savory bread puddings

That is my take on something that the smitten kitchen called scalloped tomatoes with croutons, but really turned out more like a savory bread pudding.

winter squash bread pudding

This is a bit of a take on the cheesy stuffed acorn squash, which has definitely one of the richest, tastiest things I made last fall/winter. Ooey gooey cheese and slow baked pumpkin or squash with cubes of bread, fresh herbs and a little cream to ensure it all cooks together into one cohesive mass of deliciousness. It was decadent in the best way.

really good flatbread, IIRC

So I will be upfront with you and admit that I haven't actually tried these flatbreads since nearly a year ago. However, they were pretty damn good then, when I made them for snacking during a dream weekend out in the Hamptons at my friend Jess's uncle's house. So good in fact, that Jess insisted that I make them again for the Lupus benefit that she and my friend Becky were hosting a couple of weeks ago. Of course, with a jaw wired completely shut, there really wasn't any way for me to taste test, but I think they went over ok.

It was a lovely event, hosted in Becky's empty Sty Town apartment. There was art, and wine, and cheese, and my roommate Laura's brother Paul's improv troop gave a performance. Basically, it was just the sort of classy event that you want to serve a delicious rosemary flatbread at. I found this recipe on only the biggest food blog on the web, and its provenance is none other than the dearly departed Gourmet Magazine, so you should expect great things from this little bugger.



These flatbreads look perfectly rustic and elegant, taste deliciously crispy and wonderful, and they also happen to be incredibly easy to straightforward to make. So basically, there is no excuse not take make these for your Labor Day weekend gatherings. You could serve them with cheese or sundried tomatoes, but they are great just by themselves. Just mix up the dough, roll out, bake and break into messy little shards. You'll be done before you know it.

The only reason this doesn't take ten minutes start to finish is that you split the dough in thirds and bake each flatbread one after the other, which draws things out a bit. Otherwise, you just stir together flour, baking powder, salt, water, olive oil and the rosemary. The recipe calls for fresh, but dried works just fine. Then you roll it out, sprinkle with salt and more rosemary, and bake. Nothing to it.

I've also tried making these with alternate spices, mainly because my mom doesn't like rosemary. I love the woman to death, but this I will never understand. As an alternative, I grated in some cheddar cheese, which was pretty sweet. This time around I added some romano, oregano and red pepper. My friend Grace actually made these with cinnamon sugar in lieu of the spices, which I bet would be pretty great if you swapped olive oil out for vegetable oil. Basically, this is a good base for a crispy cracker flavored with whatever strikes your fancy.

Flatbreads seem so sophisticated and upscale, but they really are a snap. For a snack that's sure to impress and please, give these a shot!

Tuna Steaks with Country Toast and Aioli

This is a long-overdue post that Sarah has been haranguing me about for some time now. I got this recipe out of a great cookbook that my mom got me, Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. It has a lot of delicious yet relatively easy recipes, which is great for me since I tend to do my cooking after work. Some people enjoy eating at 9:30 at night - I don't.


rare tuna steaks, homemade garlic aioli and grilled pullman bread

Most of this recipe is really easy, so I'll keep it short. To make the tuna steaks, just season them with whatever you want to. I think I used salt and pepper. Cook them on a griddle (I got mine at Good Will for $1.50. It's probably worth more than that just in scrap value and it's one of the best purchases I have ever made). A couple minutes on each wide will do - you just want to get a good sear on the outside while keeping the inside rare. For the toast, just brush some slices of a nice loaf with olive oil and then put them on the griddle, too.

What I found most satisfying about this dish was the aioli. I tried to make aioli once before, in an effort to ape the food at Five Napkin Burger, and it was a complete failure. This time, it was an unqualified success. First I mashed up some garlic, then put an egg yolk on top of that. After that, I slowly added one cup of olive oil, whisking vigorously the whole time. slooowwwllly. Seriously, it took like like ten minutes to whisk it because I was adding it so slowly. Eventually you can start adding more olive oil at a time, but initially it was the feeblest of dribbles. This effort paid off, because the aioli came together beautifully and was delicious. A surprising amount of aioli was produced.

To serve, just give everyone a piece of the tuna, some toast, some aioli and a lemon wedge. You can put the aioli on the toast and on the tuna, or put the tuna on the toast, etc. I guess there are 6 ways you could eat this dish, so go hog wild!

