A bold statement

So, how many of you, after reading last week’s food section of The New York Times, made a batch of chocolate chip cookies? I can’t possibly be the only one susceptible to suggestion around here. Hands up, now. Don’t be shy.


Okay, so, for those of you who made the cookies, how many ate them at every meal for multiple days, to the near-complete exclusion of other foods? I ask not only because I did, but because these cookies deserve to be eaten that way, in extravagant quantities. I mean, just look at them. A mere glimpse makes me want to pour a big glass of iced coffee and do something immoderate.


The sad part is, I would have overlooked this recipe entirely if Brandon, in his diligent, good-citizen, news-reading way, hadn’t e-mailed me a link to the article last Wednesday. I was sitting at my desk, reading something far less important, when it landed in my inbox. There was no accompanying commentary - just the link - but I knew what he was saying. I promptly stood up, walked to the fridge, removed the requisite butter, and set it on the counter to soften, and that night, I made cookie dough. (This is, incidentally, part of a top secret strategy I am developing called Kill Him with Kindness and Cookies and Maybe He Will Clean His Closet Without You Having to Ask Him Again. Don’t tell Brandon. So far, it’s not working very well, but I still have hope.)

I won’t attempt to paraphrase the article here, because you really should read it. David Leite, its author, is a wonderful writer, and those of you who like to bake will find it very informative. (Plus, it quotes Shirley Corriher! I love Shirley Corriher.) What I will say about it, however, is that it adds up to a very fine, very fetching cookie. In fact, it is, without a doubt, the best chocolate chip cookie that I have ever made at home. It is also the best chocolate chip cookie that I have ever eaten. It scares me a little to make such a bold statement, but I have decided to do it anyway.

Leite’s recipe, which was adapted from Jacques Torres, produces a model specimen: big and plump and nubbly, with plenty of those endearing cracks and folds that form on the surface as the dough softens and spreads in the oven. The cookies are soft and chewy at the center, but their edges are nicely crisped, and then you’ve got their flavor, which develops over 36 hours (don’t skimp! it’s worth it!) of rest time that the dough gets before baking. The flavor is classic chocolate chip, of course, but it has an unusual depth and complexity and, for the clincher, a sprinkling of salt on top. You know how, in Charlotte’s Web, Charlotte writes “SOME PIG” over Wilbur’s pen? Well, we’ve been seeing a lot of spiders around the house lately, and these cookies are sufficiently good that I half-expect to see the words “SOME COOKIES” appear, written in spider silk, in one of the corners of our kitchen. They really are some cookies.


Before I shoo you away from your desk and into the kitchen to make a batch, I want to share a few thoughts about the recipe. David Leite clearly went to great pains to make it very specific and thorough, but I couldn’t help but make a few tweaks, mainly for convenience’s sake. First, I didn’t bother with the fancy chocolate disks or fèves that he calls for. I like nice chocolate as much as the next guy, but I had to draw the line on this one. I didn’t want to get in the car. Maybe next time, I’ll pick up the fancy kind, but for now, I will use my standard chocolate chip of choice, Ghirardelli 60%. I think it’s perfectly delicious.

Second, I didn’t use a mixture of cake and bread flours, as the recipe suggests. Leite’s article failed to explain why the use of two flours is important, and I don’t know, it just seemed like a fussy complication. I have no doubt that it probably does something, texture-wise, but I was willing to take a risk, so I skipped it. Instead, I used a local flour that we’ve been trying lately. It’s called Stone-Buhr Northwest-Grown All-Purpose Flour, and if you can find it, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, you might try your regular brand of all-purpose flour, or, as Leite recommends, a combination of cake and bread flours.

Lastly, after the dough had its 36 hours in the fridge, I let it soften a little bit at room temperature before I tried to scoop it. It was very hard when freshly chilled, but with about 30 minutes’ to one hour’s rest on the counter, it was more readily scoopable. Don’t let the dough get warm, though; you want to bake it while it’s still cool, and even tending toward cold. Updated on June 15, 2011: I have changed the way I do this. I now scoop the dough before chilling it. Much easier. See below.

