As in the soup, because I made my own cream of mushroom– for a very specific purpose. This week I had my first tuna-noodle casserole. I did not grow up with casseroles. My dad never liked a one-pot meal, and my mom didn’t really care, so I had a childhood free of Durkee French Fried Onions. Frankly, I never liked tuna fish from a can until I was in college, so a tuna casserole was not in my culinary lexicon.

But recently my mother started making them for herself . Maybe she was finally feeling that empty-nest syndrome, or maybe she was hearkening back to her own childhood in the 1950s, filled with tuna-noodle casseroles. Either way she started to rave about them. At first I was appalled; this casserole always sounded like a train wreck to me. But then, as I started thinking about it, and alterations that I would make– tuna-noodle casserole came up in my estimation. So much so, that I had to make one for myself.

Here is what I did:

I sliced and chopped from fresh button mushrooms and sautéed them with an onion. I then made a velouté sauce in the same pan as the mushrooms. You can read about making this sauce here. I threw in a few branches of thyme, and let sauce simmer for a bit.

I cooked about 8 ounces of egg noodles part-way, draining and rinsing them. I also drained two cans of tuna. (If you must know, one of them was in olive oil.)

I then added the noodles and the tuna into the sauce, with the zest and the juice of Meyer lemon. A few handfuls of frozen peas were added. Mixing well, the whole mess went into a casserole dish.

Freshly-made bread crumbs were sprinkled on the top, and the casserole was baked until bubbly, about 25 minutes at 375 degrees.

And you know what, it was delicious: comforting, warming, creamy. I get it. Granted, this might not be the tuna-noodle that my mom makes, but at my house, it was pretty darn good.

In September of ’09 there was legislation passed in New Haven making it legal for residents to own chickens. Bring on the urban farms, and the fresh eggs! I recently wrote an article for The New Haven Advocate, our free weekly, arts and entertainment paper, all about it. So I can now tell about coop construction, buying chicks, etc. I also met some really interesting ladies with some hens of their own. Now these women can really tell you anything you want to know about raising chicks.

You can read the article here.

Christmas came and went with a flurry. The New Year was rung in with a bash. And now– it is January. I must say, that as ready as I am for the holidays to come, each year, I am equally ready to say farewell!

For me, it is was the holiday of cakes. A bûche de noël for Christmas, and a crepe cake for New Year’s Eve makes for one sugar-kissed girl! I know that the holiday has passed, but here is a picture of the bûche anyways. Until next year!

Is it possible that Christmas is already here? It feels like only yesterday that I was laying a butter-drenched cheese cloth over my Thanksgiving turkey, and shoving it in the oven.

This Christmas we’re breaking our Jewish tradition of a day at the movies, followed by a meal of Chinese food. We’re going to Brooklyn to celebrate the holiday with friends who are fabulous cooks in their own right. So, I am off kitchen-duties for this holiday. But I do have one contribution to the meal– dessert. I decided to get festive this year, and make my very first bûche de noël. It has been a process, but with eggs, sugar, and butter as my companions, I have made it through relatively unscathed.

There is the vanilla genoise as the cake. It is so light and thin, perfect for rolling. I decided the filling would be a Hazelnut Bavarian Cream Soufflé. I infused milk with hazelnuts and incorporated the mixture into beaten egg whites. There will be French Chocolate Buttercream, for frosting my bûche. But the decoration I am most excited about are the countless meringue mushrooms that I made this week to embellish my faux bois.

Dusted with a bit of cocoa, I think that these fungi are so cute, I can hardly wait to gobble them up. As I was constructing them, carving out a divot in the underside of each cap, and then securing the stems with additional meringue, I flipped the mushroom, right side up, and each made me laugh. In fact, I kept saying, “Hi!” to every one. (I know; but it’s has been a long week!)

We’re off to Brooklyn in just awhile, but I had to show you. Let’s hope all of the mushrooms make it down safely. I’ll try to snap a few pictures of the bûche de noël, completely constructed.

Have a wonderful holiday!

Have you ever looked through a cookbook and seen a recipe that was so bizarre, with such a unique list of ingredients, that you could not imagine what it tastes like? It recently happened to me.

I checked out the New York Times Heritage Cookbook by Jean Hewitt from the library. It is an out of print tome from the 1970s celebrating regional American cooking. While glancing through the dessert section from the Midwest, I stopped at Dymple’s Sausage Cake. If I were driving a car, I would have slammed on the brakes so hard, whiplash would have set in. Among the usual list of sugar, flour, and spices, were a few ingredients that made me stop in my tracks. Listed were: lean sausage meat, raisins, walnuts, pulverized gumdrops, and cold, strong coffee.

