rosemary bread
Here’s some wise advice from Justin Hinds…Save a Bread to listen to while you wait for your dough to rise.
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Rosemary bread
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Parsnip, pumpkin, & ginger soup
This soup is like autumn in a bowl! A little bit sweet, a little bit spicy – smooth and comforting on a cold dreary day. I made a broth first, and let it sit on the stove most of the afternoon, warming the kitchen and making everybody hungry!
Here’s MF Doom’s Ginger to listen to while you cook.
CAKE
I love making cakes. Not fancy, special-occasion cakes, but every-day cakes, to have with coffee in the morning, or tea in the afternoon, or a glass of wine after dinner. I have a very simple recipe I use, that is a good starting point for any kind of variation you can think of. It’s a vanilla cake, but you can add any kind of flavoring you like. You can add chocolate chips, or nuts, or coconuts, or fruit. You can slice it in half and spread jam or nutella (or both!) in between and stick it back together again. You can add lemon zest or orange zest or cinnamon or ginger. You can make a chocolate cake by adding cocoa powder or melted chocolate. You can make a crumb topping with brown sugar, oatmeal, flour, butter and cinnamon. You can frost it, or put powdered sugar on it, or coat it with ganache, or make it into an angler fish for your son’s birthday. The possibilities are endless!
To show you how easy it is, I’ve made two at once! A pumpkin chocolate chip cake, and a coconut-almond cake with cherry filling.
Here’s some instrumental hip hop to warm up this dreary day.
RZA’s Cakes, and Pete Rock’s The Cake.
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Chickpea & spinach dumplings (with a black sesame seed crust)
chickpea & spinach dumplings
Here’s Ken Parker singing Sugar Dumpling.
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Malcolm’s supreme spicy croquettes
My Malcolm is a temperamental boy, and I’m not always the most patient mother. When we try to work together on a school project, it doesn’t always end well. But when we cook together, we make quite a team. Over the summer, Malcolm invented a sauce with roasted red peppers, roasted beets and roasted tomatoes. He smelled every spice in the cabinet, choosing the perfect mix for his sauce. It turned out delicious! Smoky, spicy, slightly sweet. He named it “Malcolm’s supreme spicy sauce.” This weekend, he had the idea of turning the sauce into cookies. I suggested we make croquettes, using his signature spice mix, and we added some pureed moong dal. The result was something between a croquette and a cookie, like nothing I’ve ever tasted. But it was a wonderfully tasty dinner! We dipped it in a tart-sweet tamarind sauce, and ate it alongside cauliflower puree and spinach sauteed with garlic and mixed with goat cheese, tomatoes and pesto. And a salad of course! Malcolm ate 4 croquettes, and Isaac tried it, and ran crying from the table, saying, “I tried it and I liked it, but I want something I knew I liked, like pasta or rice!” Ah, yoots.
Spinach, pesto, & goat cheese
Here’s one of Malcolm’s favorite songs, K’naan’s Bang Bang, which gets extra points for using the phrase
Hotter than a pepper-crusted Samosa.
I want a pepper-crusted samosa!!
Recipe coming up…
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Food on film
Movies & food are two of my favorite things, so it stands to reason that movies about food represent a perfect combination for me. Following on a post about popcorn (who decided that popcorn is a good movie-theater snack? Is there any noisier food to eat?) let’s talk about movies. The best movies about food, in my opinion, express the joy of creating food and the joy of eating food. So here are a few of my favorites. What are your favorite movie scenes about food?
I love everything about Ratatouille! The character of Remy is so appealing and so unassuming, and his passion for food is so unselfconscious and unlikely. This film is about more than food, it’s about the desire to create – the passion of a real artist. And it makes you very hungry, too!
This scene is also about food & memory, a fascination of mine, as we all know.
more from all over the world…
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POPCORN!
popcorn!
I love popcorn! It’s the one food I really can’t resist. The one food I’ll eat even if I’m already full. Strange but true. I even like horrible movie popcorn, and microwave popcorn, and popcorn out of a bag with strange cheese-flavored powder on it. How do you like your popcorn? Do you like it salty? Sweet? Salty and sweet? Coated in sticky caramel and packed in a box with a toy in it? When I was in college we doused it with goyo adobo seasoning. I’ve put curry powder or other spice mixes right into the oil as it cooked, infusing every bite with flavor. But I like it best popped in olive oil on top of the stove, and generously sprinkled with sea salt and a shake of freshly ground pepper. If, like my husband, you consider it packing material, you can still revel in the fact that popcorn is the inspiration for some of the best songs ever!
Here’s a playlist to get you shaking your … popcorn pot!
And here’s how I make it…
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What are we going to do with all this vegetarian paella?
I’m calling this a paella because it has a rich, saffron-infused broth. If you’re a paella purist, however, you can call it fennel-artichoke heart-white bean stew. Either way, it’s a warm and flavorful meal for a chilly fall evening. I serve it with basmati rice, because that’s my favorite, and some nice crusty bread.
Here’s La Paella by Conjunto Yumuri. Don’t know much about it, but I love it!
Chard, pistachio & golden raisin tart
When I was in Spain quite a few years ago, I stopped at a place with only one vegetarian thing on the menu – spinach, raisins, and pine nuts. It was such a simple dish, and I had such a heaping mound of spinach on my plate, but somehow it was one of the most memorable and delicious meals I have ever eaten. The filling for this pie is loosely based on that memory. I used chard instead of spinach, because of the added depth of earthy flavor, and because it seems more substantial. And I added pistachios, quite frankly, because I had them! You could just as easily use spinach and pine nuts. The flavor would be different but equally delicious. I added lemon zest to this light yeasted crust, because I think the brightness of lemon zest contrasts nicely with the earthiness of the chard. 
Here’s Swiss Chard, by Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, a band we used to listen to when we lived in Boston. I hadn’t thought about them in a while. Thank you, swiss chard, for reminding me!!
Recipe after the jump…
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How do you like your chocolate chip cookie?
What is it about cookies with a bit of chocolate that’s so comforting? When I lived in England, a cup of tea and a choccie biccie could cure almost any woe. In America, it’s chocolate chip cookies, which in my house we call “natural antidepressants.” There are a million ways to make them! You can make them fat and soft and cake-like. Or crispy and crumbly. You can add nuts, or oats, or fruit. You can use white chocolate chips or add butterscotch chips. I like mine thin and dark and intensely flavored – crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. More like candy in some ways!
How do you like yours?
Here’s The Coup’s Wear Clean Draws. A tenuous connection, I know, but he calls his daughter his “cookie,” so this song has been in my head since I started thinking about cookies this morning. And I love it so much!
My recipe for my perfect chocolate chip cookie after the jump…
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Out of the Ordinary 