Pignoli Cookies

A couple weeks ago, I went up to the North End and had some awesome pine-nut-cookies from an Italian bakery up there. They were pretty great, but I figured I'd never make them. Then I got some almond extract for Christmas, and found a recipe online from King Arthur Flour, and figured, why not. The one problem with these cookies is that they are pretty expensive to make; you have to buy marzipan, pine nuts, almond flour, none of the generic cheap stuff that normally goes into cookies. I couldn't remember if I needed marzipan or almond paste, so I got some of both, and it seems that the difference is that almond paste is way more almond-y, a little too much for my liking. Despite the expensiveness, though, they were delicious!



Pignoli Cookies
1C (9oz) marzipan
1/4C sugar
1/8th tsp salt
1 tsp almond extract (don't use this if you don't like almond flavor, you could use vanilla instead)
1/4tsp lemon extract, or 1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/2C almond flour*
1 egg white
1-1/2C pine nuts

*I couldn't find almond flour, so I ground up a bunch of almonds in a food processor. They didn't get that ground up, but that didn't seem to affect the texture too much. I would imagine that you could just use regular flour, but I didn't test that.

Grease two cookie pans and preheat your oven to 325F.

Break up the marzipan either using the food processor or with your fingers. Add everything else except the pine nuts and use your fingers to mush it around until it is homogeneous. It will be really sticky and goopy. Roll the dough into little balls, and then roll those balls in the pine nuts. Flatten the cookies into cookie-shapes, and pop them in the oven for 22-24 minutes. Enjoy!



This is the texture of the almond "flour" that I ground up. Still pretty nutty, but the cookies didn't taste like they had nuts in them.


Marzipan vs almond paste?


The almond paste


The marzipan oozes out of a tube

California Rolls

Eating California rolls when I eat sushi is just about paramount to sacrilege. Sushi, for me, is about showcasing the freshest, most beautiful, best fish you can get your hands on. So what was I doing playing around with imitation crab?

I don't really know what I was doing. For some reason, I wanted to get some while I was at the store. And then I had it, and the only thing I could think of doing with it was to make sushi. There are two options for a California roll, you can either make a crab-mayo mixture, or you can just put the crabstick into the sushi straight up. I went with the crab-mayo mixture, but next time it'll be just crabstick. If there is a next time... It was still good, though. Rolls of bite-size rice and stuff is always good. So, if you want to try eating sushi but you don't want raw fish, or you happen to have some imitation (or real!) crab to get rid of, here is an excellent way to do it.

California rolls

1C sushi rice
1/4C rice wine vinegar
1/4C white sugar
3 pieces of dried seaweed (nori)
3/4C diced crab meat
2 tbs mayonnaise
sesame seeds
1 avocado
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded

First make the sushi rice. Rinse your rice under cold water a couple times, until the water runs clear, not cloudy. Cook it according to the directions on the package, my rice says to cook 1C of rice with 1-1/3C of water. Once the rice is done, let it cool. Meanwhile, mix the vinegar with the sugar. If you don't have rice vinegar, you can use regular white vinegar, but it is much stronger so don't use too much. Start adding the vinegar mixture to the rice, and fold it in gently, preferably using a wooden spoon. Don't do this in a metal bowl, as the vinegar can react with the metal. Keep adding vinegar and sugar until it tastes about right (you be the judge). I used just about all of it.

Dice the crab meat and mix with the mayo. Stir it up and set it aside. Peel and take the seeds out of the cucumber, then cut into long, thin, slices. Slice the avocado into long, thin, slices. Tear each sheet of nori into half-sheets.

Set up your sushi-rolling station. The rice should be in a big bowl. You need a sushi rolling mat, although a dish towel will work. Since California rolls have the rice on the outside, and it is sticky, line your mat (or towel) with plastic wrap. Have a bowl of cold water to dip your hands in. Have your fillings assembled nearby.

Dip your fingers in water, and use them to spread some rice evenly over the smooth side of the seaweed. It will probably take about a quarter of a cup of cooked rice to cover the seaweed. Sprinkle this with sesame seeds. Flip the seaweed over, so that the rice is now on the downward side. Begin to fill the roll. Start with some crab, add a little cucumber and avocado, and then roll it up. Use your fingers to press the fillings into the roll and get the roll as tight as you can.

Once it is rolled, use a very sharp knife to cut the slices. I generally get six pieces out of one roll. If you dip the knife blade in cold water, it will cut better.

