Ladurée this Ain't

Whether you purchase my baked goods or not, please think about donating to your local food pantry to help those who need it. 

These are my secret hunger weapon. Packed with the good omegas, flavorful, versatile and friggin’ delicious.

I get the Alshark brand the more specialized grocers, but I also love the Bela brand, which has smoked sardines, and sardines packed with lemon or capers. 

My simplest sardine-forward meal is to make a salad with them - I combine diced fresh tomatoes, thinly sliced onions (I like red for this, or even shallots), lemon juice, chopped parsley, the sardines from one tin (any one will do), salt/pepper to taste. Toss it all together, breaking up the tender fillets slightly and serve with crusty, toasted bread of your choice.

Like many people, I too have decided to jump on the sourdough bandwagon and make some up so that I can bake...bread? Maybe. Though I was reading up on the uses of discard to make cinnamon rolls and the many uses of sourdough beyond bread.

The first batch failed. It crusted over and had this off-putting, yogurt-yeast smell that I needed to get out of my life. I tweeted about it quite a bit and found out from a friend that sunlight is not the friend of yeast - I was effectively letting it die a sunny death by leaving it on the window sill. And here I thought fresh air was a good thing! I discarded the smelly batch and decided that I wasn’t going to let a dead starter defeat me. So I started another one.

This one I kept in the kitchen, hanging out among my aromatics and dried beans - in a cool place, away from direct sunlight. And it prospered! I have to keep feeding it because it keeps discharging a lot of that liquid by product as a result of fermentation. “Hooch” it’s called by the experts at King Arthur. My latest batch is making a lot of it, which means that it’s active and ready to be fed. Which is what I’m going to do and I cannot wait to see what it does to my first batch of sourdough bread.

Masala chai. I didn’t know how intoxicating this beverage could be until I went to India and tasted cup after cup of hot, spicy, heartening tea in every city I visited. What they serve in coffee and tea shops here in the US does not come close. I did manage to find a recipe off a back of a pack of tea that I bought in one of the many more upscale tea shops in Delhi. 

Less a recipe and more ratios to deliver on the punch of flavor I grew to crave during my trip.

For a good Masala Chai you need:

Milk Water Sugar/Honey Black loose tea of your choice Cardamom Ginger Cloves Black Pepper Cinnamon Star Anise

50/50 water and sugar or honey to taste, bring to a boil. Add your tea and the ratio of spices as follows: 30% Ginger, 20% Cardamom, 20% Cloves, 10% Black Pepper, 10% Cinnamon, 10% Star Anise.

Boil for a few mins, or until the pot threatens to boil over. Turn off heat, strain into your mug. 

Note: you can adjust the ratios based on your taste for warmth/sweet versus spicy/bracing - more ginger or pepper means more spicy, more cloves means more warmth. And I’m using whole spices here - better than ground.

Dalgona Coffee

Stupid easy. 2 tbsp instant coffee or espresso. 2 tbsp sugar (I use 1 tbsp). And 2 tbsp boiling hot water. Beat the living crap out of it. And serve on top of your favorite coffee-adjacent beverage. I chose milk.

Cookbook Book Club is on social distancing mode, so we opted to make our planned recipes individually and share them online with one another. It made me miss cookbook book club even more than usual. BUT it also allowed me to bake this amazing recipe for Adeena Sussman’s Tahini Blondies. It’s from her cookbook, Sababa, but you can also find it here if you don’t have the cookbook (or aren’t in a cookbook buying frame of mine) - link to recipe.

I love apple pie. Here’s a recipe that I like to use when I’m craving some of that apple pie goodness.

Crust (enough for 2 9-inch pie crusts) 2 cups all-purpose flour 2/3 cups of chilled, cubed unsalted butter 1 tsp of salt (I like sea salt) About 1/4 cup of ice water I make my crust in a food processor. Just add the flour, salt and butter and pulse until coarse crumbs form. Then dribble in water, pulsing until the dough just comes together. Turn out on a clean surface, split in two and then wrap in plastic wrap/beeswax wrap/etc. and chill for a min of 30 mins.

