For someone who has spent the past two months bemoaning the
swirling heat vortex that is DC in the summer, you would think I’d have been
thrilled to see the food blogosphere explode into a panoply of apple-studded,
pumpkin-spiced foods on September 1. But no: now that it’s cool enough you can
go outside without instantly breaking into a sweat, I’m ready for summer 2.0.
Thankfully, the produce stands around here agree with me.
Sure, apples are starting to take up some real estate, but there are still
plenty of peaches and our CSA bag arrives stuffed with zucchini each week. I
appreciate zucchini for what it is: the tofu of the vegetable world. It plays
well with others ingredients and takes on whatever flavors and characteristics
you might want it to. This recipe plays with zucchini on two levels, first liberating
it from the cloyingly sweet quick breads you tend to see and then pairing it
with an old favorite, feta, as often seen in dishes from around the Mediterranean.
The result is a savory muffin that goes well with other late-summer produce
like eggplant, red peppers, and tomatoes. They’re good enough to make you want
to pause your fall fare and hold onto the last of summer for a bit longer.
Zucchini-Feta Muffins
Source: I Thought There Would Be Free Food
Makes 12 muffins
Active time: ~25 minutes; total time ~55 minutes
Ingredients:
1 medium zucchini, ~10 ounces or 292 grams
~4.5 ounces feta
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 eggs
1 scant cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F and grease a 12-cup muffin tin.
Trim the ends off of your zucchini and then
grate it using a box grater, large-holed microplane, or food processor. Working
with a handful of zucchini at a time and standing over your kitchen sink,
squeeze the zucchini in your fists until most of the liquid has run out. Repeat
with the remaining handfuls, then set all of the zucchini aside.
Crumble the feta into small chunks no larger
than a pencil eraser. You should have about one cup. Set aside.
Mix together the flours, cornmeal, baking
powder, salt, and black pepper in a large bowl.
Whisk together the eggs, milk, and vegetable oil
in a medium bowl.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients
and fold to combine them. When the ingredients are mostly combined, add the
zucchini and feta. Fold them into the batter until they are well distributed.
Divide the muffin batter evenly amongst the cups.
Bake for ~30 minutes, until lightly browned. Enjoy warm or toasted with a pat
of butter.
D.C. has been hot and steamy for months now, which means
that you have to be either dedicated or crazy to devote yourself to perfecting
a roast potato recipe. I am a bit of both, which helps explain why I’ve roasted
more than 10 pounds of spuds in the past few weeks.
My quest began when my chief recipe taster and I were visiting
my in-laws. We were planning a simple dinner of grilled salmon and asparagus, and
I decided to roast some potatoes to round out the meal. Easy, right? It didn’t
seem like the type of thing I needed a recipe for; I just tossed the taters
with some oil and salt and put them in a hot oven. But that approach only got
me so far. Although the potatoes did brown nicely, they were dry and didn’t
have much flavor. I wanted more—non-dry potato centers; dark-brown crusts; and
flavor that complimented rather than whispered or shouted.
The Internet quickly led me to a method that is apparently common
knowledge in England:
the key to perfect potatoes is to boil them before roasting. After boiling,
many recipes called for you to rough up the potatoes—usually by shaking them in
a bowl—to encourage a bit of starchiness that then crisps up nicely with the
help of heat and a lot of oil. The boiling method got me closer to my goal, but
most recipes I tried used too much oil, weren’t that much crispier, and still
didn’t have the flavor I was looking for. Instead, I cut the oil in my recipe
and borrowed a flavor-boosting trick from J. Kenji López-Alt: sauté garlic
and rosemary in olive oil, then strain them out and use the infused oil to roast
the potatoes; once the potatoes are done, toss them with the garlic and
rosemary. (This method keeps you from burning the garlic in the oven, which
would happen if you were to cook the garlic and potatoes together.)
Pounds of potatoes and weeks later, I finally had a recipe
good enough to impress my in-laws, easy
enough for a weeknight, and certainly worth the devotion.
Roasted Potatoes with
Garlic and Rosemary
Source: Inspired by J. Kenji López-Alt via Serious
Eats
Active time: ~30 minutes; total time: ~60 minutes
Serves 3–4 people
Ingredients:
1 1/2 pounds potatoes (I’ve used red potatoes
and fingerlings with success)
2 generous tablespoons olive oil
3–4 medium garlic cloves
Fresh rosemary, enough for 1 generous tablespoon
when finely minced
Salt & pepper, to taste
Directions:
Finely mince the garlic and the rosemary; set both
aside.
