We’re taking a slight detour with this month’s Soggy Bottoms. Instead of one recipe, we’re sharing the ones that have worked well for us recently!
Sarah: I’ve been trying to include one new recipe a week in our menu plans, along with extremely delicious family favorites, so let me share an old favorite, a new favorite, and a dessert.
Cashew Chicken, from The Bitten Word via Martha Stewart Everyday
I make this once a month, though once the chicken and sauce are done, I add a handful of snow peas or sugar snap peas at the very end to warm them a little. It’s easy and delicious every time.
Last week we made this: Yotam Ottolenghi’s Polenta with Tomatoes
It made a LOT, and it was fiddly and delicious.
But that’s meals, and Soggy Bottoms is about baking. Can’t neglect the baking! Last weekend we made Stella Parks’ Chocolate Chip Skillet Cookie.
A few notes: first, I didn’t have malt powder, but I substituted buttermilk powder and it was just fine. We also used a mix of dark chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and chopped up milk chocolate Hershey’s Kisses, because that’s what we had. It worked great because the chips left big pockets of chocolate and the tiny pieces of the Hershey’s Kisses melted into the batter. The top of the cookie got a little darker than we would have liked, so I might cover it with foil if it’s browning too much, but the texture of the rest of it was outstanding. We ate the hell out of that cookie. If we make it again, and I can find malt powder, we’ll try the recipe as written.
Lara: When it comes to baking, there is one woman I trust: Alexa Johnston. She wrote a series of recipe books in which I have not found a single recipe that disappoints. I can whole-heartedly recommend these recipes as simple, easy to make and utterly delicious.
Lemon bars: Tart, sweet and more-ish
About the only thing Easter-related that I engage in… these delicious Easter Biscuits.
If you’ve not entered the world of cream cheese pastry, these Apricot Crescents will be a revelation.
Claudia: During this pandemic I got two email “chains” from close friends who are not habitual email-chain followers or initiators, and interestingly enough one was for poetry and the other for new dishes to cook!
I’ve been making our own cultured butter for a while, and have built quite a stash in the freezer during the pandemic because initially butter was hard to get in our area but cream was plentiful. The recipe with detailed instructions is here.
I am also fully on the bread-baking bandwagon, and have kept a sourdough starter with some degree of success. My favorite websites for all things sourdough are King Arthur Flour and The Perfect Loaf. I’m trying to keep a smaller starter to cut down on the discard that it generates, and trying new recipes to use up that discard.
There are a ton of recipes out there, but I came up with a use I hadn’t seen before — as part of a fish-fry batter. It was delish and made it slightly puffy and light without any additional leavening. For about two pounds of fish, you need about a cup of batter. Use about ½ cup of sourdough discard, add ½ cup of flour, and enough beer (you don’t need much, drink the rest!) to make a pancake-y batter, not too thick, not too runny, and you are in business. I don’t mind deep frying in the house but one of my tricks to contain splatters is to cover anything in the vicinity with newspaper, kitchen floor included, to make cleaning a little easier.
I have added Serious Eats Chicken and Rice to my repertoire and it has been a hit that reminds me of New York City. By the way, I love Serious Eats and it’s a trove of reliable recipes. You can make this one as written and it will be amazing but on days that I am pressed for time I make it all in my Instant Pot by browning the chicken first then adding the rice and cooking them together, and it’s still amazing. I’ve also added snow peas, sugar snap peas, or cut-up green beans to make it a truly one-pot meal.
Other than that, I’m on even more of a mission to conserve food and to come up with novel ways to repackage our leftovers, and a recent hit was baked ziti with yesterday’s meatloaf. Super easy and fast: break down the meatloaf leftovers in a pan with a bit of olive oil, add marinara sauce, let the flavors meld for a bit. It could work as a simple meat sauce for any kind of pasta, too, but I had some mozzarella cheese left over from sourdough-discard pizza night and it was one big circle!
