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2 September 10, 2016 Fall

Lentil and Mushroom Soup with Thyme Cream

People ask me all the time what my favorite thing to make is. I think that’s sort of a difficult question – it depends on my mood, on what I feel like eating, on what produce is abundant in my garden. But when someone asks you a question like that, to show interest in your hobby, to learn a little more about you, they don’t want to hear “it depends.” So I tell them, soup. And it’s true. I love to make soup. I love the rhythm of chopping vegetables, I love the way onions browning in butter smell, I love the sound of gentle simmering, the way steam curls over a pot and fills the entire house with the scent of comfort. I love sitting with a warm bowl of soup between my hands, how nourished and relaxed I feel after eating it. Campbell’s got it right all those years ago – soup is good food.

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0 September 1, 2016 Beef

September Fitness Goals: #DailyBowlChallenge // Steak and Elote Corn Bowl

It’s hard to believe it’s already September. Even when you’re not a student and/or don’t have school-age kids, September still has that back-to-school feeling, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just ingrained in us to start buying jeans and sweaters and new notebooks once September hits. Or maybe that’s mass marketing at it’s finest. Either way, September always feels like a little bit of a new start.

So, since I’m feeling the September-vibe as much as I did as an eager high school freshman, and since I have the luxury of being at home for a few more weeks, I’m launching a little health challenge here and on Instagram for the next few weeks. Every day I’ll be eating (and sharing!) some form of “bowl food,” whether it’s a smoothie bowl topped with fruit and coconut or a full-on meat+grain+veg combo like this one.

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3 August 29, 2016 Dessert

Greek-Style Cookout: Baklava Ice Cream Sandwiches

Labor Day is a bittersweet moment – it’s a sign that summer is winding down and instead of summer firsts (“the first swim of the summer! The first BBQ!”) everything becomes the last. The weather is still warm and the summer produce is still abundant, but the days are decidedly shorter, and there’s a chill in the air in the evenings. It’s actually a beautiful time of year, but the prospect of having to wait 8 long months until the season returns is saddening. So we soak up the last warm days, storing memories of sunshine, salty water, and grill smoke to get us through the cold dark ones we know are ahead.

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3 August 18, 2016 Drink

Green Derby Cocktail – Absinthe, Bourbon, Basil, and Grapefruit

I’m on vacation this week, and after four solid days, I’m finally starting to relax into it. It’s so amazingly quiet here in Maine right now, it’s helping me let go of some of my anxieties, one by one. I love it. Even though vacation can sometimes be an excuse to drink more than you normally would, I want to leave this vacation feeling healthy and refreshed, so I’ve been trying to cut back, only grabbing a beer or pouring a glass of wine when I want that specific thing, not just accepting any drink that’s available or offered. Drinking less makes the quality of each drink I do have that much more critical, so I’ve been leaning on wines and beers I know I love, and delicious, not-too-sweet cocktails… like this one, the “Green Derby,” which is to celebrate the fact that I’m joining Drizly’s Top Shelf blogger program.

Drizly, a Boston-based start-up turned full-fledged company, is an alcohol delivery service that partners with local liquor stores to deliver beer, wine, and booze to your front door in an hour or less. You’ll pay the same price as you would at the store, plus a small delivery fee in most regions, for the convenience of having your party ingredients dropped off at your door. It’s the perfect solution for that last minute pre-party panic moment: “Are we going to run out of beer? Who’s going to get more beer?!” or for those of us city-people without cars where the prospect of walking home with four bottles of wine and a case of beer is not pleasant.

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2 August 14, 2016 Garden

Grilled Melon, Prosciutto, and Burrata Pizza

In summers past, Trevor and I, lacking outdoor space of our own, have made a project of tending the garden and orchard at my parent’s house. Almost every weekend, we’d put on our gardening jeans, load compost or shovels or seedlings or harvesting baskets into the car, and make the 30 minute trip north of the city just to get our hands dirty. There was something extraordinarily fulfilling about spending a morning doing something physical, about emerging from the tomato patch smelling of greenness, about picking 10 pounds of blackberries despite the dozens of tiny scratches you were bound to get on your arms. About being dirty and sweaty and tired. But after a while it became somewhat impractical to tend a garden so far away, that we could only visit on weekends. So last summer, when we bought our house, the first thing I did was put in a little herb patch, and this year, it has quickly extended down the length of the house to include four raised beds for veggies, a row of strawberries, and a trellis for melons. I have a feeling it will continue to expand, wrapping around the house, using every little bit of sun we have.

