Dark Chocolate, Pistachio, Smoked Sea Salt Cookies

After being publically shamed on my facebook wall (thanks Iris!), I finally found a pocket of time in the dog days of doing nothing at home to write a blog post. My lack of blogging is not to say I haven’t been cooking lots since I returned from the Pine C—there have been oven-dried tomatoes with homemade pesto; figs with goat cheese, honey, and balsamic reduction; tomatillo salsa; and many repeats of summer favorites like the cherry brown-butter tarte—the problem is my fork usually gets to whatever I make before my camera does.

But when I saw all Rob and Iris’ new posts (everything looks scrumptious), I decided enough was enough, and after baking a humble batch of cookies, I stacked them on a plate so that they’d look semi-impressive and whipped out my iPhone to snap a few pics.

I love nuts indiscriminately, and I enjoy cooking and baking with them for a number of reasons.  Firstly, they are equally healthy as they are delicious. Secondly, they lend themselves to countless inappropriate puns. And lastly, the subtle variations in flavors between different kinds of nuts make for infinite imaginative ingredient pairings. Sure, there are some established classics (almonds drizzled with sea salt-caramel… walnuts and blue cheese… hazelnuts with pears and gorgonzola…), but if you take the time to genuinely taste the nut, you can figure out for yourself how best to accentuate its flavors (Cashews and chili? Peanuts and fresh mint? Warm sage-seasoned macadamia nut butter drizzled over roasted squash and peppered with pomegranate seeds? Just snowballing here…)

I wasn’t feeling too inventive, so instead I settled on a recipe from Joy the Baker. Pistachios, dark chocolate, and sea salt sounded like a safe bet, and my family was craving a baked dessert. I made these in the throws of post-wisdom teeth soreness, and, as I wouldn’t be able to chew the end result, one could call it a labor of love. But, as I subscribe to the belief that the dough is always better than the cookie, I can’t pretend to be all that altruistic. I downed at least four cookies worth of dough before popping them in the oven.

And the dough was seriously yummy. Pistachios hold within in them meaty and savory notes, and the smoked sea salt really accentuates this quality. The richness of the dark chocolate keeps the cookie coherent in its sophistication, but the sweetness allows you to call it dessert. Milk chocolate simply won’t do here.

Dark Chocolate, Pistachio, and Smoked Sea Salt Cookies (Adapted from Joy the Baker)

1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature

½ c white sugar

½ c brown sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 ¼ c flour

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

1 ½ c dark chocolate chunks (I used 85%)

1 cup shelled, raw pistachios, chopped

smoked salt for topping

Heat oven to 300 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

With an electric mixer, combine butter and sugar until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat to incorporate (about 1 minute).

In a separate bowl whisk flour, baking soda, and salt. Add to the wet ingredients and beat on a low speed just long enough until everything is combined. Mix in chopped nuts and chocolate. (Note: you might want to refrigerate chocolate beforehand…mine got a bit melty in the process of transferring dough to baking sheet).

Spoon out (or use your hands to guesstimate) about two tablespoons worth of dough onto the baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches between cookies. Sprinkle cookies with smoked sea salt. Bake for about 20 minutes or until they seem done. Let cool for 15 minutes.

Whatever your dental status, may you have a wonderful dough-licking, cookie-crunching, smokey, chocolatey, nutty experience!

Amanda

Blueberry Lemon Decadence

So, being back in upstate New York has brought me (Robert) back to the realization that I did indeed miss my home, even with how much fun I had this summer at Pine.  Why?  Free food.  My friends too, but free food.

Newly inspired by my summer's culinary experiments, I returned (directly to my local Hannaford) with a desire to do one thing:  watch Drawn Together in bed with a carafe of red wine.  And by that, I mean cook.  I felt like a kid in a candy store; like Ann Coulter when she sheds her exoskeleton after a long day of preying on lesser peoples.

But in all seriousness, I was down to cook.

What did I make?  More importantly, what didn't I make.  I had sautéed kale, mushrooms, fettucine with shrimp, grilled steak, risotto... the possibilities became endless; and, needless to say, I quelled my gluttonous cravings to an extent only paralleled by competitive eating festivals.

What I didn't plan, though, was the gastronomical orgy known as my last night's munchies.

