I’ve spent most of my adult life as a bake-by-photos kind of girl. No, I don’t mean that I ignore textual instructions and base my cooking exclusively on what I see (though that could be a mighty fun and/or terrible idea), but when it comes to wooing my culinary curiosity with winning recipes, delicious photos…
Project NYT: Molasses cupcakes with lemon icing
Like most people, I definitely have my favorite flavors. Cinnamon, vanilla, anything citrusy: I always tend to gravitate toward recipes that incorporate the tastes that I love. More often than not, those recipes call for expected combinations: cinnamon with nutmeg and vanilla, lemon with fresh berries, rolled oats with brown sugar. They’re classic combos because…
Project NYT: What’s up, Butternut?
Around our house (and probably a lot of yours, too), winter weather means soup weather. Fortunately, considering the piles of cold and snowiness we’ve been hit with this season, there’s no shortage of classics to pull out or new recipes to try. Whether it’s time-tested favorites like tomato or chicken noodle or new spins like…
Project NYT: Baking from honey-dipped memories
Food is a funny thing. On the one hand, it comes equipped with so many quantifiable qualities: vitamins, nutrients, calories and ingredients. On the other hand, so much of what we eat and how we eat is tied to much less tangible traits: what we know, whom we know and what we remember. Food has…
Project NYT: Rollin’ in dough
For the past few years, my heart for pizza has been divided between two great loves: Shakespeare’s Pizza, the No. 1 college hangout here in Columbia (seriously, just ask Good Morning America) and Monetti’s Pizzeria Ristorante, a little Italian restaurant in my hometown of Warrensburg. One’s classic American fare, done right with fresh ingredients, and…
Project NYT: Lentil ginger soup
Our snow day proved to be filled with all sorts of warm and cozy yesterday, with the snow day muffins starting the morning on a high note in all their cinnamon glory, followed by an evening of om-nom-nom-inducing soup that warmed us from the inside out. Nothing beats snow days and cozy nights. We should…
Project NYT: Nostalgia and the 67-year-old brownie
My quest for the perfect homemade brownie continued last night, and I dare say I might have found a winner. Hidden nearly 700 pages deep, in the “Cookies and Candy” section of my NYT Cookbook, there lies an incredibly simple, back-to-basics type of recipe that sounded like just the kind of the thing I was…
Project NYT: Oatmeal, meet Cookie. Om, nom, nom.
Dried oats are pretty amazing when you think about it. With little more than a dot of water and sprinkle of brown sugar, they’re an automatic breakfast. Roast them with dried fruit and maple syrup or honey, and your granola wishes are fulfilled. Add some butter, sugar, flour, eggs and raisins, and you’ve brought them…
Project NYT: Tomato Soup I
For the past six months, Jared and I have been in search of a delicious homemade tomato soup. It sounds simple enough, right? Beyond the tomatoes, milk, salt and pepper, it didn’t seem like there could be much to the basic recipe. Of course, I’d spent at least a decade making tomato soup from a…
Project NYT: Apple coffee cake
Typically, I’ve never been one to go for reduced-fat or sugar-free kinds of labels, but a few years ago I tried the reduced-fat cinnamon swirl coffee cake at Starbucks and found it to be a pretty delish little baked good. On further consideration, I realized that reduced-fat probably just eliminates a dot of the butter…