Sugar Cookies for the Holidays

Here's a little bit of a Christmas throwback for ya: a glimpse into Piper's and my delightful little Christmas cookie decorating party. There is an undeniable, indescribable pleasure about cutting little adorable shapes out of cookie dough. I say, why limit the fun to Christmas? Maybe for Valentine's Day this year friends could get together for a bit of good-natured platonic-love cookie decorating. Add some red wine, An Affair to Remember...What could be better?

Arugula Ravioli With Balsamic Tomato Sauce

Right now I think we all should just take a moment and tip our hats to the brilliant individual who decided that stuffing delicious pasta with delicious things and topping it off with a delicious sauce would be a good idea. Making your own ravioli is a time-consuming, delicate affair but the rewards you reap cannot be overestimated; I am of the personal opinion that homemade pasta simply tastes better, which may have something to do with the sweet personal satisfaction of having created everything from scratch.

Toffee Crunch Bars

As Piper so eloquently put it, these cookies are a "taste adventure." Don't be fooled by their rather uninspiring looks. These pack a wallop of flavors--there's espresso, almond, chocolate and more than their fair share of delicious rich buttery goodness. There's no actual toffee in the cookie, but something about the interplay of the coffee and the almond...ahh. I had originally made these for dessert, and kept noticing the way my family members kept casually nipping through the kitchen to grab another cookie.

Roasted Spring Vegetable Tart

Oh, this tart. It was going to do great things. I'm very sorry to say that despite my best intentions, this take on a spring veggie tart was very pretty to look at and assemble, not so impressive in the whole, you know, eating department. I figured, hey...we'll start out with a balsamic onion jam...layer some creamy tangy cheese in there...toss some oven roasted veggies on top and BAM! Unfortunately, it came out a little more like...meh.

But the crust was good! The recipe for that is below.

Pink Peppercorn Macarons with Strawberry-Orange Jam

As promised, Hallie and I got together to stress bake again and some wonderful, wacky and delicious things resulted from our efforts. When it comes to Hallie's and my baking relationship, she's definitely the mad genius who's like, "I know! WE'LL MAKE A STEAK TARTARE LINZER TORTE! They'll never expect it!" and I'm the one who provides a lot of encouragement, writes down lists of the ideas she spews, occasionally buys fruit and sometimes pours the sugar into the mixer when her elbow's broken. Which it is right now.

Chicken Tikka Masala

Chicken Tikka Masala is one of the best inventions of all time. Honestly, I'm not sure if there's anything more comforting than a big bowl of spicy chicken in creamy tomato sauce. Thank you, cuisine of India. You have done so much good in the world and for this happy little tummy of mine.

Molasses Spice Cookies

Sometimes, especially after a long series of mishaps, it's pretty wonderful when something, anything just happens to go right. It's been a tough couple of weeks, what with finals looming and two months having gone by since I've seen my boyfriend and then some bug or allergen or something decided to give me big ol' itchy spots ("Boy, this is piquing my appetite," I hear you mutter.) I'd also been tinkering around with new recipes and after a failed tart and a couple failed batches of cookies, things weren't looking (or feeling) too great. Until today. Like I should have known from the start, all's well that ends with molasses, brown butter, brown sugar and spices.

Lavender Cheesecake Squares

Finally! I've been waiting to make this tasty little variation on one of my favorite cheesecake bars for some time now. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing about creamy, tangy cheese and zesty lemon that a little hint of lavender can't just tip over the edge into full-on deliciousness. The sweet, floral notes of the lavender perfectly compliment everything that's going on in this little bar--it's nice enough for an after dinner sweet and simple enough for a little decadent bright spot after breakfast on a rainy spring day. Not that I'd know anything about eating cheesecake for breakfast. Not me. 

Bay Scallop Pasta with Fennel and Orange

Once upon a time, I made a recipe for scallops with a tarragon sauce. While potentially delicious in theory, it called for so much tarragon that when all was said and done I felt like I'd just eaten fourteen pounds of licorice, followed by a scallop. Not good. So I've been a little wary of tarragon ever since. This has lessened somewhat as I've grown fond of the flavor potential of fennel and star anise (the duck leg in star anise broth at Portland's Aviary was a pretty transcendental food experience), so this pretty, light spring-y pasta dish is a little leap forward for me. And what a delicious, rewarding step it is!

Black Pepper Tofu

Okay, guys. Little Bunny Tofu (for an explanation of this bizarre analogy, please see here) has survived at the zero hour. This tofu was pretty transcendent, largely because you could barely taste any tofu at all. All the spices and comforting warmth of the shallots and green onions got in a marimba-conga line together and just sashayed their way around the pan and into my tummy. This dish is bursting with flavor and heat and is exactly what you need on a cold, rainy, thunderstorm-y night.

Mini Triple Berry Pies

Don't let the cute faces fool you. These little mini pies were a bit of a beast to make (admittedly, because at the same time I was making Hot Cross Buns and Cherry Brown Butter Bars). Again, it was my own fault--I was going to make a nice, perfectly easy, perfectly respectable pie but then I darted out of the kitchen with an insane grin on my face and announced to Piper that I was going to make the pies TINY and put LATTICE TOPS over ALL OF THEM! Then Piper had to come crack my back because I had been latticing tiny pie tops for two hours.