Anyway, however you do it, MAKE THESE COOKIES. And then heed my warning: unless you have a large household, give at least some of them away to friends and next-door neighbors, or else you will eat yourself silly. In a good way. And a bad way. I took a few to our neighbor, gave three to Olaiya, and delivered a half dozen to our friends Ben and Bonnie, who live conveniently nearby. None of them complained, and in fact, Olaiya stopped by this morning to ask for more. Which, I think, means that I should make another batch.

P.S. You do know, right, that you can click on any photograph here and view in a larger size? I know that bigger can be better sometimes, especially when it comes to cookies.


Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from The New York Times, David Leite, and Jacques Torres

If you have a kitchen scale, I highly recommend using it here. This recipe is written in both volume and weight, but I chose to use the latter, so that I wouldn’t have to mess with measuring cups. It was unbelievably quick: just put a bowl on top of the scale, tare it to zero, and go.

2 cups minus 2 Tbsp. (8 ½ oz.) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 ½ oz.) bread flour
1 ¼ tsp. baking soda
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 ½ tsp. coarse salt, such as kosher
2 ½ sticks (1 ¼ cups; 10 oz.) unsalted butter, softened
1 ¼ cups (10 oz.) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp. (8 oz.) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ¼ pounds bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks, preferably about 60% cacao content, such as Ghirardelli
Sea salt, such as Maldon

Combine flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Whisk well; then set aside.

Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars until very light and fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Reduce the mixer speed to low; then add dry ingredients, and mix until just combined. (Unless you have a plastic guard that sits around the rim of the bowl, this will make a big mess at first, with flour flying everywhere. I found that carefully holding a dish towel around the top of the bowl helped a lot.) Add the chocolate chips, and mix briefly to incorporate. Using a standard-size ice cream scoop – mine holds about 3 fluid ounces, or about 1/3 cup – scoop the dough onto a sheet pan or large platter, or anything that will hold about two dozen dough portions in a single layer. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, and chill for 24 to 36 hours - and up to six days.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat.

Place six mounds of dough on the baking sheet, making sure to space them evenly. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt, and bake until golden brown but still soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer the baking sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then transfer the cookies onto the rack to cool a bit more.

Repeat with remaining dough.

Note: I may be the only person in the world who feels this way, but I like room-temperature chocolate chip cookies better than warm ones. (Yes, I fully expect to be burned at the stake for saying this.) When they’re warm, they taste too rich to me, and some of the nuances of their flavor get lost. I suggest that you try these cookies both ways and decide for yourself.

Yield: About 24 (5-inch) cookies.

Hot and sweet

I regret to inform you that we have now reached, it seems, the time of year when I can hardly motivate to cook a single thing. Uh oh.

Maybe you know the feeling? I hope so. For me, the problem is not so much the heat, although that’s certainly part of it. Here in Seattle, it only occasionally gets too hot for the stove, but when it does, it’s memorable. Last week, I was working on developing a recipe for pâté de campagne, and I can now say with a good deal of authority that pork fat is not at all pleasant to work with when the ambient temperature of your house is approximately 80 degrees. Also, though sweat is not a traditional ingredient in country pâté, mine contained a decent amount of it. It’s a good thing I went easy on the salt.

But heat aside, the main reason for my near-complete lack of desire to cook is that summer doesn’t want me to. Its best foods - all the fruits and vegetables at the market right now - want little in the way of preparation. They want to be left alone, allowed to do what they do. Today, for lunch, I ate tomatoes and mozzarella and olive oil, and for dessert, I had some raspberries. In just a minute, I might have some cold peanut butter on a spoon. For dinner, we’re going to make a salad, and I’m not sure what else. This is a little bit troubling, especially when I’m supposed to show up here with a recipe for you.

