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.

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.

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.

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

Ganda lent some excellent recipes and her expertise. Check out, for example, her meatball-rolling abilities.

I’m a big fan of meatballs and have eaten innumerable iterations of them — in Sweden too — and made a few mostly Italian versions, but these are truly magical.

The recipe comes from Ganda’s copy of Leif Mannerström’s The Art of Home Cooking and it calls for equal amounts of ground beef and pork to be mixed with breadcrumbs soaked in milk and beaten eggs, two onions, one grated raw, the other chopped fine and browned, mashed potatoes, veal stock, soy sauce, and anchovy extract (I used whole fish, preserved in oil, and threw them in with the onion when it was nearly done to break them down).

Mannerström suggests piping the mixture into balls, but we found it easier just to roll them by hand. The meatballs are browned in butter (best done in the cast-iron skillet or nonstick, I unfortunately discovered), and for gravy, you just deglaze the pan with some water.

They’re totally worth it.

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.]

For the last edition of Choice Cuts, we screened the Jules Dassin short of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” So obviously, I had to cook some hearts.

My favorite meatmongers at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats (now permanently brick-and-mortared at Chelsea Market) happened to have three bags of various bird hearts for me. However, they were also mixed in with gizzards and livers, so I spent an hour or two picking through the sacks, rinsing and sorting.

I fried them in butter, as per Fergus Henderson,deglazed with a little vincotto, and put those chewy, saucy little hearts on toast. Sprinkle with parsley, serve, rinse, repeat.

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.

Dear readers, let’s collaborate on a timely recipe.

All I have right now is a name. It’s called Nobel Surprise.
What is it? And what’s the surprise?
It’s probably based on something Norwegian and famous.
An autumn dish, like cardamom cake with pear baked inside.

Perhaps there is a touch of Kenya? Cloudberry wienerbrød, served with changaa-spiked whipped cream?

Maybe it’s not a dessert.

Maybe it’s an appetizer. It’s a teaser, suggesting magical things could happen later in the meal. It’s tasty, sure, but like a dish at El Bulli, the hype about Nobel Surprise sometimes gets out of control, and stratospheric expectations can’t always be met.

What do you think Nobel Surprise is?

UPDATE 10/17/09:
So that you know I’m serious about Nobel Surprise, I’m throwing out the first (and maybe the only) serious option: I made some cardamom milk cake last night and drizzled dark chocolate on it. The dark chocolate is the surprise, of course. Maybe it should’ve been milk chocolate, but I don’t like milk chocolate (and I hope you don’t think I’m bi-racist for saying it).

OK, I admit it. This whole thing was just an excuse for me to make dessert…

I can’t remember the last time I made a layer cake with icing. Maybe never. I prefer to leave these things to the experts. Cakes are not a cakewalk. Especially not in Santa Fe, at 7,000 feet above sea level. So when called upon to bake one for a dinner party, I refused at first.

I was happy to cook anything on the stovetop, but I wasn’t going near the oven. At which point, my friend Sarah revealed a book that got me over the fear: Pie in the Sky, by Susan G. Purdy.

Purdy realized that all the rules of thumb she’d found for baking at high altitude were inconsistent at best. In the mountains, evaporation happens faster, and leavening of any kind is more effective because of the lower air pressure. So, for example, to make a cake you have to increase your oven temperature so that your cake’s structure will “set” earlier, before the cake overexpands or dries out. But a temperature adjustment isn’t enough. You still need to decrease the amount of leavening. You also need more liquid to keep the cake from drying out. But now that you’ve added more liquid, if you don’t add extra flour your cake won’t be able to hold its structure and will fall. It’s a multivariate problem, so the exact adjustments are elusive and have made high altitude baking a real pain in the ass, until now anyway.

Purdy gathered a hundred of her favorite recipes for baked goods and traveled from her home at sea level to test kitchens in four locations: Boone, NC (3,000 feet), Denver, CO (5,000 feet), Santa Fe (7,000 feet), and Breckenridge, CO (10,000 feet). At each place, she iteratively adjusted every recipe until they came out right.

