Cure for the crazies

Sometimes I’m a little crazy. Five people coming to stay for three days in my two-bedroom apartment? Perfect time to  start a dozen different projects that have been on my list for a year into the few free hours I can eke out after work! And hey, can’t have my guests go hungry, best make granola, a batch of carrot cupcakes, blackstrap molasses ice cream with pecan praline (um, yum), and…well, at least I had one easy thing on my list.

Everyone needs a go-to dish for when you’re slightly crazed–last minute guests, forgotten party you promised a dish for, or just bordering on hangry (my new favorite word=hungry+angry. Because who hasn’t been there?). For me, this is that dish.

More than a dip, kind of a spread, it’s all delicious however you use it. Plus–and this is key–it takes all of 30 seconds to make and can be made with pretty standard cupboard fare. Dump everything in the food processor, turn it on, scoop it into a pretty bowl (or don’t, I know how demanding the hangry can be), devour. Pita chips, crackers, vegetables, spread on a sandwich instead of hummus…all are perfectly valid and perfectly delicious options.

There is one thing that makes this dip extra special–namely, pomegranate molasses. If you’ve never tried–or heard of– it, it’s a great little secret ingredient in everything from salad dressings to a marinade for grilling meat or vegetables, or even drizzled over strawberries. Tangy and tart, it provides a depth to the dip that you can’t quite put your finger on. (Ok, maybe pomegranate molasses isn’t “standard” cupboard fare, but it should be! And it actually lasts a long time in the fridge, so if you can find some it’s worth a purchase. Otherwise you can easily cook down pomegranate juice with some sugar and lemon juice until it’s nice and syrupy–look, Alton Brown even has a recipe!)

In any case, thank god for easy recipes in between frantic project-doing, apartment-cleaning, cupcake-baking, and general chicken-sans-head-running. Molasses is blitzed together with toasty cumin and spicy cayenne, walnuts, roasted sweet peppers, olive oil, and bread crumbs. Done. If nothing else for my guests, I knew this would go over well.

So I may make myself crazy, but at least I make some damn good dip too.

Everyone wins at egg wars (and happy birthday sisters!)

The last time I remember my sisters’ birthdays coinciding with Easter, we were kids and Easter baskets, dying eggs, and scrounging under sofas for plastic eggs full of pastel-colored malted milk balls was still fun in an un-ironic, I’m-totally-not-just-reliving-my-childhood type way.

Happy birthday blondies!

As my sisters and I were raised good Catholic children (five years of Catholic school cured me of that PDQ, ask my mom sometime about my eight grade teacher calling home to ask if my mom knew I said I was an atheist), Easter was a Big Family Thing. And big family things usually meant trips to Cleveland to celebrate (aka feast) with either of our parents’ extended families.

Most memorable were the Easter egg hunts at our Aunt Sandy and Uncle Greg’s house with our cousins. There was always an egg in the mailbox and probably one on top of the ceiling fan in addition to the usual under chairs and in flowerpots. And we each had to find our own hidden basket–no hinting if you found someone else’s.

After the egg hunt were the egg wars. Much like the current March Madness, egg wars were based on a bracket system: pick one of the hard boiled eggs we had decorated the day before and pick your opponent. Small end to small end (we would have made Jonathan Swift proud), we’d smash our eggs together. Whichever egg was unscathed went on to compete against the other intact eggs–yes, my family is big enough they there were usually more than three rounds of this. My Uncle Greg and cousin Danny were the master at egg wars while the rest of us just waited for our wounded eggs to make a reappearance later in the day in the form of deviled eggs, usually courtesy of my Uncle Dave.

Once an egg champion was declared, it was off to church then on to my grandparents for lunch/dinner with an impossible number of people squeezed into their basement. And there was always lamb-shaped butter. I loved the lamb-shaped butter. The cousins would congregate upstairs around the Nintendo and the do-do-do-do-do-do of Mario Brothers and would only bug the adults to ask where the frozen strawberry dessert was…or maybe that was just me (that recipe to come soon).

I say all that to say this: Happy Easter everyone, and more importantly happy happy 27th birthday(s) Erica and Laura. I wish you success in all things, from your current creative endeavors to the next time you face off against someone with only a blue hard boiled egg on your side. If nothing else, you can always make deviled eggs.

Finding tiny bits of beauty

To be fair, I did warn you. I said that I could live on soup through fall and I wasn’t lying. As I also seem to have come down with the latest strain of the plague making its rounds of my office (why are students so germy? even college students, eesh), I was craving a soup flavorful enough that I could have some chance of actually tasting it.

For about a year lentil soup was my shoot-I-forgot-my-lunch lunch from a little Mediterranean kinda-fast-food-but-not-really joint: a cup of lentil soup, a fresh pita, and three falafels for under $5. I was so sad when the place closed, and still haven’t found a good cheap-and-reasonably-healthy lunch replacement. This lentil soup is nothing like theirs, except for the hit of lemon at the end, but it’s delicious in a totally different way. (I don’t think there were enough hyphenates in that paragraph so here’s an I-need-another-hyphen hyphen: – )

This soup is creamy (without any cream), rich (with a minimum of butter and oil), so packed with flavor I can still taste it with a compromised olfactory system (thanks onion, garlic, and curry powder), and just so simple (all the ingredients were in my cupboard). Perfect.

Can I stop for a second and point out how beautiful French lentils are? Indulge your inner child, scoop up a handful, and really look closely–tiny saucers of deep olive green with blue-black speckles, stripes, swirls remind me of pictures of Jupiter and its whirlpool of clouds or the jar of spotted, striated river stones my mom keeps in a glass jar on a shelf.