Luckily, our friends Matthew, Laurie, and Iris invited us to dinner on Saturday night, and Matthew, by some miracle, actually cooks in the summertime. He is a very good friend to have. He also, incidentally, writes an excellent blog and is a contributor to Gourmet.com. If you haven’t read him yet, do. For our dinner, he made a Thai green mango salad, gai lan in a brothy peanut-coconut sauce, mackerel with ginger and other aromatics that I ate too fast to identify, and rice. (For my part, I brought along some pâté, albeit not the one that I sweat into. Only the best for my friends!) Everything was delicious - this bite spicy, the next bite rich, the third one a little tangy - but I was especially smitten with the mango salad. It was cool and sour, hot and sweet, and utterly refreshing. Brandon declared that he wanted to eat it every day until the end of summer. So, before we left, I asked Matthew if he would share his recipe, and he generously agreed.


Aside from julienning the green, unripe mango, which can be a bit tricky at first, this salad is as easy as it gets. If you’re accustomed to doing any sort of Thai or Vietnamese cooking, you might even have some of the ingredients already on hand. Basically, you just toss julienned mango with scallions, bird’s eye chilis, and macadamia nuts. (This last ingredient is an unconventional tweak that Matthew invented - peanuts, I think, are the norm - but it’s absolutely delicious.) Then you make a traditional dressing of fish sauce and lime juice in equal parts, sweeten it with a modicum of sugar, and toss it into the mango mixture. It’s a bit monochromatic, as you can see in the photograph above, but it makes up for its lack of color with loads of flavor, which, the way I see it, is a perfectly fair trade. (Anyway, if you want to gussy it up, just serve it with a few shrimp curled on top; that’s very pretty.) We made it last night, and seeing as Brandon just came home from running errands with another green mango, we’re apparently making it again tomorrow. I cannot complain.

P.S. A number of you have written to inquire about the absence of my column from the August issue of Bon Appétit. I apologize for the scare! For a number of reasons, the August issue just had to be a bit shorter, that’s all. I’ll be back in the next one.



Green Mango Salad with Macadamia Nuts
Adapted from Matthew Amster-Burton

You can often find green, unripe mangoes at Asian grocery stores. Here in Seattle, we bought ours at Uwajimaya. Choose specimens whose skin has no (or few) wrinkles, and that feel hard as rocks. When you peel them, their flesh should be pale yellow - if it’s orange, Matthew warned me, they’re too ripe - and when you taste a piece, it should be firm and crunchy.

This salad scales up easily, if you want to serve more people. You could also try playing with other additional flavorings, such as Thai basil, cilantro, or dried shrimp. Every recipe for this salad seems to differ a bit, so I imagine it would be hard to go wrong.

For the salad:
2 green mangoes
2 scallions, white parts only, sliced very thinly
1 bird’s eye (also called Thai) chili, some seeds removed, sliced very thinly
1 small handful of macadamia nuts, coarsely chopped
Sautéed shrimp, optional

For the dressing:
2 Tbsp. Thai fish sauce
2 Tbsp. lime juice
1 Tbsp. sugar

Using a vegetable peeler, peel the green mangoes. At this point, you have a couple of options for how to cut them into thin strips. You can use use a mandoline fitted with the julienne attachment, for one, or you can do the following, which, once you get the hang of it, is pretty easy:

Set one peeled mango on a cutting board, oriented so that its pit runs horizontally like an equator and the stem end is closest to you. Using a sharp knife and steadying the mango carefully with one hand, make a cut down the center, running the length of the fruit. Let the knife glide all the way down to the pit. Next, make a series of similar cuts to the right of and parallel to this first one, each about 1/8th of an inch apart. (These instructions are for right-handed people; lefties will be more comfortable moving to the left.) As you get out toward the edge, where there is no pit, let the knife cut all the way through, and then set aside that piece of flesh; you will julienne it by hand in a minute. Then spin the mango around and make a series of cuts on the other side of the first one. When you’re finished, the mango should look a bit like you ran a comb very sternly down its length. Pick it up in one hand, and, with the other hand, use a vegetable peeler to shave it into strips. This works best if you start the peeler at the far end and, holding the fruit steady with the thumb of the peeling hand, pull the peeler toward you. Repeat until you reach the pit. Then flip the fruit over, make more slits on the other side, and peel again. Discard the pit, and repeat with the second mango. Then julienne the remaining pieces of flesh by hand.

Toss the mango with the scallions, chili, and macadamia nuts.

In a small bowl, whisk together the fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar. Toss with the mango mixture to taste.

