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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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 7, 2008 at 1:30 PM
The main reason I don’t have parties very often is that I’m one of those compulsive people who allows planning to spin out of control. I end up with five times as much food as I need but still stressed out because I didn’t manage to bake my own saltines and infuse my own vodka. It’s wiser, I know, to do fewer things better, which is why everyone should have the recipe for the Lee Brothers’ cheese straws.
These are not what I would call cheese straws, which in my experience are crispy and flaky and sometimes don’t taste cheesy enough; these are more like cheese shortbread—rich, crumbly, full of cheese, and, best of all, spicy. Growing up in Houston I knew one lady who always had crackers very like these on hand for visitors. She made hers with Tabasco and called them cheese cookies. Whatever you call them, they are addictive and a snap to make, which I guess could be considered either a good or a bad combination. If you eat them all up before your company arrives you might even have time to make another batch, at least if your abandon your plans to, say, make a miniature croquembouche for each guest, which, let's face it, probably wasn't the greatest idea anyway.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 29, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Around this time every year I start to get depressed, not about the endless cold and darkness but about the limited produce at my grocery store. My heart sinks as I grab a cart, knowing that everything will be exactly the same as it was the week before; the most excitement I can hope for is a special price on broccoli.
But I’m tired of broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and all the other members of my cruciferous rotation. Last week, thank goodness, I took my cart on a slightly different path and realized I had somehow been missing the Brussels sprouts (they keep them next to the Chilean grapes, $3-a-pound apples, and other stuff I never buy). They are super-healthy crucifers too, of course, but roasted until their outer leaves are crisp they’re so different from my spare steamed broccoli and repetitive sautéed greens.
They lend themselves to compulsive eating, like a guilty snack but with no guilt. I’ve tried Brussels sprouts with a sweetish sauce and I’ve tried them hashed and simply sautéed, but they’re never as good as they are just plain roasted with olive oil and salt.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 22, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Roasting chicken always, always reminds me of Jeffrey Steingarten. I think the moment my crush on him bloomed into undying love was when I read his essay “As the Spit Turns” in the August 1999 issue of Vogue (reprinted in It Must’ve Been Something I Ate), in which he discusses his efforts to rig up an effective spit-roasting system at home. Two passages near the beginning won me over: “Whenever I have nothing better to do, I roast a chicken. …I’ll roast a chicken in the afternoon even when I am not hungry and have plenty of food in the fridge and a reservation for dinner. It’s like a hobby.” And then, “The great Brillat-Savarin declared, ‘We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast.’ I often lie awake nights worrying about whether I was born to roast.’” I like a man who has his priorities in order. It is in this spirit that I offer you Marcella Hazan’s beautifully simple bird stuffed with two lemons. I suspect that many of you already love this very recipe, and if you do not know it yet, that you, too, are always tinkering with roast chicken, perhaps even roasting a bird whenever you have nothing better to do.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 15, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent a summer studying in Paris. Although I knew enough to make a trip to Berthillon, discovered Nutella, and would hang around Fauchon staring at the piles of shining produce (decidedly unobtainable on our student allowance), I did not have a life-changing food epiphany; I developed no attachment to open-air markets and stinky cheese. For the most part my friends and I ate an inoffensive lunch of baguettes and Boursin in the Luxembourg Garden and ordered ice cream at Häagen-Dazs in between our mornings in class and our afternoons in churches, museums, theaters, and parks. We were there for the culture and the language—not the food!
So the parting words of our program director, delivered on the bus that was dropping us off at the airport, came as something of a surprise. The dapper white-haired man in his white suit and tiny sunglasses leaned on his cane and solemnly said, “If you remember only one thing about this program, let it be this: in a vinaigrette, you must use three parts oil to one part vinegar. It never fails. Try different oils, try different vinegars—your friends will think you’re a genius.”
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 8, 2008 at 11:30 AM
This week UPI reported that sales of boxed macaroni and cheese increased by 10% in 2007 (story via Jezebel). Furthermore, “half of the country's children will feast on macaroni and cheese at some point during the next two weeks.” Wow! This news will be welcomed by my sister, whose favorite way to tease me about my efforts to buy organic and/or responsible groceries is to describe what she’ll feed her hypothetical nieces and nephews when they come to visit her someday—Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Cheetos, doughnuts, soft drinks—and how much they’ll love her for it. She’s 27, the same age I was when I made a pot of Kraft Mac & Cheese on a lark and realized I had finally outgrown it. The blue box had served me well during my first few years in New York, but my experiments with homemade macaroni and cheese eventually robbed it of its appeal.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 1, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I’m a little nervous about putting this recipe before this crowd, which probably includes more people with dearly-held opinions about barbecue and tacos than I could find anywhere else. Me, I like pulled pork, but I’m from Texas, so that’s not the brand of barbecue I was raised on; and again, I’m from Texas, so I’ll accept a crispy shell full of ground beef and orange cheese as a “taco” just as happily as I’ll eat carnitas wrapped in a fresh tortilla. In short, people with standards more exacting than mine might argue that this is not real pulled pork and these are not real pork tacos. But recently I fed them to a discerning friend who went back for seconds and thirds, and their excellence has made it hard for us to enjoy pork tacos at our former favorite places, so…I’m going to risk putting this out there.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, January 25, 2008 at 2:30 PM
My sweet tooth seeks out vanilla, caramel, and fruit before chocolate, but somewhere along the line I either ate or dreamed of the perfect chocolate layer cake, and lo, it was good: enticingly tall and dark, with a firm but yielding crumb and a pure chocolate-butter taste, so moist you could eat it without icing (but why would you?).
I sampled many slices in pursuit of this ideal. Plenty of cakes had the looks, but none of them had the heart and soul: usually they were dry, and if they weren’t dry, they had a chemical aftertaste, or a squishy texture, or some kind of booze-flavored filling. When the outside world failed me, I got out my baking pans. Cook’s Illustrated and Rose Levy Beranbaum offered recipes for perfect cake, but their buttercreams were too buttery for me. I am not one to shy away from butter, but this tasted like delicious cake spread with pure, softened, faintly chocolate flavored butter, and that was kind of gross.
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