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10 August 4, 2016 Current Feature: In Season

Red Currant Kompot

In our office in Russia, there’s a little dining room with a table for four right beside the cafeteria. There’s a white tablecloth, big classical-style windows, and two heavy wooden doors – one to the cafeteria and one to the kitchen. As soon as you sit down, an older woman in a blue-and-white checked apron comes through the second door, hands you the day’s menu, and comes back 30 seconds later to take your order. It’s all very cozy and efficient and Russian. I loved the food in that little cafeteria – the meat-potatoes-cabbage-sour cream approach to cuisine definitely appeals to me, and I think traditional Russian cooking is very tasty, despite the bad rap it gets. And every day I ordered kompot, a sort of chilled, sweetened fruit juice. I discovered it on my very first trip to Russia, three years ago, and never looked back. (Three years! Have I really been traveling on this crazy schedule for three entire years?)

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0 July 31, 2016 Italian

Italian Seafood Dinner with La Crema

For the first 25 years of my life, I abhorred seafood. All of it. Yes, including lobster. Yes, including shrimp. I’ve written about it before so I won’t rehash it again. Suffice it to say, that through travel and the necessity of eating what’s available/local/good, I got over it. And in the past few months, the amount – and variety – of seafood that I eat has grown exponentially. I just got home from a week in Portugal where, not only did I eat some form of seafood every day, I ate, and loved, octopus, squid, and scallops. My mother wouldn’t recognize the girl who used to cry through meals when a “no thank you portion” of baked cod sat sadly on her plate.

This summer, I’ve been cooking lots of seafood at home, too – perhaps to make up for lost time, or perhaps because it just goes so well with a chilled glass of white wine. To celebrate my newfound love of seafood, I put together a little Italian seafood dinner paired with three La Crema wines. It’s the sort of meal that demands to be eaten outside at the end of a hot, sunny day, when the sun is just beginning to slip behind the trees and the breeze picks up again. It’s also the sort of meal that should be lingered over, with plenty of conversation and several bottles of wine on ice, within arm’s reach. It’s slow food….

0 July 15, 2016 Latin and Mexican

Costa Rica Travelogue: Puntarenas // Fish Tacos with Mango Salsa

This March, only three weeks after coming home from Japan, we took a quick trip down to Costa Rica to join my family for their spring break vacation. Hard life, I know. It feels a bit presumptive to call this a travelogue, as the majority of what we did was sit in the pool and watch the wildlife in the trees, but I did want to share some pictures and thoughts (and a recipe for fish tacos with mango salsa) all the same.

We spent a full day traveling from Boston to the Dominical area – two flights, one layover, an hour at the rental car agency, then a three hour drive as the sun slipped over the mountains in a fiery blaze and we descended into a thick, tropical darkness. When we pulled up to the house we were staying in – which was at the end of a steep, unpaved driveway with trees closing in on either edge – we were all a bit frayed. Opening the car door the heat hit us like a smack in the face – even at night the temperatures were in the 90s – as did the incredible noise of the jungle after dark. Buzzing, whirring, hooting – an incredible cacophony of new sounds, amazing to listen to when you’re calm and comfortable, but enough to put you more than a little on edge when you’re in an unfamiliar place with the only light coming from two yellow headlights guiding you forward. That first night we slept a bit restlessly.

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2 July 11, 2016 Breakfast

Stonewall Kitchen Maine Brunch (and Giveaway!)

We spent last weekend in Maine, in what felt like the real kick-off to the summer. I love the way Maine smells – like pine needles drenched in sun, freshly cut hay, lake water, wood shavings, and the occasional whiff of smoke. When I step out of the car I inhale deeply, taking in everything sweet and fresh and good about a place where days are spent outdoors and the windows are always open. It was a blissful few days. I went swimming every day, hiked on mossy trails and rocky ones, ate fried seafood overlooking the harbor, and caught a few beautiful sunsets – one from a small cabin deck with a 180° view of the ocean, one from the middle of the harbor, bobbing gently in our boat, and two from the picnic table where we gather for wine and dinner. I can’t wait to go back.

While we were there, we put together a sunny Sunday brunch featuring Stonewall Kitchen products in celebration of their 25^th anniversary. Stonewall Kitchen is a Maine company through and through, headquartered in a beautiful space in York, Maine. They are probably most famous for their jams and jellies (especially the Wild Maine Blueberry Jam!), but I’ve tried a number of their sauces and spreads and all of their products are truly high quality and delicious. Started by two young men selling their jams and chutneys at a farmer’s market, Stonewall Kitchen has expanded into a company that is a household name for many. You can read more of their story, and check out all their delicious products, on their anniversary website, Taste of 25 Years.

