Author: christine

Am headed to Oak Park (the OP) tomorrow to see a friend for gabbing and baby holding. Physically incapable of showing up at someone’s house empty-handed, this afternoon I turned on the oven and made a cake. There’s nothing like baking on a really hot day.

This recipe came to me from Bon Appetit, which used to have a section featuring reader’s recipes. Reading the October issue in 1995, I was captivated by the preamble to a recipe from Karin Korvin in Santa Monica. Her family had hosted a foreign exchange student from France who could cook but one thing: chocolate cake. Like Elodie the student, at the time I only knew how to make one thing well, also a cake. Turns out hers is an easy but elegant chocolate cake I’ve now been making for years.

Of course I’ve made a few tweaks: namely, adding salt and vanilla. Note on ingredients: use good chocolate. I’m a fan of Belcolade, as mentioned earlier, but any other premium brand will work well (Scharffen Berger, Lindt, Callebaut). And as for vanilla, use pure extract. Nielsen-Massey makes the best. Truly, the expense is worth it. With so few ingredients, it really makes a difference if you cheap out.

10 oz bittersweet (or unsweetened) chocolate, chopped

1/2 pound unsalted butter

5 large eggs

1 1/4 c. sugar (add another quarter cup if you’re using unsweetened chocolate)

2 t. vanilla extract

5 T. flour

1 1/2 t. baking powder

1/2 t. kosher salt

Heat oven to 325F. Butter and flour (I use Baker’s Joy) a 10″ springform pan. Or if you are baking for a smaller crowd, use two 6″ springforms. Keep one for yourself and pawn the other off on the neighbors.

Melt the butter and chocolate in a metal bowl over a pot of simmering water. Make sure no water can get into the bowl. Stir until smooth and remove bowl from the pot. Meanwhile, beat eggs and sugar until pale yellow and very thick. Beat in vanilla. Sift remaining dry ingredients over egg mixture and fold until combined. Gradually pour in the melted chocolate and butter, folding until combined. Pour into the pan(s) and bake on a cookie sheet for 20 minutes. Cover with foil and bake until a tester comes out crumbly (in between wet and dry). Cool on a rack, then remove sides and bottom of pan.

Once cooled, a little well will have formed where the cake has fallen. This means it turned out right! At this point, you can sift powdered sugar over it, pour on a thin layer of chocolate ganache (spiked with espresso or brandy), top it with fresh or even thawed frozen raspberries. Serve with softly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Or just eat it straight up. It’s quite rich, so cut slivers unless you’ve got a table full of gobblers. Stored at room temperature, it will keep for a couple of days.

After a weekend that was heavy on pizza, light on veg, tonight the Husband and I returned to our salad-eating ways.

I’d just read a sweet article in the September Bon Appetit about slow-roasted tomatoes. Just in time: having picked as many ripe ones from my mother’s garden as I could carry, the pile in the veg basket wasn’t long for this world.

So I made the tomatoes this afternoon. It took hours and the apartment smelled heavenly all day. Having collapsed into sticky, yummy heaps, they were incredibly fragrant and had turned a gorgeous shade of red.

I used some of the tomatoes’ steeping oil for a quick balsamic vinaigrette to dress a pile of baby arugula. Spooned the tomatoes on top of the greens, added sliced fresh mozzarella on the side, also some crusty bread which made for an excellent tomato delivery device. Gorgeous summer evening on a plate!

Feeling that we’d redeemed ourselves a bit, we then watched a crazy thunderstorm by candlelight. Hope the tornado sirens were kidding.

A friend who moved to London was back in town on business; she graciously shared her Sunday afternoon with us. Apparently the British Isles are seriously lacking in Mexican cuisine, so we ambled up the street to Picante for tacos and burritos. A sliver of a storefront, you can dine on site only when the weather cooperates. Which today it did. Fresh, fast, and very tasty. Nowhere else have I seen “white boy tacos” on the menu (hard shell, we’re told).

After that we were hot and thirsty. And desirous of people-watching. So we ambled a little farther up the road to hipster ground zero. That’s right: the Pontiac. Love it, hate it, but be honest and admit it: their lemonade-based cocktails are dangerously refreshing and sitting outside whilst drinking is what we Chicagoans love to do during our brief summers. With so many opportunities for snarkiness walking by, we couldn’t help but enjoy ourselves. After several rounds which included a few unexplained free beers for the Husband, we also ordered fries, which come sprinkled with herbes de provence (including lavender). And then home. To bed.

I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where there’s been a farmer’s market since the 1920’s. We loved going there as kids, and rarely missed a Saturday.

Someone was always stationed at the entrance with a litter of puppies or kittens to give away. There’s a restaurant in the middle that served tantalizing stacks of pancakes. We never ate there. The “Office” was staffed by a no-nonsense woman and featured an array of baby pictures, each with a sassy caption. Amish ladies in long dresses and bonnets sold fresh eggs and insanely buttery cinnamon rolls. We ate a lot of those. Hippie people sold incense and flowing dresses. Cute boys worked at the butcher’s counter. A candy stall made the whole place smell like caramel corn. Farmers’ wives and kids sold tons and tons of produce.

This week I was in town and stopped by. No puppies or kittens, heaven help me. Being a Friday, most of the stalls were closed. But there were a few Amish ladies. And cute boys cutting meat. The caramel corn machine was cranking away. And…blueberries and plums galore, grown about 10 miles away in southwestern Michigan.

Maybe the best dish isn’t revenge, served cold. In last week’s New Yorker (you know, the one with the controversial cover), Yoni Brenner makes the case for employing more subtle ways to let your cooking do the talking.

