Change of Address

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Brown Butter

This is a pretty regular looking cake.  And in a lot of ways it is.  But I have two words for you: Brown Butter.

If you haven't yet experienced the wonder of brown butter I suggest you step away from your computer screen and go immediately to your stove.  Put a stick or two of butter over medium heat and watch it melt.  Keep it there until the milk solids have separated and turned golden.  Strain.  And enjoy the resulting rich nuttiness.

I made said brown butter, let it harden a little, and used it instead of regular butter for this icing.  With the help of some confectioner's sugar, vanilla, and sea salt this icing is absolutely to die for.

The cake, on the other hand, was disappointing.  The recipe is from the Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery.  This is a great collection that my aunt put together for me.  It is an alphabetical listing of recipes by genre.  This recipe, in the cake section, is accompanied by many other different types of cakes recipes.  I swear I used this recipe and it was delicious.  But lately it hasn't been turning out right.  I have a theory that it doesn't have enough fat. I'm going to adapt the recipe, and will report back.

The real moral of the story is to use your own chocolate cake recipe, that you know and love.  Top it with icing made from your brown butter.  You will not regret it.

The Brilliance of Coconut

I recently revisited the coconut cake I first wrote about this past July.  I loved the cake.  It is light, tender, and has a lot of coconut flavor.  The fat in the cake is coconut milk.  No butter, no oil, just coconut milk.

This icing on the previous cake was too sweet for me, and too close to marshmallow.  I wanted to try making the icing with coconut oil, some cream cheese, and powdered sugar to really bring home the coconut flavor.  We didn't have any coconut oil though, so I stuck with a more traditional cream cheese icing, adding plenty of shredded coconut.

I liked this cake and icing better than the one the Saveur recipe suggests.  It is less sweet, slightly more subtle, and the coconut shines more.  I was really wishing I had coconut flakes instead of shreds, aesthetically the flakes are airier and smoother.

But if you love coconut this is a definite winner.  It's even won-over some disbelievers in the tastiness of coconut.

Mincemeat Pie

In preparation for spring we're cleaning our cupboards and freezer of all our winter stockpiles.  Mostly this means our homemade turkey broth from Thanksgiving's turkey and pumpkin from Halloween, all piled up in our freezer.  There was one, more exciting item to get off the shelves, dad's mincemeat leftover from Christmas.

Last night we made an orange cinnamon pastry to encase the mince meat.  I had never thought of flavoring a pie crust.  I recently saw it while perusing some recipes, and thought orange and cinnamon would complement the mincemeat. The combination was exceptional.

This is not a crust that can be left uneaten. 

Loving the Sablés...Still

My newest sablé flavor of choice is vanilla.  

I used my favorite sablé recipe as a starting off point (still Amanda Hesser's lemon sables).  I cut out the lemon, and instead added vanilla bean and Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract.  The leftover vanilla pod I stuck in about a cup of sugar.  The resulting vanilla sugar coated the outside of the sablés for an extra punch of vanilla.  

They have the same delightful sandy texture of the lemon, and the sweet intrigue of pure vanilla.  All around an excellent cookie. 

Lucious Lemon

Spring is coming, and I have been craving lighter desserts.   This cake is a variation on the popular muffin flavor: lemon poppy seed.

Moist and light, this cake contains no yolks, only whites, which contribute both to its light texture and color.  The lemon flavor comes from zest in the batter.  The real secret here is the lemon simple syrup, made from the juice of the zested lemon, sugar, and a little bit of water.  I brushed this syrup on the cake as the layers were cooling.  It added quite the flavor punch.

The icing is an almond cream cheese icing.  Pretty much a regular cream cheese icing with almond extract, a perfect complement to the lemon in the cake.  I then pressed poppy seeds onto the side of the cake, and piped frosting along the outer edge.

The lemon and almond combination is a real crowd pleaser.  Perfect for those like me, with spring fever.

Cranberry Update: Ice Cream

I tried making cranberry ice cream as promised.  First I strained yogurt to thicken it up a little.  Mixed it with the cranberry sauce in the spinning ice cream machine with two teaspoons agave nector.  The result is the beautiful pink ice cream.  The walnuts in the sauce gave it a crunchy textural contrast, the agave just enough sweetness to perk up the tartness of the cranberries and the yogurt. 

This will be a beautiful accompaniment to holiday dishes next winter.

A Sweet Sixtieth

A dear family friend turned sixty this past weekend.  It is such an exciting occasion, we wanted to do something very special.  She also graciously gave us her cake decorating supplies, and some extras for Christmas.  I've been teaching myself, and wanted to share my progress with her.

