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Tastiest Book Posts

Raspberry Crumb Bars

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Confession: I actually made this raspberry crumb bars back in April because I was trying to get ahead of the Baked Sunday Mornings blogging schedule. I didn’t really love them, and I meant to find time to try making them one more time, because the failure had to be on my end. How could a BAKED recipe for raspberry crumb bars possibly be flavorless and boring? Sadly, I didn’t manage a redo, so for now, we’ll have to talk about my experience with this bars as I made them in April, and I promise an update when I remake them.

Let’s start with what could have gone wrong?
-I did use mixed berries (raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries; frozen from Trader Joe’s), rather than only raspberries. That’s unlikely to have caused a disaster….but since my filling was flavorless, it seems like it could be a contributing factor.

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Chocolate Oat Bars

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Whole Foods used to sell something called "Grandma's Mistakes", an oatmeal cookie-based bar covered in chocolate fudge and a generous sprinkle of buttery oat crumbles on top. When the Whole Foods in Santa Rosa stopped carrying them, I was rather put out with them. A few years later, I discovered the lightened-up version in an America's Test Kitchen cookbook, made with marshmallows in place of heavy cream. More sugar, less fat... they satisfied the craving, but they weren't better. Then I opened up the Vanilla Bean Baking Book and found Sarah's chocolate oat bars. While they aren't called Grandma's Mistakes, that's exactly what they are.

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Chicken Marbella

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Apparently chicken Marbella was a big phenomenon in 1980s, made famous by the Silver Palate cookbook and popularized across the US as a fancy dinner party entree. Not only that, but chicken Marbella is currently enjoying a massive resurgence in popularity (at least online), thanks in part to Ina Garden. I had no idea of any of that when I picked this recipe from Ottolenghi Simple for a previous idea post. Despite the fact that my parents had a copy of the Silver Palate cookbook when I was growing up, I'd never heard of chicken Marbella. I can't remember what they made for dinner parties, but I'm willing to bet it wasn't that.

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Cream Scones

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I have always loved scones. They're probably the coffee shop pastry I ordered most frequently when I was younger, especially when said coffee shop sold the kind covered in sugary icing. When I worked at the Hamilton College coffee shop, I fell hard for Nancy Silverton's Ginger Cream Scones recipe, which we made for some of the catered events on campus. I loved how simple and easy her recipe was, and as a huge candied ginger fan, it was the only kind of scone I made for a long while.

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Ideas Post 82: Vote for a Recipe

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There are a few cookbooks sitting on our bookshelves that I'm pretty sure are duds, but I haven't been willing to invest the time/resources in confirming that fact (or disproving it! I can be open-minded). I'm frustrated enough with a few of those gorgeous cookbooks; it's high time I cook a full three recipes from each so I can make a final determination on the donate/keep decision.

Let me know which book you'd like to see me cook from first & which recipes you'd like to see on the blog (if the end result is good).

East West:

A) Grilled halloumi with pomegranate and sumac dressing
B) Foot of the mountain couscous with garden vegetables
C) Harira soup with pan-fried chicken dumplings and fava bean salad
D) Slow-roasted lamb shoulder with nomad's jewelled yogurt and nigella seed bread

Divine Food:

F) Arugula salad with labaneh, tomatoes and sumac
G) Raw beetroot carpaccio
H) Melon, goat cheese, and mint salad
I) Steamed shrimp dumplings
J) Slow-roasted beef brisket
K) Orange semolina cake (Basbousa)

Far Afield:

L) Red snapper curry (Samaki wa kupaka)
M) Wakame butter scallops
N) Char siu pork with Chinese noodles
O) Chilcano

The New Classics: A Definitive Collection of Classics

P) Spring pea and mint risotto
Q) Chilli-salt salmon noodles
R) Sticky lime and ginger chicken
S) Herb and mascarpone chicken
T) Mozzarella, lemon and mint salad

Where Cooking Begins:

U) Stir-fried celery with peanuts and bacon
V) Charred broccoli salad
W) Slow-cooked dozen-egg frittata
X) Fried grains with bacon, mushrooms, and kimchi
Y) Seared lamb patty with marinated halloumi and herbs

Salmon with miso, ginger, and lime

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This salmon with miso, ginger, and lime was born out of ME's desire for a salmon-based version of Ottolenghi's chicken with miso, ginger, and lime. Using skinless salmon, this version is even faster to prepare and can be on the dinner table in under 25 minutes.

