I'm thrilled that Baked Sunday Mornings has gone back in time to Baked: New Frontiers. I feel like I've said this already... maybe more than once?... but it's no less true. One of my favorite recipes (that I've tried so far) from Baked NF are the banana espresso muffins, so I was pretty certain these banana cupcakes would be at least as delicious. I was right....
Tastiest Book Posts
Ideas Post 57: Vote for a Recipe
This week's set of potential blog posts spans a pretty extreme range - from super talented and super young blogger Tieghan's new cookbook to ultra rigorous famous French bread and pastry guru Eric Kayser's second cookbook to a new global cuisines & vegetarian cookbook by a woman living in Brooklyn.
Help me choose what to make next!
A) Healthy Chipotle Turkey Sweet Potato Skins from Half Baked Harvest
B) Fig and Cider Pork Chops from Half Baked Harvest
C) Apple Ricotta Pancakes with Bacon Butter from Half Baked Harvest
D) Tarte au Cafe et au Chocolat (Coffee and Chocolate Tart) from Maison Kayser's French Pastry Workshop
E) Pho Noodle Salad with Tofu, Napa Cabbage, and Broccolini from Neighborhood
F) Lebanese Stewed Green Beans and Chickpeas with Spinach Pilaf from Neighborhood
Thanks for voting 🙂
Goat Cheese Potato Pizza Tartlet with Mushrooms and Arugula
I liked the shrimp with farro and white beans from Malibu Farm, but this goat cheese potato pizza tartlet with mushrooms and arugula? Stunningly good. Ooey gooey and decadently cheesy, the puff pastry base and the parboiled potato slices effectively sandwich the quintuple cheese layer, and the rosemary, mushrooms, and arugula (or other baby greens) help to cut some of that richness. Helene's goat cheese potato pizza tartlet is worth the price of the book, and something I expect to make frequently when I'm having people over. The puff pastry base means this pizza tartlet is super easy to execute without much advance notice beyond defrosting the pastry.
...Shrimp with Farro and White Beans
The shrimp with farro and white beans (and arugula) from Malibu Farm sounds a bit complicated (or at least, it did to me), but it's honestly just super delicious, quick and easy bowl food.
Bowl food seems like it took Instagram and the rest of the world by storm recently, but I realized as I was organizing my cookbooks that I bought several "bowl food"-centric cookbooks in college, including one called Bowl Food, which I lent out to someone who liked it so much I had to buy myself a second copy. There's really nothing to dislike about the concept of bowl food: comforting, healthy, low-effort food served in a single bowl. Some people have taken the concept in some pretty extreme directions, but it doesn't have to involve tweezers to carefully place your distinct add-ins. Basically, all your vegetables/fruits, meats/legumes, and grains are tossed or stirred together with whatever sauce works to bring everything together, and ideally, it shouldn't take too much hands-on time.
...
Last Meal Salad with Everyday Green Dressing
It's taken me ages to get around to making the "heavily" voted-for Last Meal Salad from Sprouted Kitchen Bowl+Spoon. I needed my blender back from my parents, time to test new recipes, and enough of a week ahead of me to eat through the salad leftovers. This past week was the week it all came together, and I'm so glad I finally got around to trying this.
Before I go any further, let's be real about this. If I were to pick my last meal on this earth, it would not be a salad. I don't care how good the salad is, and I suppose there could be some salad on the side, but my preferences lean more towards tons of sushi from Sadako in Ann Arbor or something involving great bread and a lot of cheese, like the croque monsieur from DAK, followed by triple chocolate mousse or a large slice of rich cake with homemade vanilla ice cream (and homemade hot fudge sauce, because, why not?). I've honestly never given much thought to what I'd choose to have as my last meal, although when I was younger and more foolish, my "last meal" before embarking on a healthier diet definitely included ice cream, not salad.
...Moroccan Eggplant Salad in Tomato Sauce
I wasn't completely sure what to expect from the Toss your Own Salad cookbook and his Moroccan eggplant salad in tomato sauce. The writing and recipe titles were generally hilarious, as you would expect out of the author's Tumblr account and this resulting cookbook, but eggplant salad can be challenging to pull off well. I've eaten an unfortunate number of boring or unappealing eggplant dishes. Happily for myself and my generous testers (thanks Mom and Dad), Toss your Own Salad's Moroccan eggplant salad was surprisingly good.
...Ideas Post 56: Vote for a Recipe
I'm finally making some progress on my backlog of voted-for recipes, so it's about time I accumulate some more, right?? Thanks for bearing with me!
