Liz Denys

I spend a lot of time sharing the secrets of my cooking and my baking, but today, I'm sharing some of the secrets of my kitchen. Actually, they're not so secret to anyone who's had a peek around my kitchen.

Oven thermometer(s)

For about five dollars, you can ensure your cookies spread evenly, brownies don't get burnt, and cakes rise perfectly. Don't think it makes that much a difference? My previous oven was always off by at least 25 degrees and had this special property of non-linear gain between 275 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit - all the temperatures where it really matters in baking. Having more than one is great because over time they die out, especially if you subject them, even the high heat ones, to high heats a lot and they check each other's work.

Potholders just next to my stove and oven

Alright, when I'm not taking this picture, they're about three inches right of my stove. It's great avoiding the need to rummage through a drawer when you weren't paying quite as much attention to what's in your oven as you should have. Yet I actually find it more useful that they are right by my stove than my oven below. Sure, part of it is that I mostly cook with cast iron and Dutch ovens whose handles always end up too hot to the touch, but potholders also make for a trivet substitute when you're taking a pot hot off the stove to make room for another.

A mat for my main kitchen counter

Maybe your kitchen isn't as tiny as mine, but nothing doubles the size of your counter quite like a large mat. It makes normal clean up quick - just throw it in the sink, soap up, and rinse - and helps you have the working space you need for more intensive cooking. It also really eased my transition from nearly 15 square feet of usable counter space to a measly almost 4 (I did move to Manhattan). I especially love the really non-stick quality of mine that makes rolling out pie crusts, turning puff pastry, and cutting scones easy.

Painter's tape and a retractable Sharpie

The duo of 3/4-inch blue painter's tape and the handy retractable black Sharpie makes labeling quick, easier to remove than anything else I've tried, and bold. Invaluable when you store lots of things that look like lots of other things. Or if you just have a bad memory for which spices you added to your latest hot chocolate mix.

Recipes on the inside of my cabinets

I hate dealing with books or random pieces of paper flying around my kitchen when I'm trying to beat eggs or chop onions. The insides of my above the counter kitchen cabinets are the perfect usually wasted space for pasting recipes; it's easy to just open or close the cabinet to see how many teaspoons of baking powder you need. Plus, since the recipes are usually out of view, no one has to know that you secretly love how easy and nerd chic it is to read your recipes off cheap copy paper filled with monospace type (oops, I just told you).

If I call the soup I've been making nearly weekly for the past few months French onion soup, I'm probably lying a little bit. What most people call French onion soup is mostly a thing of the past for me.

But this soup is very similar. I grew out of the big croutons and the melted cheese, and I felt the need that my recipe, well method really, had to step up to the intensity those ingredients gave in other ways. Part of that was using onions with more intense flavors than Vidalia. Yet even without the sweet white onions, this soup ends up sweeter - and denser and more filling.

But I think my favorite thing about this soup is that I can tell you exactly how to make it without any measuring cups or spoons. It takes a lot of time, but it's also really easy. Don't let its requiring caramelizing onions scare you.

French onion soup redux: simple onion soup

Ingredients:

• Olive oil, enough to coat the pot you're using and another dash
• A combination of red, yellow, and white onions - but not Vidalia for this soup as they're too sweet - enough to fill the pot
• A handful of shallots (I usually use three)
• Kosher salt
• A heavy dash of brown sugar
• A splash of red wine
• Beef stock, enough to almost fill the pan once the onions are caramelized
• A bay leaf or two
• Thyme
• Fresh ground black pepper

Preparation:

1. Coat your pot with olive oil. (I prefer to use a 3.5 quart dutch oven that happens to be shaped like a pumpkin.) I recommend drizzling it over the bottom of the pan and spreading it around with a paper towel: you'll waste some, but you won't risk over coating and thus making it harder to caramelize the onions.
2. Slice the red, yellow, and white onions thinly - about a quarter of an inch wide at the thickest layer - from stem to root. Dice the shallots. Repeat until you have thrown enough into your pot that it's exactly full without trying to stuff it.
3. Drizzle just a dash of olive oil over the onions. Add a dash of kosher salt to the pot. Toss the onions lightly in the oil and salt.
4. Cover the pot and place it over medium high heat. This is to sweat the onions. Not everyone caramelizes onions this way (it does take more time), but I always do because it retains the strong onion flavor within the sweet flavors from caramelization. Turn the heat down to medium when all the onions are translucent and there's an inch of so liquid at the bottom of the pot. You'll want to peek and stir the bottom onions towards the top to prevent burning instead of sweating.
5. Remove the lid. Add a heavy dash of brown sugar, not too much for taste, but to help caramelize the onions; you don't need all too much. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until lightly brown and reduced by more than half - that is caramelized. This is the long and grueling stage, about an hour or two depending on how big a pot and how high your medium heat is. You want to make sure that they don't burn as you cook them by stirring every ten minutes or so, more towards the end. You know that you can move to the next step when continuing to cook the onions will cause them to burn. There should be some onion sweat still in the bottom of the pot, just very thickened, and the onions will be a deep golden brown. Let some of them burn a little and get some nice smokey flavors stuck to the bottom of the pot.
6. Throw a dash of red wine into the pot to deglaze, that is to help scrape the burnings off the bottom of the pot and mix in with the onions. Don't throw in more than a dash of red wine to deglaze because we'll deglaze further with beef stock and we don't want this to be as strong a flavor as in "normal" French onion soup.
7. Add a few dashes of beef stock to the pot, stir, and scrape the bottom of the pot more to make sure that all the burns are back into the soup. After, add enough beef stock that the pot is almost filled but you can still stir it - I fill it until there's about an inch of the pot above the soup.
8. Turn the heat back up to medium high to high heat. Add the bay leaf or two, a few pinches of thyme, and a few grinds worth of black pepper. Cook to reduce for about thirty minutes or until reduced by about a quarter. I really like the flavors that bay leaf imparts, so I leave it in that whole time; you might want to pull it sooner.
9. Season to taste with additional kosher salt and black pepper. But keep the salt light or you'll lose this soup's sweetness. Cook for another 5 minutes to combine, let cool a few minutes (otherwise, it will burn your tongue), then serve. It goes better with fresh bread than toast or cheese.