Give the potatoes a good scrubbing. If your
potatoes are small, about golf ball size, cut them in half; quarter them if
they’re larger.
Precook the potatoes. You can either put them in
a microwave-safe bowl and microwave them for ~7 minutes, stirring once or
twice, or boil them in a pot of salted water. Either way, they’re done when you
insert a cake tester (or the tip of a sharp knife) into the thickest part of
the potato and it meets with little resistance.
While the potatoes are cooking, preheat your oven
to 450°F.
Heat the olive oil, garlic, and rosemary in a
small skillet over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic starts
to brown. Don’t let it go too far—in fact, you might want to stop just before
you think the garlic is done. Remove the skillet from the heat and immediately
strain the garlic and rosemary out of the oil. Set the garlic and rosemary
aside.
Toss the potatoes with the flavored olive oil and
a hefty amount of salt (more if you microwaved the potatoes, less if you boiled
them in salted water).
Place the potatoes, cut-side down, on a cookie
sheet and put it into the oven. Roast the potatoes for at least 15 minutes
without moving them. After that, stir the potatoes occasionally, until they are
golden brown.
Tip the potatoes into a bowl and add the
reserved garlic and rosemary. Toss well to combine and serve immediately.
On our way home from visiting family several weeks ago, my
Chief Recipe Taster and I went on a bit of a pilgrimage to one of our favorite
places: Stateline Blueberries,
a blueberry farm just a few miles from Lake Michigan. Despite having widely
different childhoods, my Chief Recipe Taster and I both grew up eating
blueberries grown on the shores of Lake Michigan, and to this day will swear
until we’re, err, blue in the face that there are no better blueberries in the
country. They’re so good, in fact, that we may or may not have bought 30 pounds
and may or may not have arrived home with several pounds less than that.
I feel strongly that summer
fruits should be enjoyed as nature intended them—ripe and raw—so I was loath to
cook with any of our berries, even to make dessert. But I did make an exception
for one thing: a pretty much foolproof blueberry tart. You blitz the tart dough
together in a food processor and then pat it into a pan, no rolling required,
and it takes only a few minutes to bake. While the tart shell is cooling, you
cook some of your blueberries until they’re a bit jammy and then fold in handfuls
more. Scatter a few fresh blueberries on top, let the whole thing cool for a
few minutes, and you’re done. The butter in the tart shell and a bit of lemon
zest heighten the flavor of the berries, rather than obfuscate it. Add a scoop
of vanilla ice cream on top and you have summer dessert perfection, even if you
didn’t get your blueberries from the Lake Michigan shores.
~5 1/2–6 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and
drained
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons lemon zest
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Directions:
Make the
tart shell: Put the flour, sugar, salt, and butter in the bowl of food
processor and process until the dough forms large clumps. This will take more
than a few pulses; keep going, and you’ll hear and see a change in the way the
dough comes together. That’s your cue to stop processing.
Transfer the dough into a 9-inch tart pan with a
removable bottom. Working from the center out, firmly press the dough down and
up the sides of the pan. Try to get it even, but don’t fuss if you can’t; just
make sure all of the pan is covered by dough.
Prick the dough with a fork and then put the
tart shell in your freezer for at least 15 minutes.
While the tart shell is chilling, center a rack
in the middle of your oven and preheat it to 375°F. When the tart shell is ready, place it in the oven and
bake it for 20–25 minutes, or until it’s golden. Let the shell cool while you
make the filling.
Make the filling: Place 1 1/2 cups of
blueberries and 1/4 cup water in a medium saucepan and bring the mixture to a
boil over high heat. Reduce the heat and simmer the berries until they begin
breaking down, 3–4 minutes.
While
the berries are cooking, mix together the cornstarch and 2 tablespoons of
water; add this to the berries in your saucepan and stir well to combine.
Add
the lemon zest and juice, sugar, and salt to your saucepan, stirring well before
increasing the heat to high and bringing the mixture to a boil. Once it boils,
reduce the heat and simmer the mixture, stirring all the while, until it begins
to thicken—this shouldn’t take more than a minute.
Take
the pan off the heat and add 3 1/2 cups of berries. Stir well to combine, then
pour the berry mixture into the tart shell. Smooth the berries with a spatula,
if needed, and then scatter on as many fresh blueberries as you’d like. Let the
tart cool in your refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before slicing and
serving.
