peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies

Ina Garten's recipe:

1/2 pound unsalted butter at room temperature
1-1/2 cups light brown sugar, packed
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 extra-large eggs at room temperature
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 cup good smooth peanut butter
2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 pound good semisweet chocolate chunks

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time. Add the vanilla and peanut butter, and mix. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and add to the batter, mixing only until combined. Fold in the chocolate chunks.

Drop the dough on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, using either a 1-3/4-inch ice cream scoop or a rounded tablespoon. Dampen your hands, flatten the dough lightly, then press the tines of a wet fork in both directions. Bake for exactly 17 minutes (the cookies will seem underdone). Do not overbake. Remove from the oven and let cool slightly on the pan, then transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely.

Fennel and Leek Soup

• one fennel bulb, quartered and cored
• 2 leeks, chopped, washed well, with a little bit of the dark green part remaining
• 2 or 3 cups of water
• teaspoon of vegetable boullion (I use "Better than Boullion")
• one clove of garlic, peeled, cut in half

Boil all for a few minutes until stuff is soft. Put it all in the blender and hit "liquify" and season it with salt and fresh pepper and you have yourself a freaking delicious vegetable smoothie.

I actually ate the whole damn thing.

Alcoholic Pumpkin Pie

(pair this with the Vodka crust, of course)

Filling

• 16 oz pumpkin purée (roast it yourself!)
  
• 3/2 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mace
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 cardamom
  
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/4 cups heavy cream
• 1/4 cup whiskey
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preparation

For crust:
Mix flour and salt in processor. Add butter and shortening; process until mixture resembles coarse meal. With machine running, add ice water 1 tablespoonful at a time and process until moist clumps form. Gather into ball; flatten into disk. Wrap in plastic; chill 30 minutes. (Can be made 2 days ahead. Keep chilled.)

Roll out pastry on lightly floured surface to 13-inch round. Transfer pastry to 10-inch-diameter glass pie dish. Fold edge under and crimp. Pierce pastry all over with fork. Freeze pastry 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 450°F. Bake crust until pale golden, about 15 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool. Reduce oven temperature to 375°F.

Meanwhile, prepare filling:
Whisk first 10 ingredients in large bowl until smooth. Whisk in all remaining ingredients. Pour filling into crust.

Bake pie 20 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 325°F. Bake until filling no longer moves in center when dish is shaken, about 30 minutes longer. Transfer pie to rack and cool completely. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover and chill. Bring to room temperature before serving.)

Alcoholic Pie Crust

• 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (6 1/4 ounces)
• 1/2 teaspoon table salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) cold unsalted butter , cut into 1/4-inch slices
• 1/4 cup vegetable shortening, cold, cut into two pieces
• 4 tablespoons vodka, cold (see note)


• 1. Process 3/4 cup flour, salt, and sugar in food processor until combined, about two 1-second pulses. Add butter and shortening and process until homogenous dough just starts to collect in uneven clumps, about 10 seconds; dough will resemble cottage cheese curds with some very small pieces of butter remaining, but there should be no uncoated flour. Scrape bowl with rubber spatula and redistribute dough evenly around processor blade. Add remaining 1/2 cup flour and pulse until mixture is evenly distributed around bowl and mass of dough has been broken up, 4 to 6 quick pulses. Empty mixture into medium bowl.
• 2. Sprinkle vodka and water over mixture. With rubber spatula, use folding motion to mix, pressing down on dough until dough is slightly tacky and sticks together. Flatten dough into 4-inch disk. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least 45 minutes or up to 2 days.
• 3. Adjust oven rack to lowest position, place rimmed baking sheet on rack, and heat oven to 400 degrees. Remove dough from refrigerator and roll out on generously floured (up to 1/4 cup) work surface to 12-inch circle about 1/8 inch thick. Roll dough loosely around rolling pin and unroll into pie plate, leaving at least 1-inch overhang on each side. Working around circumference, ease dough into plate by gently lifting edge of dough with one hand while pressing into plate bottom with other hand. Refrigerate 15 minutes.
• 4. Trim overhang to 1/2 inch beyond lip of pie plate. Fold overhang under itself; folded edge should be flush with edge of pie plate. Using thumb and forefinger, flute edge of dough. Refrigerate dough-lined plate until firm, about 15 minutes.
• 5. Remove pie pan from refrigerator, line crust with foil, and fill with pie weights or pennies. Bake on rimmed baking sheet 15 minutes. Remove foil and weights, rotate plate, and bake 5 to 10 additional minutes until crust is golden brown and crisp. Remove pie plate and baking sheet from oven.

Thanks, to Mark Bittman! He says to just use 2 tbs of vodka and 2 tbs of cold water, but I used all vodka, just because.

(How to) Eat Your Veggies

[A recap of all the good food Sudip made this week using delicious, freshly-farmed veggies. Enjoy!)

Good friends of ours who have bought CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares just happen to be away for a month this summer. That means that we're getting their vegetables, shipped in from a nearby organic farm every Tuesday. Given that I'm at the local farmers' market every Sunday anyway, my kitchen is just filled with amazing produce, all of it organic, much of it heirloom: beautiful little fingerling potatoes, knobby white baby carrots, jewel-like golden beets, purple kohlrabi, fennel, green garlic, sorrel leaves, purslane (my new favorite salad green), Romanesque broccoli (as gorgeous to look at as it is to eat), and of course the ubiquitous zucchini and yellow squash.

