Tag Archives: food writing

Creamy Spinach Flatbread

makes 4 servings

2 tbsp Olive oil

6 cloves garlic minced or grated on a microplane

3 scallions, sliced

1/2 a small yellow onion, small diced

1 bundle spinach (not baby) washed and chopped with stems removed,

3 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp rice vin

1.5 cups cream, reduced by half

7 oz freshly grated gruyere

Salt to taste

4 pieces 6-8″ store-bought pita bread or flatbread

8 oz low moisture mozzarella, cut into small cubes

Equipment: large sauté pan, chef knife, cutting board, microplane, salad spinner, cheese grater, tbsp measuring spoon, 1/2 cup measure, 1-2 sheet pans, cooling rack

  1. Preheat your sauté pan with the oil in it. Once the oil is hot, add the scallions, onion, and garlic and cook until soft, avoiding brow. Avoid
  2. By the end you should have just under a quart’s worth of the creamy spinach topping. You can use it as a filling, spread, or dip, but today we’re using it to make flatbreads.
  3. Preheat your oven to 400℉ and spread a quarter of the filling on each flatbread from edge to edge. Place 2 oz of the cheese on each flatbread. The cheese shouldn’t cover it completely.
  4. Place your flatbreads onto your sheet pan and then put that on the lowest rack of your oven for 10-15 minutes, or until the bottoms have crisped and the edges have browned slightly. If your cheese hasn’t melted all the way, move the pan to the top rack in the oven and bake until molten and bubbly.
  5. Cool on a rack for 5-10 minutes, cut into quarters and enjoy!

Zucchini Ribbon Salad

1 zucchini, shaved longways

1 squash, shaved

Salt

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp high quality vinegar (rice or sherry)

1/2 tbsp agave

10 grape tomatoes, halved

2 larger or 3 smaller scallions, cut thinly on a bias

1 cob’s worth of corn

8-10 mint leaves, chiffonade large ones and leave small ones whole

1 pack of tarragon (6-8 stems worth), picked and left whole

4 oz crumbled fresh feta

Salt to taste

A lot of freshly cracked Black pepper (at least 10 cranks, but to taste)

Equipment: large mixing bowl, 1 small mixing bowl, utility/ paring knife, cutting board, mandolin

  1. Cut the ends off of the zucchini and carefully slice it from end to end with the mandolin. You should have long, thin ribbons of zucchini.
  2. Cut the ends off of the squash as well, but cut it with the madoline into thin rounds. Combine with the zucchini ribbons and add a hefty pinch of salt. Carefully mix until everything is coated in salt and let it sit for 15 minutes.
  3. While that’s sitting, mix the lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt, and agave until fully incorporated. Slightly undersalt the dressing to account for the salty feta on top at the end.
  4. Drain the liquid from the sliced zucchini and squash and add the mixed dressing along with your prepped tomatoes, scallions and corn.
  5. Plate the the dressed salad and garnish with the fresh herbs, crumbled feta and black pepper.
  6. Enjoy!

Cornbread Muffins with Berries and Cream

Cornbread Muffins (makes 9 muffins)

130 g ap flour

130 g stone ground yellow cornmeal

8 g baking powder

25 g toasted milk powder

big pinch of salt

2 large eggs

245 g buttermilk

60 g melted butter

80 g honey

1 tbsp butter (for toasting)

Equipment: scale, measuring cups/ spoons (1/3 and 1 cup, 1 tbsp and 1/4 tsp), 2 small mixing bowls, 2 larger mixing bowls, piping bag, 3×3 muffin pan, whisk, serrated knife, small sauté pan

  1. Thoroughly whisk the dry ingredients in a large bowl and the wet in smaller one.
  2. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk until no pockets of dry ingredients remain, lumps are good so be careful not to overmix. Transfer to a piping bag and rest in the fridge for 30 mins.
  3. Preheat the oven to 400 ℉ and prepare your 3×3 muffin pan by spraying with nonstick spray, or brushing the muffin pan walls with butter.
  4. Fill your muffin molds 3/4 of the way up and bake for 15-18 minutes or until a toothpick poked into the middle comes out with a little bit of moisture and crumbs stuck to it.
  5. Once removed from the oven, flip the muffin pan over on a cooling rack and flip them individually right side up to cool.

Macerated Berries

1 cup Blueberries

1 cup Raspberries

50 g lemon juice

100 g light brown sugar

pinch of salt

  1. In the other small mixing bowl carefully mix the ingredients together every 10 minutes until all the sugar is dissolved into the accumulated juices

Whipped Cream

2/3 cup heavy cream

1/3 cup buttermilk

1 tbsp sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla paste/ extract

1 Pinch of salt

  1. In a larger mixing bowl whip all the ingredients to soft peaks

To Serve

  1. Cut the corn muffins down the middle and toast in a pan with butter
  2. Plate the cut muffins next to each other with a heavy dollop of whipped cream laid across the top and plenty of berries and sauce spooned over the middle and around the edges. Garnish with fresh mint.
  3. Enjoy!