So, we made her a cake.  The cake is vanilla bean, and the icing darjeeling tea (her favorite).  I made the icing like you would a red velvet icing, starting by cooking flour and milk together until thickened.  Except first I steeped darjeeling in warmed milk, then followed the steps to a typical red velvet icing.  It was full of darjeeling flavor with the typical creamy lightness of red velvet.

We sandwiched the icing between four layers of cake, spread it on the top and sides, then covered it all with white fondant and a green fondant bow at the bottom.  The cake is topped with sugar paste roses and leaves.  This was my first time using sugar paste to decorate a cake, we've been practicing since the beginning of January.  The first couple of attempts were disaster, but after watching a couple of YouTube videos we really started to get it down.  These roses are definitely the best yet, we're very proud.  I've included this second picture so the detail is clear.

I was so pleased with the aesthetic of this cake, it is this type of artistry in cakes that I find so fun and inspiring.

A Family Classic

Recently I committed a sacrilege, something I never thought I'd be able to do.

You see, I am the third generation in my family to love and make Virginia Apple Pudding.  It is simple to make, and is kind of like a cobbler but with more topping.  The batter is poured on top of melted butter, with cooked Golden Delicious apples centered on top.  After about forty minutes in the oven the batter rises up over the apples in a warm, buttery wonder.  The outside crisps and the middle is soft and slightly gooey.  Nothing fights the cold better.

This time I made Virginia Apple pudding with pears, instead of apples.  My mother would shake her head in shame, my grandmother worse.  It was good, definitely.  But it wasn't the same.  Which just goes to show you, why mess with a good thing?

Magnolia Bakery Cupcakes...Always Good

Living in a rural area I often miss the food from my undergraduate days in New York.  I had a couple of haunts, one being Magnolia Bakery.  I first went to Magnolia's during freshman orientation.  Overwhelmed by the late night line--people leave their houses after 10p.m.?--I quickly ordered the banana pudding.  And it was wonderfully light and creamy.

Then I tried their cupcakes: vanilla with buttercream frosting.  Magnolia cupcakes are light and moist, like eating a cloud.  The eponymous cookbook generously shares the recipe.

For awhile I made it often, recently I've been enticed by flashier more complex cakes.  Yesterday I revisited the Magnolia cupcake recipe, as a cake.  It turned out just as I remembered.  With rainbow sprinkles sandwiched between the layers, it was pure nostalgia.

There's Never a Bad Time for Cranberry Sauce

My Aunt Donna (actually not my aunt, but close family friend) is an excellent cook with an arsenal of great recipes.

This is one of my favorites, her cranberry sauce.  I love this stuff.  I could eat it all year round.  It's pretty simple, cranberries cooked with apple juice and honey until they pop.  Throw in some orange zest, celery, and walnuts.  Let chill.  It is excellent with yogurt, ice cream, and really anything.  We've eaten it on pumpkin pancakes, and even used it as the base for a crisp.

This fall we bought extra cranberries and froze them so we could enjoy the sauce mid-winter blues.  And that's exactly what we've done.  Yesterday, while enjoying a bit with yogurt we thought of making frozen yogurt with a bit of cranberry sauce and some yogurt.  I'll update with some pictures and opinions soon.

Fauschnauts Redux

I so enjoyed the sweet potato Fauschnauts that I decided to try it again.  I didn't have time to fill them, so I had to come up with something different.  We had some caramel left over from a bread pudding.  This was special caramel, made with brown butter. 

I am definitely convinced that brown butter greatly improves anything.  I decided to go with the theme, and brown some more butter.  I let it cool and then beat the brown butter with the caramel to make the frosting.

This was a DELICIOUS frosting: the nuttiness of brown butter, the richness of caramel, and the slightness of salt.  It paired perfectly with the subtle sweet potato flavor, even better than the cinnamon custard filled. 

P.S. I encourage everyone to put brown butter in everything.

Plaza Hotel Cheesecake

So the Plaza Hotel Cheesecake is in the 50 Best Cheesecakes in the World cookbook.  I decided I had to try it.

It's a pretty conventional cheesecake: cream cheese, eggs, and sugar.  Baked.  The difference here is, when that's all done it's topped with a mixture of sour cream, vanilla, and sugar.  And baked again, just for five minutes.