Finally, I was recently thumbing through a 1944 edition of The Settlement Cookbook owned by a relative who has died a long time ago, and we are doing a little sentimental project baking the most splattered recipe on a held-together-by-scotch-tape page in that book, walnut kipfels (yeast cookies, it looks like). It feels like a connection we need through these times.
Shana: Sadly, I am not a stress baker so my baking output has plummeted in the last month.
One of my go-to favorites is this step-by-step explanation of how to make croissants. They’re perfect for pandemic times because you do a little rolling, and then get to go lie down for a few hours in between steps. The recipe is at the bottom of the page.
On the other end of the time spectrum, I love these quick Flourless peanut butter cookies. We made these last weekend and they’re one of my family’s favorites. If you’re having trouble finding flour, these are gluten-free, delicious, and very forgiving if little hands make them larger or smaller than what the recipe calls for. I actually prefer extra wide cookies! They call for turbinado, or raw sugar sprinkled on top but if you don’t have it, it’s fine with regular granulated sugar or no extra sugar. Emeril’s version adds chocolate chips.
But honestly some days all I can manage is a microwave mug cake. On those days I turn to this recipe. It’s egg-free, which makes the measurements easier. The cake is fluffy, but densely chocolatey. And it only uses two spoons and a cup, for less dishwashing!
Amanda: I feel like I don’t have a ton to contribute, because I’ve been making a lot of big crockpot meals that give me a lot of leftovers that can be frozen. They’re nothing special.
I also had the craving for homemade pasta sauce and meatballs, which I made one Monday afternoon. So worth it! But you know how it goes with family recipes; everything is super secret.
However, I have one recipe that is fantastic and uses mostly pantry staples!
I saw this recipe for a Chocolate Stout Brownie Bread retweeted by my local craft beer store. It uses basic baking ingredients with some stout. I have a beer fridge and love dark beers, so I always have a stout on hand. I used a milk stout for this one, though I suppose you can go wild with other flavors. I had a cannoli stout in my beer fridge but I didn’t want to sacrifice it.
The only change I made was the dark chocolate chips for what we had on hand, which was butterscotch chips.
The “bread” isn’t too sweet and I’ve been having it for breakfast after warming it up in the microwave. I’m somewhat tempted to use it for French toast once it starts going a little stale, if it even lasts that long.
Tara: One of my coworkers said she’s doing a cleanse right now because she’s not leaving the house, so she’s not as tempted to cheat. More power to her, because that’s not me lately. However, I did at least commit to eating more vegetables. Pan frying them with some shrimp and noodles is the easiest way for a quick lunch between meetings, but I started getting bored of having them with oyster sauce all the time. Thank goodness Sneezy came to the rescue! She told me to make a sauce with some peanut butter (even better if it’s crunchy), lime juice and soy sauce. It’s super simple, but sooooo good. Sometimes I throw in some curry powder or cilantro if I want to change it up a little.
In terms of baking, this has long been a go-to recipe and I make it every time we have some bananas go bad (which is all the time, because we have good intentions and bad follow through). I literally took a photo out of my friend’s cookbook, which she’s clearly been using for years and years.
I also highly recommend this chocolate chip cookie. I stumbled across it more than a decade ago and it’s a huge hit with friends and family.
Catherine: So I’m a bit of a manic baker who is constitutionally incapable of following a recipe without changing it, and working from home is making me very sad because I can’t do a proper baking frenzy when I have no scientists to feed my goodies to. And I got a Magimix for my birthday, so right now I’m excited about yeasted buns and things, though I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered them yet, especially as my yeast is suspiciously slow-working just now and probably mostly dead. (But there is no yeast on the supermarket shelves…)
Anyway. Since I don’t follow recipes at all well, I have a food blog where I record what I actually did do, just in case I want to repeat it sometime. And I am gratuitously sharing recipes from there.
I love this lemon, ricotta and raspberry cake, because it takes about five minutes to assemble (no creaming of anything!), and then another five minutes to make the syrup, and the oven does the rest. I was making this about once a week for a while there.
