browniebaker

Two slices of a deep dark fruitcake I baked last November. A big 10" round cake. One-half remains and should last me until the coming winter holidays. The cake just keeps getting better with age.

Two we always have in the fridge: Ken's Caesar Ken's Peppercorn Ranch

When I like a food, I can eat it for weeks and weeks, and I used to do so when I was single but cannot do so anymore because my husband and children will not tolerate it. The foods that I have gladly eaten every day for two weeks or more, dating mostly from my days as a singleton too busy to cook any serious meals for one: pimiento-cheese sandwich; peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich; oatmeal; raisin-bran cereal with milk, which served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner during crunch times at work, for weeks and weeks; a pork-and-Chinese-broccoli stir-fry dish that I used to take out from a Chinese restaurant on the way home from work at 9 p.m. and that was enough for dinner for two or three nights in a row. These days, the foods that I would happily eat every day if my family would go along with it are: macaroni and cheese; pimiento-cheese sandwich; pork spare ribs, either Memphis-dry-rub barbecue or Chinese sticky-sweet-and-savory; and fried chicken.

BEST: pork shoulder braising in a Chinese five-spice sauce cream-cheese-and-butter pie crust baking in the oven any spice cake, cookie, quickbread, or yeast bread baking in the oven (e.g. gingerbread, cinnamon rolls, carrot cake, molasses cookie, oatmeal-raisin cookie, apple muffins, fruitcake) the pizza stone being pre-heated in the oven (it smells so good, my children say, "it smells like pizza already!") WORST: the lingering smell after deep-frying fish, or deep-frying anything, really

Butter-mochi cake?? Oh do tell. It's taken me my whole lifetime to adore sweet bean soups. Red bean - I crave beyond reason. Ooh, one of my favorite cakes, and a favorite recipe. If you crave red bean and if you love glutinous-rice sweets like Japanese mochi, you will love the butter-mochi cake. It is the Asian idea of the red-bean mochi westernized by the addition of butter. To my butter-loving taste buds, it's even better than red-bean mochi. In fact, when my mother was given the recipe by an Asian women's group, the name of this cake was "French Rice Cake" (a name I just can't bring myself to use because I hate calling things French that are not French, and because "rice cake" has unfortunate connotations to me of something crunchy, dry, and dietetic). Anyway, I crave the buttery, chewy goodness of this cake laced with sweet red bean. A tip: the original recipe calls for the smooth red-bean paste that you typically find in cans in Chinese groceries, but I have also made the cake using the chunky red-bean paste that I find in Korean groceries and that is used on shaved ice, and the chunky red beans bring good textural contrast to the smooth rice cake. Another tip: try pan-frying a slice (as my mother is wont to do), for a nice crispy edge to a warm, chewy, gooey interior. BUTTER-MOCHI CAKE 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted 1-1/4 cups sugar 3 large eggs 3 cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 16-ounce box sweet (glutinous) rice flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 18-ounce can sweet red-bean paste Position oven-rack so that pan will be in center of oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9" x 13" rectangular pan. Mix together all ingredients except red-bean paste until smooth. Pour into pan. Drop red-bean paste by scant teaspoonfuls (no larger, to avoid sinking) into batter, distributing evenly. Bake for one hour and ten minutes. Remove from oven. Cool in pan to room temperature. Slice into squares or rectangles, and serve at room temperature, or slightly warmed after slicing. Freezes well. Enjoy!

May I add that when I go to dinner at someone's house and the dessert is just store-bought ice-cream with a store-bought cookie stuck in it, I feel a bit let down? Like it's not a proper dessert. That's when I have to whip up a cobbler or pudding as soon as I get home.

I love desserts and don't consider a meal complete without a dessert. By serving a dessert every evening, I almost feel I am upholding tradition. As I am the main cook at home, we have dessert every night, and I don't mean ice cream, which I will sometimes serve in a pinch but consider to be cheating since it requires no cooking or baking. I love to bake, and desserts give me a reason to bake. Our everday desserts are devil's food cake with chocolate frosting (just last night); pies, pies, pies (my personal favorite dessert) such as buttermilk, buttermilk-chess, blueberry, apple, pecan, sweet-potato, or pumpkin; peach cobbler; strawberry shortcake; chocolate brownies; peanut-butter brownies; butterscotchies; chocolate-chip cookies; oatmeal, oatmeal-chocolate-chip, or oatmeal-raisin cookies; hot-fudge pudding-cake; banana pudding; pineapple upside-down cake; spice cake, carrot cake, jam cake, or hummingbird cake with cream-cheese frosting; fruit crisps; Boston-cream pie; butter-mochi cake; Chinese sweet red-bean or mung-bean soup; tapioca pudding; rice pudding; chocolate or vanilla bread pudding; fruitcake; pound cake; and raw-apple cake. My two children have come to expect dessert every evening, and that's all right with me!

