Category Archives: food

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake — or, grinning and bearing it

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

When you:

  • Feel a little ground down from life
  • Are questioning whether you are a big hypocrite
  • Just want to curl up in your bed, under the covers, and never leave
  • Count down the days until the weekend, starting Monday morning
  • Are frustrated with some of your co-workers and wonder if the workplace isn’t actually just the setting of a passive aggressive war in which there are many weapons and tactics at your disposal
  • Hate the slavish bi-partisanship of your Supreme Court and the batshit, corrupt, the malevolent insanity of your Congress, and the crushing disappointment of your president
  • Have a sore tastebud on the tip of your tongue, making everything you eat torturous
  • Are totally running out of healthy meal-like food but don’t have time or the energy to make a grocery store run (so you totally just eat peanut butter frosting instead)
  • Find the charm of cakes to lie in their presentation, not their taste
  • (Okay, maybe you also like their taste too)

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Vegetable Quiche (with Yeasted Whole Wheat Crust)

Vegetable Quiche

Well, okay, I am generally unafraid to tackle just about any recipe, no matter how complex, how insane the ingredients, and how difficult the technique. I like to go to great lengths to bake and cook for others. Part of it is just to see if I can and part of it is, I admit, vanity.

But let me tell you about the other 99% of the time when, in the necessity of having to feed myself…continuously…until I die…my cooking techniques, discerning tastes, and effort extends only as far as whatever in my refrigerator that is about to expire.

It’s embarrassing. I will never share with you what I eat on a day-to-day basis when the only person I need to impress is myself.

(Except lots and lots of eggs, that is).

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Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

Corn Cookies

It’s taken me a few weeks to really soak in just one of the many amazing cookbooks I recently purchased. First up: Momofuku Milk Bar, which is a super attractive book on a purely aesthetic level, but the story behind Momofuku Milk Bar‘s origins and Christina Tosi’s voice throughout is wry, evocative, and sheer engaging. There’s something delightfully appealing about all the trashy/delicious eats unapologetically served up here. Recipes like Compost Cookies and Crack Pie, with their reliance on things like potato chips, chocolate chips, and pretzels, are practically a stoner’s wet dream.

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Black Tea Grapefruit Muffins

Black Tea Grapefruit Muffins

Grapefruit is not for everyone, sure. But, it really, really does it for me.

This recipe started as me wanting to get more use out of grapefruit, a fruit which I adore. Since I am pretty much convinced that grapefruits can only be eaten in the morning (I don’t know why I think this), I thought, why not muffins? Muffins, too, make a delightful breakfast item. Coincidentally, I can only eat muffins in the morning as well. It was clearly meant to be.

I was thinking of adding a nutmeg milk infusion when I happened to have an amazing drink of black iced tea infused with grapefruit. Suddenly, it was really, really important just then to add black tea to my working muffin recipe, because then it would be like all the best things of breakfast in one muffin. Woah.

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Baklava

Baklava

After a somewhat wild night this weekend (in which I was lured by the promise of an excellent all-male Lady Gaga cover band who were, in fact, little better than your average garage band escapees with extra eyeliner and a disturbing habit of pulling out skinny black combs to touch up their heavily gelled hair), I am:

  1. Missing my new $50 umbrella, which I managed to leave at the club after using it for less than a day. A few (too many) drinks can make one forgetful, and
  2. Massively aching and severely bruised along my left hip, ribs, and arm from another tumble down a set of wet stairs in the same pair of dependable hiking shoes that I wore to traverse slippery, perilous rocks in Iceland when standing next to the massive Gulfoss waterfall where one slip could have resulted in icy death. The bruise from that previous fall, mind you, has not even fully healed yet. I am starting to look like a domestic abuse victim and can you imagine how that conversation would go? “What happened?” “Uh, I fell down the stairs.”
  3. And, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I am unable to fully recover from an all-nighter in less than 24 hours, with over a third of them spent sleeping.

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Surprise Baby Shower Cupcakes

Surprise Baby Shower Cupcakes

“I don’t want children,” I once said to my eleventh grade Calculus teacher.

I can’t remember the context though or why it was even brought up. This may seem crazy, but I don’t usually make a habit of sharing my reproductive choices with everyone, nevermind 40-something year old, slightly balding high school math teachers.

“Ever.”

He paused a moment and then nodded once, decisively. “You are going to come back to your ten year reunion with five kids hanging off your arm, I’m sure of it.”

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Midnight Amaretto Cupcakes

Midnight Amaretto Cupcakes

This weather, you guys.

Last weekend it snowed six inches. This week it has been in the high 40’s. Sometimes balmy. Sometimes that balmy day ends in “a wintery mix” of snow and sleet. Or, the old New England standby: rain.

I have three overcoats in operation, each of a varying thickness, warmth, and permeability (this last is now more important than ever since my umbrella gave up the ghost during Boston’s last rain-and-furious-wind storm, may it rest in peace). Choosing which coat to wear before I walk out the door is tantamount to planning a military operation. This is weather in New England.

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Marzipan

Chocolate-dipped Marzipan

This past week, I spent less than 24 hours in New York for work, which translates into getting up at 4am for a 7am flight and flying home at 5pm to collapse in my bed at 7pm and remain dead to the world until the next morning. Can I tell you how exhausting that was?

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