The Kitchn Archive: Jan 2010

I told you the other day that I have been completely craving lemon, and that I had a lemon tart in my sights. But first I went back to the basics: Lemon bars. And not just any lemon bars. Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Ultimate Lemon Butter Bars.Beranbaum says that she developed this recipe to address two problems that lemon bars are prone to: A topping that is not firm enough, and a base that is too soggy.

In honor of eating a bit lighter this month we’ve made effort to scale back when it comes to sugar and fat. This recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery in London is packed with all the taste with far less guilt than a standard cheesecake brings you. Plus it tastes like sunshine on a plate and who wouldn’t want that?This recipe is a treat to make and a treat to eat, plus there’s no worry about cracking tops and water baths.

We have a serious, serious thing for sweet potato fries. Does a restaurant dish include the words “sweet potato fri…”? Say no more. You don’t even have to finish the final word. We’re there. So these baked sweet potato fries from Annie’s Eats look exactly right — slightly healthier, and with a great tip for getting a truly crispy outside.We love this simple, easy recipe for sweet potato fries.

Super Bowl season is a time of snacks of all sorts — sweet, salty and delicious! These Kitchen Sink Bars cover all sorts of flavors and whip up in a snap. They’re great for cleaning out the pantry, plus you don’t even need your oven!

Julia Child’s 1960’s classic Boeuf Bourguignon has enjoyed a huge comeback thanks to the hit film Julie & Julia. But there are hundred’s of recipes in Julia Child’s repertoire. Which one is your favorite? Mine is pictured above, a delicious chocolate and almond cake called Reine be Saba (or Queen of Sheba). Read on for the recipe and let us know your favorites from JC!

Nabe (cooking pot) mono (things, stuff) is a popular Japanese hot pot dish commonly served in the cold winter months. It is cooked table side and served communally. One thing I like about nabemono (in addition to its deliciousness!) is its versatility. There are so many different ingredients to choose from! During the cooking process, the broth becomes more flavorful. At the end, after all the ingredients are eaten, rice and egg are added to the seasoned broth and a porridge is made.

It’s wintertime — so, why is ice cream on the table? Well, so many winter desserts just beg for ice cream. Apple cobbler, warm pumpkin pie, dark chocolate cake. So I was really happy to find this extra-quick ice cream recipe that is nearly as simple as making whipped cream.Most ice cream recipes call for at least a small amount of cooking. Plain milk, frozen into ice cream, gets unpleasantly icy, and it needs cornstarch or egg yolks to turn it into smooth, creamy custard.

Soon after Elizabeth mentioned them, we spotted cara cara oranges at our local grocery. We ate a few for afternoon snacks, but then our thoughts quickly turned to dessert. Wouldn’t this sweet citrus make a great jam curd? Why, yes it would!We’d hoped the curd would end up as pink as the fruit, but alas, it seems the pink color comes from the flesh of the orange and not the juice. All the same, we love the sunny orange hue that we did get!

I thought Gwyneth Paltrow’s recipe for roast chicken with potatoes from her website GOOP looked interesting, so I decided to test it in my own kitchen. The verdict? It’s quite good, actually. Just the kind of recipe to have on hand for when you want a casual but delicious meal in less than an hour. Read on for more details.The recipe calls for the chicken to be partially deboned and roasted with lemon, fresh herbs, garlic, and a tumble of peeled and blanched potatoes.

When I traveled in Japan last winter, one of my favorite dishes was matsutake dobin mushi. Matsutakes are wonderfully fragrant pine mushrooms, and dobin (“teapot”) mushi (“steamed”) is a soup steamed in a small teapot. Put these two words together, and you have matsutake dobin mushi, a nourishing mushroom soup.Each teapot holds an individual serving of soup.

The sun is finally shining again in our corner of the world, but there’s still a thick blanket of snow on the ground. So we turned to one of our favorite books, Little House in the Big Woods, and made a snow treatWe always loved the descriptions of making maple syrup and the subsequent maple taffy sessions in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. (More about those scenes here.) So we finally decided to give it a try!It’s very easy to make maple syrup taffy.

We’re a little embarrassed to write about this coffee cake today. Not because it wasn’t good – because it was. Crazy good, in fact! No, we’re sheepish about how quickly we absolutely devoured the entire loafIn our defense, there were four of us doing the devouring and we were absolutely starving by the time it was finally shaped, baked, and cooled. Plus it was just really, extremely, ridiculously good.

One element of Japanese cuisine is that it celebrates the seasons. Japanese dishes feature what is fresh and seasonal, and are cooked in such a way that is appropriate for the seasonal weather. During the winter, hearty soups such as oden are commonly found, as are hot pot meals such as sukiyaki.Sukiyaki is a type of one-pot dish that is cooked table side in a shallow cast-iron pot. Traditionally, it contains beef, but some parts of Japan use pork.

When Emma write her post on Slow-Cooker Lemon Garlic Chicken a few years ago, I started drooling immediately. Unfortunately, I don’t have a slow cooker, but I took a look at the ingredient list and hacked my own recipe together using a baking dish and the oven!

We have been thinking a lot about muffins this week; we often neglect to make muffins, and we wonder why! They are quick, easy, and simple to clean up. They are great little snacks during the day, and they are awesome for grab-and-go breakfasts too. So we were really pleased when reader Elise sent us this tip about a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin recipe.Elise says: I found this delicious recipe for Pumpkin Bread/Muffins at thefreshloaf.com that I wanted to share! They have such a great texture.

Even though eating light can often mean eating less or more healthy foods — it can also be nice to cook with less “stuff.” We do a great deal of baking and quite often, we just don’t feel like pulling out the mixer and washing all the attachments when we’re done. Which is why we like this quick, customizable no mixer cake recipe!This recipe can be made in 1 bowl, without a mixer. It can be poured into 2, 9″ rounds, a half sheet pan or even cupcakes.

OK, you guys really have to try this. I was at the Alemany Farmer’s Market recently and Jerusalem artichokes (also known as sunchokes) are in season. I’ve never tried this sunflower tuber, and I always enjoy trying new vegetables, so I grabbed a couple. They were quite cheap at 50 cents a pound. Once I had them in my kitchen, I decided I wanted to roast them, so I sliced them thin, added salt, olive oil, and fresh rosemary, and wow, welcome to flavor country!

We mentioned yesterday that we’re slightly obsessed with Brussels sprouts This dish was totally inspired by the warm salad of Brussels sprouts leaves with fried capers and hazelnuts at Contigo, a great Spanish and Catalan restaurant in San Francisco. We had a very memorable meal there a few weeks ago, but it was this dish that took the top prize. Fresh, warm, and interesting.