I have a lot of vegan friends, and I don’t see why they should miss out on yummy food, so I’ve come up with a lot of vegan cakes over the last few years. But the one I make again and again is this chocolate coconut and raspberry cupcake, because it’s again super fast and easy to make, and so good that the omnivores will try to steal it.
I have about a thousand gluten-free biscuit recipes which are all variations on the theme of 200g almond meal (or other finely ground nut meal, or even sub in some coconut or cocoa powder), 1 egg, 50g sugar, and flavourings of your choice, roll into balls, put on a tray, and bake for 15 minutes at 165°C. My favourite is the one with strawberry gum, but that’s hard to get even in Australia. I’m also very fond of doing a sort of jam thumbprint version of this biscuit, with half almond and half pistachio, and apricot jam in the middle. Add a very tiny amount of orange flower water too, if you like. I’ll usually make several batches of these with whatever random nuts I have in the house and do different flavours – hazelnut and chocolate, walnut and cinnamon, almond and coconut macaroons with glacé cherries, whatever, until I run out of nuts.
…and now you see why I need a food blog, because I could keep going and going and going and going with this end never come to an end…
Ooh, actually, randomly, and perhaps everyone in the US knows this already, but just in case you didn’t, did you know you can just put a whole turkey into a slow cooker with a little water and herbs and a halved lemon and onion or two, and maybe some butter and garlic under its skin, and ignore it for 10 hours or so, and it comes out all delicious and tender and surprisingly moist and you have the whole oven free for your very important roast potatoes and other goodies like for example gratuitous cake baking? This is the best thing I have ever learned. You do need a large slow cooker, though. And a small turkey. And if you want crispy skin, this is not your recipe.
What have you been cooking and/or baking during this time? What recipes are your go-to favorites?
I use Alton Brown’s flourless peanut butter cookie recipe. It’s similar to the recipe Shana linked above (except half white sugar/half brown, add a pinch of salt). The dough is a dubious greasy-looking mess, but they do bake into real cookies and the Intense! Peanut Butter! Flavor! is what I’ve always wanted from a PB cookie.
I put the KAF marble pound cake under strawberries and whipped cream, and when I ran out of those, the remainder of the cake was AMAZING under ice cream and homemade hot fudge. It’s not an especially moist cake, so sponging up melted ice cream was its destiny.
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/old-fashioned-marble-cake-recipe
I made pitas for the first time. I got a proper pocket puff on only 3 of 8. While I was fine with that (oh noes, 5 delicious flatbreads to make mini pizzas with, what a tragedy), I hesitate to point to the recipe as one that “worked.” I wondered if the difference between flat and puff might be the perfect pan temperature—hot enough to steam, not hot enough to immediately set the thin dough all the way through—but it wasn’t a big enough batch to conduct experiments.
Now I have an intense craving for biscuits (the American kind), so off to make an all-carb breakfast.
Apparently like every other person in quarantine, I’ve been making massive quantities of banana-nut bread. I don’t know where my original recipe came from because it’s jotted down on a very old, very stained piece of notebook paper, but it uses lots of butter & eggs, along with walnuts. I also add some diced, dried apricots and the zest of a lemon to the batter. I made two loaves Tuesday and there’s part of one loaf left today.
For the first time since our kids were young (they’re all young adults, and all living back at home right now), we are planning our menus in advance and figuring out what we’re going to cook and what we’ll do with leftovers. Advance planning means we only have to go to the grocery store once a week, which help with social distancing. I made pulled-pork carnitas over the weekend and they were a big hit (I always use an extra chipotle in adobo sauce than the recipe calls for). Whenever I make rice, I make twice as much as we need for the meal we’re having and we’ll refrigerate the rest and use it with stir-fry the next night. I’ve also made what my kids used the call “The World’s Best Lasagne” (the secret is fresh crushed fennel seeds and lots of cracked black pepper). My husband is the grill-meister and also has a Big Green Egg which we use for “low and slow” cooking like beef brisket, pork butt, or ribs.