If you’re not eating immediately, chill the salad for up to an hour or so, until you do. Top with sautéed shrimp, if you like.

Yield: About two servings, or enough to feed four as a small starter

Very well then

Apparently, I am a little bit fickle. Only three short months ago, almost to the day, I was singing the praises of homemade mayonnaise, and now here I am, about to offer you a recipe for basil aioli made by doctoring a jar of Best Foods. This might be a good time, I think, to call into service my favorite Walt Whitman quote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I have eaten a lot of mayonnaise).

I am not usually a quote person, but I find that this one comes in handy in lots of different situations.


This past Saturday night, our friend Olaiya had a barbeque. The party was ostensibly to celebrate her new backyard - she moved a couple of months ago - and our newly arrived summer weather, but between you and me, I think it was just an excuse for icy drinks and corn on the cob. (Which I really can’t fault her for.) We all chipped in and brought six-packs of beer, and I made two batches of fresh mint ice cream, and once the sun went down, the tables were lit with tea lights in old jars. It was 85 degrees outside, and Olaiya wore a foxy little dress, and the night was so pretty that not even a stain on the tablecloth from spilled beer, or strawberry margarita, or whatever it was, could mar it.


Olaiya is a caterer, so she makes these sorts of things look maddeningly easy. For dinner, she made fresh salmon burgers with radishes and red onions, and she covered a platter with sliced tomatoes and slivered basil, and there was an enormous bowl of corn on the cob with butter and lime. For his part, Olaiya’s boyfriend John made some excellent margaritas, both regular and the aforementioned strawberry, and though I am a lightweight of almost comical proportions, somehow they didn’t even make me tipsy, which pleased me so much that I had to tell everyone how not-tipsy I was, which, in retrospect, probably means that I was tipsy. Either way, it was a gold star party all around. Also, when it came time to play Who Would You Rather, I managed to come up with the following doozy: Johnny Cash, or Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash? (Go ahead and take a minute to think about it. It’s tough.)

But the very best part of the evening was one of its smallest details: the basil aioli. It was the unofficial theme of the party - a benevolent sort of stealth weapon, I guess you could say, sneaking its way into everything. While we waited for the grill to heat, it served as a dip for tiny carrots, radishes, snap peas, and potato chips, and as a finishing topknot for deviled eggs. I spread some on the bun for my salmon burger, and it was delicious, too, on a slice of tomato or a bite of corn on the cob. (I even contemplated sneaking some into my bag to bring home, since it was already finding its way into everything, but I decided to be polite.) It was such a simple, subtle touch, but I couldn’t help thinking it was something that we all - you, me, everybody - should have in the arsenal.


So yesterday, I made Brandon teach me how to make it. He had made a big batch a couple of weeks earlier, for one of Olaiya’s catering gigs, and it wasn’t too hard to scale down, tasting and tweaking. Essentially, you make a slurry of olive oil, basil leaves, garlic, lemon, and salt - very much like pesto, minus the pine nuts and parmesan - and then stir it into your favorite mayonnaise.

Now, I am very partial to homemade mayonnaise. I like it so much, in fact, that I am inclined argue that it’s not even in the same species as store-bought. But sometimes I cannot be bothered. We were short on time this weekend, and our kitchen is currently very hot, so for the sake of instant gratification, and so that we wouldn’t kill each other, we used the commercial kind. (Anyway, when you’re making flavored mayonnaise, it often isn’t worth it to start from scratch, because all those soft, delicate nuances will be covered up anyway. It strikes me that this might be veering dangerously in the direction of Sandra Lee, but I think it’s perfectly fair.) Folded together with basil puree, the mayonnaise turned a pale shade of seafoam green, which looked impossibly elegant - almost Martha-esque! next up: topiaries! - on the end of a carrot. And it tasted just as you would imagine: cooling and creamy and, in a word, summery. I’m thinking burgers, here, people, and chicken salads, and grilled salmon, and tomato sandwiches, and BLTs. I’m thinking Fourth of July. I can’t wait.



Shortcut Basil Aioli

I used Best Foods – also sold as Hellman’s – mayonnaise for this recipe. It’s the brand I grew up with, and I think it has great flavor.