Up next on my list of books to cook from is Deep Run Roots, by a woman who escaped from NYC's hectic restaurant life and moved back to her hometown of Deep Run, in rural Eastern North Carolina, to open a restaurant with her husband. There's story-telling, family history, local traditions, and lots of great regional recipes in this massive cookbook weighing in at almost 600 pages. There are an awful lot of recipes in the cookbook that I'm unlikely to ever make, like the butterbean burgers, hush puppies, pimento cheese, and warm banana pudding, but I guess that's to be expected. Happily, there are also quite a few recipes that I'd love to try.
Another book I'm cooking from this month is Bread Toast Crumbs, which is all about bread... and ways to use bread itself or bread "leftovers" to turn out a great meal. Since I'm all bread, BTC isn't a hard sell...
A) Cornbread Coffee Cake with Fresh Figs and Walnut Streusel from Deep Run Roots
B) Miso Flounder with Cucumber Noodles and Gingered Collards from Deep Run Roots
C) Sweet Potato and Turkey Shepherd's Pie from Deep Run Roots
D) Savory Monkey Bread with Scallions, Gruyere, and Bacon from Bread Toast Crumbs
E) Foccacia with Grapes, Pancetta, and Rosemary from Bread Toast Crumbs
I'd love to hear what recipes you want to see 🙂
Fancy Apple Cake
While I was in NJ at the beginning of the month, ME pulled out her copy of a cookbook I'd never heard of before: German Baking Today. At a previous job, she made cakes by request for co-workers who were leaving, and this slim little book was thrust upon her by a colleague interested in the cherry crumb cake.
We've both been watching a lot of the Great British Bake Off, which recently featured the stunning and unusual Baumkuchen, a recipe that happened to be in this little book. So, obviously, after puzzling out how the baking process could possibly yield a tender cake, it was necessary to flip through the rest of the book. Since we were planning to go apple picking, and since the photo looked stunning, we decided to make, not the Baumkuchen, but this fancy apple cake....
Shaved Carrot Salad with Ginger and Lime
Disclaimer: if you don't like cilantro, you aren't going to like this salad. It's not nearly as good with parsley as a substitution.
Samin's shaved carrot salad with ginger and lime is simple to make but full of flavor. It's the kind of dish that is perfectly balanced; remove one component and it will be good, but not outstanding (I speak from experience, I've tried messing around with this salad).
Samin Nosrat's mega-hit cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat was released just as I was getting ready to move, so I haven't actually spent much time with it. So many people have raved about how revolutionary her ideas about layering salt into every dish are that I've been feeling very behind the "learning from cookbooks" curve. ...
Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread
We finished Baked Occasions two Sundays ago, and have moved on to what might be my favorite cookbook by Matt & Renato: Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. I've made a lot of the recipes from this cookbook, but never this weekend's assignment: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread.
In my humble opinion, one of the best things about Fall is pumpkin chocolate chip bread. I can't stand pumpkin spice lattes, and I don't really like pumpkin cookies because they're weirdly squishy, but those caveats aside, I am one of those annoying people who is all about pumpkin as soon as the first hint of fall arrives. Since it's almost October but close to 80 degrees outside this weekend, I guess it's a good thing I feel that way about pumpkin....
Ideas Post 55: Vote for a Recipe
My kitchen is due to arrive on Saturday!! So this is hopefully the last recipe ideas post for a while that is both late and may not be answered with a corresponding post on schedule. You guys are the best for continuing to vote!
ME & I made tons of great food over the weekend. Some of it was catch-up work on the last few ideas posts, and a few items were brand new, so I have lots of options for ideas post 55.
Also, I updated the Ideas Page with a color scheme to quickly indicate which recipes I've already made and liked (or not) as well as the recipes that were voted for but haven't been posted yet. Please feel free to suggest something from that list as well, it helps me prioritize 🙂
A) Honey Bundt Cake from Vanilla Bean Baking Book
B) Cheddar & Vegetable Bread-a-saurus from the Harvest baker
C) Vegetarian Fried Rice from Stir-frying to the Sky's Edge
D) Raspberry Hazelnut Pancakes from Vegetarian Heartland
E) Fancy Apple Cake from German Baking Today
Boozy Fig Blondies
Considering how much of a cookie fanatic I am, you'd think I would have more familiarity with blondies. Yet it took me a surprising amount of time to fall for the blondie. Maybe since they aren't single serve, so they require more of an immediate "crowd" to feed? Perhaps because I thought they were like cookies for cheaters? It's hard to know for sure, but it wasn't until Amelia first made us the drunken blondies from Back in the Day Bakery that I realized I was missing out on an entire subgroup of baked goods.