Note from Sarah: We also had a nice salad with our fish. I made a dressing from the aioli, thinning it with lemon juice and adding a healthy amount of salt and pepper. We had a nice mix of regular lettuce and radicchio. Simple, but refreshingly tasty.


lettuce and radicchio in a lemon aioli dressing

the souffle challenge

squash souffle, taleggio and mushroom crostini and lemon buttered green beans

I am often disappointed with the lighting when I take my food photos, but am always too hungry to do much to fix it. This picture, however, I'm perfectly happy with. I love the way the bright green beans pop against the darker green plate, and I find the contrast between the orange souffle and the deep blue ceramic bowl quite striking. My dad would be proud of the plate's well balanced color palate, and for once I've taken a photo that looks as delicious as the meal actually was.

This particular meal was comprised of three things: squash souffle, lemon buttered green beans, and Taleggio porcini and cremini mushroom crostini. I made the souffle back in late December in a bout of culinary ambition. I filled four ramekins, but since I was cooking for myself that night, three of them wound up in the freezer and were woefully ignored until President's Day. Grace invited Marc and me to the New York Historical Society, which was free for the week, and afterward they came by the new apartment for dinner. With almost nothing in the house, it was souffle to the rescue!

Before going out, I had the foresight to take the souffles out of the freezer, but I didn't know what else I was going to serve. On our way back from the museum, we stopped at Fairway, where some beautiful fresh green beans cried out to me. I also picked up some cremini mushrooms, remembering I had Taleggio cheese and dried porcinis at home and could easily recreate the mushroom pizza that was such a hit at my earlier party. Grace rounded things out with some AMAZING espresso cookie ice cream from the SoCo Creamery.

When it came to preparing the green beans, I cooked them quickly in the frying pan with some melted butter, garlic, salt, pepper and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. I also sprinkled on a little Romano cheese. So fresh and light and tasty. How vegetables are meant to be eaten.

As for the mushroom dish, I came up with this Mario Batali gem while looking for some good ingredients to pair with my porcinis. This time, I would take the same basic idea and use it as a topping for the fresh Italian bread Marc's grandma had given him. Either way you go, preparing this topping is super easy and the end result is divinely delicious!

Simply saute garlic and shallots or onions in hot olive oil, and then add the sliced mushrooms. You also throw in and cook off the mushroom soaking water leftover from rehydrating the dried porcinis, some fresh thyme, and season with salt and pepper. Put your mushroom mix on pizza or Italian bread slices, sprinkle with Taleggio cheese, and pop those suckers into the oven or toaster oven until everything becomes melty delicious. Top off with a little grated Romano and some fresh ground pepper and you're in for a treat. This makes for a great pizza, but the crostini is even easier!

I do have a few notes to add: Mario cooks the porcinis before the fresh creminis, but I think I reversed the steps with no ill effects. He adds a pinch of chili flakes, but I skipped those and didn't miss them. He also recommends boiling water and 30 minutes of soaking for rehydrating dried mushrooms, not to mentions straining everything with a cheesecloth to get rid of the grit and dirt... In my opinion that's a lot more work than necessary. I've found that hot tap water and ten minutes work just fine. If you just pour the soaking liquid super slowly, any grit will stay at the bottom of the bowl and you'll be fine!

As delicious and tasty as the green beans and crostini were, the most dominant component of the meal was certainly the aforementioned souffle. Despite having a reputation for being extremely difficult to prepare, this souffle recipe seemed fairly straightforward, and I was really excited to make it. I had read all about how great organic eggs were for souffles, and I had just gotten some from my food co-op. With organic milk and squash, this seemed to be the perfect recipe for me— I even had Swiss cheese in the fridge! Unfortunately, I did have two major difficulties with the dish, which took me many hours to complete. I wish I could tell you that you'll learn from my mistakes, but I'm still not entirely sure how to work out this souffle thing.

That being said, the whole thing starts off relatively easily. I cut the squash in half, (it looked like acorn squash, but you can't always tell exact variety when it comes to food co-op offerings), scraped out the seeds, and salt peppered it, spreading on a little butter. Normally, I'd bake it, but I took a short cut and microwaved it face down, which worked perfectly. I scraped out the shells and pureed the flesh with my handy dandy immersion blender.

Then I started a roux by melting butter and cooking it with a few spoonfuls of flour. When you're making a roux, you want to keep stirring it to make sure it doesn't get burned. As I've mentioned before, this recipe could easily be gluten free if you used some gluten free flour in this step. After a few minutes, I added some whole milk and cooked that until it thickened, continuing to stir. Then I mixed in the squash, grated Swiss, brown sugar, salt, cayenne, and nutmeg. After I took it off the heat, I added the three egg yolks. At this point, I thought I was good to go.

