The last time I dyed eggs at home (a few years ago), I tried two different dying options. One was strong black tea and turmeric. The other was red cabbage (and a beet root). It’s the latter batch that turned out to be the most surprising and pretty. Red cabbage, because it contains anthocyanin, will normally turn blue during cooking. Adding acidic liquid like lemon juice or vinegar would help preserve the red pigment. I didn’t do that, instead ending up with a batch of lovely royal blue eggs. Because I also tied them quite loosely in the nylon, the little parsley leaves moved around and created this marbled effect. That part wasn’t exactly intentional but I kind of like it.

And here’s how the tea and turmeric eggs turned out:

Some eggies cooking in the tea & turmeric mixture

If any of you try this out, I’d love to see the photos of your results!

A shop I like is going out of business, unfortunately, so the last few times I’ve passed by, I made it a point to drop in and pick up something from their quickly emptying shelves. Everything is marked down significantly in their assortment of imported canned goods, spices, beverages, and sweets.

Mine, all mine!

Here’s what I snagged most recently:

• double Devon cream
• instant yeast
• Chai masala
• Fortnum & Mason Glühwein muslin spice bags
• Greek rose petal jam
• Armenian white mulberry preserves
• bottle of rose water
• several little bottles of Belvoir elderflower presse
• big bottle of Belvoir spiced winter berry cordial
• a grip of various Dutch licorice candies to mail to a friend of mine

It’s not like any of these are substantial pantry items, but this is basically a basket full of tea party stuff. I can use the yeast to bake something, and then I can put the double Devon cream and rose petal jam on that baked something, and my friends and I can eat it while we drink hot chai and cocktails made with rose water or the cordial. I didn’t actually realize that there was a bit of a theme here.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine brunch or tea or any sort of gathering without loads of delicious baked stuff. For my friends who are, for one reason or another, currently maintaining a diet that has them avoiding wheat, gluten, carbs, etc: I will learn how to bake things that you can eat. But for now, it’s flour and sugar all the way. Bread and baked goods in general are clearly on my mind, as reflects in some of the cookbooks I’ve picked up second hand recently.

Dam Good Sweet, David Guas & Raquel Pelzel, The Taunton Press

This book of New Orleans sweets has such mouthwatering treats like the classic buttermilk beignets, calas – egg and rice fritters deep fried in peanut oil, meant to be eaten with sweet syrup – and spiced pecans. The book is peppered with nostalgic anecdotes from David Guas New Orleans childhood, as well as historical bits about the city. New Orleans is a place I’ve not visited yet, but it’s high at the top of my list of cities I want to see in the United States. Until I make it over there, I can at least try and bring the taste of the city here, through the recipes. (Although I’m not so arrogant as to assume that they stuff I cook up will be on par with what the chefs, street food vendors, and city stalwarts might turn out of their kitchens.)

How to Bake Bread: The Five Families of Bread, Michael Kalatny, Red Seal Books

This tome from a master artisan bread baker is probably the most thorough culinary book I’ve ever seen. It goes into the most minute details on the science behind the interaction of yeast, flour and water, as well as discusses and visually outlines various mixing, kneading, folding and cutting techniques, from making sourdough loughs to folding perfect pretzels. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at making bread for a while, but for some reason I’ve been too intimidated. This book may be just the introduction I need.

It’s funny, I don’t actually tend to eat bread with all my meals, even though it’s very much a Russian way of doing things. Most of the time, I don’t find myself even buying bread. But there’s something different about baking my own. I think I would eat an entire loaf in a few days if I put all that work into it. Yes. So, any tips for getting started on bread making that you’ve learned from experience? And what are your favorite things to bake? Tell me secrets!

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 gift wrapping 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!