Another thing I’ve been making is lots of soups with whatever vegetables are available. I made a potato-broccoli-cheddar soup that served ya for dinner and lunch the next day. Also, Asparagus has been insanely cheap for the past few weeks, so we’ve been buying lots of it and making cream of asparagus soup. I sauté the asparagus in a big pot with olive oil, onions, garlic, and spices, then simmer in vegetable stock until everything is soft enough to buzz with an immersion blender. If we’re eating it right away, I stir in some heavy cream; if not, I pour the soup into containers to freeze for later use (adding the cream when thawed, heated, and ready to serve). We eat soup with crusty bread (mostly from the store because I can’t find yeast anywhere) or grilled cheese sandwiches.
TL;DR: I love to cook and I love to eat. It’ll be a miracle if I’m not pushing three bills by the time the quarantine is over! Sigh.
Bon Appetit has really been coming through for us on the food front- both of these recipes taste fancy but are incredibly tolerant of substitutions and not terribly fussy to make, making them perfect for these times of challenging grocery shopping (and they’re vegetarian so you don’t even have to worry about finding meat):
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/white-bean-and-spring-vegetable-stew
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/brothy-pasta-with-chickpeas
The comments on the spring vegetable stew are worth reading for the entertainment value alone, lots of freeform substituting going on.
I have been baking things I have never tried before. My favourites have been No Knead Bread (https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread) which is the easiest bread I have ever made and only uses 1/4 tsp of yeast and tastes wonderful, and Martin’s Bagels (https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/martins-bagels-recipe) which is also easy but just has a lot of steps.
@DiscoDollyDeb, we have also been doing lots of planning, which is new to us as well. It is fun to talk about what we are going to make, and trying to make use of all of the leftovers. As a happy side-effect it is also saving us money. I sort of knew planning would be cost-effective, but never really did a lot of it. Now I am, and it is a good thing.
Thankfully I haven’t gained weight, even though all I seem to do is think about food. I gave up eating lunch last year and I am down about 30 pounds. I have a lot more to lose, so I am glad my new baking zeal is not resulting in additional pounds. I am not really losing right now, but I am not gaining either, so I mark that as a win.
I hope everyone stays safe and is well. We will get through this.
I love Company’s Coming! (Tara’s banana muffin recipe – the pages are very distinctive, excellent branding) My mom still has at least 10 of those cookbooks.
My favourite muffin recipe is also adapted from a Company’s Coming book and it’s very versatile (and forgiving for substitutions or if you, like me, tend to eyeball your measurements): https://www.food.com/recipe/six-week-bran-muffins-196713
You can replace the bran flakes and bran buds with all bran, natural bran, or even rolled oats. I also like to replace the butter with canola oil (so I don’t have to cream in the sugar) and use whole wheat flour. Instead of raisins you can use whatever fruit, nuts, etc you have on hand. Favourite combos of mine include dried cherries and dark chocolate, dried apricot and walnut, frozen blueberries and chia seeds, and of course classic raisins or craisins. (The muffins aren’t very sweet so it helps to use a fairly sweet fruit.)
This recipe makes four dozen muffins, but you can easily halve or quarter the recipe. BUT – the batter lasts for a few weeks in the fridge as long as it doesn’t have fresh fruit in it so I like to whip up a bunch of plain batter and then whenever I feel like muffins pull some out, add whatever I have, and bake a half dozen. That way I can have freshly baked muffins even when I don’t feel like putting in any effort 😀
Regarding the preponderance of banana and banana nut bread: yesterday I was catching up with a friend from our old neighborhood in NJ while baking a loaf of banana bread (with dark chocolate. Alas, I am not a fan of nuts in bread though I know many folks are). Mid-conversation she texts me a picture of what she’s doing: making banana nut waffles. Similar batter, only in the waffle iron. So both our houses smelled terrific all day.
We’re trying a new one for chicken marsala this weekend, and making pasta, too. I had too many left over eggs after Passover, so we ordered a pasta machine from eBay and tried making our own pasta with all those eggs. DELICIOUS SUCCESS.
I love hearing what you’re making and what recipes are working for you!
