Tie-Dyed Christmas Cookies and Coquito

Holigays 2023

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making soft baked Christmas cookies with tie-dyed frosting and coquito, a Puerto Rican coconut rum punch.

My favorite holiday shirt started as a joke that I found online by one of those shops that stalks your Instagram. It’s one of those “designed to look vintage” thin, worn cotton shirts in a red color so pale it might as well be pink. In loopy, swirly 1950s-style font it reads “I Just Want to Watch Christmas Movies and Bake Cookies.”

I bought it right away because the algorithm will never be defeated. The truth is that baking Christmas cookies by well over the hundreds was my Christmas tradition for years, nearly a decade in fact. I’d test drive new recipes to launch in the months prior, and in the final week before the big holiday I’d narrow down to a half dozen finalists: peppermint brownies, cookie butter fudge, oversized cookies with sprinkles galore, delicate European varieties with subtle sweetness, you name it. Then I would find the cheesiest, cringiest Christmas rom-coms that Netflix could muster and I’d stay up all night getting to work.

I… do that less now. But there is always one cookie that I return to, a cookie that start to finish takes less than a movie to accomplish but the results are so impressive, so photo ready and will make everyone in your life light up with glee as they coo at the details, that it will appear as if you it took you all day to lovingly craft them. They will melt the instant they hit your tongue and remind you of those soft, brightly colored Lofthouse sugar cookies in every grocery store, but this time instead of a backtaste of slightly hard to place chemical coating your throat (hey no judgement said there at all, I love those cookies!) — you will only find the sweetness of vanilla.

This is, to me, the quintessential Christmas cookie. It’s the one my family asks for first every December. And then once I learned that for only one to two extra steps I could blow the decorations of those grocery store cookies out of the water by — gay gasp — TIE DYING THE COLORS?!? You cannot tell me that I’m not guest starring as a master chef on The Great British Bake-Off.

Funny enough, when I originally decided on this month’s recipe, it originally wasn’t about the Christmas cookies at all. I wanted to tell you about how long it took me to finally learn how to make coquito. Coquito is a delicious creamy coconut and cinnamon rum drink that is most often described as “Puerto Rican Eggnog” even though, confusingly, there are no eggs involved (I suppose its rare that eggnog these days has egg in it either? What’s the backstory on that?). Coquito and Puerto Rican Christmas are at this point, synonymous.

Are you really going to tell me that you don’t want melt in your mouth sugar cookies and cinnamon, coconut, and rum to wash it down with, right this very moment? Because I don’t believe you.

This specific Christmas cookie recipe with tie-dyed frosting is a Frankenstein of my creation from a few places. The cookie base comes from The Novice Chef’s Almond Meltaways (I substitute almond for vanilla here, since that’s what most people have on hand. That said if you have some almond extract on your shelf, feel free to switch it back! It’s delicious either way). The frosting recipe comes from Smitten Kitchen because Deb seems to be the only one who’s figured out how to make sugar cookie frosting hard enough to be able stack without making a mess, but soft enough to bite into without any distraction or teeth hurting. And finally, the “tie-dye” design originally caught me from Bon Appetite, though I streamlined the steps.

The Coquito recipe has existed in my notes app, tweaked and adjusted from year to year until I got it right, that I’m not sure of its origins? So we’ll just call it a “family recipe.”

Tie-Dyed Christmas Cookies and Coquito

Makes roughly 36 cookies, and I’m Puerto Rican — we only measure coquito in love

Ingredients for Christmas Cookies with Tie-Dyed Frosting

For the Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt

For the Frosting

1 large egg white
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
A few drops of vanilla extract
Two food colors (choosing contrasting colors for maximum visual impact)
Sprinkles, if you wish

Instructions for Christmas Cookies with Tie-Dyed Frosting

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Coat a baking sheet with nonstick spray or line it with parchment paper (in this instance, I recommend the parchment paper). Set aside.

In a stand mixer, beat butter and sugar for four minutes. Trust me on this! It will feel like a long time, but the extended mixing will ultimately make for melt in your mouth cookies.  The final mixture should be the texture of buttercream cake frosting. Add egg and vanilla extract, mixing briefly until combined.

Add flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix until combined. Now the texture should now be that of a soft dough.

On your prepared baking sheet, roll 1 tablespoon of dough at a time into small circle. Once all your balls have been made, lightly press into discs using the bottom of a cup.

Bake cookies for 8 minutes. These cookies will not look browned or cooked, but once again I am asking you to trust me that they are! Remember that we we soft, plush sugar cookies and a short baking time will help with that process! Remove cookies from oven and them rest on baking sheet for 5 minutes (this will allow them to use the residual heat to firm up and finish cooking). Then, remove off of cookie sheet to cool completely.

While your cookies cool, it’s time to make your frosting. Whisk egg white in a large bowl until it’s loose and frothy. Add 1 cup of powdered sugar, and whisk until smooth. Add vanilla extract and your last 1/4 cup of sugar — the frosting should be pretty stiff at this point, which is how you want it. This will allow it to harden on the cookie in a smooth sheet (which makes for easy stacking and packing!).

Split the frosting into three small bowls (you can just eyeball it, but save the slightly biggest amount to be left plain white).Take the two smaller amount bowls and, moving quickly, add in food coloring, start small and gradually add until the food coloring brightness is to your liking.

WHEW! Don’t give up! You’re almost there! Let’s assembly line! The frosting will continue to harden so, once again, moving efficiently is your key to success from here on out.

Put bowls of frosting next to cookies, and a flat even surface where the “dipped” cookies can eventually be placed (I just used my baking sheet). Get a small plate, this is where you will do your tie-dye.

Spoon roughly 1 slightly oversized teaspoon of white frosting into the center of your small plate. Drizzle 1 teaspoon of your first color, and 1 teaspoon of your second. You can drizzle in a loose pattern, but don’t go overboard, the cookie dipping process will do most of the work.

Gently press and slightly twirl the top of a cookie into frosting mixture (imagine a tie-dyed t-shirt as you go), then lift up and allow excess glaze to drip back onto the plate. Using a fork, pop any air bubbles on the cookie and swirl colors more if desired — but remember that less is often more!

Transfer cookie to your flat surface. Sprinkle with sprinkles (if using) while the frosting is still wet.

Repeat this process with 2 more cookies. The glaze will lose its swirly effect at this point, so add a fresh ½ teaspoon of each color into your dip mixture. Then start again with the next set of cookies.

If the colors in your mixing plate get too muddled, clean your plate entirely and repeat process, decorating cookies in batches of 3 until all cookies have been glazed. If frosting begins to stiffen too quickly while you’re still decorating, re-loosen with 1/4 teaspoon water at a time (a little goes a long way here) to thin the frosting until it’s back to its original texture.

Let sit cookies sit until the glaze hardens enough that you can tap it with your fingernail, then they are ready to be stored in an airtight container. Meanwhile, let’s make some coquito.

Ingredients for Coquito

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
15 ounce can cream of coconut (Yes in the can form is important, I grew up with Coco Lopez, if you don’t live in a Latine community you can usually find cream of coconut with liquor or piña colada mixes)
14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk
13.5 ounce can coconut milk
12 ounce can evaporated milk
RUM OPTIONS: You ultimately want equal parts dark and white rum, up to 2 and 1/2 cups total to taste (ie/ 1 and 1/4 cup white and 1 and 1/4 dark, see *note for non-alcoholic modifications)
Clean glass bottle, for storage

*Note: Did you want to make a non-alcoholic version? To make virgin coquito, replace the rums with either more coconut milk or half-coconut milk and half-coconut water (or even just regular water)

Instructions for Coquito

Add all the ingredients into a blender. Blend on low for 1 minute. Scrape down the sides of the blender, then blend for an additional 1 minute on medium speed.

Taste for rum, add more until it’s to your liking (after each addition, re-mix coquito either by hand whisking or 30 seconds in the blender on low).

When you’re happy with the taste, gently pour mixture into the glass bottle of your choice. Cap your bottle and refrigerate for at least four hours.

You can store coquito made in the fridge for anywhere between 4 to 8 weeks. It’s not common, but also not unheard of, for the coconut fat to sometimes solidify in the refrigerator. If this happens just remove the bottle of coquito from the fridge set it out on the counter for 10 to 15 minutes minutes before serving, that allows the coconut fat to soften as it warms back up.

Give the coquito bottle a brief shake before pouring to mix the spices that will have settled. Serve cold and poured over ice.

Apple Cheddar Scones, Because We Deserve a New It Girl

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making apple cheddar scones that are begging to become your new fall tradition.

Aaaaaand we’re back! After the messy disaster (delicious, but still, a disaster!) that was the s’mores brownies in August, I needed to a break. I had to lick my wounds. Humble myself. The waning sun of summer turned into the fiery red leaves of fall and now as we tumble into the overcast grey days and long nights of Midwestern “not quite yet winter,” I knew it was time to come back. There’s no more worthy return to the kitchen than apple cheddar scones.

The story of these apple cheddar scones is that years ago, when I was in my 20s and cocky and believed I could already bake with the best of them, despite barely being two years into being self-taught myself, I tried to bake these and failed miserably. I tried again the next fall, and I failed then, too.

I couldn’t figure out how to keep the classic buttery crumbled texture that is iconic to scones and requires butter to be cold when baking, while also manipulating the dough enough to hold its shape, which quizzically requires the butter to be warm enough to be malleable? Ok so simultaneously cold and warm butter, got it.

Then there was the problem of the apples, which require a pre-bake in the oven so as not to leak apple juice all over the scones while baking — though, again, warm from the oven apples? That will melt the butter in your dough, when the goal is cold butter. Plus, I never could learn how to peel an apple in any way that makes sense, despite peeled apples being traditional in most baking.

I didn’t give up. The next fall (now, my third), I took to research.

I learned that the trick to keeping butter cold enough for the delicate crumb of scones, but also in small enough pieces that it’s malleable, is to freeze it first. Then shred it using a cheese grater (who knew!?!?) and refreeze those shredded butter pieces until you need them. It turns out that unless you’re making a whole ass pie, apples do not need to be peeled in order to still be delicious in baked goods. If you roast your apple chunks the night before and put them in the refrigerator overnight, they will keep their texture and will be cool enough as to not ruin the DELICATE butter – plus with that business out of the way, you can now make the rest of the scone batter in about 15 minutes. Add another 30 minutes for baking and you can be eating fall perfection in about the length of two sitcoms or less than one Beyoncé album (and yes, this is how I measure my time).

The first time I baked these scones successfully, that’s when I felt good calling myself a baker. They are tender and shaggy. Every bite comes with sweet chunks of baked apple and cheddar that makes its presence known without overwhelm. These deserve to be a gay classic, like oversized flannel and journaling your feelings.

These scones are my Mount Everest, and I learned how to conquer them from Smitten Kitchen. In the comment section of that post, I learned the frozen shredded butter trick that’s adapted here in the main recipe. I also, as mentioned, cut out peeling the apples because no one has time for that. I’ve lowered the amount of sugar to better balance against the cheddar. For the same reason, I got rid of the sugary lid on top. I lowered the amount of baking powder and I streamlined the directions for maximum ease. That’s about it!

Apple Cheddar Scones, Because We Deserve a New It Girl

Makes six scones

Ingredients for Apple Cheddar Scones

1 pound apples of your choice (for me this came to two medium sized apples)
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup sharp cheddar, grated
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 large egg

Directions for Apple Cheddar Scones

Prep the Night Before

Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly oiled aluminum foil, spray, whatever is your favorite “keep things from sticking to a baking sheet” situation.

Cut each apple into 16 chunks (yes, I realize this seems fussy but it allows for the “right size” chunks so that you don’t have to re-smash them later. I handled it by cutting my apples into quarters, then each of those quarters… also into quarters).

Place apples onto your prepared baking sheet in a single layer and bake them for 20 minutes. They should feel dry to the touch and half-baked, potentially with a little color on the edges (though this is not necessary).

Let apples come to room temperature and put them in the refrigerator overnight. If I’m tired, sometimes I’ll put them in the refrigerator while still slightly warm and it works out fine. Sometimes I cover them for their fridge sleep, sometimes I don’t.

Place your butter in the freezer overnight.

The Next Day

This is what butter looks like when you freeze and grate it. Such cute delicate swirls!

Once again, pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly oiled aluminum foil, spray, whatever is your favorite “keep things from sticking to a baking sheet” situation.

Take out your frozen butter and grate it using your cheese grater. It will start to melt surprisingly quickly underneath your hands, so feel free to switch butter sides all around so that you’re always holding the coldest part as you go. Collect your butter shreds and put them back into the freezer.

Grate your cheese. Add grated cheese to your frozen butter. Return them both back to the freezer.

In a large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. From here, you will want to move very quickly because remember — our only goal is to keep everything as cold as possible. That’s how the scones will bake into tender deliciousness.

Add your frozen butter and cheese mixture to your flour mixture. Toss everything together a few times until the butter and cheese are evenly coated with flour and no large clumps of butter or cheese remain (small clumps are fine, we love small clumps).

Add the cream and egg to your mixture. Sometimes I’ll quickly pre-beat the egg and cream together, just to make it easier to mix in, but this is not necessary. Mix everything together and add in your apple chunks, then mix again. Scrap off any batter from your fork or spoon into the bowl. Your mixture will probably still feel or look dry. This is because the cold butter hasn’t done its thing yet, but don’t worry. No matter what you do — do not add more cream because you think it needs it! I have learned from this mistake too many times. Don’t be like me.

If your mixture looks dry, instead it’s time to get your hands dirty! The warmth your hands should take care of it. Put clean hands into the batter and knead and/or “punch down” into the batter a few times (careful not to smush your apples too badly!) until the mixture just comes together into a dough, a few remaining dry crumbs is fine.

Generously flour your counter top. Scoop out the dough with your hands and place it on top. Using your hands, pat the dough into a roughly 6-inch circle. The size of the circle ultimately matters less than the width of the dough itself. You want the edges of the dough circle to be about 1 1/4 inch thick (I make a rough measurement by comparing it my nail bed. If you have short nails, the dough should be as tall as the top of your thumb nail at all places).

Cut your circle into 6 wedges. Using a spatula or running underneath them with a knife (in case they are stuck to your counter), transfer the scones to your prepared baking sheet. Leave 1-2 inches between each scone.

Bake until scones are firm in the middle and golden at edges, about 30 minutes. Carefully lift them off of baking sheet (use a spatula if needed) and let them cool for 5-10 minutes.

Eat!

Have a S’Mores, Have a Brownie, Have a S’mores Brownie

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making s’mores brownies to celebrate the last week of summer.

We were due for a failure.

I am not a professional food blogger. I’m — at best — someone who learned how to cook the same way that a lot of people in their 30s learned how to cook, by reading other food bloggers sharing their lives online. I miss that style of writing, to be honest, and as its faded away while morph into Internet 4.0 or whatever generation of being Very Online faces us these days. I love being in the kitchen, I love cooking, but to create, test, and photograph recipes for work? Who am I kidding?

I started off with the safest bet I could think of, a four-ingredient asparagus tart using pre-made puff pastry that takes about 15 minutes to throw together but took me a week to write and photograph. Then came the a little over one-hour strawberry chocolate “just because I can” cake (that took over a day to photograph alone!), and slowly I started to believe in myself. I thought maybe I could do this. Cobbler. An open-faced Mexican black bean sandwich. Maybe a decade of watching other people cook was going to pay off…. And then came the s’mores brownies.

The idea started simple enough, after all s’mores + brownies is enough of a sell that I don’t think I have to spend a long time describing them here for you to already be on board, right? Three perfect layers: a toasted graham cracker crust, a warm unbelievably chocolate-y brownie, and melted caramelized marshmallow just this edge of dripping down the sides. How else should you spend the last week of summer?