I read it again and again. There were no eggs, and only a very little bit of additional leavening in the form of baking soda and powder. I showed the recipe to a few friends, both adventurous cooks in their own right, and they couldn’t imagine what it would taste like either. Rightly intrigued, we made a date to bake this cake; and this is what it looked like:

Fruit cake, right? And I guess it tasted like fruit cake too, at least that was what we all imagined as we took slices of Dymple’s Sausage Cake, still warm from the oven. But it was hard to forget what it felt like to plunge your hands into the meaty dough to fold in the raisins. We just didn’t think about the black coffee cascading into the batter, darkening the raw sausage, or the brightly colored gumdrops getting tarnished by the warm spices. Right.

Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t the sausage that was the biggest turn-off. Upon baking it sort of disappeared, leaving behind only a trace of porkiness. It was actually those gum drops that tossed this cake over the edge. I imagine they were intended as substitutes for candied fruit; but yellow gumdrops do not a candied citron make.

But we had to give it try. We came, we saw, and we sort of conquered. The closest thing that I could find to Dymple’s Cake on line, was this one. It however, omits the gum drops– good thinking.

Did everyone have a splendid Thanksgiving? Was it filled with turkey, pie, and maybe a little bit of booze? Was there enough food? That is a silly question. If your Thanksgiving is anything like mine, it is all about abundance. Abundance is great; but after the turkey is packed up, the sides are nestled in their Tupperwares, the brussels sprouts two ways (yes, you read that correctly) are chilling in the refrigerator, and each guest has his or her own care package to take home, and you still find yourself looking at a bowlful of homemade cranberry sauce, what are you to do?

Make scones, of course!

For the past two years one of our guests has made the most delicious cranberry sauce, based on this recipe. The cranberries are tart yet sweet, flavored with just a hint of orange, and blooming with those warm spices of the holidays. This sauce kind of makes one wish that we ate cranberries all year round.

But with so much leftover, I needed to do something that would do justice to this luscious sauce. After some hemming and hawing, I decided that scones would do the trick. It was perfect! The sauce is shiny, and thick, so I basically filled the scones with it, then baked them.

This is my basic scone recipe. They are light in texture, slightly sweet, and offer a neutral base for any filling. In the summer I stud the scones with fresh berries; in the winter, dried fruit fits the bill; and now, come Thanksgiving time, I have to say cranberry sauce is my new favorite.

Scones with Cranberry Sauce

1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup corn meal, fine ground
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, and cut into chunks
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup sour cream (light is fine, I would avoid fat-free)
1/2 cup cranberry sauce, chunky
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
additional Demerera sugar for sprinkling (optional)

Makes 8 scones

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix well the flour, corn meal, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Add the butter, and with your finger tips, work into the flour mixture until coarse, pea-sized pieces are obtained. Mix together the milk and sour cream. Pour into dry ingredients all at once. Stir gently until just combined. Do not overmix.

Divide the dough in half. Place eight portions of dough on a parchment paper or Silpat lined baking sheet. Slightly flatten the dough. With a teaspoon, place a portion of cranberry sauce in the middle of the dough. Now with the remainder of the dough, top each spoonful of sauce. It is not necessary to cover the sauce completely.

In a small bowl, beat the egg and the 1 tablespoon milk. Brush the egg mixture on top of each scone, and sprinkle with additional sugar, if using. Bake scones for 13-17 minutes, or until tops are golden-brown.

Is everyone gearing up for, hands down my favorite holiday– Thanksgiving? I know that I am. There is pie crust to be made, bread to tear for stuffing, and a rustic pate to be assembled– and that is just on today’s schedule. Tomorrow the real work begins; but I am hard-pressed to call any of it work. Gathering together with loved ones, and cooking a fantastic meal, hardly seems like work to me.

For the past several years, brussels sprouts have always been the green vegetable of choice for the Thanksgiving meal. They are synonymous with holidays for me– as synonymous as a cruciferous vegetable can be!

I recently started blogging at iVillage Food. There, I will have a weekly column about eating seasonally. So what was one of my first entries? You guessed it, brussels sprouts. If you have yet to decide on the green vegetable to go with all of those glorious starches, there is a recipe on iVillage for Brussels Sprouts Braised in Cream.