I made this recipe last week, and it was the best thing I made in months. It also jump-started me wanting to cook something other than breads or sweets again: https://www.thekitchn.com/lentil-soup-recipe-23004361
The other post I saw that has been a source of inspiration was this one from Epicuious which is for a 10 day meal plan – but I love that it offers a ton of substitutions if you don’t want to do it as a meal plan but more of a use up your pantry plan: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/cooking-through-it-10-day-meal-plan-article
It also was good for breaking me out of my rut of food that I don’t want to make anymore. Sometimes coming up with ideas is half the battle.
I’m nannying again part time while waiting to see what’s going to happen with potential teaching jobs/schools and the youngest I take care of LOVES baking and the oldest is starting fractions in math so scaling bread recipes up and down has been happening a lot.
We’ve made a couple different focaccia recipes as it’s one of my favorites and the kids love picking the herbs from their garden. https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/golden-focaccia-recipe
The King Arthur Flour recipe was more what I’m used to with focaccia, but we infused the olive oil with fresh sage, mixed chopped up fresh sage in the dough, and used some dried sage as the topping with the infused olive oil. Stretched it super thin, baked up to about 3/4″ thick, this has been the youngest’s favorite bread so far. Also made this focaccia https://korenainthekitchen.com/2013/02/06/the-ultimate-focaccia/ pretty much as written but with a bunch of herbs in the dough, then used 8″ round cake pans for baking so it ended up being 2″ thick. This was oldest’s favorite bread we’ve made so far, she loved both the rosemary and olive variation and the one with just loads of herbs. We made Semlor (https://food52.com/recipes/40698-swedish-semlor) and discovered the kids don’t like cardamom but will eat anything with enough whipped cream, pan dulce with extra cinnamon (kids loved), and pan dulce https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/88907/conchas-mexican-sweet-bread/print/?servings=12 (oldest devoured, youngest thought it needed frosting or whipped cream to really count as a sweet bread). Youngest (6 years old) also described a bread she had and wanted to make and it sounded like ciabatta so we used this recipe https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/rustic-italian-ciabatta-recipe
and it wasn’t what she wanted, but she did enjoy dipping it in infused olive oil.
We’ve also been trying to make foods mentioned in the books we read if it’s something the girls haven’t had before so now they’ve had puttanesca (youngest loved that it was a pretty color like tomato sauce but did not taste like tomato sauce and therefore was delicious, oldest felt tricked bc it looked like tomato sauce but did not taste like normal tomato sauce and decided she wouldn’t ask for it again but would eat it if that was all that was available), horseradish (both hated), and coconut cream cake (making our way through Series of Unfortunate Events). I’ve been keeping an eye out for flour and buying a bag whenever I see it available, but we’re low on sugar so trying to keep making more bread recipes than sweets. Youngest would prefer to bake every day, but we don’t always have time.
I think we’re making bagels and pretzels today, and I’m going to start a sourdough starter today so I can use some of the discard with them on Monday (if I’ve got my timing right). The girls’ new nanny that took over when I left to do student teaching/subbing is done with finals and starting summer school so I’ll be working even less (3 days a week instead of 4) and will have more time to bake at home too. I’m looking forward to incorporating more sundried tomatoes in my breads!
I had taken a sourdough baking class at a local bakery (Seawolf) last fall and they send you home with a proofing basket and portion of starter. I’d kept the starter going and baked a loaf every couple of weeks until March. I’ve been baking at least a couple loaves a week and they are looking pretty good now!
And pizza. I’ve made *so much* pizza lately. Sometimes with sourdough starter castoff, sometimes naan pizza using this naan dough recipe that I came across years ago https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/14565/naan/
This red lentil soup recipe I’ve used as a base and pretty much just tossed in other things like butternut squash, sweet potatoes, acorn squash instead of or in addition to cauliflower. It is always a little different, always easy & comforting. https://food52.com/recipes/7020-red-lentil-and-cauliflower-soup
I usually only make pie around the fall/winter holidays but… so there’s been a lot of pie baking… bourbon chocolate pecan pie (I use a mishmash of recipes I’ve been working on for awhile), rhubarb pie straight from the late 70s edition of Betty Crocker I learned to cook from growing up… Oh! But for a 2-crust pie crust I add a beaten egg & a tbsp of white vinegar which makes it so much easier to handle…
Thanks everyone for sharing recipes!
