In college, about a decade ago, I briefly toyed with the idea of being a French major. I had studied the language for about 7 years and had romantic but vague ideas about moving to Europe and working there. Very vague ideas. Something to do with foreign relations/ journalism/translation/nannying…or really, anything. In reality, I just really wanted to move to Paris and was looking for a way to live there legitimately.
That, of course, never happened. I ended up majoring in art history, working at a book store for a year after graduation, then moving to New York for culinary school. Though I never ended up living in France, I did become very familiar with classical French cooking.
As a culinary school grad, I’ve made countless things from scratch, both sweet and savory. But one thing I had never tried my hand at before was cheese-making. It had always seemed pretty elusive, and books on the subject tend to be filled with diagrams straight out of a high-school chemistry book (not my best subject back in the day.) But I do likeeating cheese. So when the opportunity came to take and review a mozzarella-making class through CourseHorse, a start-up for finding and booking classes all around New York, I was pretty excited.
The class was held at Murray’s Cheese, where I’ve dropped a sizable chunk of change over the years. But the class was the first time I visited the classroom upstairs (it’s pretty spacious with a window that looks over the shop). The tasting portion was already set up when we walked in, with a slate board of various mozzarellas and a glass each of sparkling and red wine behind it.
Everyone has a favorite blueberry muffin recipe. This is mine. It's funny. As a fan of sturdy breakfast foods, I'm usually partial to bigger, denser muffins that are more reminiscent of scones. But for blueberry muffins I always come back to this one. Soft and pillowy, it's almost cupcake-like, the opposite of what I usually look for in a muffins. But I guess I'm just partial to the nostalgia behind them.
For those of you not from the Boston area, Jordan Marsh was a department store that sat right smack in the middle of the city's downtown from just after WWII to the 1990s. On ordinary weekends, it was filled with city and suburban moms dragging their kids (including yours truly) through the sale racks. I don't think there was a single weekend when I wasn't there with my mom or aunt, browsing through a maze of women's sweaters and blouses and scarves.
But even then there was something refined about it. Jordan Marsh was from the era of older department stores, when they still wrapped your purchases in pretty white boxes emblazoned with the store's name in a thin elegant font. Yeah, I played with those boxes at home, little 6-year-old me pretending I was a refined lady out on the town shopping for refined things. And later used them to store my Barbie clothes.
You know how everyone has a few dishes in their repertoire that they have made the same way for as long as they can remember? Those dishes that you learned once, thought they tasted pretty good, and so you never wavered from the familiar way you were taught?
For me one of those dishes in potato salad. That old summertime picnic and barbecue standby. Since high school or college, I’ve made it in the exact same manner, tossing boiled potatoes with a mayo and dill dressing, maybe accented with a bit of lemon juice. Classic, comfortable, but not terribly mind-blowing, like that black sheath dress you wear to the office.
Well, I think I’ve found the smoking hot, slinky red dress equivalent of the potato salad. And it involves thickly cut bacon and tangy barbecue sauce.
When it comes to breakfast, I'm a creature of habit. Well, for a short period of time, anyway. I go through periods in which I would eat the same thing every single morning for 3 to 4 months: oatmeal with dried cranberries, toast with raspberry preserves, almond croissants, Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds, Barbara's Puffins. And then move on to the next thing for 3 to 4 months.
My most recent breakfast habit has consisted of combining vanilla yogurt with granola from the Park Slope Co-op. I've tried a lot of their granolas from the bulk bins, mostly settling a very minimalist one with lightly crispy oat clusters and dried blueberries. But then I started seeing a whole bunch of homemade granola recipes on Pinterest. (My fellow food bloggers are very inspiring!) So I decided to try my hand at making granola from scratch.
Recently a branch of People's Pops opened in Park Slope. Pretty much everywhere I walk, I see kids and adults alike happily slurping fruity popsicles as they walk down the street. With the recent heat wave, it has become a strong test of willpower to not stop in when I walk by, which is practically everyday.
I've eaten my fair share of People's Pops this summer, but realized I could easily go broke having as many a day as I'd like. And so I've recently started making a bunch of popsicles at home with yogurt and fresh summer fruit. Plus, a walk to the freezer takes much less time.
July is the time of year when I go in for my yearly physical. This year, the results came back fine and dandy as usual, except for one tiny thing — I have a slight iron deficiency. Of course, that's very minor in the spectrum of problems a doctor can phone you about, but it's also a little crushing to not get the same "everything looks great! keep doing what you're doing!" remark from years past.
"Eat more lean red meat," I was told. "Or more dark leafy greens."
It's great to have a legitimate excuse to go find out and find a nice juicy steak or burger, stat! But really, I definitely would not be able to keep doing that every day to meet my iron requirement. This is where the kale comes in.
How can you tell you've found the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe? I guess one logical answer is if you stop trying other chocolate chip cookie recipes. Another answer, I've discovered, is if you crave the cookies so much you would bake them in the middle of a heat wave.
I should probably also mention that my apartment doesn't have central AC. Last week, when it was about 95 degrees during the day for 3 days straight, I had to blast my rickety old air conditioner for 2 hours before my studio cooled down. But it was worth it just to be able to turn the oven on for an hour to bake these chewy, delicious cookies.