Liz Denys

I don't blog that much about savory food: savory food for me is even more technique-based than recipe-based, so I find it limiting to discuss one dish because it's a particular combination of techniques on a very particular set of ingredients. But I really enjoyed this particular butternut squash combination, so I'll settle for describing it without measurements.

The above is steamed butternut squash with lightly caramelized onions and red and orange bell peppers with a cinnamon sage brown butter sauce on a bed of arugula, which I assure you sounds much more complicated than it actually is.

It actually started off two nights before as a sauce for fresh sweet potato gnocchi. I'm not completely sure what inspired me to make that combination because it had the failure mode of most gnocchi I want to make: too many vegetables, not enough emphasis on the gnocchi itself. I guess I'm just not one for snarfing down a bowl of pasta on its own because I never manage to feel anywhere between unsatisfied and overstuffed from mostly starch. But then I remade it again precisely the same without the gnocchi and loved it.

Butternut squash with cinnamon sage brown butter

Ingredients:

• Onions, diced
• Olive oil
• Unsalted butter
• Red bell peppers, diced
• Orange bell peppers, diced
• Fresh sage, finely chopped
• Ground cinnamon
• Butternut squash, diced
• Arugula
• Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fleur de sel or other coarse sea salt

Preparation:

1. In a small saucepan, lightly caramelize the onions in a little olive oil and butter until a pale brown.
2. Add more butter to the saucepan, and cook on medium heat until browned. Watch carefully to avoid burning the butter.
3. Lower the heat and add red and orange bell peppers, sage, and cinnamon. Cook until flavors meld then remove from heat.
4. Boil or steam the butternut squash in another pan until tender. (You could also pan roast the the butternut squash in the sauce over low to medium heat, but it will require more butter than cooking the squash separately.)
5. Layer arugula, butternut squash, and onion pepper brown butter sauce. Grate Parmigiano Reggiano cheese over the top and finish with black pepper and fleur de sel.

But you still have large blocks of Valrhona dark chocolate and are craving the flavors of chocolate chip cookies? Turns out that while it's difficult to turn a large block into chip-sized chunks, it's a lot easier to turn it into shavings. Unfortunately, these shavings would get lost in the texture of a traditional chocolate chip cookie, but they add a delicate layer of flavor to a vanilla cake.

Sometimes, you just don't want to bake an entire cake, even a small single-layer cake, because you know enough of it won't get consumed quickly, so your best plan of action is to make individual cookie-sized cakes. Their fluffy, tender cake insides are well preserved by a smooth, cookie-like exterior.

The secret: replacing some of the butter in a cookie recipe with more ricotta cheese. This doesn't come as too much of a surprise - lemon ricotta cookies are often borderline cake-textured - but the trick here is adding a little extra vanilla and coarse salt so that your chocolate and simple cookie dough flavors don't turn into cheese ones instead. The result? The fluffiest chocolate tinged cookies around.

Ricotta chocolate shavings cookies

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup whole milk ricotta cheese (skim milk ricotta makes a firmer cookie)
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste (I like the added vanilla bean flecks here, you can use extract instead)
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon coarse salt
• 1 cup dark chocolate shavings

Preparation:

1. Cream softened butter, ricotta cheese, and sugars together.
2. Add egg and vanilla bean paste and mix until well incorporated.
3. Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in another bowl. Add to the wet mixture and blend together.
4. Fold in chocolate shavings.
5. Optionally chill the batter in a refrigerator 2 hours to overnight. Though, I find that these cookies bake almost as well when you skip this step, but the batter is a little fussier to handle.
6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Using an ice cream scoop or tablespoon, place 1 1/2 inch diameter balls of dough about 2 1/2 inches apart on baking sheets covered with parchment paper. Bake for 16-20 minutes on the top rack or until the edges just browned.

Yields 18 3-inch diameter, 1-inch high cookie cakes. When kept in a sealed tin after cooling, they retain their texture for a few days.