I am a city girl through and through, but during the summer the suburbs sing a one-note siren song that has nothing to do with escaping the teeming masses or the asphalt-aggravated heat and everything to do with grilling. Where I live, apartment buildings are not allowed to have grills, no matter how petite, and every summer that regulation fills me with wistfulness for my misspent Midwestern youth, when grilling was the default cooking method from March to October.
Since I’m unwilling, at least for now, to trade the privileges of city living for suburbia—or the country, despite my occasional Green Acres-style fantasies—summer turns into one long “how little can we turn on the oven” competition. (Answer: not quite as little as I would like.) The season is a steady parade of dishes that require minimal cooking, one that could quickly get tedious if not for condiments like this cilantro-jalapeno pesto. It takes no more than 10 minutes to put together, and can be put to a myriad of uses: scrambled into eggs, an accompaniment to broiled fish, or our favorite—slathered onto whole-wheat ciabatta and loaded up with roasted veggies. If you’re lucky enough to have a grill, this pesto is still your friend; it goes equally well on virtually anything that comes off of a grill, no suburbs required.
Trim the bottom 1″ of stems off your
parsley and cilantro and discard. Roughly chop the rest of the herbs, stems and
all, and put them in the bowl of your food processor.
Trim the root ends off of the green onions, and
the top 1″ or so off the top. Roughly chop the onions and add them to the
food processor bowl.
Finally, chop the stem end off of the jalapeno(s).
De-seed them, if you prefer less heat, or just roughly chop them and add them
to the food processor.
Add the cashews and a drizzle of olive oil to the
food processor, then process until you get a paste. Stop, scrape down the bowl,
and add salt to taste. Process again, adding a bit more oil if needed to make
the contents into a paste.
Use immediately or refrigerate until ready to
eat.
A few weeks ago, my Chief Recipe Taster and I decamped from our
small city flat to visit my family in the house and the state where I grew up.
Going “home” is always mostly wonderful and a little bit difficult. Wonderful:
spending time with my family and enjoying the sublime beauty that is Michigan
in the summer. Difficult: seeing the city and state I grew up in seem to get a
bit poorer every time I visit; wrestling with the same tangle of love for the
place/deep desire to GTFO and see something new that I’ve wrestled with since
childhood.
“Home” might be emotionally complicated, but it’s worth it,
food-wise. In many ways, Michigan is still an agricultural state, and you see
that most in the summer when the farm stands are full of crisp-tender,
pencil-thin asparagus, spring onions, and lettuces. And the strawberries! We
happily picked and ate them by the handful, but I wanted something more,
something that took a few of the ingredients I grew up with and turned them
into something more than the sum of their parts.
That’s where this cake was born, a moistly decadent, almond paste-enriched batter that wraps around berries made even more flavorful by a brief stint in the oven. If that description doesn’t tantalize you, perhaps the fact that this cake requires almost no effort will—the batter is made entirely in the food processor. It’s quintessential summer effortlessness, but good enough to merit turning on your oven. Emotions notwithstanding, what could be simpler?
Strawberry-Almond Cake
Source: I Thought There Would Be Free Food
Makes one 8-inch round cake, serving ~8 people
Active time: ~20 minutes; total time: ~50 minutes
1/2 cup sugar
4 ounces almond paste
1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 cup strawberries, washed, hulled, and halved or quartered, if very large
Slivered almonds, to garnish
Directions:
Position a rack in the middle of your oven, then preheat it to 375°F. While you’re at it, butter and flour—or otherwise grease—an 8-inch cake plate or springform pan. This is also an excellent time to do a little mise-en-place, so get out and measure all of your other ingredients.
Cube the almond paste and add it, along with the sugar, to the bowl of a food processor. Process the paste and sugar until the paste is finely ground.
Add the dry ingredients—flour, baking powder, and salt—to the food processor and pulse to combine.
Add the wet ingredients—milk, oil, vanilla extract, and egg—and pulse until well combined. If the batter is very thick, you can add a little extra milk, one tablespoon at a time, until the batter is just thin enough to spread easily.
Scrape the batter into the prepared cake plate. Dot with strawberries and then scatter on the almonds.
Slide the cake into the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the top of the cake is lightly browned and a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out with just a few crumbs clinging to it. Serve plain, or gild the lily with a dollop of fresh whipped cream or scoop of vanilla ice cream.