The graham cracker was my first mistake. I lost track of time and it came out just this side of too toasted (especially to withstand another two trips to the oven for the brownie and marshmallow layer each). The brownies simply… would not cook? And I’m talking about a brownie recipe that I have perfected for at least 12 years — the brownies I bake “casually” to impress third dates and new friends, my back pocket recipe — they would not solidify when it mattered most.

The marshmallows are when I almost gave up. They broiled perfectly, gold and melted at the edges, but slicing into them left everything — my fingers, my shirt, and once I took off my shirt my literal bra — covered in a sticky, sugary mess.

But then I ate one. And humming out-loud in my kitchen to no one, I ate one more. I staged this gooey mess of brownies for this article’s photoshoot, certain they were the worst photos I’d ever taken, and — whoops! — two of them fell over, so clearly I ate those as well.

Life is not what’s always expected. Sometimes you will flat out fail. And sometimes, if you’re just lucky enough, those failures will be a beautiful, sticky, chocolate three-layer perfection that you couldn’t possibly see coming.

These s’mores brownies are loosely based on a recipe from The Kitchen, with a few notable exceptions. I lowered the cooking time for the graham cracker layer, to account for it grand total of three trips into the oven. I’ve swapped the brownie recipe out completely for Smitten Kitchen’s favorite brownies (also, my favorite). And I recommend cutting the marshmallows open before broiling them, so they best adhere to the brownies for easiest cutting. Enjoy!

S’mores Brownies

Serves 9 to 16, depending on how you cut them

Ingredients for S’mores Brownies

Ingredients for Graham Cracker Crust

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs (see *note)
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Special Tool: Parchment Paper

Ingredients for Toasted Marshmallow Brownies

3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup flour
1 10-ounce bag large marshmallows

*Note: Graham Cracker Crumbs? The most old school solution for making your own graham cracker crumbs is still the best method, which is to pile a bunch of graham crackers into a ziplock bag (or reusable bag, if that’s your jam) and then roll over and whack the hell of it with a rolling pin or hammer, until crumbs form. Keebler also says boxed pre-made crumbs, and those work just as well.

Directions for S’mores Brownies

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line an 8×8-inch pan with parchment paper, set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix together the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and salt. Pour in the melted butter and stir with a spoon until all the crumbs are evenly coated with butter. Pour the crumbs into the lined brownie pan, and use your hands or the back of a spoon to press firmly along the bottom into a tight, even layer.

Bake graham cracker layer for 15-20 minutes, until solid and golden brown (if it’s slightly toasty, no worries, it adds to the s’mores vibes). Remove from the oven, and set aside to slightly cool. Raise oven temperature to 350 for brownie layer.

While graham cracker layer cooks and cools, prepare brownie batter.

In a medium dry saucepan over low heat, melt chocolate and butter together until only a couple unmelted butter or chocolate bits remain. It’s key that the pan be bone-dry to start, otherwise you risk the chocolate seizing up as it melts — though with the butter serving as a buffer, that really shouldn’t be a concern. (You can also melt butter and chocolate together in the microwave, microwaving in 30-second bursts and stirring, though surprisingly for a microwave, I find that process to be more fussy!)

Take saucepan off heat, and continue to stir until remaining bits are melted together. Pour butter/chocolate mixture out of saucepan and into a medium bowl.

Whisk your sugar into the butter/chocolate mixture, then eggs, then vanilla and salt. Stir in flour with a spoon until it just disappears.

Pour brownie batter over cooked graham cracker layer, gently spreading it out until it makes an even second layer. Bake brownies for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a fork inserted into the center comes out batter-free (a few moist crumbs is expected with brownies, but you shouldn’t have wet batter clinging anywhere, you know what I mean!).

Remove from the oven, and set aside to slightly cool. Now it’s time to prep the marshmallow layer.

Using a sharp knife, cut marshmallows the long way down the middle. Arrange marshmallows, cut side down, in a close grid over the brownies, keep going until they make an even layer with little-to-no brownie showing underneath.

Turn the oven to broil. Place the marshmallow-covered brownie pan in the oven and broil for 1 to 2 minutes, until the marshmallows are melted and light brown on top. Don’t go anywhere! Watch this process carefully (if your oven light, like mine, is broken — you can even do this process with the oven door ajar if needed), those marshmallows will go from “nothing happening here” to “burned fire hazard” in a blink if you aren’t careful. It should take about 1 minute for golden marshmallows to up to 2 minutes if you prefer a more charred take. Once the marshmallows are your desired color, take the brownies out immediately.

Whew my friend, you have almost made it! You are nearly there! Most brownies you would let cool completely for an even cut, but in this case (ironically) the marshmallows cut easiest while still in a mostly hot and melted state. So here’s what happens next: first, you are going to let the brownies rest in the pan for about 5-10 minutes, you want the brownie still warm but solid enough that you can lift them by their parchment paper onto your counter or a cutting board without them falling apart. Lift carefully, and if they feel a little stuck, run a knife along the edge of the pan to loosen any stuck marshmallow.

Once you have the brownies on the cutting board, carefully peel away parchment paper from the sides. Using the biggest ass knife in your kitchen (you are right now thinking, no Carmen couldn’t have meant that knife, but I did. Use that knife!), slice your brownies to your chosen size. They will be gooey, so you’ll want carefully wipe your knife wit a wet paper towel between cuts.

Serve as a warm gooey mess, and I dare you not to smile.

This Easy Shrimp “Beach Ceviche” Is a Late Summer Flex

A couple summers ago, I started making beach ceviche — ceviche to eat on the beach. I’d always been intimidated by the idea of making ceviche, because the technical process of curing raw fish with citrus seemed like it might leave little room for error. But once I learned that using frozen fish to make ceviche is actually a safe and recommended option, I decided to take a stab at it. I’ve now made my shrimp ceviche a few dozen times for friends and family, and since I’m constantly asked for the recipe, I decided to finally formalize it here!

I like to call my ceviche “Beach Ceviche” because, you guessed it! It’s best eaten on the beach! There’s also a practical version for my tendency to prepare this dish specifically as a beach snack: The process of curing the shrimp with lime juice can vary timing-wise. Sometimes it can take over half an hour. So if I prep the ceviche in a sealable bowl and pop it into my cooler backpack, by the time I’m on the beach, it’s usually ready to go. There isn’t much of a concern with over-curing when it comes to this shrimp ceviche. When working with other fish like tuna or salmon, it’s def possible to let it sit in the citrus too long, yielding tough or chewy fish. I find frozen shrimp to be way more forgiving than other fish, and I’ve let my Beach Ceviche sit and cure in a cooler for over two hours before without compromising the taste or texture.

The ingredients and process for this Beach Ceviche are simple enough that you could definitely whip this up on a beach vacation (so long as you have access to a kitchen) and impress everyone around you with such an upgraded beach snack that blows sliced fruit and a bag of chips out of the water! Just pack a large Tupperware for vacation in case your Airbnb or rental doesn’t have one. But I’ll confess I’ve also “emergency” bought a new sealable bowl at a grocery store while on a beach vacation just to be able to make Beach Ceviche. I’m also lucky enough to live near the beach (and lived even closer the past two summers), so Beach Ceviche really has become a staple in my household, and it quite literally never disappoints! What’s better than eating fresh, citrusy shrimp by the ocean?!

As with a lot of the things I make — even the recipes I make a million times — there’s a lot of room for riffing and customization! If you have specific questions about substitutions you want to make or just questions about the process in general, hit me up in the comments!

Of course, the beach isn’t required for Beach Ceviche. This dish would also be great for a pool party, as an appetizer at a dinner party, in a backyard, etc. Its late-summer vibes are truly immaculate, so now’s a perfect time to give it a whirl!

Beach Ceviche

Serves four

Ingredients for Beach Ceviche

1/2 pound of raw frozen shrimp, thawed with tails removed and cut into 1/2 inch chunks
5-10 limes (see directions for more info)
1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 small red onion or two shallots, diced
2 scallions, diced
1-2 jalapeños, diced
1 avocado, cut into chunks
Cilantro, chopped
Tortilla chips for serving

Directions for Beach Ceviche

Start by placing your chopped raw shrimp pieces into a large, sealable plastic bowl or Tupperware. I use the third smallest bowl from my Target mixing bowl set, to give you an idea. Next, you’re going to juice your limes with whatever juicing apparatus you have. I somehow have four different tools for juicing citrus, which perhaps makes sense given that I live in Florida. My most effective tool is my KitchenAid attachment, especially when it comes to juicing large quantities.

You need enough lime juice to cover all of the shrimp. It doesn’t need to be swimming in lime juice, but it should all be covered. The number of limes this requires, I find, varies greatly, depending on the quality and size of limes and other factors. One trick for getting more juice out of your citrus is to firmly roll it with your hand against a hard surface before slicing it in half to juice.

This is important: DO NOT USE ANYTHING OTHER THAN FRESH LIME JUICE. Lime juice from the bottle is great for a lot of things in a pinch, but not for ceviche. I made the mistake of trying it once because I had a craving for beach ceviche but was out of limes, and while the shrimp did eventually cure, it took literally 2+ hours. Never again! Use the fresh stuff only!

I usually let the shrimp sit in the lime juice on its own while I do other getting ready for the beach tasks, like sunscreening and picking which of my 75 bathing suits and cover-up combinations I’m going to wear (again, Florida). After about 15 minutes, I return to the ceviche to add the tomatoes, onion, white parts of the scallion, and jalapeño. Give it a stir to mix it all up. You should start to see the shrimp changing color from its translucent raw shade to a more solid white (depending on the type of shrimp, the color can also become a dark pink). Don’t freak out if it’s still looking pretty raw. It’ll get there; I promise.

I do some more beach tasks like packing additional snacks and beverages and looking for my misplaced sunglasses. After about 10 minutes, add the green parts of the scallions, the avocado, and as much chopped cilantro as you desire (or none, if you’re one of the cilantro naysayers!), and give it another stir. Then pop that top on, pack the ceviche in a well insulated cooler, and head to the beach!

By the time you get all set up at the beach, your ceviche should be ready to enjoy with some tortilla chips. I’m partial to the Tostitos Scoops for maximum ceviche scooping capabilities. If you open your ceviche and the shrimp still looks gray-ish and raw, again, don’t panic. Give it another shake to let the lime juice do its thing, and try again in a little bit.

Some notes on modifications

• If you prefer a spicer ceviche, I like to use serrano peppers instead of jalapeños. If you like a more mild ceviche, remove the jalapeño seeds before chopping.
• Additional ingredients you can throw in include chopped mango, chopped watermelon, chopped cucumber.
• You can add pickled red onions if you want a more pickled flavor profile.
• Yes, you can make this vegan! Skip the shrimp and instead use sliced canned hearts of palm. This is the best vegan ceviche hack I’ve personally tried.
• You can really use any tomatoes for this, but I like the slight sweetness of cherry tomatoes, and sometimes I halve them instead of quartering them when I want a slightly chunkier ceviche (and then accordingly chopping everything else a little chunkier to match).
• It’s very rare that I write a recipe that doesn’t call for salt, but I don’t find this ceviche needs salt so long as it’s being enjoyed with an appropriately salty chip accompaniment. But if you feel otherwise, go for it! Tajín could also be fun to play with here!

If you make Beach Ceviche and snap a pic on the beach, tag me! I want to see! It’ll probably make me immediately want to get my ass to the beach!

Hangover Molletes

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making molletes, a Mexican open-faced bean and cheese sandwich that’s perfect for summer mornings, summer evenings, or just for when you’re missing your friends.

The thing about these molletes — a Mexican open-faced bean and cheese sandwich with fresh vegetable salsa and sliced avocado — is that they are not about hangovers at all.

Now, I realize that I named this post “hangover molletes.” For my 30^th birthday, my closest friends and drove to the vineyards on Long Island for a weekend of sharing as many rosé and white wine tastings as possible, playing dirty scrabble by a fireplace, chilly east coast sunset beaches, and somehow randoming upon a local strawberry festival (how??). In the mornings, our group of five would pile into the kitchen to nurse our hangovers. And that was when I was introduced to molletes. Crusty bread lightly buttered at its golden brown edges, saucy black beans seasoned in such a way you will dream about them long after they are gone, cheese to the brim, fresh vegetable salsa, and rich wedges of avocado delicately piled on top. These sandwiches are not about hangovers, they are about friendship.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I needed a hangover cure, to be honest. But lately, I have been missing those friends. We live spread apart now, which happens when you get older and life isn’t defined by late nights pounding through New York City streets and laughter now gets shared in hasty text messages between work meetings instead of last call at the club. My birthday is in June, somehow it is already August, but summer has always been our season. And so we return to molletes, cutely named because I thought “I Miss My Friends Wahhhh!” wouldn’t get as many clicks on a post.

In the years since they were first made for me, I’ve discovered that there is really never a bad time for crisp bread that will make a delicious crackle once you bite in, velvety savory beans, and sweet tomatoes, corn, or bell peppers. Molletes are a deserving brunch food for any occasion (in fact they are often served with a fried egg on top, if that’s your thing), but they also make a filling vegetarian dinner for any summer night that you intend to spend watching TV on your couch or reading a book on your porch. It can be easily scaled up for a crowd or down to a single serving. I do recommend playing your music loud while you’re cooking it — or maybe FaceTime a friend and think of me.

We are doing things slightly differently this week. Traditionally for Sapphic Table installments, there’s a core recipe (or recipes) that I’ve adapted; set recipes are how I’ve best learned how to cook. However, I was taught molletes on my feet and then learned some tricks from the internet later. In place of canned refried beans, I use How Sweet Eats’s Saucy Black Beans which are cooked on a stovetop with onion and green pepper until the beans break down and become ridiculously lush. Molletes are traditionally made on Mexican bolillo rolls, but I’ve never lived someplace where bolillos are common, so I’ve adjusted to ciabatta or whatever crusty bread I can find at the store. As I mentioned earlier, they can be topped with eggs if that is your breakfast sandwich mood. Corn is untraditional and not a necessity, but c’mon — have you ever had fresh corn off the cob in August?? Exactly.

“Hangover” Molletes

Serves two

Ingredients for Molletes

Ingredients for Black Beans

1 can black beans (14 ounce can), drained and rinsed
1/2 cup diced red onion
1/2 cup diced green pepper
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon cumin
Salt
Black pepper
Red pepper flakes
1/2 cup chicken stock (vegetable stock also works if you’re keeping vegetarian)
1/2 tablespoon lime juice

Ingredients for Salsa

1/2 cup diced green pepper
1/2 cup diced red onion
3/4 cup diced cherry tomatoes
2 teaspoons chopped cilantro

Ingredients for Sandwich Assembly 

Crusty bread for two sandwiches (bolillo rolls are traditional, I often use ciabatta)
1-2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
1 ear of corn, shucked and kernels removed (or roughly 3/4 cup corn kernels, if you’re not working with fresh)
1 avocado, sliced

*Note: Never shucked and cut off your own corn kernels? My favorite website for learning basic How To’s will always be The Kitchn, and here they are on how to shuck corn and the best ways to cut kernels off the cob.

Directions for Molletes

In a saucepan over medium heat, add the black beans, onion, green pepper, garlic, chili powder, paprika, cumin, salt and red pepper flakes to taste, and a few generous grinds of black pepper. Add stock and lime juice, stir everything all together. Simmer the bean mixture, uncovered, for 10 to 15 minutes. It should slightly bubble, but not reach a boil.

Stir occasionally and notice as the mixture begins to reduce and thicken. You can also speed this process up at the end, as the beans soften, by mashing them slightly with a fork while they cook. After the allotted time, the beans should reach desired texture (I prefer mine chunkier with whole beans remaining, you can also mash them until completely smooth). Set aside to cool.

