Liz Denys

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.

I love to make and eat quiche. In fact, there was hardly a week last year that would pass where there wasn't a quiche in my refrigerator because I just love quiche that much. Why? Well, it's great any time of day, it reheats well, it can feed a crowd, and it doesn't have to be complicated or actively time consuming to make.

But the best part of quiche is that you only need to know one basic method to make virtually any everyday quiche. Of course, you can always level up and use more complex methods to make 3-inch tall spinach quiches in springform pans, but you have to care more about the specific ingredients you use because their weights become a factor you must incorporate into the recipe. Everyday quiches follow a simple, easy to remember method:

Roll out a pie crust (homemade is best, see below) and fit it into a pie pan. I like to use glass pie pans because it's easiest to see how much the crust has baked during blind baking, as the top will be covered with foil. Blind bake the pie crust by covering it with aluminum foil then filling the foil with pie weights for about 15 minutes at 450 degrees. If you don't have pie weights, dry rice or beans can be used instead, but you won't get as much mileage out of them if you make pies a lot. (You also probably won't be able to eat them later.) Blind baking is important in many pies because crust often needs to bake at higher temperatures than the rest of the pie to achieve the desired flaky texture.

If you're using a harder cheese, like cheddar or Gruyère, top the crust with cheese (here, I used sharp cheddar) after blind baking the crust and bake for another 5 minutes at 375 degrees. This keeps heavier cheeses separate from the egg and cream or milk quiche base, resulting in a lighter, fluffier quiche.

A quiche's ingredients can really be whatever you want. Commonly used ingredients include bacon, bell peppers, onions, asparagus, spinach, and mushrooms, but you should really only use this list as inspiration. My favorite quiche combination, used here, is crispy bacon, lightly caramelized onions, green apples (they're fantastic in quiche), and sharp cheddar.

Eggs obviously play an important role in quiche, and the addition of cream or milk makes them fluffy. I find that the easiest way to get the proportion of egg to liquid right in the quiche base is to crack your eggs into a measuring cup and fill with cream or milk (you can use either or any mixture of the two) until the measuring cup contains 1/2 cups times the number of eggs worth of substance. I used three eggs, so I filled the measuring cup to 1 1/2 cups.

Next, transfer the egg mixture to a mixing bowl, add a pinch of nutmeg and some salt and freshly ground pepper, and beat together until very well blended. Layer the ingredients in the pie crust, then pour the egg mixture over the ingredients.

Bake the quiche for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. I like to take the quiche out of the oven 10 minutes early and top with more cheese if I'm using a hard cheese to add another texture to the smooth, light pie.

In my opinion, the best pie crusts are made from scratch. Homemade pie crusts tend to be butterier than what you can find at a store, and they freeze just as nicely for long-term storage. I suggest making a few at a time if you plan to bake more than one pie over the course of the next few months. The following recipe is a great pie crust to have on hand because it's only lightly sweetened with sugar, so it works well in both savory and sweet pies.

Lightly sweet pâte brisée

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour - traditionally, this is 3/4 cups all-purpose flour + 1/4 cup cake flour, but honestly, I usually just use 1 cup bread flour because it's what's already out.
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup ice water

Preparation:

1. Combine 1/2 cup flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor and pulse a few times until mixed together.
2. Add the thin slices of butter to the mixture and pulse until even crumbs form.
3. Add the remaining 1/2 cup flour and pulse to combine.
4. Add the ice water and pulse until the dough is fully incorporated. Freeze until ready to use, and defrost just enough so that the dough can be rolled out between two sheets of cling wrap or wax paper.

Makes one 9-inch pie crust.

Creamsicles were one of my favorite desserts as a child. Whenever my family went to the pool, I would absolutely dread the 15 minutes every hour that I couldn't stay in the pool known as adult swim - until I headed over to the pool's snack shop and grabbed a creamsicle.

Unfortunately, as I grew older, I became less fond of ice creams (really, I don't know why, but frozen cream just doesn't do it for me anymore), but I still longed for the marriage of flavors between crisp oranges and sweet cream. So now I make panna cotta.

Panna cotta, or "cooked cream," is actually one of the simplest desserts to make (well, now that you can use gelatin instead of fish bones). It takes trivially more effort than jello (you have to measure out ingredients instead of just pouring out of a box) and the end result has a dramatically more elegant silky texture. Below is my recipe to satisfy my desires for a warmer creamsicle, clementine panna cotta, but if you replace the zest and vanilla extract with half a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste, you end up with a traditional vanilla panna cotta. But you can experiment with the flavors using the rest of the recipe as a base.

Clementine panna cotta

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin (packets of gelatin usually contain 1 tablespoon)
• 9 ounces milk
• 24 ounces heavy cream
• 7.5 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon clementine (or orange) zest
• 1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 6 clementine (or orange) slices for topping
• Honey for topping

Preparation:

1. Combine the gelatin and 4 ounces of the milk in a small bowl. Leave to absorb for about 10 minutes.
2. Combine the remaining milk, cream, sugar, and clementine zest in a heavy-based saucepan and bring to a boil.
3. Remove from the heat, and add to the gelatin mixture. Also add the vanilla extract. Whisk until completely dissolved.
4. Cool to room temperature. Strain, if desired (this will prevent zest from accumulating at the bottom of the bowl but is purely a matter of taste and presentation preferences), and pour into six 1-cup bowls or glasses. Cover and refrigerate for 5 hours. Turn out of bowls if desired for serving.

Makes 6 individual panna cottas.

Earlier this week, I made bacon cheddar scallion biscuits because I had been craving an especially savory breakfast bread option for those mornings that you wake up a little bit later than you'd like. Nothing too fancy, just fifteen traditional country biscuits except that I replaced some of the butter with bacon fat and added bacon, scallions, and a lot of extra sharp cheddar cheese.

But then late Friday night rolled around: I had already eaten dinner, but wanted just a tiny bit more food. Naturally, I was craving a burger, but knew that I couldn't handle a full portion. I had almost resigned myself to making myself a miniature burger with all the fixings but without a bun, but glanced over towards the toaster oven and noticed eight perfectly sized bacony, cheddary, buttery biscuits - practically waiting to become burger buns.

Putting caramelized onions, bacon, and cheddar on the burger along with the already flavor-packed biscuit felt like overkill, so instead, I left the bacon to the biscuit and put very finely diced onions along with slightly more grated extra sharp cheddar cheese in the burger patty itself. Well, that's a bit of a lie, a tablespoon or so more of grated cheddar ended up on top of the burger patty because cheese is kind of just that good. When the burgers seemed about done, I very, very lightly toasted (they had a lot of cheese in them) the bacon cheddar scallion biscuits.

All in all, these sliders were quite rich, but hardly overbearingly so. And quite delicious. I woke up the next day wanting them again (or maybe I just really have immense, insatiable burger cravings), so I made them for brunch the next day, too.