jar is going to make the friend who's feeding the cat when I'm gone this week awfully happy. Everyone wins!

Rhubarb upside-down cake

I made this last weekend, took this photo on my phone, devoured the cake with a friend (the same night we ate the mushroom tarts, as a matter of fact), and completely forgot about it until right now, though I'm not sure how that happened. It's really good. I used this recipe as a jumping-off point, which has a great, roughly 1:1 fruit:cake ratio, and tweaked it a bit to my taste. I like almond with tart fruit, so added some almond extract and switched out ground almonds for some of the flour, used lemon instead of orange, and cardamom instead of mace.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake
adapted from Recipezaar

Base
2 T. butter, melted
1/2 c. sugar
juice of one lemon
4 stalks rhubarb, chopped

Cake
3/4 c. flour
1/4 c. ground almonds
1/2 t. baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 t. cardamom
1/4 c. butter
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
zest of one lemon
1 t. almond extract
2/3 c. plain yogurt

Preheat oven to 350F. Combine the base ingredients in an 8" square pan, making sure all of the rhubarb pieces are coated, and set aside.
Combine dry ingredients.
Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, beat in egg, almond extract, and rind.
Mix in the flour mixture alternately with the yogurt, making three additions of each.
Spoon batter over rhubarb, spreading right to the edge of the pan, and bake for 35–40 minutes, until top springs back when lightly pressed.
Let cool for 15 minutes, then run a butter knife around the edge to loosen and invert onto a plate or platter.

Book club salad

My book club met at place last night and earlier this week, it had occurred to me that I needed to come up with something to feed those bitc— I mean, the ladies. Somehow or other, I landed on this recipe, which sounded springy and delicious, especially since I already had most of the more obscure ingredients — Meyer lemons, Trader Joe's Harvest Grain blend, walnut oil — in the house. I tweaked it a bit, mostly by adding things, and I fully admit that there are a lot of components that need to be dealt with separately and then mixed together, but it's worth it. This was really, really good. I was planning to hew more closely to the recipe, but I didn't realize that it called for 8 oz. of the Harvest Grains blend but that the bag is 16 oz. until I'd already cooked it all. The asparagus was a little lost in all that grainage, so I rounded it out with some baby spinach and tofu.

I've written the recipe as though you were doing it all at once, but for this batch the process was made slightly less onerous by putting it together over a couple of evenings: cooking the grains, tofu and asparagus and making the dressing the first night, then toasting the almonds, chopping the spinach and adding the cheese right before I served it. (Speaking of the cheese, the Hungarian feta that they've started carrying at Sahadi's is pretty much the best thing ever, super creamy and really strong and sheepy and salty AND under $4/lb. ) Originally I was annoyed that I hadn't added the spinach while the grains were warm, so that it would wilt some, but I really like it as is, crunchy and lively and more salad-y.

Book Club Salad
adapted from The Kitchn

1 c. barley
16 oz. Trader Joe's Harvest Grains blend OR 12 oz. Israeli couscous (or, as my friend Katherine calls it, "big couscous") and 4 oz. quinoa
1 c. sliced almonds
1 lb. asparagus, trimmed and chopped into 1–2" lengths
1 pkg. extra-firm tofu, drained and cut into 1" cubes
1 T or so soy sauce
5 oz. baby spinach, roughly chiffonaded
2 Meyer (or regular) lemons, zested and juiced
1 T walnut oil
olive oil
1 c. feta cheese, crumbled

Cook barley in salted water until al dente, drain and add to large mixing bowl. Cook other grains according to package directions (for the TJ's blend, I always have to add more water and cook longer). Add to barley in bowl and mix together, adding a bit of olive oil to keep it from sticking together.
Toast almonds in a dry skillet until fragrant. Add to grains. Heat a bit of olive oil in the same pan and cook asparagus until crisp-tender, just a minute or two. Add to the grains. Add more oil to the pan if necessary and brown the tofu cubes, adding the soy sauce at the end. When it's been absorbed, add it to the grains mixture.
Add the lemon zest to the salad. Mix the juice with the walnut oil, drizzling olive oil into the mixture and whisking, tasting occasionally, until it tastes balanced to you. Add the dressing to the salad and mix well. Stir in the feta.