Boy were we singing a different tune last week, LOL. We won’t harp on what we all already know, but we’ll just say, Gab & I sincerely hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. In an attempt to do a little ~positive reframing~, we hope all of the other extroverted introverts out there felt a small spark of serotonin secretly pass through their brain as the event cancellations started rolling in. Wherever you stand in terms of mood, energy levels, and viral load, it’s clear we’re going to spend a little more time inside than we perhaps bargained for. What a better time to embrace some true projects! If you never got around to sourdough last time, let’s be real, you’re probably not going to now– but you can tackle rich braises, fluffy focaccia, decadent layered desserts, or even build a whole house! ’Tis the season and Omicron’s the reason, now let’s get cooking and focus on the priorities:
SO WE’RE HERE AGAIN…
Half-Day Projects: Usually reserved for lazy Sundays or big holidays, these rich, saucy short ribs take about 4 or 5 hours to come together. If you start cooking around 2pm, stirring and rendering and roasting all afternoon, you'll have a hot pot of buttery beef by 7pm. You could eat it with a crusty loaf of bread (homemade or not — that's your prerogative), but I like starting a little pot of these blue cheese grits about an hour before the short ribs are ready. Looking for something to do with the earlier half of your day? These cinnamon rolls claim to take just 90 minutes, but the rise times are always a hair longer in my chilly apartment, and I take an incredibly long time rolling the dough into a perfectly even log. Still, the brown butter filling and sweet cream cheese frosting make housing three of these babies for breakfast easy.
Full-Day Projects: Last week I said I wrote about wanting to make Lani Bake’s internet-famous, truly gorgeous marbled shortbread for my first ever cookie swap. Well, COVID canceled my dear cookie swap, but it can’t cancel my joy and affinity for overly-complex recipes with 20+ steps! It starts with a scary simple cookie dough that both looks and feels like Play-Doh, and ends with layering and cutting and rolling and repeating multiple colors of day-glo cookie dough until it resembles an edible piece of art. Between chilling (I recommend even more chilling than the recipe calls for in between the rolling steps to get cleaner color lines) and layering, you’re looking at a good chunk of time to make these, but what else are you doing? But, if you’d rather spend that chunk of time making something gooey, salty and starchy, allow me to introduce you to my favorite cheesy baked baked at the moment: this squash and leek lasagna. The recipe requires making a roux that turns into a béchamel, shredding a slightly soft cheese (a miserable task that you should pawn off on someone else), roasting squash and sautéing leeks, and pre-boiling a bunch of lasagna sheets. All of that work, though, leaves you with a bubbly pan of lasagna that’s sharp and creamy, though not overwhelmingly heavy or rich.
Overnight: The very best, least finicky bread you can make at home is decidedly focaccia. If you somehow made it through 2020 without making it, you should be ashamed of yourself. The now-closed Brooklyn sandwich Saltie (RIP — gone from our stomachs but forever in our hearts) has a wonderfully easy recipe that basically involves mixing, shoving in your fridge for 1-2 days, then baking with a shit-ton of olive oil. The second, Basically’s no-knead focaccia, is also very straightforward with just a little more technique. The third, and by far-most time and effort-consuming is Rick Easton’s potato pizza, the mad genius behind Bread and Salt Bakery and the focaccia-stylings of Superiority Burger. Time and Patience are the main ingredients in this recipe, but damn is it worth it. Whichever recipe you go with, I can’t say this enough: there is no such thing as too much olive oil when making focaccia— the limit does not exist.
Multi-Day Projects: Last year, I spent an obscene amount of time building my greatest baking exploit yet: a mid-century modern gingerbread house. In about three days I went from whipping up several batches of my favorite gingerbread to a full home– albeit a home for ants! The wildly talented food stylist Judy Kim worked with Epicurious on a truly epic (sorry, but it is!) design template and production plan to construct your very own. Judy’s house includes an undoubtedly delicious recipe for a cardamom shortbread, but I didn’t want to be tempted to eat it, so I stuck to gingerbread. It was painstaking, tedious, at times ridiculous, and altogether completely amazing. Building the structure is only the beginning— by day three, you’ll be searching your [actual] house for tiny furniture, lights, and accessories to adorn your [gingerbread] house. It’s the best kind of madness. I wish I was kidding, but the entire house is still intact nearly a year later, in a bin in my parent’s basement (at my dad’s behest!) Committing to a recipe with a written active time of 13 hours is exactly the type of thing to do during this permanent-snow-day phase of the pandemic and depending on how the next few weeks pan out, I may just be expanding the neighborhood.