You're making your pie dough! Go on, grab your butter. I'll wait for you. We're doing it together. Right now. I promise you it's easy. And it will feel so good tucking these rounds into your freezer, and crossing off that to-do! Foolproof Pie Dough Correction! Last week, I shared a recipe and method for making a double batch of the peasant bread. Many of you noticed that the flour amount was wrong: it should be 8 cups of flour (I had written 4). The updated recipe/method can be found here: 2x...
11 days ago • 1 min read
I bought my turkeys! And made my bread for the stuffing! And stashed them both in the freezer. Friends, I never do these sorts of things, but I've decided: This is the year. This is the year we are going to be so organized that when Thanksgiving morning arrives, we're going to be bored — we're going to be sitting around with our crosswords, twiddling our thumbs, sipping our punch, wondering what else we could do: meal prep for the following week? Well, we can dream anyway. Last week, I shared...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Friends, A few weeks ago I pulled up a Google doc I had made last December, roughly a week after Thanksgiving, with my notes from the occasion. Here they are: Turkey was delicious. It was done in 1 hr. 50 minutes. Gravy wasn’t very thick when first making it, but it thickened right up on Thanksgiving. Loved the roasted turkey stock, Gourmet’s old recipe, used it in everything: potatoes, stuffing, gravy. Mixed pie fillings on Tuesday. Parbaked the crusts on Wednesday morning. Baked the pies...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Friends, Earlier this week I made a pot of this roasted butternut squash and garlic soup. It's a very simple recipe calling for mostly three ingredients —butternut squash, garlic, and stock — and what I love about the recipe is this: in the time it takes for the squash and garlic to roast in the oven, the stock — the vegetable stock — can materialize stovetop. If you've never made vegetable stock, I think you will be so pleased by the process and result: It's made with scraps! It's full of...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
... Friends, it's both 🎉 (If you are confused (hi mom 👋), here is some context: "the dress".) I spent yesterday afternoon sitting on a metal bleacher watching a high school soccer game surrounded by parents wearing heated vests, pulled-up hoodies, and hats. It was sunny but breezy, quintessential fall weather, and by the time the game ended, I was chilled to the bone. I returned home, cranked up the oven, chopped up some cauliflower, and pulled out two spices I rely on a lot this time of...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi Friends, A few months ago I opened Joe Yonan’s latest book, Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking, and was immediately struck by a recipe for romesco sauce. It called for placing all of the essential components — peppers, tomatoes, unpeeled garlic, stale bread, and almonds — on a sheet pan, roasting them all together; then puréeing them with smoked paprika, vinegar, and olive oil. If you’ve made romesco sauce before, you know it often calls for roasting and peeling peppers first, a step...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Friends, hello! Yesterday a dear old friend arrived on the train from NYC with a dozen bagels and three tubs of cream cheese. It was lunchtime, and we went to town, slicing and smearing and topping them with what feels like the last tomatoes of the season. For dinner, we had pizza topped with blistered sungolds aside charred broccolini over Romesco, made with a mix of peppers and cherry tomatoes. This is a terrible photo, but it was delicious: All of this is to say that the tomatoes (and the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Friends, hello! And happy fall. Earlier this week my mother-in-law dropped off a bag of apple cider donuts from our favorite spot, Riverview Orchards. One bite of the warm, cinnamon-sugar shrouded treat sent me straight into fall-baking mode, and I drafted a weekend baking agenda: apple Dutch baby for breakfast, Bolzano Apple Cake for dessert, skins-on applesauce for snacking in between. Next week a friend is coming to town, and I'll be making the above-pictured French apple tart, which looks...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Well Friends, the baguettes have arrived: not in time for the Paris Olympics; not in time for Labor Day Weekend; not even in time for last weekend, as I had been so hopeful they would. Alas, here they are: crusty and open crumbed and just in time for... soup season? Hooray! This is a long and nerdy post, but it had to be — in order to explain the reason for the three methods outlined in the post, I had to explain the science behind them, as much for me as for anyone. I was going to wait to...
2 months ago • 1 min read