Sassy Radish

As most people’s thoughts turn to Thanksgiving (now that the election is over – we voted; did you?), I’m about to say something unpopular: I’m a little tired of traditional cranberry sauce. This might sound strange coming from someone who stuffs cranberries into snacking cakes and tucks them into banana bread. It’s not the cranberries themselves—it’s cooking them that I am objecting to.

Something changed about my palate this year. For one, I can’t get enough Spanish food (and in fact, I think about it all the time). We’ve a neighborhood restaurant that makes tapas-style Spanish dishes with Moroccan and Jewish influences and I might as well carve my name in one of their seats, I’m there so often.

Continue reading fresh cranberry relish.

How did I get from reading someone’s personal blog to making a mushroom tart from her recently-released cookbook? Well, it’s a journey spanning slightly less than a decade. Yes, it’s been that long.

I remember a friend of mine, some time ago, telling me about this blog called Smitten. “Go,” she said, “The writing is hilarious, and I think you’ll love it.” I did and she was right—the writing was punchy and pithy, and its author not only made me laugh, but recognize my own erratic life in the big city. The blog was written by Deb Rothberg, a twenty-something, and the topics ranged from suffering through horrible dates to drinking bourbon on a cold wintry night. Being eerily familiar with the former, and quite enjoying the latter, Deb Rothberg was my kind of lady.

Continue reading mushroom tart.

A couple of weeks ago, while picking up a coffee at an East Village cafe, the Bluebird Coffee Shop, I ate the best almond cake of my life. The experience was so monumental, that I couldn’t stop talking about this amazing cake. I talked about it to anyone who’d listen, I’d use superlative adjectives, I’d gesticulate wildly. You’d be surprised by just how few people want to hear about the “best almond cake” they’ll ever have. Kind of blew my mind.

I became besotted with this almond cake so much, that I did something I’ve never before in my food blogging and writing career have done—I gathered enough courage to ask the café, outright, for the recipe. And lo!—they gave it to me!

Continue reading almond cake.

As Hurricane Sandy is mere hours away from New York, I’m trying to put on last minute touches on our home preparedness. I found two glass juice containers and filled them up with filtered water. While making eggs this morning, I spied some mushrooms in the back of the fridge and fried them up as well. The possibility of wasting food doesn’t sit well with me, so I’m doing the best I can to use as much as possible, while Andrew gives interviews to Canadian Television and Sky News – the celebrity that he is.

Continue reading things to do during hurricane sandy.

I’m not sure if starting with this: “I made cheese crackers that taste just like the ones from a box!” works effectively as a selling point. But I mean that in the best possible way. Sometimes, I get an itch to recreate my favorite manufactured snacks at home. Usually, they come out better and more revelatory than the store-bought varieties. Marshmallows, for instance, become light and ethereal instead of dense and gummy.

Continue reading homemade cheese crackers.

This just might be the easiest cake to make period. Something to have on hand that you can whip up when company unexpectedly shows up as a fail-safe quick dessert. I wouldn’t be even the tiniest bit surprised if that, besides apple pie, of course, becomes your other favorite Thanksgiving dessert, (because no one grows weary of pie). Or perhaps, this snacking cake can become your morning-after-Thanksgiving coffee cake; you know, while you wait for the pancakes. It could also become your there-is-nothing-exemplary-about-today-so-I’m-going-to-make-cake cake, or your it’s-gray-depressing-and-cold-out-and-I want-my-house-to-smell-nice cake. Any of those descriptors can apply. But honestly, do you really need a reason to bake in this weather? I didn’t think so.

Also, something of an important thing to note: In the time that it took me to write out the above paragraph, you might have made your first cranberry snacking cake and I’m not even slightly exaggerating.

Continue reading cranberry snacking cake.

I was all set to write about sauerkraut yesterday, but then something happened. We came home to find our cleaning lady asleep in our bed. And that proved to be a very distracting thing.

Given my ethnic roots, my relationship with cabbage is so strong, I should have been incredibly focused. After all, Russians and cabbage are linked at the hip. We stuff it, we saute it a number of ways, we make soup out it.

