November 19, 2009
Posted by Robin Bellinger, August 22, 2008 at 11:15 AM
The first time I dared to (knowingly) eat anchovies was in Suzanne Goin’s green goddess dressing, after a few transportingly delicious dishes from Sunday Suppers at Lucques convinced me that she would not lead an open-minded cook or eater astray. I had never tasted green goddess before, but come on, how can you resist an emulsion with a name like that? Before I knew it, I was dipping anything and everything into the tangy, vibrant, verdant sauce. Raw vegetables? Check. Croutons? Probably. My finger? I’m telling you, no shame.
This recipe is marvelous for late summer when herbs are cheap and plentiful and the market is full of candidates for crudité. Goin suggests using it to dress a salad of romaine, cucumbers, and avocado. It also might do amazing things for a BLT, though I haven’t put that theory to the test yet. Ranch may be America’s favorite salad dressing, but green goddess is the classy cousin who still knows how to have a good time.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, August 15, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Panzanella (tomato-bread salad) and pappa al pomodoro (tomato-bread soup) both intimidated me as a home cook—until a couple of loaves of old bread forced me into trying them.
As it turns out, it’s pretty hard to combine decent tomatoes and decent bread and create something other than success. Previously, I had seen recipes that involved soaking stale bread in water and then wringing it out, which seemed kind of gross and elaborate. Turns out that none of that is really necessary—your bread doesn’t even have to be stale. You can dry it out in the oven or take your chances with fresh bread, which might not be authentic but has never disappointed me.
Here's my favorite basic tomato-bread salad. It’s fast, simple, and also luxurious. In fact, the grilled bread tips it over into decadence, but no one in my house is complaining.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, August 8, 2008 at 11:15 AM
Ten years ago, when I turned twenty-one, I had never fallen head over heels in love, and I had never cared for guacamole. Then I met a charming boy who urged me to spend the summer with him in California, where good guacamole was ubiquitous and, it turned out, very much to my taste. (Maybe this is why I’m always surprised to see mountains of avocados at the store in the days leading up to the Super Bowl; for me, guacamole is all about summer.) The boy ended up breaking my heart disastrously, but guacamole has never let me down. As I made a batch last week with my usual puppylike excitement (Guacamole! Guacamole!), I wondered if this past decade of avocado-y pleasure has made up for the year or two of pain and self-doubt incurred by the heartbreak. I think the answer is yes.
Like love, guacamole never looks the same way twice, and we all have our own requirements and preferences. I like it chunky with tomatoes, garlic, onions, and not a lot else. I have yet to discover my ideal recipe, but until I do, Ina Garten’s is my starting point. Sometimes I add cilantro, lime juice, or cumin, and sometimes I skip the Tabasco. I am in the business of collecting guacamole tips, so if there are brilliant insights out there I hope you will share.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, July 18, 2008 at 2:30 PM
Here’s a confession: until recently I did not really understand the appeal of pie. As a child I didn’t care for things that were crisp and buttery, like shortbread and crust, and that was that. In the past few years, however, I started eating pie when politeness required me to, and soon saw that perhaps this dessert had something to offer (although it was still no cake, cookie, or ice cream in my book). My first successful homemade pie, baked to celebrate this past fourth of July, completed my conversion to enthusiastic pie-eater.
I had had good luck in the past with shortbread-type crusts for Frenchified tarts, but one or two previous attempts at American-style flaky crust had disappointed me. In the end, the pie crust that brought me around is the one my mother has used for years. Every Thanksgiving, convinced that I did not like crust, I would eviscerate her apple pie and pass the empty shell with its beautiful brown flaky-but-tender top edge on to my grateful father. Oh, the years I missed out on this crust! I won’t dwell on it now—I will simply bake more pies. This recipe is so fast, easy, and delicious I can’t imagine ever needing to track down another.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, July 11, 2008 at 2:30 PM
People don’t eat collard greens often enough, probably because they just haven’t tried them—they look deceptively old-fashioned and limp, like something on offer at a depressing cafeteria or prepared by your grandmother who isn’t such a good cook. When I was a child, they definitely fell into my category why would anyone eat that, and even when I finally grew up and embraced green vegetables, I liked ‘em firm and bright—not soft, murky, and bacon-studded. I came around (was forced to, really, by boredom with the standard repertoire of Italianate sautéed greens), even to the point of wishing we could serve collards alongside the fried chicken and corn pudding at our wedding. We left them off the menu since I was worried people wouldn’t try them, but my evangelical zeal has not diminished: please make yourself a pot of collard greens.
