Below freezing, with 40-mph winds

That’s what it’s like outside in Brooklyn today.

I thankfully remembered a couple of weeks ago to bring the composting worms inside, along with the few survivors of the fire escape garden (though one tomato plant out there is still clinging to the last of its miraculously green leaves):

What’s this? What’s the tiny speck hanging off the middle plant?

Could it be? It is.

The little alpine strawberry plants we got from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden last spring are the toughest little guys I’ve ever tried to grow on purpose. Matt and I have both killed one or two each through neglect, and while only one of his came back from the dead only to be met with further neglect that it couldn’t live through a second time, my formerly-dead plant seems to be rallying nicely, and her sister is bearing a sizeable fruit on this, the eleventh day of December.

There’s no excuse

Over Thanksgiving, we ate too much (22 pounds of turkey and four pies for eight people!) and whiled away hours of digesting by playing Nintendo and Blokus and watching movies — “Away We Go” and “Objectified,” both altogether enjoyable.

In the latter, the otherwise insufferable Karim Rashid makes a couple of statements that the designers around me liked. The one I still remember — Why, with the millions of chairs that have been designed and produced, are there still uncomfortable chairs? — reminded me of something Steingarten wrote (probably in The Man Who Ate Everything), about how the standard for chocolate-chip cookies, provided on the back of the Tollhouse morsels bag, is both widely available and good, and therefore there should be no excuse for lesser cookies to exist in the world. (Could be that I’m generously misremembering, since the only quote I can find seems only to say that the recipe makes all other chocolate chip cookie recipes superfluous.)

That’s how I feel about this chocolate cake.

Matt is undertaking to become the baking expert around here. And when he was looking to bake something for a friend’s birthday, I directed him to a recipe that the Amateur Gourmet has written about several times. It’s true what the AG says, the cake is a people magnet. And more than that, it is very, very good. (Even when you forgo the second layer because you only have one cake pan each in 8″ and 10″.) Maybe one of the best chocolate cakes I’ve ever had, in fact. It’s easy enough and so good that you wonder why there are so many dry, tasteless chocolate cakes out there.

But then again, I’ve got a few uncomfortable chairs too.

Doing Mom proud

I contributed a dumpling recipe (my mom’s, actually) to the October/November 2009 issue of Jamie Magazine. There are still copies of the issue on US news stands.

Now that’s a spicy meatball

At the latest edition of Choice Cuts, we paid tribute to the movie Tilsammans with husmanskost, classic Swedish comfort food.

Have a heart

Or five or six.

[Warning for the faint of -- ahem: scores of undoubtedly cute little chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl gave their lives for this post.]

Fish in flavor

Our most recent edition of Choice Cuts was all about La Serenissima, and in that city of canals, one eats a lot of fish.

I somehow failed to get any pictures of the baccalà mantecato, but our token Venetian confirms that it holds up to the standard. Eating whipped salt cod on grilled polenta is like wrapping your tongue in a Snuggie (that’s a good thing), and the dish is actually pretty easy to put together. It just requires a little forethought — the cod needs a few days of soaking so you can keep all your teeth (and your mixer can keep its motor intact).

Sarde in saor, on the other hand, is a giant pain in the ass. Not only because the dish requires several days to complete, but because it turns out filleting sardines is not really as easy as the internet would make it seem. (Corollary: Filleting sardines to feed 20 is no fun.) But I love this dish, whose name is Venetian for “sardines in flavor” or “sardines in tastiness” and very apt.

Filleted sardines get a roll in some flour and then are deep fried.

Meanwhile, onions get stewed for a while in vinegar with raisins and pine nuts.

Alternate layers of onions with sardines in a big (ideally ceramic) vessel. Cover it and leave it in the fridge for two or three days.

Mangia. And then hunt down a fishmonger or friend skilled in filleting for next time.

BLT 2009: Double the bacon, double the fun

That was 2008.

This was 2009:

Deceptively simple

I have a tendency to make the most unassuming dishes in the most time-consuming, overwrought way. I figure that the more attention you pay to every step and aspect of making a dish, the better it’s going to be ultimately.

You look familiar

Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?

At my CSA pickup on Saturday, I was psyched to see that not only were we getting six pounds of peaches, pears, and plums, but that the plums were just like the ones that grow in the Langhe, where I used to live in Italy. Called ramassin there and Italian prune plums here, they’re especially good for putting up or for turning into a pie with the last few peaches from the previous week’s CSA share.

A cold one for hot days

Ganda posted last year about Brian’s method for making iced tea, but I thought I’d mention my variant. Also because I’m a recent convert to iced tea. I’d always preferred it hot, but during this heat wave, I would rather not make my insides feel like the outside.

We’ve been making gallons of iced coffee this summer using the cold-brewing method described in the NYTimes a while back. Also coffee ice cubes, which are key. It amazes me that there are still people out there who don’t know about cold brewing.

I’m not a coffee drinker, but I cold-brew iced tea in a similar fashion: before going to sleep, while Matt’s grinding the Stumptown, I drop a bag of PG Tips in a jar, fill it with cold water, and stick it in the fridge. In the morning, I’ve got a perfect, cold iced tea waiting for me. You could do it in less time, of course, but leaving it overnight makes it just the right temperature to help face a 95˚ subway platform.

My next innovation for iced tea will be unsweetened lemonade ice cubes.