What I don't get (so sue me): southeast-Asian food: too much sweetness in dishes that I am accustomed to as savory; crabcakes: adulteration of a good thing; Alaskan crab: stringy and bland, when Dungeness and blue crab are so superior in flavor and texture; sashimi: just boring; alcohol in sweets: adulteration of a good thing; lobster: crab is so much better; any cheesecake other than plain: adulteration of a good thing; raw onions: they give me a headache; coffee: yuck barbecued beef brisket: pork barbecue is so superior; thin vinegary barbecue sauces: boring; and Korean food: unrelieved red-pepper spiciness.

Butter Mochi Cake Serves 12 as Dessert. If you love sweet red-bean paste and glutinous-rice sweets like Japanese mochi, you will love this cake. It is the red-bean mochi westernized by the addition of rich butter, eggs, milk, and vanilla and baked into a deliciously buttery, gooey, chewy cake laced with sweet red bean. 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted 1-1/4 cups sugar 3 large eggs 3 cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 16-ounce box sweet (glutinous) rice flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 18-ounce can sweet red-bean paste Position oven-rack so that pan will be in center of oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9" x 13" rectangular pan. Mix together all ingredients except red-bean paste until smooth. Pour into pan. Drop red-bean paste by scant teaspoonfuls (no larger, to avoid sinking) into batter, distributing evenly. Bake for one hour and ten minutes. Remove from oven. Cool in pan to room temperature. Slice into squares or rectangles, and serve at room temperature, or slightly warmed after slicing. Freezes well. This recipe calls for smooth red-bean paste, but you may substitute an equal amount of the chunky red-bean paste that is similarly available in cans and is commonly used on shaved ice. The chunky red beans bring a good textural contrast to the smooth rice cake. Also, try pan-frying a slice, for a deliciously crispy edge to a warm, chewy, gooey interior. Keywords: Dessert, Easy, Cake ( RG586 )

grated hard or semi-hard cheese, cream cheese, or cottage cheese mashed into a baked russet potato

This one has always baffled me. Every pizza dough recipe I've ever seen calls for olive oil, but my experience is that if anything, it adversely affects the texture. Is this one of those things that just gets thoughtlessly copied or does someone have a compelling reason for adding oil? I've seen a few recipes purporting to be authentically Neapolitan, and they do not call for any oil in the dough. I believe the recipe that America's Test Kitchen settled on after much experimentation (for thin-crust pizza) also uses no oil. I have tried both oil and no-oil in the dough and prefer no-oil: the crust is definitely crisper, cracklier without oil. The only time olive oil touches my dough is when I brush it on top before adding toppings; I feel it contributes to a good crisp exterior. I bake pizza about once a week, by popular demand. The kids wouldn't have it any other way.

Oh, come on, please share! I live in the D.C. area and would like to know.

But the fruit sinks... There are many pancake and batter recipes that do not need eggs: Very low fat pancakes or indian jalebi (sweet pancake spirals) or tempura batter (flour + fizzy water) or yeast-raised pancakes or chinese pancakes and wrappers or tortillas... These so-called pancakes without eggs -- now you're really reaching! I doubt that the Larousse definition of "clafoutis" that you originally cited uses the term "pancake" in a sense that includes all these eggless batters and wrappers that you now cite. Why not stop trying so hard to limit the definition of cobbler? Let's not begrudge people of various regions in the U.S. the privilege (perhaps the right?) of calling their concoctions "cobblers." Face it: there ARE regional variations of the American cobbler. Could we, in an expansive spirit, show some tolerance for, even celebrate, our regional differences?

For flavor, let the dough ferment in the refrigerator at least overnight and up to three days. The fermentation period also allows a chemical reaction to happen that makes the dough bake up into a more crackly, crispy, blistery crust. The other things I do are (1) use bread flour; (2) use a high ratio of water to flour for a wet, soft dough; (3) stretch out into a circle over the knuckles of my hands, then press out further on a cornmeal-dusted wooden peel with floured fingers; (4) preheat a pizza stone in the center of the oven to a temperature of 550 (the highest my oven reaches) for a period of 20 minutes, since the stone takes longer to heat up than does the air in the oven; and (4) slide the pizza off the peel onto a pizza stone and bake for 5 to 7 minutes until the bottom of the crust is well-browned and crisp -- lift the edge with a spatula to check.

Like clafoutis, toad-in-the-hole is made with an eggy batter, essentially the same batter as used for Yorkshire pudding. If you ask on what authority I base this assertion, I'll have to admit I lived in Oxford, England, for a while, am a great lover of English foods, and sometimes cook toad-in-the-hole as comfort food.