...
Ideas Post 54: Vote for a Recipe
I am continuing to amass to-do recipes at this point, so apologies again about how behind I am on actually posting the voted-for recipes. This week's collection of potential choices is rather diverse, wandering from Middle Eastern breakfast rice to Indian vegetarian curry to a rich risotto to a zesty side salad.
Thanks for voting!
A) Cardamom Rice with Poached Eggs and Yogurt from Plenty
B) Shaved Carrot Salad with Ginger and Lime from Salt Fat Acid Heat
C) Blue Cheese Risotto with Wild Mushrooms from the Chelsea Market Cookbook
D) Matar Dal with Watercress, Braised Red Cabbage Sabji, and Brown Rice Chapati from Peace and Parsnips
Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Buttercream
This is not a chocolate cake for the faint of heart.
It's best if you don't think about the amount of butter in this chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream from Valerie Gordon's Sweet. No one wants to know that the secret to the incredibly delicate and tender cake crumb stems from the full-fat trinity of butter, sour cream, and heavy cream. In combination with a hefty dose of good bittersweet chocolate, Dutch-process cocoa, and strong coffee that serves to deepen the chocolate flavor (you can't actually taste the coffee), this is the chocolate cake for anyone who really loves chocolate....
Ideas Post 53: Vote for a Recipe
If you subscribe to the Tastiest Book via email, you might have noticed a strange silence over the past few weeks. As it turns out, I was editing my email template, thought I had saved and exited so the service would resume...but had not. I even subscribe to my own posts to make sure it's all emailing out more or less properly; I thought it was just my overwhelmed inbox at fault. So, that's why emails from the Tastiest Book have been paused for most of August, which explains why you might have missed new posts from me (like the double-header Idea Post 52) as well as why it's seemed oddly quiet from my perspective.
I know I'm quite behind on posts, both generally and the ones promised based on these Ideas posts. However, I'm gradually catching up, and rapidly moving towards having, not only a kitchen, but my own kitchen with "all my things" in it. So, we might as well plan ahead because when that time arrives, my kitchen is going to know it is loved (or at least well-used).
I've been eyeing the Malibu Farm Cookbook for what feels like ages, but it has always cost over $20. I wasn't completely convinced it was worth $20; today it went on super sale for $2, so I bought it. And now it's the cookbook of this week.
A) Goat Cheese Potato Pizza Tartlet with Mushrooms and Arugula from the Malibu Farm Cookbook
B) Shrimp with Farro and White Beans from the Malibu Farm Cookbook
C) Mama Tran's Vietnamese Chicken Salad from the Malibu Farm Cookbook
D) Mustard Chicken with Mustard-Fennel Slaw from the Malibu Farm Cookbook
E) Bay Leaf-Scented Yogurt Cake from the Malibu Farm Cookbook
Lebkuchen (or Pfefferkuchen, aka German gingerbread cookies)
This Sunday's recipe from Baked Occasions is a Christmas cookie originating from Germany, a kind of glazed gingerbread cookie known as lebkuchen. I have to confess that although the posting date is today, a rather warm (for SF) day in late August, I made these for Christmas last year, as part of the second round of 12 days of cookies I brought to work. ...
Risotto with Beans, Sausage, and Bitter Greens
Much like the other recipes I've tried from Six Seasons, the recipe for risotto with beans, sausage, and bitter greens (it rhymes!) required a bit of tinkering before it was ready to become a blog post. Is it a good thing that Joshua McFadden's recipes require me to adjust as I go along? His instructions seem to either miss explanations entirely or just assume that the reader knows to do certain steps outside the recipe guidelines.
...
Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal No-Bake Cookies
These cookies are the perfect quick cookies. Craving something chocolaty but don't feel like going through the hassle of making cookie dough and waiting for it to bake? Too hot to turn on your oven? Need an after-school/work treat? Not the most confident baker? Don't have an oven, or a mixer, or a stove top? These chocolate peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookies have you covered. You'll be finished making them (and eating them), in well under 30 minutes and they taste like a simplified cookie version of a peanut butter cup. ...