Chick o’ Stick Cookies

Recipe makes 8 cookies

1 cup peanut butter

3/4 cup light brown sugar

1 egg

1 1/4 cups desiccated coconut (separated into 3/4 cup and 1/2 cup)

1/2 cup Turbinado sugar

Equipment: hand mixer, mixing bowl, baking sheet, parchment paper, oven

  1. with a hand mixer cream together the peanut butter, brown sugar and 3/4 cup of the coconut until it’s light and airy
  2. add the egg and blend until smooth
  3. with clean hands, roll the dough into 8 equal sized balls
  4. mix the rest of the coconut and the turbinado sugar together and roll the dough balls in that mixture
  5. bake the cookies 1 inch apart on a parchment lined baking sheet at 350℉ for 10-15 minutes, or when the edges just start to darken

best enjoyed with coffee or tea

Sam’s Coconut Sablé

makes 16 cookies

75 g unsalted butter, room temperature

50 g extra virgin olive oil

80 g white sugar

25 g fine dry coconut

55 g egg yolk

5 g dark rum (optional)

3 g salt

5 g baking powder

50 g powdered coconut milk

130 g all-purpose flour

  1. Mix the butter, olive oil, sugar and dry coconut until the mixture is fully incorporated and slightly fluffy.
  2. Add the egg yolk, rum and salt and mix thoroughly.
  3. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until no dry bits of flour remain. Chill the dough for at least 1 hour.
  4. Once fully chilled, preheat the oven to 300℉. Roll the dough into 16 balls, each one approximately weighing 30 grams. You should end up with 16 dough balls.
  5. Space the dough balls out on 2 parchment lined baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. The edges of the sable should be just barely starting to brown.
  6. Cool for 5 minutes on the sheet trays, then remove the cookies from their trays and finish cooling on the counter until they’re no longer warm to the touch.

My Leap of Faith

That late August Georgia day is tattooed onto my brain. It was warm, I was beyond nervous. My fiancé and I piled our lives into a 20 ft U-Haul, filling it only about a quarter capacity. The smaller, more practical truck we rented was unavailable, so they let us “upgrade” to a bigger one. They didn’t account for the extra dollop of anxiety that was plopped onto my plate by that behemoth, making itself comfortable beside my fear of failure, pandemic stress, and the sheer presence of the great unknown. Despite my worst fears, the trip went exactly as smoothly as it could have, which further cemented my decision to make such a dramatic migration. I even got a few days with my Grandma when we passed through Virginia, which worked as a great distraction.

In New York City, we dropped off our stuff at the new apartment and the truck at the closest U-Haul return location. We managed our way back and were left to imagine what lives we had ahead of us in a city crippled by the pandemic. Neither of us had jobs, and there weren’t many available, so taking leaps of faith was going to be the norm for the next year or so. We still aren’t comfortable with that part. What drove it all, defying the fear and anxiety, was a shared love of food and the faith that we would make and eat the best cuisine of our lives. I was going to train as a chef amid a worldwide disaster and industrywide collapse.

A few days went by and I was able to tour the place in which I was meant to hone my craft for the next 6 months. As I took my first steps through those heavy double glass doors, I was overwhelmed by the face of culinary-focused academics staring me down. As I passed endless fully equipped kitchens in my tour, my excitement was overflowing, and I looked at my fiancé and said, “This is where I should be.” After I received my start date and some paperwork to finish before then, we left and I was chomping at the bit for more. We spent the meantime exploring the neighborhood we lived in and we soon learned of the absence of energy in this once bustling city. I saw statistics online that really drove the point home. Despite the seemingly busy subway trains that kept alternating seats empty to combat the spread of Covid, the subway was only seeing a fraction of the riders it saw a year prior. Even Times Square was close to empty.

My first day finally arrives and I get up before the crack of dawn to make it to class a half hour early. I was a little nervous, but mostly excited. I was finally here! I had been waiting for this moment for almost a year, all the while imagining how the universe would find a way to pull the rug out from underneath me. My patience had finally paid off. We learned of knife cuts, stocks, sauces, cooking methods, regional dishes and much more, but what I’ll remember most about this time in my life are the relationships that I made. A native New Yorker classmate of mine told me, “I’m sorry you have to see the city this way, it’s a shitshow.” I told her there was no need to apologize, I saw past the tragedy and tried to focus on the beauty of the city in pain.

We often discussed our hopes and wishes that everything would be cleared up enough for us to have proper externships and find good jobs after school. Did we all really decide to go to school during a pandemic? Was it something we would grow to regret? I still don’t know the answer to the latter, but yeah we did it. We picked the most hopeless time to start careers in a tough, yet rewarding industry. And who knows, maybe we picked a perfect time. We’ll see businesses revive and mourn the ones we lost forever. We will build a palace on the ruins that are a pre-Covid world. Every chef that graced our classroom with their knowledge and experiences told us what would be expected of us young cooks. We’re the ones that will rebuild and permeate the industry with our talents and bring it back to life like a phoenix emerging from a pile of discarded masks and faded lines of floor tape.