2 Tbsp. olive oil
¼ cup packed basil leaves
½ tsp. lemon juice
1 medium garlic clove, pressed
Pinch of salt
½ cup mayonnaise, either homemade or commercial

In the jar of a blender (or a small food processor), combine the olive oil, basil, lemon juice, garlic, and salt. Process until the mixture is smooth like pesto, pausing every now and then to scrape down the side of the blender jar with a small spatula or knife.

Put the mayonnaise in a small bowl. Add the basil mixture, and stir well to mix.

Serve as a dip for raw vegetables, spread onto sandwiches, folded into chicken salad, or dolloped on top of deviled eggs (minus the paprika and hot sauce, preferably).

Note: This recipe doubles very easily. However, don’t automatically double the amount of garlic and salt called for here; start with the quantities for a single batch, and then add more to taste.

Yield: a little more than ½ cup

In its frilly finest

I love having house guests. It has been brought to my attention that this is perhaps not a very common or popular stance, but I am sticking by it. As a general concept, I think house guests are pretty great. It’s like having a slumber party, only you can cuss without getting in trouble, and the mean girl from second grade isn’t around to make you cry anymore, and instead of Dr. Pepper and Funyuns, you can share such things as salami and cherries and bottles of rosé and pappardelle with bagna cauda, wilted radicchio, and eggs fried in olive oil. I think we can all get behind that.


This past weekend, my friend Leah came up from California for a visit. A couple of months ago, over some cookies and milk at Sweet Adeline Bakeshop, I had suggested that she come to Seattle, and I must have been very persuasive, because she arrived on Friday morning, just in time for lunch.

The unofficial focal point of the visit was to be a day trip to Mount Rainier on Saturday, a trek we dubbed the First Annual Summer Solstice Picnic and Hike. However, as it happened, it was cold and rainy on the mountain, and the trail we wanted to take was buried under eight feet of snow, so our “picnic” took place in the car and our “hike” turned into a brisk 25-minute walk on a different, shorter trail. But it was okay, because Leah had some very cheering dirty jokes up her sleeve, and there is no situation that cannot be improved with a rousing impersonation of [warning: noisy link] Shooby Taylor. And thankfully, the other parts of the weekend went off without a hitch, and they involved even more important things, like cookies that taste like toffee, the aforementioned pasta, and Hasselback potatoes.


Have you ever had a Hasselback potato? It’s a Swedish invention, named for the restaurant in Stockholm that introduced them in the 1700s, and it’s traditionally comprised of a whole potato that has been peeled and cut to resemble a fan, dotted with butter, baked, and then topped with fine bread crumbs and broiled. When properly made, a Hasselback potato is crisp on top and creamy inside, a perfect hybrid of a roasted potato and a baked potato, dressed in its frilly finest. It’s tasty, but it’s also very old-fashioned, the kind of side dish usually relegated to stuffy, stodgy, white-tablecloth restaurants with waiters in starched vests. Until recently, I had never given it much thought. But one day a week or two ago, Brandon happened to mention the Hasselback potato, and the idea lodged itself in my mind - right beneath, come to speak of it, all those Shooby Taylor lyrics - and when it came time to decide on that night’s dinner, I thought, Hasselback potatoes.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t particularly interested in the usual version, which would necessitate obtaining bread crumbs and pulling out the vegetable peeler. What I wanted was the pure heart of the Hasselback, which is to say a potato that straddles the line between roasted and baked, and that happens to be pretty too. So we made a rustic version. We bought some red potatoes, scrubbed them, and cut slits into them from the top down, so that they would fan open like accordions when they baked. Then, for extra flavor, we slipped slices of garlic down into the slits of some of the potatoes and, into the slits of others, some bits from a broken bay leaf. Then we drizzled them with olive oil, salted them generously, and baked them until they opened like strange flowers and their skins were wrinkled and crisp. We ate them with salmon fillets that Brandon had rubbed with crème fraîche and baked, and aside from the fact that there was way too much bay leaf in a few of the potatoes - see photo above - and one of us whose initials are MW proclaimed them “crazy, and not in a good way,” there was a lot of appreciative moaning around the table that night.