Chocolate Pop Tarts with Almond Butter and Jam Filling
I had mixed feelings about this past Baked Sunday Mornings' assignment. Matt and Renato's chocolate pop tarts aren't just chocolate pop tarts, they are also stuffed with peanut butter and (strawberry) jam. Or in my rendition, they are chocolate pop tarts with almond butter and jam filling. As a dessert, they consist of nothing that I would ever think to eat together. ...
Ideas Post 52: Vote for a Recipe
Oh my goodness! I've been doing this Ideas Post thing for over a year! (I know... 52 weeks = 1 year, but I missed a couple here and there). And people vote on what recipes they'd like to see!! It's pretty awesome.
In honor of that awesomeness, this week's Idea Post is a double vote from two new and one old cookbook. Please vote for your two(~ish) favorites, and I'll try my best to get the winners both up this week!
Round 1:
A1) Moroccan Eggplant Salad in Tomato Sauce from Toss your Own Salad
B1) Eggplant and Veggie Balls from Toss your Own Salad
C1) Help! My Vacation Starts in Two Weeks Kelp Noodle Salad from Toss your Own Salad
D1) Lemon Ginger Scones from Flour Bakery
E1) Cornmeal Lime Cookies from Flour Bakery
F1) Intense Chocolate Brownies from Flour Bakery
Round 2:
A2) Everything Biscuits from the Harvest baker
B2) Blueberry Cream Scones from the Harvest baker
C2) Stuffed Spinach and Feta Cheese Scones from the Harvest baker
D2) Summer Squash Loaf with Olives and Cheese from the Harvest baker
E2) Shaker Fresh Herb Bread with Walnuts from the Harvest baker
F2) Blueberry Gingerbread from the Harvest baker
Spanish Chopped Salad
There's some rumor I've heard that chopped salad was expressly developed as a way to charge naive customers into paying egregious amounts for the scraps of meat, cheese, and vegetables left over in a restaurant kitchen. There might be some truth in that story, but I still love a great chopped salad, more fool me.
Sara Forte developed a brilliant take on the traditional chopped salad by translating the flavors from her experience in Spanish tapas bars onto the concept of a chopped salad. In the Sprouted Kitchen Bowl & Spoon, she presents a similar idea of greens, meats, and cheeses, but with a much perkier salad dressing, better cheese, and a larger variety of healthy produce and legumes.
...
Roasted Pepper Panzanella
Let me say this right away, in case you start reading the paragraphs below and stop before getting to the bottom thinking I disliked this roasted pepper panzanella. It's terrific. I can't conceive of anyone not liking it. You should make it right away, because it's fast and easy, doesn't require much cooking, is way different from your average salad, plus this is the season for sweet bell peppers.
...Ideas Post 51: Vote for a Recipe
After making it twice, I can confidently say the roasted pepper panzanella from Six Seasons was a big hit and I'll be posting it soon. The cauliflower ragu still needs a little tweaking before it is ready for posting, but it's almost there. And the risotto with kale and shell beans is on trial tomorrow night. In my opinion, Six Seasons has passed the cookbook "keeper" test, albeit more as a source of inspiration rather than as a no-fail recipe source.
I missed last weekend's regularly scheduled Ideas Post feature, because I'd fallen a little behind schedule with posting. There are a few recipes I've been meaning to post but I want to re-test them and I can only eat so much. Plus, I don't currently have a kitchen...
In the meantime, I'm batch cooking for the week ahead, so today's offering of post ideas includes:
A) Savory Asian-Flavored Granola from Bold Flavored Vegan Cooking
B) Baked Oats with Pistachios, Dried Figs, and Honey from Nourished Kitchen
C) Marrakesh Carrots (a grated carrot salad) from Sprouted Kitchen Bowl and Spoon
D) The Last Meal Salad from Sprouted Kitchen Bowl and Spoon
E) Spanish Chopped Salad from Sprouted Kitchen Bowl and Spoon
F) Kimchi Fried Quinoa adapted from Bold Flavored Vegan Cooking
Hazelnut, Blue Cheese, and Date Scones
I've owned the cookbook Sweet for a long time, but I hadn't spent much time with it until the last few weeks. It is a stunning cookbook and I am a little ashamed of how long it took for me to realize it's potential.
In trying to make up for lost time with Sweet, I recently made the apricot basil cream galette and these hazelnut, blue cheese, and date scones. The apricot basil cream galette was quite good, although I was the only one to taste the basil and since making the basil cream was the most finicky part, that was a bit annoying. After trying these scones, all is forgiven.
...
