cheeseandchocolate

I have plain (usually nonfat) yogurt every morning with breakfast, and my favorite by far is Straus Family Creamery, from Marin County, CA. Not likely it's sold in the NY area, but worth a check. It's European-style, so it is more liquidy, very smooth, very opaque, and just tangy enough. For my money, it's the best. Stonyfield is alright, but it has too many lumps for me, and it lacks the smooth mouthfeel of Straus. Haven't tried Total yet, but it sounds great. Oh, and if you are in the mood for a cream-top whole milk yogurt, Brown Cow does do an outstanding job. And I second whoever mentioned Mamie Nova...when I lived in France, I often had their rhubarb yogurt for dessert. Mmmm.

Wow! This page of the "Dinner!" thread is perhaps the most intimidating one I've seen yet. Yikes. Oh well...no shame here. I just have to remind myself that I'm a grad student with a hefty part-time job on the side and a nearly-vegan boyfriend to feed. So... Tonight's dinner: Mujadara Daniel Boulud's Eggplant with Cumin Farmer's market "Magenta" lettuce with lemon-tahini dressing And to round it out, homemade chocolate chip cookies and milk. I've been using Elizabeth 11's cookie recipe (which I first read about here and then looked up on cookierecipe.com), and the cookies are absolutely delicious. Beautiful too--especially when I use my Silpats. Looooove those Silpats.

Clearing-out-the-fridge meal, before Mom and I hop an early-morning flight to D.C. for the grand opening of my brother's third restaurant, Ceiba (also owns DC Coast and Ten Penh, if anyone has been there): Culatello and garlicky Salumi salami (the last of the stash I brought from Seattle) La Brea French baguette Warm steamed cauliflower with sherry vinaigrette Warm roasted red bell peppers with argan oil Leftover Italian prune-plum clafouti

Back in Oklahoma to visit Mom. Treated my grandmother to a night away from her retirement community's dismal dining room (mmmm, jello salad!) and had her over for a simple, easy supper: Spaghetti with juicy smashed roasted tomatoes (dusted with ground coriander and sea salt before roasting), capers, basil from the garden, freshly grated Parmegiano Reggiano. Warm Italian prune-plum clafouti, sprinkled with powdered sugar.

I love cooking with my mother--something I don't get to do nearly often enough, since she's in Oklahoma and I'm in Seattle, WA. My parents both did the cooking when I was growing up, although my dad always tended towards the savory side, my mother the sweet side (when we actually had homemade desserty items, which wasn't on a regular basis). My father loved to come home from work, fix himself a scotch, and rummage through the fridge for dinner ideas. Cooking was his creative outlet, and we've got tons of recipe cards in his scratchy handwriting--from Burg's Potato Salad to more original endive/shrimp concoctions. If Mom and I were out of town somewhere, he'd have a group of friends over and fix long-braised ribs, osso buco, or something else more to his liking than ours...and then he'd delight in recounting his guests' praise! He passed away after a brief battle with cancer last December, so my memories of him are especially strong and present right now. But I digress... My mother taught me a lot about vegetable preparations and baking. As a kid, I loved her brownies ("Kate's Brownies," supposedly Katharine Hepburn's recipe) and her raspberry cake with raspberry icing. Apparently, our standard poodle did too...one year, the dog stood on her hind legs while we were out and ate an entire layer of my birthday cake right off the counter where it was cooling. My mom is quite legendary among her circle of friends for her now-discontinued Christmas cookie gifts: she'd get together with a friend and bake for ten days or so, churning out linzer cookies, apricot crescents, triple-chocolate "rads," chocolate-dipped pecan bars with shortbread crust, mendiants, the best fruitballs you've ever tasted, Russian tea cakes, the like. She helped me conquer my pie crust fears and counseled me through some disasters when I was doing some baking for a local caterer. To this day, we always put on music and dance around the kitchen (a dance quite creatively titled "the Kitchen Dance," which has now spread throughout the family), and we laughed our way through an unbelievable Martha Stewart lemon-meringue pie disaster a couple of summers ago. Can you tell I miss cooking with her? These days, I do most of the cooking when we're together, or we'll team up to make dinner. As a matter of fact, I'm headed out to visit her tomorrow, shouldering a bag filled with Seattle goodies: Salumi's cured meats, Tall Grass Bakery's hominy bread, and Dahlia Bakery's macaroons, along with prune plums, nectarine marmalade, fresh mozzarella...I can't wait.

When I stopped in to get some bread last week, I picked up some of the Dahlia's coconut macaroons. Stuck 'em in the freezer (had other desserty items to be eaten first) and finally thawed them yesterday for last night's dessert. Mmmmmm mmmm! Those babies are the lightest, most moist macaroons I've ever had...truly ethereal. Anyone know their secret?

Sunnyside-up eggs with pepper and fleur de sel, mopped up with wheaty, crusty, chewy bread from the Dahlia Bakery Green salad with lemon-tahini dressing A peach

Homemade chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Take 'em out of the freezer, nuke for 10 seconds, and eat while still partially frozen but not rock-hard. Takes away the sometimes-overwhelming richness/sweetness, as FG noted.

