Spiced Pear Chocolate-Caramel Tart

As promised, welcome to part one of The Roaming Kitchen’s two-part series: Thanksgiving desserts. Please try to contain your excitement!

I wanted to try my hand at a poached pear dessert, so here we are. I wondered if I should pair my poached pears with chocolate, or perhaps ginger, or possibly caramel, or perchance figs. And then, because it’s the holidays and a time for a wee bit of decadence, I decided to include them all.

This tart has quite a few steps, it might be true, but none of them are difficult, and all of them are an excuse for family participation in the kitchen. If you don’t feel up to making the whole tart, however, you can simply make the poached pears alone, and match them with: ginger snaps, a drizzle of chocolate or caramel, a dollop of mascarpone whipped cream, a sprinkle of crushed, toasted hazelnuts, a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, or whatever else you wish. All would make a pretty (and delicious) picture on your Thanksgiving table. Read more »

Onion Soup

One of the more entertaining aspects of my relationship with the Frenchman is our collective opportunity to play with language. At any given moment, one of us is speaking in a third language, and so mistakes are made. More often than not, we bend it to our liking in the name of wordy nerdiness.

While we met in Spain and started our friendship in Spanish, it’s probably our least fluent language now. Still, we both weave Spanish words and expressions into conversation, and use it to aid French and English when we don’t know a word. (I have recently taken to employing “tranquiler” as a French verb meaning “to calm down”. The problem is, the French word is actually “calmer”, far more similar to English than the Spanish “tranquilizar”. I will not be stopped!)

Before I met the Monsieur, I never gave much thought to the ‘Frenchisms’ we’ve adopted in English. Some make sense, like “French Toast”: French people really do eat pain perdu (“lost bread”) when baguettes go stale, although in France they make it far less sweet than we do, and it’s more likely to be served as dessert than for breakfast. Read more »

October Shepherd’s Pie

This is less a recipe than a concerned effort to use up all the fall CSA vegetables idling in the crisper. And the thyme withering in its sleeve. And the last tiddly-bits of goat cheese camping out in the cheese drawer. (Yes, that’s right. We have a drawer in the fridge entirely devoted to cheese. I would like to blame it entirely on the Frenchman, but that would be a downright lie.)

Feel free to use my base as inspiration for your own seasonal shepherd’s pie. The goal is to find balance: each layer should play off the flavors and textures of the last one. Creamy should give way to crisp. Sweet, spicy, bitter, and salty can all have their moment in the sun. It goes without saying that when you use vegetables at the peak of their season, you’re eating vegetables that taste like their best selves.

This recipe is also an opportunity to use up leftovers. Last night’s vegetables are fair game. Any kind of puree–I’m thinking mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, or any other mashed-up root vegetable–can be spread over the top. This is a good time to use up those last nubbins of cheese. Read more »

Banana Cake with Swiss Cream Cheese Frosting

When my sister was in elementary school, one day each year was devoted to “Multiculturalism Around the World”. On this day, the lunchroom was transformed into a kind of culinary bizarre where each student should bring in a food item to share with their class to represent their heritage.

My mother, mightily dutiful to the plenteous needs of her three daughters, but at the same time a full-time lawyer, had to be clever. A full blown observance of her Costa Rican and Panamanian ancestry would have required the sacrifice of night hours she should have been..you know.. sleeping. And so she decided to make a recipe much loved in our house. Meanwhile, she told my sister to tell the teacher it was “plantain bread”.

Plantain bread, ha! ‘Plantain bread’ summons images of a somber, dense brick, does it not? What my sister passed around that day was tender and sweet. Of course it was. It was the dog-eared banana cake recipe from my mother’s 1965 edition of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, fragrant with butter, sugar, vanilla, and banana mash. Read more »

The Best Veggie Burger Ever

PLEASE SEE THE UPDATED VERSION OF THIS RECIPE HERE.

Yes, yes, the title of this post is bound to invite raised eyebrows. Could this really be the best veggie burger, of all time, ever? Well, I can tell you this with full confidence: this here veggie burger is the best I’ve tasted by some margin.

Because here is the thing–given the choice between a beef or lamb hamburger and a vegetable facsimile, I would never normally choose the later. Ever.

It’s not that I have something against vegetables. In fact, I quite like vegetables, in their natural state, or coaxed with a bit of heat, olive oil and sea salt. But veggie burgers are not vegetables. Veggie burgers have always seemed to me a strange and unhappy amalgamation of rabbit food mash, a strict and humorless attempt to appease those who forgo meat. Read more »

Nectarine Hazelnut Tart

This was supposed to be one tart recipe, but it morphed into two. The reason being, when you toss an assemblage of ingredients into a food processor and hope they will magically whiz together into tart dough, well.. they don’t always cooperate. Baking has rules. Toasted hazelnuts and a stick of butter do not a tart dough make.

The first crust recipe I tried (which you’ll see in some of the pictures) was far too buttery, and too crumbly. (Just take my word for it that there is such a thing.) Even after some solo time in the oven, the crust would’ve been far better scattered over the top of the nectarines than underneath them.

On my second go around, I added more flour, a touch of baking soda, and an egg. These additions provided much needed structure. Note to self: making dough is not reinventing the wheel. Read more »

Pulled Pork with Stone Fruit Salsa

Cooking intrigues me for multifarious reasons, but chief among them is this: the learning process is endless. The opportunity for new challenges is endless. There will always a new ingredient to try, or a new technique to study. And even if you taste all the ingredients there are to taste, and try all the techniques there are to try (if such a thing is even possible), you would still be left with the enormous task of mixing and matching so many ingredients with so many techniques.

Learning to cook well takes time–this aspect of cooking at least is magic-less. The 700th clove of garlic you peel will naturally discard its coat more swiftly than the ones that came before it. You’ll sense vanilla custard is done now–right now, not thirty seconds from now, but now–without a thermometer only through exhaustive practice.

Writing a recipe requires imagination, yes, but imagination without context will lead you nowhere tasty in a hurry. The best recipes call upon knowledge assembled steadily over time. Like an unhurried braise, intuition in the kitchen is a gradually lacquered thing. Read more »

Salt-Crust Chicken with Buttermilk Dressing

I’ve known for some time that baking whole fish in a salt crust is a super-duper prize idea: It’s easy, it’s dramatic, and best of all, it results in foolproofishly (get it?) soft, tender fish. It wasn’t until I offered to write a recipe for these lovely people that I began to realize the sheer possibilities of salt crusts.

It’s really down to J. Kenji López-Alt, who knows what the fish fingers he’s talking about. His recipe series, The Food Lab, delves deeply into the chemistry of what makes a dish tick. He experiments with food from all possible angles, providing pictures along the way. In doing so, he illuminates the reasons why something works, and just as importantly, why something doesn’t work. I’ve learned a lot from this man.

In perusing an article he wrote on salt crusts, I came across his recipe for salt-crust chicken. It just makes sense. The salt traps moisture, and gently flavors the chicken in cooking. While you don’t achieve the crispy skin of a roasted chicken, you do come away with meat that’s impossibly soft and juicy, even the breast meat. You can basically use any herb/aromatic combination you like, so this preparation becomes endlessly adaptable as well. Read more »

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