This makes about 4 servings when I make it in my 3.5 quart Dutch oven.

I've never understood the common obsession with chocolatey baked goods that aren't insanely rich. Don't get me wrong - I like chocolate - but that's just it, I like chocolate, not a pinch of cocoa flavor. Chocolate chip cookies always tasted better to me with the chips on the side, and chocolate cakes would have been more delicately delicious if they were vanilla. So when I make a chocolate baked good intended at least partly for me, it's got to be rich.

Cookies that secretly want to be brownies but like their density better definitely satisfy my chocolate baked good craving (and even are better than brownies to me). It seems like most people don't make chocolate cookies without making them chocolate chocolate chip cookies, but I don't want bursts of chocolate that break up the chewy texture - I want a kick of something salty. And since it's Christmastime, something peppermint.

Well, I only had six miniature candy canes, so just throwing a bunch of those into batter for about a hundred cookies (remember how I can't bake in small quantities?) wouldn't do. Where I didn't have enough candy canes, I did have a lot of peppermint bark. I threw the six miniature candy canes and a big slab of peppermint bark into my food processor to create a pepperminty chocolate powder to throw into the smooth, rich cookies for frequent bursts of minty holiday cheer.

Peppermint brownie cookies

Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups peppermint bark and candy canes, mostly peppermint bark (mine was white and dark chocolate with broken candy canes)
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 0.25 cups glucose (keeps them moist, chewy, and shiny)
• 0.75 cups granulated sugar
• 0.75 cups brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 0.5 teaspoons vanilla
• 3 ounces melted dark chocolate
• 1.25 cups flour
• 0.75 cups cocoa powder
• 0.5 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Preparation:

1. Break up the peppermint bark and candy canes and place in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until the mixture is finely ground. Take a break for a minute or so if the food processor starts to get warm so that the chocolate does not clump. Set ground bark and candy canes aside.
2. Cream butter, glucose, and sugars together. Beat for roughly three minutes.
3. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until combined.
4. Melt the dark chocolate, add, and beat until combined.
5. In another bowl, mix the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Combine these dry ingredients with the wet mixture and mix until combined.
6. Add ground bark and candy canes, and lightly mix just until combined. Refrigerate the dough for about thirty minutes to an hour - until firm, but still soft enough to mold.
7. Heat the oven to 375 degrees.
8. Arrange teaspoon-sized balls of dough on a parchment-lined baking sheet, then pat the tops of the cookies down so that they are no more than half an inch tall. If the dough becomes soft while portioning out cookies, place the baking sheet in the refrigerator until firm again.
9. Bake for roughly 10-12 minutes. Like brownies, they are done when they are slightly underbaked and will firm up as they cool. Let cool on the cookie sheet until you are able to move them to a cooling rack with the help of a spatula.

Yields roughly 4 dozen cookies.

I grew up on pumpkin muffins. Every fall, without fail, my mom would make them by the dozens in her heart-shaped muffin mold, and I'd eat them for breakfast, sneak them into my lunchbox, frost them for dessert after dinner, and snack on them off courts at tennis meets.

But I live some nearly 800 miles away from my mom now and autumn isn't marked with heart-shaped pumpkin muffins morning, noon, and night anymore.

My pumpkin muffins are close to her recipe, but with butter instead of canola oil and brown sugar instead of white, I end up with something a little richer, sweeter but drier, subtler. They don't work well with frosting, but also don't want any. And if I'm forced to compare, this muffin makes a little more sense with my morning cup of coffee than my childhood mug of hot chocolate.

My version of Mom's pumpkin muffins

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter (my mom uses canola oil)
• 3 cups brown sugar (my mom uses white sugar)
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 15-ounce can pumpkin
• 3 cups flour
• 2 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 3/4 tsp nutmeg
• 3/4 tsp ginger
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine butter (oil) and sugar in a stand mixer and cream together.
3. Add eggs and mix until combined.
4. Add milk and pumpkin and mix until combined.
5. Add dry ingredients until incorporated. Be careful to not over-beat.
6. Fill greased or paper muffin tins until they are 2/3 to 3/4 full and bake for 25-30 minutes if making normal size muffins. If making miniature muffins decrease time and watch carefully. Bake until lightly browned.
7. Remove from pan and serve warm. These can also be frosted when cool if desired and eaten as a treat.

Yields 2 dozen muffins.

I went most of my life without having fennel. Then one day I had it roasted, the next raw, and I was in love. Surprising, given that I'm not very partial to anise flavoring.

While fennel is very versatile to cook with - you can boil, braise, fry, grill, roast, sauté, or steam it - my favorite way to eat fennel is raw. It makes spectacular salads:

Fennel, edamame, and onion salad

Ingredients:

• Raw fennel bulb, stalk, and leaves, raw and chopped
• Edamame, cooked and out of the pods
• Onion, raw and very finely diced
• Olive oil
• Freshly squeezed lemon juice
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Kosher salt

Preparation:

1. Combine all ingredients to taste. Let combine for at least an hour before serving; the longer you wait, the better the flavors will mesh and the less pungent the onions will be.

This salad is even better when you add in chopped raw mushrooms.