dessert

Nut Sticks (a.k.a. Mandel Bread) (a.k.a. Mandelbrot)

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Mandelbrot 12

I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. My fiancé is Italian-American. Our ancestral food cultures — meat-and-potatoes kosher vs. Mediterranean Traif City — have just about nothing in common beyond, like, the fact that both of our people eat bread and drink wine. (His people’s is better.)

But there is one dish that turns the circles of our respective backgrounds into a Venn diagram — a dry, almond-speckled cookie that old ladies of both the Catholic and the Jewish persuasion have been pushing on reluctant kids for billions of years (rough estimation). Continue reading →

Chocolate Cake and Chocolate Frosting

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Chocolate Cake 16

It’s Valentine’s Day. It’s 9 degrees (in New York City, at least). It’s Day 2 of a three-day weekend. Do you need any more excuses to spend the afternoon inside, doing nothing in particular besides mixing, baking, frosting, and consuming a chocolate cake that you may or may not decide to share with someone else?  Continue reading →

Strawberries Bavarian and Creme Fraiche

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Bavarian 1

It finally happened: I crossed the gelatin rubicon.

You know how Julie Powell (of Julie and Julia fame) flipped out when faced with cooking Julia Child’s aspic, a.k.a. meat jello (shudder)? That’s sort of how I felt when I first saw that there’s a whole section of gelatin-based dishes in Nonnie’s cookbook.

Almost all of them are desserts — save a truly horrific-sounding shrimp mold, which I intend to avoid for as long as possible — but that still didn’t quite ease my worries. I know that gelatin is a perfectly cromulent ingredient; I know that modern gastronomic types even champion it as the secret to everything from juicier meatballs to soft-serve.

And yet… gelatin is gross, guys. Continue reading →

Cream Cheese Pastry

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Jelly Horns

The first time I leafed through Nonnie’s cookbook, I was surprised to find that there are barely any cookie recipes in there — just three,  in fact, and one of them is secretly a cake.

Hidden in another section, though, there was something called “Cream Cheese Pastry” — a simple, cream cheese-enhanced dough that’s rolled out, cut, and filled with jam.

“Oh!” I thought. “So they’re rugelach!”

Not really. Continue reading →

Carrot Pudding

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Carrot Pudding 3

Sweet potatoes don’t make an appearance at my family’s Thanksgiving table — and haven’t for as far back as I can remember. (Although the one year my mom hosted, they were present — and topped with mini marshmallows to boot.)

Instead, the buffet’s “orange food” requirement is filled by my Aunt Maureen’s specialty, which is called either carrot pudding or carrot soufflé depending on who’s speaking. It’s soft and rich and decadent, unabashedly sweet but still substantial enough to fit in on a plate filled with turkey and stuffing. It’s certainly not an everyday food, unless you’re cultivating gout — but for the biggest eating day of the year, it works perfectly.

This… is not that carrot pudding. Continue reading →

Chocolate Mousse and Rice Pudding

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sisters

My older sister loved long hair and eye makeup and ratty, stained, hole-riddled sweatshirts that were two, three, four sizes too large. She loved drawing and straight As and gossip, cigarettes and true crime and a freshly made bed. She loved Gone With the Wind and Lolita and Gossip Girl and the Baby-Sitters Little Sister books, though she swore the latter was an ironic love. (So did I. It wasn’t.) Continue reading →

Apple Cake

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Apple Cake 2

After two months of experimenting with Nonnie’s busted binder of recipes, I’ve discovered two things to be true.

The first: Nonnie’s savory recipes are hit or miss. For every deliciously browned, crispy-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside oven-roasted potato, there’s a nasty onion parade or questionable amalgamation of boxed mac and cheese, tomatoes, and canned tuna. (Not that we didn’t eat the whole pan of the latter anyway.)

The second: When it comes to pastries, though, Nonnie knew her shit. Continue reading →

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

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Coffee Cake 4One of the best and weirdest parts about working in media is the sheer number of perfect strangers who line up to give you stuff for free.

Case in point: This spring, for reasons I still don’t totally understand, I was invited to a party celebrating the various different types of flours manufactured by Bob’s Red Mill. (Seriously, the invite was a total mystery; I hadn’t even started my incredibly well-trafficked food blog yet.)

Because I figured (rightly) that such a party would involve not only the standard open bar but also a variety of professionally made baked goods, I jumped at the chance to attend. Continue reading →

Polka Daters

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Polka Daters 1

Expansive as it is, there are a few major recipes missing from Nonnie’s cookbook — things I keep going back and looking for, only to be surprised all over when I realize again that they’re not there.

There’s no simple roast chicken recipe, for instance, even though I know Nonnie must’ve roasted billions of birds in her day. (Maybe it’s not in there because Nonnie thought only a moron would need to follow a recipe in order to roast a chicken — “just turn the oven on and stick it in! You need me to draw you a map?”) There’s no kugel, either, although Nonnie made an ethereal noodle pudding that my mom’s been trying to recreate for 40 years. To this day, she swears it never comes out like Nonnie’s did. Continue reading →

Banana Bread

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Banana Bread 1

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from five years of obsessive food blog consumption, it’s that the world hardly needs another banana bread recipe.

Sure, you can jack it up with chocolate, or millet, or peanut butter, or bourbon, or cream cheese and buttermilk and icing spiked with coconut and pecans in what’s supposedly a healthy, guilt-free recipe (yeah, okay, Southern Living). But at its core, it’ll always be the same humble loaf — a cake designed to seem healthy enough for breakfast consumption, and to use up the spotty brown chiquitas on your countertop before they turn into their own thriving, fruit-fly-based, self-contained ecosystem. Continue reading →