April 2013

Double-The-Cream-Cheese Cheesecake

A few weeks ago, I posted this picture of a cheesecake that I ate at Craig’s aunt and uncle’s for Easter brunch and several readers wrote me and asked for the recipe. I wrote Craig’s aunt Liz who put me in touch with Andrea, who made the cake. The secret? “This recipe has twice as much cream cheese as the original recipe called for.” I love that about this recipe because if you’re going to eat something decadent like cheesecake, you may as well make the most decadent cheesecake you can possibly make. This is that cheesecake. Thanks, Andrea, for the recipe.

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Do Any Young People Eat Cottage Cheese?

When I think “cottage cheese” I think of my grandmother who would greet me, growing up, with an offer of diet chocolate soda (she stocked that stuff like it came from the fountain of youth) and cottage cheese with sugar and cinnamon. The texture of cottage cheese was so foul to me that when choosing a picture for the top of this post, I couldn’t even stomach what came up on Google Images. Somehow, though, I’ve been thinking about cottage cheese lately. Is that just a grandma thing? Has yogurt displaced it? Are there any young people who eat cottage cheese? If so, are you one of them? Please tell me more in the comments.

Ligurian Lemon Cake with Raspberries

When I went to Paris in 2005, the warm croissants certainly set my heart aflutter, as did the cracklingly fresh baguettes and the dainty, delicate macarons. But the moment my heart almost stopped beating from the shock of deliciousness was the moment I tasted my first Pierre Hermé dessert, a dessert called H. Mogador that contained, “Biscuit au citron, gelee de fruit de la passion, ganache chocolat au lait et fruit de la passion.” It was basically a chocolate popsicle filled with passionfruit, one of my favorite flavors; I didn’t eat it, I inhaled it (watch me on video here). That dessert was the first thing I thought of when years later–this year, in fact–I found Pierre Hermé’s dessert cookbook (which he wrote along with Dorie Greenspan) at the used book store on my street. I immediately snatched it up.

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Springtime in New York

My Mondays always start with me editing pictures from the previous week and deciding which of them will make good food posts. But this morning I found myself looking at a bunch of Instagram pictures I took this weekend and my favorite ones are all of New York City as it charges head-on into spring. Thought I’d share them with you here in a post that has nothing to do with food except for the picture of coffee.

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Anatomy of a Superior Sandwich: The Captain’s Daughter at Saltie

One of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had is the Captain’s Daughter at Saltie in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s described minimally on the menu: “sardines, pickled egg, salsa verde” and yet tastes like so much more. The bread, focaccia, is fluffy and rich with olive oil. The flavors are as bold as flavors can be: fishy, bright, acidic, briny. The texture, unlike the criminally soft-on-soft sandwich I wrote about last week, is chewy (from the bread), soft (from the sardines) and crunchy (from all the vegetables). Let’s lift up the hood and see what else we can discover so maybe, just maybe, we can recreate this sandwich back in L.A.

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Scrambled Eggs with Gruyère, Fried Pita with Olive Tapenade & Tomato Salad

The three elements that made this breakfast come together the way that it did were leftover pita (from the night I made chicken and hummus), leftover olive tapenade (from the night I made 4-hour lamb; the recipe’s in that post), and leftover Gruyere (from that cauliflower gratin). The breakthrough moment was when I decided to fry the pita. I learned how to do this when Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook gave me their recipe for a beet salad at their restaurant Animal; instead of croutons, they fry pita. Turns out that’s a really wonderful thing to know how to do.

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The Food Personality Quiz

In early 2013, scientists and scholars from the Institute Marron Glacé gathered in Montmarte to discuss the creation of a food personally quiz that would help define four different types of food personalities. Sadly, after a bad case of the Norovirus wiped out nearly half the attendees, the other half grew disenchanted with their chosen profession and applied to dental school en mass. Only three graduated, the other two became dental hygienists. The point is that the quiz they had been developing never saw the light of day until one of those dental hygienists e-mailed me recently and asked if I’d like to post the quiz on my website. I said I would. She tried to charge me several hundred dollars; I balked. She agreed to let me use it if I would pay for a teeth whitening. My appointment is scheduled for next Tuesday; in the meantime, here’s the quiz. Hopefully you will find it enlightening.

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Hot Coffee Drink vs. Cold Coffee Drink

There’s a funny website called “Is It Iced Coffee Weather?” that determines, based on your location, whether it’s iced coffee weather. The current prognosis for me is: “No. Try it hot.”

This is a question I’m often asking myself because I enjoy drinking coffee every day, so much so that I drink tea in the morning in order to save my coffee drink for later on when I can get it from a coffee shop. And when I get to the counter I have to decide if I want it hot or cold. Lately, I’ve come up with a good strategy.

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