Challenges you define for yourself are luxuries. Training for a marathon, reading the Brothers Karamazov, writing a novel in thirty days or learning to bake a loaf of bread – it all falls under the category of luxury.

My new challenge is unquestionably an indulgence. I’ve joined the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group in their new incarnation – working their way through Dorie Greenspan’s 1996 book, Baking with Julia, the companion to Julia Child’s last PBS cooking series.

It’s going to mean a lot butter, flour, sugar, yeast and learning. And that I might finally make a decent loaf of bread.

The Tuesdays with Dorie group has been active for years, originally working their way through Baking: From My Home to Yours. I’ve been following their progress and am a longtime fan of Greenspan ’s writing– so when I heard the group was starting fresh, I jumped aboard.

I’m excited about the book – which is divided roughly equally between breads and sweets, and weaves together recipes from some of the best bakers of its era, through Greenspan’s writing. And I love the format of the challenge; two posts a month, each hosted by two bloggers; only the official hosts post the recipe for any given challenge.

Our sweet challenge this month is David Ogonowski‘s Chocolate Truffle Tartlets: a chocolate crust filled with biscotti, chunks of milk and white chocolate and surrounded by a bittersweet chocolate filling. Of course, my tartlets are a little different: I made my crust by hand with a blend of whole wheat pastry dough and all-purpose flour, and my tarts were filled with cocoa-nibs and large crumbs of the extra crust batter that I pre-baked.

I made 8-3 ½ inch tarts, and next time (oh yes, there will be a next time!), I’ll go even smaller – maybe something the size of an actual truffle – they’re that luxurious. Visit the blogs of our hosts for this round, Steph, Spike, Jamie and Jessica to see the recipe (and four more tarts!). But I warn you, you’ll be tempted to start baking too.

Not long ago, I finished reading As Always, Julia, an edited selection of Julia Child’s correspondence with Avis De Voto – the woman who was in every practical way, her agent. The sheer voyeuristic pleasure of reading the long detailed letters, (in addition to all the ins and out of many of the recipes that went into creating the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the letters also bring the political anguish of the McCarthy years vividly to life) quickly gives way to admiration for Julia Child’s sheer strength of will – and her intelligence. Working for more than 10 years on such a project, didn’t always feel like a luxury, but what a gift it turned out to be for American food culture.

Watching the truffle tartlets episode on youtube made me a little sad. Julia was 84, in 1996, and though now an icon, she is no longer a dazzling presence. I admire the fact that she chose not to take on the book project, but to pass the torch to a worthy successor: Dorie Greenspan. Given her character that act must have been every bit as much a challenge, as a luxury.

Recipe: Potatoes with Tart Lentils and Winter Greens

My dog Max has a passionate love for seafood; salmon, trout, shrimp, lobster, and especially tuna.  The only time he indulges in countertop surfing is when we have fish on the menu. He once jumped into the back of fisherman’s truck parked on the street. When my cousin Mark made sushi in our kitchen a few years ago, Max was never far from his side.

I’m like that about Indian potato dishes; K.M.’s  black pepper potatoes, and the aloo dom (pressure cooked potatoes in yogurt sauce) I had in Darjeeling more than 10 years ago, and still dream of. The first time I made a successful aloo gobi (check out the video from Bend it Like Beckham), I felt like I had finally achieved novice status in Indian cooking.

When I do emergency recall drills with Max, his reward is half a can of tuna. As you can imagine, he always comes when called, just in case I’m packing fish.

I think I’ve finally come up with a reward that might have that same effect on me – make it worth my while to clean the house, or do our taxes: Potatoes with Tart Lentils and Winter Greens.  Think I’m exaggerating? I ate the last of the leftovers for breakfast this morning – instead of a mini-dark chocolate tart.

This is a two-recipe dish to make. First you make the tart lentils and then the potatoes and greens. It’s a lovely side dish, but served over rice or with flatbread, it makes a meal on all on its own.  This recipe calls for two special ingredients; panch phoron (Bengali five spice mix) and – here’s the controversy part: mustard oil.

Just about the only place you can buy mustard oil is in an Indian grocery store and every bottle is labeled for external use only. Because of studies done years ago and the levels of erucic acid in mustard oil, the FDA does not approve culinary uses of mustard oil. And I don’t think anyone makes it organically, so the mustard oil I use may well be genetically modified and the practices used to cultivate mustard crops are probably not green at all.

