oat-apricot bars (and a great springtime cocktail)

So what do you make when you're craving something sweet that's also portable for lunches and such, and you're also impatient for summer stone fruit to make its debut? CHOW's Crumbly Oat & Apricot Bars, made with dried apricots and apricot jam, do the trick. Aren't those gorgeous? They turn out just like the picture. The crust reminds me of the salty oat cookies at Teaism, one of my favorite neighborhood snacks. As noted in the comments on the CHOW website, it's important to use kosher salt for this, not only because table salt is saltier and more densely packed for its volume (they'd be salty indeed if you used a tablespoon of table salt), but also because kosher salt won't totally dissolve in the crust mixture, resulting in appealing little bursts of salt playing off the sweet.

I was almost dissuaded from trying this recipe because of the user comments. But having made this and having had them turn out fabulously, I have to say I have no idea what these people are talking about. Raw flour taste? Not sweet enough? What did they do? Seriously, these are great.

And as for the drink, I think I have perfected my version of a pomegranate martini. Two shots of vodka, one shot of Grand Marnier, a splash of rosewater, a generous squeeze of lemon, topped off with pomegranate juice. The rosewater is nice with pomegranate and it makes the drink something more than just spiked fruit juice (got the idea from a similarly embellished sangria I had recently), and it's not cloyingly sweet. Some boys might even drink it (just don't tell them about the girly rosewater).

I'm watching Dirty Dancing on cable as I type this - What was Jennifer Grey thinking in the '90s when she got that thoroughly generic nose job? Why did she do that? What was wrong with her real one? That is all.

Gotta go - it's time for the big finale. Ooh, here they all come marching down toward the stage for the big lift! Nobody puts Baby in a corner!

on a sugar high

So we're having this holiday cookie swap at work tomorrow, and for some reason we're each supposed to bring six to eight dozen cookies. That's right, six to eight DOZEN. I think maybe the idea is that this way, everyone goes home with several assorted cookie plates they can then give to people. I dunno. I also don't know quite how I'm going to get all this stuff to and from work tomorrow, because I walk to work. All I know is that it means I've gone through a truly astounding amount of butter in this weekend's baking.

My contributions: maple-date bars, lavender-vanilla bean shortbread, lemon curd thumbprints, and chocolate cupcakes with chocolate-mint ganache and mint buttercream frosting (from the fabulous Cupcake Bakeshop blog). The cupcakes, which you see above (sorry for the less-than-optimal photo) were my first cupcake effort, inspired by my purchase of a nifty decorating set - instead of a pastry bag, it's a small plastic accordion-pleated squeeze bottle that's a lot easier to control for a beginner. I'm a decorating klutz, but it worked out well.

Happy holidays, everyone!

success!

Okay, I almost NEVER make pies from scratch because, frankly, I am scared of making pie crust. On this blog, Melissa has often stated her caramel phobia; well, that's how I am with flaky pastry. It just never, ever ends well. I always seem to end up with too much filling or too little, and burnt, bricklike crust with nary a flake in sight. But I had a fridge full of apples, a lazy Saturday ahead of me and a husband requesting pie, so I figured I'd face my fears. Imagine my surprise when I took this beauty out of the oven:



I used the recipe from Cook Something by Mitchell Davis. It was the very first cookbook I ever bought myself and almost every recipe I've tried has been great (and I've tried almost all of them -- just not the apple pie, until today). It's 10 years old now and the pages are falling out. I'm nostalgic about this book because this is pretty much what I taught myself to cook from.

Once again, I used the freeze-the-butter-and-grate-it trick. You end up hardly having to work the dough at all, and I think that's the key.

clean-out-the-freezer bread pudding

Two people just can't eat a lot of fresh bread before it goes bad. I end up turning baguettes into bread crumbs and throwing rolls into the freezer. Ditto for pancakes and waffles--Mr. Tart and I can't even finish a half-batch of homemade breakfast goodies on our own. As a result, our freezer was bursting with leftover sweet and starchy goodies, and they had to go. It was time for bread pudding!

I used my favorite very easy recipe from Epicurious, but this time substituted leftover waffles and croissants (turning an already-French dish into a very-French dish). I cut them into big chunks and let them sit out on the counter until they weren't soft anymore, and then preceded with the recipe. (I also had more than the four cups' worth the recipe calls for, so I increased the amount of milk in the custard--enough to cover the pastry pieces--and also the baking time.) And I doubled the bourbon sauce--it's intense and delicious and takes the dessert from France back to New Orleans.

goat-cheese cheesecake with gingersnap-hazelnut crust and blood-orange caramel

I hardly ever follow recipes to the letter anymore. Which, when I'm making dinner, generally works out fine because I know enough techniques and flavor combos to throw something decent together. But I don't really have the pastry skills to make that work with dessert. So I'll improvise in a sort of modular way, using made-up elements and components of various recipes. The goat-cheese cheesecake recipe I used was crustless and baked in six ramekins, but I like cookie crusts with my cheesecakes and I wanted to use my springform pan. So I made up a gingersnap-and-hazelnut crust (delish!), made extra filling (good call) and sort of guessed on the baking time. I think I overdid it by about 10 minutes -- it was a bit too much on the cakey side, rather than the creamy/silky side. Live and learn. But even when cheesecake isn't technically flawless, it's still cheesecake. You can't truly screw it up.

