Two pie? Aye!

A potluck at a friend's apartment and a gift sent from Florida provided an excellent opportunity for not one, but two desserts.

The goat cheese cheesecake is something I've been wanting to make for a long time. In its original incarnation, it involved a peach and thyme filling, but peach season has given way to apple season while I was trying to find an opportunity to make it. I also wanted to sweeten this with honey, but I wanted to go by the original recipe first until I had a better idea of what the viscosity would be. This was rather runny as-is, so if it had been sweetened with honey instead of sugar, I'm sure the baking time would have had to be significantly increased. But oh, boy, would that have been delicious.

Turning from autumn to summer, we have a key lime meringue pie, thanks to the parents of a dear friend from high school. They sent us a wedding gift of miniature ceramic pie plates, key limes, condensed milk, and a recipe for key lime meringue pie. How could I resist?

Apple nutmeg goat cheesecake for those without a springform pan, adapted from Food and Wine
Double the recipe (except for the goat cheese; the original called for 11 oz) if you have a springform pan.

1 prebaked crust of your choice in a pie pan (I used graham cracker, but I bet a flaky, buttery pastry crust would be amazing)
6 oz goat cheese, the good stuff
3 eggs, separated
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon juice plus 1/4 tsp lemon juice
1/4 to 1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar (or honey, if you're brave)
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1 large, tart baking apple, of the sort that mostly breaks down when cooked
nutmeg
2 tsp butter

Peel the apple and slice it thinly. Melt the butter in a pan and add the apple, a pinch of salt, nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp lemon juice. Cook over medium-low heat until a chunky paste is formed. Set aside to cool, and set the oven to preheat at 350 F. Beat the goat cheese with the egg yolks, vanilla, lemon juice and zest, and sugar until it's very smooth. Stir in the flour until just incorporated. With clean beaters, beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. Stir a third of the egg whites into the goat cheese mixture, then gently fold in the rest. Pour about half the filling into the pie crust. Layer the apple paste on top as evenly as you can, and pour the rest of the filling on top. Bake for 15 to 25 minutes (I know, it's a big span of time, but my oven is weird and should not be trusted), until the filling is set and a knife inserted into the middle of the cheesecake comes out clean but moist. Cool to at least room temperature before serving sprinkled with nutmeg.

Simple gifts

I know, I know, how saccharine and disgusting! But I can't help it. There has been such a glut of them recently. Take these matryoshka measuring cups and spoons, given to me by my mother-in-law.

My revived basil plant.

This thing has at least nine lives.

Cheap end-of-summer heirloom tomatoes, resting on a bamboo cutting board courtesy of my best friend's mother (i.e. my second mother).

Pretty and delicious

The re-realization, at the wedding of two of my high school friends who have been dating since we were in ninth grade, that the friends I made in high school are so staggeringly full of personality, strength, and accomplishment that I couldn't have assembled a better group of them if I'd tried.

PAR-TAY

Roasted heirloom tomato and red pepper soup on an unseasonably cool and rainy day, with butter lettuce salad and 45-cent happy hour bagels.

Tastes better than it looks. As usual.

Schadenfreude. No, I don't have a specific recent example of that, but I figured I had to cut the cloying examples featured in this post with the acknowledgement that revenge is just as sweet as any of the above.

Neither here nor there soup
I'm calling it this because it needs to be summer for tomatoes to be good enough to make this, but it's too warm to be eaten if conditions are not autumnal.


1.5 lbs heirloom tomatoes, slow-roasted
2 large red peppers, roasted and blistered in the oven
4 cloves garlic, roasted
1 carrot
1 onion
1 rib celery, with the annoying veiny bits stripped out
1 pod star anise
1/4 to 1/2 tsp sugar
paprika
cinnamon
salt
dash of soy sauce
pepper
red pepper flakes
1/2 to 3/4 cups milk
1/2 tsp cornstarch

Dice the onion, carrot, and celery to make a mirepoix. Sweat the mirepoix in a heavy-bottomed pot, then add the roasted vegetables and garlic, add soy sauce and water to cover, and bring to a boil. (I don't really care about a perfectly smooth soup, so I included the tomato and red pepper skins, but if you do care, take the skins off by scalding the vegetables prior to roasting.) Reduce to a simmer and add the spices to taste; make sure you taste every 5 minutes or so and remove the anise pod as soon as you find the anise flavor to be sufficient. Simmer until all the vegetables are soft enough to immersion blend or puree, at which point you should cool the soup enough to do so. Warm the milk in the microwave and add the cornstarch gradually, stirring to combine. Stir the cornstarchy milk into the soup and heat through. Pass through a mesh sieve or a chinois if you like. Eat with crusty bread (or really cheap bagels) and salad.