So when I thought about what to make for Leah on Friday evening for her first meal in Seattle, I decided that it was a perfect excuse for more Hasselback potatoes. This time, we flavored them with thin slices of shallot, which we all declared to be quite lovely, and we ate them with ratatouille and homemade lamb sausages. They’re just potatoes, of course, cut in a fancy way and jammed into the oven, but they’re oddly charming somehow. They look a little like roly polys, actually, which pleases me tremendously. (Is it bad to describe your food by likening it to a bug? Yes? No?) For lunch yesterday, I ate the leftovers with my fingers, dipping them into a small pile of salt on the side of the plate, and I highly recommend it. And though I do love house guests, I don’t intend to wait for another before I make them again.



Rustic Hasselback Potatoes

For this preparation, I like to use potatoes that are roughly the size of tennis balls.

Red or white potatoes, medium to large in size
Optional: thinly sliced garlic or shallots, fresh rosemary, bay leaves, butter
Olive oil
Kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Rinse (and scrub, if necessary) the potatoes, and dry them well. Working with one potato at a time, place it in the well of a wooden spoon, the kind you would use for stirring a pot of soup. Starting at one end of the potato and working toward the other, make a series of crosswise vertical cuts about ¼ inch apart, taking care not to cut all the way through the potato. The wooden spoon should help with this; the knife will hit the sides of the spoon before it can go all the way through the potato.

Place the potatoes on a baking sheet. You can either leave them plain, as is, or you can now season them by slipping herb or aromatics into the cuts. If you want to use garlic or shallots, slip a small slice into each cut. If you want to use rosemary, wedge 1 small sprig into one of the center cuts. If you want to use bay leaves, slip 1 whole leaf into one of the center cuts. (Do not use more than 1 bay leaf, and do not be tempted to crumble it into bits to put in multiple cuts. Use only 1 leaf in 1 cut. See story above.) Then, whether you have seasoned them or not, drizzle the potatoes with oil. You’ll want to sort of open the cuts with your fingers while you drizzle, so that some of the oil gets down inside, and use nice amount of oil – not a dainty little wisp, but also not a huge splash. Sprinkle generously with salt.

Slide the baking sheet into the oven, and bake until the tops are crispy and the potatoes are cooked through, about 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Serve hot - and, if you like, topped with a finishing sliver of butter.

Note: My friend Hannah makes an especially daring version of the Hasselback. I love her.

I baked you a cake

Wow. I’m not sure what to say today. I sent off my revised manuscript at 9:30 this morning, and judging by the mess around our apartment, my entire brain went with it. Just now, I retrieved the mail from its slot by the front door and discovered that, apparently, when I paid the bills last week, I didn’t put stamps on any of the envelopes. Consequently, they all came back today, like a small flock of homing pigeons, only flatter. Let’s hope that my brain does the same. Soon.


I’m not going to type for long today, because I feel a nap coming on. But I wanted to celebrate this little victory with you, because you’ve been very patient with me lately, and with my brain. I want to thank you for that. So I baked you a cake.


Well, actually, I baked it for a friend’s party, and it’s all gone now, but I saved the photographs for you. And the recipe. Does that count? I hope so.

I also hope you like carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I know I do. To me, carrot cakes taste like picnics on red checked blankets and parties by the pool, and because I can’t give you a picnic or a party, I thought this was a good alternative. There are pecans in the cake part, and it was supposed to have raisins too, but I left them out, because I worried that you wouldn’t like them. It’s moist and lightly spiced, and the frosting is not too sweet, and it’s three layers tall, which means that there’s plenty for everyone. Brandon shaved a taste from of one of the layers before I frosted it, and he made all sorts of moaning noises and declared it the best carrot cake ever, and I don’t think he said that just to make me feel better about the loss of my brain. (Although maybe just a little.)

So dig in! And don’t worry about saving any for me. All I need is that nap.


Classic Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Adapted from Bon Appétit

I know there are lots of carrot cake recipes out there, and with all sorts of embellishments, but it’s important to have a classic one in your repertoire, and I think this one will be mine. It’s simple and miraculously moist, and the flavors are spot-on.