Just gorgeous. How can you not love food and cooking when it involves tiny bits of beauty like this?

I also love that this soup gives me an excuse to use a lot of really good curry powder, breaking one of the cardinal rules of cooking in an apartment: no seafood or curry if it’s too cold to open a window.

Oh well, I can’t smell anything right now anyways, and my neighbors can just indulge me for a day.

Soup season, take two

And so begins the Week of All Food, Thanksgiving week. The only holiday dedicated solely to cooking and eating (and appreciating the people you cook and eat with) is on Thursday and, as you would expect, I’m super excited and have all sorts of capital-P Plans. But since I know the latter half of this week will be overflowing with treats in all forms, savory and sweet, better to start the week with something light.

I’ve already mentioned that soup is one of my favorite dishes this time of year, and this particular one is just so good for so many occasions. Feeling like you’ve over-indulged in all that fall and winter have to offer (or know you’re about to)? This is substantial enough to satisfy, but won’t make you feel like taking a four hour nap after one bowl. Coming down with a bug and not in the mood for chicken soup? Copious amounts of ginger, garlic, and carrot are all fantastic for fighting whatever ails you. Or simply feeling especially virtuous? You will feel like a saint when you pull this out of your bag for lunch.

And now, a bit of a diversion–I was lucky enough to meet Deb Perelman who writes the Smitten Kitchen food blog (the source for this particular recipe) on Sunday, and it was amazing. Rare, perfect mid-November weather in Chicago, one of my favorite neighborhoods, awesome indie bookstore, and great company with the friend who introduced me to the Smitten Kitchen blog (thank you again Katherine!). Could it get much better? Turns out, yes!

Deb was, as expected, incredibly kind and generous to the huge crowd of people anxious to meet her, taking a few minutes to talk to everyone. And personally, when I mentioned that she inspired me to set up shop in this little corner of the internet and told her the name of the blog, she asked if I commented on her site because the name sounded familiar. Oh yes. This blog sounded familiar to Deb Perelman. Shut the doors, turn off the lights, we’re done here because it can’t get better than that.

Greens ‘n things

So I hear the east coast is having some weather (much weather! 30 Rock fans? Shall we conversation? No?) Has anyone else heard this? Rain and wind, I think they said. Maybe the news will spend a minute discussing it or I’ll see if I can find it mentioned on the Internets somewhere, we’ll see.

Sarcasm aside, I hope all resolves itself soon, bad weather sucks and is making me dread thinking about the other four-letter “s” word that’s coming sooner than I’d like. But in the meantime, I’m making salad with the last of the really beautiful lettuce I picked up over the weekend.

Lettuce seems like such an insignificant thing to get excited about. It’s usually relegated to the ubiquitous side salad, pale green and lacking flavor, or added as an afterthought to a burger just to get peeled off after it’s warm and soggy. What a sin.

Tians, and squash, and breadcrumbs, oh my

I’ve been dipping my toes into fall the past two weeks, trying to let my body and brain know what’s coming before I stand on the edge and cannonball in. This means a few jackets, leather boots, lots of scarves (…I might have a problem with scarves. Help me.). Salads topped with roasted root vegetables and candied nuts, a soup or two, even a casserole…excuse me, a tian topped with enough fresh herbs to resist feeling mid-winter heavy.

Fall feels pretty good right about now.

Tastes of home

I’ve talked already about some of what I’ve learned about cooking, food, and entertaining from my mom, but haven’t mentioned much about my dad. While I think a lot of my adventuresome tastes comes from my mom, I think my dad helped me appreciate the food that just says “home.”

I recently made a recipe for eggplant slices coated in breadcrumbs and baked and was reminded nearly instantaneously of the fried zucchini my dad used to make for me and my sisters growing up. The zucchinis were almost inevitably from our garden out back, sliced in circles, breaded, and fried on the stove. They were perfectly imperfect: salty and crispy and juicy in the middle. I don’t remember what else we would eat with them, but I do remember the sunny, end-of-summer days fighting with my sisters over a plate of them at the kitchen table.

Edible summer

This time of year, there are two types of people: first, there are the ones who are ecstatic about the drop in temperature, the cooler nights, the early hints of fall in the air. Then there are the people grasping at summer by their fingernails, trying to wring every second out of the daylight hours, the warmth, the sun.

Guess which one I am?

Peak summer chili

As I was making a ridiculously oversized pot of my favorite chili earlier this week and began planning to share the recipe here, I started thinking about the recipe’s origins and all the memories associated with it.

That may sound like this is some treasured family heirloom recipe, passed down through generations. In fact, the recipe is from Emeril Legasse and his show on the Food Network back when it was in its “celebrity chef-catchphrase” phase. But it made me remember when the network first started and the Saturday afternoons when my mom, sisters, and I would all cram onto our big white couch in our little house and watch a show called, so simply, Taste.

Playing hostess

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was help my mom get ready for a party, and it’s now one of the things I miss most living 600 miles away from home. Sorting through my mom’s recipes and cookbooks to come up with a menu, creating grocery lists and trips to Wegmans (and I miss Wegmans!), serving as sous chef to my mom’s head chef role, getting the house ready, chit chatting with guests, and cleaning up after everyone left–each part of the process had its own challenges and rewards, but I learned a lot in the process about being organized, being flexible, but most of all, making people feel comfortable and welcome.