I also started creating some individual calendar months — here are January and July. More to come soon! Let me know what you think…

The gougère right out of the oven

Friday night I decided to try something new. I didn’t really know what at first, but as I was flipping through my Vegetarian cookbook, I came across a recipe for a mushroom and cauliflower gougère. I didn’t have any mushrooms, but I did have some asparagus, so I decided to try my own version of the recipe.

The recipe came together quite quickly. I made the dough, which includes a generous amount of butter and cheese, and spread it around the sides of a cake pan. Then I quickly cooked up some onions, cauliflower and asparagus with some pureed tomatoes, thyme and rosemary, and put the mixture in the center of the dough. It went in the over for about 40 minutes, and it puffed up like crazy. The dough doubled in size, but by the time it reached the table just a few minutes later it had lost some of its airiness.

The gougère on the table, slightly deflated

The gougère was quite decadent. The dough was creamy yet fluffy, and the vegetable filling balanced out the richness of the dough. I also thought it looked quite beautiful — and the asparagus made for a nice colorful addition. I thought it turned out even prettier than the photo in my cookbook since it was more colorful. I was also surprised that this was relatively easy to make. Including the beet, grapefruit and goat cheese salad I made, everything took about an hour and a half.

Beet and Grapefruit Salad - taken on my iPhone

Since I started getting my LOVE Delivery veggie boxes, I’ve been getting a lot of beets, and I find that I absolutely love cooking with them. I was a little intimidated when I first was faced with cooking beets since I’d never cooked one before, but just simply roasting them and then peeling them is about all you need to do.

This salad was particularly tasty and it looked very pretty, though the warm beets did start running a bit in the dressing when I moved the plates.

Recipe: Beet, Grapefruit and Goat Cheese Salad

Ingredients:

• 1-2 beets
• 1 small grapefruit
• 1 small shallot
• red wine vinegar
• olive oil
• lemon juice
• goat cheese

Directions:

You’ll need about half a beet and half a small grapefruit per person.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash the beets and wrap in foil. Put the beets in the oven for 40 minutes. They are done when you can easily pierce them through the foil with a knife. (You can roast beets in advance and keep them in the fridge.)

Unwrap the foil and allow the beets to cool until you’re able to peel off the skin with a paring knife. Cut the beets in half and then create quarter-inch thick slices.

Peel your grapefruit and cut it in half. Slice those halves into quarter-inch thick slices, removing any seeds.

For the vinaigrette, finely chop the shallot and place it in a small bowl. Pour in red wine vinegar until the shallots are just about covered, and let them sit for at least 10 minutes. Add olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

Alternate the beet and grapefruit slices in a line on your salad plates. Spoon a small amount of the vinaigrette over the salad and top with some crumbled goat cheese.

Making pretzels reminded me a bit of making bagels, since there was rolling and shaping involved, as well as boiling before baking. It all went surprisingly smoothly, too. I was worried at first since the dough seemed like it might be a bit dry, but after it rose, it was soft — and it got huge! When it was time to start rolling out the pretzel shapes, the dough was really easy to handle, and the pretzels came together really quickly and nicely.

Pretzels just shaped and ready to be boiled and baked

Once they were shaped, I boiled them in water with baking soda in it, and let them dry a bit on a towel before sprinkling them with sea salt and putting them in the oven. The rye flour gave them a beautiful dark brown color, and I drizzled on a little butter once they came out of the over to make them glossy and give them some extra flavor.

Rye Pretzels - Hot Out of the Oven

And boy, did these pretzels have flavor! Between the rye, honey, sea salt and butter, they were unlike any other pretzels I had, yet still had that wonderful slightly chewy texture and nice thin crust. I ate one almost right out of the oven and brought the rest to Evan’s office for everyone working late.

Special Pretzel Delivery! They were still warm when I got there.

I’ve always been a fan of soft pretzels, but these were far and beyond any soft pretzel I’d ever had at the mall or at a football game. I love making things like this that are really a special treat and something you can’t get on a regular basis. Next time I’ll roll the dough out a little thinner so the holes in the pretzel are bigger — I underestimated just how much they would continue to rise.

Want to try this for yourself? Check out the recipe at NYTimes.com.

But just before my flight to Florida on Wednesday, I decided I would treat myself to a little present, since I knew I’d have some free time in Florida.

I played around with it a bit on the plane, but found it awkward — I kept making the strokes too thick, or making strokes when I meant to be moving the canvas around. I also didn’t have a clear plan for what I wanted to create on it or how I was going to go about it.

Last night, though, I decided to give digital finger painting another try. I started with a simple image close to things I’d painted in the past. A lake landscape with a sailboat.

Then I decided I’d move on to something more complex. I’d had so much fun creating my Conan-Leno Illustrator piece, I thought I should try out another portrait, though this time it would be more freehand. I chose a photo of my sister Michelle that I took on my iPhone a few months ago and got to work.

I outlined the image, colored it in and added some shadows and highlights. Then I added a fun background that went with her hilarious karaoke posing.

Then I found out that Brushes lets you play back your brushstrokes from your .brushes file, and I created this little movie of creating the image. It’s a little strange in that it doesn’t actually go 100% chronologically, but starts with the back-most layer, and fills in your brush strokes in order for each layer. It’s actually quite backwards from how I created the image. Still, it’s quite cool. And my grandma has already asked that I create a portrait of her.

Creating a Brushes Portrait of my Sister from Francine Kizner on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago, we invited friends over for dinner on very short notice. I had enough food in my fridge and pantry — I just needed to figure out what to make. I put together a salad with grapefruit, avocado and a shallot-citrus vinaigrette, and I pulled some little puff pastries out of the freezer, baked them, and filled them with a mixture of cauliflower, goat cheese and other vegetables.

I was worried that dessert would be a problem. I only had one egg in my fridge. So I started looking for something relatively simple that would work with the ingredients I had on hand. I found a recipe for Butter Drop Cookies in my trusty How to Cook everything and saw that there was a modification to make them into Chocolate Drop Cookies. That sounded perfect.

They were quick to make — about 30 minutes from gathering the ingredients to pulling them out of the oven, and they turned out to be fluffy, cakey, soft cookies that weren’t too sweet or rich. I was missing a few ingredients, including milk, which I substituted with water, and vanilla, which I just did without. I also didn’t have enough plain sugar so I used some light brown sugar — and the cookies still turned out just fine. And though the recipe didn’t call for it, I dusted them with powdered sugar to make them look a bit more festive.

The cookies kept well for quite a few days, and I even made them again a couple of weeks later — and I had all the right ingredients — when Evan’s brother was in town and wanted something sweet after dinner. They were even better when I was able to include vanilla and milk.

The Recipe:

Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 8 tbsp (1 stick) of unsalted butter, softened slightly
• 3/4 cups sugar (I used a combination of white and light brown)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (the first
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted
• 1 oz semisweet chocolate, melted

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees
2. With a mixer, combine the butter and sugar, then add in the vanilla and egg. Mix together the flour, salt and baking powder, and add the dry ingredients and the milk a bit at a time. Once all the ingredients are incorporated, add the melted chocolate.
3. Spoon the soft dough into mounds on a baking sheet, and bake for about 10 minutes, until the cookies seem to be firming up a little, but still soft.
4. Let the cookies cool a few minutes before removing from the pan, and dust with powdered sugar before serving.

I guess I was feeling courageous one evening when I had a half a butternut squash left and needed some inspiration to use it. I started to look for a gnocchi recipe and found one online that seemed simple enough.

I added more flour than the recipe called for since the dough wasn’t coming together enough, and when I rolled out the first bit and started cutting the little pillow shapes and trying to curve and mark them with a fork, they looked like a bit of a disaster — misshapen, lumpy and a bit sticky.

The first batch didn't look great

Thankfully, things got better from there, and the rest of the batches looked a bit more appetizing, though maybe I should have just skipped the fork step — it creates a more traditional look, but isn’t required.

The gnocchi started looking a bit better -- at least a bit more like gnocchi

I cooked them in small batches in boiling water for just a couple of minutes each, and topped them with some butter and asiago cheese. I served them with some tasty green beans with almonds, thyme and dijon mustard — a really delicious recipe (even with much less butter than called for), and a few tomatoes.

The finished dish -- gnocchi with green beans and tomatoes

The gnocchi were a little bit denser than I’d hoped, but for a first try I think they turned out quite well, and they had an interesting slightly sweet and nutty flavor from the squash and cinnamon.

I got a cookbook called “Debbie Learns to Cook” when I was quite young. It’s a combination storybook and cookbook with some rather funny illustrations of a family with rather large, alien-like foreheads. So of course, what did we call this book while I was growing up, but The Alien Cookbook. As far as I can tell, the book is out of print and pretty well unavailable except for a few used copies.

The only recipe we ever made out of the cookbook was pancakes, and they were truly great pancakes — always light and fluffy. My mom had written in cup and tablespoon measurements next to the measurements in the book, which were all in grams. There were a few other recipes in there, too — for mayonnaise, candy apples and chocolate mousse.

When at my parents’ house recently, my mother pulled the book out and decided that I should take it home with me. I was happy to have this little piece of nostalgia — and the secret to delicious pancakes — and a few days later when Evan and I were hankering for some dessert, I decided to make the simple chocolate mousse.

Click to view larger version

I only made one serving, which we both shared, and it turned out very rich, but quite delicious. It could have used a little more sugar for my taste, and maybe a splash of a liqueur or vanilla to cut richness a little, but the texture was good, and it came together quickly.

I’m glad to have my first cookbook back!

It’s Hanukkah! And that means it’s latke time. Those tasty, greasy potato pancakes come in a variety of styles. My personal preference is to keep them thin and somewhat crispy. That’s why I like recipes that leave the potatoes simply grated and don’t have much or any flour. The recipe I’ve been using for a few years, always turns out well. I believe it’s from my parents’ food processor cookbook.

Ingredients

• 6 large potatoes
  
• 1 onion
• 5 eggs
• 1 tsp salt
• pepper
• vegetable oil
  

Directions

Peel and grate the potatoes (I recommend doing it in a food processor), then wash them under cold water and squeeze out the excess moisture. Grate the onion and mix all the potatoes, onion, eggs, salt and pepper together in a bowl.

Get the oil nice and hot, and start frying away until each side is nice and browned.

Drain on paper towels and serve hot with applesauce or sour cream.

Applesauce

Now, for that applesauce. If you’ve never made it, it’s remarkably easy and will taste much better than any you buy at the store. And, there’s only really one ingredient — apples. I sometimes use apple juice, too, since it’ll make it a little sweeter.

All you need to do is peel and cut up the apples — I used 2 large ones and a cup of strawberries for the applesauce you see in the photo above — then put them in a pot with apple juice or water (or some combination of the two). Cook the apples over medium heat stirring frequently until they begin to fall apart. After about an hour, you’ll have applesauce. If you don’t like it a little chunky, you can puree it with a food mill or food processor. You can also add some sugar if it’s not sweet enough, but this shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve used apple juice in place of some of the water.

I really liked the strawberry applesauce I made — it was quite sweet and chunky, and it had a beautiful reddish color. I’ve also made it with plums before, which also add a pink color.

Happy Hanukkah!