I have mixed feelings about all this. But I use it anyway, in small quantities, when I make certain Indian dishes. I love the flavor and the aroma. And there is always that voice the back of my head saying, the FDA didn’t have a problem with trans-fats or breast implants, mustard just lacks lobbyists. Some researchers think that mustard oil might actually be good for you. As Walter Willett said to the New York Times last year, “The reality is that we are not really sure {that mustard oil represents a threat to human health}.”

I have to admit, deciding what cooking oils are good for me and good for the environment is something I still struggle with on a daily basis. It’s an area of nutrition research that has been turned topsy-turvy in my lifetime and still changes frequently. So I am especially grateful when someone takes on the topic, like Winnie Abramson at Healthy Green Kitchen, or just this week, Andrew Wilder at Eating Rules. I love the colorful oil comparison chart from Eating Rules so much that I taped it up on my refrigerator for reference – even though it doesn’t mention mustard oil.

Don’t let worries over mustard oil stop you from trying my Potatoes with Tart Lentils and Winter Greens. Just use a high quality peanut oil if you are more comfortable with that. You might just end up eating them for breakfast too!

Recipe: Red Velvet Cheesecake Layer Cake

Many things in life are a hassle: doctor’s appointments, any kind of encounter with government or corporate bureaucracy, opening plastic packaging. Making a cake shouldn’t fall into that category.

I don’t need it to be fast – or easy. Just not frustrating or aggravating. Many culinary tasks have a learning curve – boning a duck, stuffing a sausage, even chopping an onion. You won’t (or at least I didn’t) get it right the first time – but by the forth, you’re relaxed and confident. No more tears.

Not so much with me and cakes. It’s not the baking – but the decorating. I’ve been making cakes for a long time, and I still find the assembly process to be hit or miss – mostly miss. I have a reputation among my friends for giant, freaky looking, leaning cakes. Every now and then, I produce a winner, but it’s almost always a triumph of taste over presentation.

Usually, I’m okay with that. As I’ve said before, I really am all about flavor.

But in the back of my mind, I still have a vision for a perfect cake – a birthday cake, maybe a wedding cake. I want to be the person my friends and family think of for cakes that have a wow factor for flavor and visual elegance.

It’s a work in progress. I’ve learned to split layers, level cakes, cut them round, and to use a crumb coat for every frosting. I finally bought a decent pastry bag. I’m ready to admit that I really do care.

January is a month with three important birthdays in my small world. And this year I was determined to make a least one attractive cake. I’ve had a chocolate cake with beets in mind ever since I read Nigel Slater’s recipe for one in Tender. I’ve been researching Red Velvet cake too – which was probably all about red food coloring from the beginning. But I’m not, so the beets seem like a good solution.

And then I found this cake on Une-Deux Senses. Funny too, because I’m actually not a white chocolate fan, but the combination of white chocolate cheesecake and dark chocolate cake layers really rang my bell. I’ve made my adaptation twice now – and it came out beautifully both times. I didn’t need to cover it with nuts to hide the imperfections, or make any excuses for it.

It’s really a no hassle assembly job; the baked cake layers aren’t high enough to need a split – it’s a dense, rich cake, the white chocolate frosting is one of the easiest I’ve ever worked with, and the cheesecake layer ties it all together, without any fuss or stress.  And of course, the color scheme is a natural for Valentines’ Day – as long as you plan to feed a crowd.

Recipes: Satsuma Apple Marmalade and Dark Chocolate Almond Marmalade Tart

Marmalading: it really is a word. The Oxford English Dictionary says so, citing C.S. Lewis’s diary. Granted, the entry is marked as a rare usage, but still. That’s what I’ve been doing this week – making marmalade.

At first, I was afraid I wasn’t actually making marmalade at all, since my recipe doesn’t involve first boiling orange seeds to release the pectin contained within. Rather, (Satsumas are nearly seedless oranges), I chopped up an apple, tossed it in the pot, and hoped for the best.

Luckily, the OED definition covers this method too:

“a preparation of similar consistency made with other ingredients, such as a sweet preserve of diced ginger in a jelly set with apple pectin, or a relish made by cooking vegetables with sugar and vinegar.”

I’ll get back to you in a later post on the second part of that definition, but for now, I am thrilled that my preparation passes muster with the most venerable authority of the English language. Otherwise, I’d be worried about the legitimacy of this marmalade.

But not the taste.

I’ve made it twice now – once with Satsumas – left over from a case I bought at Christmas time, and once with the classic marmalade orange, the Seville. I prefer the Satsuma variety, but both varieties, and the method (the Seville seeds went into the compost) are toast-worthy.