We’ve had a lot of cold weather so I’ve been making soups also using what I found in the freezer and pantry. I had some dried beans sitting there for a while and a chunk of ham with the bone I’d frozen and forgotten. Ah, yummy smells issued from the kitchen and filled the house along with the cornbread muffins. So satisfying.
I’ve been doing a lot of freezing what I make, since I’m cooking for one. At the moment, I have a bunch of beef stew (from here https://www.recipetineats.com/beef-stew/) and ricotta stuffed shells in the freezer
On the baking end of things, this soda bread recipe (https://www.recipetineats.com/no-yeast-bread-irish-soda-bread/) has turned out pretty well for me, I really like this recipe for potato scones (https://www.thespruceeats.com/scottish-tattie-scones-recipe-434996), and these cookies are very tasty (http://kjcharleswriter.com/2017/02/24/pollys-ginger-biscuits/).
The link to the mug cake goes to Emeril’s cookie recipe. Can you fix? Easy recipes are much more my speed.
@MaryK: Fixed!
@Tara, shout out to Company’s Coming Muffins & More!!
Yes, I can recognize a Company’s Coming cookbook just by the font. And yes, I know immediately that my personal favourite banana muffin recipe is actually on the opposite page.
My go to recipe lately has been the Bon Appetit foccacia: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/focaccia-bread
I started the pandemic with quite a few of things, like a loaf of banana bread, in my freezer, so the need to bake has been low.
I have staged a couple of moderately successful episodes of Chopped in my kitchen so as to avoid the grocery store or adapt when the grocery store could not supply. Most successful would be the polenta lasagna wherein I substituted slices of polenta for the noodles and blended cottage cheese with some mozzarella and parmesan to replace the ricotta.
Also in the freezer were balls of the Cranberry Chocolate chip cookies from Rose Levy Berenbaum’s Christmas Cookies. They are my go to cookie. I make a double batch with fresh cranberries, which makes a softer, cakey cookie, at the holidays and then freeze half the dough for later. If I crave them at other times of year I have found that dried cranberries or cherries make a crisper, more traditional and equally yummy chocolate chip cookie.
Last week I used all the white chocolate chips in the house (really surprising how much I had. I think I had big plans for the holidays that never got fulfilled)to make peppermint bark and fruit & nut bark. Melt the chips in a double boiler, add one cup of crushed peppermint hard candies per bag and spread out on a cookie sheet or melt the chips, spread on a cookie sheet and sprinkle with chopped nuts and dried fruit. I like pistachio and dried cherries best, but this time I had a bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit which was almost as tasty. Fast, easy and makes so much I sent packages off to the goddaughters in Ohio & North Carolina. I cannot take in all those calories on my own.
Blueberries are all over the place here, and irresistible, so I will be making the blueberry muffins from The Clinton Street Bakery tomorrow as the weather will be crappy and it’s my float day from the office. They are perfection in a paper cup.
Thank you for this fun post and comments thread! I have been baking, though I don’t consider myself “jumping on the bandwagon” as I have made almost all of my bread for many years now (and I’m thankful that I had a just-opened jar of yeast when all this began, and I was able to score a 10kg bag of flour early on in the pandemic. Though when I was at the grocery store today for my every-two-weeks shop, I noticed that they had some flour again, and some jars of yeast.)
Above and beyond my regular bread-making, I’ve been working on perfecting my English muffins (one more recipe tweak and I think that they will be perfect). Next up I want to work on bagels…
@Ren Benton – I get pretty consistent pita bread (with pockets) using this recipe:
https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/pita-51121470
(I usually make a quarter batch for 3-4 good-sized pitas so that I eat them while they are still very very fresh. And I didn’t have a pizza stone until last week, so they work well on a regular baking sheet.)