Then came the egg whites. Do not, I repeat DO NOT, attempt to whip eggs whites with an immersion blender. As all around useful and handy as this machine is, this is one area where it straight up fails to perform. At this point, I was reduced to whisking the little shits by hand, which was quite possibly the most frustrating thing I've ever done. After at least a half hour, I abandoned my original batch of egg whites, and started afresh with grocery store eggs that had been sitting the fridge for weeks. These whipped right up, forming stiff peaks even with me doing it by hand. Organic eggs would have been nice, but they were just too fresh for me to whip by hand. If possible, use old eggs, an electric mixer, and definitely don't let any water or yolk contaminate your egg whites, and you should avoid the frustration I experienced.

With that battle won, I folded in my egg whites into the batter in two separate batches. Apparently this makes a difference when it comes to lightness and airiness. I just do what I'm told. At this point, you're ready to put your souffle in a nice ramekin and bake the sucker. I followed the online wisdom for souffles and cheesecakes and cooked it in a water bath, which is supposed to cook it more evenly and keep it from cracking. All that entails is filling a larger pan with an inch of water, and then placing your souffle dishes in the bath to bake. I don't know if it works, but I do know that my souffles all took FOREVER to cook, which brings me to my second problem, which I am still stumped by.

If you have any tips on how to ensure that a souffle is cooked all the way through, I'd love to hear them. The temperature on my old oven was always a wild card, and while the souffle I baked there rose beautifully, it was still quite wet inside when I impatiently bit in. The souffles I defrosted must have been a bit waterlogged, because they barely rose at all. In the future I'd probably add the whipped egg whites after defrosting the batter to avoid this problem. Aside from that I managed to get them cook almost all the way through, but the blue ramekin pictured is deeper than the other ones I used, so it was still a touch underdone. This wasn't terrible, but it certainly was frustrating. How do you test for doneness without deflating the thing? Tricky tricky.

Anyway, these problems aside, the squash and cheese and brown sugar made for a delicious combo. This is a damn tasty recipe, but I think that a really well cooked souffle calls for a little bit of practice! However, I still think Grace and Marc enjoyed their dinner, and it probably didn't hurt that I ate the most underdone of the three souffles. It was just so great to have them over and to cook for them without worrying about tiptoeing around crazy people. We just relaxed and watched the Olympics with Laura and Taylor and had SO MUCH FUN. In conclusion, I love living in a reasonably accessible part of the city.

a simple supper

tortellini in tomato sauce, sauteed spinach and a fresh mozzarella garlic crostini

This is the kind of meal I love best: delicious cheesy pasta and a nice fresh vegetable. Normally, I try to get my protein in there with some meat, but sometimes it's nice to have a lighter meal, and one without meat can be just as filling.

This meal was pretty much the offspring of my previously featured pizza party. I had initially planned to make spinach ricotta pizza, but didn't have time to saute the pizza before my guests arrived, and it just would have been too much to handle with five other people in the kitchen. However, the spinach went to good use in this meal. As you can see in the picture, it is just barely cooked. I rinsed off the leaves and then cooked them on medium heat with garlic and oil until just wilted. If there is a lot of spinach, it make take some conscientious stirring to ensure that it all cooks evenly, but even then this shouldn't take more than five minutes.

The main dish of the evening was the tortellini, which I served with the same sauce I had made for the pizzas. Normally, I make my sauce by sauteing garlic and olive oil, and then adding chopped canned tomatoes, cracked black pepper, and parsley and basil, if I have them. I deviated from the usual routine when I found this recipe, a darling of the food blog world, just days before hosting the event. The sauce is incredibly simple: half a stick of butter, and half an onion, unchopped, simmer with a can of whole tomatoes. That's all there is to it, no chopping involved! It was really quite tasty, and the butter certainly gave it an added richness. Of course, I tossed in a clove or two of garlic, because I felt wrong making tomato sauce without it. When it came to the end, I felt bad discarding the garlic and onion before serving, so I tried mashing it up with the tomatoes. If I made this again, I'd probably take it out and smear it onto some Italian bread. My only complaint with the recipe was that I felt that it wasn't as good the second day. I probably will continue to stick to my usual sauce in the future, but if tomato sauce intimidates you, this is a great one to try making, as I can't imagine screwing this one up!

