vanilla bean pound cake

The truth is, I bought my very first vanilla bean only last week when I was making rice pudding. It’s not that I didn’t know how fantastic they are in all of their clarity of flavor and little-goes-a-long way charm, I was just both too cheap to buy them, and too afraid to go down that slippery slope whereby no extract would do ever satisfy me again.

Recipe

fusilli with baked tomato sauce

Note: I first made this baked tomato sauce from Nancy Harmon Jenkins in 2007, after being tipped to it by Luisa Weiss, who’d found it nearly a decade earlier in The Best American Recipes 2000. But despite finding it to be “one of the best tomato sauces I’ve ever eaten,” I didn’t make it again for some time. I blame the fact that I was on a homemade pasta kick at the time and the idea of this being dreamiest with homemade fettuccine got permanently linked. So, when I made this — a friend reminded me that she loves it and I realized it had been too long — in the summer 2017, I was shocked to realize that the reality of this dish is exactly the opposite: this is a 25-minute dinner and one of the better ones in the category.

It goes like this: pour a glug of olive oil in a 9×13-inch dish. Halve a pound of ripe cherry tomatoes and arrange them cut side-up. Stir together some plain breadcrumbs (2007 Deb tells you they should be fresh*; 2017 Deb wants you to know that panko works great here), that you season with garlic, sharp cheese, salt, and pepper and sprinkle them over. Drizzle with more olive oil and bake this for 20 minutes. While it bakes, boil a pound of pasta. By the time it’s al dente, the tomatoes are bubbling with concentrated flavor and lightly browned on top. Mash them lightly with a fork, toss in the drained pasta — that’s right, the baking dish is your assembly pan and serving dish, hooray — a bit more olive oil and fresh basil, turn to coat it all evenly with that same fork and dinner is made.

This method yields the sweetest, most complex sauce. A perfectly reasonable reaction to trying this is to swiftly realign all of your food priorities to a single one: accumulate cherry tomatoes so you can make this as often as you wish (weekly at minimum) for as long as tomato season lasts.

* “I insist that you use fresh breadcrumbs here — that sawdust from a can probably won’t cut it. But fortunately, that’s as easy as grabbing a single cheapo bakery roll from your grocery store, slicing it into discs, drying it in the oven for 10 minutes or so (hey, you’re preheating the oven anyhow) and pulsing it in the food processor. Even the flavor of the most generic roll is miles ahead of the stale, pre-packaged alternative.”

Video

Fusilli with Baked Tomato Sauce

Servings: 6
Time: 25 minutes
Source: The Best American Recipes 2000
Print

While 2017 Deb likes to believe she’s more laid-back in the kitchen than she was when she was a fresh new home cook, afraid of coloring outside the recipe lines, but this is not entirely true. I pretty much only want to make this with fresh, local tomatoes these days but do know that 2007 Deb insisted that the best part was that “you can even make it with those cherry or large grape tomatoes that stay eerily fantastic — I try not to question it — through the winter.” All of this is to say: it works with both but is extra-lovely in the late summer.

5 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound very ripe cherry tomatoes, halved
1/3 cup plain dry bread crumbs, panko works great here
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
2 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino cheese
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 pound dried fusilli (corkscrew) or farfalline (butterfly) pasta
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, torn or sliced

Heat your oven to 400°F. Pour 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in the bottom of a 13-by-9-inch baking dish. Arrange the tomatoes in the dish, cut side up.

In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs, cheeses, and garlic and toss with a fork to mix well. Sprinkle the bread-crumb mixture over the tomatoes, making sure that each cut side is well covered with the crumb mixture. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then the 1 more tablespoon of the olive oil. Bake until the tomatoes are cooked through and the crumbs are starting to brown on top, about 20 minutes.

While they bake — as in, right away — bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until one minute shy of done. (If you can, try to time the pasta so it finishes cooking about the time the tomatoes are ready to come out of the oven.)

When the tomatoes are done, add the basil and use a fork to stir and lightly mash the tomatoes into a rough sauce. Drain the pasta and immediately transfer it to the baking dish. Add the last 2 tablespoons olive oil and mix well. Serve at once, right in your baking dish.

Recipe

vegetable dumplings

In case I haven’t broadcasted this loudly enough in the 114 entries prior to today, I tend to get a little obsessive in the kitchen when trying to find “perfect” recipes. “Perfect” is always some approximation of an ideal that got etched in my tastebuds in some other time and place — there’s salted butter caramel (Paris), bretzel rolls (a Fresh Direct discovery), frisee with poached eggs (Balthazar, 2003) and one day soon, those truffles from La Maison du Chocolat, as my wee Valentine’s Day supply has rapidly diminished. I know better than to try to go back to such a place and expect the same experiences time after time, but it doesn’t mean I can’t have warming fits of nostalgia when I find a lost flavor on my dinner plate.

Recipe, Tips

for beaming, bewitching breads

For months now, my obsession with bread making has snowballed, leaving me eager buy a bread-specific cookbook to further fill our apartment, and my idle hours, with kneaded deliciousness. I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m extraordinarily conservative about the cookbooks I buy. On one hand, it’s a space issue — isn’t it always? — but considering that this hasn’t kept me from buying a pasta-cranker, too many baking pans and, most insanely, six varieties of flours, it’s hard argue that an stuffed apartment is truly a deterrent. More accurately, I find it impossible to make decisions. Berebaum’s Bread Bible? Silverton’s La Brea Bakery? Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice? I always thought I wanted this book, but how can one ever know for sure? Thus, I delay and delay, as if owning two bread cookbooks would be a crime against humanity. (Please, speak up if there is a bread book that makes you swoon.)

Recipe

sour cream bran muffins

To celebrate my sister-in-law’s swearing in to the New York bar on Monday, we went to Blue Smoke for lunch. I ordered a pulled pork sandwiched stacked about as high as my chin, and in a frightening act of who-is-this-girl and what-did-you-do-with-Deb, finished all but one or two bites of it. Later, we (mercifully) spent some quality time at the gym, and at the exact moment that Alex said “Mmm… leftover applewood-smoked chicken for dinner!” I realized not only was I still full, I had the dreaded Meat Hangover.

Recipe

miniature soft pretzels

I wish I had something more eloquent to say about the miniature soft pretzels I made for the two Super Bowl parties we attended on Sunday, but every time I look at them, intelligent words escape me: they’re sooo cute! Are they not the fattest, more adorable little things you have ever seen?! They were so plump, all their holes closed up and while I tried to twist them into the traditional pretzel shape, as if all they really wanted to be when they baked up was a dinner roll. With turkey and mustard, I believe they requested.

Recipe

caustic confit

When I first saw a recipe for a Lemon Confit Shortbread Tart in Wednesday’s New York Times, I was still too deep in my cooking-failure funk to consider trying my hand with it, although I did say out loud and to nobody in particular, “Well, doesn’t that look nice?” But when making weekend plans with my parents and my mother told me that she’d seen some lemon tart in the paper and really wanted to make it, I knew it was destiny, and secretly rejoiced that it would be someone else coughing up for nine lemons.

Recipe

the week of cooking averagely

The thing with having such a delightful run of flawless dishes is that you forget about the ever-present likelihood of hitting a dud, or perhaps three. I seem to have lost my kitchen kavorka this week, but in an effort to move past these fiascos, I hope you don’t mind if I air them out, in no particular order.