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.

spaghetti with bacon, breadcrumbs and arugula

Nathan and I made this when he hosted our book club. The selection was Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, the discussion was riveting and the dinner... was actually better as leftovers.

When I found this recipe I was really excited. Bacon and breadcrumbs and arugula and sun dried tomatoes with spaghetti in a creamy sauce... What could possibly go wrong?

cipolline in agrodolce

I promised you I had one more Roman peasant dish to tell you about, and here it is. Sweet and sour onions, or, in the mother tongue, cipolline in agrodolce. Agrodolce, according to wikipedia, is just a sweet and sour sauce-- the sweet "dolce" component usually being sugar and the sour "agro" element being some sort of vinegar. If you'll recall, we first made an agrodolce sauce for pork chops, using honey and balsamic. Here, it was balsamic and sugar.

Even with the fancy sounding name, an agrodolce sauce is actually really easy to make, and the most difficult part of cooking this recipe is peeling all the little cipollinis. It's not hard per say, just time consuming and a definite pain in the ass. Before you start peeling away, throw your raisins in some hot water so that they'll rehydrate and get nice and plump.

easter lamb, risotto and crepes

In my continuing trend of long overdue holiday meals, I present to you an Easter leg of lamb, stuffed with all sorts of deliciousness and served with a mushroom risotto and homemade strawberry crepes. First, let's talk about the lamb, courtesy of our friend Martha Stewart.

beet and blood orange salad

So I apologize in advance for the quality of these photos. However, if you, like me, are at a loss for what to do with your food co-op beets, this may be just what you need. Alice Water's beet and blood orange salad

roasted ramps

So I already covered my ramp carbonara, but there was one other thing I did with ramps this past spring: I roasted them, plain and simple.

caramelized bananas over oatmeal

I remember the first time I learned that you could utterly transform bananas into sweet, chewy, crisp, melty banana candy simply by slicing them and pan frying them with butter. I had helped my friend Kevin move, and as a thank you he made breakfast. It was either french toast or waffles, both of which I love and would have been more than satisfied with. Then he asked if I wanted bananas, and I was blown away.




Obviously, caramelized and fried bananas are hardly a culinary innovation. This is basically the same concept of Bananas Foster, without the theatrics of flambeing.

I don't add sugar when I caramelize my bananas, and they are still plenty sweet. If yours aren't particularly ripe, I suppose sugar would help, but I'd honestly advise waiting until the fruit sweetens up naturally in order to yield the best result.

There are two basic versions of this dish: thin sliced and thick sliced. Thick slices afford for the most variation in texture and flavor in each piece, as the center of a thick slice of banana will taste purely of banana. This is very good, but usually I like to slice my banana really thinly, which means that the inner banana gets very soft and almost melts away, while the exterior becomes a delicately crispy sugar shell. If you don't have enough butter in the pan, the fruit can easily stick and all the slices can quickly become a sticky caramelly mess. If that threatens to happen to you, do not fret. It's not as pretty, but it will still taste amazing.




So what can you do with these golden little beauties? They are a welcome addition to breakfasts, brunches and desserts. You could stuff them into crepes with mascarpone or ricotta, layer them with puff pastry and whipped cream, pile them atop a stack of pancakes or french toast, serve them over ice cream... The possibilities are endless.

Today, I chose oatmeal. It was an excellent way to enliven a somewhat dull breakfast food!

ramp carbonara

Obviously, it is September, so all good food bloggers should be writing about late summer tomatoes and peppers and plums. I am not a good food blogger. I am going to write about a delightful seasonal veggie that you can only really get for a couple of weeks out of the year, but procrastinator that I am, it'll be ramps on the menu, AKA something that was out of season by the beginning of June.

I am also a bad blogger because if you take out the ramps, I've already talked to you about this dish six times. That's right, six whole times.




So basically, if you've read my blog before ever, you know how this going to go. The only new step is slowly caramelizing the chopped ramps in the bacon fat after that we got that all nice and crispy. When I was making up the bacon and the ramps, I brought the pasta pot to boil, added salt and then tossed in the spaghetti to cook until al dente.

I actually went traditional on this one, simply tossing the cooked pasta, ramps and bacon with the beaten egg yolk, and then adding cheese. I was really excited with how good this came out. The ramps added a ton of great extra flavor, and I was very pleased to have bought them and finally sampled this spring green market special. It's a shame that we'll have to wait so long before ramps are back at the market, but I fully intend to cook more with them when they are.

citrus sriracha mayonaise over scallops and avocado salad

I am pretty sure that I have never said this before on this blog: drop what you are doing and make this right now. For reals. Your day off plans for Labor Day are now to make scallops with this awesome sauce. I promise that you'll thank me.

This sauce recipe comes from The Amateur Gourmet, but it's definitely something you can imagine emerging from a professional kitchen, and it's simultaneously really easy to prepare. This was hands down the most elegant thing I've ever made on a weeknight, and Nathan and I couldn't stop exclaiming how good it was.

Of course, it all because clear when you read further and learn that Mr. Amateur Gourmet actually jacked this recipe from none other than famous chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten after NYT restaurant critic Sam Sifton selected it as one of his favorite restaurant dishes of 2010. That certainly goes a long way towards explaining this recipe's brilliance-- and if that's not good enough for you, I don't know what else to say.




So I guess you want to know how to make the dish already, right? Well you better be down to make your own mayo*. Don't worry, your arm might get a little tired, but it's totally doable. I have faith in you. Whisk together a splash of sriracha, pinch of salt and egg yolk, adding your oil drop by drop until you get a nice thick mayo. Then you stir in orange and lime juice to thin it out and add some of that citrusy zing and acidity that pairs so nicely with seafood.

The original sauce was served over big, seared, sea scallops, but as much as I love them, they are a bit rich for my blood. I went for cheaper bay scallops, which had sadly been frozen. Obviously, I didn't achieve that nice golden brown carmelization that you so often see on scallops (I cooked them in butter over medium high heat), but I think that's just fine for these little guys. The sauce went SO SO well with these scallops. A little sweet, a little spicy, and a whole lot of creamy deliciousness. So perfect!

To go with our scallops, we had a bright green salad, tossed with our spicy citrus mayo and topped with slices of orange and avocado. It was an excellent accompaniment. You might find that you don't need a rich mayo based dressing on avocado, but the citrus cuts the richness, and the sriracha adds some bite. It really hit the spot.

So, what are you waiting for? Go make this now!

PS. In a pinch you could probably just add sriracha and citrus to regular Hellmans mayo. Don't tell Jean-George I said so.

strawberry cornmeal cake

I don't have too much to say about this recipe for strawberry cornmeal pound cake.




It is a tasty breakfast-y cake, very easy to prepare and special because it's not just a pound cake: it's got cornmeal and fresh strawberries. That doesn't make it extraordinary by any means, but it definitely elevates it above your average pound cake.




I love cake recipes that only involve creaming butter and sugar and then stirring in the dry ingredients. I am like the world's slowest baker, but even I can handle that without stopping to consult the directions too many times.




Be warned that this really isn't that sweet. It's more of an afternoon snack type of cake, or a toasted-and-slathered-in-butter breakfast type of cake than it is a big celebration cake. But the strawberries are pretty, and it'd be great for tea. Plan accordingly.