Weekend prior, I had made a pitcher of delicious Thai basil sangria for a gathering I co-hosted. (The drink was a hit and disappeared within the hour, thank you Food & Wine!) I found myself with still quite a bit of left over basil, as well as a bunch of fresh mint that was left from a yogurt-mint sauce I prepared for lamb kabobs. (More on those at another point; I discovered the lamb mix also makes for an excellent meatloaf, while the mint-yogurt sauce serves as a fantastic marinade for chicken).

So, with all those fresh herbs, I made a pesto. The recipe is a combination of several different recipes I found online. A lot of the pesto recipes using the more spicy Thai basil also called for the addition of fish sauce; generally, I love the phish sauce – especially in a bowl of vermicelli noodles at a phở joint – but I wanted to keep the recipe as simple and vegan friendly as possible. Myself, I’m an omnivore, but I like to try and make sure that I can prepare at least a few good things that would be absolutely OK to serve to some of my vegan friends.

Thai Basil Pesto

Ingredients:

• 1 and 1/2 cup fresh Thai basil leaves
• 1 cup fresh mint leaves (it adds… something extra, I don’t know what it is!)
• 1/3 cup blanched almonds (but you could use other nuts you like, maybe pine nuts or peanuts?)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp agave syrup
• 1/3 cup olive oil (or a little more to help with blending & if you like less chunky texture)
• 1/2 tbsp rice wine viegar
• 1/2 tbsp fresh lime juice
• 1 tsp crushed red pepper or chili flakes
• salt and pepper to taste

Put all the ingredients in a food processor and chop’n'grind. That’s it. Keep refrigerated.

Things you can do with the pesto: EVERYTHING. It’s so nomnom delicious. So far, I’ve had it on chicken, on a pesto and cheese sandwich, and this morning with some poached eggs & Hollandaise on an English muffin. Let me know how you like it!

I made this cake recently for a friend’s birthday brunch. The recipe is from Farmers’ Market Desserts by Jennie Schacht, a San Francisco-based author. The book is laid out in seasonal sections and has some really great desserts like this cake and goat cheese panna cotta.

This cake was very easy to make. I did make the mistake of (impatiently) opening the oven a few times, so it didn’t quite cook through perfectly at the very center. My oven is pretty temperamental. However, it came out moist, crumbly, spicy-sweet. A good dessert for fall but also really works any time pears are in season.

You can get the recipe here.

Now that the days are getting longer again, and I’m slowly creeping out from under the piles of work, I’ve been excited to do more cooking and baking, more day to day photography, things like that.

In honor of Pi Day, I thought I’d re-share the port wine apple pie with a cheddar crust that I’d posted about previously.

This isn’t much of an update at all, but I still wanted to say Hello! I hope to be back on a more regular basis, soon.

Cocktails (Bulleit Rye in a shotglass for me, please and thank you) before dinner were in the large kitchen, with lots of chatter, followed by a delicious meal and a fluffy walnut cake. Towards the end of dinner I felt like my temperature was rising again, so J. took me home. I did not have the horrid fever dreams, and today I am just very stuffed up and going through tissues like a loon, but I no longer feel sore or headachy.

J. is expert at giftwrapping

J. gifted me with many delightful things. Two items that will get put to use soon, possibly even this week as I might bake something for my brother’s birthday dinner, are a lovely French style, tapered rolling pin and Christina Tosi’s Momofuku Milk Bar cook book, which I’ve been talking about getting for ages. The recipes are nuts (that’s “good” in my vocab): Chinese sausage foccacia, PB&J cake, cereal milk ice cream pie? WHAT?

My giftwrapping job

I have all of this week off work. I wish I hadn’t gotten sick, because now that means I’m not feeling well enough to go check out a new (to me) karaoke night on Tuesday. However, at least I get the sickness out of the way so I can feel better for the rest of the week, right? I also have to finalize gift shopping for my family (advantage: Russian immigrants and the fact that we are still pretty used to exchanging gifts according to Soviet tradition).