I have a great fondness for the recipes that come printed on the back of packages. The cornbread recipe on the back of Quaker cornmeal? That was the first thing I ever baked, and despite having tried about 15 other varieties, it’s still my favorite. Ditto the peanut cookie recipe printed on JIF jars, even though I no longer eat JIF, and the oatmeal raisin cookies on the inside of oat canisters. I’ve made these recipes dozens of times, and they’ve always turned out perfectly. They’re the type of recipe that you can count on, whether you’re tired or crabby or only giving the project 37 percent of your attention. In my opinion, that’s because these recipes are the makers’ chance to provide you with an accident- and idiot-proof way to prepare something delicious with their product, and food manufacturers are smart enough to not mess that up.
Which is why I knew exactly what to do after panic-buying some buckwheat flour at the grocery back in March. There was no other flour on the shelves, I was running low at home, and that combination was stupefying enough that I felt compelled to buy buckwheat and chickpea flours, neither of which I had ever used.
Back home, my Chief Recipe Taster questioned precisely what I would do with said flours. I didn’t actually know myself, but a surreptitious glance at the package allowed me to save face. “I’ll make buckwheat crepes,” I said, attempting to hide my great fear of crepes, one of those things that have heretofore seemed too fussy to bother making myself. But I’d bought the buckwheat, which meant I had to use it, so a few weeks ago I embarked on a crepe-making adventure and was astonished to find that they’re dead easy. I served them with butter-sautéed leeks, the hardest part of which is cleaning the leeks, and eggs fried in the same pan as the crepes, once those were done, and if we hadn’t have had to do the dishes afterword, I’d have thought we were in a restaurant. I’ve made them numerous times since then, and they have yet to fail me. It’s a recipe that proves the rule: you can’t beat the recipe on the back of the box.
Buckwheat Crepes with Sautéed Leeks and Fried Eggs
Source: Pereg and I Thought There Would Be Free Food
Makes: ~8 crepes and serves ~4 people
Active time: 60 minutes; total time: 120 minutes
Note: This is my favorite way to enjoy these crepes, but they’re also very good with sautéed spinach; Gruyere and thinly sliced ham and apples; or spread with peanut butter and jelly.
Crepe Ingredients:
2 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup milk
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Sautéed Leeks Ingredients:
~2¼ pounds (1,000 grams) leeks
1 generous tablespoon butter
Salt, to taste
Eggs, for serving
Directions:
Make the crepe batter: Vigorously whisk together the eggs and olive oil until the mixture is smooth and largely homogenous. Add the milk and whisk to combine.
Add the buckwheat flour and salt, and whisk until you have a thin, smooth batter. It should be much thinner than pancake batter. Cover the batter and refrigerate it for at least one hour, or up to overnight.
Prepare the leeks: While the batter is resting, remove the top few inches of green from the leeks, as well as the root ends. Remove any leathery or papery outer skins from the leeks and either discard them or stick them in your freezer scrap bag to make vegetable broth later.
Halve the remaining leeks lengthwise, then rinse them thoroughly in cold water. Let them drain in a colander for a few minutes before chopping them width-wise into ¼”-thick sections.
Heat a skillet over medium heat. Once it’s hot, add the butter and let it melt before adding the leeks. Sauté them gently until softened, ~10-15 minutes, adding salt to taste.
Make the crepes: While the leeks are sautéing, set a crepe pan or large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. When the skillet is hot, add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, swirling to coat the pan. The oil should be hot and liquid, but not smoking.
Working quickly, add ~¼-⅓ cup of crepe batter to the pan and swirl it to spread the batter into a thin circle. Let the crepe cook until the top is firm and not tacky to the touch, and the underside is golden brown. Slide the crepe out of the pan and set aside. Repeat with the remaining batter.
Check in on the leeks—they should be soft, but not browned or dry. If needed, add a little water to keep them from sticking. Once soft, turn off the heat and let them sit until you’ve finished with the crepes.
When the crepes are done, heat a hefty glug of olive oil in the pan. When it’s hot, crack in as many eggs as you would like and as your skillet can hold, and fry them to your desired viscosity.
To serve, spread a crepe with some leeks and top with a fried egg.
I try not to speak in sweeping generalizations, but here comes a whopper of one: In bars, there are only two types of people. Cocktail people, and everyone else. By “cocktail people” I mean those who can saunter up to the bar, engage in an at least semi-literate conversation about the merits of different spirits in different drinks, and order something with a modicum of suaveness and certainty. Then there’s everyone else, and I’ll be the first to put myself in this camp; look for me in a bar and you’ll find me staring at the drink menu or blankly at the wall of offerings, unsure of what to order.
