28 May 08 re: reader recipe roundup

Ladly:

I'd be interested in knowing which recipes from the website you have made part of your regular menus. It seems like you have to try new things so much that you don't get enough chance to cook old things again.

mb:

Not a problem there, no worries. I cook many of Heidi Swanson's dishes from Super Natural Cooking all the time. I make her otsu (it's what I'm making for dinner tonight), crusty beans, spice loaf, muhammara, and brussels sprouts a lot. They're just part of my repertoire now.

m-c:

Ditto for me, her crusty beans and her tofu scramble, which we didn't feature but mentioned in the wrap-up are family favorites now. Both are extremely adaptable -- I've made the crusty beans with every kind of bean from ordinary black beans to heirloom flageolets to some nifty little green chickpeas I got my hands on. And her version of the tofu scramble is curried, but I've also made it Italianate and Mexicanish.

Mark likes both dishes, the beans and the tofu scramble, because they go so well on toast -- he likes practically anything on toast, but some things are better engineered for toast than others.

mb:

I also make the fish soup from Ruta Kahate's 5 Spices, 50 Dishes on a fairly regular basis.

And the egg pie from Tamasin Day-Lewis's Tarts With Tops On is now a highly requested item at any brunch I attend.

m-c:

And then there are those scallion biscuits I made on the basis of the Alice Waters cream biscuits. I haven't made them again in the physical world, but they've become a large part of my fantasy life, the one in which I can eat as much as I want of anything without gaining a pound.

But you know, I'm glad you brought up this question because there was that amazing corn recipe from Ruta Kahate that I wanted to be sure to make once we had fresh corn -- I'll put in on the calendar for next month.

Eileen:

Did either of you ever make that gnocchi again?

m-c:

Oops, no, I forgot. Thanks for reminding us.

mb:

No, we've both been slacking on that. I'd better try to make them before it gets too hot!

Ferdi:

I'm curious why you say in the recipe list that the recipe for Turkish eggs is from the USA. Why wouldn't it be from Turkey?

m-c:

Turkish eggs means eggs with yogurt, not eggs from Turkey, just like French toast means bread soaked in beaten eggs and fried or baked, not toast from France.

Bill Granger, whose recipe I started from, is from Australia, so I guess properly I should have said the recipe was Australian-American.

Socorro:

Have you continued working on the recipe for olive-oil poundcake? That sounded like something I'd like to try.

m-c:

I decided to back up and start with a quick bread I've made a thousand times before, apple‑peel bread, based on a recipe for apple bread from Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cook Book (Harper & Row, 1961), but this time measuring the temperature and the time carefully, instead of my usual by gosh and by golly.

Armed with that information, I planned to try to recreate Margaret's cranberry-banana bread, which is one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted. And only then would I return to the olive-oil poundcake.

I've gotten only as far as an OK cranberry-banana bread.

Socorro:

Is there some reason you wouldn't just ask Margaret for her recipe?

m-c:

Oh, I did, I did, but recipes don't always produce the same results in different kitchens (nor in the same kitchen, for that matter). I have a supercharged convection oven, so I always need to use a lower temperature or less time than recipes specify, or both. On a recent trip Back East I learned that Margaret makes her banana bread with bananas that have turned black as coal -- I always thought when she said a ripe banana she meant one with heavy spotting. On the other hand, the last time I made it I used toasted hazelnuts along with the cranberries, and that was a huge, huge win.

m-c:

I found an even better way of making your egg pie. Instead of breaking raw eggs into the pie, I cook them till the whites are firm but the yolks are still runny, chill them in the refrigerator and then plant them in the onion-broccoli-cream mixture. The whites warm as the pie cooks but the yolks stay runny. The easiest thing is to do the eggs the day before.

mb:

Oh, we always love it when readers alteR our own alteRed recipes -- but, wait a minute --

Hey, Mom, you're not a reader.

m-c:

Of course I am -- I read your recipes. You read mine, don't you?

mb:

Well, in that case, do you have a reliable way of cooking eggs so the whites are firm and the yolks are still runny?

m-c:

I thought you'd never ask. I'm working on an appendix on that very subject.

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