Oh, and if you like raisins in your carrot cake, add ½ cup with the carrots and the pecans.

For the cake:
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 (slightly heaping) tsp. baking powder
2 (slightly heaping) tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
¾ tsp. ground ginger
1 ½ cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
½ cup unsweetened applesauce
3 cups finely grated peeled carrots
1 cup pecans, chopped

For the frosting:
2 (8-oz.) packages cream cheese, at room temperature
½ cup (4 oz. / 1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 ¼ cups powdered sugar, or to taste
3 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Position racks in the top and bottom third of the oven, and preheat to 325°F. Lightly grease 3 (9-inch) round pans with butter or cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pans with parchment paper, and then grease the paper too.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. Whisk well to blend.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the sugar and oil until combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well to incorporate after each addition. Add the applesauce, beating to mix. Add the flour mixture, and beat to incorporate, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula if needed. Add the carrots and the pecans, and beat briefly.

Divide the batter evenly between the prepared pans. (It will look pretty skimpy, but don’t worry; the cakes will rise nicely in the oven.) Slide the pans into the oven – I put one on the top rack and two on the bottom and rotated them once or twice during baking – and bake until the cakes begin to pull away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. The original recipe says that this should take about 45 minutes, but in my oven, it only took 30 minutes. Cool the cakes in their pans on a wire rack for 15 minutes; then turn them out onto the rack to cool completely.

When the cakes are cool, make the frosting. In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter and the cream cheese on medium speed until smooth. Sift in the powdered sugar, and beat on low speed until incorporated. Add the vanilla and the lemon juice, and beat well to incorporate. If the frosting is lumpy from the sugar, bump the speed up to medium-high and beat the crap out of it. That usually does the trick.

To assemble the cake, place one layer on a platter or cake stand. Spread it with ¾ cup frosting. Carefully place another layer atop it. Spread with ¾ cup frosting. Top with the third cake layer, and then spread the remaining frosting over the top and down the sides. Serve at room temperature.

Note: You can make the cake layers one day before assembling the whole cake. Wrap them tightly in plastic wrap, and store them at room temperature. The assembled cake can be prepared up to 2 days before serving. Store it in the fridge, covered with a cake dome, and allow it to come to room temperature before serving.

Yield: 10-12 servings

49 degrees

Before I begin, I feel that a warning of sorts is in order. I understand that some of you people, especially the ones on the East Coast, are having a heat wave? Is that right? Well, if so, you might consider clicking away right now, because what I am about to say will have almost no relevance for you. Sorry.

That said, here goes. Today, June 9, it is 49 degrees and raining. I woke up and turned on the heat, got out my green wool socks, and now I am eating baked pasta.


Anybody still there? I’m not even sure I am, and I’m the one writing this thing. But I can tell you this for certain: the pasta is very tasty. Even though, at this time of year, I usually prefer to eat popsicles and strawberry shortcake.

We’re still on a Jamie Oliver kick around here. I think I’m in love. It doesn’t hurt that thumbing through Jamie’s Italy feels like sneaking, stowaway-style, into someone else’s summer vacation, which is something I would very much like to do right now. But even more than that, Jamie makes everything - the simplest spaghetti in a pot, the plainest bowl of greens, the most basic combination of pasta and tomato sauce and mozzarella - feel like something worth shouting from the roofs about.

Take, for example, baked pasta. When I was in high school, the cafeteria sometimes served it. (This, of course, was on the days when they weren’t serving creamed chipped beef, tuna noodle casserole, or turkey tetrazzini.) I don’t think I ever even tasted it. I didn’t see any need to. Baked pasta, for me, was Cafeteria Food, and that was that. But we have now made Jamie’s recipe, or a riff on it, two times in the past two weeks, and if this weather keeps up, we might even make it again. Like I said, I think I’m in love.