Tender, smoky, mellow, and toothsome, long-simmered greens make a great side dish for barbecue and fried chicken, among other things, and are also good with nothing but rice. I like them at room temperature as much as I like them hot. Even after I was converted to the greens, I was skeptical about the supposed deliciousness of pot likker, their simmering liquid, which Southerners will sip straight up. Well, what a fool I was—pot likker is delicious, especially with corn bread. Even dry, disappointing corn bread shines when combined with collard greens.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 20, 2008 at 3:00 PM
Crab cakes are one of those things that always look powerfully enticing on a menu but that I almost never order. They’re too expensive, or I’m feeling too fat to eat fried food, or—and this is usually the dealbreaker for me—there’s a good chance that they’ll be inferior. And who wants to eat expensive, fattening food that disappoints?
Making excellent crab cakes at home should be a good solution to this problem, but crab meat is so expensive that I worry about botching the frying and wasting a nice ingredient. So a few years ago I was pleased to discover these baked crab cakes in The Dean & Deluca Cookbook. They come together in a flash and bake in the time it takes you to make a salad for a light and elegant little meal. They are extremely tasty, too, at least in my opinion; because they are baked and need not withstand all that frying and flipping, they contain no breading, just an egg for binding, and are therefore rich and sweetly crabby. If you can’t live without crisp breading, these might not be the cakes for you; but if your priority is crab, you should be quite happy.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 13, 2008 at 12:45 PM
I’m about to type a cop-out phrase that I would immediately cut if I were editing someone else’s work: I don’t know if I can find words to express how I feel about strawberry shortcake. What keeps coming to mind is Buddy’s gleeful, innocent enthusiasm in Elf: “Smiling’s my favorite!” Strawberry shortcake’s my favorite, no contest, and I look forward to it all year long. Properly made it offers purer pleasure than any other food I know. It is luxury, it is summer, it is bliss.
Strawberry shortcake is not a towering, gloppy affair, nor should it ever involve Cool Whip, a little boat of grocery store sponge cake, or out-of-season strawberries. It is a biscuit (preferably a cream biscuit) split in half and topped with barely sweetened sliced strawberries and whipped cream. It looks appealingly homey, but its balance of flavors and textures is simply elegant. It melts in your mouth and tastes ambrosial. It’s easy to make and, despite what the cookbooks say, still pretty good the second day. Lindsey Shere’s recipe is a thing of beauty. If you say you don’t like strawberry shortcake, I say either you hate strawberries (and who are you?) or you’ve just never tried the real thing.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 6, 2008 at 2:30 PM
In the past few months Mark Bittman’s shrimp “my way” has become one of my favorite emergency or late-in-the-week meals. This superfast dish is good with a vegetable, on top of rice, or over angel hair pasta. I think it tastes good the next day, too. Because I use frozen shrimp, they can be on the table in half an hour or less with no planning or trip to the store.
For anyone who eats fish, comfort with shrimp cookery is a great asset. They’re so fast and so versatile. Cookbooks warn about the dangers of overcooking the delicate creatures, but I’ve never had really disappointing results with a shrimp recipe (unlike some scallops and sautéed fish fillets I could mention).
As I said, I use frozen (and peeled and deveined, hooray) shrimp here. Fresh would definitely taste better, but at my grocery store the unfrozen shrimp are usually much more expensive, imported from Asia, and previously frozen anyway—three strikes. My frozen shrimp are wild-caught in the Gulf of Mexico, which, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, makes them “eco-OK” (not the best, not the worst). Although my more-greedy-than-discerning palate and I think frozen shrimp taste just fine (especially in a boldy-flavored preparation like this one), yesterday I was curled up with The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper, which pronounces frozen shrimp “close to tasteless.” Hmm.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 30, 2008 at 12:45 PM
If I had to make a lifetime commitment to one dessert, forsaking all others, I would probably choose vanilla ice cream. Maybe we’d spice things up sometimes with caramel sauce or a gingersnap on the side, but my heart would never stray from my pure, cool, fragrant sweetie.