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Orange Almond Blueberry Muffins

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I haven't been keeping up well with the regularly scheduled (every other Sunday) Baked Sunday Mornings posts from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. Part of it is because these cookbook has more "one-off" recipes that I don't want to make than their other cookbooks do (like last week's mocha fudgesicles, which I did want to make, but I couldn't find popsicle molds anywhere in time), and part of it is because we've been busy/gone almost every weekend since February. But for today's recipe, Orange Almond Blueberry Muffins, I planned ahead.

We had a Muffin Bake-Off at work towards the end of May so I thought, why not look for an upcoming muffin-related recipe on the BSM schedule and make that for the Bake-Off? These orange almond blueberry muffins were the next upcoming muffin, plus a very informal poll at work had concluded blueberry was generally acknowledged as the best muffin variety.

Because I had a captive audience who would provide their unfiltered opinion, I opted to make 3 different blueberry muffin recipes; this one from Baked, one from HonestlyYum and one from Green Kitchen at Home.

Batter for Orange Blueberry Almond Muffins
Batter-filled tins for Orange Blueberry Almond Muffins

These orange almond blueberry muffins did not win the Bake-Off, but they were the best of the three, and they placed fourth overall (out of nine, including one that was a fabulous recreation of the Rebel Within and one other baker's blueberry muffins). In my opinion, and Caleb's, these had too high a ratio of batter to blueberry; they need about 2-3x the number of blueberries to be almost perfect. I'd also steal the blueberry compote swirl and streusel from the HonestlyYum muffins (but nothing else, because I didn't actually like the flavor of the muffin (vegetable oil overpowered everything else), and neither did most of the judges.)

Orange Blueberry Almond Muffins

Head over the Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of these orange almond blueberry muffins.

Chicken with miso, ginger, and lime

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I used to think it would be really cool to be a famous food blogger, but I've come to realize that a lot of the most popular food blogs really annoy me. With all the pop-up ads that slow the page way down, the sponsored posts, and recipes that don't always turn out, I've stopped following a lot of food blogs.

I don't ever want to be an in-your-face blog. This site isn't built to have "the best" recipe for whatever you're looking for, nor am I interested in keeping up with current food trends (are adaptogens over yet?), the latest appliance craze (air fryer), or whatever fad diet is supposed to cure all the woes (are we still in Keto?). There are a lot of people out there to fill that niche already.

I love food; cooking it, eating it, sharing it, talking about it. Blogging "well" requires a hefty time investment, which is why I haven't been blogging much recently. However, I enjoy having this repository of all the dishes I've tried and liked so I can easily share them with friends and family. I don't love every recipe I post, but I like the dish enough to take the time to post it - maybe because it's fast and easy, maybe because it's healthy and simple, maybe because it's delicious but a lot of work...maybe it really is the best XYZ thing I've ever eaten.

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Ideas Post 80: Vote for a Recipe

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Happy Saturday! and Happy almost Mother's Day!!

It's been ages since my last recipe vote post, and while I'm not caught up, I'm at least a little less behind on all things blog-related than I've been over the past few months. I also finally finished the final episode of the Great British Baking Show (season 9) and started Netflix's new Street Food series... #goals.

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Blue Cheese Risotto with Wild Mushrooms

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When I was a postdoc at UCSF, a group of us would get together every week for movie night. The responsibility for movie selection was rotated amongst the regular attendees but the location was pretty constant: our place or Nima's (because most other people lived too far or their place was too small). We watched some incredible movies (Twelve Years a Slave), some truly awful films (I've blocked their names out), and went through an Oscar's phase that left me with the Frozen soundtrack stuck in my head even before my friends' kids started singing Let It Go on constant repeat.

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Cilantro-free Chile Verde with Pork

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Caleb's Dad makes a fabulous chile verde, but this one from the Food Lab is also delicious and with my modifications, it's cilantro-free for the cilantro hater in your life. Bonus, my version has more vegetables.

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Vanilla Madeleines

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Madeleines have a reputation. They hold a special place as a literary icon/cultural cliche, all as the result of a book most people haven't actually read. Until eating them fresh from the oven at Dominique Ansel Kitchen, I'd never liked them. I thought they were dry and tasteless and boring. Dominique Ansel was the first to satisfactorily explain this to me in his cookbook, the Secret Recipes. Madeleines are best eaten immediately, and should not to last more than an hour or two at the most. His mini hazelnut madeleines, served fresh-from-the-oven madeleines finally made me a madeleine believer.