Filling (enough for a 9-inch pie plate/pan/etc.) 4 large Jonagold apples 1/3 cup dark brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon 1/2 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar 2 tbsp all-purpose flour Peel, core, and slide the apples thinly. In a large bowl, combine the apples with all the other ingredients and set aside for roughly 20 mins or so. This allows the flavors to meld into one another a bit and for the flour to get all gooey. Assembly + Baking Preheat oven to 375 deg F. Roll out chilled dough into roughly two large circles, enough to cover the pie plate of your choice. Lay one of those bad boys in the pie plate, making sure there’s some overhang (and if not, just adjust using your common sense). Fill the crust with the apple filling, try to lay the apples down flat versus higgledy-piggledy. Place the other pie crust on top, crimp the edges, and make a few small slits on the top of the pie with a sharp knife. So it looks like this.

Bake for 45 mins to 1 hour, or until crust is golden brown. This is very important: let completely cool before cutting. I left mine cooling overnight and that was some good pie the next morning.

Buttermilk Biscuits.

Ramen Noodles. Gussied up.

Now, who wouldn’t want to eat the whole batch in one go? Keep scrolling for the recipe below! (adapted from the one on The Spruce Eats)

Ingredients: 6 tablespoons oil (preferably olive oil) 8 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 1/2 cups Dutch process cocoa powder 2 teaspoons espresso or instant coffee powder 2 cups dark brown sugar 4 large eggs 1 tablespoon vanilla 3/4 cup all-purpose flour 3/4 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Optional garnish: flaky sea salt for sprinkling

I painted my kitchen walls lemon yellow. The yellow of a cartoon sun. The yellow of grass-fed-organic-raised-by-the-most-kind-farmer-in-the-country yellow.

Yellow signifies beginnings to me, good beginnings - the beginnings of inspiration. And inspired I become when I enter my kitchen, single-minded sometimes in the creation of a dish. The mood lift of yellow gives me the right kick in the pants to push me towards creativity.

They don’t call it mellow yellow without cause - the chaos of my jars, cookbooks, condiments, appliances all mellow against the backdrop of the yellow. In my mind it’s the color of balance, so my limited space does not overwhelm me. It lends confidence to my decisions to cook a multi-course meal, or bake a multi-level cake.

One of my favorite things to do on a weekend, after a long and tiring week of work on things that I need to work on (but don’t necessarily love to work on), is to go into my kitchen in the quiet of the morning. Especially when the sun is just turning on its brilliance and hasn’t barreled through the window yet - the kitchen walls begin to absorb its glow. It’s quiet, bright and as the coffee smells waft from the fresh french press - it’s the closest to zen I can get in this crowded city I live in.

Was boxed cake mix. I don’t remember if it was yellow cake or chocolate cake, but I know it was Duncan Hines (we always bought Duncan Hines) and there was boxed frosting to go with it. 

It was the beginning of a love affair with baking (and cooking) that endures till this day.

I posted the recipe in a tweet. Because it's short and tweet, I mean sweet, like the cookies. 😬😁

In 2019 I tried many things when it came to managing my weight and getting “healthier” - Noom, the Keto Diet, no alcohol over an extended period of time, no refined sugar over an extended period, a combination of all of the above.

What I’ve realized in doing all of this is the following:

I don’t crave sugar as much as I thought I did.

I don’t need to drink alcohol when I go out.

Sleep is more important than any diet (I know, duh).

Exercise needs to make an appearance because diet alone doesn’t cut the fat.

This is less about losing weight and more about being healthy and preventing any potential ailments down the road.

I also found that I have more stamina than I thought I did and more willpower as well. None of the above should come as a surprise to anyone who has “getting healthy” on their mind, but I wanted to post an update response to my 2019 post about going back on the diet train.