Stuff I've Been Cooking — August 2023

Summer dishes in full force.

I neglected to give a cooking update in July; so I’m making up for it with this month’s supersized “Stuff I’ve Been Cooking” column. There’s no time to waste!

Mussels with orzo in coconut and saffron

In June I declared I was entering my Ixta Belfrage era. Last October I declared I was welcoming more mussels into my life. And since both posts, I’ve cooked nary an Ixta recipe and super nary a mussel. That all changed last night with this glorious mussel dish from Ixta. The coconut milk lends a velvety texture to the broth while onions and tomatoes offer respective pops of sweet and tangy. These aren’t revolutionary ingredients with mussels, but here they’re used beautifully. The big game changer for me was the orzo. Why don’t we use orzo with mussels more? Do people do that? Am I just late to the party? Sure it’s fun to dip bread into the broth (and lord knows I definitely did that), but how convenient to have the sop-vessel already IN the liquid? This dish was so good I saved the leftovers to use as sauce with chicken. And by the way, I suspect this would be excellent as a straight up chicken dish anyway.

Fun fact: Just now I poked a spoon in the leftover broth, and I realized that I didn’t need to save it for chicken because it already had orzo in it. IT WAS ITS OWN PASTA DISH! I ate it immediately.

Vietnamese Coffee ice cream and other assorted frozen things

On Amazon Prime day this year I upgraded my old ice cream maker for a fancy one with a built in compressor. This means I can now essentially whip up ice creams from scratch in about 90 minutes, which is a real boon to everything except my waistline. People may not know this, but in the early 2010s I was an avid ice cream maker. Now I’m back in full force, plundering the pages of David Lebovitz’s excellent cookbook The Perfect Scoop. First up I made Vietnamese coffee ice cream, which I found sensational. Notably, it never hardens past a semi-stiff soft-serve, which means it melts swiftly once scooped, but I was okay with that. My friend Paul enjoyed it too but felt it was a shade too sweet. Next time I’ll brew stronger coffee to offset the sweetened condensed milk.

I followed that success with an intriguing recipe called Super Lemon Ice Cream. Imagine lemon sorbet… but with a creamy finish. Fresh out of the ice cream maker, I thought this one was good but strange. Since then I’ve embraced the strangeness, and now I’m obsessed with it.

Lastly, I’m currently spooning my way through a quart of divine chocolate sorbet, which honestly destroys all other chocolate frozen confections, sorbet or otherwise. It features no eggs or dairy, but six ounces of chocolate is mixed into the batter (so, some dairy technically), lending the sorbet an uncharacteristically creamy texture. You’d swear you’re eating ice cream. The result is a deeply rich chocolate experience that feels so decadent and luxurious, you might expect to find it in a high end restaurant. It is unparalleled, and in the world of frozen desserts, almost… healthy?

Rice Cooker Sardine Rice

My tinned fish journey continues, most recently with the purchase of Anna Hezel’s From Tin to Table cookbook. The other night I tackled her delightfully simple yet elegant rice cooker sardine dish, which took maybe 5 minutes to prep and 15 minutes to cook? Yes, it made my kitchen smell very fishy, but it also made my heart feel very joyful. This is the epitome of a weeknight meal, and it’s going in the rotation, funk be damned.

Lemongrass chicken noodle salad of dreams

I love when a recipe hypes itself up. Salad of dreams? I’ll be the judge of that. From Lara Lee’s new book A Splash of Soy, this composed and beautiful Southeast Asian inspired salad comes together about as quickly as the rice cooker sardine thing, and it’s just as good (maybe even better tbh). No surprise here: IT’S GOING IN THE ROTATION. Actually, it’s already in the rotation because it was so good that I made it again the very next night. The real aha moment for me here was using chicken tenders for the protein. They cook faster than a breast and take on more marinade. Huzzah! Turns out this WAS the lemongrass chicken noodle salad of my dreams!

Tomato Tart a.k.a. THE Tart (I suspect)

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, I spent July 4th weekend in the Hamptons with my friends cooking up local produce, and this tomato tart by Alison Roman may have stolen the show. Hailing from her new cookbook Sweet Enough, this tart comes together very quickly and packs a bold, undeniable flavor explosion. I’ve already made it a second time, and I continue to marvel at how truly remarkable this dish is. This is probably my favorite thing I’ve made in this newsletter.

Pull-apart bun bread with whipped honey butter

Nothing I’ve made this summer… or perhaps any summer… has been so perfectly photogenic as this gah-gah-gah-gorgeous pull apart bread from Nevada Berg’s Norwegian Baking Through The Seasons. I don’t often bake bread, but this recipe kept catching my eye; so I woke up early on a recent Friday morning and started the process. I was delighted by how easy it was — a recurring theme this month, it seems — despite various steps to knead, proof, and roll out the dough. My friend Judy came over for the tasting (and to watch Love Island UK, natch), and we were both blown away by the bread. We honestly couldn’t stop eating slice after slice, which I think is actually okay because a bread like this really is meant to be consumed fresh. It held up well over the next few days, but it was only truly special that first morning. We loved the accompanying honey butter recipe, but we also had great success pivoting in a savory direction by spreading salted Irish butter and dill atop the slices as well. There may have been an anchovy moment too. What is life?

Sausage bake with crunchy potatoes, red cabbage, and caraway

The sausages photographed oddly pale, but I can assure you they were a) not raw, and b) quite crispy.