I don't have a lot of complete memories from my childhood. Somehow, my photographic memory didn't kick in until the middle of seventh grade, when all of a sudden I started to remember everything. Sadly, everything from before that time is either a blurry film played a fifteen times the normal speed or a small set of photographs picked from an album that fail to tell a story. But sometimes the couple of photographs can be pieced back together to make something that resembles cohesion, even if they can't form an actual story.

Sometime in either kindergarten or early grade school, my class took a field trip to some reasonably famous breakfast place (I'm terrible at putting this part of the story together) where we helped the kitchen make apple pancakes then ate them with our classmates. I remember peeling and slicing the apples, playing with some dough, and arranging dough in a lattice on top of what now seems to be more like a pie than a pancake. I can even faintly smell the scent of granny smith apples against a tin-toned industrial kitchen.

Then for about fifteen years, I had not seen or even heard about apple pancakes.

Until I wanted to make more foods, especially everyday baked foods, in my cast iron frying pan. And it all came back to me, even though my baked apple pancake just seems lighter and less rich overall (or maybe I'm just nostaglic).

While it may not feel as decadent of that pancake so many years ago, it's easy to be enticed by its easy, simple pleasure. Melt a small amount of butter into a cast iron frying pan, slice and lightly sauté a couple of apples, whisk together batter, assemble, stick in the oven, take a long hot shower, and when you're out, there's an aromatic, fluffy pancake waiting to start your day.

Baked apple pancake

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 Granny Smith apples, cored and cut into thin slices
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Preparation:

1. Preheat an oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 10-inch cast iron pan, braiser, or other oven safe pan.
2. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a frying pan over medium heat.
3. Add the apple slices, cinnamon, ground ginger, and brown sugar. Sauté until the apples begin to soften and brown, which takes about 5 to 6 minutes, then set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs. Add the milk, flour, and salt to the eggs and whisk until blended well.
5. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter. Add the melted butter to the egg mixture and whisk until smooth.
6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan; then arrange the apple slices evenly on top. Bake until the pancake is lightly browned and has puffed up, about 25 minutes.

Makes 4 servings.

Once upon a time, I stumbled across a reasonably accurate Szechuan recipe for dan dan mian. This isn't it.

In fact, I've never actually made it because I couldn't acquire all of the ingredients without going out of my way. Also, I don't really like committing to making a certain meal while in the store (ratatouille being a notable exception), so for dan dan mian to actually grace my stove top, it needed to use only things that I would have around with reasonable probability or that I could buy once and use many times (like chili paste).

The recipe I used is at most inspired by Szechuan dan dan mian. Actually, it started off reasonably authentic, at least to my knowledge. But then I added a large splash of soy sauce to the pork and couldn't find non-whole-wheat noodles in my cabinets that weren't (clearly too wide) pappardelle egg noodles. I did, however, actually have pork stock for making the broth because I had made pork dumplings the weekend before.

The biggest departure happened when I added the greens, as I'm pretty sure Brussels sprouts sautéed in bacon fat don't really count as authentic Asian of any sort. I found that cutting them into quarters lengthwise helped them break down into smaller parts: I don't usually desire this from my Brussels sprouts, but it made them easier to eat in a chopstick-sized bites with the rest of the dish. The flavoring of the sprouts didn't make the dish feel overwhelmingly less true to form (though who am I to really know; I'm clearly not Chinese), but the texture was definitely something foreign to this type of food.

While this meal may not make sense to those who hold traditional Szechuan cooking close to their hearts, it was a hearty, delicious meal of which I was excited to have even a teeny tiny bit leftover for the next day's lunch.

"Dan dan mian"

Ingredients:

• For the meat:
  • 2 tablespoons sesame oil
  • 1/3 cup scallions, green and white portions finely chopped
  • 1/3 cup onions, finely diced
  • 2 tablespoons garlic, minced
  • 2 teaspoons ginger, peeled and minced
  • 1/2 pound ground pork
  • 2 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 3 tablespoons chili paste
  • Black pepper
• For the broth:
  • 3 tablespoons good peanut butter with a bit of crunch
  • 1 tablespoon sesame seeds
  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil
  • 3 cups pork (or chicken) stock
  • Salt
• For the Brussels sprouts:
  • ~10 Brussels sprouts, rinsed and quartered lengthwise
  • 2 tablespoons bacon fat
• 8 ounces noodles (any kind works, I used pappardelle egg noodles)
• Chopped fresh cilantro

