Hi, I’m Amanda, and I want to write about food. I spend a lot of time reading about cooking, thinking about cooking, and actually cooking. Here are some of the things I’ve made this February alone.
First things first, Sourdough! A long time ago I took a bread-making class with food writer and baker (check out Downtime Bakery if you’re local to Philly!) entrepreneur, Dayna Evans. This was pre-pandemic, and the wave of people enthusiastically learning home baking had not yet come to pass, and I was very excited to begin my journey with natural leavening.
When I think about why I love to cook, bread holds a lot of the answers: it’s versatile and nourishing, and the process of making it is physical in a very pleasing way. With time, patience, and a gentle hand you can transform water and flour into crackly, chewy, tender bread. Add heat and It feels like a kind of magic, it really does!
A fatal, possibly Millenial-centric, flaw I encountered when everyone went bread crazy in March 2020, was annoyance. After all, I had already been obsessively making sourdough each week! I had kept my starter alive and I was not part of a “trend”. As with all things, time passed and I eventually got over myself. That’s a Taurus for you, holds a pointless grudge for 2 years while still keeping a little jar of fermented flour and water alive in my fridge. Eventually, the pressure to return to this process that I actually loved got to me and I produced my first loave in about 2 years.
What a beauty!! Now, we love to have bread around in the house for snacking and toast centric meals, but I, of course, was asking myself what I could possibly make for dinner that could use up some of this beautiful bread (why did a winter panzanella not occur to me? I don’t know!). It’s February, everyone’s least favorite month, and everything is cold and dull. What’s the opposite of cold and dull? A big vat of tangy, warming tomato soup. I have made tomato soup in the past, but I didn’t have a “go-to” recipe in mind. So I did what I often do, and opened up the NYT Cooking app on my phone. There I found Jennifer Steinhauer’s adaptation of Tomato Soup from Ted’s Bulletin. I really highly recommend this recipe, although I did half it because carrying home 4 28 oz cans of tomatoes home from the co-op was not something I was looking to do. This recipe starts off beautifully with cooking down onions in butter until they’re softened. The rest is relatively simple and the result is a beautiful soup that has a nice balance of acidity, depth, and warmth. I mean, what’s better on a cold day than a hearty grilled cheese on fresh sourdough dipped into a tangy bowl of tomato soup?
Speaking of cozy winter meals, I’m hard pressed to think of anything more comforting and filling than gnocchi. Gnocchi has a funny place in my mind, because I first encountered it in Italy on a high school pilgrimage I attended (yes, it was a catholic high school). When poring over a menu in Padua one word stood out that I knew, “patata”. I had no idea what I had ordered but I thought “hey, potatoes are always welcome!”. What arrived shortly was a plate of little potato clouds gently drenched in a perfect tomato sauce. As you can imagine, it was an awakening. In the years since I’ve attempted this dish from scratch with minimal success, and I finally decided enough was enough and I wasn’t going to let it get the best of me this time!
Browned butter, pine nuts, parmesan, and sage.
This recipe came from a book that was recently gifted to me, Lidia’s a Pot, a Pan, and a Bowl. I’ve also been trying to make a concerted effort to use my spilling-over collection of cookbooks because they’re an incredible resource (and I have to justify amassing more of them somehow!). There is something very satisfying about reaching for a book with that one recipe and having it crack open to the exact page, which has spills and remnants of ingredients all over it. While I’m not yet deeply familiar with this book, the gnochhi turned out beautifully! Luckily for you, there is a video of Lidia herself demonstrating her gnocchi recipe and technique.
I think the only major difference between the recipe in the video and the recipe in the book is the book version called for parmesan to be added into the dough. I liked the extra flavor the cheese gave this perfect fluffy gnocchi. In the video, as well as in the book, Lidia calls for the use of a ricer. I do not own one of these, so I simply waited for my cooked potatoes to cool a bit and then grated them on the finest plane of my box grated. This did the trick of making the potato fine but not clumpy or sticky. If you make this recipe, you can freeze and cook the gnocchi at a later time, or fresh! It makes a lot, so I got to enjoy some fresh gnocchi for a few frigid days this month.
Speaking of pasta, for the past few years, I’ve been making fresh pasta as Valentine’s tradition for my partner and I. I’m not sure where this idea came from? Maybe because pasta from scratch can feel like a labor of love. It is also a pretty immersive, repetitive process. Kneading endlessly, rolling out, shaping, etc. It’s a lot! But I have long wanted this process to be more accessible and not just for special occasions. So when I made pasta for us, I decided on this beet tagliatelle from Serious Eats.
The pasta, clearly, came out beautifully. I use an Imperia pasta roller (which I love, and believe is worth the investment!) but if you have a kitchen aid, there are pasta rolling attachments available. The dough from this recipe was smooth and pliable enough to roll by hand with a rolling pin, so if you don’t have pasta gadgets you’ll still be able to make some gorgeous noodles. I decided on this recipe for Mushroom Paparadelle from Pasta Social Club for the sauce, because my partner loves mushrooms, and because I am a member of the Park Slope Food Coop and we have a truly incredible selection of mushrooms year-round. It was absolutely delicious, unfortunately after all the pasta making we sort of devoured it ravenously and I forgot to take a photo. Here are some stunning Chantarelles, though.
As I’m sure you can tell, this is a carb-friendly household. So, yes, I made a lot of bread and pasta, but that is in part because I am still reminiscing about our time in Italy this past September. Three weeks of sun, spritz Aperol, olives, pasta, and of course, pastry. While traveling around the country one thing remained consistent: every morning began with an espresso and a pastry, and if I was lucky a glass of ACE juice. Here’s a brief sampling of what traveling up and down Italy was like:
It was during this time that I fell in love with a little chocolate studded brioche roll that’s sold in grocery stores locally. It may look unassuming but I found the plain, soft, barely sweet rolls to be the perfect thing to eat in the mornings. So when we arrived back in the US, I still craved my morning brioche bun. As lucky as I am to live within walking distance from Russo’s Mozzarella and Un Posto Italiano, I was not able to find the fluffy premade buns locally. I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied unless i gave them a try! So, I tracked down a recipe from Del’s Cooking Twist and got to work.
This was my first time making brioche, and I have to say I really enjoyed the process. It’s something I’ll certainly return to in the future, but for now, I’ve been lucky enough to find Bakerly French Brioche somewhat locally at Sahadis in Industry City.
Ok, well phew, that’s a wrap for me in February, a short month in which I tested the limits of what flour can do. If you’d like to read long-form on the topic of flour, I can’t recommend this article from Dayna Evans in Eater about how Flour is made. Please enjoy! and see you back here for our big re-design in April!