Baked pasta is, by definition, nothing fancy. It’s essentially just noodles with tomato sauce - which, in all fairness, you could technically eat on their own - layered in a pan with cheese and then baked. But there’s something so special about the way the cheese melts and bubbles, oozing into crevices here and there, and there’s also that lovely thing that happens to the top layer, the way it gets crispy and craggy, like the corner of a brownie. When baked pasta is good, it’s very good. And Jamie’s recipe is. It uses fresh mozzarella, for one thing, and a homemade tomato sauce, which - though it does splatter all over the stovetop and make a royal mess - is more than worth the trouble.


We first made it over Memorial Day weekend, and it gave us the most delicious leftovers. We hauled a Tupperware of it out to the Gorge that Monday, when we went to the Sasquatch Music Festival, and even at room temperature, with the smell of sunscreen and marijuana and stale beer hanging heavy on the air, it tasted absolutely terrific. If that isn’t high praise, I don’t know what is.

However, for as good as it was, we did find ourselves wishing, just a little bit, that we had used Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce instead. Jamie’s recipe had quite a bit more onion than we usually like, which made the tomato flavor less pure and tomatoey, and anyway, once you have eaten what we now simply call “Marcella Hazan Sauce,” or MHS, you have little patience for others. So this past Saturday night, we made baked pasta again, but this time, we used a double batch of MHS. We tweaked it just a little, cutting back on the butter and including some garlic and hot pepper flakes, and we upped the quantity of pasta too, so that we would have plenty of leftovers. The sauce takes a while to simmer, I have to admit, but while it does, you can take care of all sorts of important things, like opening a beer and playing some cards, or bitching about the next-door neighbor who dug a post hole for his new fence in the middle of your herb garden.

And then, when it’s all done, you have not only dinner, but also lunches, delicious warm lunches, for at least a few days. And when you live in Seattle and it’s early June, that means a lot.


Baked Pasta with Homemade Tomato Sauce and Fresh Mozzarella
Inspired by Jamie’s Italy

We like to use chiocciole for this, but you could use almost any smallish pasta shape.

2 (28-oz.) cans whole peeled plum tomatoes
5 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 large yellow onion, peeled and halved
4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 to 2 pinches red pepper flakes
Salt
Red wine vinegar
1 ½ lb. small pasta, such as orecchiette, chiocciole, rigatoni, or ziti
¼ to 1/3 lb. parmesan cheese, grated
3 (~4 oz. each) balls fresh mozzarella
Fresh basil leaves

Dump the tomatoes with their juices into a large saucepan. Add the butter, onion, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a couple pinches of salt. Place over medium heat, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 45 minutes. Remove and discard the onion halves. Using an immersion blender (or a food processor, if need be), blend the sauce until mostly smooth. Return it to the saucepan, and continue to simmer it over medium or medium-low heat for another 45 minutes or so, until it has thickened to the consistency of a usual tomato sauce. It’s alright if it’s a bit loose, but you want it to have a least a little body. Taste it for salt and acidity, and if needed, add a small splash of vinegar.

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

When the sauce is almost ready, cook the pasta - don’t forget to generously salt the water! - to al dente. Drain it well, and toss it with half of the tomato sauce and a handful of the parmesan. Take out a large (at least 9” x 13,” or preferably 10” x 15”) baking pan. Put a layer of pasta in the pan, followed by some of the remaining tomato sauce, a handful of parmesan, some chunks of mozzarella, and a couple of torn-up basil leaves. Then repeat these layers until all the ingredients are gone, ending with a layer of cheese on top.

Bake for about 15 minutes, or until warm and bubbling. Then, if your baking dish is safe for the broiler, broil the top for a minute or two, until golden.

Serve hot or warm, or at room temperature. It gets even better, I think, after a day or two.

Yield: about 6 to 8 servings

Western Union

Hello working hard do not have time to write properly so decided to send telegram STOP Also do not have recipe STOP In past week, overcooked asparagus ate salami that tasted funny burned bread decided to eat celery with peanut butter for dinner but found celery molding in crisper drawer STOP Ate olives and cereal instead STOP Do not pity me STOP I like olives and cereal STOP Separately not together STOP And this too shall pass STOP Writing in telegram style is fun STOP Except am tired of typing stop STOP

Am guest blogging at everyday polaroid every day this week yes every day STOP so please come see me there STOP wont you QUERY