Ideas post 86: Vote for a Recipe

I’ve been going through a rough patch with cookbooks lately.

I bought Beautiful Bundts a year and a half or so ago, and the first cake I made from it - a chocolate chip cream cheese bundt - was beautiful but not something I really enjoyed eating. It’s been hard to get motivated to try more recipes.

The Clandestine Cake Cookbook came into my life probably a decade ago, but I never made anything from it because I just couldn’t get excited about any of the cakes. In the past two weeks, I made the pistachio & lime cake as well as the Dutch chocolate hazelnut cake. The pistachio cake was dry and the cream cheese frosting was bland as bland can be, however the lime curd was excellent and worth repeating to join with something else. The Dutch chocolate hazelnut cake called for more butter than any cake I’ve ever made, which I feel like is saying a lot. More than 4 sticks of butter in a single standard-sized bundt cake feels wrong.... I was sure there was an error. The cake itself was good (very buttery), but it ate like a coffee cake, not a bundt cake, and the Nutella really didn’t need to be there. I love Nutella, but this cake would have been much better topped with a nice blueberry compote or a cinnamon sugar crackle. Two strikes and we’re finished with the CCC.

Our friends gifted me with Nancy Silverton’s latest cookbook, Chi Spacco, for Christmas. In a fit of showing thanks (aka, I don’t just accumulate cookbooks and never actually make anything from them), I tackled the focaccia di recco, pork cooked in milk with fried sage and fennel pollen, Moroccan lamb shanks, and butterscotch budino. They all came out fine, but they were all a lot of work and a lot of read-between-the-lines cheffing was required. The focaccia di recco, which is highlighted in the header as being the recipe restaurant regulars might buy the book for (and it is also famous from Chef’s Table), was just mediocre and the instructions are missing any and all discussion of a temperature for baking. Also, that cheese is Impossible to find and I live in the Bay Area. Furthermore... I do not have a butcher. The cuts of meat Nancy asks for.... they require a butcher.

The Milk Street publishing house, home of Christopher Kimball following his split from America’s Test Kitchen, is pretty popular for well-tested “boldly flavored” recipes. I made the spinach coconut red lentil stew from their first cookbook “Milk Street” and it was awful. Super bitter, very embarrassing, went right into the trash... I worry it was my fault for messing up the frying of the mustard seeds and I want to give the cookbook another chance before it too goes into the donate pile.

A) Thai-style Napa Coleslaw with Mint and Cilantro

B) Cauliflower with Tahini

C) Sichuan Chicken Salad

D) Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma)

E) Date-stuffed Semolina Cookies

F) Shrimp in Chipotle Sauce (Camarones Enchipotlados)

G) Herb and Pistachio Couscous

Let me know which of these you’d like to see on the blog!