corned beef, cabbage, & twitter

- corned beef, cabbage, & twitter
  
  Mar 18th
  
  Interesting graph of the twitter trends relating to corned beef vs. cabbage for the last week:
  
  I have no idea why there could have been a divergent spike in cabbage tweets on Sunday and Wednesday nights. Any ideas?
- happy thanksgiving!
  
  Nov 15th
  I’ve just returned to the world of food blogging after a couple of months off. Anyway, I’m back just in time for Thanksgiving, the #1 eater’s holiday of the year. For starters, I’ll link to some of my past Turkey Day recipes:
  As I looked over this list, I realized that I have never shared my recipes for stuffing or gravy — and those are my favorite parts of Thanksgiving! I totally agree with Mario Batali when he says that the stuffing and the gravy “represent the most personal components of the meal.”
  
  My family eats my mother’s stuffing. Period. Anything else is fine the other 364 days of the year, but on Thanksgiving it’s apples, onions, and celery sauteed with a bunch of butter, tossed with Pepperidge Farms plain stuffing mix and moistened with just enough turkey broth (made from the neck of the one who will end up on our plates) to bring it all together. That’s it.
  
  The gravy is simple as well — 1 TB each of butter and flour for every cup of turkey broth that ends up in the bottom of the roasting pan, cooked together to make a roux and then whisked into the defatted broth (plus any remaining broth from the neck and other turkey parts). Maybe a little black pepper. It’s simple, but it’s ours. Anything different just isn’t Thanksgiving.
  
  So here’s to your Thanksgiving traditions — may your turkey be juicy!
- 36 hours for cookies?
  
  Jul 21st
  About two weeks ago, the New York Times Food Section published a story about one author’s quest for chocolate chip cookie nirvana. In it, David Leite interviews several cookie pros in and around the Big Apple to identify some tips that could help home bakers find The Way with cookies:
  1. Rest your dough. Leite recommends at least 24 hours but mentions that 36 are even better.
  2. Under-bake your cookies. The key to a chewy cookie is to make sure it isn’t cooked all the way through.
  3. Don’t be afraid of salt. Coarse salt in and on the cookies makes flavors “pop.”
  4. Make ‘em big. Larger cookies can provide for cascading textures from crispy on the edge to chewy/gooey in the center, provided you pay attention to Tip #2.
  Intrigued, I made a batch of these and waited. And waited. And waited. 36. Long. Hours.
  
  Finally, I popped the dough balls into the oven, six at a time (they’re big, don’t forget). When they emerged from the oven, they were as advertised — golden all over, rich, buttery, and with that variegated texture that Leite promised. My only substitution was for Ghirardelli semi-sweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips rather than Valrhona chocolate “feves” (which are flatter), mainly because that’s what I had on hand. I don’t think the cookies suffered, but I’m willing to give the feves a try one of these days.
  
  Was the 36-hour wait worth it? Yes and no. The cookies were wonderful, but certainly not spontaneous. I think they were more uniformly golden than my usual batch of chocolate chip cookies, but the texture bit really stems from under-baking (I should really call this “properly baking” your cookies, as they aren’t raw, just less done than the typical home baker makes them). The biggest selling point of this recipe, to me at least, is that you can make the dough and bake off a cookie or two at a whim, up to 3 days later according to the article (but probably as long as a week later if you wanted).
- [recipe review] simple, crusty bread from the NY Times
  
  Nov 27th
  
  I got a chance to make Jeff Hertzberg’s simple bread recipe from his book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day that was shared on the NY Times website. It is billed as being even quicker than Jim Lahey’s “No-Knead” recipe that appeared in the NY Times about a year ago and it lives up to that billing — you can follow this recipe and have a decent loaf of bread in about 3 hours.
  
  But that’s just it — the bread is only passable. I can make very good sandwich bread in three hours. This, however, is supposed to be “artisan” bread. It isn’t artisan bread by any stretch of the imagination.
  
  When I think of artisan bread, I imagine a slightly sour, very crusty, open-holed bread with wonderfully chewy insides. This bread is more related to white sandwich bread in texture — maybe slightly chewier due to the wetness of the dough. The flavor was almost too “y

corned beef, cabbage, & twitter

happy thanksgiving!

36 hours for cookies?

[recipe review] simple, crusty bread from the NY Times