As the beans cook, cut up your vegetables for salsa if you haven’t yet. Toss them all together in a bowl, set aside.

Brush butter on the cut sides of your bread — if you don’t have a brush, drizzling also works just fine — and place bread, buttered side up, on a baking sheet. Broil until bread is slightly toasted, about one minute. The goal here is firm up the bread so that it can hold up to the bean mixture, so don’t worry about it being overly browned just yet. It’s going back into the oven after we’re done.

Remove from broiler. Lower oven temperature to 350 degrees. Spread bean mixture evenly to the edges of the bread, followed by cheese, and then corn kernels.  Put back into oven until the cheese is fully melted to your liking and the bread has finished toasting, for me that’s usually another 10 minutes. Slice your avocado.

Top each mollete with salsa and avocado slices. Serve with fried eggs or hot sauce if that’s your thing. Devour.

A Peach Blueberry Cobbler for the Peak of Summer

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making a peach blueberry cobbler that’s so good, I ate it cold from it’s pan at 3am.

I have tried to write — and deleted! — the intro to this post at least three times now. I thought about calling this cobbler “insomnia cobbler” because I found myself eating it at 3a.m. cold from the pan while watching poorly edited reruns of Sex and the City. I considered “magic cobbler,” as it is often called across the internet for the magical way that the fruit sinks into the cobbler topping during baking, switching places as one rises and the other falls. But the best thing I can say is to cut right to the chase: this cobbler is the perfect cross-section of messy, juicy, summer fruit nestled in a cloud-like topping that’s somewhere between a buttery pancake and a just sweet enough biscuit. You want it.

A thing about me is that I love cobblers in the summer, which feel like all the best parts of pie (butter, sweet comforting smells of cinnamon, and fruit) without the pain of spending multiple hours fiddling with pastry dough that has to remain cold to create flakes, but warm enough to remain pliable, in a 90 degree kitchen that is too fucking hot for either. Cobblers are inviting, they encourage lopsided smiles and that “hhhmmmmm” sound people make when the food is just too good, pointing at the plate while they eat. And if you pair a still a touch too warm cobbler with vanilla ice cream, allowing the ice cream to melt into all the nooks and crannies of fruit and topping until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins — well, in that case, you have a friend in me for life.

Now this cobbler is indeed magic. Not just because of the cool science experiment where the fruit — starting its journey sitting on top of the cobbler batter – melts and sinks while it cooks, creating a rich syrup that envelopes the bottom and sides like velvet.

And it’s not just magic because it is as delicious fresh and hot from the oven, when the pancake-biscuit topping is impossible light and soft, but also crisp at the edges, as it is ice cold directly from the fridge, when the butter of the topping becomes dense and rich, nearly the texture of a fudge cake.

No, this cobbler is magic because no matter which summer fruit I have paired it with (thus far strawberries, then cherries, now peaches and blueberries) – it is uniquely delicious every time. As you can probably tell from my opening love letter soliloquy, I’m someone who tries out a new cobbler recipe nearly every summer, so I know of which I speak, and this baby is running up on GOAT status. But I gotta say, peaches and blueberries remain my fav.

I was first introduced to this recipe from The New York Times Cooking, which quizzically calls it a “Pudding Cake” but to each their own. Most notably, I swapped out their suggested strawberries for my favorite couple. I recommend lime juice for lemon, and I also replaced their lemon zest for cinnamon — because I believe if you’re going to turn on your oven when the temperature outside is boiling, your house should get to smell damn good.

Peach Blueberry Cobbler for Peak Summer

Serves four

Ingredients for Peach Blueberry Cobbler

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 ounces blueberries (for me this came to a little over 1/2 cup)
9 ounces peaches, cut into chunks (I used three very small, early season Peaches that haven’t hit their full size just yet. I’d expect this would be roughly 1 1/2 medium-to-large peaches, look at photos for an idea of blueberries-to-peaches fruit ratio)
1/2 teaspoon lime or lemon juice
3/4 cup granulated sugar
Salt
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon (dealer’s choice)
1/3 cup milk
1 1/4 cups boiling water
Powdered sugar, for serving

Directions for Peach Blueberry Cobbler

Pre-heat your oven to 425 degrees. Place your butter in the bottom of a 8-to10-inch oven safe pan of your choice (cake pan, deep dish pie plate, a small roasting pan would even work — as long as whoever you use is at least 2 inches deep). Put pan in oven while its warming, melting your butter. This is a two birds-one stone approach to cooking.

Once the butter has melted, swirl it along bottom and sides of pan to coat, then pour the butter into a cup or anything large enough to eventually mix with milk, which we’ll get to in one second.

In a medium bowl, add your fruit, 1/2 teaspoon of lime/lemon juice (whichever is your preference), 1/4 cup granulated sugar, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Toss it all together until the sugar has coated the fruit. Set aside so that the sugar gathers up the fruit juices and becomes syrupy. This will happen naturally while you do other things.

In a separate medium bowl, mix together the flower, baking powder, cinnamon, the remaining 1/2 cup sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Return to your butter. Mix milk into the melted butter. Slowly pour the butter mixture into the dry ingredients. Stir with a spoon until everything’s combined — the batter will be thick, but spreadable, like soft cookie dough.

Transfer your batter into your buttered oven safe pan and spread into an even layer (I sometimes have to push everything down a bit with my spoon and force it out to the sides, but it works out easily). Arrange fruit over batter, making sure peaches are cut side down. Press them slightly into the batter for safe keeping. Pour any remaining syrup over the top.

Here comes the part that will make you feel like a mad scientist! Boil your water. Once boiling, pour water over the top of your cobbler, the fruit will float and there will be steam everywhere and it is a lot of fun.

OK! Now put your masterpiece into the oven. Bake until the cake is golden brown on top and the sauce has thickened and bubbles along the sides, about 25 to 27 minutes.

Dust with powder sugar, serve it warm (but obviously not so hot that you’re burning your mouth with boiling fruit!).

Mac and Cheese To Eat Out of a Pot in Your Underwear

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making a single serving stovetop mac-and-cheese perfect for eating out of its pot in your underwear. Technically it’s not seasonal, but hey you could always pair it with a salad.

I know that Mac and Cheese seems more like a fall recipe, but hear me out. You know those muggy nights that seem to only be capable of happening in the summer; the kind of nights when sheets of rain pour against your windows, and all you want to do is strip down to your underwear and empty out everything from our head??

Ok great, then you know the only thing that can be reliably called upon, the only way to achieve that immortal bliss, is to immediately pour a glass of white wine, take off all of your clothes and stand in the middle of your kitchen while eating a pot of creamy, delicious — if ever so slightly salty — melted cheese, luxuriously dressed over pasta in exactly 15 minutes or less from when you first had the idea.

If it’s just me and you have never not once in your life had such an urge, don’t tell me.

For the rest of us, this is a Mac and Cheese recipe built for impulsiveness, cravings, and comfort.

It’s not the decadent, bronze, smooth, perfectly baked Mac and Cheese that takes over an hour to make and is 100% best served once the leaves have changed and you need a blanket to stay warm. No, this is rushed and unpolished (though I find elegance in its messiness) — a beautiful meeting of those nostalgic blue Kraft boxes from after school specials and the trendy adult cacio e pepes that have overtaken the menus of fancy Italian restaurants everywhere. It’s for when you need cheesy pasta RIGHT NOW and nothing else will do.

When I started this column, I imagined sticking to “seasonal” recipes that used up my love of farmer’s markets, vegetables, and fruit. And yes, technically speaking, stovetop Mac and Cheese is not that. However, I can tell you, from personal experience, that if you pair this Mac and Cheese with some freshly sliced sweet summer tomatoes on the side and a nice chunk of crusty bread, your eyes will roll back in your head and you will reconsider everything you once knew in life. Just a little tip from me to you.

Like all things that come with being perpetually single but loving to cook, it’s actually difficult to find an appropriately pared down Mac and Cheese recipe for just one person. Deb Perelman’s comes the closest to my needs, though I’ve taken a few liberties. I’ve swapped out her parmesan for a sharp cheddar because I don’t see any reason to mess with a Mac and Cheese classic (though I keep Deb’s heavy hand for pepper, to give it that aforementioned cacio e pepe edge). I use slightly more butter, because who are really we fooling here? And finally, I sub some of the flour for cornstarch. Years of trial and error have taught me that a little cornstarch will keep your cheese sauce extra creamy, even as it cools.

Mac and Cheese To Eat Out of a Pot in Your Underwear

Serves one

Ingredients for Single Serving Mac and Cheese

4 ounces short, chunky, and twisty pasta of your choice (I used bowtie/farfalle, and have you ever noticed how hard it is to measure out dry pasta when you don’t have a scale? I find this visual guide from The Kitchn to be really helpful!)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon cornstarch (see *note for alternative)
1 1/2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1/2 cup milk
Many grinds of black pepper
Salt
1/2 cup (1 ounce or 30 grams) shredded sharp cheddar cheese

*Note: Don’t have cornstarch hanging around?  You can substitute the 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch for an additional 1/2 teaspoon of flour, bringing the total amount of flour to two teaspoons total.

Directions for Single Serving Mac and Cheese

Bring a small/medium pot of water to a boil. Add your pasta and cook according to package instructions for al dente, then drain.

Return the pot (now warmed) to your stove. Melt butter in the bottom of the pot over medium heat. Using a fork or whisk, add flour and cornstarch. Mix until they disappear and no remaining dry parts remain.

Add milk, going a solid — but careful! — splash at a time, stirring constantly with fork or whisk so that no lumps form. Don’t forget to scrap down the corners of the pot while you’re at it! Once everything is smooth, season with a good pinch of salt and many grinds of black pepper. Bring sauce to a simmer.

Cook at a simmer, stirring, for one minute. Remove from heat. Stir in grated cheese until melted and combined. (If you find the cheese won’t seamlessly melt into the sauce, put the pot back on low heat while stirring until the cheese melts and everything combines, then take it back off heat.)

Is your drained pasta still warm? Great! Then add it to the pot, and stir evenly to coat. (If your pasta got cold while you made sauce, pause here! The sauce will seize up if you try to mix in cold noodles. Re-warm it by quickly rinsing it throughly with hot water and drain it again. Once completely drained, add rewarmed pasta to pot, stir to evenly coat.)

Your Mac and Cheese is ready! Give another grind of black pepper on top, for aesthetics.

Grab a fork. Use your phone to put on a podcast. Dig in.

Chocolate Strawberry “Just Because I Can” Cake

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making a chocolate cake with fresh strawberry frosting, just because we can. 

This is a story about birthdays.

My mother is exactly 30 years and seven days older than me. I know the number to the date because, famously, I was supposed to be born on her 30^th birthday. But legend has it that when my mother was told by her doctor of my expected birth date, she had a conversation with me in utero, one-on-one. She was willing to share her body with me, she was willing to have everything she knew in life go upside down by becoming a mom, but she was not — and I repeat, not — prepared to share her birthday. You see, she knew that as soon as I was born, whatever day that was, it would become “the baby’s birthday.” She’d never have the day to herself again.

And so, knowing better than to ever upstage her, I dutifully waited until I was exactly one week overdue to be born.

The week between June 19^th (my mother’s birthday) and June 27^th (my own) is one of my favorite times of the year. Ok yes, anyone who’s ever even casually read my writing knows that we’re close as a mother/daughter duo, so there is that. But also? I’m in it for the cake. The third week of June comes with not one — but two birthday cakes — and I, for one, think that’s beautiful.

This cake, however, is actually not either of our birthday cakes this year! My mom had a double chocolate cake from Deb Perelman’s magical Smitten Kitchen Keepers that I made over the weekend. Mine’s from a local bakery because I’m tired (whoops!) (it will be vegan chocolate with a vegan cookie butter buttercream). But this cake? This is the kind of cake you can make for no other reason than you have a little over an hour to spare and a few handfuls of strawberries in the fridge.

That’s right, I said an hour. If you hustle, that’s the time that stands between you and a fudgey, chocolatey, cake that’s just this side of a brownie and a strawberry frosting that tastes like summer itself was bottled into a Barbie pink tube.

If you were baking online roughly eight years ago, this chocolate cake recipe will be instantly recognizable to you — it’s lifted from Smitten Kitchen’s viral one that I swear every person on the internet had a copycat of (it’s really that good, and who doesn’t want a birthday style cake that can be made in the time it takes to watch a repeat of Grey’s Anatomy?). The frosting is adapted from Baking Mischief’s Small Batch Strawberry Frosting (I doubled it), with a sprinkle of Martha Stewart’s Quick Strawberry Jam, because I’ve found if you cook the strawberries down a bit first you don’t lose any of their fresh flavor and also you keep your frosting from spitting apart on day two or three, which otherwise can happen with fresh fruit.

Of course, that’s assuming the cake lasts that long.

Chocolate Strawberry “Just Because I Can” Cake

Serves 6-9 (depending on how large you cut your slices)

Ingredients for Fresh Strawberry Frosting

1 cup of strawberries, cut into medium chunks
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
Lemon or lime juice, you’ll only need a light squeeze
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature (fun fact! you can speed this up by putting cut up butter in microwave for 5-15 seconds, stoping to turn butter pieces around every 5 seconds, until you can leave a thumbprint easily but butter has not yet melted)
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

Instructions for Fresh Strawberry Frosting

In a large skillet stir your strawberries, sugar and a squeeze of lemon or lime juice. Stirring frequently, cook over medium-high, until strawberries break down until a jam like consistency (I speed this along by pushing down on the larger strawberries with my fork or spatula while cooking). Keep going until the mixture is thickened — if you make a streak with a spoon, it should remain unfilled with strawberry juice — and bubbles completely cover surface, roughly 5 minutes. (I’ve gotten a note in the comments that this might be more like 10 minutes! But you want it to look like jam and also to hold its shape when you swipe through with a spoon.)

Take strawberry jam off heat and transfer to a container, let cool to room temperature.

(While the strawberry jam is cooling, this is when I make the chocolate cake! Scroll down for details!)

Put room temperature strawberry jam, room temperature butter, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and pinch of salt into a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer until fluffy and looks like frosting. Taste for sweetness — you can add up to an additional 1/2 cup of powder sugar if needed, but I find the frosting to be appropriately sweet without it.

You’re all done! Frost your cake.

Ingredients for Dead Ass Simple Chocolate Cake

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature (once again! you can speed this up by putting cut up butter in microwave for 5-15 seconds)
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup buttermilk (see *note for DIY buttermilk instructions)
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

*Note: Who keeps buttermilk around in their fridge? Ok if you don’t have buttermilk and don’t want to buy it for such a small amount, you have some options! The classic DIY buttermilk is to “sour” regular milk with lemon juice or vinegar. Add one tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to one (slight, you can afford to be a little under here) cup of regular milk, stir and let sit for 5-10 minutes before using. Then you’re all set! For this recipe you’ll want 3/4 cup of that mixture, what you do with the final 1/4 is your own business. Alternatively, you can also replace the 3/4 cup buttermilk with either 3/4 cup sour cream or plain yogurt, in both cases thin out the sour cream/yogurt a bit with milk before using, so it’s loose but still thick, and take 3/4 cup of that mixture.

Instructions for Simple Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Coat an 8-inch square brownie pan with nonstick spray and line the bottom with parchment paper (you can trace an outline of your pan on the parchment paper and then cut to size, so it matches the bottom of the pan).

In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugars together with an electric mixer until fluffy (be careful of over-mixing, if you’re unsure, look for when the butter is creamy and you can see flecks of sugar throughout).

Add the egg, the yolk and the vanilla. Beat until just combined and scrape down the bowl. Add the buttermilk and beat it all again. Don’t worry if the batter looks a little uneven or curdled — we’re in the middle of a process here!

Put your flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a small/medium bowl. Shake this mixture all over the wet batter.

