Some people see the light and get religion. Other people see the light and get sheet pan pizza. That’s what happened to me this past Friday night when I cooked up the best sheet pan pizza of my life here in my own apartment, setting off a smoke detector and freaking out the dog in the process, but oh was it worth it. (Sorry, Winston.) Now that I know how to make a killer sheet pan pizza, I plan to make sheet pan pizza on the regular.
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Iconic dish names have to start somewhere. Who invented Toad in the Hole? Chicken a la King? S’mores? I’m sure they all have stories, and if we had more time we could research those stories, but my point is that sometimes a dish needs an official name. And that’s why I Christen (what’s the Jewish version of Christen? Bar Mitzvah?)… I Bar Mitzvah this dish: Eggs on a Green Blanket.
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Call me a rebel, but when a recipe calls for dried cranberries? I used dried cherries. “Adam!” you might say. “What are you? Some kind of thorn in the side of society, trying to topple the status quo?” To that I say, “Hey, I’m just your average every day food blogger who happens to like dried cherries more than dried cranberries.” Especially when they pop up in these chocolate cherry poppyseed cookies.
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At its most basic level, cooking is playing with fire. And as anyone who was ever a kid knows, lighting things on fire can be fun? But dangerous. But fun? Fast forward to the me of today, and now I have no desire to light things on fire, but sometimes I have the desire to get my vegetables really charred over a hot flame. And now that I’m the proud owner of a carbon steel pan (see here), I decided to put it to work this weekend and make a recipe from Sheela Prakash’s upcoming cookbook, Salad Seasons; a recipe for scorched sugar snap peas with burrata.
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We all have our ride-our-die recipes. These are the recipes we love above all others, the recipes that we’d go to hell and back for, the recipes that we want chiseled into our gravestones. In my particular case, I have two: the cavatappi with sun-dried tomatoes that I talk about all the time, and this almond cake… which I also talk about all the time. It’s a recipe that I first wrote about back in 2004 (!) when I made it with my friend Lisa in the kitchen of my Chelsea apartment, back when I was a grad student at NYU. Since then, I must’ve made this recipe at least a hundred times. It’s my go-to dessert in almost any and every situation and it always dazzles. And I’m doing a new post about it now because I want to really emphasize the point: this is a recipe that you need in your repertoire.
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The pandemic really changed people’s relationship to beans. In the time before we were all locked into our abodes, bored out of our minds, beans had a negative connotation; as in “that’s not worth a hill of beans” or “you’re full of beans.” Now being full of beans is a good thing. People look at heirloom dried beans like they’re looking at jewels; and getting a membership to the Rancho Gordo Bean Club is harder to get than a membership to The Soho House. Not to toot my own horn (though tooting comes easily when you’re eating a lot of beans), but I was way on the heirloom bean bandwagon way before it was cool. I was cooking Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallards back in 2012. And my cabinets have always been filled with the good stuff; most recently, Borlotti Beans from Italy (via Gustiamo) which I transformed into this robust but springy Borlotti Bean Soup with Swiss Chard.
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Here’s the thing about my Jewish childhood: I grew up eating lox, I grew up eating eggs, and I grew up eating onions (lots and lots of onions), but I didn’t grow up eating matzo brei. What can I say? It was a blindspot in my otherwise very Jewish upbringing. And it’s a shame because matzo brei — the Jewish version of migas, with matzo replacing the tortilla chips — is a wonderful way to stretch your scrambled eggs in the morning, to use up leftover matzo from Passover, and to turn both things into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Take, for example, this matzo brei with lox, eggs, and onions; a tribute to my dad’s favorite Jewish deli breakfast order. It’s a breakfast that anyone, Jewish or not, would have a hard time saying no to.
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Banana bread is a great way to pretend you’re that eating something virtuous when, really, you’re eating cake. That’s what makes this chocolate banana bread, from Jessie Sheehan’s Snackable Bakes (my new favorite baking book), such a treat. There’s no pretense here about “healthfulness” or “low-calories” or “gluten-free” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s basically chocolate cake mashed up with banana bread with all of the best qualities of each.
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