So, have a wonderful holiday! Don’t eat anything I wouldn’t eat– which isn’t much! Gobble, gobble!

I grew up in the suburbs, and have lived in one city or another for most of my adult life, so I had never had the pleasure of eating a fresh egg before. And I mean fresh.. like straight from the chicken fresh. But this all changed for me last week, when a generous neighbor gave me a few of his.

I live in a residential neighborhood in New Haven, CT– the kind of place where you are happy to have a car for mobility, but can still walk to a market only blocks away. It is hardly the sticks, and it’s not really the sort of place where livestock is prevalent. But this hasn’t stopped a neighbor of mine from raising a few chickens, coop and all, and sharing the wealth.

He gave me five perfectly incongruous eggs, ranging in color from barely tan, to a buttery pink. Their yolks were like a shiny scoop of orange sherbet sitting in a puddle of clear albumen; and I couldn’t wait to scramble them up. My mom, who grew up in the mid-west, with chickens, ducks, you name it, told me to scramble them simply, letting their eggy nature shine through– so that’s what I did. Giving them a vigorous shake with the immersion blender, I scrambled them low and slow with a bit of butter, making the tiniest curds that I possibly could. A dash of salt, a grinding of pepper, and a sprinkling of chives, was all the gussying these eggs needed before they slid on my dinner plate.

They were excellent, pure, and delicate. Now the only question is– should I get some chickens?

I went apple picking again. Correction– I went apple, crabapple and quince picking, and I went a little crazy. 22 pounds of crazy. The apples are enormous, and delicious, but enormous none the less– imagine the head of a small child, covered in delicate, chewy and edible bright green skin. But apples, unlike so many summer stone fruits, stay fresh for quite some time after picking. Even with this rule in mind, I knew that all of my apples would be needing some assistance in their depletion. So, I made a pie.

I will be the first person to tell you that apple pie is not my favorite; I much prefer the typical pies of summer. I love pie; and I like apples, but I always feel so moderate about an apple pie. So this was a single crust pie that I literally threw together *. But while it was baking, it filled the house with that lovely aroma: of baking apples, of butter, of that remarkable smell of the imminence of the holidays. As I cut slices from the pie, when it had just cooled enough to still hold its shape, my mouth watered just a bit. Then I took a bite, and I have to say, it was a damn good pie.

Maybe it was those gigantic, fresh-picked Mutsu apples that did it. Maybe it was that the apples were roughly diced, rather than primly sliced; or maybe I have just outgrown my prejudice. Either way, eating this pie turned out to be the perfect welcome to the season.

Here is the recipe for an Oatmeal-Crumb Topping, that embellished my pie.

1/3 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup oatmeal
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

In a medium sized bowl, mix the brown sugar, flour, and oatmeal. Pour the butter over the mixture. With your fingertips, gently toss together, leaving some clumps of the mixture.

Gently pat on top of a raw, single-crusted apple pie. (I chopped my apples rather than sliced them.) Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven, immediately dropping temperature down to 375 degrees for 40-50 minutes, or until golden brown.

* My mother says that I should clarify: You should sweeten/season the apples for the pie however you choose, prior to baking. I tossed my diced apples in brown and white sugar, a few tablespoons of flour, and a modicum of cinnamon, before topping with the oatmeal-crumb mixture.

Who loves shopping with gift certificates? I do! Gift certificates give you an excuse to buy things that you normally wouldn’t buy. They tinge your shopping with a bit of frivolity. You never buy socks, or wooden spoons, or computer paper with them– at least I don’t. I was given a gift certificate awhile back, so I was sitting at my computer, pondering what to buy at the Sur la Table site, when this amazing pan jumped out at me. A brownie pan that ensures a delectable edge piece? I had to have it.

At the risk of this blog turning into an advertisement for this pan, or a site with glaring evidence of product placement, I just had to show you. For someone like me. and apparently countless others, who love those extra chewy, browned to perfection, crispy edged morsels of brownies, bar, or anything baked in a Pyrex container, this pan is perfect. With a sturdy, meandering curve throughout, this pan guarantees at least two edges in every slice. Genius!

I waited the requisite five day mail delivery, tore open the package, and made a batch of brownies that evening. They did not disappoint. I think that even a mediocre brownie recipe (which mine actually turned out to be) is made infinitely better with this pan. No more slicing the edges off of a bar for me– my baking life has been forever changed! (Okay, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, let just say, the pan makes a damn good brownie.)