I blame the cocktails, really. At least in my experience, they’re invariably expensive, complicated, and one-note, always a little too sweet for my liking. They seem like something that any reasonably intelligent person should be able to knock together, but so many of them, particularly nowadays, seem to require a degree in chemistry to read and create, as well as a trust fund to buy all of the ingredients. In the face of all of that, wine seems a heck of a lot simpler.
But my candied citrus peel experiments left me with a lot of orangey simple syrup, and if I’m not the type of person to toss my orange peels in a bin, you’d better believe I’m not the type of person to pour perfectly good simple syrup down the drain. Given that there aren’t a lot of other options for simple syrup, my choice seemed obvious: devise a cocktail that required fewer ingredients than I have fingers.
And so the “Orange You Glad This Isn’t a COVID Pun” was born, thus completing a recipe trifecta: make the Braised Chickpeas with Tomatoes, Orange, and Rosemary; save the orange peels to make Candied Citrus Peel; and save the syrup to make this cocktail. You can make it with rum, which lends a light tropical note and goes down very smoothly, or bourbon, which is a bit kickier, and my preference. Either way, it’s a cocktail that should please you, whichever type of person you are.
Orange You Glad This Isn’t a COVID Pun?
Source: I Thought There Would Be Free Food
Makes 2 cocktails
Total time: 5 minutes
Ingredients:
2 ounces bourbon or rum
2 ounces orange juice
1 ounce simple syrup
Lemon juice, to taste (I like my cocktails quite tart, and use about 1/2 ounce)
A few dashes bitters
Ice
Candied citrus peel, to garnish
Directions:
Combine all ingredients except candied peel in a cocktail shaker. Shake for 10–15 seconds, or until your cocktail shaker feels appropriately chilled.
Strain into glasses, garnish, and drink immediately.
I try to eat only what’s in season, but occasionally find
myself undone by beautiful produce. This has happened not once, but twice, in
recent weeks. The first time, I was undone by a cardboard box heaped with
mandarins, their still-attached stems and leaves an tantalizingly glossy green;
the second time, by a pyramid of plump cara cara oranges. In both cases, I was
powerless to resist and subsequently glad that I didn’t—seasonality be darned,
those citrus fruits were outstanding; juicy and succulent with the perfect
amount of tang.
But each time I peeled a fruit and went to pitch the rind
into the bin, I hesitated. Really, it was guilt—it seemed like one type of
environmental sin to buy fruit out of season, and another one to chuck part of
it away, and my conscience simply couldn’t take it. So I saved the peels,
letting them accumulate in my refrigerator while I decided what to do with
them. The idea, when it came, felt a little bit audacious and a little bit
obvious: why not candy the peels? I spend weeks searching for candied peel
every Christmas to make fruitcake, and perhaps that annual scavenger hunt made
me think that candied peel would be difficult to make. But no! Like many of the
other things I like to make from scratch (bread, granola, pesto), all it takes
to make candied peel is a bit of time.
Some recipes call for you to cut up your preferred citrus
fruit—clementines, grapefruits, lemons, oranges—in order to harvest their
peels. This is certainly an option, but I opted to save the peels from our
regular consumption over the course of a week or two, collecting them in a
covered dish in the fridge. A few might dry out a bit, but in my experience
they don’t spoil quickly. When you’ve accumulated a fair number, let your
preference for bitterness and your available time guide your next steps. If you
don’t like bitter things, cut away with the pith; if you’re low on time or your
pith-peeling skills need work, skip it. Blanch the peels at least twice—more if
you don’t like bitterness—then boil them in a sugar syrup. Strain off and
reserve the syrup for cocktails, let the peel dry a bit, then bake with it,
freeze it, or eat it as we do, straight out of the jar. I think it tastes
delicious, but maybe that’s just the imagined flavor of absolution for eating
out-of-season fruit.
Candied Citrus Peel
Sources: I Thought There Would Be Free Food
Makes as much as you like
Active time: ~ 1 hour; total time: ~4 hours
Ingredients:
Accumulated citrus peels, any variety—I’ve used
clementines, grapefruit, mandarins, and several varieties of oranges
Water
White sugar
Directions:
If you want your citrus peels to be less bitter,
use a very sharp knife to carefully cut away and discard as much of the white
pith as possible without slicing into the peel.
Slice the peel into your desired width; the ones
in the photo above are about 1/4-inch wide, but I’ve also done them thicker or
thinner—it’s your choice.