I might be one of Lobel's new regulars. I bought two eight-ounce Wagyu boneless rib steaks (net price: 93 cents each, as my husband and I each had a $50 credit). They were sheer bliss to eat: rich and unctuous with the well-marbled fat, extremely tender, and full of deep beefy flavor. After debating whether to cook in a cast-iron skillet on the stovetop or to grill over charcoal outdoors, my husband persuaded me that he would do right by these two babies if he grilled them. He left the house with my admonition to make sure the steaks ended up RARE. I cautioned him that these two were very thin (3/4" to 1" thick) and would not take very long on the grill. You'd have thought someone was taking custody of my actual babies, I was so worried. (My husband and I both prefer medium-rare, but we wanted to taste-test this meat under optimum conditions, and we thought rare would let the texture and flavors really come through.) Well, I neglected to tell my husband that he would have to under-shoot for rare, or he would end up with medium-rare -- I thought he knew! So we had the steaks medium-rare, and they were still superb. Both steaks were beautifully marbled, but one steak was very evenly marbled throughout, while the other had some huge pockets of fat here and there in addition to the thorough marbling. At the end of an excellent dinner, when I went to clear my husband's plate, there was a small pile of fatty chunks that he had cut off and was intending to throw away uneaten. Of course, I ate it! Excoriated him as well, for almost wasting this delicious, charred-at-the-edges, pearly-white fat. It's all good. So now I have this hankering to try some more Wagyu, in larger cuts and in other cuts as well -- and this time, I'll do the cooking.

What is your authority for that? The original Limousin dish may have been cherries in a flan custard (with or without a pastry base), but modern usage (e.g. Larousse 1984) defines it as "[fruit] arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a fairly thick pancake batter". No mention of eggs, and I submit fairly close to Larousse goes on to say " The Academie Francaise, who had defined clafoutis as a "sort of fruit flan" were faced with protests from the inhabitants of Limoges and changed their definition to "cake with black cherries". Never the less there are numerous variations using cherries or other fruits. The word comes from the provincial dialect word clafir (to fill)" Yorkshire puddings always have egg in the batter - that is what gives the rise. Maybe the pudding described would be even better with an eggy batter... My authority? Just my knowledge (that I acquired from living in France and that I have had so long, I don't know when or how I first acquired it) that the dish that the French call clafoutis is made with an egg-based batter. Even the definition that you cite defines clafoutis as a "flan"-like dish made with "pancake batter." Flans and pancakes are both typically made with eggs. The point is, not everything with a batter poured over it is a clafoutis.

No, its a Clafoutis. But maybe the original audience wold not be familiar with the french term, so called it by their closest equivalent. You can make them with cherries, apples or almost any fruit. Eggy batter works even better. I believe cobbler was originally biscuit dough in lumps on the top to resemble a cobbled street, but by extension means any fruit (or indeed savoury) pie where the topping is not in a continuous sheet. Good saoury cobblers are with the filling topped wih lumps of dumpling dough OMG! All of these years I have been making that recipe and now I find out I have been making a Clafoutis? I find that deeply disturbing. Not to worry. It's NOT a clafoutis, which requires egg in the batter.

No real recipe needed for this Southern treat. Just roll uncooked bacon strips in dark brown sugar on both sides until well-coated with as much sugar as will adhere. Place on foil-lined baking sheet and bake until crisp, maybe flipping once. See what works for you. I believe Jill Conner Brown's _Sweet Potato Queen's Big-Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner_ contains a good recipe for this.

a hot baked potato topped with cold, full-fat cottage cheese

Is this the "Tang uh-a ts'ai" you're referring to which is known as "tong ho choy" in Cantonese (Chrysanthemum Greens)? Yes, that's it! Wow, it's great to know the English name. Thanks so much for posting it. Mom never used garlic with it; I'll have to try it.

Two favorites: (1) K'ong shin ts'ai (in Mandarin), or ing ts'ai (in Taiwanese), or ong choy (in Cantonese). My mother still grows them in her garden, after all these years. She snaps each stem into sections so that each stem-section has a leaf, puts the entire bunch in a big pot of boiling water to blanch, and drains them in a colander. She puts in a mixing bowl a egg-size lump of lard that she skimmed off the top of the pot of red-braised pork, along with a little bit of the delicious braising sauce (which contains soy sauce, garlic, rice wine, dried shiitake mushroom, and black pepper); raw minced garlic, and salt and black pepper to taste. She tosses in the drained greens while they are still warm. When I was a child, my much-awaited treat was to stir, and pick out a strand for the first taste. Pungent, unctuous deliciousness! (2) Tang uh-a ts'ai (in Taiwanese; my own imperfect transliteration), which is translatable as "winter-oyster vegetable." Medium-green, with thin, elongated oval leaves, this delicate vegetable needs just a quick blanching. My mother cooks these vegetables very quickly in a clear soup of fish balls or in noodle soup. Winter-oyster does best in a simple, clear broth, in which its pleasantly bitter taste shines through. Oh, goodness, I am feeling an almost painful vegetable-longing!

or, rather, le Chateau Blanc, as the noun chateau is masculine and takes the masculine form of the adjective

oven-barbecued pork shoulder (eighteen hours at 200 degrees F, but no smoke) macaroni and cheese biscuits salad dining-hall peach cobbler (purposely made with canned peaches, to take me back to grade-school dining-hall!)

I finally achieved success in pie-crust pre-baking when I used ENOUGH ceramic pie weights -- a whole pie-plateful. The ceramic pie weights are sold in little packages, never enough to fill an entire pie-plate, so that the edges of my crust always slid downward. I finally went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought four more packages of Mrs. Anderson's pie weights (that's a brand name). No more slippage, and the pie crust is beautiful.