deensiebat

Thinning the garden led to my favorite greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts spring dish: shrimp with green garlic: Just green garlic, fish sauce, curry powder and shrimp, but it tastes like much more.

Blether, I love your on-board marmalade! A friend of mine owns a pizza cart, and sometimes bakes flatbreads out of leftover dough at the end of the night. I topped one with a mashed-up hard-poached egg, dried mint, smoked paprika, and a sprinkling of salt:

Lousy picture, but lovely dinner: asparagus pizza

More spring celebration with a rhubarb custard tart: I par-baked the crust, but I think I might like it better without.

After putting up a few dozen jars of strawberry jam, a friend taught us how to make pannukakku, a Finnish oven-baked pancake. Went together beautifully.

I made a batch of potato knishes using Pam Reiss' excellent egullet tutorial. So good!

I filtered and finished a batch of rhubarb liqueur that had been steeping for a few weeks. Definitely needs to age for a while, but I couldn't resist taking a sip.

RWood: Gorgeous! Emmalish: I had the same reaction when I finally tried the World Peace Cookies a few months back. I needed a last-minute Passover dessert Satuday, and made the Payard flourless chocolate walnut cookies:

took me a minute to figure out that last photo -- looks like it'll be a fun seder. i paused to take a picture of pretty carrots that went into smoked whitefish gefilte fish. The gefilte fish turned out well, but far less photogenic.

I think we're doing pretty much a repeat of last year's menu: matzoh ball soup smoked whitefish/sole gefilte fish with horseradish mayo potato tagine swiss chard with roasted carrots Last year I made matzoh crack and macarons for dessert, but this year I delegated and we've got a flourless chocolate torte, kosher-for-passover noodle kugel, and macaroons coming.

Another entry in the "if it has an egg on top, it must be breakfast" category: leftover Middle Eastern-style rice pilaf and stewed okra, topped with a poached egg.

Reviving this topic to show the (attempted) fractal-like precision of my Ordered Pear Pi. Well, more accurately a pear frangipane tart, but that doesn't sound nearly as dorktastic. Happy Pi Day!

I took my first stab at royal icing on a batch of sugar cookies -- part of a congratulatory care package for a pregnant friend. My technique could use some refinement, but they were good enough for free, and ridiculously fun to make.

Ha! I actually make my ruggelach with a sour cream dough, but the basic tenet holds -- sneak in more butterfat than you thought possible, along with some sort of other tangy dairy, deal with the fuss of a soft and sticky dough, and be rewarded with tender, flaky deliciousness. So glad these worked out for you!

Success! I removed the egg, upped the flour, and seriously overlapped the sides before baking. Recipe here. Filled with plum-rosemary and apricot jam from last summer. Only 2 out of 16 de-triangulated themselves in the oven.

Despite my best efforts of chilling the dough, overlapping the sides, sealing the corners with egg wash, and freezing the shaped cookies, all of my hamantaschen unfurled into something closer to open-faced jam tarts. This was the most triangular of the bunch: Oops! Dough had 1 stick butter, 4 oz cream cheese, an egg yolk, and 1 1/3 cup flour. More flour? Any other suggestions? Totally rich and delicious, but kinda misses the 3 points.

Cauliflower curry with braised tomatoes, adapted from Lord Krishna's Cuisine. Nice and tangy, suiting the unseasonably springlike weather we've been having.

The ugly side of this recipe: I've been making tons of no-knead bread, using a cast iron Dutch oven with a clear glass pyrex lid. Unfortunately, any stray drops or films of oil on the lid (of which there have been many) have baked to a pretty unappealing dark brown, and are totally impossible to remove. Any advice? Other than resorting to oven cleaner?

If you click on the cookie name in my post, it'll take you to the recipe rundown on my blog (in all its rice/sorghum/xantham gum glory). Hopefully your GF friend will enjoy! They're pretty dreamy.

After some spectacular baking failures over the weekend, I managed to come up with delicious gluten-free World Peace Cookies (aka Korova Cookies). I used Dorie's amazing recipe as a template, but subbed in a bunch of different gluten-free flours (some of them appropriately sandy), then added egg yolks to bind and hard-boiled egg yolks for fat-without-structural-issues. So nice to be able to share their chocolatey-salty goodness with my gluten-intolerant friend.

I finally got a good recipe for fudgey vegan brownies:

I just discovered kale chips for a healthy snack. Well, healthy-ish.

It's sugar -- I hadn't even thought about the salt option, although I suppose it's in line with the salted licorice of Scanidinavia. We keep joking about the appropriate garnish, since sprigs of lingonberries aren't available. A sprig of dill? Skewer of herring?

Holiday time brought the return of the Scandopolitan: Basically just a Cosmo, but with aquavit and lingonberry juice. And infinitely more fun to say.

We were invited to a New Year's Eve party that has, for reasons that are still unclear to me, a Dutch theme. Any recommendations on particularly good Dutch party snacks we can make?