A very indie Christmas

This post brought to you by Passion Pit and my stain-concealing black skinny jeans.

As I've mentioned, despite being an atheist with relatively tenuous ties to Christianity, I will wholeheartedly embrace any festivities for which I can cook obscene amounts. Christmas day started with brioche cinnamon rolls. The recipe used a pound of butter and made twelve rolls. Globs of caramel adhered tantalizingly to the underside when I flipped them over.



I made a spinach, pea, and mint soup that is not pictured because it looks like an algae-filled lake on camera. The main course was champignons bourguignons, because let's face it, the beef is just the side dish to the amazing sauce in a bourguignon (at least in my opinion). Andy nearly purred watching the raw vegetables turn into a thick, saucy mix as we cooked it. Green beans provencals were the side dish. Dessert was simple: phyllo purses full of brie and raspberry jam, drizzled with homemade ganache.

And all through it, my classy, classy brother drank Busch Light out of a wineglass.

Post-dinner activities included a throwback to my childhood: plate-making. You draw on circular pieces of paper and send them off to a company that, for a fee, will make them into plastic plates. I made one that was okay. My brother, the artistic one, made one that was great. My sister and her boyfriend co-made one that isn't pictured because it looks like a terrifying acid dream.

When Andy said I should contribute to his plate because it was only fitting that I should have "a heavy influence on it," I wrote this:

So he drew on my arm.

Luckily, the markers were, according to the box, extremely washable.

Andy and I finished off the afternoon with a long beach walk. We saw parrots (which flabbergasted my pet Yankee) and porpoises (which, for some reason, didn't as much), but I think this was the highlight:

Other highlights: being forced to guess what my Christmas present was (the autobiography of Edward Dahlberg!), my mother saying "no" when my father asked if she'd like to say some words before we all ate, and my underage sister exploding her beer all over the tablecloth.

Checkmate for Jesus.

In honor of almost-Easter--some members of the Catholic side of my family were visiting--I made an Easter checkerboard cake. This called for a large-sized recipe of white cake (eight egg whites! It was a very fluffy cake), split into three portions and dyed pastel green, pink, and blue (thought about doing purple rather than blue, but didn't want to risk it, since purple can be funky sometimes). The recipe instructed me to use a "checkerboard cake pan," but I had no idea those existed: It's pretty simple to pipe batter in concentric rings of alternating colors. Typical checkerboard cakes call for one to do this in chocolate and vanilla batter; thus, the Easter theme. Making it succeed requires only a steady hand and a not-too-thin cake batter.

The recipe also called for a very pale white shortening icing so that the cake can be decorated with jelly beans and green coconut shavings and other Eastery sundries, but the idea of spreading a cup of shortening on a cake sort of freaks me out, so I just slapped on a chocolate frosting and called it a day.

More slapping together occurred with dinner: a cup of quinoa, a zucchini and most of a quart of mushrooms (stemless) chopped up and sauteed in Smart Balance with some white wine and fresh sage and garlic, stir together in the saucepan, eat. This was largely because we had to go see my sister in her final circus performance (well, penultimate really, but her final season) of her high school career; if you're Facebook friends with her, keep an eye out for photos and videos!

Not kosher for Passover... but kosher for awesome.

On today's menu: rosemary bread a la Andy, pea-and-spinach soup, and what Cook's Illustrated describes as "perfect chocolate chip cookies."

1. These cookies are nearly perfect; their imperfection stems from a slight equipment malfunction (the cookie sheets suck, and I don't know where the good ones are, and we had no aluminum foil, so the bottoms browned quite quickly). They use 10 tablespoons of browned butter and 4 tablespoons of not-browned, and they're so very good.

2. The rosemary bread is hard not to like. The recipe instructs to use a bread machine, but those are for wimps who can't wise up to the fun of making bread the old-fashioned way. Basting it often with olive oil gives it a light, crunchy, delicious crust.

3. The soup involved cooking up some shallots in Smart Balance, throwing in frozen green peas and vegetable broth and spinach and a splash of white wine (I wish I had sherry) and mint and pepper and boiling it up and pureeing it, sadly without the aid of my trusty immersion blender, and then tossing in a few tablespoons of cream to smooth it all out and voila.