Stir it all together with your mixer on low (or by hand) until the flour just disappears. Scrape down bowl one final time, because baby you made it!

Scoop batter into prepared pan and smooth flat. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick or fork inserted into the center comes out clean.

Let cool for about 5 minutes in its pan, then run a thin knife around the edges to ensure it’s loose, and get ready for what I call the “two plate maneuver” — first, carefully flip your brownie pan upside down onto a plate, so the cake slides out. The cake will now be upside down on this plate, with the bottom of the cake facing up. Cover the now exposed bottom with the cooling rack and immediately, but still gently, flip it back — so the cake is now right-side up again (this can also be done just using a second plate instead of a rack, I have never “owned” a cooling rack in all my years of baking).

I know that sounds awkward written out, but I promise its instinctive once you’re in it. Basically you just want to get the cake out of the pan, and have it ultimately be right-side up. Do whatever works best for you.

Let cake cool completely before frosting. Following Deb Perelman’s advice, I always speed this up by putting it in my freezer for about 15 minutes.

(While the cake is cooling in the freezer, this is when I finish my strawberry frosting! Scroll back up for details!)

Once your cake is completely cool to the touch, frost it. Cut into pieces and serve.

Four-Ingredient Asparagus Tart for Mothers Day (Or the Friend You Yell “Mother” at in the Chat)

Welcome to the sapphic table, a series of (hopefully!) unfussy seasonal recipes for your farmers market, your CSA bounty — or your grocery store. Today we’re making a four-ingredient asparagus tart for Mother’s Day, or for that friend you yell Mother at in your group chat.

In my opinion there’s no better home for springtime asparagus than nestled between a bed of cheese and butter. That’s my selling point. My strongest argument.

But if “cheese” + “butter” hasn’t quite done it for you yet, I can go deeper. This dead simple asparagus tart is so easy to make for ridiculously impressive results that you can assemble and bake the entire thing with sleep crusted in your eyes and still partially in your early morning zombie form. If you cut a few corners as suggested (I promise you don’t have use a rolling pin unless you want to), it will take you longer to decide on a Spotify playlist than to get this into the oven. Buttery, store bought, frozen puff pastry will do all the work for you — making the final result impeccably rich and flaky, almost as if you’re a master baker, and will knock the socks off of anyone in attendance. The asparagus roasts as the pastry cooks, becoming deliciously charred at the tips and lush throughout. This is a genius hack recipe, especially if you consider yourself not skilled in the kitchen. The end result is always outstanding, no matter how little experience you have.

I have particular feelings about brunches, especially brunches at home — they should feel like luxury, a self-carved vacation of your own making, but the process of creating said brunch should not leave you exhausted, otherwise you’ve defeated the whole purpose. If I close my eyes while sipping my mimosa from a mug (that I’m pretending is a glass, but I can’t be trusted with stemware that early), I want to feel like I could just as easily be at that one fancy restaurant downtown as I am in my pajamas serving friends from my kitchen.

If that also sounds like what you’re into, just saying perhaps to impress for mother’s day because you forgot to make reservations at the nice place you know she likes, or maybe for your chosen family to survive through the rough edges and sharp corners of the day together, maybe to eat it by yourself while you read that book you keep putting off and save the leftovers for Monday morning… in any of those extremely hypothetical situations, this is for you.

There’s a few dozen versions of this asparagus tart online and to be honest I’m not sure what even qualifies as a “tart” but I’m keeping it because that’s what all the other recipes call it, plus it sounds nice. This version is lightly adjusted from Martha Stewart’s, because that’s how I first learned how to make it. Over the years I’ve lowered the cooking times to minimize the chance of the puff pastry burning, along with using slightly less cheese and asparagus. The shatteringly flaky pastry shell is my favorite part and extra cheese/ asparagus weight can create what was once known on the Great British Bake-Off as a “soggy bottom” — still delicious, but you’ll end up having to eat it with a fork and knife. I also offer less expensive alternatives to her original gruyere.

Four-Ingredient Asparagus Tart for Mothers Day (Or the Friend You Yell “Mother” at in the Chat)

Serves 3-4 as a main course, or 6-8 as a side

Ingredients

1 sheet frozen puff pastry
1 1/2 to 2 cups shredded gruyere cheese (*this can easily be cheddar if it’s cheaper or your store doesn’t have gruyere. It could also be a mix of cheddar and gruyere if you’re feeling it, but that would take us over 4 ingredients!)
3/4 to 1 pound of asparagus
1 tablespoon olive oil

Instructions

Defrost puff pastry according to package instructions (pay attention! It might require setting it out in the fridge overnight).

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Trim the bottoms of the asparagus spears (cut off the white parts). If your asparagus is medium-to -thicc, instead of thin, use a knife to cut asparagus length-wise — making two skinny asparagus where there was once only one. If your asparagus is already thin, you don’t need to do that. Set asparagus pile aside.

Line a baking sheet large enough to hold the puff pastry with parchment paper or lightly oiled aluminum foil, spray, whatever is your favorite “keep things from sticking to a baking sheet” situation. Place pastry on a baking sheet.

Optional: Using a rolling pin or a clean wine bottle, roll the puff pastry into a slightly larger rectangle than its original shape (I usually just roll it once or twice first up-and-down, and then side-to-side, all over. I also sometimes skip this step). Trim any uneven edges.

With a sharp knife, lightly score — this means draw a line into it, slightly pressing down — the pastry dough, 1 inch in from the edges on each side, to mark a smaller rectangle. Inside your scored markings, use a fork to make holes all over the dough. This is to prevent the dough from “puffing” too much while it bakes, so please poke holes liberally.

Put in oven for first round of baking, roughly 12 minutes.

Remove puff pastry shell from oven, and inside your scored lines, sprinkle your shredded cheese. Arrange asparagus in a single layer over cheese. If you wanna get fancy, you can alternate the ends and tips. Asparagus should be packed tightly together — it will shrink while baking! — but not overlapping (a little overlap is OK if you just can’t make a single layer work, but ideally we’re going for single layer here). Drizzle olive oil over asparagus and season and season with salt and pepper.

Return to oven and bake until spears are tender, another 12 minutes.

Cut into 6-8 pieces, depending on preference. Serve warm.

A Very Special Senior Team Holigay Recipe Roundup

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This is…you can’t make a meal with this roundup. We’ve got cookies, gravy, cake, pasta, sausage balls and two separate and very different alcoholic beverages. Okay, like, you could make this a meal but I have questions if you do that and don’t add anything else. Why are the only options straight whiskey or grasshoppers (lactose intolerant arsenic, basically) and WHAT DOES THE GRAVY GO ON. What this is, however, is a pick-your-own-adventure of the senior team’s fave recipes for the holigays. And what this is REALLY about as opposed to anything you could use to build a meal, is what we consider ours and what we consider worth sharing with you. Enjoy and as Anya says, mangia mangia! Wishing you the happiest of holigays!

xoxo,

Nico

Maybe You’re Observing Lent, or Maybe You Just Want This Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Filet-O-Fish Recipe

I’m not Catholic, but I grew up in a predominantly Catholic community. Most of my peers observed Lent, which starts on Ash Wednesday and ends the night before Easter. During those weeks, many Lent-observers eat fish on Fridays to abstain from “warm-blooded animals,” and some Christians follow this practice year-round. If you’re a fan of the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich, you can thank this tradition.

Created by franchise-owner Lou Groen in 1962, the Filet-O-Fish was the first non-hamburger item on the McDonald’s menu. In his Catholic community, Groen noticed that sales declined every Friday, so he slapped some fried fish on a bun with American cheese and tartar sauce to keep the Catholics coming back. Now the Filet-O-Fish is a McDonald’s staple, and consumers are deeply obsessed.

However, if you have food allergies, there’s a chance that McDonald’s is off the table for you. That’s the case for my girlfriend, who has Celiac disease. Throw in my dietary restrictions due to chronic digestive issues, and ordering fast food (or ordering from restaurants in general) feels nearly impossible for us. After extensive research, I started making copycat Filet-O-Fish sandwiches in my own kitchen that suited our particular needs, and readers — I think I’ve nailed it.

Whether you’re observing Lent right now or you’re just a fan of the FOF, you can make this gluten-free, dairy-free fish sandwich at home. My specific brand recommendations for ingredients are all certified gluten-free or processed in a gluten-free facility.

*Makes four sandwiches

Ingredients

For the Tartar Sauce:

1/2 cup mayonnaise (I use Primal Kitchen Mayo, which is Certified Gluten-Free)
1/4 cup minced dill pickles (I use Bubbie’s Kosher Dill Pickles, which are processed in a gluten-free facility)
2 teaspoons white onion, minced
1 teaspoon parsley flakes
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
10-12 capers, minced
1/8 teaspoon sugar

For the Sandwich:

4 cod or pollock filets
3/4 box of Simple Mills Almond Flour Crackers, crushed
Dash of salt
Dash of pepper
1 egg
4 slices of dairy-free American cheese (I use Daiya American-style Slices, which are processed in a gluten-free facility)
4 gluten-free buns (I use Udi’s Classic Hamburger Buns, which are Certified Gluten-Free)

Instructions

1. If you’re using frozen gluten-free buns, take them out of the freezer to thaw.
2. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees
3. Mix your tartar sauce ingredients in a small bowl. If the mixture is too thick or if it doesn’t have enough of a “vinegar-y” taste, add a little pickle juice. Refrigerate the mixture until you’re ready to use it.
4. Cut your filets into squares that are slightly larger than the buns (these will shrink a bit in the oven).
5. Whisk one egg in a bowl.
6. In a separate container, crush your gluten-free crackers. You can do this by hand or you can pulse the crackers in a food processor.
7. Add salt and pepper to the cracker mixture.
8. Dip each filet into the egg mixture. Then dip each filet in the crushed crackers. You may have to do this more than once to make sure that each filet is evenly coated.
9. Place your filets on a baking dish. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the fish is flaky and the cracker coating is slightly browned.
10. While your fish cools, warm your buns in the broiler or microwave.
11. Put those sandwiches together! For your most authentic Filet-O-Fish experience, place a slice of dairy-free cheese on the bottom half of each bun. Place each filet on top of the cheese. Add tartar sauce to the top half of each bun to complete your sandwich assembly.

A Definitive Guide to the Best At-Home Breakfast Sandwich

We’ve all picked up our own little ~hobbies~ in quarantine; some of you have been baking bread or making fresh pasta; some of you have apparently been getting really into rug tufting (??). I have not been doing anything impressive or productive; most of my days are spent listening to the soft fizz, like a Coke being opened slowly, of my brain disintegrating; I’ve started several craft-based hobbies that have not progressed since May of 2020 and my inbox is like a war zone. The one thing I have managed to focus on and find any fulfillment in is perfecting the breakfast sandwich. I have so much admiration for y’all who really discovered the meditative joy of making risottos and three-day sourdough breads, but that is not my ministry. I, like many people, have found eating regularly to be very challenging of late; I have accepted that the best way to get myself to eat meals is to make sure they’re something I really like and also something easy and fast to put together.

I am here to share the fruits of my labor, and many months of trying lots of different breakfast sandwich iterations before landing on this one. Maybe you will feel differently than me! I welcome your insight as well. Perhaps you can tell me about it over a breakfast sandwich.

First, the ingredients we will need for this journey:

Bread

This is a key element to nail down – you have a lot of options and some of them are definitely incorrect. An incomplete survey of our options:

+ Crusty sliced loaf bread
+ Bagel
+ English muffin
+ Croissant
+ Bun or roll of some sort

Bagels have a bread-to-filling ratio that’s too high, at least if you use both halves of it for a closed sandwich, although an open-faced bagel breakfast sando might be okay (still very dense, though!). English muffins are too thin, making for a low bread-to-filling ratio and they get soggy very quickly. Same problem with croissants; no structural integrity. What about tortillas? you may ask, which is a great point but one that takes us out of breakfast sandwich territory and into breakfast taco/burrito or huevos rancheros territory. A story for another day, my friend.

To me, the objective best choice is a ciabatta or focaccia roll; they’re airy enough on the inside that they’re light and easy to eat, small enough that you can pick up the sandwich easily in one hand, and yet sturdy enough that you get plenty of crusty bread along with your sandwich ingredients and they won’t get soggy even with condiments. I like to buy a big bag of them, slice them all in half right away, and then put the pre-sliced halves in the freezer so they don’t go bad and I can put them in the toaster right from the freezer.

hello there, “take and bake white rolls” from target

Although I feel extremely confident this is the best, time-tested choice, I’m open to other interpretations, and especially interested in more avant-garde carbohydrate choices. Perhaps two hash brown slabs (gluten-free!)? A glazed doughnut? (The bakery at my airport has an egg and cheese on a glazed doughnut and tbh it’s great.)

Egg

Okay, the approach I’m going to suggest here is dependent on whether you tend to like your eggs fried or scrambled (or which of those things sounds better to you in a sandwich setting, I suppose).

For fried: I do the Smitten Kitchen bodega-style egg, which involves beating an egg with a little water to thin it out and cooking it on a flat nonstick surface like a crepe, throwing a slice of cheese on there, and folding it up with the cheese inside to form a gooey little pocket. As you can see, I cook mine for longer than hers, so it’s less delicate and omelet-y and more crisp on the outside, so you get some crispy cooked egg and melted cheese. You could also, if you’re really into runny yolk, just fry an egg and flip it over to cook the other side and throw a slice of cheese on top of it in the pan.

For scrambled/fluffy: This is based off the Flour Bakery egg sando, which uses as its premise the fact that reheated egg is gross but egg that’s been cooked with some high-fat dairy (ex. quiche or frittata) reheats beautifully to make sandwich egg in volume for a restaurant menu. This exact recipe is a little fussy, it asks you to steam the egg custard mixture in a tray of water, etc etc, but also isn’t actually hard — and the real draw here is that you can cook a lot of egg at once and then portion it and put it in the fridge (or freezer even!) and have your breakfast sandwich most of the way done already every morning. You can use the quiche inspiration premise to use plenty of other recipes for this, doesn’t have to be this one – if you have a quiche or frittata recipe you like, or for instance this Moosewood moment I grew up eating, that could all work also. If you want to add greens or veg or other seasoning to the egg mixture, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.

I personally like the bodega-style egg better, and also find the process of making it very satisfying, but also am not always up for a meditative multi-step cooking process that makes more than one dish dirty in the mornings, especially as my brain cells continue to degrade into asbestos over the course of quarantine. So I’ve been finding it expedient to make the baked fluffy eggs and keep them in the fridge too for days when I really need to have breakfast mostly already made or else I’m realistically not gonna end up eating it.

Vegans! Probably by now you’ve already developed some egg workarounds in your life but I would either use some baked marinated tofu here or perhaps some chickpea flour/tofu situation. EDIT: House vegan Stef has informed me that JustEgg would be ideal for this application.

Cheese

I am a purist and think that thick-cut sharp cheddar is the vibe here, but if you want to use like gouda or some shit, I’m not going to stop you. I also think there’s a strong argument to be made for the plastic-wrapped Kraft American cheese singles, tbh, to give things an authentic McD’s breakfast feel. Vegans, gotta be honest, you’re on your own here.

Protein

Optional! I’ve been using the Beyond Breakfast Sausages because I am vegetarienne and I like them better than the Morningstar ones, but you could of course also use bacon, ham, Canadian bacon, actual sausage, leftover chicken tinga, whatever you’ve got. If you have more patience than me, marinated pan-seared tempeh is great here.

