I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and saw this Smitten Kitchen post:
It was for the Leite’s Consummate Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe, but I initially mistook the chocolate chips for blueberries. When I found out they were not blueberries, I was disappointed. While I’m sure Deb’s chocolate chip cookies are wonderful, my brain latched onto the idea of a blueberry-studded cookie. I mean, why not? Why not put blueberries into a cookie?
So I did.
It has been a rough week. A little over a month ago, I adopted a little green cheek conure named Turnip. He was energetic, sweet, charming, and an absolute weirdo — but long story short, despite the weeks and weeks of working with him (on my own and with a parrot behavior specialist), he was unhappy whenever I’d have to leave him to go to work, run errands, or basically do anything other than be right there with him. He apparently made a big fuss whenever I was gone, and so he had to be rehomed for the sake of his own sanity and that of my neighbors.
We had bonded fantastically, to the point where if he was getting outside time and I left the room to go attend to something else and took “too long” to return, he’d come searching for me. There have been more than one occasion when I was in the kitchen washing up only to find him crawling up my leg like a little feathery Spider-Man. Awwww.
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.
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.
This was a productive weekend. I finally hung up the the little raincloud mobile I made…
…along with two paper lamps from the Japanese supermarket.
Then, I drilled drainage holes into my darling Anthropologie “Perch planters.” The store had a 20% off sale recently, and I checked out with a whole mess of fish-shaped planters because that’s the kind of person I am.
Aside: why don’t more cute planters come with drainage holes? Having those makes a huge difference in plant mortality. I mean, let’s not even talk about the Terrible Thyme Tragedy of 2013, or the Great Succulent Massacre of 2014 — for me, the grief is still too near.
Planters need outlets for water runoff or else you risk overwatering your plants (which will kill them), or underwatering them for fear of overwatering (which will also kill them). Now all the planters I buy get drainage holes punched into them.
I don’t have a clever segue planned, so I’ll just abruptly drag us back to the point of this post: I also spent the weekend baking a tasty carrot cake.
My mind is in the tropics, with sand between the toes and an umbrella drink clutched in hand. Two weekends ago, I was in the Bahamas with my friend Sam, taking my first beach trip since I studied abroad in Sydney seven years ago, despite having reassured myself every month since then that a seaside retreat would come soon, so very soon. Sorry, self — I misjudged.
Once the beach was within sight, I stripped off my oversized gingham shirt like it was on fire and sprinted into the waves to do some hardcore frolicking.
I didn’t even stop to check for sharks.
Speaking of which, dressing for the beach is so easy because it’s just 1) bathing suit and 2) something to cover that bathing suit. But in Seattle, it’s back to pants. Ugh. Pants, you guys. PANTS.
Indulge me while I share some vacation snaps with you all, seeing as how my nice tropical tan will soon fade now that I’m back to spending 8+ hours a day indoors in an office. Just let me have this.
My birthday was this past weekend, and I had a great time thanks to a wonderful dinner hosted by my friends and coworkers at Il Terrazzo Carmine (if you want the best clams and linguine in the city, that is the place). I also had boxes of treats sent to my home from my out-of-town friends and family, and who doesn’t like mail, especially if said mail contains cookies?!
I’m sure my heart did a Grinch-style “grow three sizes” thing, which was welcomed after a particularly rough week. So in case any of my Houston, Seattle, Atlanta, wherever lovelies are reading this — thank you from the bottom of my heart for making all of my years wonderful, and I look forward to spending yet another one with all of you.
Now that we have the sentimental crap out of the way, let’s get down to the really important business: cake.
Last week, my boyfriend and I broke up. The sudden change left me hollowed and lost.
I know what I’m feeling is nothing new. That’s why what Shakespeare wrote about coping is as relevant now as it was 400 years ago: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’erwrought heart and bids it break.”
Take torch songs, for instance. There is solace in the over-the-top and drippy lyrics because it’s like Bonnie Raitt just gets you when all the logic and well-intentioned advice in the rational world doesn’t. She just gets how it feels to love someone so completely, and to try so hard, but to have it not be enough for that someone to stay. She just gets the incessant thoughts that plague you: What if I did something different? What if I were prettier, thinner, funnier, smarter, anything-er? Does he even miss me, or did he already forget? She just gets the inconsolable grief that follows. She just gets what it’s like to feel as if you’ve been thrown away.