Category: Desserts

Comfort Classics: Cheesecake

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“There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway….No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts.” –Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

In describing chef David Chang, Anthony Bourdain gets right down to the facts of cooking: you’ve either got it, or you don’t, and there’s no faking that. Bourdain seems to think that Chang, chef and owner of several New York City fusion restaurants, very much so has this cooking “it” factor. Chang’s restaurants, including Momofuku Noodle Bar, are unapologetically simple, yet Michelin starred. You might even have to wait years to eat there. The success of chefs like David Chang with their boldly simple craft begs the question: is simple, unapologetic cuisine really best? Continue reading →

A Taste of Nostalgia

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IMG_8343Audre Lorde, in her excerpt “Spices” from her titled work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, recreates the sense of child-like wonder of watching and helping her mother work in the kitchen through her now nostalgic, adult eyes.  This is a retrospective activity we participate in over and over again throughout our mature lives, knowing that, as Lorde so indisputably put it, “Whatever came from home was bound to be special.”

Lorde’s focus in her memory of the processes her mother used while in the kitchen instead of simply looking at the food.  I think that’s part of the reason why I connected so closely to her writing.  The actions around the food make the memory.

A memory I often have is one of watching my mother bake peanut butter chocolate chip cookies in our kitchen, and then later on, when she was certain I wouldn’t burn myself on the stove (though I proved her wrong many times), taking over the household bakery.

It’s a sweet flashback, and one that speaks out to Lorde’s reminiscence to her and her mother’s time in the kitchen together.  It’s a memory I go back to when I feel like I’ve lost myself in the mess of trying to become a fully functioning adult.

My memory always begins with the end of the first batch of cookies… Continue reading →

"Cooking for Two" cookbook.

The Power of Simplicity: Janet Hill, Fannie Farmer, and Perfect Recipes a Century Later

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In her late thirties, high school teacher Janet McKenzie Hill ventured to Boston, where she enrolled at the Boston Cooking School. After studying under American culinary pioneer Fannie Farmer, then director of the BCS, Hill graduated in 1892. She went on to found the Boston Cooking School Journal, which she edited for many years, and author numerous cookbooks, including Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing Dish Dainties (1899), Practical Cooking and Serving (1902), and Whys of Cooking (1916) (Feeding America). This recipe for ginger cakes—flavorful spice cookies boasting a crispy exterior and a dense, chewy center akin to soft gingerbread—comes from her 1909 volume Cooking for Two: A Handbook for Young Housekeepers.

Version 2Plain Ginger Cakes

½ cup of molasses

1 teaspoonful of soda

¼ cup of butter

¼ cup of boiling water

2 cups of flour

½ teaspoonful of salt

½ tablespoonful of ginger

½ teaspoonful of cinnamon

Stir the soda into the molasses; melt the butter in the boiling water; turn all into a bowl and stir in the flour, sifted with the salt and spices; add more flour if needed, but keep the dough as soft as can be handled. Roll a little of the dough at a time to a sheet about three-eighths of an inch thick and cut into rounds. Press two pecan nut meats into the top of each, and dredge with granulated sugar. Bake in a moderate oven. The recipe will make about twenty cakes.

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Boorish Bread

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“He’s the best at what he does, after all. The finest bread I’ve ever had. And the most expensive: in human cost, aggravation, and worry. Hiring Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown was always a trade-off—with God or Satan, I don’t know—but it was usually worth it. Bread is the staff of life. And Adam, the unlikely source” (242).

–Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

Boorish Bread

If you could eat one food for the rest of your life and nothing else, what would it be? Your grandmother’s roast beef and gravy? Your mother’s meatloaf? Greasy pepperoni pizza from that pizza joint down the street that stays open until 2 a.m.?

If I had to choose, I would choose bread. But not just any bread. The heavenly, doughy goodness that is Texas Roadhouse rolls. Continue reading →