It’s not only the lack of seeds that makes this marmalade a little strange – fresh brewed tea is another of the main ingredients. For me that’s a plus – I’ll take every little hit of caffeine I can get to start off the day. It’s fine with me if that extra zing is spread on my toast. Since I first imagined this marmalade as a component of a chocolate tart, the fact that it is more than good enough to eat on toast, a scone, or with a spoon is a huge bonus

I’ve been haunted by the combination of chocolate and oranges for years – that prefect balance where neither element is overpowering, or overwhelmingly sweet.

When I was in college, I spend my summers working for a candy making company – picture something like the Rocky Mountain Chocolate stores you see in every tourist trap, but with better ingredients, and without the drab uniformity of a chain store. We made caramel, nut brittles, and fudge – and one of my favorites, (though never a best seller), was the chocolate orange fudge. It was the bitterness of the peel, contrasted with the depth and sweet finish of the chocolate that got me.

And still does.

Obatzda Beer Soup with Black Bread Croutons

Snow has mysterious power here in Seattle. Politicians panic. Kids of every age, dogs and TV weathermen rejoice. We don’t drive in it if we can possibly help it – in fact, some people actually abandon their cars on the road at the first sight of flakes. We usually don’t even have to shovel it – only once in 10 years does it stay on the ground that long. No one owns a snow shovel, anyway.

I was lucky enough to have a cheese soup planned for the first real winter day of 2012.

Many of us who participated in Charcutepalooza are searching for the next thing – something that keeps us writing and connected with one another. Some of the meat-masters have taken up the #baketogether challenges, and many are still producing and talking about charcuterie on Twitter.

This month though, I’m excited to be a part of #Souperbowl – a monthly soup making challenge. Hosting duty rotates through the group; each hosts picks a deadline, three key ingredients, and a country of inspiration for the aspiring soup makers.

When I saw Amanda’s instructions for January -create a German beer-cheese-bread soup – I knew I was in this month. I’d already been planning a January fondue – making a mental shift to a cheese soup was easy. Plus, I know almost nothing about German food, so it was a chance to do some research.

What I came up with was Obatzda – a tangy cheese spread, commonly found in Bavaria, and served in beer gardens. While my soup is probably closer to Liptauer, since I used farmer’s cheese, rather than a more traditional aged cheese, like Camembert, than it is to true Obatzda, it is still a knockout.

This spread is strong stuff – I made it with stout, sauerkraut, dill pickles, and quite a bit of cayenne. That shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s obvious by now that I’m really not about subtle flavors. I blended my obatzda with a stout-simmered base of caramelized onions, beet and carrots, and garnished it all with homemade black bread croutons. It’s rich, and pleasantly bitter – the bitterness of a cold winter day spent outside.

Much of the winter in the Pacific Northwest, we have grey sky, rain, mud, and temperatures in the 40’s. But for snow, as on Sunday, life comes to a halt. I made the soup early in the day, right after breakfast, and we reheated it for dinner, after our long, snowy amble along the beach with the dogs.

Winter doesn’t get better than this. We’re expecting more snow today. And we’ll be eating more Obatzda soup.

Recipe: Lemon Shallot Shrimp Salad

Sometimes, nothing beats a salad for dinner; on hot days, in August for instance. Or in January. I love roast chicken, tagines, chili, lasagna and cheese, all the typical comfort foods as much as anyone – more, probably.  But I take comfort in salad, too.

We’re lucky here in the Puget Sound. Greens grow abundantly pretty much all year round. Last week I came home from the farmers market with a huge bag of arugula and bundles of kale and rainbow chard.

I got a cordless immersion blender for Christmas, so I’ve been making salad dressing in excess. Almost every dressing starts with shallots sautéed in olive oil – it’s a lovely taste platform. I am a sucker for croutons, too, toasted in the pan, just after you sauté the shallots.

And how can you go wrong with shrimp? Well, here’s where the salad gets complicated. Learning about sustainable seafood is a necessity for anyone attempting to eat a green diet.  Visit Seafood Watch. Get the app for your phone.  Check out the Marine Stewardship Council. Read Four Fish, and cook from Good Fish and For Cod and Country. Seek out sustainable sushi, and if you have a local grocery store or fish market that makes it easy for you to buy sustainable seafood reward them with your business.  It’s important. Our consumer seafood choices do make a difference.

