Roses are red
Violets are blue
And chocolate is brown.
Poetry: I am bad at it.
Buuuuut Valentine’s Day is coming up! Or as I like to call it, Discount Candy Eve. And because Chris Evans still hasn’t shown up at my door bearing many treats in his big, strong arms (very rude, Chris, why do you hurt me), I guess I’ll be doting upon the next best Valentine’s Day date: myself. And if there’s one thing I know I like, it is chocolate.
Awww shucks, I shouldn’t have.
Hello, friends! I trust all of you spent your long Thanksgiving weekend eating excessive amounts of food (as is one’s patriotic duty on the last Thursday of November). I made five dishes — three of which were potato-based — and spent it at home alone marathon watching The Great British Baking Show. And yes, I planned it that way, and yes, it was relaxing and glorious and no one was around to say anything about the fact that I chose to drink my wine out of a tumbler with a bendy straw.
But now, it’s time to get cracking because the holiday season insanity has begun! If you’ve got many a potluck to attend, consider making pie as your contribution. You can make it ahead of time, transporting them isn’t as precarious as transporting a crock pot full of scalding hot brisket, and there are as many varieties of delicious pies to choose from as the day is long.
Confession: I am not very good at making pies. Or rather, I am not very good at making pie crusts. But I am a firm believer of homemade pie crusts no matter how rubbish they may end up looking (and trust me, I’ve made some pretty rubbish-looking ones) because they will always, always taste better than the premade, store-bought kind. Trust me. You can do this.
This is a chess pie. I don’t know why it’s called that and am far too lazy to Google it myself, so you’ll have to do that investigation on your own. But I do know that it’s something I’ve had a few times when I lived in Texas, where non-fruit pies are commonplace year-round. The filling is a sweet golden custard, with just a little bit of crunch on the top. All of this is cradled inside a thin buttery crust. Yum.
Okay, that title is only there because it’s almost Halloween. This isn’t that spooky, but what you see here is a green cake, made without dyes or magic spells or any other kind of tomfoolery. That pallor is all natural, baby, thanks to the pandan leaf.
Pandan, also called screwpine, is a common “flavoring agent” (meaning it infuses things, but you don’t really eat the leaf itself — kind of like a bay leaf) in Southeast Asian cuisine, and one of my favorite pandan employments is in pandan chiffon cake. It’s fragrant in the way that excellent Jasmine rice is fragrant, and just a little coconut-y. In fact, cooks often bump up the coconut-ish flavor with additional coconut milk, which I definitely did here.
Cooking with whole pandan can be kind of an ordeal, but it is absolutely worth the effort if you’re always looking for a barely-sweet, light, almost angel food-like cake to have in the mornings with your coffee or tea. If your city has a big Asian grocery store — preferably a Chinese or Vietnamese one because my Japanese supermarket didn’t have this, but the Chinese one did — go there and look around the frozen vegetables section; that’s where I found the frozen pandan leaves I used here. With whole pandan, you can get that beautiful green hue without food coloring! Pandan extract can also work when whole pandan isn’t available, but be warned that it can also be a bit cloying and artificial-tasting. Bummer.
The trick is cut your pandan leaves up into half-inch pieces, then blitz it all in a blender with some water. The recipe I followed (linked below) said to only use a few tablespoons of water, but my blender pitched a fit over that so I ended up using about a cup of water for the entire thing and still got plenty of pandan flavor and green coloring.
I did a little decorating today, and I have to say that my kitchen prep station is much cheerier now for it. I’m sure you’ll recognize the quote, as it is also on the right side of this little blog. Ah, The Hobbit. How right you are.
I’ll be going on a little journey of my own this Thursday, though I do hope it is nowhere near as perilous as Bilbo’s trek to The Lonely Mountain, and that my own adventure will have 100% fewer giant spiders. I’m going to do the four-day hike from Cusco to Machu Picchu with a friend! I’m both excited and terrified, but you guys, I am going to hug so many llamas.
My friend Sara came over for dinner and to drop off Gregory, who will be accompanying me to Peru as my trusty sidekick.
Gregory.
I whipped this up for us, and it’s a pasta dish I’ve made many times before (though usually with shrimp). I did learn on this occasion, though, that not all jalapeños are created equal because whoooooooweeeee this one was spicier than any of the others I’ve ever used. So even though the recipe below says to use a whole jalapeño, it may be better to make sure your pepper doesn’t taste like the Fire of Mount Doom before tossing the entire thing in.
When I was in my third year at Boston University, I worked part time at the now-defunct Pie Bakery in Newton. It was there that I learned that the city is wonderfully calm during pre-dawn hours, that some people are very mean before they get their first cup of coffee, and that ricotta and peaches go together like Chris Evans and my bed, heyooooooooo hahaha sorry I’ll show myself out it’s been a long (short?) week.
Peach season is winding down now that summer is coming to an end, and while I usually bake a massive peach pie to give everyone’s favorite stone fruit one last hurrah, this year I decided to do a light chiffon cake filled with creamy ricotta and sweet peaches instead. Gotta shake things up a bit, you know?