I ended up using half of the avocado, half the cucumber, and made six rolls.


Use about this much filling. Experiment to see how much filling you can get in the roll without overstuffing it.

Kale and white beans

This meal felt like comfort food, which is strange, because I never ate cooked greens growing up, they were certainly not part of my life at least until the age of 20. Except to look at them and go ewwwwww. So why does boiled kale seem like comfort food to me? I have no idea. A while ago I was trying to figure out what to do with some leftover kale, I had made a kale, white bean, and sausage soup, which was delicious, but I had leftover kale. I could have made kale crunchies, but that seemed like too much work. Then I found this post, and she writes about her kale so poetically that I had to try it. I kind of did my own thing, since I had leftover beans, too, but this bowlful of glop was totally inspired by that recipe. If you aren't into fried eggs with runny yolks (and I know Ed doesn't like runny yolks, but thats how I love my eggs- crunchy on the bottom and goopy on top), you could cook your egg over easy or just leave it out, but, I really do think the yolk adds something to the overall dish. Ups the yum content...

So, this dish also goes really well with some sort of thick, whole-grain, toasted bread. I happened to have some of that leftover from the soup (because all soups go best with bread), but, like pretty much everything I make, its a flexible dish. You could leave out the bread. You could leave out the beans. You could leave out the egg. You could leave out the bacon. It all works, but, I like kale with all its accoutrements.

Boiled kale with stuff
Makes two servings, more or less. Maybe three if you don't eat much.

1/2C white beans (dry), or 1 can white beans (cooked)
1/2lb kale (those big bunches at the supermarket are about one pound)
3 pieces of bacon
1 onion
4 cloves of garlic
two thick slices of whole wheat bread, toasted
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper
2 eggs

The total cook time will be about half an hour, but its an easy half hour, you're just boiling things. If you forget to soak the beans, the cook time could be more like an hour and a half... so just stick the beans in a pot of cold water before you leave in the morning and they're ready to cook when you get home. Prep time is pretty short, too.

Soak the beans for 8 hours, or do a quick soak, where you bring the water to a boil and then let them sit for an hour. Or buy canned beans, but, its a lot cheaper (about eight times cheaper) to buy the dry ones. And then you can flavor them.

Bring your soaked beans to a boil, and then turn down the water to a simmer. Add a bay leaf. These will take 20-30 minutes to cook, I didn't time it, just keep checking them. Meanwhile, chop your bacon into little pieces, however big you want, you can leave the pieces all stuck together when you do this, they'll separate as they cook. Throw the bacon into a pot, and cook it until it is at a consistency at which you would eat it. In other words, no raw bacon. Instead of draining the grease into wherever you drain grease, drain it into the bean water. If you have lean bacon that doesn't drain, add about a tablespoon of olive oil to the bean water. I find the fat helps the skins get soft. At this point you can add salt to the beans, too, about a tablespoon or so.

Chop your onion and dice your garlic. Add the onion to the bacon in the pot, and cook until they're translucent. Add the garlic and cook until its toasty golden. Add 3-4 cups of water, and bring it to a boil. Take the leaves off the stems of the kale, chop them up, and add them to the water. Its probably a good idea to wash the kale first, but, I forgot, and it wasn't gritty. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cook the kale for 15 minutes or so in boiling water. This is plenty of time to clean up the mess you just made prepping dinner.

Toast some bread. Fry an egg, I actually used olive oil, and it got really nice and crispy, just how I like it! Once the beans are done, layer a piece of bread in a big wide bowl, then stack some beans around it (throw out the bay leaf). Put a big ol' pile o' kale (and bacon) on top of the bread. If you want soup, pour in some broth, otherwise, just the kale. Put the egg on top. Break the yolk, and mix everything around until you have a delicious, yolk-soaked, pile of glop. Dig in!

Egg yolk sugar cookies

I made a chocolate truffle cake the other day. Because Ed asked for it. It was so-so, I thought I overcooked it and made it too dry but Ed liked it. Anyway, it used egg whites, so I had two egg yolks left over and remembered a really good egg yolk cookie I'd made a while ago. I decided to make those, but since I only had two egg yolks, I had to do some funky measuring things, and ended up sort of completely changing the recipe. Instead of being pretty moist, it was dry and stiff. Oh no! I was worried that I'd never be able to get these into balls, but, after tasting the batter (a necessary step, especially with cookie dough!), it was too good to not bake. So I rolled it out, which was the perfect thing to do with dry, stiff, cookie dough. This might have just become my go-to recipe for roll-out cookies, because they taste really good. It did make a pretty crunchy cookie, though, once it had cooled. But a yummy crunchy cookie.