I know, I know– another thing to research, worry about and feel guilty about. That’s where I was for a long time. But we, as a species, have done so much cumulative, unintentional damage to the Earth that the solutions must be as all-encompassing as the ecosystem we hope to repair. That’s why it’s not enough to just eat organic, or drive a hybrid, or give money to the Sierra Club. All that matters – but we can do more. I certainly can.

The trick is to change your perspective; on a bright sunny winter day, doing the right thing doesn’t feel like a burden. It’s a privilege – one we can honor in a small way with every meal we eat. And many of the choices we make.

So get some pink shrimp or Pacific white shrimp, and give this salad a try.  It’s so worth it.

Recipe: Tamarind Tofu Noodles

Last week it was lemon ice cream –  today it’s tamarind noodles, and Friday a post about a lemon shallot shrimp salad. Maybe it’s a salt hangover from Charcutepalooza. (Have you seen the contest winning post? It’s really something special.) All I know is that I’m all about sour flavors right now.

I love tanginess almost as much as I love the heat of chilies – which probably explains my strong attraction to South Asian food. Sour and hot? Hand it over, now.

It’s a good thing that citrus season peaks in January. My palate is ready for that wake-up call. Something to cut through all the cream, sugar, and duck fat I’ve consumed in December. I’m not making any excuses; lemons and limes aren’t local. And tamarind isn’t even in season right now. But, right now, these are the flavors keeping me in motion.

I’m not the only one. I made lemon cheesecake bars for New Year’s brunch, and K.M., who really has hardly any sweet tooth, and never minds skipping dessert, keeps asking me to make more. He’s never, ever, before requested a repeat of a dessert recipe that didn’t feature chocolate.

Clearly it’s a sign; time to celebrate the taste of tart.

And that’s exactly what these noodles are. I came up with the recipe looking for use for leftover pasta – somehow, I always, always cook more pasta than I need – and thinking of pad Thai. Luckily, I also had some bok choy, chilies, an egg and two limes on hand. And there is always tamarind paste in the pantry, perhaps because I don’t think of it as often as I should.

You can make these noodles as spicy as you like – add more red pepper flakes or some extra hot sauce to the tofu marinade. But don’t overpower the sour notes. That’s the whole point.

Recipe: Tart Lemon Blackberry Swirl Ice Cream

After two full years of making my own ice cream, it’s become second nature; easy even. If I have eggs, sweetened condensed milk, half-half, and whole milk in the house, I can come up with almost any flavor, and end up with a creamy, yet firm texture.

I’m ridiculously proud of this skill. It’s a case where practice has made, if not perfect, at least a huge difference. I can look at the warm custard and tell if it is going to freeze properly – not too hard, not too chalky, but with just the right mouth feel.

Ice cream was my first step to this new kind of cooking. Something K.M. and I both love, but don’t need. A commitment I could make pretty quietly; if I didn’t make ice cream, (rather than buying a pint) we could do without.

At first I avoided recipes with eggs, or any ingredient (like lemons) that had the potential to curdle the milk. Then I got a copy of David Lebovitz‘s The Perfect Scoop, and I’ve never really looked back. I don’t follow every bit of Lebovitz’s procedures (though I did at first), but working through the book gave me the experience and confidence to experiment.

Because most of my ice creams are improvised, they haven’t gotten a lot of press in this space – I won’t post a recipe I haven’t tried at least twice. Over the holidays, for instance, I made candy cane ice cream with chocolate shavings. I melted half my politically correct candy canes right into the custard and shattered the rest of them with a hammer, to add during the freezing process.

That ice cream had the crunch of a good candy bar and the flavor of peppermint hot chocolate. But you’re lucky I don’t have a picture of it – turns out, melting organic candy canes into custard turns the whole mixture sixties hot-pants-pink. Picture that, with brown chocolate streaks. It’s a visual problem that I’ll work on next Christmas.

In the meantime, I’m celebrating citrus season with this tangy lemon blackberry ice cream – a recipe I’ve made more than a few times. It’s a perfect match for the gingersnaps that the New York Times featured as part of their food writer’s holiday memories round-up. I made them with whole wheat flour and extra ginger and they are too good to be limited to just the holiday season.

And cookies are another item on the growing of the list of things I make rather than buy. A list that also includes cream cheese, bacon, turkey pastrami, pizza, dog food, and most recently (and here’s a freak-flag alert) soap.

What’s on your homemade-only list?