tomato sauce a simmerin'

The Italian bread was also leftover from the earlier gathering, as pretty much no one had eaten it the night before. I roasted a couple of garlic cloves in olive oil with salt, pepper and a little grated cheese. This is absolutely a divine way to eat garlic or onions, as it makes them much mellower and sweeter, without totally eradicating the strong flavors that make them so delicious in the first place. I melted some bocconcini on top of the bread, and smeared the garlic clove on top. With some cracked black pepper on top, this was really simple and tasty and the perfect final component to a completely satisfying meal.

tomato soup

creamy tomato soup with a cheerful sprig of parsley

Generally, I am not that crazy about tomato soup. I don't dislike it, but it isn't something that I really get all that excited about most of the time. However, even though I didn't really grow up eating a lot of tomato soup, it still has those homey comforting connotations that are particularly attractive in wintertime. So, when I stumbled upon this America's Test Kitchen recipe for grilled cheese and tomato soup on the Smitten Kitchen blog, which I've been all about this week, it suddenly became the perfect thing to make for dinner.

I would definitely recommend this recipe. It had a really deep smokey flavor, a product of de-seeding and oven roasting the canned canned tomatoes with a little salt, pepper and olive oil until all the liquid evaporates. The recipe called for sprinkling them with brown sugar, but I decided not to because I've always been kind of grossed out by adding sugar to tomato sauce, and I'm not the only one.

Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe as it was written: chopped up shallots or onions, an cooked them for a bit in butter with tomato paste. Added a spoonful or two of flour, cooked that off, and then gradually added ice cubes of my frozen stock, and then the tomatoes and the extra juices, which I strained to remove the seeds. After that cooked for awhile, Nathan blended it all up with the immersion blender, and then I added the cream, the brandy, some salt, cayenne and cracked black pepper. This could easily be gluten free if you just used the right flour!

While this was going on I made up the buttered grilled cheese sandwiches in the cast iron skillet. Normally, I "grill" my cheese sandwiches in the toaster oven, without butter, but if I was doing the classic soup and sandwich combo, I was going to do it right. Also, Nathan would have pitched a fit. As it was he was skeptical of my choice of Italian bread, and kept asking charming lovely little questions like, "have you ever MADE grilled cheese before?" Shut up Nathan.

Despite his hating, I fried up those babies just fine, and let me tell you, they were delicious dipped in that tomato soup. We served them with some vinegary tomato pasty cabbage, but Nathan took the lead on that one so I'll let him write that one up later.

Here's a shot of our soup on my kitchen table to close with.

kitchen table in the bronx

french toast success

oven baked amaretto pannetone french toast

Despite my doing a totally half assed job, this boozy baked french toast recipe came out pretty awesome. No measurements, just milk, beaten organic food co-op eggs, some cheap ass amaretto, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla extract and a dash of salt mixed together and poured over buttered slices of pattetone. I was deathly afraid it would be too dry/too boozy, but instead got the slam dunk breakfast I had hoped for.

I love when a yummy french toasty is all crispy on the outside and runny on the inside. Unfortunately it was taking a longer to cook than the prescribed half hour (I kept underestimating how hot to set the oven) so I popped it under the broiler to finish off and the edges on one side started to burn a little. Minor damage, but still a shame. I normally would have been more patient, but Laura needed to leave for work so I tried a short cut. Unless your bread is at very even levels in your pan, I don't recommend the broiler for this one.

That being said, the broiler is a new-found love of mine. My mom doesn't have a broiler in her stove at home, because there is a drawer for storing pots and pans under the oven. I'd broiled things in the toaster oven, so I knew that broiling meant that the heat was coming only from above, but I only recently discovered/realized that the drawer under my oven is meant to serve as its broiler.

My stove is an ancient gas range which I have to light manually by lighting the pilot and then opening the bottom drawer and lighting the burner there, which is prone to ignite in a rather explosive manner if the gas is left running for more than a few seconds. I never would have thought to cook anything in that bottom drawer had it not been for witnessing my Aunt Cathy utilizing her similarly designed broiler to cook our beloved garlic sweet potatoes, from Mark Bittman's first Thanksgiving column in the New York Times, dating all the way back to 1997. My broiler can crisp things up pretty fast, so you've got to keep an eye on it, but it is pretty darn useful! I'm a little embarrassed it took me so long to discover it, but I'm sure glad that I have!


fruit studded french toast