The herbaceousness of butter lettuce lends itself perfectly to panna cotta. There is a gentle bitterness that cottons to the fat in the cream here. Then come the strawberries and their bright sweetness. A finish of olive oil, and this truly wows.
When it’s too hot outside to bake, but you still need a cake, fridge cakes are the answer! Simple and foolproof, this dessert from the new cookbook Fridge Cakes by Jean-Luc Sady is made by layering shortbread and whipped cream with marshmallows and chocolate in a loaf tin, then chilling the cake in the fridge for 3 hours before serving.
Sonker has spent too much time in the shadows. We wanted to give this Appalachian original its due.
Most recipes call for using a stand mixer, but we found this counterproductive to our goal of chewy, dense cookies because the mixer beats air into the dough. Instead we make our dough by hand, melting the butter for easier mixing.
Baked goods do something peculiar when boiled with milk: they dissolve and become stretchy and elastic. Throw the mixture into a blender, and this strange concoction becomes velvety and thick, like pudding. I first encountered this magic trick at a restaurant full of them, called Alinea. There, a pudding made by boiling brioche and cream was served with raspberries for an elegant “toast-and-jam” bite. Since then, I’ve applied the same principle to just about every other kind of bakery treat I can get my hands on—like gingerbread or devil’s food cake. Most recently, I’ve been reducing glazed donuts to a velvety pudding to flavor ice cream.
When it came time for Dan, my main squeeze, to celebrate his mother’s birthday, he made it clear that she wasn’t a cake person. Lucky for me, Holli is an ice cream person, and a popcorn lover as well, so I set myself to the task of making a buttered popcorn ice cream for her birthday. This was my first chance to make an impression on her, and I was determined it be a delicious one.
Meringue pie can be tricky to prepare. We figure out how to make a perfect lemon meringue pie with a sky-high topping that doesn't weep.
I started thinking about about the waste from coffee because in a restaurant people drink a lot of coffee; you can end up throwing away a lot of coffee grounds. We decided to start cooking with used coffee grounds, and the dishes we came up with tasted just as good - with a rich dark coffee - as they would have using fresh coffee grounds. Just store the ground in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic container with enough space for air circulation.
Though we claim to be rhubarb purists as our grandmother was, we do believe it pairs very well with tart raspberries.