Although spinach gnudi — soft, pillowy cheese dumplings fried in browned butter and sage — are traditionally more of a spring or summer food, I’m here to make the argument we should eat them right now, in prime soup-and-sweater weather. Because did you hear the part about warm cheese? the puddle of brown butter? the earthy sage? It’s a symphony of delicious fall things and if you tell me you don’t want to curl up on the plate and take a nap in it, fine, I’ll believe you but I do think you’re in denial.
Welcome to the cake that has terrified me the most. You see, I have two favorite cakes. The first is my Strawberry Summer Stack Cake, the layered strawberry, cream, and butter cake version of the Strawberry Summer Cake in Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The second is the Opera Cake (Gâteau Opéra), a stacked and striped dessert with thin almond cake layers soaked in espresso syrup, chocolate ganache, and a rich espresso buttercream. The difference between the first cake and the second is that the second recipe was never going to happen.
Oh you wanted a chocolate zucchini bread recipe? Don’t you know this is a food blog? I’m contractually obligated to tell a meandering and infuriatingly irrelevant story in each headnote, keeping you from the recipe as long as possible for nefarious, possibly witchy, purposes, and I don’t want to disappoint. Next week, I’ll be celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with a guy I met because I wrote some rambling things on a blog about, like, dating and New York City and funny things that had happened, he read it, we went for a drink, I stopped dating, needed a new subject to fill the void, and Smitten Kitchen came to be one year later. [Some people have honeymoon babies, I, uh, had you.]
High on the list of cooking things that I’ve got far more opinions on than anyone has ever asked of me (and may have even, at times, prayed I’d stop yapping about), are homemade ice cream sandwiches. Why? Because it’s devastating when you realize something that should bring us nothing but incandescent summer joy — ice cream! cookies! — rarely work as well as promised. Most cookies become so hard once frozen, you feel like you’re breaking a tooth with each bite. Unyielding cookies also squeeze the ice cream out the sides, leading to drips down your arms and an immediate bad mood (for adults; kids, naturally, love it). While writing Smitten Kitchen Keepers, I became obsessed with creating a deeply nostalgic homemade chipwich-style ice cream sandwich that did everything right and I had three big a-ha moments along the way:
I didn’t mean to get so carried away making focaccia over the last few months, but don’t I always say that? As if I forget how easily I get consumed with a very specific idea for what a recipe should be and cannot let it go, even when it’s past time to move on. As if it was someone else who made blueberry muffins 25 times one summer until she found what she was looking for. Thus, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised but I still am: I’ve made an obscene amount of focaccia this spring and summer trying to find the recipe I’ll want to use forever. Here are five things I learned along the way:
Is it too hot to cook? Does the thought of even turning on the microwave feel like it might tip you too close to the surface of the sun? We are long overdue to talk about my favorite heat wave meal, one I’ve been holding out on you for five too many summers. As the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, I had my reasons. What if you’re not as obsessed with inhaling a pound of fridge-cold cucumbers as I am? What if the mere whiff of peanut sesame noodle dressing doesn’t make you want to climb into a vat of it? What if my favorite salad tofu — firm silken — isn’t your favorite salad tofu? What if you don’t have a favorite salad tofu? [Six question marks in a paragraph might be a record!]