I hope everyone out there is happy and healthy. Holiday seasons in general are loaded with a lot of expectation, and sometimes heartache. I know not everyone celebrates any particular holiday, or some are really cash strapped, or going through a rough patch emotionally. Ultimately, I just really hope that you are feeling happy and healthy, and that you are spending time with some really lovely people who make you laugh, and that on cold nights you have a nice drink and a plate of food to warm up the spirits. That’s all we really need, right?

Bordando el Manto Terrestro, 1961

Frey Norris is one of my favorite art galleries in the city. Curators Raman Frey and Wendy Norris are young, highly enthusiastic, incredibly dedicated, and very welcoming and gracious towards gallery visitors. I had the rare pleasure of seeing some of appointment-only private collection stored in their offices a few years back, and it really was something that left me speechless, with pieces by Varo, Fini, Carrington, Ernst, and Tanning (among many others). They also have a great sense for highlighting emerging and mid-career artists.

It’s a bit fluffy, but beautiful Belle Époque staging. It’s one of Colette’s books that I haven’t read, so may need to add it to the list.

On the way home I got the urge to make a bread pudding (omg, I totally just wrote brain pudding), partly inspired by a friend misreading another friend’s tweet (she said “afternoon pubbing,” but somehow it became “afternoon pudding”). So I gave in to the urge and made this when I got home.

Bread pudding is one of those desserts that has the most rewarding ease:tastiness ratio. It’s also dangerous. I could eat the entire pan in one sitting, but then I might need to be airlifted off my couch. This blog post has a recipe for a NOLA bread pudding with a cognac sauce served as the basis, but I also made some substitutions.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups cubed bread (I used soft buns, which ended up being a little too soft, so go for something with more texture like a French bread, a brioche or challah)
• 2 cups milk
• 4 tbsp butter + a little more to grease the pan
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup dried apricots (soaked in warm water for about 10 minutes) chopped in thin slices
• 2 eggs
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp vanilla cognac (I used Meukow, if you don’t have vanilla cognac, use plain cognac or cooking brandy, just increase the dose of vanilla extract then)

Preheat the oven to 350F. Scald the milk lightly (no film!), melt the butter in the milk, then stir in sugar until well mixed. Let cool slightly and pour the mixture over the cubed bread and the apricots (make sure to squeeze out the excess water from the apricots after soaking/before adding to the bread). Let the mixture sit for about 10-15 minutes. Beat the 2 eggs, then stir in the salt, nutmeg, vanilla extract and the cognac. Mix well and then fold into the soaked bread and apricot mixture. Pour the mix into a well greased baking dish (I used a square 2L baking pan). Bake 35-45 minutes until the top is golden brown and a toothpick or knife inserted into the bread pudding comes out mostly clean. I didn’t make a sauce to go with it because for me that’d just be too decadent, but the blog I linked has a great recipe for a cognac sweet sauce that would pair well with the pudding.

How did you come to develop your tone and theme in your blog? More importantly, do you feel a personal blog should have a particular theme, or should the blogger reserve the right to write about whatever they want? Is there an obligation for consistency in a personal blog?

I feel that I’ve somehow set a theme for this to be about all things gastronomical and domestic, but that wasn’t really my intention. True, I love to cook and nest, but I also don’t want to have my blog be some precious cozy thing.

One of my favorite thing about keeping an online journal in the past has been the option to write down stream of consciousness thoughts, discuss current events, share impressions on pop and art culture. I want to write about Anselm Kiefer and how his paintings make me think of ancient hermits and the Atacama desert; I want to gush about Stephin Merritt and how delightful “Strange Powers” is; I want to post bajillion pictures of my roommate’s dog. But I’ve not felt like it somehow… fits in. So I haven’t. I probably would need to get rid of this damned teacup logo (what I mean by precious). I could post these thoughts somewhere like Facebook or Tumblr, but those are not the best platforms for blogging, plus I want to have zero question about owning the content.

Do I rename my blog completely and head in another direction? Do I stick to writing about what goes on in the kitchen? Do I keep it as is and write whatever I want? Do I even owe an explanation for either path?