Egg-yolk sugar cookies
1C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1C sugar (although if you are going to frost the cookies, I would use 3/4C)
1 stick butter
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp lemon zest (or orange, or lime, or grapefruit... whatever)
2 egg yolks

Cream the butter and sugar until its pretty fluffy. Add the egg yolks one at a time and beat them in. It'll still be pretty dry. Add the vanilla and lemon zest. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add this mixture to the butter, and combine until it looks like cookie dough. If its wet enough, you can roll it into balls, or if its dry, you can do what I did and roll it out.

The roll-out cookies took ~10 minutes at 350F. Start checking them after 6 minutes or so, because if you leave them in there a minute too long they go from perfect-slightly-chewy-golden to mildly burned.

This recipe made me 44 stars.

Eggplant parm

This is a little different than normal eggplant parm. For one, there is no slab of mushy, slimy eggplant coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. You may wonder how it is eggplant parm without that. Well, read on, hungry eggplantovores!


Sorry its not a great picture, rather unappetizing actually, but if you could smell it and taste it you wouldn't think as much. Actually, most of my pictures are pretty unappetizing, but thats because I'm hungry and want to eat the food I'd just made rather than photograph it.

This is sort of Alton Brown's recipes from Good Eats, I mean, it started out as his recipe but it becomes more and more of an eggplant stir-fry with Italian flavors the more we make it. I give to you the recipe the way we last made it, but it will probably morph some more next time. As it should. The basic premise is that when you cut the eggplant up and salt it, it oozes out all its water, and then when you cook it, it won't get mushy and slimy. Which is what I really don't like about eggplant, usually. So, what follows is a recipe, sort of, but you are encouraged to make it your own and change things. I think this time I even left out the parmesan, which totally negates the "eggplant parm" thing, doesn't it? Its a flexible recipe...

Eggplant Parmesan
This will make enough for just about three servings, two servings if you're feeding highschool boys and four servings if you're feeding highschool girls. We usually end up with three servings. One for me, one for Ed, and one for lunch.

1 eggplant
1 onion
olive oil for frying
2-5 cloves of garlic (depends on how you like your breath)
1 tomato
1/2C fresh parsley and basil or any other random fresh herbs you might have.
a couple mushrooms
1/4C panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)
1/4-1/2C grated parmesan cheese, or grated mozzarella cheese for a goopier dish (pictured above)
salt and pepper to taste
other vegetables, depending on what you have in your fridge and want to use up or what your mood is telling you

Slice the eggplant into rounds 1/4" thick. Salt each side with kosher salt, or any coarsely-ground salt, and let them sit in a colander for 20-30 minutes. Once they've beaded up with water and there is water that has come out of the colander, you're good to go. Chop your vegetables however you like them chopped, I like my onions and garlic diced finely, everything else in pretty big chunks.

Once your eggplant has sweated, rinse the slices under cold water to rinse off the salt and squeeze them a little between your hands to squeeze out any extra water. If you're wondering why you didn't just squeeze the eggplant first and dispense with the salting, its because of chemistry. 'nuff said. Jess can elaborate. Slice the rounds into long pieces.

Put some olive oil in the pan, sweat the onions until they're a little translucent, add the garlic until its toasty golden. Add everything else except the eggplant, then as the tomato is starting to look not-raw (maybe a minute in), add the eggplant, and toss it around for one minute. Add the salt, pepper, panko, and cheese, toss it about to combine, and serve.

The eggplant is going to be not-mushy, and its going to taste delicious. You can eat it just as a pile o' eggplant, or you can serve it over pasta. Or you could serve it over some other random grain. Or as a side dish. It all works.

Vegetable-polenta stacks

This is by no means current, but I found the picture as I was organizing my computer and it was too pretty to not post. Over the summer, I had just gotten back from the farmer's market, not sure what I was going to make for dinner, and this creation sort of just took place. Its a layering of polenta rounds and zucchini and eggplant and heirloom tomato and hummus and basil, topped with some olives and sundried tomatoes. I might have had a dressing for this, I don't remember, but I bet the lemon-basil dressing from the Gazpacho salad stacks would go really well with it. It doesn't matter, in the end, because you'll just deconstruct this thing to eat it, but while it lasts, it sure looks pretty.



