Starting in December

Have I introduced you to Dorie Greenspan? I wax on and on about the Barefoot Contessa and she’s great and all, but Dorie. Oh, Dorie.  Easy to love, she is an absolutely captivating cookbook author and baker that has earned my fondness with consistently reliable and smile inducing recipes.  Dorie worked with Julia Child to write Baking with Julia and has also composed her own collection of cookbooks featuring sweets and desserts. Printed on the spine of her latest cookbooks is a miniature version of her head shot and her warm grin seems to smiles confidently back at you like a kitchen fairy godmother.  Following Dorie’s recipes reminds me of talking to a good friend showing you how to cook — the head notes of her recipes convey her wit and humor and the instructions include carefully placed details to assure the home cook that they are on track.

Home for Dorie is in three cities — a town in Connecticut, New York and Paris.  Paris is the home to Bistro Paul Bert, a local dining establishment Dorie likes to frequent when visiting her Parisian apartment.  In typical Dorie fashion, her charm won over the chef and he divulged both his recipe and technique for this simply prepared steak and cream sauce.  Perfectly pink, this peppery steak cooked to a textbook medium-rare using Dorie’s exacting specifications and directions.  By reducing some cream and scraping up the tasty bits of fond from the bottom of the frying pan with a splash of brandy, I was able to create a luscious yet uncomplicated pan sauce that only made the beef tenderloin more decadent.

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Ah, beets.  Jewels of the soil.  Pulled right out of the ground beets are ugly little tubers, but once they are cooked and their skins are removed a vibrant and glossy interior is revealed.  I have a soft spot for beets and unlike most of my peers I don’t shrink away from them when they pop up on a restaurant  menu.

That is exactly how I found this five ingredient recipe (hey, salt does not count) — by sneaking a ruby red cube off my mother’s plate at our favorite Spanish restaurant in Sacramento.  Until that moment I had not spent much time thinking about beets, they just seemed like a vegetable I would form an opinion about at some point in the future.  But that one bite of my mom’s beet speed things up.  I was first transfixed by their bright color and shiny exterior but kept coming back for more because of their sweet and subtly earthy flavor.

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This time of year, in order to starve off frozen fingers and frozen toes I drink my body weight in coffee, tea and hot chocolate.  By the time I nighttime rolls around, I am pretty sick of hot beverages and want something entirely different to warm my bones.  This may explain why I prefer hot soups in the summer, but that’s a different story.  I lust after spring vegetables all winter long, but equally important are flavors bright enough to grab my attention, pucker my lips and say, “Ooh!  What is that?”  Yet another roasted root vegetable is simply not going to cut it.

Assorted, half-filled bags of rice fill the pantry shelves — castoffs from recipes tested and swiftly forgotten.  And yet the rice bags remain, waiting to be cooked and fluffed into something edible.  Plain rice, whatever the variety, mounded next to a serving of meat and vegetables seems incredibly ho-hum. (Although, if Ryan had his way this is exactly how we would eat rice everyday.  We would also drown each grain in soy sauce but the snob in me has to draw the line somewhere.)  Despite the depressing weather and the lackluster availability of produce I am determined not to let anything ho-hum come out of my home kitchen and rice was one of the first ingredients I wanted to tackle.

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Yet again, that darn Ina Garten has captivated my attention.  Sure, I made and wrote about her espresso ice cream less than 24 hours ago (oh yes, there was soup too) but when recipes turn out well it seems a crime not to share them.  Such was the case with these herbed ricotta bruschetta.  Ina’s recipes have yet to fail me.  And I have tried a lot of her recipes.  Her husband Jeffrey is a lucky man.

Still riding high after my first homemade cheese experiment, making ricotta seemed like the next logical step.  In hindsight, I should have started here because homemade ricotta involves nothing fancy — just some milk, cream, vinegar and cheesecloth.  (Vegetarian rennet?  I am still trying to figure that one out.)  To make the ricotta, boil the milk and cream together to get rid of any undesirable wrongdoers lurking in the liquid, then add some vinegar to encourage the dairy to separate into curds and whey.  It’s not a particularly pretty process, but half an hour later you have a bowl of ricotta staring back at you.  Sure, you could substitute the homemade cheese for some from the store but you would miss out on the fun of a chemistry experiment in your own kitchen.  Homemade ricotta tastes luscious — even if you prefer to let your ricotta drain longer for a drier cheese, it still has a creaminess lacking in the tub variety.

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Have you noticed that chocolate covered espresso beans had fallen out of fashion? Neither had I. Not one to closely follow food trends, I got a little confused yesterday when I visited three different stores (one supermarket and two coffee shops) to try and find these shiny, brown little candies. Granted, it had been the better part of two decades since I had bitten into one of them, but what should that matter? I haven’t eaten a single twinkie in the same period of time and I still see them at the register every time I fill up my car with gas. Am I this out of touch?

I was on a mission to make The Barefoot Contessa’s espresso ice cream, a creamy pale brown mound of goodness she made for her husband Jeffrey during an early episode. If the ice cream made Jeffrey happy, then chances were good it would also make me so. After store number two I flirted with the idea of substituting chocolate chips — I even bought a bag at the supermarket — but trudged on because Ina said so.  When that woman talks, I listen.

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