Anyway, the best thing you can do with produce like this is not to mess around with it too much. That means, for me, no fancy sauces, no complicated cooking process. A little coarse sea salt, a few lashings of black pepper, a touch of lemon or sherry vinegar, the best olive oil you can afford, and heat--what else do you need?


The dishes I made this week aren't recipes so much as they are wonderful combinations of ingredients that I wanted to share: fingerling potato and purslane salad with knobs of ripened goat's cheese; baby golden beets, fingerling potatoes, and baby white and orange carrots roasted together with olive oil, pepper, and sea salt; spaghetti with sorrel pesto; a soup of Spanish lentils, sorrel, baby carrots, and green garlic; roasted beet, fennel, and goat's cheese salad; and finally, Romanesque broccoli soup with purple onions and green garlic, topped with a quenelle of goat's ricotta. So delicious.

Ramps, Part Deux

[Now, what to do with aforementioned ramps. Chefdip is on a roll!]



Earlier, I wrote about the glories of pickling ramps. Tonight, I decided to use the ramps I pickled over the weekend. Luckily, I still had some wonderful ingredients from Saturday's farmers market: asparagus, new potatoes, and scallions. So I made a warm salad. I quartered the new potatoes, tossed them with olive oil, coarse sea salt, and pepper and put them into a hot oven to roast. When they were nearly done and getting caramelized, I add the asparagus and scallions, which I cut up in small pieces. I have some thyme growing in my kitchen, so I tore off some sprigs and added them as well.

When the vegetables were caramelized and tender, I took them out and squeezed a lemon into them, then added the zest of that lemon--and a handful of pickled ramps. Some more coarse and salt, and I had a wonderful warm spring salad.

For our main course, I took baby swiss chard (which I'd also bought at the market) and wilted it in olive oil, then set the greens aside. I made a sauce by mixing creme fraiche with the strained pickling liquid from my ramps, plus salt and pepper (you whisk it and gets wonderfully foamy). Then I seared off six sea scallops, which I'd seasoned first, adding some butter after turning them initially, then basting the scallops with that delicious brown butter.

I put a bed of swiss chard on the plate, topped with a couple of sea scallops, put some pickled ramps on the plate, and spooned on the sauce. The dish was absolutely incredible and tasted like the essence of springtime.
















I'm out of produce. Tomorrow I'm ordering a pizza.

Ramps? Pickled? What?

[This comes to us from our dear friend Chefdip. I've never had a ramp, and I've certainly never had one pickled, but he takes it there, and makes the rest of us look bad in the process. Shad roe? Shaved asparagus? Sorry, I'm busy with my Betty Crocker yellow cake over here.]



















Springtime seems to bring the most delicious things to the farmers markets:
fava beans (which are worth the great trouble involved in preparing them), earthy morel mushrooms (best eaten when cooked gently in butter), the most delicious asparagus (which I both roast and eat raw, shaved in a salad), and tender, young salad greens. And of course, the shad are running, and that means shad roe, which I look forward to each year with an anticipation bordering on lunacy.

Ramps are also in season. Americans have been eating these wild, garlicky little leeks for ages, but only recently have they become a flash item in restaurants. They're only available for a short time in the spring, they grow wild in parts of Appalachia, and they're highly perishable. But they're intense and delicious. I like to eat them with shad roe and capers, in a soup with new potatoes and thyme, pan-roasted with chicken, oven-roasted with scallions--just about any way I can.

But because they go bad so quickly, I like to pickle them, to extend my ramp season. I can then add these pickled ramps to a braise, to salads, to a sauce for soft-shell crabs, to frittatas.

Last weekend, I pickled my ramps in two ways. Both involved a base of 1 cup of white wine vinegar and 1 cup of sugar. To the first batch, I toasted some mustard seeds, coriander seeds, black peppercorns, and bay leaves and added this mix to the liquid. I blanched the ramps for just a minute or two, then put them in a sterilized jar and poured over the pickling liquid. In the second batch, I toasted off about 4 tsps of the Bengali spice mix called panch phoran (five spices): nigella seeds, fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and cumin seeds--the aromas in the kitchen were unreal--and added this to the brine. After about three days, you have a truly wondrous thing.

Moutarde

Casino is the name of the supermarket I go to. It is enormous, even by american standards. Mustard is often sold in reusable drinking glasses, and since I like matching glasses, I have decided to consume as much mustard as possible and acquire a set of four. I have been putting it in mixtures of whole wheat penne, beans, vegetables, and olive oil, balsamic, salt, and pepper. It's actually great! It's the best with navy beans thrown in.

Apple Pie

This is the apple pie I made for our potluck Thanksgiving in Dole. It was good! I will post the recipe I used later. I am really proud of the heart shape on the top.

Gajar Halwa (Carrot Pudding)

The recipes I have seen online for this dessert have been different from the one given to my friends by one of the Indian assistants here. Hers called only for the ingredients above:

§ one liter of milk
§ six or so big carrots
§ a cup and a half of almonds soaked in milk
§ a cup and a half of raisins
§ a small bowl of sugar

Cook the grated carrots in the milk for a long time (enough time for all of the milk to have evaporated leaving a thick orange pudding). Then add the almonds, raisins, and sugar (to taste). I also added a pinch of salt. Poof! Done!

Other recipes call for 2 tbs of ghee (or butter), a little cardomom, and a combination of cream, condensed milk, and milk in place of the whole liter of milk. I have also made this with coconut milk with great results.

It's the easiest and deliciousest thing ever.