Chicken Corn Soup

One of my favorite rituals is hanging up new calendars. All the promise of a New Year, held in your hand and hung on the wall; the illusion that the way we order and divide time matters. Or maybe the allure lies in just being able to flip ahead from January to June and be reassured that summer is just a few page turns away.

It’s important to believe in that possibility on days when the sun sets at 4pm. And it can be vital to eat something restorative and colorful at this time of year – something like Chicken Corn Soup. Who can think of corn without thinking of sunshine?

K.M. introduced me to this soup – it’s served in every Chinese restaurant in Kolkata, where he grew up. I’d never even heard of it, till I found a book by the late Copeland Marks, Indian and Chinese Cooking from the Himalayan Rim. I made the soup, and K.M. said it was close, but not quite the thing. And we’ve been tinkering with the recipe ever since. It’s become a family standby – the soup I make if one of us has a cold, or an attack of grey-winter depression.

It’s not a soup I make during the summer – when corn is fresh, I want to eat it straight off the cob, or maybe, if I’ve bought too much, in corn chowder. But I always buy enough corn to freeze, so that I can make this soup throughout the winter months.

Here in Seattle, you can get Chicken Corn Soup at Shanghai Garden, a restaurant in the International District. (It you’re local, and you haven’t been, go. Have the soup and the barley-green shaven noodles. Then send me a thank-you email.) But I like it best made at home.

Most recipes you find for it online call for canned creamed corn. But if you want to take the soup to the next level – where it finally got the seal of approval from the man with the relevant taste memory, you need to start by making your own creamed corn. Which you wanted to do anyway, right? Why buy a can full of BPA, extra sodium, and things you can’t pronounce, when it takes a half an hour to cream the corn yourself?

This soup isn’t low in calories, or the kind of thing you’ll see on magazine covers this month. I’d much rather eat real food, all year long, in smaller quantities sometimes, than eat things that have been processed to become diet food. Been there, done that, not going to happen again.

Besides, knowing that there is a bowl of this soup waiting for me at home, is likely to inspire me to walk or run an extra mile along the beach with Max or Mishka and that’s a much better use of my time than counting calories.

Or so I tell myself.

Recipies: Gingerbread Cupcakes and Northern Pacific Dark Fruitcake Cupcakes

I’m a little late with this post in every way – not only am I posting a fruitcake recipe just a few days before Christmas, but it turns out that National Cupcake day was last week. Who knew?

I know a lot of people out there are over cupcakes – but I’m still into it, even though I hardly ever make my own – there’s not a lot of incentive, frankly, with Cupcake Royale less than a mile away. But cupcakes make a great holiday gift, in ones and twos, or by the tray. No utensils or formality required. And if you don’t frost them, you can even pass them off as breakfast.

Gingerbread and fruitcake are two of my favorite holiday flavors. My gingerbread recipe – which is an adaptation of Mimi Sheraton’s Old Fashioned Dark Gingerbread, from Visions of Sugarplums, is something I relish every December; I’ve made it as loaf, a sheet cake, a bundt, and even as a layer cake. It is a dark rich gingerbread, and a recipe that I think is enhanced by whole wheat flour.

The fruitcake recipe has a little more history to it.

Almost all the men in my mother’s family worked for the Northern Pacific Railway – one of the original transcontinental carriers. Trainmen, engineers, switchmen, and a yard master; her grandfather, her father, her uncles and her husband – my Dad. They all had dining car favorites – special food recalled from an age when travel, elegance and flavor went hand in hand. Dad could talk for 10 minutes about the prime rib – and believe me, he wasn’t a foodie of any kind.

The most famous food to come out of the dining car was the “Great Big Baked Potato” – no kidding, the potato even had its own song. But another tradition a lot of NP families remember is the Northern Pacific Fruitcake – sold by the cake and the slice every year during the holidays. It was before my time – I was two years old when the Northern Pacific disappeared in a merger and the last dinning car was decommissioned.

Mom had a recipe for the cake, clipped from a union newsletter, but my parents said it wasn’t the same. So when I stumbled across a copy of Dinning Car Line to the Pacific, by William McKenzie – a book that details the history (and recipes!) of the NP dining cars, of course I had to have it. And the book contains not one, but two recipes for NP fruit cakes – neither of which match the one in my mother’s notebook. My version is an adaptation of the “dark” fruitcake. I use whole wheat flour, dried fruit, rather than the candied stuff, and I don’t always bother to age it.

I’ll never know if it’s true to the original – but both these cupcakes are a great holiday treats.