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 …
Tag Archives: gluten-free
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 …
Celery ice
A fancy early-spring dessert The first edible plants that grow in the spring are stems – because stems are what plants grow first – like chives and celery. This is a simplified version of a New York Times recipe: a dessert made out of nothing much more than celery and sugar. It requires practically no …
Baked apples
Fairly healthy dessert Baked apples aren’t health food – if you want that, just eat an apple, which is also good! But they are better for you than pie and certainly better than cookies or ice cream. And baked apples only take a few minutes to put together, cook while you are eating dinner, and …
Applesauce
Put up applesauce for the winter Apples are new and exciting in September, but you’ll be getting tired of them by February, and there still won’t be any decent fresh fruit available until the end of April. Applesauce is a great way to eat apples when you’re tired of apples. Plus, you can use applesauce …
Sweet potato sauté
Thanksgiving in a non-cooker’s kitchen Once I found myself making Thanksgiving dinner in the kitchen of someone who didn’t cook. I’d ask for salt, or a pie pan, or oregano, and she’d look around and say dubiously, “I must have some somewhere around here….” It gave me a new appreciation for people who are just …
Sweet potato fries
You need a sharp knife No, really, a sharp knife. Otherwise making sweet potato fries is no fun. But besides that, most cooking is more fun with a really sharp knife. You need sharp knives to slice apples for baked apples, or to slice onions or carrots. It’s one of the core problems of my life. I can’t seem …
Spicy corn
A simplified recipe This was originally an incredibly complex recipe from the New York Times that involved simmering the corncobs and then removing them, and both butter and bacon. This is a simpler, healthier version for everyday. It’s also a great splash of bright color for your Thanksgiving table. How to make spicy corn: Boil …