UGH! So many great weeknight meals to report! Here is yet another one, this time coming to us from Melissa Clark’s Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals. Basically, you just roast potatoes and cabbage on a sheet pan, adding mustard-slathered sausages midway through. I opted for Italian sausage because why not. I love their garlic punch. Also, this may have been an oversight, but I don’t believe the recipe calls for salting the potatoes. Let’s not pretend like sausage juices are enough. I salted those Yukons, and so glad I did. Would have been a disaster otherwise. Nevertheless, what a breezy, straightforward midweek meal. Will call on this one again.

Cashew caramel cookies

A gooey, stretchy vision of caramel catches my attention every time I page by this recipe in Jesse Szewczyk’s book Cookies: The New Classics. It was only a matter of time before I made these molten-centered caramel cookies. These were hugely successful, especially with my boyfriend, who quietly snuck one under his paw seemingly every time he walked by the cookie stash. The key to achieving the signature gooey center is to mash two old fashioned caramel candies together and encase them in dough. It’s not particularly hard, but unwrapping all the candies is tedious, and getting the caramels to stick together is a bit annoying. Definitely worth it to push through for these baddies. My only complaint with the finished product is that once the cookies settle down to room temperature, the caramel becomes a bit tricky to navigate - often fully ejecting with the first bite, which means you’ve suddenly got two caramel bites and some cookie stuffing your mouth all at once. Maybe stick the cookies in the microwave first before serving.

Fun fact: while I made these cookies, I documented every step on TikTok for what I was certain would be a viral video. I mean, gooey centered cookies make for compelling content! As of press time, the video has 900 views. So… looks like I won’t be breaking the internet anytime soon. But you all may enjoy it regardless.

Grilled sweet chili corn

I’m a corn monster during the summer (and honestly the rest of the year too); so I’m always looking for new twists on my favorite staple crop. For July 4th I once again turned to Lara Lee and a recipe from her Indonesian cookbook Coconut & Sambal. Fresh, shucked corn is slathered in oil and grilled before being ExtraSlathered™ with a compound butter of brown sugar, red chiles, and kecap manis, which is basically soy sauce and palm (or brown) sugar reduced down to a syrup. The whole thing is then attacked with lime because of course it is. The result is a bright, zingy, sweet, and impossibly delicious — if messy — corn on the cob. Placing the shucked corn directly on the grill does impart serious char flavor, but it also causes many of the kernels to pop or shrivel. I made this recipe again a night or two later, and instead of basting the corn with the butter as it grills, I just added the butter afterwards, and it tasted just as good but with juicier bites. I want to make this my default corn on the cob recipe, but I’m not sure I need to overload my corn on the cob with butter and sugar every time. Still, as a delicious variation on the classic lime-on-corn combo, I can’t recommend this enough.

Sautéd turnips with prunes and radicchio

Oh nooooooo. I wanted to love this dish, but I merely liked it. I did hope it would grow on me, but these poor turnips wound up in the back of the fridge in leftover purgatory, only to resurface two weeks later when it was time to clean out the Forgotten Ones. Poor things. This recipe hails from Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden, and he rarely has ever steered my wrong; so I imagine there was some user error here.

Roasted radishes with green goddess butter

About as Alison Roman of a recipe as there could be, this one hails from Nothing Fancy, and let’s just put it out there: radishes are nice and all, but here they’re just green goddess delivery vessels. And that’s okay! I’d rather a radish than my empty spoon. A perfectly good summer side.

Beets with buttermilk and walnuts

Also from Nothing Fancy comes this glorious preparation of beets, which is as beautiful as it is delicious. Here we roast the beets with vinegar, eventually slicing and splaying them atop a puddle of buttermilk and sour cream. Sweet & sour: the love affair continues. Lightly pickled onions and walnuts add texture and brightness. This is a dish I’ll turn to for dinner parties and happy hours alike (at least in the fantasy world in which I am doing either of those things consistently).

Polenta with fresh corn and braised eggs

Did I mention I’m a corn monster? Born for corn, if you will. Here’s another corn-forward item that comes from the vaunted world of Yotam Ottolenghi — specifically his book Flavor. Glancing at the recipe, I figured this would be just a giant pot of corny corn corn with eggs on top. What I didn’t account for was the spinach and feta which actually wound up lending a spanakopita vibe to the dish. Fun! Unfortunately I over baked the eggs on top; so there were no runny yolks, but flavor-wise, this was a lovely.

Charred leek gulai sayur

Another one from A Splash of Soy by Lara Lee! Here leeks are roasted and then thrown in a sauce of chiles, tomatoes, ginger, lemongrass, coconut milk, and various aromatics. My experience with Indonesian food is limited; so I really didn’t know what to expect here, especially with leeks being the “hero ingredient,” as Lee calls it. The results were great — bitingly sour with a strong depth of flavor. I especially enjoyed the leeks, whose melty texture was surprisingly comforting. I only wish there were more of them. Next time, I may throw in another roasted leek. Or maybe I’ll be wild and just roast a bonus leek this afternoon and toss it in all the leftover sauce. Even though this is a vegetarian dish (vegan had I used vegan fish sauce), I could imagine adding chicken to the guilai sayur without a problem.

---

What dishes have you been cooking this summer? Any hits? Or misses?