Put the sliced peel into a heavy-bottomed saucepan
and add just enough water to cover. Set the pot on the stove over medium-high
heat and bring to a vigorous boil, then drain. (You can keep this
citrus-flavored water to make tea with, if desired). Repeat the blanching and
draining process once more.
Use a kitchen scale to weigh the amount of peel
you have. Add it back to your saucepan along with the same weight of sugar and
water. For example, if you have 300 grams of orange peels, combine them with
300 grams of white sugar and 300 grams of water.
Set the saucepan over medium heat. Let it come
to a boil, and then reduce the heat to low and simmer the peel until it is
soft—it shouldn’t be mushy, but still have a bit of toothsomeness—and nearly
translucent.
Drain the syrup from the peel, reserving the
syrup for later use (recipe coming next week). Set the peel on a wire rack to
dry until it is just tacky, which may take several hours.
At this point you can toss the citrus peel with
additional white sugar. If the peel isn’t dry enough, the sugar will absorb
into it; if it’s too dry, the sugar won’t stick. It’s a fine balance.
Whether you sugar the peel a second time or not,
I prefer to store my citrus peel in a glass jar in the refrigerator. It also
freezes well for several months.
Can we talk about chickpeas for a moment? They’re one of my
all-time favorite foods, largely due to their versatility: they can be hummus or
chana masala; their canning liquid can be used to make mousses and puddings. Chickpeas
are like tofu, when done well (yes, tofu
can be done well)—they take on the flavors of what they’re cooked with and
in that process become something more than the sum of their parts.
Apparently everyone discovered the wonder that is chickpeas, given how few of them I’ve seen in the grocery store over the past few weeks. I hope people are doing more than draining and sprinkling them over salads, which is quick and tasty but also quite a lot of wasted potential. With a modicum of effort and not much beyond pantry staples, chickpeas can become something nigh on transcendent. Braised with tomatoes and enlivened by oranges and rosemary, these chickpeas are a bit citrusy, a bit herby, and a lot delicious.
Braised Chickpeas
with Tomatoes, Orange, and Rosemary
Source: Adapted from Milk
Street Magazine
Serves ~6 people
Total Time: ~45 minutes
Ingredients:
Olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon honey, plus more for serving
2 29-ounce cans chickpeas, drained
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes or whole peeled
tomatoes, liquid reserved and solids chopped
1 medium orange (save the peel for the next two
recipes!)
1/2 medium red onion, thinly sliced
3 or 4 medium garlic cloves, minced
1 4-inch long sprig fresh rosemary
Salt and pepper, to taste
Fresh oregano and parsley for sprinkling, if
desired
Directions:
Heat a large Dutch oven over medium heat. Add
enough olive oil to lightly cover the bottom, then add the tomato paste and
honey. Cook, stirring often, until the tomato paste begins to deepen in color,
about 4 minutes.
Add the chickpeas and tomatoes (along with their
liquid, if you used whole tomatoes).
Increase the heat to medium-high to bring
everything to a simmer, then cook until most of the liquid has evaporated,
about 10 minutes.
While the chickpeas are cooking, zest about one
quarter of your orange and set it aside. Slice the orange into quarters and set
them aside.
Reduce the heat to medium-low before adding the
onion, garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper to the chickpea mixture. Juice
one-quarter of your orange into the Dutch oven, and stir well to combine.
Cover the pot and cook for an additional 10
minutes, until the onions are soft, adding a few tablespoons of additional
water if needed to prevent sticking or scorching.
Turn off the heat under the pot. Stir in the
orange zest before dishing the chickpeas into individual bowls. Drizzle with additional
olive oil and honey and sprinkle with fresh oregano and parsley, if desired,
before serving.
I’ve never had much use for traditions. I was something of
an iconoclast in my youth and thought that traditions were empty rituals, things
done over-and-over for the sake of being done over-and-over. I frequently (and annoyingly,
truth be told) bemoaned all traditions from the benign to the malignant.
Despite my best intentions, traditions have crept into my
life over the years. Part of that is due to moving away from home; part of it
to getting married and experiencing the fun of creating new rituals with my
partner. But most of it was Iraq. I was volun-told for a four-month deployment,
scheduled to depart in the spring. I was frantic that I would have to leave
before Easter, not simply because I didn’t know what the holiday would be like on
the base, but because I needed that last milestone, that last touch point with
familiarity before I left for a place that was deeply unfamiliar. I found
myself clinging to traditions in the days before I left, wanting to run my
favorite routes, visit my favorite coffee shops, and make my favorite dishes
one more time. When it came to Easter dinner, I took no chances at all, making
my now-traditional chicken, leek, and mushroom pie and a carrot cake for
dessert.