When the med chem group was responsible for food & drinks at a work party last May, we/I went a little wild with our "May the fourth be with you" theme. There are a lot of ideas out there on the internet for Star Wars themed parties, starting with easy finger foods and quickly entering very complicated territory. One of the more accessible ideas was a Sarlacc pit Bundt cake, which involved using two madeleines for the jaws. I decided if I was going to make two madeleines for the party, I might as well make a full batch of madeleines, obviously... So, off I went to my cookbook shelves for an appropriate madeleine recipe. ...

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Mushroom Ragu

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A few weeks ago (maybe even a few months ago now!) I ate at Orchard City Kitchen in Campbell and was completely blown away by their trumpet mushroom carpaccio. I never would have ordered it myself, but the waiter convinced a friend to try it and we were all super happy when it arrived. Piles of thinly shaved mushrooms with thin shavings of Parmigiano, avocado aioli, and a Meyer lemon truffle oil. So simple, but so incredible. When I saw the raw mushroom salad in Market Cooking, it reminded me of those trumpet mushrooms, so that's what I planned to make... but then I posted options(!) in the recipe vote and this mushroom ragu won the day instead.

I'm not mad about it.

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Lemon-Berry Bundt Cake with Ricotta and Cornmeal

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Kristin Donnelly's lemon-berry Bundt cake from Modern Potluck is another cake I've been hoarding for myself for years. My notes from the first time I made this read: "amazing" ... underlined three times.

I didn't love the way my photos of it turned out at the time. Early morning light tinted everything blue and I didn't have time to wait for more photogenic light, which is one of those "I blog but I have a real day job" dilemmas. I don't mind apologizing for bringing cake to work with one slice cut out, but bringing one-day-old cake because I needed to retake my photos seemed like a step too far... so months passed without posting about it.

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{no-bake} Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust and Easy Fudge Sauce

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This is the perfect summertime pie. I know, we just entered Spring but this peanut butter pie from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking is everything you want in a summer dessert. The chocolate cookie crust is really simple (add to food processor and blitz), requires zero baking, then is covered by a thin layer of stabilized melted chocolate followed by a homemade no-churn peanut butter ice cream, both of which are also really easy. Freeze everything together overnight (minimally 4 hours if you're short on time), then take it out of the freezer about 10 minutes before serving. While it defrosts enough to slice, make the easy hot fudge sauce. Everything about Baked's peanut butter pie is uncomplicated, yet the end result is a stunning pie that tastes better than a Reese's peanut butter cup (which I love).

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Bridget Jone's pan-fried salmon with pine nut salsa

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Last Spring I took a three-part Fish & Shellfish class at the San Francisco Cooking School, with the goal of becoming more comfortable cooking fish and shellfish at home. Fast forward 10 months, and this salon from Ottolenghi Simple is only the third fish dinner I've made since. This is no reflection on the class, as it was fantastic and I felt like I became a lot more confident around fish. It says a lot more about our work schedules and weekend travel. Fish just doesn't keep as long in the fridge, and it doesn't freeze well cooked, so it doesn't really fit into our batch-cooking routine. That said, Ottolenghi's Bridget Jones' pan-fried salmon made a fabulous weeknight dinner, plus I ate the leftovers (cold) over the course of the next two days and they were almost as good as the fresh dish. Caleb even requested a repeat, and he's not the biggest fish fan.

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Lemon Lemon Loaf

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I've been baking a lot with lemon recently, but I haven't actually been posting very many lemon-containing recipes (or really, very many recipes at all). It's not that I haven't been testing at least one, if not several, new recipes every week. Unfortunately, I've fallen into the problematic routine of collecting photos and notes but not actually typing them up and posting the results. One of the great things about following the scheduled recipes on Baked Sunday Mornings is it enforces some concrete post deadlines. Today's scheduled recipe was the Lemon Lemon Loaf from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, and since I have loved all the lemon things I've tried from the Baked collection of cookbooks, I was pretty convinced I would love this little loaf as well. ...

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Ideas Post 79: Vote for a Recipe

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I'm finally a little caught up on previous dishes picked as the "ideas post" winners, so it's time for a new batch. This week/month, it's all about vegetables and relatively easy options, so I'm picking from David Tanis' beautiful Market Cooking.