But these are cute. And their lattices are tiny. And they did taste good.

Garlic Noodle Bowl

You know the song about Little Bunny Foo Foo? Hoppin' through the forest, abusing field mice, etc.? That's sort of how my relationship with tofu has gone. Not so much eating it, but cooking with it. I like the idea of it but after a disastrous attempt at Black Pepper Tofu (hopefully to be vindicated later this week) and now this, I feel like it gets one more chance and then I'm-a float down like that good fairy and turn it into a goon. Little Bunny Tofu.

Side note for those who are interested in the Black Pepper Tofu incident: I couldn't get the top of the tofu box open so I resorted in stabbing it repeatedly like that one scene from Psycho and then the too-soft tofu started oozing out and all over me and the kitchen and I gamely persisted in trying to coat the goo with cornstarch before I got some on my foot and then called my sister to pick up some shrimp.

Cherry Brown Butter Bars

Guys. I made these things and they are sort of a big deal.

I'm definitely in the "it's always better with browned butter" camp. I was converted after having a bake-off with my brown-butter brownies (which are going to have to be put up here pretty soon) against my mother's traditional brownie recipe. The judges said it was a draw, but I'm pretty sure they only said that because you don't anger the person who's just made you a bunch of brownies. Anyway, I'd been ogling these little beauties over at Smitten for a good long while when my good friend Katrina invited me to her family's Easter barbecue. And then, since I couldn't decide whether to make hot cross buns, mini tarts or these bars, I made them all. Because why not? Someone's gotta support the butter industry.

Fig, Olive Oil and Sea Salt Challah

This may be the most beautiful bread I've ever baked.

I'd written off challah for a long time because it looked a bit too complicated, but today I finally made the leap, and boy am I proud. My desire to overcome my challah fear was spurred on by two factors. One the fact that Peter got me The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for Christmas and this recipe particularly stood out in all its sweet, salty glory (plus, there were really cool-looking weaving instructions!) The other is that as of late my sister and her architecture cohort has become obsessed with challah. The third fact, which I'm going to sort of nest as a subheading under facts one and two, is the amount of immensely rewarding "Holla!" jokes you can invent before/during/after making it.*

Palak Daal

For no particular reason at all (all right, maybe because of my slightly insane cooking marathon) I had a sudden urge to try out a few more healthy and wholesome recipes this week. And while beige-tinted bowls of flaxseed quinoa bran--hey, it is probably a thing somewhere on the internet--leave me cold, I've found consistently that the way to go when you want wholesome, vegetarian and preferably not pasta...you gotta go Indian.

The Classics: Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookie

I know, I know. How many oatmeal raisin cookies does the internet need? Well, dear reader, think of this not as another oatmeal raisin cookie, but as the oatmeal raisin cookie. While I'm as willing to dive into cocoa nibs and almond extract as the next adventurous baker, sometimes you really don't need to reinvent the wheel. These little beauties have served me well my entire life and I'd be hard-pressed to find a new recipe I like enough to replace them. And who knows? Maybe you don't have your own oatmeal raisin cookie recipe yet. If that's the case, start right here.

Rustic Rhubarb Tarts

Part of me has been impatiently tapping its feet waiting for spring to arrive and the rhubarb to start rolling back in to the grocery store so that I could try the beautifully rustic tarts featured on the cover of Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. While I haven't yet been able to get the cookbook for myself, I've often found myself pulling it down off the shelf at Powell's and gazing longingly at the stunning cover. Finally, BA announced that rhubarb was back in season so I eagerly began the hunt--it took three grocery stores (and some bug-eyed looks from a few HEB employees) to find some fresh rhubarb, but boy was it worth it.

Cooking Marathon, Day Three

Day three of the cooking marathon ended things with a bang--and a burn. Compared to Days 2 and 1 this was fairly easy to execute (Mom made our traditional Sunday breakfast, so I was off the hook for that one). We ate dinner at around three and overall I was happy with everything...until the crumble.

Cooking Marathon: Day Two

 

Well, I did it. The key word here today, folks, was rustic. Rugelach sticking to the counter because the dough had warmed up too much so the little pastries were kinda torn in places and not remotely even? Rustic. Gnocchi ruining your life and sticking to the finger to the point where you're trying to fling them off your hands and into the pot and they finally blop in after losing all semblance of traditional round gnocchi shape and kinda now resemble little pellets with angry poky areas? Rustic. More importantly, did everything taste good? Why, yes. Yes it did.

Bailey's Feelings-Fueled, Ill-Advised Cooking Marathon: Day One

 I will be the first to admit that I may have gone a wee bit overboard this time. These recipes were taken during Spring Break which, if you'll remember, was the week in which my sister was off larking about major geological formations and I was alternating between bouts of compulsive Poirot watching, tea chugging, people-eschewing and double cake baking. So when my parents invited me home for the weekend I immediately decided that it would be a SUPER good idea to plan out basically the culinary equivalent of a marathon--creating menus of never-before-tried dishes to trot out for the parents. The fun part was that each day I'd make breakfast, lunch, dinner and a dessert. ("Fun?" I hear you ask. "I bake my feelings and then give them to people," I reply. You probably don't make any further comment because you're picturing someone eating my feelings.)