For our brunch, we used four Stonewall products to put together three delicious recipes. First, Sea Breeze Mimosas, the simplest thing in the world to make – just a splash of chilled cranberry-grapefruit Sea Breeze Mixer, a dash of cranberry bitters, and a healthy pour of prosecco. If you’re getting an extra strong start to your day, a little bit of vodka added to the mix doesn’t hurt either. Second, a Smoky Roasted Garlic Hash – potatoes sautéed with shallots, Roasted Garlic Oil and smoked paprika, strips of roasted red pepper and poblano, a sprinkling of scallions, and a crispy olive-oil fried egg to top each serving. And to finish off the dish, an essential topping: Habanero Mango Hot Sauce. This smoky, slightly sweet, slow-burn hot sauce is absolutely delicious – I’m kicking myself for leaving it behind with my family (we put it on everything from eggs to burgers to baked beans over the course of the weekend).

The last recipe, and in my opinion the star of the show, Wild Maine Blueberry Jam Doughnuts. These are the doughnuts of your dreams – light, just a little bit chewy, rolled in a generous amount of cinnamon sugar, and stuffed to the gills with Wild Maine Blueberry Jam. There’s a trendy/hipster doughnut shop near us in Boston that makes jelly doughnuts that I dream about (so much so that I got one for my birthday breakfast for the past two years) – and these were even better. Every single one of my family members tried to have just one and ended up eating two – even my weight-lifting, sugar-avoiding little brother.

Congrats to Corinne of Spare Cake on winning! ~~A Giveaway!~~ I have good news – Stonewall Kitchen is also hosting a giveaway to send one reader their own set of products to make a delicious, Maine-inspired brunch. In addition to the four products I used in these recipes, you will also receive a canister of Farmhouse Pancake and Waffle Mix and the most adorable Downeast Coffee Mug to round out your brunch-making kit. To enter the giveaway, leave a comment below telling me your favorite way to spend a summer morning. By entering the giveaway, you are agreeing to the contest rules as outlined at the bottom of this post.

Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Stonewall Kitchen, but all opinions are honest and my own as usual.

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Sea Breeze Mimosas

Serves 1.

1/4 c. Stonewall Kitchen Sea Breeze Mixer, chilled
1 dash bitters
1 oz. vodka (optional)
1 c. chilled Prosecco

Pour Sea Breeze Mixer into a champagne glass. Add 1 dash bitters and vodka, if using. Top with chilled Prosecco. Serve immediately.

Wild Maine Blueberry Jam Doughnuts

Makes 12 large doughnuts. Recipe adapted from Taste of Home and Serious Eats.

1 c. milk, heated until warm but not hot to the touch
2 packages active dry yeast
1/4 c. plus 1 TBS sugar, divided
3 TBS softened butter
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 1/2 c. AP flour
1 1/2 c. bread flour
canola oil or shortening, for frying
1 c. sugar mixed with 2 tsp ground cinnamon, for coating
2 jars Stonewall Kitchen Wild Maine Blueberry Jam

Place warm milk in a small bowl. Sprinkle yeast over the top of the milk, along with 1 TBS of the sugar. Stir for 30 seconds, then let stand 10 minutes, until yeast is foamy. Set aside.
In a large bowl, cream butter and remaining 1/4 c. sugar together until light and fluffy. Stir in salt, then beat in eggs until completely mixed in. Add milk and both kinds of flour and stir until a smooth dough is formed. Knead dough until it is smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Place dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in the fridge overnight.
When ready to fry doughnuts, remove the dough from the fridge. Shape into a flat disc, then roll out on a floured surface to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Use a biscuit cutter or glass to cut 3 inch circles out of the dough, and place doughnuts on a baking sheet or tray. Re-roll any scrap dough to make more doughnuts. Cover doughnuts with a towel and let rise for 20 minutes.
Heat canola oil or shortenining in a high-sided frying pan or dutch oven until the temperature reaches 350-375ºF. Fry doughnuts one at a time in the hot oil, flipping once. Doughnuts should fry for about 1 minute per side before they are golden brown on the outside and cooked all the way through. You may need to adjust the temperature up or down as you go.
Combine the 1 c. sugar and 2 tsp cinnamon in a paper bag. Immediately after frying each doughnut, place it in the paper bag and shake the bag to coat the doughnut with cinnamon-sugar before placing it on a plate to cool. Repeat the frying and sugar coating process until all doughnuts are cooked.
Once the doughnuts are cool to the touch, begin filling them. Place the blueberry jam in a pastry bag fitted with a pastry tip. Insert the pastry tip into the side of the doughnut and fill until the doughnut is heavy and jam is starting to come out the front of the doughnut. Serve doughnuts as soon as possible after filling them.