So the resulting book is like five cookbooks in one. The ingredients list for each recipe in the book is a grid, with a column for each altitude. Made in Santa Fe, the 7,000 foot version was fantastic. One of the better cakes I’ve ever tasted, and definitely the best cake I’ve ever made. So here’s the recipe:

First, a spreadsheet of ingredients for the chocolate buttermilk cake.

You’ll need two 9-inch cake pans, parchment paper, and a mixer.

1. Get your eggs and butter out if you haven’t already, get the oven warming up with the rack in the correct place, and butter the bottom and sides of each pan thoroughly. Line the bottoms of the each pan with a circle of parchment paper and add a second layer of butter on top of the parchment paper.
2. Chop the chocolate and melt it in the microwave on high: 30 seconds; stir; 15 seconds; stir; repeat in 15 second increments, stirring each time until the chocolate has just melted. Set aside.
3. Mix together, then sift the flour, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg in a medium bowl and set aside. Sifting is super important, don’t skip this!
4. Now, let’s get the batter going. In the work bowl of an stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until well blended. Scrape down the bowl and add the vanilla and the eggs, two at a time. Mix well to blend, then scrape down the bowl again.
5. Turn the mixer back on, on the lowest speed. Add 1/3 of the flour, then 1/3 of the buttermilk, alternately, until everything has been combined.
6. Fold in the chocolate and stir until well combined.
7. Divide the batter into the two pans, and smooth the top. Bake for the appropriate time for your altitude. The cake should be springy, and a cake tester should come out clean. Just barely. If it’s not done after the minimum time, you’ll be surprised by what two extra minutes in the oven will do.
8. Set the pans on wire racks and let cool for 10-15 minutes, then run a knife around the edge of each cake layer to release them, and invert the cake. Remove the parchment and let the layers cool completely on the wire racks before icing.

For frosting, melt 8 oz of 70+% chocolate in the microwave, combine with 1 cup heavy cream, and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so. You’re basically making a ganache. Mix with an electric mixer until you’ve reached a good icing consistency; you may add more cream if you need to thin it out. Ice the cakes, and serve!

Soup season is officially open, and I’ve been exploring water-based soups this year. Mostly because I don’t have the time and energy to make stock (not that it requires much), and I’m not buying stock at the supermarket because it isn’t very good, it’s expensive, I think it’s a waste of food transportation energy, and the supermarket I’m shopping at doesn’t sell meat anyway, so my choices are mushroom, vegetable, or nothing.

It’s amazing how flavorful nothing can be. With a little added fat and umami of course. You see, you can’t just salt your way to success with water-based soup. You need some kind of base, probably some variant of a mirepoix along with a bunch of fat. I don’t know where I heard this recently, but fat is flavor. So, preferably you’ll want a couple kinds.

Plus you’ll want a balance of umami (which, really, is what stock is all about), salt, and acid. Example one: this delicious west african peanut soup from Bittman. Fattened up with grapeseed oil, chicken fat, peanut butter, and peanuts. Tomatoes lend the umami and acid. Sweet potatoes and kale make for a good textural balance. Wow, it’s so damn good.

Example two: red lentil soup with lemon, which has graced this blog in the past, perhaps more than once. The recipe calls for stock, but this one works well with water. You need another flavor dimension beyond the olive oil/tomato paste/lemon troika to drive it home, though. A cup of grated parmesan at the end works well, in lieu of salt. And a dollop of yogurt upon serving takes it to the top.

So, that’s what I’ve got. If you have any other water-based soup secrets, I’d love to hear them…

That was 2008.

This was 2009:

This year, more than half our toaster hook-ups dried up, there was no dessert portion of the evening, and we overcompensated on the lettuce front, but we had Tim’s mayonnaises, more of the best tomato jam ever, Don’s bacon bourbon Old Fashioneds, and 25 pounds of bacon, with representation from (drumroll, please):

Allan Benton / Madisonville, TN
Pleroma Farm / Hudson, NY
Mountain View Farm / Jackson, NY
Bradley Farm / New Paltz, NY
Jeffrey’s Meat Market / New York, NY
Char No. 4 / Brooklyn, NY
Los Paisanos Meat Market / Brooklyn, NY
some Polish butcher (double-smoked!) / Brooklyn, NY
me (pork belly from Fleisher’s / Brooklyn, NY

Can’t wait for 2010.