One thing I was contemplating is keeping all the food related blog posts as a separate section, only occasionally updated with recipes and cookbooks reviews, and then creating a main blog notebook for the more frequent updates that I’ve been mainly keeping on Tumblr. The emphasis would be on my day to day thoughts, with friends being alerted to any time I post a new recipe. Or would that be too disorganized? One of my favorite bloggers, Luxirare, recently reorganized the site in a similar way. It took a little while to figure out the structure, but now there is more content from her and I have a feeling she is able to share even more than previously.

Answer my questions for me, Internet! That’s what you’re here for!

photo from Empire Design Studio

The book is beautifully designed and laid out by the Empire Design Studio. The recipes and instructions are thorough and Zuckerman covers a variety of desserts, from cakes and tarts to souffles and syrups. She also provides a great deal of information on baking and pastry making techniques, offers suggestions for modifying recipes, and indicates exactly what type of kitchen equipment you’ll need for each recipe. Her enthusiasm for her craft comes through the pages, and the book is brimming with clever recipes like Basil Ice Cream or Goat Cheese Cake with Hazelnut Brittle.

my creation

I decided to go with the Date Cake with Toffee Sauce. The recipes require very little prep work. The rich flavor of Medjool dates and spices is balanced nicely with espresso and brandy in the cake, while the toffee syrup (also with brandy) is so gooey and delicious that I want to pour it on absolutely everything. Both recipes are available on Cookstr, so rather than duplicate efforts please refer to the links below.

A couple of personal notes:
- I cut the quantities in half when trying out the recipes, which yielded a delicious and fluffy 5×5 inch pan. Unless you are making the cake for a large party, I actually recommend you do that. It’s only supposed to sit covered at room temperature for 3-4 days max. But maybe you can eat a whole giant cake!
- I did not use a stand mixer. I just mixed everything by hand. The butter and sugar I creamed with a fork, and then everything else I mixed with a wooden spoon. This isn’t out of some old fashioned purist approach but because my stand mixer is very big and heavy and I have to haul it out of the side closet to use it, since there is no room to keep it on the kitchen counter permanently.
- I used Raynal VSOP brandy. The flavors of dates, sugar, spices and coffee are strong enough on their own not to require a flavorful cognac like Grand Marnier. Although I’m sure it would taste delicious, so if you like some extra decadence, go for it.

Everything else is super straight forward. Word of caution: you will have a very hard time resisting the urge to constantly lick the mixing spoon when making the toffee syrup.

Date Cake
Toffee Sauce

it's really bright at the top of Getty Center

As an aside, I have to wonder: why do people have to ask the most inane questions? Or even worse, they don’t ask questions but rather attempt to involve the artist in some sort of pointless, pedantic discussion of one tiny needling detail, masking it as a question. “Oh I noticed this one thing you did, which is like this other thing, and was your intention to blah blah blah?” That’s not a question. You are just showing off. People…

After the moderated discussion we were shown a short behind the scenes film shot in digital b&w, tracking the process of the making of the documentary. While I enjoyed the actual film, I actually found the behind the scenes look even more interesting. It was fascinating to see the artistic process and the techniques used. The Museum is really small, with narrow exhibit spaces and not much room to maneuver. There were some great uses of two way mirrors, scrims and cut-out panels that cast shadows, and some stop motion. Weeping Glass was made on a shoestring budget, but it does have Derek Jacobi (!) as the narrator. All in all, it was a worthwhile event. J. and I also chatted with two women, a photographer and an art dealer who drove from Santa Barbara, and it was nice that the screening also had such a big turn out to support the Quays.

After the event, we drove to Canter’s where we ate kugel and eggplant parmesan and pickles (well, I ate the pickles because I love them so much). And then the following morning, we flew back to SF. Tiny adventure = great success!

Oh, the Sony Pictures lot has a great mural for Cary Grant and Irene Dunne’s “The Awful Truth,” which is one of my favorite old comedies: