My son just celebrated his very first birthday. I was naturally flooded with an enormous range of huge emotions. But, instead of being very weepy and nostalgic for the entire month prior, staring at him constantly, willing time to stop, I instead funneled all of my sentimentalism into obsessing about his very first birthday cake. This process was not unlike trying to make each precious decision about our wedding. Would this be the best choice, that I will then look back on in a decade and remember with zero regrets and nothing but fondness? Or even more, is this the best choice of all of the options I have entertained in my mind imagining this day for the last 3+ decades? Of course, an impossible assignment. But wanting it to be a perfect day and first cake experience for him, I pored over old family recipes scribbled in pencil on cocoa-powdered index cards. My first thought was my dad's carrot cake recipe. It is spectacular. But I kept looking, and came across again Aunt Margaret's Chocolate Frosting. It is the perfect, dark, rich, everything your yellow birthday cake screams for recipe. It is one of the top three recipes in our family's repertoire. Certainly worthy of a first birthday party. I then pictured him smashing his first piece of his first birthday cake into his face with his chubby hands, and pictured dark brown Jackson Pollock's covering the walls of my grandparents' condo. (I also then remembered a first birthday I attended where the cake was red velvet, leaving the kid and high chair looking like something out of a slasher film.) So opting for a more neutral hued confection, I finally settled on the dense-banana-cream cheese-miracle that is Amy's Bread's Monkey Cake, a cake so good a dear friend recently had it for her wedding cake. Also, twelve years ago I lived right around the corner from the original Amy's Bread in Manhattan with my brother for a year, and it is a super special part of that neighborhood. Ok, so what's the point? The point is that he's one, and loved the cake, and mostly likely would have loved any cake. I loved obsessing over what to make, baking it for him, whipping the frosting, and seeing him literally lick the plate. I also loved that it was an opportunity to really go back to my cookbooks, my notes and my recipe cards and rediscover old favorites. And work on something that I was excited to share with the people I love. That, after all, is exactly why I cook.
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Help! Thanksgiving is 72 hours away and while you have been dog-earing cookbooks for weeks, shopped the weekend before, and even managed to avoid the elbow to your shoulder by the feisty octogenarian who was going to in NO WAY let you have the store's last quart of whipping cream (this actually happened to me in graduate school), you just realized that you totally forgot to plan for something to occupy your relatives while you get the food ready for the table. And so inevitably they will end up equally split between hovering directly in your path in your tiny overheated kitchen or rehashing the recent election and whatswrongwiththiscountry requiring a last-minute rearrangement of the pilgrim place cards. Again.
Oh, right, and you have overzealously planned an almost too complicated multi-course meal culled from your favorite food blogs, and have no time left in the schedule or room in the oven to make another darn thing. So, put it on toast. Or bread, or thick oat-y crackers or toasted wedges of pita. Here are a bunch of ideas, some quicker than others, for holiday-worthy crostini. If you have the time, or children with idle hands, these all look pretty assembled and arranged on a platter, particularly the repetition of the shape and colors. However, if you are pressed for time, just put all of the elements on a platter in small bowls with a heap of sliced bread rounds and your guests will love getting all interactive. If you can manage, you can slice say a baguette on a deep angle to make long elegant oval slices, maybe brush it with olive oil or rub it with garlic and toast it in a low oven on a cookie sheet. Or grill it quickly to get nice grill marks. But again, fresh sliced good crusty bread is great just as is. Also check with local food markets to see if any have frozen par-baked baguettes that you can finish in the oven yourself. Here are several ideas, but definitely come up with your own with what you have on hand. Just try to mix tastes and textures. Layer something creamy/mushy on the bottom so it all sticks to the bread, and maybe top with something crunchy or colorful, or fresh herbs. Gobble gobble.
And this roasted squash on toast recipe from Jean-Georges Vongerichten is next on my list to try. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
I have a really lovely huge piece in the current issue of the beautiful Green Door Magazine. It is on hors d'oeuvres for Thanksgiving and fall gatherings--including southeast asian pickled shrimp, turnip soup, mini endive salads, and stuffed fresh figs. Issues can be purchased online, in either print or digital, and some of my food piece can be found here. It even has Vincent D'Onofrio on the cover. Happy cooking. | ||||||||||||||||
One year and three days ago, at 3:30 in the afternoon on 11/11/11, I was eating lentil soup. I am able to tell you exactly that, as it was the meal I finished just as my water broke for the birth of my son. Truthfully, it was lentil soup followed by a scoop of my husband’s homemade vanilla bean ice cream, topped with a generous drizzle of David Lebovitz’s perfect hot fudge recipe, and it may or may not have been then topped with a few crushed peanut M&Ms that had been unclaimed by trick or treaters eleven days earlier. If there was ever a time to treat myself to a tasteful hot fudge sundae in the middle of the afternoon, my due date seemed the best day of any. Standing at the edge of the new parent cliff, really having no idea what the next many weeks would hold for us, I had been furiously putting meals away for days and days. I don’t know what I expected, but my level of anxiety was fairly appropriate. And when I get anxious, I cook. When someone is struggling, I cook. When things seem grim and I have no idea what to do, out come the cookbooks. And so for the very expectant weeks prior, I had been cooking and cooking. Our chest freezer in the basement was a culinary tetris, packed tightly with calories to keep us going in the 3ams of the coming weeks. Quart container after quart container of warming stews, gumbos, and soups were obsessively stacked alongside a half dozen bags containing fifty frozen dumplings each, devotedly hauled home from Chinatown in the city. I may have been facing a month without leaving the house or having both hands free at once, but I was not going down on an empty stomach. I didn’t know who I’d be on the other side of all of this, but I knew I’d still demand great food. Lentil soup has been a comfort food staple for me through most of the very varied episodes of my life. Cheap, simple, high in protein, and even vegetarian—for that twenty-year phase I went through—its sum is definitely more than its parts. And this will always be the last thing I cooked as a person who wasn’t someone’s mom. As soon as it gets dark before quitting time and a tiny chill shimmies under the door, I crave this recipe. And eating it again this year, days before I became a person who is the mom of a one year old, I am brought right back to a year ago, or my lunch break room in graduate school, or the kitchen in my first apartment in New York, and also my tiny dark brown dorm fridge. I look at the photo we snapped just before walking out the door to drive to the hospital, and am astounded by how I feel like I don’t even know those people. But it is indeed me, as is the girl hosting her first dinner party in a studio apartment, or the girl with the giant mug in her window seat in college, all recognizing each other by the smells and tastes of the recipes that make up my life’s cookbook. Happy first birthday darling boy.
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Catie Baumer Schwalb is a chef, food writer and photographer, who splits her life between the city and the country. Not too long ago Catie was a New York City based actress and playwright for more than a decade. She has her Master of Fine Arts from the National Theater Conservatory, and her Grand Diplôme in classic culinary arts from the French Culinary Institute in New York City.
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