Condiments

This is really what takes things from mediocre to memorable. I like to have one sort of creamy condiment and one spicy/tangy/savory one. For the former I’ve been doing a half-and-half mix of Dijon mustard and mayonnaise, which is drawn from the Flour recipe above; it kind of brings in a hollandaise feeling, which is nice with the egg. For the latter I’ve been doing either homemade tomato jam (a gamechanger of a condiment in general) or this tomato chile spread from Target. I also do some arugula and usually whatever hot sauce I have on hand. If you live in someplace where you can regularly access good avocados (jealous!) that’s probably gonna be good as well. Fresh tomatoes in season would probably be great. Lightly pickled onion? Radishes? Sure, go wild.

Assembly

Okay, go time! Ideally this is like, a 15 minute process at most, and you’re satiated and ready to live your life.

1. Get your egg situation going – if you need to reheat baked egg soufflé, take it out and microwave it for like 25 seconds so it doesn’t stay cold in the center, and put any cheese you want on top. Stick it under the broiler in your oven or toaster oven. If you’re doing a bodega egg, crack your egg into a bowl, add a spoonful of water and salt and pepper and beat; heat a flat nonstick pan and pour in, throwing your slice of cheese in the center. Let the egg cook through and fold it over onto itself into a little square to fit the size of your bread, and flip over to let cook on the other side for 30 seconds.
2. If you’re using a protein that needs to be cooked, go ahead and put that in the pan.
3. Grab your bread and toast it, can be straight from the freezer, you don’t need to thaw. I usually use the ‘bagel’ setting so the inside of my sandwich gets toasted without the outside getting too cooked, but whatever you wanna do.
4. After your bread is toasted, go ahead and condiment it – I do mustard/mayo on top, tomato jam on bottom topped with arugula.
5. Your egg and protein should be ready – you can throw them on and add some hot sauce, salt and pepper.

Delicious! You did it! No one can take this breakfast sandwich away from you; whatever indignities your day may bring, you can hold this in your heart. I’m so proud of you; I always knew you could do it.

The Dyke Kitchen: Bold, Tingly, Spicy Mapo Tofu

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

I’ve taken great joy in tofu as long as I’ve been a food-chewing human. I grew up eating tofu weekly over rice, prepared in a very simple way: cut in big squares that were pan-fried with a few cloves of smashed garlic and soy sauce. My parents liked to remind me that rice and tofu made a complete amino acid — so it was an ideal and healthy combination. I’ve always just been comforted by its smooth texture and the very delicately beany taste mixed with soy sauce — they go together like long lost twins.

Later, when I went to college at Oberlin, where my parents met, I found out that my mom had not only been in the MOST hippie-dippie of co-ops, which was appropriately vegan, but was the head tofu maker there too. So I began to learn what she loves about tofu. Through a couple of trips to Japan, where we had exquisite examples of tofu, and an unsatisfactory attempt to make our own batch, I now appreciate the textures, flavors and the process of making tofu even more. I am a particular sucker for soft or silken tofu for its custard-like texture. I also like the yuba, which is a skin that forms when the soy milk is cooking and has uniquely squeaky, satisfying bite.

Anyway, this passion for tofu was something that my mom shared in a group chat with my girlfriend not long after they met. It was a video of a shop in Portland, OR, where Sarah lives, called Ota Tofu, and they make fresh tofu by hand. My mom expressed how much she wanted to taste it. So when we all met in Oakland to share a Thanksgiving meal with my parents, Sarah decided to surprise my mom and bring along a casual eight blocks of fresh tofu over to her house — a very generous gift that my mom loved!

Ultimately my mom decided that maybe four blocks was really all she needed — a soft, medium, firm, extra firm — so I took home a soft and medium for myself. My sister made a delicious kimchi jigae with one of the blocks and I’m eating the soft tofu raw, in a bowl, scattered with scallions and sesame seeds and a light cheery blossom soy sauce.

With the medium block, I decided to make mapo tofu. I like that it’s a really bold, flavorful dish, where the tofu cubes play an important textural element and act as a little fluffy islands in a sea of chiles. The original dish is Sichuan, and so uses a lot of chilies and some numbing peppercorns, which I used here, but my seasonings and sauces lean more on my Japanese pantry. That said, this mapo tofu still gives you soft tofu in a spicy, glossy sauce with bits of pork, and it’s SOO flavorful and satisfying, especially on a cool day. As always, you can make this without pork and just add more mushrooms or other vegetables, and you can adjust the spice level too. Oh, and don’t forget to complete the amino acid and eat it with rice!

How To Make Mapo Tofu

Ingredients

4 tablespoons fried chili in oil, like this one or this one or you can make your own, but this is one of the main flavor ingredients so you need one you like
1 lb ground pork
16 oz medium-pressed tofu, you can also use soft
30 oz shiitake mushroom
4 scallions
4 garlic cloves
1 inch ginger
1 1/2 cups cubed squash, I used delicata but another would work
2 cups broth, chicken, vegetable, dashi all work
2 tablespoon corn starch
3 teaspoons sugar
3 teaspoons miso
2 tablespoons mirin
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce + a little extra for the pork
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon black garlic molasses
1 teaspoon ground chili powder
1 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorns, these have a tingly numbing effect and an almost citrusy pepper flavor, but they’re not exactly hot
4 teaspoons salt or more to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions

This one has a lot of liquid ingredients, so I first started by getting them out from their various homes in my kitchen.

To prep the tofu, I removed it from its packaging and poured out the water. I placed 4 paper towels in a strainer, and put the block of tofu on top. Using two more paper towels, I gently pressed it on all sides to remove the excess water. You can also do this with clean dish towels, but I get weirded out by potentially rouge towel fibers sticking to the tofu.

Next, I started chopping up all of my aromatics and produce. First off, I minced my garlic and ginger and just the white parts of the scallions. I separated each pile in half, reserving one part to mix in with the pork and the other part to cook in the pot to start off the dish.

Then I put my ground pork in a bowl, added a teaspoon of salt, half of the garlic, ginger and scallions whites, a splash of soy sauce and mixed it up with my hands.

I went back to my board to chop the squash into cubes, slice the greens of the scallions into pretty large pieces and slice the shiitakes into slivers, and cut my tofu into cubes — once through the middle of the block and then into a 3 x 3 grid.

Before I heated my pot — and I used my cast-iron enamel dutch oven, but any pot will do — I went to measure out 2 cups of broth and set that aside. I also made a slurry with the cornstarch, shaking it in a jar with a tablespoon of water. Then, to make things easy on myself, I put the sugar, miso, mirin, soy sauce, fish sauce and black garlic molasses and sesame oil together in a liquid measuring cup and stirred it all up with a fork to combine it.

Then, I set my pot over medium heat, poured in the olive oil, and cooked the rest of the garlic, ginger and scallion whites until they were soft, but not brown.

Next, I added in the ground pork. and let it cook til it had a few browned spots, but it wasn’t cooked all the way through. You can break it up with a spoon a little, but it’s okay to have a few chunks and it tends to melt into the sauce when you simmer it anyway.

Your tofu goes in next with the squash and the shiitakes. And in a few more teaspoons of salt and I let them all cook together for about 5 min.

Next up are the chilies in oil. In addition to giving the dish a lot of earthy flavors, this does determine a lot of the spice level, so you should taste your chilies and decide if you want to do all  4 tablespoons or maybe even add an extra. I decided to give mine an extra spice kick by adding ground Sunnam chilies with the oil, but you don’t have to do that either.

Stir everything up so the oil is well-distributed, and then add the broth. Once it’s warm, though it doesn’t need to simmer, you will then add in the mix you’ve made of the sugar and many sauces, followed by the cornstarch slurry. Mix all of this together well.

Finally, you’ll toss in the scallion greens and your teaspoon of whole Sichuan peppercorns. Bring everything to a low simmer and then keep it there for 20-30 min. It’s a gentle cook. If the mixture is a little dry or thick, you can add in more water, but the corn starch will give it a glossier, saucier feel.

When your squash is tender and done, that’s when you know you can dig in!

The Dyke Kitchen: Golden Chicken Korma Pot Pies

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

It’s officially celebration-style comfort food season, and that’s exactly what today’s recipe is about! If you enjoyed my previous biriyani collaboration with Sarah, I think you’re gonna love this one too. Our chicken korma pot pies came about because, as always, we had a long list of foods we wanted to make together, including pie and a korma. So we decided to mix them together! It’s not like the traditional filling of a chicken pot pie is generally knocking anyone’s socks off as it is, and I thought flaky pie crust would be a nice thing to dip into a spicy sauce. For those unfamiliar with a pot pie, it’s basically a stew in a small pot with a crust that covers the top.

So we tried it out and I’m here to report that chicken korma pot pie was the best food we’ve made together! Sarah kept repeating that it was “fucked up” which is her highest food rating. The chicken korma is lightly spicy and that specific kind of creamy that comes from blending cashews. The pie crust is flaky and adds a crunch. We also topped the pies with some fried herbs, seeds and nuts (recommended by the recipe we followed), which added even more texture. It’s without a doubt, a very rich dish, but it was also a delicious way to eat vegetables, which Sarah needs to be enticed into eating. You could easily make the korma vegetarian with paneer, using the same method as we did for the biriyani, or with just veggies.

One of the best parts of these chicken korma pot pies are that if you’re someone who is going to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, little separate pot pies are a nice way to have individual servings that not everyone needs to touch, that you can drop off to people, and that reheat easily if you’re dining solo. We ended up making three pies in the glass bottoms of two-cup pyrex storage containers. That used up all of our korma and one disc of pie crust, which is what the recipe below makes. In practice, we doubled the pie crust recipe and Sarah made a honey pie with the other crust, which was a fun sweet and savory pie time! When we make the chicken korma pot pies again, which we’re planning to do to try to impress my parents, I would make four pies with a little less korma in each dish, and make the pie crust top a little thinner. Everything else I’d do the same!

How To Make The Pie Crust

Sarah made this crust first and then put it in the fridge to chill, while we made the korma. After it was done, we assembled the chicken korma pot pies. Since this was Sarah’s job, she will tell you what she did:

This was only my second time making crust, but because I have so many crust daddies in my life, I was not worried. I floated the need for a crust recipe and, of course, Cee Webster — former tech extraordinare of this very website, Capricorn, baker of many things — came through. Their crust is simple and straightforward.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour (sift it!)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup frozen butter
3 tablespoons ice water
1/2 teaspoon of turmeric powder

The Dough

Using the large holes of a box grater, grate the frozen butter into a bowl and put it back into the freezer.

Whisk flour, turmeric and salt in a bowl. (We didn’t add the turmeric until later, but it afterward we realized this was probably the best place to do it.)

Mix frozen butter gently and briefly until it’s crumbly, where you can see chunks of butter (this is important!). I like to use my hands but you could also use a pastry cutter or cut it up with crisscrossed butter knives. You want to see chunks of butter still.

Add just enough very cold water to make the dough come together into a ball.

Pat it into a small disc and smooth out any cracks at the edges. This will make for a smooth experience when you roll it out later! Wrap it in some plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge to keep it cold while you make the other elements!

The Rollout

Flour a surface and your dough disc.

Roll the dough out into a relatively circular shape that you can cut 3-4 circular shapes from.

If you’re making these pies in ramekins, use the lip of your container as a stamp, and then roll out the dough so it’s a bit larger.

After you fill your containers with chicken korma, gently lift your dough circle(s) and drape them so they cover the filling completely.

If you wanna get fancy you can crimp the edges of your pie — I highly recommend it! Something about seeing the crimped pie-edge was so satisfying. I spent 1 minute watching a YouTube video before I became a pro, and you can too.

Beat an egg and brush it over the tops of your crusts. Put all the little pot pies on a baking sheet and cook them in a 400 degree oven for 30 min, or until the crust is golden and you can see the korma bubbling inside or up out of the dishes.

How To Make The Chicken Korma

We made a few small changes to the Navratan Korma recipe by our fave, Dassana Amit, but mostly did what she suggested. It looks really involved, but getting all of the ingredients together and into pastes is the most involved part. You will need a food processor or blender to make these pates. After that you just cook it all together!

There are five parts of the this korma so I’ve divided the ingredients by step:
1) You fry the onions and first batch of whole spices
2) You make a paste of garlic and ginger
3) You make a paste of nuts and seeds
4) You add the pastes, ground spices and dairy to the pan, followed by veggies and/or meat
5) You fry up the toppings that we ate on top of the pies

Ingredients for Part 1

1 onion sliced thinly
2 tablespoon ghee or butter
2 to 3 green cardamom pods
1 black cardamom pod
3 cloves
1 inch stick of cinnamon
1 tej patta or Indian bay leaf
2 single strands of mace

Ingredients for Part 2

5 garlic cloves
1 inch of ginger root

Ingredients for Part 3

1 tablespoon white poppy seeds or khus khus
10 -12 almonds
10 -12 cashews
1 tablespoon bittermelon seeds or magaz
¼ cup water for blending

Ingredients for Part 4

2 hot green chilies chopped, depending on how spicy you like it, remove some seeds
1 pound of chicken thighs, cubed and salted
1 1/2 cups chopped cauliflower florets
2 small yellow potatoes, about a cup chopped up
1 very small Delicata squash, or about a cup of cubed up
½ cup plain yogurt
½ cup whipping cream
½ teaspoon garam masala powder
½ teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon red chili powder

Ingredients for Part 5

1 tablespoon ghee or butter
7 almonds, blanched and peeled
10 pistachios
10 cashews
1 tablespoon golden raisins
½ tablespoon magaz seeds
1 tablespoon mint leaves
2 teaspoon ginger julienne

Directions

First things first, you need to soak the nuts and seeds for Part 3 and the almonds and raisins for Part 5 for 30 min. So we put ours in a glass measuring cup and then filled it with hot water.

Next, I’d suggest chopping up your chicken thighs into one-inch chunks and tossing them with salt in a bowl, be generous with it. I also suggest dancing around with the bowl of chicken so it gets evenly salted.

Also slice your onion thinly, and chop up the rest of your vegetables into smaller cubes.

Then in, a big high-walled frying pan, on medium-low heat, add ghee, the whole spices in Part 1. Let the spices start crackling and then add the onions and let them caramelize. Salt them with a few pinches.

Meanwhile, peel the garlic and ginger, chop it and pound it in a mortar, or blend it up in a food processor or blender. Either way you want it to become pretty smashed up. Put this aside in a bowl.

At this point, hopefully the nuts and seeds for Part 3 have softened. Remove the skin on the almonds, then add them (save 5-6 almonds for the Part 5 topping), the cashews, the white khus khus seeds and magaz seeds into a food processor or blender with 1/4 cup of water. Blend them until they’re a smooth paste.

Now, add the ginger and garlic paste and green chilies to the onions and mix it in.

Then add the paste of nuts and seeds and mix that in. It might look like a thick glob in the pan at this point, which is actually fine.

Mix up the yogurt so there are no clumps, and then add it to the pan with the turmeric and red chili powder to the pan. Stir it up and then add 1 cup of water.

Now add the chicken to the pan first, and let it simmer in a low heat for about 15 min. Then it’s time to add the vegetables. Stir them up and taste the sauce to see if it needs more salt.

Let everything simmer on low heat together for another 20 minutes or until the potatoes and cauliflower are tender. When they’re cooked through, you’ll add the garam masala and pour in the whipping cream. You can take the pan off the heat, but let everything sit together in the pan.

Guess what? You’ve made chicken korma! And If you didn’t want to put these into a chicken korma pot pie, you could also eat it over rice or just by itself. If you do want them in pot pies, go back up to the pie crust section to figure out how to assemble them.

BUT for the final touch, no matter how you eat it: the toppings.

Get out a small frying pan and put it over medium high heat with ghee. When the pan is hot, add all of the components of Part 5 into the pan and stir them around until they start giving off a nice aroma. Take them off of the heat and sprinkle them over the top of your baked pot pies, or over a bowl. Then dig in! It will taste like a special event.