The only trouble with making vanilla ice cream yourself is that the raw ingredients looks so gorgeously wholesome that you are liable to end up convinced the product is good for you. This line of thought will seem more and more reasonable as you near the end of your first bowl and start thinking of a second. But what’s your waistline when true love is at stake?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM
My two main goals as a cook are to squeeze more vegetables into our diet and to master the essential dishes of French bourgeois and American home cooking. My husband’s two main goals as an eater are to convince me to braise large pieces of meat more often and to consume quesadillas as frequently as possible. As it happens, these desires work together better than you might expect: I tend to use quesadillas as a kind of reward meal for a week that has otherwise been grimly healthy or as a break for myself after a day or two of ambitious cooking.
For many people the idea of a recipe for quesadillas is silly, I know, but I spent a few years improvising sloppy, not-so-great ones before Cook’s Illustrated turned me into the confident filler and flipper I am today. The most important tips here are to fold the tortillas in half and fry them as half-moons and to brush a little vegetable oil on the outside. The goal here is not authenticity, Mexican food buffs: it’s cheesy deliciousness.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 16, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Sometimes I recall that I grew up without hummus and am amazed. It seems like such a natural kid-food, but it just wasn’t around in Houston then (now it is—my childhood, we’re talking decades ago now, people). I discovered hummus in my Yankee college town, at a little bakery that slathered it on a large, soft pita and wrapped it up with sliced tomatoes and onions. It dripped all over the place but was heavenly, especially during finals when one’s brain couldn’t be expected to function on dining-hall fare alone.
As a single girl in Manhattan, I had to be careful about buying hummus because I could eat a whole container over the course of an idle afternoon. What began as a little snack would end up a crime scene featuring me splayed out on the sofa with a magazine, eyeing an empty plastic tub and a half-full bag of baby carrots with horror: what have I done? My Lebanese friend warned me that hummus was full of fat. My Israeli friend taught me which brands would do (Sabra) and which would not (all the other ones) and convinced me to buy a vat of tahini. I learned some (some) self-control and self-sufficiency, and now I make my own hummus.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 11, 2008 at 4:00 PM
For the last year or two I’ve been obsessed with the idea of floating island even though I had never tasted it. It’s an old-fashioned dessert that sounded to me like pure delight: chunks of caramel-drizzled meringue in a puddle of crème anglaise. I’m neutral when it comes to meringue but figured that any dish involving a sea of crème anglaise had to be right for me.
Afraid that my dark-chocolate-loving husband would turn up his nose at the combination of vanilla custard, caramel, and fluff, last week I made it for my family in Houston. Reader, this involved a lot of time standing at the stove patiently stirring and vigilantly watching the candy thermometer. And then the meringues didn’t really succeed. My mother and I dished it up anyway. And?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 2, 2008 at 1:30 PM
Since I was raised on wonderfully lardy, cheesy Tex-Mex, it took me a while to come around to the ungloppy goodness that is a fish taco. In the early 1990s fish tacos became something of a craze in Houston, if I remember correctly, but I was not on board. In my wisdom and maturity today, however, I embrace all foods Mexican or Mexican-ish, including tortillas (corn or flour) full of fish (fried or grilled) and slaw (or salsa, or avocados, or whatever feels right).
This is the sort of thing a competent and intuitive cook can put together with no recipe. I have made brilliant fish tacos off the top of my head, but I have also made some less satisfying ones, with poorly cooked fish or unbalanced flavors. When I can get it right every time, I will know that I have arrived as a home cook. Until then, I rely on recipes to reorient me when I get off track. This is my current favorite. It's fast and fairly healthy but always feels somehow celebratory to me.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 25, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Since the thought of another pile of paper to manage makes me cringe, I don’t keep a file of recipe clippings for the future. I can’t remember, then, what prompted me to pull this recipe from Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times a few years ago, but some part of me must have known that his baked ziti would become my most popular dish.
Unsophisticated and absurdly easy to whip up, baked ziti presents difficulty only to those of us who have trouble managing our greed. Since the measurements are so round, I don’t even have to check the recipe before I go to the store: 1 pound sausage, 1 pound pasta, 1 pound cheese, 1 can tomatoes. It freezes beautifully, which makes it the nicest of emergency dinners for nights when you’re too busy to cook but want something nicer than a tangle of sad pad thai.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 18, 2008 at 1:00 PM
It isn't summer yet, but the sun has me thinking. Every June when the food magazines put out issues full of gorgeous grilled things, I, a grill-deprived citizen of New York City, feel somehow snubbed. The rest of the country, I imagine, is enjoying lingering al fresco dinners on decks and in gardens as I continue to eat inside at a corner of the table that also holds my computer and my work. Certain things I never get to eat at home at all--grilled fish, grilled pizza, grilled corn.