To make the polenta rounds, start with a cup of polenta, or corn meal, or any combination of the two. Polenta is a coarser grind, I think that is the only real difference. Add three cups of water to the polenta, about a teaspoon of salt, and any herbs you think might go well. Basil, oregano, rosemary, anything really. Stir the polenta as it cooks, because otherwise it'll stick to the bottom. Its kind of a high-maintenance sort of dish, because if you stop stirring, not only will it stick, it'll start exploding at you. So, be careful of little polenta volcanoes. Once it is starting to pull away from the sides as you stir, which shouldn't be too long, maybe 10-20 minutes, its done, so add a quarter cup or so of grated parmesan, stir it in, and spread it in a baking sheet to cool.



You don't need to grease the sheet, this stuff will pull right away from it. You want it to be pretty thin, so you might need two baking sheets. Spread it out as evenly as you can, and let it dry/congeal/cool/not sure what word goes there for 20-30 min. Once it isn't steaming, you can stick it in the fridge, which will accelerate things. Once you take it out of the fridge, use a glass or other round thing to cut circles out. Leave them on the baking sheet, and bake them at 400F until they are crispy, flipping them about halfway through (sorry no times, it really just depends on your oven, keep checking the rounds). You can eat them without crisping them up, they're delicious that way, but they're even more delicious with an outside crunch.



For layering, its up to you. I had eggplant and zucchini, so I roasted those, and spread the polenta with hummus and just sort of layered stuff on top. Depends what you have available, but this stack is hummus-polenta-tomato-zucchini-polenta-hummus-tomato-zucchini and onwards. You can make smaller stacks if you don't want something to topple off the plate, or if you're into majestic, tall food, make 'em sky-high. Or, just pile stuff on a plate and eat it.

Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins

I can't leave you without a muffin recipe for too long. It is, after all, my primary source of sustenance after rollerskiing. I figured I'd go along the lines of the King Arthur Flour Mini Pumpkin Cakes, which had been a success as a cupcake, but I wanted something a little healthier and a little less fluffy and airy. Fluffy is a great quality in a cupcake, but I like something I can bite into when I eat muffins. Something that will support nuts, and fruit, and whatever else I feel like putting into it. I made two versions of these muffins, the first was with all white flour (I wanted to make it whole wheat but I forgot until it was too late), twice the nuts, and no cranberries. This was a good muffin, and I was going to just make it again, but I didn't have as many walnuts, so I added half a cup of cranberries. Random. But they're a delicious addition. I upped the sugar a little too, since cranberries are so sour, but I love how you get little sour pockets of redness inside the muffin. If you're not so into the cranberry-explosions in your mouth, skip the cranberries and just go with all nuts. Or you could add raisins or dried cranberries. Its a muffin, people, the possibilities are endless!

Having gone through two batches of these muffins by now, I have discovered - they freeze very well. It must be all that pumpkin goop in them, but they stay really moist in the freezer, and won't crumble to pieces like some low-fat muffins are wont to do. I think these have moved up to second place in the "freezer muffins" category, behind the carrot spice muffins, and they're probably in the top five of my overall "favorite muffin" category. They got a good Ed-rating, too, despite having pumpkin in them. He even knew that they were pumpkin muffins, and went back for a second one. I call that a success!

Pumpkin Cranberry-Walnut Muffins
Makes 12 muffins with pretty big tops

1C pumpkin puree
2 eggs
1/3C plain yogurt (skim is fine)
1C sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 tbs spices (cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg in this case, heavy on the ginger)
3/4C whole wheat flour
1/2C white flour
2 tbs ground flaxseed
1/2C chopped walnuts
1/2C chopped fresh or frozen cranberries*

*If you use dried cranberries or raisins, reduce the sugar to 3/4C. You could also add some crystallized ginger.

Preheat your oven to 400F. Grease a muffin tin. In a large bowl, mix the pumpkin, eggs, yogurt, sugar, baking powder, salt, spices, nuts, and fruit. Add the flours. Mix to combine, and then pour the batter into the muffin tins. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until the muffins are starting to look pretty brown on top. Since these are so moist, they're ok with baking a little longer than normal, so that they don't start to taste gummy.

If you're in the mood for a cakier muffin, you can substitute parts or all of the yogurt for oil. It will make it lighter. No guarantees as to how it will work out with the nuts and fruit, though.

Sorry the picture is not great. Some things just deserve to be eaten instead of photographed...