The Dyke Kitchen: That Meat Sauce So Delicious

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

This election week has been exhausting and I have been looking for comfort in my food — something warm, reliable and simple that also makes me happy when I eat it. I began what I knew would be a trying week with homemade nachos smothered in a gooey cheese sauce made by my friend Phoebe. Then, to make sure I had something substantial waiting for me in the fridge, I made one of my classic Kamala dinner dishes: That Meat Sauce So Delicious.

This sauce is based on a distinct pasta memory I have — not from the selection of excellent meals in Italy I’ve enjoyed — but from what should have been a really below-average lunch, at a nondescript restaurant not far from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. I was studying abroad at the time, and we, as a group of 35 very closely bonded women and five men from liberal arts and women’s colleges, were always ill-prepared to make the most of our cultural program excursions, because they were too early and we had always just finished partying. So while the particular trip to this museum is not one I can recall, I do remember, afterward, the hemming and hawing I did with my friend Rosa about where to have lunch in this obvious cluster of tourist traps. The Italian place we chose had also been selected by at least 10 other members of our program, who we sat with. Everyone took a quiet moment to look at the menu, but it was clear what to order. All the items on it were generic Italian dishes written about in Spanish, and then in bold, at the top was one item called Spaghetti With That Meat Sauce So Delicious. It conveyed what I needed to know.

“When the restaurant makes it easy, only idiots say no,” I said to Rosa and closed my menu.

“I don’t know. You don’t think that’s just a trap for the idiots? For the one’s who can’t think for themselves?” Rosa asked me skeptically. “I’m not falling for that shit!” she declared.

So when the waiter came around to take our order, everyone at the table got That Meat Sauce So Delicious, and Rosa, the genius, ordered pesto. And when the food came, and all of our hungover, 20-year-old faces were stuffed with the overwhelmingly satisfying That Meat Sauce So Delicious, I watched Rosa dig into her pesto and then look silently into her lap.

“It tastes like a front yard!” she cried and dropped her head onto the table. “I’m the idiot. I knew it. I’ve always known.” Which was and is not true, but it is something I bring up with Rosa, to this day, when we’re trying to make a decision and she’s really pushing for the option that seems bad, only because the good option seems too good to be true.

Anyway, the truth about the meat sauce is that it’s just a good tomato sauce at the right time in the right place, and you don’t have to make it with meat — I’ve often made it with minced shitakes and it turns out great. But for my version, this week, I wanted to use the Italian sausages I had and decided to ladle it over potato gnocchi. I will say, the sausages added great flavor, but didn’t create the same silky texture that I’ve gotten when using mixes of fattier meats, like bacon, ground pork and ground beef. But that is just not what was in my fridge this time and I was not mad about it! There are a million hot tips that people have for what makes their own tomato sauce pop, so please share yours too, I could always use some new tricks try out.

How To Make That Meat Sauce So Delicious

Ingredients

Half a large white onion
1 leek
3 cloves garlic grated
1 carrot
2 celery stalks
1/3 cup fresh sage chopped (Many people prefer these herbs dried because they’re more powerful and you can just use a few teaspoons, but I like the taste of fresh. That’s just me.)
1/3 cup fresh basil chopped
2 tablespoons fresh oregano chopped
4 hot Italian sausages out of their casing
28 oz can of San Marzano or plum tomatoes crushed
Tomato paste
1/4 cup of red wine
Maple syrup
Fish sauce or dashi (When I don’t have high quality anchovies, this is my solution.)
Red pepper flakes
Fennel seeds

Directions

The hardest work of this meat sauce, is the chopping and prepping of your aromatics and herbs, everything else is a cinch. So start by chopping the onion, leek, celery and carrot into small cubes. The smaller they are, the more easily they will melt into a sauce. I also like to keep things a little chunky for bite, so as always, make the choice that’s right for you or figure it out over time!

When I’m making sauces like this, I like to grate my garlic on a microplane or cheese grater — if you’re fancy, you might have a garlic press — because I think it lets out a different flavor and I like the way it melds with the tomato.

Chop up your herbs! I once bought this pair of herb cutting scissors at Target while I was stoned, because they have like 5 blades that go all at once and it looked really cool. It doesn’t work any better than a knife and I highly recommend never getting any. I still forget this nearly every time I chop herbs, however, and pull them out just to see. Anyway, I like to put half of the herbs in at the start and save the other half for later into the simmer.

My tomatoes were not crushed when I bought them, so I opened the can, poured them into the bowl and tore them apart with my bare hands!! It’s fun and it feels really nice. My friend Michael, who excels at cooking Italian cuisine, showed me this trick and I like it. It gives your tomato pieces way more character than when they get diced by a machine, though a cold, calculated cut is something I enjoy like too — there is a canned tomato for every mood,

Next, I peeled the casings off of my sausages. Because I had made a pizza a couple days before this pasta, I had one sausage that was already de-cased and browned that I just tossed into the meat sauce.

Because, for me, sauces are all about timing, I like to get everything ready and lined up on the counter behind me, so I can make quick decisions and execute!

The next step is getting a big pot of very salted water on high heat on the back burner so I can throw my gnocchi or pasta in, when I’m ready.

I put my dutch oven on medium heat, glazed it with a heavy pour of olive oil, and began by cooking my onions with a big pinch of salt, until they were translucent. Next I added, the leeks. I waited until those were cooked down before adding the celery and carrots together.

When the celery and carrots were soft and everything is a kind of mush in the pan, I scooped my garlic into the pot and added the sausage. Sometimes I like to break the meat up evenly, sometime I like when it cooks in chunks. This time I went for chunks. Stir all of this up, so they’re all coated in each other.

And then before the meat is doing too much sizzling, I like to add in my tomato paste. In addition to a thick texture, the tomato paste can add an important sweeter flavor if you give it some time to cook. So I put in about two tablespoons of tomato paste, but you can put in more if you want a stickier sauce — I’d just suggest cooking the paste longer, if you add more.

At this point, I like to salt again, add a teaspoon of red chili flakes and fennel seeds, and also add in half of all the herbs, and then mix it all together.

So when everything is a little stuck together, now is when I’ll start adding in the liquids. I’ll start with the wine, and let that cook down a little. And then I add a few healthy glugs of fish sauce — I also sometimes use a 1/4 cup of dashi along with the wine if I want a smokier sauce — and then drizzle in a few tablespoons of maple syrup. Depending on your taste and the acidity of your tomatoes, you may want more or less sweetness, and you can also just use sugar, though I like the way maple and tomatoes taste together.

Then, finally, I add my tomatoes! I stir it up a bunch and bring it up to a boil. Then, I turn down the heat to as low as it will go. I cook it with a lid partway on but with enough room to let steam out of the side for about 30 min.

After 30 min, I have to taste and assess. Does it need more liquid, is it starting to get a little dry? If yes, add some broth, stock or just water, just a splash. How does the tomato taste? If it’s still a little flat you might need more salt and more sweet — the acid in the tomato should start out with a bite, but finish in a rounded sort of way that’s soft. How is the sauce texture? If it’s too watery, you can leave the lid off to let the steam leave, but you might need to give yourself a little more tomato paste and more olive oil or even some butter. Does the red pepper bite? Does the fennel come through?

I like to adjust the flavor and then add the rest of my herbs and let it go for at least another 30 min. When I have a good simmer going, the vegetables have sort of melted, and I feel like the flavors are coming together as one whole, not just a series that follow each other, this is when That Meat Sauce So Delicious is ready. Now, and only now, is when I will cook and drain the pasta or gnocchi. And I always finish it off with cheese, cheese is everything.

The Dyke Kitchen: Butter Me Up, Blondies

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

I didn’t know I was going to be presenting you with a blondie this week. When I’m feeling stressed — and lately, I’ve been ELECTRIFIED with both excitement and anxiety about the fact that my first novel is coming out in 10 days — I like to take an afternoon break, where I take deep breaths while I pull an espresso from my machine, shake it up in a jar with milk, ice and mint, and eat a little dessert. Recently, I had a hankering for a chewy dessert bar, and I didn’t have enough chocolate to make brownies, so I was like “Duh, blondies!”

I went searching for a blondie recipe that would really capture the chewiness I was after and ran into this gem. What I was most intrigued by was that there is a smushy layer of browned butter that gets baked into the middle of the blondies. And looking at it reminded me of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — which I thought would be a great flavor addition to the blondie!

My truth is that I don’t like peanuts thaaaat much, and jelly felt like overkill. So what I ended up with was a blondie with a ribbon of blackberry-miso-browned butter in the middle, and I’m here to report that it’s really, really good. Whether it’s breakfast, a stress break treat or a stoned midnight snack, it’s excellent. The miso (as you might already be aware since I add it to everything, like these cookies) adds a salty, nutty dimension and the blackberries add a tartness brings a nice contrast to a big tray of butter and sugar.

How To Make Blackberry Miso Browned Butter Blondies

Ingredients

For the browned butter ribbon:
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 large egg, beaten in a small bowl
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
12-15 blackberries
2 tablespoons miso

For 24 blondies:
1 cup unsalted butter at room temp, and a little more for greasing the pan
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 cups light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup toasted pecans

Directions

Okay, so first things first: you gotta take care of the pan. In a world that is not mine, you could grab your 13 x 9 pan and set your oven to 350 F.

However, I have a strangely dimensioned ceramic casserole dish from my mom that is 12 x 7 with a pretty high wall, and I ended up going with this dish. I buttered it and dusted it in flour and set it aside. Then I set the oven to 365 F to accommodate for my extra depth.

Then, I got started on my browned butter mixture. I have to tell you that making browned butter over a hot oven during a late-summer heatwave is the closest I’ve been to a sauna in months. Prepare for both a pore cleanse and blondies. Get out a medium saucepan, plop in your butter, room temp or cold, and cook it over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until it bubbles and then you start to see little flecks in the bottom of the pan. These flecks will brown very quickly, so keep your eye on them. and when they start to get a little tan, I keep stirring and take the pan off of the stove to see how far they’re gonna go. Butter is one of the few things, in my opinion, that isn’t great burned, even in a blondie.

Once the butter is done, pour it into a small mixing bowl. It’s time to blend the miso and the blackberries. I used the mini food processor that is powered by my hand blender, but you could also use a blender, or you could muddle them — however you want to smash the blackberries and mix them with the miso, go for it!

I will say that the blackberry seeds might bother you. If that’s the case, you could blend them, strain the juice and then add it to the miso and browned butter. I personally found the texture of the seeds in the blondies strange in a good way.

Once you’ve managed to combine the blackberries, miso and browned butter, add the egg and 1/3 flour, 3/4 cup brown sugar and whisk it together. You want all of the flour combine, and it should form little ribbons that cascade, like a set of stairs into the foyer of a mansion. Set that bowl aside.

Combine the dry ingredients in a medium bowl: flour, baking powder, salt.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar together until they get fluffy and combined. I did this by handing my friend Vinh;Paul (who you might remember is good with kitchen gadgets) my electric hand mixer and telling him to do it. But you could also use a stand mixer or even freehand it with a whisk. And tbh, if you don’t get it fluffy, but it’s fully combined, that’s okay.

Next add your eggs one at a time, and then add the vanilla and get them mixed all up. This is the point where things should start to get a little fluffy and creamy.

Then I mixed the dry ingredients into this large bowl, mixed it at low speed and then added half of the toasted pecans.

Now you’re ready to pour the blondies-to-be into your baking dish!

I eyeballed about half of the batter and poured the first layer in the pan. It looked admittedly like a really thin layer, but it will rise, so don’t worry.

Then I got the browned butter mixture and poured it all in, in as even a layer as I could, across the top of the batter. I used a spatula to smooth it out where it seemed uneven. Then we poured the rest of the batter on top. Vinh;Paul was very helpful in getting this top layer to cover the blackberry-miso-butter layer. There were places at the edges that were iffy, but we learned that this is totally fine.

Then I popped the whole tray into the oven to bake. I set a timer for 20 min. When the tray was still jiggly on top, I sprinkled the rest of the toasted pecans on top of the blondies. I put the tray back in the oven for about another 20 min, and pulled them out again when the edges were browned and when a wooden skewer came out mostly clean — there were distinct crumbs, but also some moisture from the browned butter layer.

My friends and I have been eating these blondies wildly, the tray was half gone the same day I made them! I’m eating one now, as I write this. They’re just really satisfying, and you know what else they’re good for? Eating while you watch the Great British Baking Show. Because I always feel left out when they have a dessert to eat and I don’t. And that, friends, is just one small way that I’m easing my stress.

The Dyke Kitchen: Classic Air-Fried Cornish Game Hen & Waffles

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

Kamala & The Waffle Maker

Back in February, before we had a full view of what was in store for us in 2020, my mom texted me frantically one evening to say that her favorite waffle iron was on sale, and did I want a version of my own. I said yes, of course.

I love waffles. The are perfect for toppings. I also really like that while, yes, there are traditional types of waffles, the waffle iron, as a tool, is an invitation to make whatever kind of waffle you want! When I lived in Oakland, I spent a lot of weekends hauling my mom’s 4-slice All-Clad stainless steel waffle maker — it’s very heavy, so that’s just one of the reasons I wanted my own — to my own apartment to make bacon & chive waffles, cornmeal waffles to eat with salsa, waffles made from dosa batter, regular sweet ones smothered in butter and truffle honey.

Long story short, I didn’t know in February that I wouldn’t be seeming my mom again until August. So on my last trip home, after six months of built-up anticipation, spending every brunch-ish moment of quarantine thinking about the waffles I would not be making, I did finally receive the gift of my very own waffle iron! It’s a 2-slice, but it’s just as amazing as my mom’s. And I knew I wanted to break it in with something special.

When my close friend Vinh;Paul told me that he was bringing his air fryer back from his mom’s house (this great story is below!), it seemed like the perfect reason to put our new kitchen tools together for our own style — always-original, always-sorta-Asian — of chicken and waffles. So here you have our menu for a night we spent making a tiny hen and waffles, and guzzling really great watermelon cocktails made by Sarah — those are also below! For texture and freshness, I also made a very similar cabbage salad to the one I made with these scallion pancakes, though this time, with the addition of peaches.

Vinh;Paul & The Air Fryer

Mother and I love TJ Maxx HomeGoods. We take great pleasure in buying fun gadgets at discount prices, loading up the house with conveniences that we only use once or twice before shelving it in the laundry room. If there’s a gadget, Mother definitely has it. From a yoghurt maker to three different kinds of high-speed blenders, a food dehydrator, garlic presses, a dedicated almond chopper, and my personal favorite: the Yonana Classic, a contraption that turns frozen bananas into soft serve.

Some may find Mother’s penchant for these conveniences excessive. And though we’ve gotten into some arguments about her laundry room being too cluttered to wash clothes, she’ll have it no other way. Mother grew up in the countryside of Việt Nam, during an extra tumultuous time in Việtnamese history: post-French colonialism but still in high tensions due to the American occupation. When she had to suddenly flee in ‘75, or else risk persecution, she lost everything: keepsakes, photos, and a link to her parents and eight siblings, all of whom were too far away to leave with her.

But don’t feel sad for Mother. She’s done wonderfully — if this wall of gadgets could talk, it’d probably say, “She has soft hands because she doesn’t believe in exerting effort when a machine can do the work for her.”

And what better machine than an air fryer! No more heavy cast irons filled with hot oil greasing up the kitchen. “You can have fresh eggrolls anytime,” Mother said, “without wasting good oil.” She grew up with so few things, only to still lose everything. I don’t think she ever imagined a life of such ease. Since I moved to LA, our trips to TJ Maxx HomeGoods have become a thing of the past, but the spirit of convenience still lives on. During this pandemic, while everyone has been sheltering in place, Mother donned two layers of masks and went right back to shopping the minute the discount doors of the Maxx reopened.

