Category Archive

The ultimate comfort food

We have a tradition for the first meal we eat on our first night in a new apartment. It’s not particularly original – we order pizza. I remember when we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, in one of the most hellish days I’ve ever spent – just try to imagine navigating a U-Haul through the streets of the Big Apple – and we finally allowed ourselves to relax, surrounded by boxes, with a pesto pizza from the parlor a few blocks down Amsterdam Ave.

Last weekend, we moved from our well-appointed but tiny apartment in Wallingford to a more spacious pad in Madrona. We now have a washer and dryer, a dishwasher and a (gasp) full-sized refrigerator. The first night, with an almost-bare fridge and most cutlery still deep in boxes, we again ordered pesto pizza, indulging in a garlicky chicken topping.

You get a freebie on moving day. But after that, you have to roll up your sleeves and put away enough kitchen supplies to actually make use of that nice fancy kitchen you wanted so badly. For me, the odds are good I’ll break in my oven with cookies.

The critical components

It used to be chocolate chip was my standby, but Jeremy loves snickerdoodles with an almost-religious fervor. I can get behind that. Snickerdoodles are essentially sugar cookies with the addition of cream of tartar for that distinctive tang, given a quick roll in cinnamon and sugar. Some bakers believe they should be thin and flat, and I’ve made them that way before. We prefer, however, a plumper cookie. That gives you a slightly crunchy crust on the exterior that gives way when you bite it into a chewy center.

My recipe is adapted from an AllRecipes.com entry called “Mrs. Sigg’s Snickerdoodles“. It might not be that glamorous to use an online recipe, but I’ve tried the America’s Test Kitchen version and it honestly wasn’t as good. Also, the AllRecipes one has almost 2500 reviews and over 33,000 versions saved. Sometimes, the masses are just right.

Mmm...cookies...

Snickerdoodles

From AllRecipes.com

• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 1/4 cup shortening, such as Crisco
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 1/3 cups flour
• 1 tsp. cream of tartar
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 2 Tb. sugar
• 2 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Using a hand or stand mixer, cream together butter, shortening, sugar, egg and vanilla. Slowly stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt (ok, ok, you can sift the dry ingredients together first if you’re legit like that.)

Cover a baking sheet with a parchment paper. In a small ziplock sandwich bag, mix the sugar and cinnamon.

Shape the dough into small balls about 3/4 inch in diameter. I find it works best to do this with your hands. Then drop each ball of dough into the ziplock bag and shake it around so it’s coated on all sides.

Arrange the balls of dough on the baking sheet with some space in between and then gently press on the top of each one – don’t flatten them, just dimple the tops a bit.

Bake 8-10 minutes, until the bottoms are light brown and the tops start to crack a bit. Don’t wait until the tops are golden-brown – they will be dry and overcooked at that point.

Makes 18-24 cookies, depending on size.

Shelf life of about 3 hours

One of the great things about living in the Pacific Northwest is that every summer, right around the beginning of August, the landscape erupts with blackberries. I mean, the little buggers are everywhere: in vacant lots, in alleys, climbing out of retaining walls, in traffic circles, along every road. I’ve read that they’re comparable to kudzu in the South; crawling over everything like weeds, resistant to extermination.

If something has to be so pervasive, hey, at least it produces fruit. There’s really no reason to buy blackberries in the store or even the market, when I can take a bowl, walk around the block, and pick a good half-pint. My father said he went to a 5-foot swath south of the city, shook the branches, and enough for a pie literally fell into his waiting bowl.

Today I took a little stroll around my neighborhood and down to Greenlake and returned with, as usual, more berries than I knew what to do with. There’s a fine line when picking blackberries — you go from “hmm, will I find enough?” to looking down and realizing “holy crap I just picked three pounds of blackberries” rather quickly. Once you find a fruitful patch, you go into a blackberry frenzy, picking every plump berry in sight until you suddenly snap to reality and accept that you have way more than you need.

I decided to make free-form blackberry tarts, which is another way of saying I didn’t want to worry if they looked pretty. A good thing, too; these were, shall we say, “rustic” in appearance, though they tasted just fine – maybe a little more sugar needed to counter the tartness of the berries. Or vanilla ice cream on top would work as well.

I really do feel fortunate to have so much good quality fruit at my fingertips. We don’t have enough room for a garden, yet I’m still able to walk out the door and within minutes have ample fresh produce in hand. Seattle in the summer, to me, always means blackberry picking.

Free-Form Blackberry Tarts

(adapted from How to Cook Everything)

Dough:

• 1 1/8 cups flour
• 2 Tb. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• ice water
• 1 egg yolk

Filling:

• approx. 2 cups blackberries (or could use another berry of your choice)
• 1-2 tsp. sugar, depending how sweet the berries are
• 1 tsp. cinnamon or nutmeg
• 2 Tb. melted butter

To make the dough, put flour, sugar, and salt into a food processor and pulse a few times to blend. Add in the butter and pulse for about 10 seconds, until mixture resembles cornmeal.

Turn mixture into a bowl and sprinkle 3 Tb. ice water and egg yolk over it. Using a wooden spoon, gently mix until it starts to come together — you may need to add another half Tb. of ice water. When you can, use your hands to mold the dough into a ball. Wrap it in plastic wrap, flatten into a disk, and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Mix the berries with sugar and spice, but gently so they hold their shape.

When the dough is chilled, take it out and cut it into four pieces. Roll each piece out into a rough circle, about 1/8 inch thick. Place all four circles onto a baking sheet.

Put berries in the center of each circle of dough, leaving about an inch of dough from the edge. Fold up the edges around the berries so they’re tucked in, but don’t try to cover the berries with the dough entirely.

Brush the dough and the fruit with melted butter. Bake for 20-30 minutes, until fruit bubbles and the crust is golden brown.

Serve with powdered sugar, or vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream. If they look misshapen, just tell people that’s the idea.

Fug-tastic tarts