Adventures in Eclectic Home Cooking
Posted in Recipes on Dec 8th, 2011
**So it’s not a pie in the usual sense, but baklava is pastry stuffed with nuts, sweet syrup, and butter. The pie spirit is there. And really, who would complain about getting baklava?** Growing up I never knew that there was more than one kind of baklava. The sticky, crispy, little diamonds with pistachio and [...]
Posted in Recipes on Dec 4th, 2011
Sour cherries aren’t really in season this time of year, but they can often be found jarred. They lose their characteristic bright red coloring when they are jarred (I believe the bright red “cherry pie filling” that you can find cans of has added coloring to make them look as they do when they are [...]
Posted in Recipes on Nov 29th, 2011
I’m very particular about my apple pie. I used to think that I didn’t like it, but it turned out that I didn’t like how soupy and sweet many apple pies can be. Then I found the joy of baking specifically with apples that could stand up to the heat and retain some firmness. To [...]
Posted in Recipes on Nov 25th, 2011
Pumpkin pie is a classic Thanksgiving pie, but there’s no reason you can’t have it all year round. During the fall, I usually get tasty pumpkins and squashes on sale, and then I bake and puree the flesh so that I can freeze it and use it all year long. Canned pumpkin is also generally [...]
Posted in Recipes on Nov 23rd, 2011
The first pie in the parade is pecan. This pie screams Thanksgiving to me, even more than pumpkin pie. Growing up, I remember there always being a pecan pie on the Thanksgiving dessert table. It was probably especially popular in kosher households because it’s an easy pie to make pareve, or non-dairy, so you can [...]
Posted in Recipes on May 8th, 2010
Earlier this year, I got an ice cream maker attachment for our stand mixer and I’ve been having fun making different frozen desserts with it. I find that it is more fun to experiment with sorbet rather than ice cream as the results are more reliably edible, due to the simplicity of sorbet chemistry: adding [...]
Posted in Food Features, Pondering on Dec 16th, 2009
About six weeks ago, we were gifted a so-called “Amish Cinnamon Bread” yeast starter in a zip-top bag that came along with a somewhat cryptic-sounding recipe. Due to my affinity for baking, I decided to take charge of the project. After waiting ten days and “mushing” the bag everyday, it eventually yielded what it promised [...]
Posted in Food Features on Oct 4th, 2009
For me, fall means apple picking. And apple picking means apple pies! The minute the weather turned crisp, we grabbed some friends and headed upstate to pick as many apples as we could carry. Empires and Jonagolds were ripe in abundance so we filled up mostly on those. Empires have a pure white flesh and [...]
Posted in Recipes on Jul 19th, 2009
Everyone at work has been trying to shake off the tense, busy months we just came out of. Since Iron Chef was such a hit, someone decided we should have a brownie throwdown. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it, since sweets aren’t really my thing, but I just happened to be [...]
Posted in Recipes on Mar 14th, 2009
My favorite cookies growing up were Syrian butter cookies called “greybeh” in Arabic. My grandmother would serve them for dessert on a doily sprinkled with powdered sugar. The delicate cookies were shaped like bracelets and would usually have a pistachio pressed into the area where the two ends of the dough overlapped. They would melt [...]
