milk – The Kitchen Illiterate

Dorie’s Cheese Souffle

Whew. The last two weeks, nay, the past month has been crazy nuts. We have been BUSY. There’s been traveling, and hiking, and visiting with friends and family. There’s been working and more working. There has been stress, but thankfully, there has also been plenty of laughter to alleviate some of it, and there has also been some darn good food here and there along the way.

Like this souffle. I made this weeks ago, right before things got hectic, and I’ve been waiting, sometimes less than patiently, to share it with you. If you’ve ever thought of making a souffle, and pushed the idea aside thinking it’s too hard, think again. I, too, left my souffle dreams unfulfilled because I thought I wasn’t up to the task. They have a reputation as demanding and persnickety, and I’m not always good with persnickety. But this was surprisingly easy. And wow, delightful. It made an ordinary Sunday night dinner feel so special.
Continue reading Dorie’s Cheese Souffle

Turnip Soup with Greens from Greens

I have recently become a little bit addicted to cookbooks. Awhile ago, I realized (duh) that I could check them out from the library, and decided that was an excellent way to test drive a book to see if I would really cook from it before shelling out the big bucks. Of course, what I discovered is that I’m very likely to fall in love with a book, even if the likelihood it would make its way off the shelf often is nill. That’s what happened with The Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown.
Continue reading Turnip Soup with Greens from Greens

Greek Frittata

Frittatas are like the easier version of quiche. Just as much eggy goodness, no need to roll out pie dough. They make for a simple, quick dinner, and are perfect paired with a light green salad. You might be more familiar with the frittata’s role at the brunch table: I assure you, it plays well at any meal. What makes this such a stellar workhorse? You can do anything with a frittata. You can throw in whatever bits and pieces you have floating around in your refrigerator and chances are it will be delicious. Versatility is the name of the game.
Continue reading Greek Frittata

Chicken and Dumplings

While a California winter isn’t as wintry as New England, or even Walla Walla, we’ve been getting our fair share of damp chill lately. But unlike the onset of winter in Boston, the Bay Area winter doesn’t fill me with dread. I’m actually loving it: the damp and the fog, the drizzly rain, and the grey chill that suggests a coat, but doesn’t require ankle-length wool overcoats, scarves, and hats. I think it’s just perfect. The best part is that it’s just cool enough to make me crazy cozy winter foods, like chicken and dumplings.
Continue reading Chicken and Dumplings

Celery Root Soup with Pomegranate and Bacon

I got my hands on my first every celery root last week, when it made its homely appearance in our CSA box. I felt a little intimidated by the thing. It looks so tough. I really wasn’t sure what to do with it. I put it in the crisper and pretended it wasn’t there for a few days. Then I came across this recipe for Celery Root Soup in Gourmet Live, and I knew what I had to do. It was time to face the celery root.

Celery root is also called celeriac, but that makes me think of a disease, which you really don’t want to think about in relation to food…which means I probably shouldn’t bring that up…moving on. It is not, as I once thought, the root of a common celery plant. You probably already knew that. It’s very knobby looking and gnarled, and for those of us use to more suburban vegetable offerings, but celery root can be a bit of a mystery. I had no idea what this thing would smell like or taste like, or how it would cook. Luckily, once you break past its daunting exterior, the celery root isn’t challenging at all.
Continue reading Celery Root Soup with Pomegranate and Bacon

Chocolate Pudding with a Little Kick

We were driving back from Emeryville on Friday, after eating some extremely delicious sandwiches from the Vesta Flatbread truck. I was torturing poor Sean with my recent fascination with 1970s radio hits (the 60s, 70s, and 80s radio station on Pandora is my new favorite thing). KC and the Sunshine Band came on the radio, and all I could think of were Jell-O commercials. And then, then I wanted pudding. My brain works in mysterious ways.
Continue reading Chocolate Pudding with a Little Kick

Chicken in Milk

You know when you bookmark a recipe but don’t get around to trying it for years, and when you finally do, you curse yourself for waiting so long to discover this new, most amazing meal? That’s what happened with this chicken. I saw this recipe on The Kitchn over two years ago, and Faith Durand, the woman who posted the link, was so effusive about its awesomeness I bookmarked it immediately. And then forgot about it completely.
Continue reading Chicken in Milk

Wine and Dine: Bolognese

I’ve always loved the idea of spending a Sunday afternoon with a bubbling pot of tomatoey ragu sitting on the stove, and last weekend, I finally did it. You can read about my Sunday Supper Bolognese at the Union Bulletin’s Wine and Dine Blog, where I’m now writing a weekly (roughly) column about my cooking adventures.
Continue reading Wine and Dine: Bolognese

Grandpa’s Favorite Spice Cake

My Grandparents both passed away this last April. Their deaths were unexpected: Both were pretty healthy for being 80 years old, and had just returned from spending the winter with my parents in San Diego, which they’ve been doing every year for the last 15 years. My Grandma had a stroke one spring afternoon while out tending her garden, and a week later, my Grandpa passed away of a heart attack. It’s a blessing that neither of them suffered, that they didn’t have to endure years of failing health and illness, that they lived together in their home until the end, and that they were surrounded by family in the days and weeks before they passed. But these blessings come with the sadnesses of unanticipated loss: There are so many things I never got to ask them, never got to learn, never got to understand about their histories, and their lives together.

Like most people, a lot of my family memories revolve around shared meals and food: beer cheese soup and summer sausage sandwiches every Christmas Eve; baking pies with Grandma in the summer and anticipating the scraps of dough, baked with cinnamon and sugar, as a treat; watching Grandpa grind potatoes with his old hand-cranked grinder for his famous potato pancakes; dusting Grandma’s funnel cakes, fresh out of the fryer, with powdered sugar; spreading peanut butter and honey over fried bread dough and calling it dinner. And even though I have countless kitchen memories shared with them, when I came across my Grandma’s ring of faded and smudged recipe cards in her kitchen last spring, I realized how many more family stories there were to share that I am never going to know about. Grandma’s recipes were the only thing I really wanted when my aunts and uncles started cleaning out their house.
Continue reading Grandpa’s Favorite Spice Cake

Swiss Chard and Red Pepper Gratin

What? Another gratin? Has the kitchen really gotten this boring? Well, actually no. This gratin couldn’t be more different from last week’s Sweet Potato and Spinach Gratin. In fact, I’m not even really sure that this is a gratin. It seems a lot more like a frittata, but if the New York Times wants to call it a gratin, who am I to argue?

I bookmarked this one a year and a half ago, and every time I came across it subsequently, it just didn’t catch my attention the way it had at first. But this week, for some reason, it stood out. I think it was the red peppers. I buy red peppers so infrequently in the winter that I can’t even remember the last time I had them. But the red peppers at the produce market last weekend were so brilliantly red I couldn’t resist them. And I was intrigued by what looked like a frittata with rice, which I’ve been eating a lot more of lately, so I decided I had to try it. I only wish I’d tried it sooner.
Continue reading Swiss Chard and Red Pepper Gratin