 

A) Velvety Green Leek Soup

B) Celery Salad with Pistachios

C) Raw Porcini Mushroom Salad

D) Mushroom Ragout

E) Japanese Cucumber Salad

 

Caramel Cake

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Pictures of this caramel cake from the Fearless Baker started appearing in my Facebook feed last year and I knew that I had to make it. I finally stumbled into the right opportunity, with enough advance notice for a test cake, when we celebrated a friend's birthday a few weeks ago. People raved about the taste of the cake but complained about how difficult it was to frost the cake before the frosting set and crumbled if you tried to move it, so I wanted to bake a practice cake before making the real deal. This cake is really easy to make, and while it's true the frosting sets quickly, Erin's caramel cake is so delicious, it's easy to live with a frosting that is a bit temperamental. This caramel cake relies upon a cake base made with heavy cream to  yield a very tender and delicate cake with a tight crumb, and the caramel frosting is easy, rapid to make, and absolutely incredible.

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Quintuple Chocolate Cookies

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About two years ago now, I visited a friend in DC and visited the CakeRoom, where we sampled several desserts, including a decadent "Death by Chocolate" cookie. One of the bakers in the back heard me pestering the sales clerk about what precisely was in the cookie and he was kind enough to give me a rough sketch of the secret ingredients, including five total different forms of chocolate, one of which being a thin disc of chocolate in the middle to assist with loft, plus a bit of lemon zest to punch up the chocolate. This cookie was so good, but I don't live in DC (plus apparently they only sell them online by the dozen now). ...

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Oatmeal Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookies

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My dad has a preference for oatmeal-based cookies, so I made a lot of oatmeal+fruit+chocolate cookies growing up. Somehow that habit has been sadly sidelined by "other" cookies and I don't make oatmeal cookies very often any more. Caleb made such great oatmeal cookies while we were at Michigan that for years I didn't make any. Then too, oatmeal cookies aren't a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and I've always felt like personal preferences on spice level, fruit/nut mix-ins, chewy vs. crispy, etc. are even more divisive when it comes to an oatmeal cookie than a "traditional" chocolate chip cookie. Happily, Baked Sunday Morning's is here to shake me out of my cookie rut with this Sunday's scheduled "Oatmeal Cherry Walnut Cookie" recipe. Since I fall into the category of people who cannot abide nuts in their oatmeal cookies (and so does Caleb), I decided to replace the chopped toasted walnuts with an equivalent weight of Guittard mini chocolate chips, thus resulting in these delicious oatmeal cherry chocolate chip cookies.

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Turkey Chili with Butternut Squash

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It's a little difficult to believe, but it's been more than two years since I first made this turkey chili. At the end of 2016, I threw a pre-holiday dinner party for a bunch of friends using Modern Potluck as the recipe source and Marie-Eve as my fearless cooking companion. Everything we made from Modern Potluck that day was delicious, and I've posted two of the recipes we made (the polenta casserole and the Chinese chicken salad), but I've kept tweaking this recipe and so it's only now appearing as a proper post.

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Brunsli (Swiss chocolate orange spice cookies) {gluten-free}

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Google doesn't have a ready answer for the number of cookie varieties in the world, but it has to be pretty substantial. Sure, there are eight major cookie base types (rolled, drop, molded, no-bake, fried, ice-box, sandwich, and bar), but from there cookie recipes quickly spiral away from each other. My EatYourBooks.com account returns a total of 49,446 recipes tagged as cookies. If I search for chocolate chip cookies, there are 5,007 cookie-type results (In case you're curious: non-cookie-types including things like chocolate chip cookie cheesecake, chocolate chip cookie-stuff pretzels, chocolate chip cookie ice cream, etc). A quick glance indicates these 5,007 recipes include at least 8 major subcategories: chewy chocolate chip cookies, crispy chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chip shortbread, vegan chocolate chip cookies, browned butter chocolate chip cookies, "not your average" chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate chocolate chip cookies. If I clicked on the next page, I'd probably see even more variation.

So I guess it shouldn't be surprising that I'd never heard of brunsli until I was perusing Ottolenghi Simple. Basler brunsli are a traditional celebratory Swiss cookie, originating from Basel; bruns meaning brown and li is a diminutive, so brunsli are by definition "little brown" cookies. Billed as a "spiced brownie cookie" in the recipe header, brunsli date back to the 1800s, at which time Basel was an important trade hub and merchant families in Basel were building wealth off importing exotic foodstuffs like chocolate and spices, which found their way into special occasion foods. Now associated primarily with Christmas, brunsli were historically served at weddings and festivals, which explains why the traditional shape of these cookies is a flower (not a star!). The recipe header in Ottolenghi Simple mentions a desire to bring brunsli out of the Christmas holiday cookie category and make it more mainstream, because it is "delicious any time of the year", and they've swapped in Chinese five-spice powder for traditional cinnamon and cloves and orange zest for traditional kirsch to help make their point.

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