It may seem silly to some, but Mother and I certainly have a deep care for each other, even if it’s gone mostly unspoken. As her youngest child and also her queer little baby, I know that helping me live a life that is filled with ease is her way of saying, I love you. And I feel very lucky about this. Despite our differences, she has always opened her arms wider to show me tenderness, the intuitive nature, and How can I anticipate your needs before you know you even need it?

The last one is my favorite. Anticipating someone’s wants before they want it is so fun to me. When Kamala told me her mom was giving her a waffle maker, I thought, What better way to honor our moms then by using these gadgets together! Fried chicken and waffles was an obvious choice, but knowing Kamala so well — and Kamala knowing me so well — a regular chicken just wouldn’t do. I like food to be fun, delicious, offbeat — a touch of my weirdness in every bite — a kind of performance piece conceptualizing flavors. I’ll admit that frying a cornish game hen isn’t that weird, but what it lacks in novelty it makes up in being damn tiny and super cute — sometimes eating up cuties is my favorite thing.

How To Make Savory Cheddar Waffles

I wanted to make a waffle that would be a good match for the air-fried hen that Vinh;Paul was making. In my dreams it would be light and crispy, and I wanted it to have a savory flavor. I ended up adding some shredded cheddar for the sharpness, and also because I love how cheese melts in something very hot, like a waffle iron. I also added some dashi and yogurt to the batter. Lastly, I employed my mom’s greatest trick for a fluffy waffle, which is separating the eggs and whipping the whites into stiff peaks.

Ingredients

This made about 10 waffles in my iron.

2 cups of all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
A few grinds of black pepper
2 egg yolks
2 egg whites whipped so they are very stiff (you should be able to hold the bowl upside down)
1 ½ cups warm whole milk
2 tablespoons of plain whole fat yogurt
⅓ of liquified, browned butter
1 tablespoon of concentrated dashi
½ cup of sharp shredded cheddar

Directions

Get out your waffle iron and set it to the desired setting so it starts heating up.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, and black pepper.

In a small or medium bowl, add the egg yolks and the dashi and mix them together.

In a liquid measuring cup, warm your milk (I did mine the microwave for 2 minutes) and then add the yogurt to the milk and stir it up so it’s more or less combined. Add this to the bowl with the egg yolks and dashi and stir to combine.

Brown the butter, and when it’s ready, add it directly to the flour mixture and stir them together.

Now add the bowl of warm milk and egg yolks into the large bowl of flour + butter and stir to combine.

Now that you have one bowl of batter, toss in your cheddar (I really just grabbed a big handful and added it) and stir to get them evenly distributed.

Whip your egg whites into stiff peaks and then gently fold them to your batter until they are fully combined. They’re going to lose some air as you combine them, but if you’re slow and methodical, you’ll still get a lift.

There was enough butter in this batter that I did not need to grease the waffle iron. So I put about a third of a cup of batter into each waffle square and cooked them to crisp level 6 on my iron. My iron beeps when it’s ready to cook and when it’s time for me to take out the waffles, so the actual cooking I can’t say I put much effort into.

In the end, they were light and fluffy, success! They cheese was delicious and the dashi is hardly detectable, but does add a savory undertone to the waffle itself, so it has a depth of flavor that makes it enjoyable to eat on its own.

How To Make The Cornish Game Hen

When I originally cooked this hen, I soaked, dredged, air fried it whole. The flavor was right, but as one side crisped up, the other side would go soggy. The extra step of cutting the hen in half will solve this soggy bottom problem by giving it enough space to breathe and get super crunchy. In honor of our moms, and their love of gadgets, I hope you enjoy this recipe and make it into a delight that you will also share with those you love.

Ingredients

Hen prep:
1 cornish game hen weighing approximately 2 lbs
2 cups buttermilk
2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp black pepper
½ tbsp turmeric powder
½ tbsp garlic powder

Seasonings:
2 tsp salt
2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp onion powder
1 ½ tsp oregano
1 ½ Italian seasoning
1 ½ dry rosemary
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp aleppo pepper powder**
1 tsp Korean gochugaru**
½ tsp nutmeg (optional)

*Buttermilk substitution: combine 2 cups whole milk + 2 tbsp white vinegar and let sit for 5 minutes to sour.

**Flavor is personal! And we don’t always have some of these ingredients on hand. We just happen to prefer a spicier fried hen and have these spices around the house, but feel free to add or omit herbs and spices to taste.

Dredge Station:
1 cup flour
1 cup panko breadcrumbs
2 eggs
2 tbsp Frank’s Red Hot or other vinegar based hot sauce of choice (optional)
2-3 tbsp of olive oil or any other cooking oil on hand

Directions

The night before: Using a sharp knife, cut cornish game hen half lengthwise, from center of breast bone, for two even pieces. Discard gizzards or save to make stock.

Combine 2 cups buttermilk, salt, pepper, turmeric powder, and garlic powder in a large bowl. Marinate cornish game hen in refrigerator for at least 4 hours but preferably overnight. Marinating the hen before frying allows the acids in the buttermilk to tenderize the meat, resulting in a succulent and tender bite.

Day of air fry: Remove cornish game hen from the buttermilk and set on a rack for 30 minutes, allowing the hen to come to room temperature. Meanwhile, combine seasonings in a small bowl.

Prepare the dredge by combining 1 cup flour and half of seasonings into one large bowl; 1 cup panko breadcrumbs with remaining half of seasonings in a second bowl; 2 eggs with hot sauce whisked together in a third bowl. Taste flour and panko breadcrumbs mixture. Add additional spices or herbs if desired as this will be the final taste of the air-fried hen.

Taking one-half of the bifurcated cornish hen, dredge in flour, then quickly cover in egg mixture, and cover in panko breadcrumbs. Set back on wire rack to rest for additional 15 minutes. Repeat with remaining half of game hen.

When ready to air fry, brush or spritz cornish game hen with a light and even coat of olive oil. Do not skip this step! The hen needs a little oil or else it will not crisp up.

The air fryer does not need to preheat. When ready, place one half of the cornish game hen — cut-side down — onto the air fryer tray, cooking in 2 batches. If using a large air fryer, both halves may be placed on the tray at once, as long as there is enough air flow.

Set air-fryer to 350° and start timer for 30-35 minutes. Brush with second coat of oil halfway through cooking (about 15-18 minutes), checking for doneness, when the internal temperature of the hen has reached 165°.

Let it rest for 10 min before carving and enjoy with country gravy (we used a packet for convenience) or any other sauce preferred.

Note from Kamala: This air-fried game hen was very tender and tasty and better than a lot of chickens that I’ve had! The brine that Vinh;Paul made added to the flavor of the meat, and all parts of it were tender, none of them got too dry — I think the small size packed in the flavor and made it easier to cook it evenly.

How To Make Sarah’s Wet Ass Watermelon Cocktail

This drink requires some prep, but once all the elements are ready you can easily make more drinks for your guests (and yourself) all night long.

For each drink you’ll need

1/2 cup of watermelon juice
1/4 cup of tequila
Juice from one half of a lime
5-6 mint leaves
1 tbsp simple syrup
1/4 tsp of smoked sea salt

Directions

For the watermelon juice
I think it’s funny that grocery stores call the small, juicy seedless watermelons “personal watermelons”, but I digress. Cut the rind off your personal watermelon and slice into cubes small enough to blend.

Blend all the watermelon until it’s a smooth pulpy liquid.

Then pour through a strainer into a large bowl or pitcher. If you don’t want any pulp, strain the watermelon juice through a cheesecloth. Press softly on the watermelon flesh to release the rest of the juices.

For the simple syrup
Bring 1 part sugar, 1 part water to a boil. Let cool and pour into a glass container.

To make the drink
In a glass jar with a lid, add 5-6 mint leaves, the juice of half a lime and 1 tbsp of simple syrup and muddle (a wooden spoon works just fine).

Add 1/4 cup of tequila, 1/2 cup of watermelon juice, and 1/4 tsp of smoked sea salt.

Lid the jar and shake until the mixture is frothy.

Unlid the jar and serve it to the lucky mouth that gets to drink it. Maybe it’s yours?!

The Dyke Kitchen: The Art Of Salad

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

I have a lot of feelings about salads. First, it’s a nice thing to eat when it’s 90 degrees in my apartment and it feels like the world, especially on my coast, is on fire. It’s refreshing, re-invigorating, cooling. I have, while stoned and imagining new snack combinations, posed the philosophical question: what is a salad? And the core of my answer revolves around a refreshing experience that involves at least a few fresh, raw ingredients. This captures a full range of salads I love, from potato salad to cold somen noodles to a Jell-O mold with suspended fruit in it — a specialty of one of my Japanese American aunts, who made the most elegant lime Jell-O and lichee molds with a white cream layer. “Refreshing” can mean many different things to different people. I’d call halo-halo a dessert salad.

But I’m here to talk about the kinds of salads that I make, which are not the world’s most complex nor philosophically challenging, but are always built around a kind of balance that I find necessary for a great salad. I know salad is known to many people as a kind of ascetic diet food, but I grew up eating luxurious salads that my mom made. She has shown me wonderful ways to create harmony and surprise in a salad, while also showcasing the best qualities of really good produce. The way my mom does salad feels like the confluence of her being Japanese American, a Calfornian and having family roots in farming and gardening. It’s all about putting foods together that bring out the essences of each other. What I love about salads is that they’re like a live jazz solo, where you can throw together the same ingredients over and over again, and they’ll always be good, but never quite in the same way.

For a Sunday of salads, I ended up making a Caprese salad with nectarine; a classic lunch salad of mine with baby kale, avocado, tangelo slices, edamame and walnuts; and a salad to go with an herb and garlic yogurt marinated chicken (actually the same marinade that we used to make chicken for biriyani) that included raw corn, shaved squash, preserved lime, pickled carrot and mixed greens. I think it goes without saying that whenever you’re eating something raw, the better your produce — ripeness, freshness, variety — the better your salad will be. But these are some other things I consider for the art of salad making.

Salad Tips

Flavor & Texture Balance

Even if it’s just a quick one, because I’m starving and I’m busy and I need to shove some nutrition in my mouth with one hand and type with the other, I’m always looking for a balance of flavors and textures. I want my salad to combine savory, sweet, acidic and fatty. Sometimes I’ll go extra and get sharp or bitter greens in there or give it a spicy edge. You can also pull the flavor harder in one of these directions, but an exciting salad does all of these things for my tongue.

Texturally, I also want a contrast, but within a range. If I’m doing thick slabs of juicy tomato, I also want to cut crunchy chunks of cucumber and hunks of crumbly cheese. If I’m using a silky, fatty dressing, I want a sturdy, cruciferous green. If I have a soft ribbon of prosciutto and thinly sliced fennel root, I want an aggressively crunchy nut. If I’m slicing plums thinly, I want a tender green and shavings of parmesan. You get my point. There should be lots of different textures in every bite, and that often means that I’m thinking about how to cut my vegetables so they either fold together or hold their own.

Get Your Fruit & Herb On

Vegetables are great and I love them dearly, but they’re really amplified by eating them with herbs and fruits. I think it’s just like putting a filter on a photo, they enhance a salad. I try to keep basil, mint and cilantro around at all times, because tossing a handful of them into greens makes it exciting, or carefully placing a basil leaf onto a very well-arranged plate can bring out the nectarine-ness of a nectarine.

Dressing and Self-Dressing

I make a lot of my own dressings. One year in college, I ate in a co-op where my entire job on a lunch cooking crew was to make salad and salad dressing for 3 hours. I could not have been happier. But some of my favorites are really easy. I do one that’s two parts mayo, 1/2 part soy sauce, 1/2 part lemon, then I shake it up in a jar. Why is it so good? You can even add garlic or hot sauce to it. To make my vinaigrettes, I use two parts olive oil, 1/2 part vinegar, a dab of honey and a squeeze of mustard to help bind these sworn enemies — and then toss in whatever I want for flavor: herbs, miso, tahini. preserved limes, smoked chiles, apricot jam, fish sauce, smashed up berries, onions (I’ve never tried these all together, but now I am intrigued…)

Sometimes, when I’m lazy, I pick ingredients that I know will mix up together and form their own sort of dressing. Often, all I need to do is salt the salad, let it sit for a little bit and then toss it. This works really well with citrus, which hits both a sweet and acidic note. You can also do this on the fatty side with eggs, which can run and create a fatty base, and a very ripe avocado or a softer cheese, which will coat everything. If you’re a meat eater, I also do this with chicken and steak, and let the dripping juices dress the salad.

How To Make The Caprese Salad

Ingredients

Fresh mozzarella, I like when the cheese is really fresh and jiggly
Heirloom tomato, I like to get the darker red ones with a spicer flavor and sometimes I’ll mix a yellow one in too
Ripe nectarine
Basil leaves
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Salt & pepper

Directions

Slice the mozzarella and tomato. I like to make them thick enough to get a satisfying bite through them, and still thin enough to really soak up the juices. I also use a serrated knife on tomatoes to get through the skin, and I like the way it cuts through fresh mozzarella too.

Lay the cheese first and then the tomato out on a plate, and salt them. I used a grey salt, and I think Maldon salt is great here too, but any salt will do the trick.

Cut up the nectarine. Because the cheese and tomato are flat, I like to cut angular pieces of the nectarine off of the pit and put them on top, so there are different shapes coming into each bite. I’ve also used plum in this too, which is really tasty.

I place basil leaves on top and then drizzle a spicy olive oil over the top, spoon about a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar around the plate, and then grind some black pepper. Sometimes I’ll also add a few drizzles of a sweet white vinegar, like this basil plum vinegar, over everything too.

Give this one at least 10 minutes to sit around. The salt will bring out the juices and marinate your cheese, and when everything is room temperature, you can really taste each element.

How To Make The Orange Avocado Salad

Ingredients

For the salad:
Baby kale
Mint
Tangelos, or any citrus that you like, I also love grapefruit in this
Edamame, or any other semi-firm bean you like
Ripe half of an avocado
Walnuts

For the dressing:
2 parts olive oil
1/2 part rice vinegar
squeeze of lemon
dab of tahini, which also can do the binding job of the mustard
dab of miso
dab of honey
dash of light soy sauce, I’m also fond of this cherry blossom soy sauce
sprinkle of sesame seeds

Directions

I start by finely chopping the mint and mixing it together with a coarsely chopped kale.

The way I cut the citrus is to slice the tangelo in half and then cut off off the skin with my handy serrated knife, so it’s just the tender flesh. I will also slice off any excess tough white parts and then I cut this skinless half against the grain, so in the opposite direction of the segments. This makes for a very delicate, juicy slice of citrus, and I like that. I add these to my greens.

The walnuts (I also do this with sliced almonds and it’s delicious) and edamame go on next.

And then I do the avocado. Depending on how I’m feeling, I’ll either do the avocado in thin slices that melt on the tongue, or I’ll do cubes that are like a little cloud that you hit as you’re eating the salad. You can’t go wrong.

For the dressing, I put everything into a small jar and shake it up. I only use a little dressing on this salad, since the orange and avocado put a very nice coating on the salad on its own.

How to Make The Chicken Salad

Ingredients

For the chicken:
1 pound boneless skinless chicken thighs
1/2 cup of plain yogurt
a bunch of mint
a bunch of cilantro
3 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon turmeric
salt

Served with:
pickled carrots (thinly sliced carrots sitting in rice vinegar for at least 30 min)
chopped preserved lime
greens, I’ve done this with chard, mustard greens, kale, and also just butter lettuce
mint, basil and cilantro
raw corn kernals cut off the cob
yellow squash ribbons

Directions

Take all the herbs (I removed the mint leaves from their stems, but kept the cilantro stems on), yogurt, turmeric, salt and garlic cloves and combine in a food processor, so you have a thick paste. Place the chicken thighs in a tub, salt them, and then pour the marinade over the top, and let it sit over night.