The result really is a great cheesecake.  Not just to eat, but visually stunning as well.  The two layers, different shads of white, are quite elegant when sliced.  The sour cream topping, lightens the cake, so you don't feel a brick in your stomach when finished.  It also lends a pleasing tang to the overall flavor, contributing to its increased complexity, while also cutting through the richness of the cream cheese layer.  Paired with some fresh berries this cheesecake would make an elegant end to any meal, whether you're eating at the Plaza, or not.

Valentine's Cookies

(Yes we're talking Sablés, again)

This is a Dorie Greenspan recipe for Linzer Sablés.  These cookies are traditionally made for Christmas.  I think they're quite perfect for Valentine's Day, withe red jam and a heart window.  The dough is equal parts ground almonds and flour, as well as your normal cookie ingredients.  Just like traditional roll outs, the dough is chilled before flattening and cutting out the shapes.

The most important thing is that you have two heart shaped cookie cutters in the same shape but differing sizes.  One has to be small enough that it will fit inside the larger one while leaving you enough dough space that the cookie won't just fall apart.  The other important thing to remember is that you need equal numbers of plain hearts and windowed hearts.  Once that is done, they're ready to bake.

When the cookies have been baked and cooled, they are ready for assemble.  I made two kinds of jam for these linzers, with fruit that was otherwise going to go bad.  One is a strawberry balsamic jam, the balsamic cuts the sweetness of the strawberries nicely while still complementing the flavors.  The second was a basic cranberry jam.  (These are adult cookies, meant to surprise with the sweet and sour combination.)  

After sandwiching the jam between the two cookies, a little sprinkling of powdered sugar, you have a beautiful treat for your Valentine.  A platter of these cookies is really spectacular. 

Fauschnaut Day

On Fat Tuesday, where I'm from, we eat Fauschnauts.  They're a German doughnut often made partly with mashed potatoes.  They are plain doughnuts, for those used to the sugar bombs at Dunkin' Donuts, they many not be doughnuts at all.  But to me they're tradition.

This year I couldn't wait for Fat Tuesday.  These I made using mashed sweet potatoes instead of the normal white potato.  Plus I added a little intrigue by filling them, with a homemade cinnamon custard.  Okay, so I like tradition with a twist, there's nothing wrong with that.  I finished them off with a simple glaze.

The added flavor and substance was much appreciated on my end. They really were quite wonderful, though maybe not "fauschnauts" to most. I guess I lean more towards the sugar bombs.

A Queen of Cakes

As you can see from the picture this is a queen of cakes.  Not the queen, because that would be too difficult a decision, but a queen.  It is Red Hot Red Velvet Cake from Baked. 

We had some red hot laying around that I wanted to use up, and remembered this recipe from when I browsed through the cookbook a couple weeks ago.  The cake is pretty much a traditional red velvet recipe, but with less red food coloring.  The effect s more subtle than many fire-engine red velvets you see elsewhere.  This icing too is pretty traditional, with a few twists.  The milk is cooked with flour like usual, but in this recipe granulated sugar is added to the mix.  This mixture is beaten at high speed of an electric mixer until cool and then beaten with butter, heavy cream, vanilla extract, and cinnamon.  The resulting icing is light and deliciously creamy as one expects from a red velvet icing, but with the added intrigue of cinnamon and less sweetness thanks to cooking the milk with sugar and avoiding the powdered sugar.

The cinnamon icing complements the cake, complicating the flavor profile.  Ringed with icing dot and crowned with red hots, you have the queen of Valentine's Day Cakes.  (As I was writing I decided it needed an upgrade, plus what could be better for Valentine's than a red velvet cake?)

Knodels=Warm Goodness

One of my fellow classmates at school was Austrian.  After a cooking party, that ended with lots of leftover bread, he made Knodel.  I had never heard of it, but I fell in love instantly.

Knodel is basically meatballs but with bread instead of meat.  Your stale, leftover bread, is drenched in scalded milk, and mixed with egg and onion.  I put some celery in there too.  Recipes I looked at suggested parsley, being that parsley is the only food I genuinely hate, I left that out.  The mixture is then rolled into balls and poached in water or broth.  We had some broth that needed to be used, and I threw some cabbage and carrots in there just to add some vegetables and make it a full meal.

It snowed that night. We couldn't have planned it better.  What better to eat on a cold, wintry night than warm doughy balls.  A perfect comfort food, and tragically scarce in the States.

Rhubarb: A Delight Deserving a Starring Role

I love rhubarb.  The slight sweetness contrasts so delightfully with its sourness.  Plus its such a nice rosy pink.