I didn't poke mine at all. I baked them for 15 minutes at 450 degrees, lowered the temp to 350, and let 'em go another 15 minutes. Mmmm mmmm!

Agreed--very, very good bread. I sped over to buy a loaf today (it's apparently called "summer corn bread") and was pleasantly surprised to find that they were having a today-only special: buy one loaf of any bread and get a free loaf of their house bread along with! Wow! At any rate, I have to say that this tasty bread is extremely similar to the Tall Grass Bakery's hominy bread. Only difference I can detect is that Dahlia's has a smattering of fresh corn kernels; otherwise the taste is nearly identical. I've been a big fan of that hominy bread for a while...and they make it year-round! So when Dahlia's summer corn is gone in a couple of days, take heart.

An update: Gave the popovers another go last night with a preheated oven and preheated pan, as you all suggested...and they were faaaaaaabulous! When I opened the oven after the requisite time, I thought they'd been overtaken by some alien life-force: they were absolutely exploding out of the muffin tin wells! Puffy and crispy on the outside, doughy and custardy inside. Mmmmm! Thanks for your helpful posts, all!

Hmmm. I'm confused. Fannie Farmer explicitly says, "Forget what you've heard elsewhere; a cold oven is the secret to good popovers." I paraphrase, but that's the gist. And my mother swears by the cold-oven popovers she and her sister used to make (but unfortunately she can't find the recipe!).

I made popovers for the first time last night, and they didn't turn out quite as I thought they would. Hmmm. I used the classic Fannie Farmer recipe, but I halved it because there were only two of us eating. I baked them in a sprayed muffin tin, using every other well, winding up with a total of six popovers. Started with a cold oven. When I pulled them from the oven after the requisite time, they had only risen to about the level of the top rim of the muffin tin--basically, they'd hardly risen at all. They were nice and crispy on the outside, and on the underside, there was a little indentation, as if the batter had started to rise from underneath. The flavor and texture were delicious , but they were tiiiiiiiiny! About two inches tall at the highest point. My questions: what did I do wrong? Could halving the recipe have messed things up? Could it be my oven? I have already noted that my oven calibration is a little off (electric oven in an apartment), and I usually remedy this by keeping an oven thermometer in the oven and tweaking the settings when it is preheating until I get the temperature I want. In this case, since I was starting from a cold oven, I couldn't tweak the oven to the correct temperature. Hmmmm. Any ideas?

I don't think anyone has mentioned Jeffrey Steingarten. LOVE Jeffrey Steingarten. Now there's a man who is *driven* by food.

On a visit to Boston a couple of years ago, I experienced *meat-toast,* as I now think of it. The night before I'd had an unusually large amount of beer (for me, that is), so I was feeling a little off-kilter in the morning. I wanted a good, solid, simple breakfast, so my cousin (who I was visiting) and I headed out to one of her favorite spots. I ordered two eggs over-easy with some "grilled sourdough toast," as the menu appealingly called it. When the server set my toast down on the table, I noticed an oddly meaty smell (think hamburgers, clouds of smoke over the barbeque) but ignored it...that is, until I took a bite. The toast tasted like a hunk of grilled meat, but with the familiar crispy, airy texture of toast. Meat-toast. It was like licking the oily-drippy underside of a grill (if my imagination is on target), which is probably not far from what I was actually doing by eating the stuff. [shudder.]

Sunday night's dinner, after a weekend tucked away in a house in a tiny town, far from the cares of our normal life: Carrot-ginger soup Green salad with lemon-tahini dressing Fresh mozzarella drizzled with EVOO and sprinkled with fleur de sel and pepper, with Tall Grass Bakery baguette and soon...fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies! I just pulled them out, and they smell sooo good...

White beans cooked with fresh rosemary and sage, pureed with some of their cooking water and some minced garlic, and then drizzled with EVOO and balsamic Green beans and yellow wax beans with argan oil Pain au levain from our local (Seattle) Tall Grass Bakery And for dessert: fresh apricot clafoutis (from the new Joy, with creme fraiche substituted for half of the milk) I feel very right now.

Tonight we're having some friends to dinner, and here's the plan: Tomato and Corn Salad with Basil: sliced heirloom tomatoes scattered with fresh white corn cut from the cob and roughly chopped basil, with a simple vinaigrette (from Janet Fletcher's excellent Fresh From the Farmers' Market). A little sliced baguette to go along. Mark Bittman's Pasta with Parmesan and Mint (now famous on eGullet)--I'm using linguine and spearmint Chocolate Mousse (adapted from la Maison du Chocolat, from Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets) Someone, please keep me away from the mousse until dessert time...

Terrific thread! I have a couple of unfortunate dinners of my own to share: About three years ago, I had a summer job at prepared-foods counter of a fancy grocery store which shall go unnamed here. We had many customers who came in every night to grab something for dinner, and one of them was a friendly, early-30s-ish man. We'd often chat--totally benign stuff. He worked for some small record label and was in training to be a masseur. He once invited me to his home for dinner, and for some reason I can no longer remember nor justify, I accepted. He was a nice guy, after all. He lived in a sparse but beautifully-done rustic house up in the hills. As soon as I arrived, he showed me around and then proceeded to set to work on dinner, which he told me he'd picked up at the farmers' market that morning. As I stood and watched, he took no less than 15 minutes to arrange six different kinds of sprouts ( ) on a plate for me, carefully tucking little orange cherry tomatoes here and there, along with a few chunks of avocado. He then gave the whole plate a hearty drizzle of olive oil and handed it to me. He threw together a 30-second version of the same for himself, and we sat down to eat at a tatami table in his living room. Now, this meal *might* have been alright if it had been followed by something juicy, creamy, starchy, fill-the-belly-y, or maybe even just a big ole chunk of bread for me to maul. But that was it: sprouts. After dinner, he played some Chinese string instrument for me (he'd lived and studied in China and Japan after college) as my stomach rumbled, and then I politely left and went home to eat a massive peanut butter and raspberry preserves sandwich. Another unfortunate meal was at the home of a friend of my boyfriend's. The two of us were living in different states at the time, and I had come to visit him for the weekend. This friend of his, a very nice "Mountain Mama" type of girl, offered to cook us dinner and suggested an acorn squash curry. Mmmm, acorn squash curry! But when we arrived and sat down to eat, the highly-anticipated curry turned out to be a room-temperature mixture of unsalted, near-raw bitter vegetables with a little chalky curry folded in, served over room-temperature brown rice. She offered us a bottle of avocado oil from the fridge, if we wanted to drizzle it over the top. I grabbed onto the salt shaker for dear life, ate about half of the raw mass, and got a terrific stomachache.

I enthusiastically second "badthings" on Zuni and Delfina. Mmmmm. If you do wind up at Zuni, order the Gateau Victoire for dessert--deep, dark chocolate goodness. As for Delfina, don't pass up the little octopus starter with white beans and great EVOO, along with the incredible profiteroles with coffee ice cream. I no longer live in the Bay Area, but I *pine* for these things to this day. Hope they're still on the menu!

Yes.

In response to FoodMan: It was absolutely delicious! My only wish, though, is that there had been more tomatoes. My three pounds of plum tomatoes--by the time I'd halved, seeded, roasted, and peeled them--shrunk down to form only one real layer on the tart, plus a few extra to fill in little gaps. I'd hoped there would be at least two layers of tomatoes (and that is what the recipe suggested), if for no reason other than to make it *look* more substantial! I think I'll just start with more tomatoes next time...I figure it can't hurt to just roast more and pile 'em on. Did you have this problem, or did my tomatoes just shrink more than usual? They were still plenty moist and juicy with tomato flavor. I just wanted a more substantial tart, you know? Hmmmm.

Oven-roasted tomato tart (from recent Food and Wine) Leeks vinaigrette Baguette ...And dessert: dark chocolate wedged into a chunk of baguette, popped in the oven for a few minutes until melty

Yippeeeee! Another L'As du Fallafel fan! I too heard about it from a friend who said it was a "great falafel place," and ohhh, yes indeed. When I was living there and my boyfriend came to visit, we ate there four times in two weeks--a lot, considering that we were cooking at home most of the time! He too is a fan of the "Fallafel Speciale," with its chunks of fried eggplant. We now live in Seattle, and despite my research on falafel in the Puget Sound area (and willingness to drive for it), I've never found anything that even comes CLOSE to L'As. Those little crispy balls of fallafel, two kinds of cabbage slaw, tomato/cuke salad, hummus, tahini sauce... Sniffle, sniffle. I miss it. By the way, if you're back in the neighborhood of L'As, check out the Jewish pastries and such at Sacha Finkelsztayn, the yellow-front boutique across the street from it. I used to love their "Gateau Reine de Saba"--a fairly thin, moist, crackly-topped chocolate cake--and the Sacher torte is sometimes nice too, albeit unorthodox and lighter than usual. Very popular spot. AND...if you're seeking a fabulous boulangerie, check out Au Levain du Marais on rue de Turenne, just north of the intersection with rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Great baguettes and baguettes de campagne, sandwiches, pain au chocolate (warm from the oven at 4pm, in time for the schoolkids' snack), mousse au chocolat in a cookie cup, chausson aux pommes, and more.

In response to Margaret Pilgrim: I did wonder about that as I wrote my post...but the spirit of generosity overcame me! Plus, Le Repaire is already well-known among food lovers in Paris, and I often read write-ups about it both before and after I ate there myself. Fortunately, I always got in when I wanted to, and it was never teeming with tourists--so let's keep our fingers crossed it stays that way! It'll be the, um, E-Gullet secret--just between ALL of us!