I bought a jar of Jiff peanut butter yesterday. If you’re here, you probably already know I’m not exactly the Jiff kind of mom. My kids have been raised on freshly ground, natural (read: not sugar, no additives) peanut butter, and even that as a sometimes treat.
But I was a 1980’s Jiff kid, through and through—Jiff on white Wonder bread, with Smucker’s grape jelly. Honestly, what is better?
Read MoreIf you saw my dissertation on bananas as rations, you know that I likely still have several bananas hanging around, brown and fragrant and ready for —you guessed it—more panckes!
Read More2020 was supposed to be the year of the Lasagna. Currently, it’s looking more like the year of the bean (or rice, or insert-any-other-pantry ingredient needed to get through a three week quarantine at home). Beans are great, but how many of you can get your kids to eat beans two nights in a row? Not me.
With very few exceptions, we’re all home with our kids for, like, weeeeeeeks—and it seems to me like they are ALWAYS hungry. Lasagna is the kind of food that can keep a family fed for many nights in a row, happily. But it has other perks, too: namely, that you can prepare the whole thing a day before, and store it in the fridge overnight to have ready to pop in the oven an hour before dinner (just before the kids start to whine)…
Read MoreDid anyone else grab bananas by the armful on their last half-calm, half-frantic cruise through the grocery, that last time you went solo, the kids still in school. Maybe you kept your gloves on the whole time—the Coronavirus was already getting real, but not quite in your own backyard yet. Maybe you still bought strawberries and kale, but just in case everyone was right, you still stocked up on rice and beans and pasta and all the 28-oz cans of San Marzano tomatoes your shelves could fit. And bananas, obscene amounts of bananas.
Read MoreTiramisu is my dad and my husband’s favorite dessert--two of the people I love feeding most. But I didn’t make it for years, somehow recalling it from culinary school as a laborious task. How wrong I was. One night, I decided not to bring home the tempting piece hanging around in the Italian bakery window I passed on my way home from work, and instead make it myself. It was a slam dunk.
News flash: tiramisu is not only easy (provided you’re not making ladyfingers yourself), it is a built-in make-ahead. You can make this a day ahead, or even two, and still come out looking like an absolute star the day you serve it. Try it for yourself.
Read MoreI’m a bundt girl. Like, if my twenties were three-layer sponge cakes with silky butter creams and fresh cascading flowers, the following decade has been more bundt—still beautiful, but wildly unfussy—the kind of cake that turns heads with its smarts, as well as its style.
There have been plenty of layer cake holidays in my years— and years for epic bouche de noels with lovingly crafted meringue mushrooms— but this year I’m craving something a bit fairy tale, like Christmas in Brugge or a small German village. A cake that’s more Hansel and Gretel than Marie Antoinette.
Enter this all-butter-bundt, flecked with chocolate and spiked with whiskey. It’s tender and moist, but with enough structure that it can be wrapped and gifted to neighbors and friends in the days ahead. A brown-paper-package tied up with string, with the heady aroma of chocolate—that, to me, is Christmas.
Read MoreHow many of you cookie swap? Well, I’d be lying if I said I’d been to a cookie swap in the last five years, but it was one my favorite thing about holidays growing up. My mom was a cookie swap queen. And by that I mean, mostly, she baked her standard pale and crispy and perfectly uniform sugar cookies in the shape of bells and holly and trees and mittens, and let us sprinkle on the sugar, dutifully took them to the church cookie swap the first Sunday in December, and came home with a box overflowing with two dozen snowballs (Mexican Wedding Cookies), Peanut Butter Blossoms, homemade toffee, and in later years, those little round pretzels with melted chocolate and M and M’s meant to look like red-nosed reindeer. You can pop back several of those in just one bite.
Read MoreThe other day, I fielded a VERY IMPORTANT question via Instagram about my Chocolate Chip Cookies for Modern Times: DO THEY BLONDIE?
Why, yes! I hadn’t thought of it because, frankly, blondies are often too dry or too sweet or just a bit too meh for my taste. But, the potential of blondies is obvious: uniformly moist, chewy cookies with relatively little crust (unless you choose an edge piece). And in the vein of easy and modern (as my cookies promise to be)—blondies are the even faster, even easier answer.
Read MoreYou’re going out on the limb when you set out to makeover the world’s most iconic cookie, especially one you’ve already somewhat famously madeover before. But, I’ve decided not to take cookie baking so seriously in my next decade of life, and that’s just how these Chocolate Chip Cookies for Modern Times came to be in my new book, Every Day is Saturday. I wanted o have a little fun and make something beautiful, super satisfying, overtly chocolatey while still a smidge toward healthyish on the cookie barometer…
READ ON FOR THE RECIPE.
Read MoreThere is so much I love about chocolate cake, starting with the fact that I’m sure it’s the first cake I ever ate, the kind of cake my mom always, always baked on our birthdays as children, and later, carted to us across the country (literally) in her double decker Tupperware cake carrier when we moved far from home.
Too often, I find the kinds of chocolate cakes at birthday parties or events spongy and bland, not chocolaty enough to satisfy, not toothsome in the way I believe a cake absolutely should be. Not so this cake, which comes to us from Odette Williams, from her new book, Simple Cake. Skip on down for the recipe, below.
Read MoreImagine your dreamiest chocolate sweet—the thing you’d eat with abandon if you could do so without consequence—if toothaches and stomach aches and snug waistbands were just the made up things of terrible fairy tales. Mine would be a Flødeboller, these chocolate dreams pictured above—though, I only recently learned that is what they’re called. I knew it in childhood simply as a chocolate-coated marshmallow treat—but not just any marshmallow—it would have to be an pillowy, airy, freshly made marshmallow without even the faintest resemblance to the kind you find in a bag (I’ll skip those all together, thank you). And not just any chocolate coating—the chocolate coating would be thin and snappy, and give to the slightest pressure from the tooth—made with the highest quality dark chocolate you can find (I link to one of my favorites for baking, below).
Read MoreThere is only one thing, in my opinion, that needs to be made on the week of Valentine’s day, and that is anything containing chocolate (and lots of it). It could be big or small, fancy or simple, but for my taste, it should come as close to an elevated form of a pure chocolate truffle as humanly possible. This tart is one I developed ages ago for my very first book, but it has stood the test of time, and lives up brilliantly to the call. Thanks to its press-in crust (no rolling or pastry mastery required), it couldn’t be simpler. The inside, little more than a glorified ganache, set and baked with an egg, is pure chocolate bliss. You’ll need a tart pan with a removable bottom, and the best chocolate bricks or bars you can find, and the rest is as simple as is gets.
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