As a treat, I currently have cinnamon buns in my freezer, but I also have 2 black bananas lying around, getting ready to be turned into muffins.
No sourdough yet for me, though I’ve been reading lots around starters so may try again soon (last time I tried – ?7 years ago? – the starter went mouldy on me rather than fermenting).
I can talk about what I’ve been cooking for days. I made Yotam Ottolenghi’s cauliflower cake, and it was delicious! Savory, not sweet. It’s a bit like a crustless quiche, but firmer, and more stuffed with veggies. If you don’t have the fussier ingredients, like fresh basil and nigella seeds, it’s perfectly fine to skip them.
Lots of muffines-the last two batches I made were pumpkin muffins(substituting winter squash pulp) and carrot-applesauce muffins.
I bake quite a bit anyway, so I had a lot of bulk yeast and bulk flours in the house, from my last trip to an Amish grocery store, but now I’ve had time to experiment with them. I used the teff flour for breakfast pancakes, excellent. It has a slightly sweet nutty flavor, not as strong as buckwheat.
I was at a Middle Eastern grocery yesterday, and stocked up on various lentils. I like to make a Lebanese soup with lentils, cracked wheat and spinach, you add a little lemon juice at the end which really makes the flavor pop.
And I just made my family cheesecake recipe, which is very light and fluffy, not the dense New York style cheesecake. What does the trick is you beat the egg whites separately,
But my new go-to is no-knead foccacia. I got the recipe from the Washington Post, but you can find a similar one by Googling. The great thing about this is, you don’t have to think about making bread the day before you actually want to eat it, like with the no-knead bread. It only has to rise a couple of hours, so you can decide in the middle of the afternoon that you want fresh bread with dinner.
@SBSarah, the cheesecake and cauliflower cake are great ways to use up eggs. As is flan.
Because I had a jar of rum-soaking raisins and dried cherries in the fridge -who doesn’t- I added them to my chewy fudge brownie recipe; cause I like chocolate covered raisins. And oh my gosh I ate the pan empty! The alcohol taste completely bakes away, so no worries for anyone under 21. Just use a high quality chocolate, it is so worth the extra cost.
I wonder if the Bitchery could help me with something. I had a copy of a magazine from the 80s; I think it was either Family Circle or Woman’s Day, though it might have been Good Housekeeping. It had an outstanding article on muffins that could be baked in 3 different sized muffin pans. Many of the recipes included variations. I best remember a fruit muffin with a streusel topping that I made with apple & spice. There was also a corn muffin recipe with bacon & whole kernel corn. Most of the recipes used buttermilk or sour cream. They were really dependable and delicious.
Sadly, some years back when the spouse was in the hospital, the children helpfully cleaned out Dad’s man cave where the magazine was housed and the magazine I’d saved for 20+ years vanished. I only bring this up because I’ve been trying to Google this since the Pan-dammit started with no luck. Any suggestions for tracking this down would be deeply appreciated. Such is my faith in the power of the Bitchery.
…drooling….
I have baked cookies, and cakes, and cookies, and biscuits, and cornbread, and cookies, and cakes.
I’m cooking all the time, too. Because the kids won’t stop eating! lol
Hey, I’d love to check out Catherine’s recommended chocolate coconut and raspberry cupcake recipe, but the link in this post actually leads to a different cake (the lemon & ricotta cake mentioned earlier in the paragraph).
Hey, I’d love to check out Catherine’s recommended vegan chocolate coconut and raspberry cupcake recipe, but the link in this post actually leads to a different cake (the lemon & ricotta cake mentioned earlier in the paragraph).
(But whoops, sorry for the double-post!)
@Stephanie: No worries, Stephanie! Should be fixed now. There were a lot of links to transfer over from our shared doc!
Lara, I saved the recipe for those Lemon Bars and made them this morning. They are amazingly delicious and very very “more-ish” as my husband says! Thanks for the recommendation. These are definitely going into my baking rotation.
@Catherine Made your ricotta cake with lemon & blueberries (didn’t have any raspberries). Just as easy and delicious as you said. Definitely a keeper!