So we still had some rhubarb in our freezer from last spring, and a Nigella Lawson recipe just waiting for it.  So on a cold wintry night we made Nigella's Rhubarb Cornmeal Cake.  The cake has a crumbly comforting texture and nuttiness of cornmeal.  Moist and delicious all around.

My qualm with the recipe is that it just does not have enough rhubarb.  It's not fault of the recipe, more just personal preference.  Rhubarb really needs and deserves more of a starring role.  I'm thinking crumble or crisp.  That's on the list for this spring.

Craving: Answered.

Recently I've become obsessed with the chocolate-mint combination.  I'm not sure why.  I'm not a big chocolate person but something about the cool lightness of mint and the way it cuts through the richness of the chocolate is intriguing me.  Then I made these...

These Chocolate Mint Brownies, posted on the Scrumptious Photography blog, are right up my alley.  First a fudgie cake brownie, then a minty cream layer, and a chocolate glaze for on-top.  And those three parts make one glorious brownie: pure indulgence (plus breath freshener).

I love these brownies.  And there's not much else to say, except that the picture doesn't do them justice.

Again With the Sablés

I know, I know, again.  I'm sorry, but really they're great cookies.

This batch of sablés are chocolate with sea salt.  The dough is the crumbliest of the different recipes I've tried.  In the mixing bowl I thought it would never hold together.  With determination and some quality hands it came together just find.  Equally challenging was slicing the dough before baking.  I lost a couple.  But after some practice I learned a cutting technique that proved quite successful.  (Support the slice with one hand while cutting with the other.)

All that extra maneuvering was worth it for the best in sandy texture.  With dark chocolate chunks, plus sweet and savory thanks to the sea salt, this recipe is for sure a keeper.  One of the favorite sablés.

Another Twist on Nostalgia: Graham Cracker Cake

In case you haven't noticed yet I love making cakes.  The artistry is so fun.  Plus they're tasty.

For Christmas I was given All Cakes Considered. It was written by a woman on staff of All Things Considered, who brings a cake to work every Monday.  One recipe particularly caught my eye, Graham Cracker Cake.  The cake has no flour at all, only graham cracker crumbs.  And there's something so good about graham crackers.

The icing is the perfect complement.  It's essentially whipped cream with some powdered sugar, coffee, and cocoa.  Light and airy, with a delightful touch of mocha flavor, it is delicious atop the heavy graham flavor of the cake.

The best part, for me at least, was decorating the top.  The series of stars we so much fun to do, and added such a special touch.

Crust, Jam, and a Little Nostalgia

 I think the picture pretty much speaks for itself.

We made homemade pop tarts. These were adult pop tarts, with a homemade cranberry jam filling; a little tang to counterbalance the sweet.  The recipe came from a great cookbook, Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It.  It's one we use often.  The pastry dough was some of the best I've ever had: flaky, flavorful, and tender.  We're going to try it as a pie crust.

But really, the pop tarts were super fun, especially for those of us who weren't allowed to eat them on a regular basis as a child.  They got a lot of laughs, great conversation piece.

Brown Butter Sablés

As I sat down to write this, I realized that I've been writing about my parents a lot lately.  Yesterday my mom and doughnuts, today my dad and cookies.  Why?  Because food is love, at least for me.

So, to celebrate my dad's recent retirement, and his surprise party that I missed.  We sent him Brown Butter Sablés, which my honey found a recipe for at SmittenKitchen.com.  Yes, we're still obsessed with sables.  Yes we're trying every recipe we can find.  And yes, I'll probably write about another kind next week.  Sorry.  But you have to try these cookies.

Actually this particular recipe was not my favorite.  I love brown butter.  It has such a rich, nutty flavor far beyond regular butter.  I actually have recently become obsessed and have started using it in cookies and cakes in place of regular butter.  So, you can imagine how excited I was about these cookies.  They sound wonderful.

I'm not sure what it is I found disappointing.  Perhaps I built them up too much in my head.  But the finished cookies weren't as special as I expected.  They were too sweet, with not as much complexity as I expected.  I think a little extra salt would have added intrigue.  My honey, though, loved them. 

Earl Gray Doughnuts

My mom loves tea.  I mean really loves.  She drinks probably at least three cups a day.  And so, a year or two ago, when Kelly Alexander included a recipe for Earl Gray doughnuts in her New York Times Magazine article Fry Baby, a flag went up in my head. I have been wanting to make those donuts ever since.