The following day, bring the chicken up to temperature and then you can either broil it in the oven or, like I tend to do, just fry it in a pan with a little oil until it’s cooked inside and gets browned on both sides — okay, maybe even a little blackened. I used to try to wipe off the marine before I cooked it, but if you’re down to scrape the bits off of the pan between batches, I kinda like the flavor added by keeping the marinade on it.

If I have a tender green, I leave it whole on the plate, and if I’m working with a larger leaf, I’ll cut it up into small ribbons.

You can make the carrot pickles, right after you take the chicken out to get to room temp. I just slice the carrot up into thin sticks and place it a bowl, covered with rice vinegar.

For the squash, I like to use a vegetables peeler and just peel off slices of the the squash raw. I do this with zucchini too. It’s often light and sweet, with a little crunch, and you can roll them up, which is a fun bite to add to a bite of chicken.

The corn adds a lovely sweet crunch and I like the way the milkiness of the corn does a little self-dressing — it’s a light fresh flavor that contrasts with the depth and boldness of the chicken.

The herbs I’ll either mix into the salad or pile on top.

For a final touch, I like to add a little mound of chopped up preserved lime, which adds a savory, bright bite that’s a little less sharp than the carrot.

Sometimes, I’ll add a dab of yogurt on the plate, sometimes I’ll spray some lime and fish sauce over the top, and other times I’ll add rice to the scene and a glug of thai sweet chili sauce.

There are so many beautiful kinds of produce in season these days — melon, peaches, plums, tomatoes, corn, blackberries — I hope you make a balanced salad that surprises you in a good way!

The Dyke Kitchen: Biriyani Our Own Way

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

When Sarah and I first became friends, I was highly entertained by her Instagram cooking stories, and excited by the idea that she was teaching herself how to make South Asian dishes. We both like to watch Padma Lakshmi’s cooking stories and revel in our crushes on her, which are half about Padma’s hotness and half about pretending that she is the Indian mom that neither of us had, the woman who could have taught us the nuances of making the food of our people — though, yes, Sarah is Bengali, it’s not quite the same.

Anyway, now that Sarah and I are dating, and eating excellent food together is one of our mainstays, I wanted her to show me the secrets of her South Asian cooking. She decided that biriyani was the best option, because she’s made it a few times and was pretty confident about it. Before we begin, I’m not someone who can say I’m an expert in the dum cooking method (which is the sealed-pot method that makes biriyani so delicious), nor am I the most experienced blender of Indian spices. But that’s okay, because Sarah kinda is! The paneer and chicken biriyani that we made was our own take on this recipe, from Dassana Amit, who is Sarah’s internet Indian cooking guide. Her website Veg Recipes Of India makes it all feel easy and is full of actually useful tips, especially great for a semi-clueless half-South Asian like me.

This style of cooking biriyani is one that’s partly inspired by this recipe and also just our idea: you mostly cook each part of the dish, and then do a quicker cook of them all together in one pot. It makes it easier to make sure each element cooks at the rate that makes it most delicious. Also, I really like cooking with chicken, and paneer is Sarah’s best friend, so we decided to throw both in here, but Sarah has made it with just paneer before and sings its many praises.

How To Make Paneer and Chicken Biriyani

Ingredients

Fried Onions

1 thinly sliced white onion
4 tablespoon oil or ghee

Paneer & Chicken Marinade

1 cup of paneer cubes, and we highly suggest rehydrating the paneer by soaking it in a hot water bath for 15 min before you do anything else with it
1 pound of boneless skinless chicken thighs, trimmed and cut into cube-ish pieces, salt them and put aside in bowl
8 tablespoons yogurt, if you use a Greek yogurt you’ll need to loosen it up with a couple tablespoons of water
1 inch of ginger root
4 to 5 garlic cloves peeled
2 green chilies
1 tablespoons cilantro leaves
½ tablespoon chopped mint leaves
¼ teaspoon turmeric powder
¼ teaspoon red chili powder, we used Kashmiri for the color
¼ teaspoon garam masala powder
½ teaspoon ground coriander
¼ teaspoon caraway seeds
1 teaspoon lime juice
3 teaspoons salt

Biriyani Rice

1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 inch cinnamon stick
1 fresh Indian bay leaf, you can also use a regular one
2 to 3 cloves
2 to 3 green cardamom pods smashed and deseeded
¼ teaspoon caraway seeds

Layering Ingredients

3 tablespoon milk
16 to 18 saffron strands
1 tablespoon ghee
1/2 cup chopped cilantro leaves
1/2 cup tablespoon chopped mint leaves

Directions

Element 1: The Onions

Sarah is obsessed with these onions and ate a bunch of them while we cooked. You start by gently frying the onions in ghee until they’re a deep dark brown. (Make sure to salt the onions when they start to brown!) This serves to not only to make your kitchen smell AMAZING, but they’ll give texture and a great flavor to your biriyani in the layering process. Be patient, pour a glass of wine and let them get really dark and tasty (much darker than the photo, this is just the beginning!). When they’re done, let them drain on a paper towel and set aside for when you start making layers.

Element 2: Yogurt Coated Chicken And Cheese, Please

As you may know from my other pieces in this series, I’m a big fan of marination and I always think the longer the better. So while the onions started frying, we got this marinade going. Sarah got out her mortar and pestle to smash up the garlic, ginger, cilantro, mint and green chilies. You could also do this just by chopping or food processing, but there was an undeniably good flavor from the smashing.

I added the contents of the mortar to a bowl where I whisked it together with the yogurt, salt, lime juice and spices: turmeric, red chili powder, ground coriander, caraway seeds, garam masala.

Then I added our rehydrated paneer cubes and chicken pieces, coated them and let them hang out for a while. It can also make sense to separate the chicken and paneer, but to me, getting another bowl dirty seemed not worth it.

Element 3: Basmati

I’m notoriously bad at cooking rice when I can’t do it in my Zojirushi rice cooker — I’m an Asian princess, so what? So Sarah monitored me AND the frying onions, while I rinsed our rice and then let it soak for 30 min, and got the rice water ready.

We prepared the cooking water for the rice by putting 2 cups of water into a sauce pan along with a cinnamon stick, the caraway seeds, bay leaf, the contents of two smashed cardamom pods and a pinch of salt and then brought it up to a boil. After it was finished soaking, I added our rice to the water, let it come back up to a boil, and then turned down the heat a little to let it simmer.

Sarah told me that we wanted the rice mostly cooked, but not all the way done. We wanted it to do its final cooking after we had layered all of our ingredients and were letting them cook all together at the end, with a tight lid over the top of the top — this part was important since rice is really the crown jewel of a biriyani. While the rice cooked, we got started on the chicken.

Element 2: Yogurt Coated Chicken And Cheese, Please

Because I wanted a tender chicken in this dish, I wanted to give the chicken a longer cooking time than the paneer. So I heated up the leftover ghee from our fried onions in the dutch oven, and then picked out the chicken pieces from the marinade.

I cooked them so they got firm. When the chicken was mostly cooked through, which took 10 min or so, I added the paneer into the dutch oven with the rest of the marinade. Everything cooked together in harmony briefly, and then we took all of it out of the dutch oven, strained the juice in to a measuring cup and waited for the rice to get nearly done.

If you were doing this just with paneer, you could skip this step, and go directly into layering. Though, I will say, the chicken fat tasted SO GOOD in this rice.

Element 4: The Saffron Milk

Heat up your milk on the stove, just so it’s warm and add the saffron strands.

Make The Biriyani Layers

When your rice is sufficiently cooked, but still with a little bite left in it, go ahead and drain it, and you’re ready to layer!

Start with a layer of protein at the bottom of a small dutch oven or pot. Next add a layer of rice. Following that, add a hefty handful of fried onions, a spoon of the saffron milk and ghee and a pinch of herbs on top. Do this again until you’re out of ingredients, and you can dump the extras on top.

What we did not do next, but should have done, is added back the liquid we had drained from the cooked chicken, paneer and marinade. Later, at the end, when I was struck with this genius, I went back and did it, but adding it earlier would only have made it taste better. I poured about half a cup over the top, but you could do more if you think your rice needs more cooking — you don’t want more liquid than will get absorbed by the rice.

Once you have your layers, you’re ready to let it cook and marinate in its own juices. Sarah added a few generous dabs of ghee to the top, and then we covered the top of the dutch oven with foil, put the lid on top, and let everything simmer on medium-low heat for almost 30 min — I think we got impatient and wanted to eat it at around 25 min.

Your beautiful biriyani is done when the rice is fluffy and you have a little crisp to some of the parts too. The best part is uncovering it and digging in with a spoon! I served ours with a cocktail made from mezcal and smoked tea & vanilla syrup, topped with a tiny charred marshmallow.

I learned a lot from cooking with Sarah and we were really happy with our results — turns out we don’t need Padma after all! Just kidding, we always will, call us, Padma.

The Dyke Kitchen: A Summer Simmer With Short Ribs And Plums

The Dyke Kitchen is a bi-weekly series about how queerness, identity, culture and love are expressed through food and cooking.

Now, as I’m sitting in my living room sweating on my couch, it seems unimaginable that earlier this week, there was a crisp breeze whispering through my windows, begging me to braise. I understand that it’s summer and not traditional braising season, but I was feeling prematurely into the way the August light has subtly shifted and felt a shade of autumn in my heart. Some of that has to do with the long evenings I’ve been spending outdoors in order to be with the people I love, and in the parts of California where you can find me, that means nights with flannel, wool socks, beanies and a fire, even at the height of summer.

Anyway, I had a wide open evening and a bunch of plums and pluots on my counter that I had been eating over the sink. I decided I probably should DO something with them. I don’t know what exactly clicked, maybe it’s that I’ve been eating a lot of fruit in a savory context, but I decided to do beef short ribs braised with broccolini and plums in a soy sauce-based liquid. And then, I thought it would be nice to eat that with ricotta gnocchi with preserved lemon in them.

So that is what this meal turned into: a warm, hearty dish that’s simple, but has some fruity flavors mixed into the richness. This is not a light, summery meal, but you know, I’m still enjoying it after the sun goes down and there is something about it that feels excessive and satisfying.

How To Make A Stove-Top Braise

If you don’t eat meat, you can still braise with plums like this, just use a vegetable that’s a little more hearty. I’ve added wedges of acorn squash, whole turnips, celery root, and other sorts of structured, harder vegetables to this kind of braising liquid with great results. I cannot tell you what is happening with the broccolini, but it really adds something to the broth, and there is a beautiful way that onions and plums melt together in a sauce that I have endless affection for.

Ingredients

4 bone-in beef short ribs
2 bundles of broccolini
1 sweet white onion
5 plums

For the braising liquid
1/2 cup of low sodium (this is what they had at the store!) soy sauce. I will say that I like things salty and if you wanted to be more conscientious, you could do 1/4 cup soy sauce and add more as you go
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
A spoonful of honey or maple syrup
2 cups of chicken broth (mine was made with some celery so that was a component of this too)
I ended up adding in probably another ½ cup of water to the pot

Directions

Get out a dutch oven, put it on the stove over medium-high heat and brown your short ribs. Tbh, I only do this because everyone says this is what you do, I can’t say that I experience the browning in some spectacular way.

After that, take them out and take the pot off of the heat.

Cut your plums into quarters (remove the pits), cut the onion in quarters, and trim any dried ends off of your broccolini.

Then I put the ribs back in first, stuff the onion and plums around them and arrange the broccolini on top like a wreath. I don’t mind if my vegetables get super cooked down, but if you like to keep some bite, you can also do the option of waiting until the meat is basically done and then adding them in OR you can do one bunch the whole way and one bunch in at the tail end. Like I said, the broccolini does do something nice to the flavor. If you’re 100% veg, put them all in together, it’ll be fun!

Now mix up the braising liquid, and pour it into the dutch oven. I added chicken broth after I did the soy sauce mix, and then added a little bit of water to make sure the meat was fully submerged.

I put the dutch oven back on to the burner, put the lid on and brought everything up to a boil. Then I put it on the back burner to simmer at a very low setting, and cracked the lid so steam could escape.

I left it like this for 3 hours, checking now and then to make sure the meat was still submerged in a liquid and adding water when it seemed like it needed more.

When the ribs had fallen off the bone and were tender in my chopsticks, I considered it done and was happy with the results. At that point, I like to remove the bones and slice the short ribs into pieces so they’re easy to eat over rice, with gnocchi, with noodles, however you like.

I’m here to note, that you can also braise in the oven, and I’ve done a very similar recipe where you put the dutch oven in the oven at 325 degrees F with the lid on, and you can get a similar delicious and really tender meat or veggie in around the same time frame.

How To Make The Ricotta Gnocchi With Preserved Lemon

I like these little dumplings because they’re so cute, have a chew that I like, and also they taste like CHEESE, which is one of my all-time favorite things. They’re also quicker than their potato cousins, though I will admit, as a gnocchi fan, they’re not really the same. But I don’t really love spending time cooking and then ricing potatoes either.

I thought preserved lemons would bring in a bright and also bitter flavor that would cut some of the pure beef fat that was going to be prominent in the short ribs. I also like the way lemon and ricotta taste together, that seemed natural. I made these while the beef simmered!

I’ve been using this Serious Eats recipe for years, and the main difference between mine and theirs is that I’m not nearly as meticulous, and while they don’t turn out as pretty as theirs, they still taste good.

Ingredients

8 oz of high-quality ricotta. I use the basket of Bellwether Farms. Truly, you can still use a more processed, stabilized ricotta and you will certainly live to tell the tale, it just might have a different texture and flavor.

1 cup of all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the board

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

1 egg and 1 more egg yolk

¼ wedge of preserved lemon, minced or food processed

1 teaspoon of salt

Directions

I begin by heavily salting a big pot of water and putting it on the stove to boil.

Drain your ricotta by spreading it out on a paper towel with a spatula. Does this feel strange to do? Yes. Does it work? As long as you have sturdy paper towels, that won’t disintegrate into the cheese. You can also pat it down and press it with a clean dish towel.

Scrape your drained ricotta into a large bowl and mix in your parmesan (mine was obviously microplaned, and so I put in more than ½ a cup, but I work in estimates!), flour, and eggs.

Mix it up with a spatula so it starts to come together into a dough. Before it’s fully integrated, but coming together, add your preserved lemon and salt. Then keep mixing so it forms a dough, a wet, sticky dough, but a dough.

I then flour a board, and get out a baking sheet and cover it with parchment paper.

Then I grab what seems like a quarter of the dough, work it into a ball and roll it out into a long snake that is about the width of my index finger. My experience of these gnocchi is that they get super puffy in the water — they can get tough if you cook them too long and they’re just kinda flat and slimy if you don’t cook them enough. So to try to make things easy for myself, I cut them pretty small, like no bigger than the first section of your fingertip.

I put the cut pieces of gnocchi dough on the parchment covered baking sheet where they go to await their boil.

Repeat the snake rolling and chopping activity three more times and you should have a baking sheet of cute little pillows. Mine often get pinched or look weird and wrinkly, and I do not care.

When the water is boiling, I take about ten to twelve gnocchi pieces and fling them into the boiling water. I have no tips for making this elegant, though I’m sure someone else does. They only need a few minutes to puff up and float to the surface (sometimes they need a nudge off the bottom of the pot) and that’s how you know they’re done.

I lift them out with a strainer, and then put the lid of the pot on to bring it back to a boil. Then repeat the process until all of them are cooked.

I think over time you can figure out the exact texture that you like best: mine is just-cooked-through, and still pretty tender.

These are also great with a tomato sauce, a pesto, in browned butter, and all the ways you might want to eat cheese ravioli — they’re sort of like the filling and ravioli outside in one.

Anyway, this was a sort of off-the-cuff meal, but it’s bringing me joy throughout the week.