I also used the blood-orange caramel called for in the original recipe. But I tweaked that too: I added a good fat pinch of sea salt, and instead of taking it off the heat after adding the orange juice, I let it reduce for a few minutes (mine was inexplicably runny), and I finished it with a bit of butter - maybe a tablespoon or so - which deepened the flavor. Perfect. It plays off the tanginess of the cheesecake. I will be using this caramel recipe to accompany many desserts in the future. In fact, I made a double batch and we had some this morning, accompanying peaches as a crepe filling. (Hooray, dessert-as-breakfast!) And that hazelnut brittle in the original recipe? I will trying that in the future too.

an easy, luscious summer dessert

The farmers' markets here in D.C. are starting to explode: The first honest-to-goodness dirt-grown tomatoes, the sweet corn, and the peaches all made their debut at my local market today. The peaches I bought were ripe but still firm, and I found some locally made mascarpone, so I made this based on something I remember reading about in the Washington Post food section. We had it with a very tasty dessert wine (Bonny Doon Vineyards' Muscat Vin de Glaciere) that I'd been saving for the right accompaniment:



Grilled Peaches with Mascarpone, Basil & Tupelo Honey

Slice peaches in half and remove pits (for grilling, it's important that the peaches not be overripe); rub a little olive oil on both sides. Preheat the grill; meanwhile, chop some basil and mix it into some mascarpone cheese (enough to put a dollop in each peach half). Put the peach halves cut side down on the grill; grill two or three minutes on each side. The peaches should be fragrant, lightly charred and heated through, but they shouldn't start to collapse. Put a dollop of the basil mascarpone in each peach half, drizzle with honey and top with a little more basil.

It was just Mark and me tonight, but this would be a fabulous dinner-party dessert for when it's too hot to turn on the stove and you want to impress guests with something that tastes much more sophisticated than it should.

the budding gourmand

My nephew Carl recently turned one year old. His birthday cake was actually gingerbread cupcakes which Elizabeth adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe; he wolfed two of them down and chased them with ice cream and laughed.

Why gingerbread? Well, a neighbor had given their family a plate of various cookies just before Christmas, so Carl's parents fed him a soft gingerbread cookie. When it was gone, he sobbed and cried real tears. They held up the plate to show that the gingerbread was all gone, and he continued to wail. So they handed him the plate to make it clear that no more cookies were left. And what did Carl do? He started licking the plate!

Here he is with the cupcakes:

Can't you tell that he love gingerbread? His other favorites include bananas (he can even say "nana" when he sees one!) and ice cream and carrots and apple juice.

cooking with kids

I've been tutoring a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and their mom in French for a semester now. One night a week we have a "cooking class" in French, where I teach them the necessary vocabulary and they follow my directions to prepare something simple and sweet that they can eat right away. (We meet after dinner, so it's supposed to be a dessert.) And I'm running out of ideas! Here's a list of what we've done so far (that I can remember); can anyone else suggestion other hands-on, kid-friendly desserts? (They don't actually have to be French.)

"bananes royales" (banana splits)
palmiers (rolled-up puff pastry sliced into cookies)
croissants (refrigerated crescent rolls that they rolled up themselves)
crepes (I made those and the girls added the toppings)
French toast
spider crackers
parfaits (with yogurt, granola, and fruit)
strawberry shortcake
cookies (from a refrigerator tube, which we decorated with icing after slicing and baking them--baking cookies from scratch with two preschoolers would take up all the time we had for lessons!)
cinnamon toast
ants on a log
fruit dipped in chocolate

bread pudding? bread soup?

Mr. Tart and I recently dined at Boulder's Mateo, where we had a lovely meal--including a ginormous lobster raviolo--yep, just one!--which ended perfectly with what they called a dried-cherry and caramel bread pudding. Served in a ramekin, the custard was nearly liquid and the bread chunks still chunky and almost crisp. I suspect that this bread pudding hadn't actually been baked, because the bread had not absorbed much custard, hadn't gone soft, hadn't expanded and enlarged, and no dried crusty bits clung to the side of the ramekin. It was like a thick sweet soup studded with dried cherries and topped with caramel syrup. And this dessert tasted so rich and lucious I didn't even mind being misled by the "bread pudding" misnomer.