Our Brooklyn apartment is small, so when you walk through the door you are immediately standing in the open kitchen, which becomes our living room/home office. Without moving, you can also see into the bedroom where half of our bed peeks out.

When we came back home yesterday mid-afternoon, after working at a coffee shop since the early morning, as soon as we unlocked the door we felt immediately that something was amiss. Bags of garbage were strewn about the kitchen and the entryway, the vacuum was in the middle of the living room, the furniture was off kilter, and every single light in the apartment was on. And then we saw someone’s feet on our bed. It took us a few seconds to figure out that they looked like our cleaning lady’s feet and then we looked at each other and silently mouthed in unison, “Holy crap, our cleaning lady is IN OUR BED!!!”

Continue reading sauerkraut.

I’m sure many of you have seen the contraption I’m wearing until next Wedneday when my stitches come off. Suffice to say, this space agey sleeve stops many people in their tracks and as a result I’ve made many a friend and have probably referred quite a few clients to my surgeon, god bless him.

The surgery went very well. Until I entered the operating room, I was cool as a cucumber. Other than a terrible migraine that kept me up all night and was probably the cause behind me throwing up, unexpectedly, in front of the elevator doors by our apartment (which poor Andrew had to clean up), Tuesday morning went smoothly.

We showed up to the hospital at 5:45am, bleary-eyed. There were lots of meetings with the nurse, the anesthesiologist, the surgical assistant, and, finally, the surgeon himself. I signed lots of papers and listened intently to the anesthesiologist, a kind Indian man, who told me exactly what was going happen and kept affectionately calling me “moya devochka”, “my little girl” in Russian, with a charming accent. I changed into the given-to-me hospital clothes and non-slip socks, and felt like a rockstar. At least I wasn’t going to take a spill on the hospital linoleum.

In the operating room, suddenly everything felt real. There were needles and scalpels laid out; everything was white and brightly lit. There was an operating cot with a headrest, This is really happening, I thought. I’m having surgery. Once they gave me the local anesthesia, I don’t remember much after. I woke up as I was being wheeled into the recovery room and Andrew was waiting for me. He squeezed my hand. You were very brave, he said.

Continue reading friday link love.

That, above, is my left hand, and that “x” over it is where the cyst (I’ve named it Dennis) currently lives. But come sometime tomorrow (I’ll know more about the timing of my surgery by the end of today), Dennis will be no more, and I’ll be recovering from surgery and looking for post-surgery recovery activities.

I guess, in some way, we’re breaking up, Dennis and I—this relationship just isn’t working out. I could say that we should just be friends, but I won’t mean it. After surgery, I’m pretty sure I won’t be in touch. In fact, I hope our paths never cross again.

Surgery prep has me remembering a lot of random details. I have to show up to surgery without any jewelry, make up, or nail polish. One of the nurses said that only applies to my fingers, but since I rarely wear nail polish on my hands, that’s an easy one to keep in mind. As of last week, I had to stop taking my vitamins and supplements. As of today, I can’t take anything but Tylenol should I need it. And after midnight tonight, I can’t eat or drink anything until surgery. So it’s a little bit like a mini Yom Kippur except there are scalpels involved. Which gives me a brilliant idea…

Continue reading what to do when recovering from surgery.

You would think that working from home might mean that we dine on fancy, elaborate dinners, and that Andrew eats like royalty around here. I run an elaborate ruse: come weekdays, we’re all about quick meals around here. Roast chicken is for the weekend, and so is stuffed cabbage. Mondays through Fridays, it’s all about the manageable, or if I am feeling lazy – take-out.

Our regular weeknight rotation includes: shrimp and broccoli, deconstructed banh mi, merguez burgers, Thai beef salads, and lots and lots of pasta dishes.

But sometimes, instead of cooking a meal I can’t wait to write about, I fail. I burn dinner. I discover that chickpeas and kale stewing together in a slow-cooker, while sounding amazing in theory, look like the split pea soup they used as vomit in Poltergeist.

[I just wrote “vomit” on my blog. Excuse me for my brutal honesty.]

Continue reading branzino with roasted grapes.