Smoky Roasted Garlic Potato Hash

Serves 4.

8-10 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, washed and cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1 tsp white vinegar
sea salt
2 TBS Stonewall Kitchen Roasted Garlic Oil, divided
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 poblano pepper
1 red pepper
4 slices bacon, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
3 large shallots, peeled and thinly sliced
1 TBS olive oil
4 eggs
Stonewall Kitchen Habanero Mango Hot Sauce, for serving

Add the cubed potatoes and white vinegar to a large pot. Fill with cold water to cover the potatoes and salt generously. Bring to a boil over medium heat, and boil gently until potatoes are just tender when poked with a fork, about 15 minutes. Drain the potatoes, then toss with 1 TBS of the roasted garlic oil and the smoked paprika. Set aside.
Preheat the broiler to high. Place the poblano pepper and red pepper on a foil-lined, rimmed baking sheet, then place under the broil. Broil until pepper skin is beginning to blacken and blister, then use tongs to turn the peppers to another side. This should take about 5 minutes per side. Once peppers are blackened all over, remove from the oven and set aside to cool. Once cool, remove and discard the stems and seeds, and slice the pepper flesh into thin strips.
Heat a large frying pan over medium heat and add bacon. Fry until browned and crispy, about 8-10 minutes, stirring frequently, then add the sliced shallots and saute until golden brown. Add the cooked potatoes to the pan and season generously with sea salt. Fry the potatoes until golden brown all over, stirring occasionally, about 15-20 minutes total. Remove from the heat and mix with the sliced peppers. Transfer to a large platter.
Heat the olive oil over medium-low heat in a frying pan. Carefully crack the eggs into the hot oil and fry sunny-side up. Place the fried eggs on top of the potato hash. Serve with the Habanero Mango Hot Sauce.

Giveaway Rules

No purchase necessary
Void where prohibited
One entry per household, and only entries answering the listed question will be considered
The sponsor of this giveaway is Stonewall Kitchen
The estimated retail value of the products is $49.25
The odds of winning will depend on the number of entries received
This contest is only open to U.S. citizens over the age of 18
The contest will open today, July 11^th, 2016 at posting time and will close at 11PM EST on Friday, July 22nd, 2016
One winner will be selected randomly and contacted via email (so please leave an accurate email address!). If I do not hear from the winner within 48 hours, the winner forfeits their prize and an alternate winner will be chosen.
I will post the winner here by Monday, August 1^st, 2016

3 June 15, 2016 Dessert

The New Place // Rhubarb Campari Sorbet with Prosecco

This month marks the one year anniversary of buying and moving into our house. It’s a little hard to believe it’s already been a year! We had grand plans for the house when we bought it (we still do) but we’ve progressed a little slower (OK significantly slower) than we planned. Our major accomplishment is that we’re halfway through renovating our basement, and really, that’s mostly thanks to Carl (thank you Carl!!!) and to Trevor’s dedicated trench digging. And Trevor has painstakingly renovated the guest room – it’s almost done and is going to look gorgeous with the new orange couch we bought. But even though the to-do list for the house is miles long, I love living in it the way it is. Because it’s ours!

The last time I moved, from the sunny Davis Square house I shared with three roommates, to the little Inman Square apartment Trevor and I moved into, the place that will always be our first apartment, I wrote this post, about all the things I would miss and all the things I was looking forward to. This time, I didn’t have the time to indulge in that kind of thinking before we moved, but now that things are calmer and our new house is starting to feel like ours, I find myself thinking about it more – what I miss, what I love.

There’s so much that I love about our new house. One of the biggest things is the light – every room in our house is filled with sun, and we know at any given time of day the best spot to curl up in the sun for a minute or two. The sun is also the key to the second thing I love – having our own garden, which is thriving. We don’t have tons of space but we are making the most of it: in the front we’ve replaced hedges with a hodge podge of flowers – foxgloves and heather and poppies and whatever else tickled our fancy at the nursery. After much deliberation on varieties, we planted an apple tree this spring, and regularly talk about the wealth of apples we’ll have in oh, say, five years. And along the side of the house are the herbs and veggies and fruit bushes, planted neatly in raised beds that get 10 hours of sun a day this time of year. Almost every night you can find Trevor and I out “walking the grounds,” checking each plant’s progress and then sitting on our stoop to discuss. I love that.