Several years older and a dubious amount wiser, I now see that
it was only because my upbringing was secure that I could question tradition
and see it as so unnecessary. Certainly, some of them are, but they’re also powerful.
When they are thoughtful, traditions provide us with fixed points from which we
can chart our course and our progress. They provide vantage points through
which we can study other times, either happier or more difficult than the one
we are abiding in. Traditions form anchors, the kind that steady us or the kind
that keep us from moving forward. It’s up to us to decide.
Nowadays, no Easter feels complete without a towering carrot
cake. For years, I used the same recipe, but this year I decided to push my own
bounds by making not one but three different versions to taste test. Much to my
surprise, the clear winner was not my traditional recipe, but it was the best
carrot cake I’ve ever had. It’s a three-layer stunner redolent of spices, chock
full of carrots and nuts, and crowned with the most glorious cream cheese
frosting. Really, it encapsulates my new and old feelings on tradition awfully
well—traditions do have their place, but there’s always room for improvement.
The Best Carrot Cake
I’ve Ever Had
Sources: Adapted, barely, from Stella Parks’ Brave Tart
Makes one 6-by-5-inch cake, serving at least 6 people
Active time: ~2 hours; total time: ~3 hours
Note: This might
be the best carrot cake I’ve ever had, but fair warning: it’s also the most
labor intensive. I highly recommend making this over the course of several
days. For example, prepare the custard for the frosting, chop and toast the
nuts, grate the carrots, and brown the butter on day 1. Bake the cakes on day
2, and make the frosting and frost the cake on day 3. Make sure to leave time
for the finished cake to set up before slicing it, or it will be difficult to
cut.
One More Note: I
call to make this in three 6-inch cake tins. If you don’t have this size pan,
you could make a two-layer cake using 8-inch cake tins or a one-layer cake in a
9×13-inch baking dish.
Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients:
3/4 cup milk, any percentage
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 eggs (to get a half egg, crack one into a
small bowl, whisk, and measure out roughly half)
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
8 ounces cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
1 1/2 sticks butter, softened but still cool (I
used salted butter)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt, to taste
Carrot Cake
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups walnuts or pecans (optional)
1 pound carrots
2 sticks butter (I used salted butter)
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup gently packed brown sugar
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground coves
1/2 tablespoon vanilla
3 eggs (no need for them to be at room
temperature)
Directions:
Make the
custard for the frosting: Put the milk in a small glass bowl or measuring cup
and heat it in the microwave at 50% power until it’s warm, but not boiling. In
a separate, medium-sized bowl, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and eggs.
Pour about one-third of the warm milk into the
egg mixture, whisking well, and repeating twice more. Scrap the custard into a
medium pot and cook over medium heat, whisking constantly. The custard will
change texture quite suddenly, going from fairly loose to thick and a bit
lumpy. Keep whisking, and keep
cooking the custard for another two minutes or so. At this point, it should be
very thick and quite smooth.
Remove the custard from the heat. After it’s had
a chance to cool a bit, stir in the vanilla extract.
At this point, you can cover the
custard—pressing plastic wrap onto its surface so that it doesn’t form a
skin—and refrigerate it for a few days.
Prepare
the nuts: Finely
chop the nuts and then add them to a skillet set over medium heat. Toast the
nuts until they’re golden brown and fragrant. This will likely take 5–10
minutes. Remove the nuts from the skillet and set them aside.
Prepare
the carrots: Wash, trim, and peel the carrots. Grate them with a box grater
or in a food processor, then set them aside.
Brown the
butter: Place the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Let the
butter melt before increasing the heat to medium. Swirl the pan regularly or
stir it with a spatula to ensure the butter browns evenly. Continue swirling or
stirring until the butter is clear, golden yellow, studded with little brown
bits, and smells toasty and delicious.
Note:
If the heat under your pan is too high, the butter might start to foam up,
making it difficult to see what color it is. Reduce the heat or even take the
pan off the stove for a few minutes to let the foam subside before proceeding.
Make the
cakes: Position a
rack in the middle of your oven before preheating it to 350°F.
Do your future self a favor by preparing your
cake tins now. Grease them well, with either cooking spray or butter, and line
the bottoms with parchment paper. Yes, you really should do this—after all,
you’re spending quite a bit of time making the best carrot cake ever, is this
really the time to skimp on preparation?