I chopped up some nectarine and kiwi and strawberries for a fruit salad, too, and all the doors are open, because the weather is perfect in Sarasota in late March, and why the hell not? I just wish I had a camera, because the soup is a lovely color and I want to make you all jealous.

Outlaws of the Marshmallows

The homemade marshmallows, which weren't really a baked good per se but too bad, came out really well. They came out well despite me dropping the candy thermometer in the boiling sugar solution and almost overheating said sugar solution, perhaps because I was too busy rocking out to my "U Can't Touch This" Pandora station***.

In any case, these are definitely superior in taste to the store-bought Jet Puff kind, although those will always be in the portion of my heart reserved for certain inalienable processed foods (Kraft mac and ersatz cheese takes up most of the rest of it). Dipping them in dark chocolate is a great choice, but I'd also just as happily flavor them with lemon or orange or peppermint extract.

Only four days or so left in which to bake! Not that it's making me despondent; on the contrary, I am on tenterhooks waiting to go play ACF Winter and return to Boston to see certain people. And finish undergrad. But four days of cooking left! If there's anything you are particularly interested in tasting (family) or having me test for you (tragically absent friends), post and let me know.

***A note on bad music: Some music is bad in a really, really great way; for instance, I am convinced that O-Zone would have had a following outside Moldova even without this guy. (By the way, I apologize to the couple who had the misfortune of watching me rock out to "Faith," by George Michael, as I was driving to meet some friends for dinner this evening at a truly tasty Thai restaurant called Siam Orchid that you Floridians should all patronize. I was listening to NPR not two minutes before you saw me, which would have spared you.) But some music is just bad (see: song from the most recent film version of Romeo and Juliet that my sister is doing a circus routine to, song she is currently playing that might be called "Don't Stop" in which the singer declares that she revels waking up in the morning looking like P. Diddy). This music should be expunged in favor of additional repetitions of everything on the radio during the 1980s.

And now for something completely different...

So, I might make some marshmallows at like 1 a.m., depending on the rate at which I finish my half of a quizbowl packet, but I did eat some wonderful tarte tatin today.

That occurred at a memorial service for a woman named Joanne Perrot. My dad took some ceramics classes at the local community college in whose studio Joanne worked, and he quickly realized and showed the rest of my family what a lovely person she was. She and her husband Paul, the most dapper of erudite older French gentlemen, were consummate world travelers, artists and art connoisseurs, and just generally good people. We stayed way too long at the service (from 2 to 7:30) because it was impossible to tire of talking to their wonderful children and other friends and relatives who are doctors, scientists, teachers, artists, and so on. Joanne was a spectacular woman who will be missed and who left her mark in her extraordinary family in friends.

Who, to draw it back to the purpose of this blog, have great taste in desserts.

Crunchy, happy people laughing

Today's recipe comes complete with an entertaining story along with the deliciousness!

I had a little bit of a hard time getting all the oaty bits to clump, which presented a worrisome burn risk (along with the fact that I accidentally dumped in the dried fruit before the baking), but with the 15-minute stir intervals, it turned out fine. I used pine nuts, almonds, both slivered and roughly chopped, chopped dried apple, and dried cranberries; crystallized ginger would have worked just fine as well, and I'd like to try this with pecans and currants. Although the Traveler's Lunchbox author prefers light and crispy granola, I think using rolled oats for this (and perhaps increasing the sit time before it goes into the oven) would make for a nice, hearty granola. If you're into that kind of thing.

And since I like really spicy granolas and spice cakes and cookies and such, I would have jacked up the cinnamon and cardamom levels, but I'm afflicted with a cold right now that's rendering me unable to taste much, and I didn't want to accidentally inflict a spice overload on people. I did add a little nutmeg, though, and a little dried ginger.

The upshot of it all is that despite the rather large lunch I had courtesy of a friend's very kind grandmother (who also gave us a tour of an exhibit on Venetian painting at the Ringling, the local art museum where she is a docent), I've got a nice bowl of granola goodness with Feya yogurt. And more quizbowl questions to write*.

*This has been the most sedentary break ever. Serious activity is going to happen when I'm back at 'deis.

College cookies

My lack of a camera is really beginning to bug me, because today's baking fun doesn't really mean anything without pictures.