I’m surprised how much I like living in a neighborhood. “Neighborhood” wasn’t particularly high on our list when we were house shopping – we were coming from a series of city apartments where neighbors weren’t really a concept that had much impact on our lives. We never even met any of our neighbors in Cambridge. So we were really lucky to end up moving into a place where neighbor is a word with meaning – people who will take in your trash barrels and check on your house while you’re away, who chat across fences when you both happen to be out. Families with kids that spend all day playing outside. It’s great. And when it’s nice, I like to take long evening walks around the nearby streets, looking at houses and gardens and just enjoying the fact that there’s little traffic and lots of fresh air. In Cambridge I only walked places when I had a destination or an errand – here I walk just to walk.

There’s more. I love having my own office. It might sound materialistic of me, but one of my favorite things is sitting at my gorgeous new desk, with a homemade latte in my favorite mug, snuggled up in my extremely soft jersey robe, catching up on emails and blogging with the early morning sun falling softly through the window. It’s “me-time” at it’s finest. I love that the entire house is filled with gorgeous wooden floors, deeper in color than most. I love that we can change whatever we want about the house. And I like the new routines we’re building, like the Friday morning dates we have at Tamper cafe, one of only two remotely trendy/interesting eating establishments within walking distance.

The list of things that I miss is shorter. I miss being able to walk 30 steps around the corner and find myself in one of best local grocery stores/butchers in the city, the kind of place where you can find pork belly and black pudding and fava beans without having to give it a second thought. Ditto for being able to walk across the street and choose from a selection of trendy bars and restaurants. I miss having a house cleaner – something we could afford when we had fewer rooms and no renovation costs. And I miss being a little closer to our friends, although honestly, we’ve been just as social as before – having easy access to the highway means an Uber home from downtown is only $20 and 15 minutes, which is very doable a few times a month. And I honestly can’t think of anything else I miss. Nothing about the house itself. Just walkability and a handful of individual establishments.

We have a friend who is currently studying for his Master of Wine examination, who knows vast amounts more about wine than I could ever hope to. We have another, mutual, friend who recently brought a bottle of champagne to a soccer game to celebrate a finals win (they lost), only to find upon popping the cork that the champagne had gone flat. Upon discussing this event our wine-y friend told us – “Never save champagne. Open it up on a Tuesday night just because.” We are guilty of holding on to two bottles of fancy champagne that I know have been improperly stored. So we heeded his advice and opened one, just because, and also to celebrate our home-ownership anniversary. We drank half and the rest we poured over this gorgeous Rhubarb Campari Sorbet, which we slupred while watching Game of Thrones (now #champagneofthrones).

A few things to note. One, yes, it might seem wasteful to pour Veuve Cliquot over sorbet. I say, whatever floats your boat. Two, yes, the sorbet in some of these photographs is not at all set – it was almost Game of Thrones time and I couldn’t wait any longer. I need a blast chiller. Three, because of the aforementioned not-set sorbet, I photographed these again the next night. And yes, I opened another bottle of prosecco. Only this time, it was a $10 bottle of La Marca that’s been in our fridge for 2 1/2 years, so, about time. Which brings me to the main point of this paragraph – the prosecco was actually a much better match for the sorbet. It is significantly sweeter and blends better with the sweet and tangy sorbet. So, in conclusion, open your fancy champagne on a Sunday night just because. But if you’re going to pour it over sorbet, open the $10 prosecco instead. Or open both and live it up.

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Rhubarb Campari Sorbet

Makes 1 1/2 pints (3 cups). A Katie at the Kitchen Door original recipe.

1 lb. rhubarb, roughly chopped into segments (about 4 cups chopped)
1/2 c. water
1 c. sugar
3 TBS campari

Add rhubarb, water, and sugar to a large saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Simmer until the rhubarb is very soft and almost falling apart, about 10-15 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat and transfer to a blender. Blend on high until the mixture is a very smooth puree. Always use caution when blending hot liquids! Pour the blended mixture through a fine mesh strainer, using a spatula to press the mixture through the strainer into a large bowl. Stir the campari into the strained rhubarb puree until evenly combined. Chill the mixture until very cold.
Churn the chilled rhubarb puree in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Once churned, you may need to let the sorbet sit in the freezer for another 1-3 hours before it is firm enough to scoop.