new york cheesecake
Recipe New Yorkers have a reputation for being pushy and over-the-top — these are things you learn when you leave the city for a weekend, and a ticketing agent at the airport in Tulsa, for example, informs you that you’re so much more polite than she thought a New Yorker would be. We apparently like things bolder and taller and shinier and more intense and while I’m not sure if this really applies to your average straphanger commuting from walk-up to cubicle and back again everyday, I am absolutely certain that it applies to our cheesecakes.Crème fraîche, the ultra-rich, slightly tangy and impossibly dreamy cream I like to stir into pastas and soups and drizzle over baked fruit desserts is not carried in every grocery store, and even where it is, it’s not exactly the most budget-minded ingredient. Here’s how you can make your own at home: Mix one cup of room temperature heavy or whipping cream with two tablespoons of butter milk in a glass jar and cover. Let it stand at room temperature for 8 to 24 hours, or until it thickens. Stir well and refrigerate for up to two weeks.
Recipe A few people have asked me what I thought of the food on the cruise we took and I admit, I’ve been dodging the question. If there could be a tiny, unfortunate thing at making a craft of getting food to taste the exact way you wish it to in your own kitchen, it would definitely be that the food outside it never tastes as good as it once did — especially food at a week long all-you-can-eat-buffet. Given, understandably, that nobody wants to eat their spaghetti while you espouse on all of the techniques the kitchen could have employed to avoid gumminess, like I said, I mostly shut up.
Recipe So this year? It’s been fulla brisket. It started at New Years, with the Southwestern Pulled Brisket that made me a brisket person. And also a slow-cooker person. But mostly a brisket in the slow-cooker person because together, magic happens.
Recipe And on Saturday, we returned from our week at sea, our week of no work, of sunshine and someone else making dinner and lo, what a bummer. But we had a great time, from stunning views as we sailed out of New York Harbor on a freak 75 degree day in March:
Recipe I could never get into kale. Heck, I’ve long been timid about greens in general — the delicate ones like baby spinach and arugula were easy but as soon as things got a little heavier, I got nervous. When I finally found a respectable green I found palatable — Swiss chard, which I think of as the green for spinach people — I went to town with it: a tart, a spaghetti dish and then gratin. But I still couldn’t warm to kale. Because I didn’t like the way it tasted. And I don’t care if something is chock-full of vitamin A, C and calcium, I don’t care if it makes you live longer or feel stronger or fixes the budget deficit, I’ve got this hang-up wherein I won’t eat food if it doesn’t taste good to me. (My offspring is a little less particular, it seems.) And kale just didn’t.
Recipe Meet my new favorite potato dish. Oh, those mustard-roasted potatoes were wonderful, weren’t they? And who doesn’t love baked pommes frites? And latkes, they were a force to be reckoned with. But they’re dead to me, or they would be, if in some cruel parallel universe I was to choose only one way to eat potatoes from this day forth.
Recipe I confessed some wanderlust a few weeks ago, though “some” is a bit of an understatement. See, parents get paralyzed a bit in the beginning — in the early days, just getting a cup of coffee in the morning is kind of a triumph — thus even when the kid hits a half year old (which once-Wee Jacob did this week, sniffle) and you’ve got a good routine down, you still know you’re not ready to pack everything the three of you will need for one week into suitcases and then willingly relocate to a 180 square foot stateroom for a so-called vacation.
Recipe First off, this dish is not called “spinach and chickpeas”, it is espinacas con garbanzos. Don’t you agree? “Spinach and chickpeas” is something you eat because you should — it is healthy and you aspire to be. Espinacas con garbanzos is something you eat because it sounds sexy, and doesn’t taste half bad either. It’s hearty and smoky with a little kick, you eat it on little fried bread toasts at a tapas bar in Spain.ncG1vNJzZmirnZ7BtbHNpKCtm5iau2%2BvzqZmqZmXmnx5fY54enaFVWiPkHGSfXg%3D
Jenniffer Sheldon
Update: 2024-09-19