Finally I did.  (Sadly my mom is far away and didn't get to taste this batch, but the next one she will.)  The earl gray comes in just as a topping, mixed with sugar and sprinkled over top.  The doughnut itself has orange juice and zest to pick up the bergamot in the tea. Otherwise it's a pretty basic yeast doughnut. 

This was my first time making doughnuts, and I don't have a doughnut cutter, so I used one for biscuits. That's why there's no hole.  When they were cut and fully risen I fried them in a couple inches of canola oil.  They looked just like doughnuts from the store.  Except warm and more delicious.    Though I do think they'd be better with a hole, or some orange custard filling.

A Heavenly Breakfast

I know I keep raving about Spring Ridge Creamery and how good their milk is.  But, really, it's true.  So the latest experiment was making ricotta.  And, after a little cooking, a little citric acid, and a stint with cheesecloth it came out great.  Thanks to the Creamery's milk our ricotta was light, creamy, and flavorful. 

Luckily at the same time, Amanda Hesser published Recipe Redux: Heavenly Hots.  The contemporary recipe is Jody Williams' Heavenly Necci.  Necci, Italian, are chestnut crêpes.  Williams re-vamped version of traditional Necci are more moist with slightly extra volume. 

It just so happened that I have chestnut flour lying around needing to be used.  Even more coincidentally, Heavenly Necci are to be served with ricotta.  The Heavenly Necci were delicious, though not so heavenly to make.  They were so thin and delicate that they were difficult to flip; we had several casualties.

In the end we had a beautiful breakfast of homemade ricotta and Necci, and it just fell together.  That's how the best things in life happen.  

The Elusive Root Beer Cake

I've been fascinated with root beer cake for awhile.  It all started with a Saveur recipe for, you guessed it, root beer cake.  Complete with root beer gummies on top, it seemed the perfect all-American cake.  The recipe has one rather elusive ingredient: root beer extract.  I halfheartedly searched for months for that extract.  And finally found it in November.  Caught up in the holidays I finally made the cake earlier this month.

Don't get me wrong it's a good cake.  Moist, with a great airy but somehow dense texture.  The icing was equally pleasing, except for a slight sugary grit. But the cake is disappointingly lacking in root beer flavor.  The let down was worsened by the months of anticipation.

That same weekend I came across the Baked cookbook (which, by the way, has some great recipes).  It too had a recipe for a root beer cake, this one a chocolate bundt root beer cake.  Eager to find a root beer flavored cake I tried it.

Now this too is a good cake.  It is made much like Coca-Cola cakes are made, by melting butter, cocoa and the soda on the stove top, and moving on from there.  Here too, it is lacking in true root beer flavor.  For chocolate lovers the fudge icing is exceptional, and makes the cake.  The cake itself is relatively run-of-the-mill.

I am still in search of a cake that truly tastes of root beer.

Dessert Risotto: Revisited

Not too long ago I wrote about a dessert risotto, and suggested it might good brûléed.  So we pulled out the kitchen torch and tried it on a new batch.  I had never brûléed before, and I have to say, it was far easier than expected (and really pretty fun).  The most difficult part was getting the torch to work, ours is quite finicky. 

The resulting risotto was beautiful to look at.  Texturally it didn't quite work.  The beauty of crème brûlée lies in the contrast of texture.  The smooth custard and the crackle of the burnt sugar.  But in the risotto the crackle jumbled with the soft bite of the rice, and neither were enjoyed to their full extent.  This is why brûlée is best left to its crème and rice to its risotto.  Delicious as each is, they're simple best left alone.  

Sablés: A Special Cookie

The sablé is a very special cookie.  I'm not sure what it is exactly, the sandy texture, the rich butteriness, or the perfect half-dollar size.  Regardless this is a cookie that has a lot going for it.  I first encountered them while visiting Dijon, France, where sables were elevated beyond topic to subject--with twenty or more different kinds.


I forgot about them for awhile.  My interest was re-invigorated when I decided to make Amanda Hesser's Lemon Sablé from her book, Cooking for Mr. Latte.  (Her book, by the way, is purely delightful.  A must read if you eat and are a woman.)

Since Hesser's Lemon Sablés, I've taken up trying all sorts.  The latest experiment were cinnamon.  The recipe, supposedly David Bouley's favorite, were slightly disappointing.  Don't get me wrong, they're still great cookies.  But the wow factor is missing a little bit.  There are a couple differences between the Hesser and Bouley recipes, the most important, I believe is Bouley's uses half the egg of Hesser's and uses whole eggs instead of just the yolk as Hesser does.  There are other differences but I believe it is the yolk that elevates Hesser's recipe to sublime.