So here's what I'm wondering: does it really have to be baked in the oven to be considered "bread pudding"? And does anyone have a non-baked bread pudding recipe to share before I try to invent my own?

there's even tomatoes in the dessert!

Mr. Tart and I recently had a delicious Supper Club dinner with our foodie friends Cynde & Todd and Katie & Aaron. We try to get together every few months for an Iron Chef-inspired meal, where we all contribute dishes using the theme ingredient. In honor of late summer's bounty in our gardens, this time it was TOMATO.

The appetizer was my perennial favorite, fried green tomatoes. Thick and tart with a spicy cornmeal crust, they just say "summer" to me. Our first course--as you can see above--was a tiered chilled soup of avocado and chicken broth and sour cream, topped with fresh tomato puree, decorated with chopped cucumber and shallots. My mother-in-law found the recipe in Sunset magazine and shared it with us (the long chives masquerading as straws were a last-minute inspiration).


The main course consisted of Cook's Illustrated extremely-picky-but-quite-successful ratatouille recipe. I spent much of the afternoon draining and pressing and roasting and pan-frying each type of vegetable separately, but when they came together, each one asserted its own flavor and texture instead of turning into Provencal mush. We served it with polenta (made from corn meal) with four ounces of goat cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes thrown in. Cynde brought a side dish of tomatoes baked with couscous, raisins, and cinnamon--adding to the Mediterranean feel of our meal--and a green salad with tomatoes.


Katie had the night's biggest challenge: dessert. She prepared crepes with a sweet, creamy filling and topped them with homemade tomato preserves which had been cooked with sugar, ginger, and lemon. Mr. Tart and I confessed later on that we were a little suspicious of the idea of sweet tomatoes, and Katie grimaced as she ladled them out, telling us we didn't need to eat them if they tasted nasty--but once we tried them, we all were hooked!


And Katie was kind enough to give each couple their own jar of tomato preserves, suggesting that we use it as a glaze on meat as well as on top of desserts. I'm thinking it might also go well with a quiche (my mom always serves a sweet raspberry salsa with hers). We'd welcome other suggestions from loyal Three Tarts readers!

Too many aphrodisiacs?

Mr. Tart and I recently had another themed potluck dinner with Cynde, Todd, Katie, and Aaron (and their urchins, Atley and Noah). In honor of Valentine's Day, this month's theme ingredient was "aphrodisiacs." Here's what we came up with:

Cynde's appetizer: Dried figs stuffed with bleu cheese, some wrapped in prosciutto. (Todd called them, inelegantly, "crammed figs," but seeing the speed with which they were crammed into people's mouths, perhaps he ended up more descriptive than he anticipated!)

Salads: "Love apples" with red onion and homemade croutons (from Cynde, recipe courtesy of her brother, a chef in Hawaii and also a member of Mr. Tart's Boy Scout troop in high school) and "The World's Sexiest Salad" with mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, cantaloupe, and prosciutto (Katie).



Katie's main course: Grilled chicken marinated in white wine and fruit nectar (apricot?), served on top of baby spinach with grilled figs caramelized with demarra sugar and a reduced nectar-wine sauce. And yes, it was as good as it looks. (Well, it's Valentine's Day! Of course you're going to get food porn on this blog!)

My dessert: Peach and raspberry crepes with lavender in orange syrup (you've read about this disastrous recipe already). That's Noah helping me garnish. Katie and Aaron provided Godiva white chocolate liqueur to sip with it.

So do these reputed aphrodisiacs live up to their notoriety, or is it just a bunch of hooey? Well, I'm not one to kiss and tell! Too many aphrodisiacs at one meal? Never!

Noah's First Fondue

Mr. Tart and I recently joined some friends from grad school for a fondue dinner. We brought the chocolate dessert fondue, very traditional, and Cynde and Todd provided the swiss cheese fondue with bread and veggies. Our fearless hosts, completely undaunted by the prospect of serving fondue for the first time to a French teacher, decided to experiment a bit to avoid that whole meat-dipped-in-boiling-oil thing for the main course. Katie found a recipe for grilled steak brushed with pesto dipped into a blue cheese cream sauce (which made Mr. Tart a very happy man). Doesn't it look good?

We all loved all of it. The biggest fan, though, was perhaps two-year-old Noah, who delighted in the fruit and chocolate. We thought it dangerous to give him a fondue fork, seeing as he doesn't yet have the manual dexterity for something so long and pointy, so Katie just put the pre-dipped food on his plate:

Isn't he just the cutest thing you've ever seen at the dinner table? His enthusiasm soon spread:

And here's the "after" picture. The dinner party was clearly a rousing success! After all, nothing says "good party" like chocolate up one's nose.