I actually started yesterday by baking some plain old sugar cookies (using my favorite recipe, which yields dense, chewy cookies, rather than crisp, crumbly cookies), then running out of time to decorate them before going out to Have Fun (dinner at some friends' followed by a visit to this place). Most of them had been eaten by the time I got around to decorating them today...

In any case, my little sister just got into Louisiana State University, so these were LSU cookies. I used a basic confectioners sugar-milk-food coloring icing to make purple borders around the circular cookies, flood them with bright yellow and slightly thinner icing, and write the LSU logo on them. My best friend Liz attempted and failed to decorate one of them (a cross between Jackson Pollock and an epileptic baker), but my friend Kelsey made a very cute tiger cookie (LSU's mascot is the tiger).

Anyway, I'm sure you'd all be falling all over yourselves with glee if you could actually see the cookies, but you can't. Just trust me on this one. Feel free to post accolades, and give Kelsey her due!

Bread, part 1

After a brief hiatus to go to my mom's hometown in Louisiana, I'm back at it. Tonight: rosemary olive loaf. I thought about doing cinnamon bread, but I noticed some Ezekiel brand cinnamon raisin bread in the fridge; while it is of unknown provenance, I can always use it for bread pudding later if it's too old to be eaten and then bake some fresh to replace it!

I dug out of the cabinet some yeast that looked like it had been packaged the year I was born, intending to make one loaf of rustic rosemary olive bread that I've made with great success and one loaf of a rosemary bread that Andy has made over and over and that I absolutely love. Unfortunately, only one of the packages of yeast still had some life in it, and it was the one for the rustic loaf, so the Andy bread will have to get pushed back to another day.

The dough for this is really, really dense and kind of dry when first mixed, more so than any bread I've ever baked, so if you give it a shot, don't let that worry you. As the recipe says, rubbing it with flour produces a very attractive crust. And that dough produces a very tasty bread. It's pretty hearty, so I don't know if I'd serve it with a meal, but it's great dipped in olive oil or toasted with some butter on it.

Here is the recipe for the me bread, and here is the recipe for the Andy bread. "Jo" just uses a bread machine, but you can bake it at 375 for "about 21 minutes," in his words, basting the top with olive oil often starting about 15 minutes in. Eyeball the dough as its rising, and punch it down once, maybe twice if you're feeling flush.

Hints:
-Don't start baking bread at 10:45 at night (altogether pleasant social engagements and altogether not pleasant stomach upset pushed my baking time back) unless you're not tired. At all.
-Writing a quizbowl packet is a great way to pass the time while your bread rises (Look forward to questions on [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], T-Party field!).
-Only pretending to write a quizbowl packet while actually reading The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a really great way to pass the time.
-Make sure you have non-Methuselean yeast before you begin. But then again, if you begin at a normal hour of the night (and if you are less stubborn in sticking to your baking decisions than I am), this shouldn't be as much of a problem.

Prequel: Sarasota ain't too thrilling, but desserts are!

I'm sitting on Andy's couch with no finals and no med school interviews and no newspaper work on the horizon. I could be writing 8/8 music for PACE NSC (a high school quizbowl tournament, for you readers not in the know), but instead, I'm prepping, via Tastespotting, for a month of culinary goodness.

Here's the thing: Those of us from Sarasota know that while the good ol' SRQ might be able to furnish some beautiful beaches, it is sorely lacking in a laundry list of other things to do. I'm going to be around from Dec. 18 to Jan. 15 (minus a few days in Louisiana), assuming that my parents remain acquiescent to my going to ACF Winter (a college quizbowl tournament, for you readers not in the know); while I've got some wonderful and captivating friends who are going to be around, there will still be ample amounts of potentially unspent time.

So, I plan to bake. A lot. I'm going to try some ambitious things (I like the look of this pistachio tart that reportedly took 8 hours to make...) and some simple things (Cupcakes with 2 tablespoons of ginger? ys plz), some new things (homemade marshmallows) and some old things (Emma never tires of apple turnovers); I'm definitely going to be open to suggestion. No, I'm not going to hold myself to some Julie and Julia-esque standard in which I cry into my pillow and ponder divorcing my husband if I don't achieve a dish a day. But I do intend to run through as many pounds of butter and flour as possible.

And if you're going to be in Sarasota, my father and brother are absent the house, so my mother and sister and I will need help eating it all. Really. Just call or comment if you want to eat something that you see.