Luckily, two summers ago I finally made the consoling discovery that you can cook very tasty hamburgers indoors in a cast-iron skillet. For some reason I never make them in winter, but now that I can leave the house without a coat, it's time to throw open all the windows for a Saturday night cookout high above 57th Street.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 11, 2008 at 12:30 PM
A few years ago at a family meal my dad randomly launched into a lengthy panegyric to rice. He does this sometimes—proclaims a deep but previously unvoiced passion—and my mother, sister, and I roll our eyes at the poor outnumbered guy in our family and keep talking about shoes or Martha Stewart or whatever. At the time I thought, How can anyone get excited about rice? It doesn’t taste like anything.
Now I’ve come to see the wisdom of my father’s palate, and if I weren't scared of getting fat I’d eat white rice several times a week, with Indian food, soy sauce and vegetables, or naked but for a pat of butter. Why didn’t dad eat a lot of rice in college, I wonder now. One of his stock stories is how he could subsist for weeks at a time on canned tomato soup when he was putting himself through school, when he would have to sit at a bar and watch his buddies drink beer because he couldn’t afford to buy one for himself. Sometimes for a treat he would eat jelly. So why didn’t he buy himself a big old bag of rice and feast on that? Is it possible that he was scared to cook it?
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 4, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Yesterday I was glad that Lucy alerted us to the existence of Totally Baked (something has been done to the Dining Section online, and now I am bad about seeing Food Stuff). Recently I was craving a baked potato on a night when I had no patience for cooking and no potatoes in the house, so I ran out to get one at a Hell’s Kitchen establishment that will remain nameless. It was gummy, hard in the middle, and totally disappointing. Now I have another spot to try.
A well-baked potato with the right toppings offers an amount of pleasure disproportionate to the raw ingredients cost, especially with a green salad on the side. It also involves very little active time and kitchen cleanup. For these reasons it was one of my favorite dinners senior year of college, when I was cooking for myself at a school not really equipped for independent eaters. I knew how to bake potatoes, roast vegetables, steam broccoli, whisk together a vinaigrette, and make beans and rice out of a box. Oh, and heat up a can of soup. It must have been a little monotonous, but in retrospect I think I ate very well.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 28, 2008 at 12:45 PM
It isn’t easy to write about recipes week after week and keep your energy level high and your judgment accurate. The accepted wisdom is that readers will stay with you only if you give them a picture and a story, preferably one whose ending is that this recipe for [food] is The. Best. Ever. (Disaster stories are good, too, but who wants to provide a steady stream of those?)
I’ve been burned more than a few times by recipes that bloggers lavishly hailed as amazing but that in my kitchen (my fault?) were only so-so. I’m forgiving, though, because the successes are worth it, and because I know that people are just doing what they have to do to keep cooking and writing. All these peeks into people’s kitchens and lives make up for any number of recipes that don’t quite deliver.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 21, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Since I don’t go to church and am not crazy about holidays whose secular celebrations feature chocolate and candy, Easter barely registers on my seasonal radar. If you, on the other hand, have a bunch of pastel hard-boiled eggs around, what a great excuse to make deviled eggs. I shop at the Greenmarket as much as I can in part because I feel bad for factory-farmed chickens, but the shameful truth is that my taste buds usually can’t tell that the farm-fresh eggs there are so much better, the way everyone always claims. Here, though, even I can’t help but appreciate the difference made by truly great eggs and homemade mayonnaise. Alice Waters’s stuffed eggs sound plain as can be, but I think they are really something special.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Enchiladas may not be an essential part of everyone's cooking repertoire, but this recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook is so easy and versatile that I tend to be evangelical about it. Though the results are not authentically Mexican or even authentically Tex-Mex, they are consistently yummy.
The key here is that you can substitute two to three cups of just about anything pre-cooked for the three cups of chicken in the ingredients list. I like to make them with beans and kale, pulled pork, and even roasted potatoes and cauliflower. You could try beans and squash (inspired by 24 Boxes), and I've been meaning to try a breakfast version with scrambled eggs for a while now. (My only unsuccessful combination so far involved rice, which was just too starchy baked into the tortillas. This recipe is also not really good for cheese enchiladas. For cheese enchiladas, do yourself a favor and turn to Homesick Texan.)
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