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Clams with White Wine, Sweet Corn, and Basil

If you were to do a graph–and I’m not a graph person, so you’d have to help me out here–measuring the effort you put into a dinner vs. the pleasure you get from eating it, chances are there’d be a real corollary between the work put it in and the pleasure received (see, for example, lamb merguez with eggplant jam). Every so often, though, there’s an outlier: a recipe that’s so incredibly easy, so simple to put together, it doesn’t make sense that the results should taste as good as they do, but they do. And I’d wager that of all the recipes that fit into this tiny category, the ones at the very apex of “easy to do” and “good to eat” are recipes involving mussels and clams.

The Corn Cookie

Delaying gratification is an exercise few food lovers can comprehend. We nibble the hors d’oeuvres before the guests arrive, we gobble up the bread basket before the waiter puts pad to pen, we’re ready for seconds while most people are still on their firsts. Which is why I deserve some credit for not devouring the Corn Cookie from Momofuku Milk Bar on my walk home from the East Village last week.

Summer in Winter

December is a deceptive month. You have the Christmas songs and the decorations and the temperature goes up and down and hints, rather cruelly, that maybe, just maybe, it won’t be a bitter cold winter after all. Then January hits and you’re walking down the street with your nose falling off from frostbite and you curse yourself for ever trusting December in the first place.

On one of those bitter cold days, then, I have just the meal for you. I call it my Summer in Winter dinner and it does very little to warm you up, but it will conjure thoughts of hot summer days and will make you so happy with memories of warm summer fun you won’t notice the icicles dangling from your private parts.

Is this better?

For those of you who told me to resize my pictures, my wonderful design team–Leah & Justin–walked me through the process and now we can compare the results. This is how a picture used to appear on my site:

And this is what it looks like when I resize it in iPhoto to have a 425 width before uploading to Flickr:

IMG_2.JPG

Is the second one better? To me they look exactly the same–but I’m not very image savvy.

And in case you’re wondering what you’re looking at–last week I made a vegetarian chili I found on Epicurious (recipe here) and served it with Dorie Greenspan’s magnificent cornbread muffins, a recipe I almost made again today (which you can find here on Serious Eats).

Elise’s Fritters & An Heirloom Tomato Salad

Do I hold the record for fastest re-blogged recipe? Probably not. Elise put up her recipe for spicy corn fritters on August 12th, I made them “today” (technically yesterday) August 13th, and now it’s 12:22 AM and I’m blogging about it on August 14th (my mom’s birthday: happy birthday mom!) But no matter. The point is, these corn fritters are truly excellent and a cinch to make. Head to your local farmer’s market to load up on corn and then do what I did: buy a basket of strange looking heirloom tomatoes and make a little salad to serve next to the fritters. Just add olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper and basil if you have it. That’s it! A perfect summer meal. Thanks Elise, your fritters make me twitter with joy.

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