My uncle Larry’s favorite joke. And the origin of one of my favorite dishes: salade Niçoise. According to Martha Schulman in her cookbook, Mediterranean Light, there are infinite variations and just as many arguments about the proper ingredients. Tuna is the base of all versions, the pure use anchovies, too. As it’s one of the few things the Husband truly loathes, I usually omit the eyebrow-looking fishie. Also delicious is a pan bagnat, which is just Niçoise as a sandwich. Here’s our version, as had for dinner the other night:

mixed greens

steamed haricot verts

steamed baby yukon taters, quartered

hard boiled eggs, chopped fine (the Husband used the potato ricer)

tomato, quartered

cucumber, sliced

olives

can of imported tuna, packed in olive oil (drain it!)

crusty bread

herby mustardy vinaigrette (dijon mustard, lemon juice, salt, pepper, olive oil, basil, tarragon)

Often on Sunday nights, the Husband and I don’t feel like a big dinner. Sometimes that means cheese and crackers and olives. Or a salad with scrambled eggs (will do a post on that recipe soon). Tonight’s light meal was inspired by a recent trip to Hopleaf: I’ve been obsessing over their CB&J sandwich. Fortunately, we had fresh figs on hand! Spread a small ciabatta loaf with chunky almond butter, sliced figs, and slices of comté and popped it into the toaster oven. While the cheese was melting, I did a quick saute of the haricot verts and one of my scorned purple onions, dressed with a little balsamic vinegar and cracked pepper. Husband poured glasses of a Torrontes/Chardonnay blend, and we sat down with our plates to watch the season premiere of Mad Men. A perfect end to the weekend!

Today I had the pleasure of watching my friends’ beautiful, sweet, fun, chatty, active gals. Aged six and three and a half. Lord help me, I took them to the farmer’s market, promising the playground as our first stop and gelato afterward. With the playground deemed unworthy, “too many babies,” I hustled the gals through the first produce stand we came to. Rows of bins at the perfect height for grabbing and tossing tomatoes, á la Bozo’s Circus. A small corn mountain, ready to be shucked on site. Grabbed the little globe eggplants right before liftoff. Tried to make a game of filling a bag with haricot verts and selecting ears of corn. Was scorned for buying purple onions. Bought a blueberry muffin from Celestial Kitchens to appease the hungry urchins. No wonder everyone else had their kids locked down in a stroller. Got the hell out of there as fast as we could. Spent about $15, but I can’t be sure.

The intention was a quiet dinner in our neighborhood at a BYOB sushi place we like. The Husband grabbed a bottle of Albariño we’d picked up at the Cellar Rat. Had a nice slow stroll north toward Bucktown, a chance encounter with our friend, Julie, and a good look at the gardens and dogs of Chicago’s near northwest side.

I wasn’t prepared for the see-and-be-seen scene nor the pulsing house music. Valet parking for SUVs? Women so Botoxed, one couldn’t tell who was mother and who was daughter? A 45-minute wait for being a lowly walk-in? I’d brushed my teeth and put on a skirt. The Husband had put on shoes. Clearly, we’d underestimated the changes in our neighborhood.

Okay, so we’re snotty. Sorry, but it’s not fun to live in a neighborhood that years ago, friends were afraid to come to, and now is home to tear-downs, local businesses closing their doors, and frat boys barking into their cellphones that they “live in the ghetto.” Only the current administration gets the Husband more riled.

Anywho, we were eventually given a table in a quiet corner. The food was as good as always. The people who work there are sweet. Accessible sushi, true, but super tasty, very fresh, and made with care. And they have fresh wasabi. You can’t blame a restaurant for succeeding. So hie thee to Coast Sushi, but make a reservation or do take-out.

Strange, but true. Think it’s because they’re always way too sweet. And often, underdone. And then the chocolate is usually milk or semi-sweet (I’m a deep, dark chocolate gal) and infrequent at that. When I was baking for money, guys always asked for them, often adding, “just like my mom used to make.” Aside from not being dumb enough to risk wrecking some dude’s Proustian moment, I just never felt inspired to make them.

Until I read an article in last Wednesday’s New York Times by David Leite about a quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Holy patron saint of baking, he had gone to Shirley Corriher, Dorie Greenspan, Jacques Torres, and a host of New York bakeries for answers. The Christmas tree lights in my brain’s cookie room lit up. I had to try this recipe.

Made the dough the next day…with 2 variations, as usual based on what I had on hand. One: I had no bread flour and very little cake flour, so I used all-purpose. Two: I used an 11.5 oz. bag of Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet Baking Chips and about 8 ounces of finely chopped unsweetened chocolate. That’s right: unsweetened. I used Belcolade Noir Absolu Ebony discs (96% cacao) from Belgium, which I buy wholesale but I think is for sale at the Chocolate Source. I suggest using the highest quality you can find and afford. And when you think you’ve chopped it finely enough, chop it some more.

After chilling the dough for the suggested 24 hours, I baked them off last Friday morning. Absolutely delicious. Not too sweet. Super chocolate taste throughout. Deep caramel taste, which was offset perfectly by a sprinkling of sea salt. I simply could not stop eating them; thank goodness we were having a party that night. To get them out of my house, I offered the entire batch as a prize to the first guest who could release the salad fork that had been stuck for days in our dish rack. It took the winner exactly 30 seconds to claim his cookie trophy.

Another week, another batch. What would the cookie taste like with nuts? This time, I added very finely chopped toasted pecans to my adulterated version of the NYT’s recipe. And I waited 36 hours to bake off the dough. Definitely worth the wait….

The dough was drier, so the cookies didn’t spread as much, which played right into my preference for smaller cookies. The pecans added a deep, toasty accent. The sea salt was fairly singing. Hey, I like chocolate chip cookies! Now to pawn them off on the neighbors before the husband and I eat them all.

By the way, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs is Honorius of Amiens.