Stir
together the flours in a medium bowl, then set it aside.
Stir
together the sugars, leavening agents, salt, and spices in a large bowl; this
can either be the bowl of your standing mixer or any large bowl you happen to
have. Add the vanilla and eggs and beat the heck out of the mixture with
whatever you’ve got—standing mixer, hand mixer, bulging biceps—on medium speed
for five minutes (yes, really). The mixture should be light in color and fluffy
yet thick. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.
If
you have a standing mixer that allows you to be hands free, add the butter in a
slow stream, beating into the egg-and-sugar mixture on medium-low speed. If you
aren’t using a stand mixer, add the butter in three additions, stirring to
combine after each addition. Once you’re done, give the sides and bottom of the
bowl another good scrape down.
Go
ahead and add the flours, mixing well to incorporate. Fold in the carrots and
nuts. It’ll look like there’s too much of them, but trust me—they’ll all fit,
and it will be delicious. You guessed it: give the bowl a final good scrape
down.
Pat yourself on the bake for having remembered
to prep your pans and preheat your oven ahead of time. You’re awesome!
Divide the batter evenly between your pans. If
you have a kitchen scale, you can be precise about this, but otherwise just
eyeball it. The cake will still taste just as good. Smooth the batter in each
pan, then pop them all into the oven.
Bake until the cakes are golden brown and a cake
tester inserted into the middle of each cake comes out with just a few crumbs
clinging to it. This was about 45 minutes for me, but I suggest checking your
cakes around minute 40, to make sure they don’t overbake.
When the cakes are done, remove them from the
oven. Let them cool in the tins for a bit before turning them out onto a wire
cooling rack, removing the parchment rounds from their bottoms, and turning
them right-side up again. After they cool, you can frost them or wrap them well
in plastic wrap and frost them the next day.
Make the
frosting: Several hours before you plan to make the frosting, take the
custard, cream cheese, and butter out of your refrigerator and set them on the
counter to soften.
Once they’re softened but still cool, congratulate
your past self for remembering to have taken out your ingredients ahead of
time. If you forgot or are short on time, give the butter and cream cheese a
few short blasts in the microwave on 40% power (do this separately, as they
have different melting points) to soften them up. Still give yourself a pat on
the back because hey, you’re baking the best carrot cake ever.
Stir the vanilla custard well. If it’s very
thick, mash it up with the back of a spoon and give it a good stir.
Put the butter and cream cheese in a large
bowl—again, either of your stand mixer or any large bowl. Cream them together
using a stand mixer, hand mixer, or your own power until they’re light and
fluffy—this should take about five minutes.
Add about one-third of the custard to the
butter-and-cream cheese mixture and beat well to combine. Scrape down the sides
of the bowl and repeat with the remaining custard in two additions.
Add the lemon juice and mix well. Give your
frosting a taste. If it could use a little more pizzazz, add a bit of extra
lemon juice and/or a touch of salt. Repeat tasting and flavor adjusting as
needed.
All
together now: Your cakes likely domed a bit while baking, so set one on a
level surface and use a serrated knife to carefully cut off the dome and create
a flat top. Repeat with the remaining two cakes. Pick up one cake at a time and
brush any stray crumbs from the sides or top; this will help ensure that your
frosting is smooth and bump-free.
Set one of the cakes on a plate or cake
decorating turntable, then dollop on a good amount of frosting. Use an offset
spatula or even a butter knife to work the frosting from the middle of the cake
to the edges. Add the second cake layer. If you have time, you could let this
sit in the refrigerator, to ensure your cake is straight and strong.
Add a dollop of frosting to the second layer,
and again work it from the middle of the cake to the edges. Add the third layer
and repeat.
At this point you have three options: leave the
cake as-is for a “naked” look, add a small amount of frosting around
the sides for “semi-naked,” as I have shown, or fully frost that
sucker, because it’s spring and a pandemic and YOLO.
If you’re going with either the semi-naked or
fully dressed version, scoop up a tablespoon or so of frosting onto your
spatula or knife. I prefer to start at the bottom of my cake and move up, so I
spread the frosting on the seam between layers and turn the plate around
slowly, working the frosting around the cake, adding more to my knife as I go.
If you need detailed frosting instructions, I recommend this guide.
Once the cake is frosted, set it to chill in the
refrigerator for at least an hour. If it’s going to be several hours before you
cut and eat the cake, consider draping it loosely with plastic wrap. When it’s
chilled, cut with a serrated knife and enjoy.