Next try will be cinnamon instead of lemon in Hesser's sablé recipe.  When it works, it works.

I Tried the Impossible

I've found this new patisserie blog, Tartelette, and it is great. 

The first thing I tried was a recipe for saffron and pumpkin macarons. I substituted sweet potato for the pumpkin because we had it lying around.  Macarons are something I've been too scared to make.  They're so cute, colorful, and intimidating.  Particularly the egg white/cookie part.  This recipe was just too good to pass up.

I have to say that I was surprised and proud of the results.  For a first attempt I think they turned out great.  The saffron/sweet potato combination was surprising and perfectly complimentary.  The cookie got a little soft after they sat.  But the gooeyness worked.

Soft Pretzels

So work is slow right now, which is really great for me.  I spend a lot of time experimenting.  I was making cookies and the back of the flour bag had a recipe for soft-pretzels.  I decided to try them.

It's really a lot like making bagels.  You make a pretty basic bread dough, wait for it to rise, form the pretzels, give them some more time, boil them in alkaline water (made by adding baking soda, beer, or others), and then bake.  Oh and before the baking you can brush them with butter and add any desired toppings.

I tried a couple of different toppings: salt, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds.  My favorite, thought, was a six pepper blend of spices that we have that I just love.

We enjoyed the pretzels for a couple of days after they came out of the oven, but really they were best when they first came out.  And surprisingly easy to make.

Conquering the Souffle

Souffle is one of those dishes that has always scared me.  I made a chocolate one once, and it tasted good, but it didn't rise properly at all.  In fact in sunk more than anything.  It's those darn egg whites.

But the other day I found a link to a banana souffle on the Saveur web site.  We had a lot bananas, and it was so cold, that a hot banana dessert seemed perfect.

So we tried it, and it turned out perfectly, at least technically and aesthetically.  The recipe we followed had lemon juice in it, for us it was too much, it overpowered the banana, and was too lemony for a January day.  The texture was great though.

I've been inspired to experiment more with egg white dishes.  Who knows what might come out of our kitchen next?

Dessert Risotto

At school we met this guy who really loves rice.  Who ever thought someone could love something so white, and, let's face it kind of bland.  But he kept us standing out in the cold for 8 hours talking about rice.  And we ate a whole lunch of rice: comparing, contrasting, and complaining.

In all fairness to him, he's Italian, and Italian rice (risotto) is far more complex than our plain rice version.  This guy's rice is carnaroli rice, a good rice for making risotto.  He ages his for a year which makes it even better for risotto.  The rice is Acquerello, and it goes for about nine dollars a pound on amazon.

We got a couple of cans of it for free on our visit, and we're just finishing it up now.  I'm just really not a rice person.  But this time we did something different with it...dessert.

We cooked the rice just as would for risotto.  Except instead of broth, we used the milk I keep raving about from the creamery down the road.  The result proves the point that quality ingredients make all the difference in the world.  It was absolutely delicious.  The next time we're going to try brulee-ing it.

I'm beginning to love rice.

Fighting the Winter Doldrums

On a Christmas shopping trip to Atlanta we bought some pasture-raised ground beef, and decided to freeze it as a treat post-holiday excitement. After being back at work for a week, and freezing cold temperatures we were ready for a little pick-me-up. Out came the ground beef.

We decided to make meatballs, and do them right. So we started by making our own spaghetti. For lack of a better place, we hung it on our laundry rack to dry. We made our sauce from scratch with San Marzano canned tomatoes, bought just for the purpose. And for the meatballs we made our own bread for bread crumbs, and got to rolling (with the addition of onions, garlic, and some spices).

But before we got to rolling, while at the library, I noticed meatballs glossing the cover of Bon Appetit magazine. The article shared about five different recipes for meatballs, mostly ethnic recipes of meatballs re-thought. None were very appealing to me. There were however five tips, universal to all meatballs. One was to cool the mixture in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before rolling. Another not to compact the meat too much while rolling, and still another to wet hands with cold water between each meatball.

I can't remember the other tips. But we did try those three. Maybe I took the compacting one too literally, because our meatballs fell apart a little bit in the browning stage. Those farther from the heat source seemed to fare better. I'm not sure how much those tips helped, it's not like we use a meat press for our meatballs.

Falling apart or not, they were tender, warm, and comforting. Perfect for a cold, January night at home.