I wrote multiple drafts of this post, all trying to be a little funny, a little witty, a little ha ha ha. But the fact is I don’t particularly feel like any of those things today; I just feel tired, but also very much relieved.
After only a few months in my beautiful apartment, I packed all my things up again and hauled it upstairs to the top floor into yet another new beautiful apartment — this time with a view and without a disruptive upstairs neighbor who had made it impossible for me to sleep for the last four months. Best of all, Disruptive Neighbor proved disruptive to his own roommate and got kicked out anyway.
But moving twice in one year — nay, in one season — is a bit much, and I am spent. I speed-unpacked just to get things feeling like home right away, but I’m still very much in new surroundings and very much craving some comfort in the form of foodstuffs that I can stuff into my maw as I melt my exhausted carcass onto the couch and fire up Hawaii Five-0 on the ol’ Netflix.
My mom grew up in Vietnam,* which means that when she craved comfort food, it was typically some kind of Vietnamese fare from her own youth. As she was the primary Provider of Food for our family, my siblings and I grew up eating a lot of these things with her. This means despite being surrounded by the cafeteria pizzas, pot roasts, and mac and cheeses of my Texas upbringing, a lot of my comfort foods are actually Vietnamese too. Funny how that works.
Most weekends, we’d go visit a tiny Vietnamese bakery next to the Asian grocer, and she’d pick up a bag of bánh tiêu, or Vietnamese hollow fried bread. They are shamelessly greasy because they’re deep-fried, though it’s no worse than a donut. They’re also just a little sweet, though not dessert-sweet by any means. In any case, they make a satisfying midday snack.
‘Tis the season for picnic-ready salads here in the ol’ U.S. of A, especially with July 4th coming up this weekend. And because nothing goes together with amateur pyrotechnic displays as well as easy-to-eat and easy-to-share food from a cooler, I’m here to help with a delicious garlic-filled pasta salad.
A bonus is that there is minimal stove time involved (just however long it takes to boil water and cook your pasta of choice) so you don’t have to sweat it out too much to put this together. This is vitally important when you live in a city where air conditioning is a luxury and not a given, despite outside temperatures regularly reaching rotisserie-levels. Seattleites insist that the heat wave will only last for about a month.
Another month, another cake! This one is for my friend Nicole — the same one who conquered her fear of cooking clams just a few weeks ago! Her birthday was this past weekend, so of course I had to provide her (and the office) with a celebratory cake. Any time you survive another year, it’s just cause to have a fête, if you ask me.
Nicole has a soft spot for puddings and custards, so I figured for her birthday, I’d try to capture the moist, rich qualities of those things with this: a citrus-y, spongy cake with soft ricotta filling. I used a combination of this recipe from The Life Harvest and this one from Tart to Heart.
Both are a take on the Italian dessert Schiacciata alla Fiorentina, though it seems like traditional recipes include yeast, whereas this one does not. I’ll certainly try the yeasted variety soon enough.
I know, I know. Two pasta recipes in a row? Am I some kind of madwoman?
I assure you that I’m not. Well, not that mad, anyway. I just really like pasta, you guys. Especially pasta that is clams and linguine.
This past weekend, my friend Nicole admitted that she had never cooked clams before and found the idea intimidating. “This will not do!” I cried, except in a much less dramatic fashion. So on Saturday, I picked up a bunch of manila clams from Taylor Shellfish Farms and Nicole came over to don a cute apron and help cook.
It’s nice to have a sous-chef!
The first time I cooked clams, I was nervous too, but it’s super easy. They cook really quickly, and if you’re worried about getting sick, just remember to toss out any clams that don’t open all the way after cooking; don’t force any open! The partly closed ones (or completely closed ones) were likely dead before you cooked them, and you don’t want to eat those. You can keep your clams alive and happy for up to a day by keeping them in the fridge, covered with a damp paper towel. Make sure they’re not in water, either.
I love shows where people travel around the world and eat delicious or weird (or delicious-weird) stuff. That kind of programming combines two of my favorite things: traveling and eating. I mean, if there was a travel-eating show that also included a 10-minute segment in every episode where Colin Firth just beats the tar out of various baddies whilst looking dashing? Might as well just call it Amy’s Favorite Show Ever: Don’t Bother Watching Anything Else, I Know I Won’t.
Don’t worry, this dish isn’t anything “weird-delicious,” though its source is from one of my favorite show hosts! Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods was definitely on my regular TV show rotation, and I keep up with his Twitter updates — mainly because he tweets about some interesting-sounding (and looking) dishes he eats at various restaurants all over the world. The other day, he tweeted out a recipe for “chitarra with broccoli rabe and lemony bread crumbs.” And uh, that sounded delicious, despite my not knowing what “chitarra” is, other than that it sounds a lot like an Avatar character.
Chitarra, or spaghetti alla chitarra, is an egg pasta that from what I can tell with my amateur pasta knowledge (gained entirely from consuming a lot of pasta), is about the same thickness as spaghetti, but is square-shaped instead of round. In my head, I call it “yellow square spaghetti,” which I’m sure I should never utter out loud to anyone who is actually a pasta connoisseur.