Preparation:

1. For the meat:
   1. Heat the sesame oil in a sauté pan over medium heat.
   2. Once the pan is hot, add in the scallions, onions, garlic, and ginger, ands sauté for roughly five minutes or until the onions and ginger are slightly softened.
   3. Add the pork, soy sauce, and chili paste. Stir fry until pork is thoroughly cooked.
   4. Add black pepper to taste, mix well, and set aside.
2. For the broth:
   1. Heat the stock over medium high heat until it begins simmering.
   2. Meanwhile, add the peanut butter, sesame seeds, and sesame oil to a food processor and pulse until blended. The sesame seeds should end up finely chopped and the peanut butter should be more smooth though not completely smooth.
   3. Once the stock has begun simmering, ladle about a half cup into the peanut butter and sesame mixture and pulse again until well blended. This prevents the broth from being clumpy.
   4. Add the peanut butter and sesame mixture to the rest of the broth and turn heat down to medium.
   5. Add salt to taste and simmer for about ten minutes; then, turn down heat to low so that it doesn't reduce too much. For an exceptionally smooth broth, optionally blend for a minute with an immersion blender (or pour mixture into a stand up blender then return to the stove).
3. For the Brussels sprouts:
   1. In a small pot of salted, boiling water, blanch the Brussels sprouts until tender. Drain.
   2. Sauté in bacon fat until crisped and browned. Set aside. Note that the sprouts will probably fall apart - this is actually desirable because they will mix better with the ground pork as topping for the noodles.
4. In a pot of boiling water, cook the noodles according to their instructions. Strain.
5. Divide the noodles between two large bowls. Ladle in broth. Top with the meat and Brussels sprouts and garnish with cilantro.

Makes 2 servings.

I'm not frequently a fan of flavored lattes. I like an occasional pumpkin spice latte near Halloween, an occasional vanilla latte if it's exceptionally well made, but I usually just stick with the simple unflavored latte. Furthermore, I'm definitely not a fan of mochas: I'd rather alternate sips between a coffee and a hot chocolate. But the other day, I was at a recently opened nearby coffee shop, Voltage Coffee & Art, and I just had to ask them about their "Madame X" latte - one flavored with "Earl Grey infused white chocolate ganache."

It surprised me: I was afraid it would taste too much like a mocha with strong coffee as well as tea, but since they only put a "latte amount," less than a tablespoon, of the Earl Grey infused white chocolate ganache syrup in, it tasted divine. You could taste the espresso, the bergamot from the Earl Grey, and the white chocolate, but instead of being three competing flavors, the bergamot perfumed the coffee, the white chocolate cut the strength of the bergamot, and the strength of espresso subdued the white chocolate to tasting like an elegant cream.

I decided to make my own version of the Earl Grey infused white chocolate ganache syrup so that I could make the latte at home. My version is fairly simple to make, and you can add as much or as little as you want to coffee and steamed milk to produce anything from a flavored latte (about a teaspoon and a half) to a bergamot white hot chocolate (or even mocha if you prefer), as the bergamot here is pronounced but scales delicately. I recommend pairing with a lighter espresso roast.

Earl Grey infused white chocolate ganache latte syrup

Ingredients:

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1/3 cup milk (2%)
• 1 tablespoon Earl Grey tea leaves
• 10 ounces white chocolate, coarsely chopped or chips
• 2 tablespoons light corn syrup or glucose

Preparation:

1. Pour cream and milk into a small saucepan. Add Earl Grey tea leaves, and bring to a boil. Stir while boiling so that cream mixture does not scald.
2. Meanwhile, melt white chocolate over a double broiler. Add corn syrup or glucose and stir until mixed completely.
3. Once tea has steeped enough (about 5 minutes after boiling), strain tea leaves then replace cream mixture in the saucepan. Add the melted white chocolate mixture as well. Stir until thoroughly combined. Remove from heat.
4. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Makes roughly 2 1/2 cups of syrup.