Really a cranberry pie People like berry pies, but berries are not in season at Thanksgiving when you have time to make pies and a lot of people coming over. Fortunately, this is the time of year when cranberries are available, and cranberries make a delicious berry pie. Serve this at Thanksgiving alongside the pumpkin pie, …
Monthly Archives: September 2019
Ice cream from scratch
Homemade Ice Cream I never used to make ice cream because I thought you needed an ice cream maker, but that turns out to be completely unnecessary. You can make delicious ice cream just in a pan in your regular freezer, and not take up cupboard space with a machine. This recipe makes very rich, …
Hamentaschen
Why make hamentaschen? Hamentaschen are traditional cookies for Purim, which usually falls in late February or early March. Purim’s a celebration of Jewish religious freedom, and generally of freedom for all people everywhere, so it’s nice to have cookies when you’re celebrating! The name probably comes from the German/Yiddish mohntashen, meaning poppy-seed purses, and was …
Apple pie
Apple pie’s harder than it seems I’ve always had trouble with apple pie; I’m not willing to use cornstarch as a regular ingredient because I don’t understand how to make cornstarch. My apple pies tend to come out saggy like this one in the picture, and runny. You can solve both those problems with this …
Creme caramel
Creme Caramel Together with chocolate mousse, creme caramel is the standard dessert in cheaper restaurants in France: it seems fancy because it’s hard to make, but the ingredients are cheap – milk, sugar, eggs – and it can be made ahead and brought out during the dinner rush without reheating or anything. These same qualities make …
Chocolate bark
A great Christmas present… Chocolate bark looks very luxurious when you put it in a fancy box or bag with curled ribbons, but it’s cheap and very easy to make, and only takes a few minutes of work (plus a couple of hours to cool). And, like chocolate mousse, it doesn’t even use the stove. How …
Chocolate strawberries
A funny fundraiser story I once went to a fancy fundraiser at a very fancy house up in the hills on the expensive West Side of Portland, and the whole thing was being catered in a very beautiful way, with little tables and lots of little stations each with its own type of food. But …
Chocolate mousse
Every day for two weeks… I’ve tried many chocolate mousse recipes over the years, and they’re good, but most of them are unreliable. Sometimes you get a great chocolate mousse, and sometimes it’s all runny and won’t set up. How can you make an unreliable dessert when there’s people coming to dinner? So I decided …
Chocolate chip cookies
With some shortcuts to make it easier I’ve cut some corners here over the usual recipes, and it doesn’t hurt the cookies at all! I think these are about the best chocolate chip cookies you’ll find anywhere. How to make chocolate chip cookies: Preheat the oven to 375 F. Put two sticks of butter in …
Chocolate streusel
A fancier chocolate cake This is a more complicated chocolate cake, although considerably simplified from the New York Times recipe I started from. It has a lot of ingredients, but nothing complicated about putting them together, and it cooks pretty fast. What about the frosting? This really, really doesn’t need frosting, especially if you eat …