Yes, I will admit, I've been staying up until the wee hours these past two weeks.  No, I don't mean 2 or 3 in the morning.  I'm talking about 4, 5, and 6.  One day I made it to 9:45.  Anyway, it goes without saying that I had more than a midnight snack, and on the regular.  Rather, I commenced a personal tradition of fourthmeal.  Though, to make myself feel better about my life decisions, I will state that these fourthmeals were, for me, more like dinners (resultant of a nocturnal shift in my sleeping patterns).

So, last night when I came downstairs in an online-shopping- and Tumblr-induced hunger-pang stupor, this little lady had some decisions to make.  What did she decide?  Blueberry greek yogurt.

And so, as I peeled off the foil lid of my dairy delight, I was struck with thinspiration.  I said to myself, "Precious, why not indulge?"  So I did.  And the result?  Mindblowing.  Based on the novel Push by Sapphyre.

Blueberry Lemon Decadence

Ingredients:

1 Blueberry Greek Yogurt
5 Maria cookies (made by Goya, can be found in most "hispanic" or ethnic sections of the supermarket)
1/4 lemon (save peel for garnish, if desired)
Honey
Maple Syrup
Cardamom (ground)
Cinnamon (or cinnamon sugar, if you have a sweet tooth)
Dried lemon peel
Cloves (ground)

So yes, I feel a little bit like my governor's semi-alcoholic semi-homemade semi-nauseating semi-spouse/girlfriend Sandra Lee with this semi-store-bought "recipe."  On a side note, I learned yesterday that recently at some meeting thing Governor Cuomo introduced her to my dad as "Sandy."  1, Why wasn't I there, and 2, she would.  I just... I just don't know.  She's a trainwreck (though biiiitch can she set a mean table).  But all Food Network qualms aside, don't think you're settling because you're preparing something in a plastic container bought from a store.  Hey, New York factoid: Chobani and Fage [and Siggi's, actually, my favorite Icelandic yogurt] all source their milk from New York dairy farms.  YEAH LOCAL AGRICULTURE WUDDUP.

So we commence:

1. Remove lid from yogurt.
2. Do not stir, nor remove any residual liquid from top of yogurt.
3. Add a few pinches of each of the four spices, so that each has a considerable dusting on top (you want to taste it, don't you??)  I would guess I used around two teaspoons cinnamon, and around a half or full teaspoon of the other three.

4.  To make sure the spices are dispersed evenly, rub the top of the yogurt around with a spoon.  The yogurt's top liquid will serve as a perfect solvent to make a nice, spiced, soupy mixture.
5.  Drizzle on a desired amount of honey (I recommend one or two teaspoons) and spread in a similar fashion.
6.  Crush three of the Maria cookies into a fine crumbling/ dust, directly onto yogurt, then flatten to form a lookalike crisp topping.
7.  Drizzle a small amount of maple syrup over the cookie topping - about enough so that you can make a decorative criss-cross pattern (don't bother being too artsy - you won't see it anyway).

Now, the fun part.

8. Run a knife around the edge of the inside of the yogurt container to free the yogurt from the plastic; and, placing a shallow bowl over the top of the container, flip yogurt over and smack the top several times to free it.
9. Your yogurt should now look like a slightly overweight purple volcano.  Squeeze the quarter lemon, or less if you're not a huge lemon person, over the top.
10.  If you're feeling adventurous, top with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar or a lemon peel twist.
11. Eat immediately in one of two fashions:  Either eat like a custard, or [my suggested path] scoop heaping amounts up with leftover Maria cookies and eat yogurt as a makeshift dip.  You should only need two or three.  Remember, it's about the yogurt.  Though Maria cookies are amazing.

You will never look at yogurt the same way.

Now Dat's What I Call YUMMUS

I used to be very adamantly anti-garlic. Not because of the taste, but rather because I constantly worried that at any moment I could meet my dreamboat soulmate of a man and I couldn't risk ruining our first meeting with my pungent garlic breath. Fortunately I now realize that anyone worth kissing will embrace any residual garlic taste that may linger in my mouth, so I have whole-heartedly embraced this flavorful cousin of the onion.

My mom is not as enthusiastic about garlic as I am (or cilantro. or onions. or many strong-flavored foods) so if you take after my mom you may want to use just one clove of garlic.

I'll warn you in advance that many of my measurements may not be totally accurate. During the blending process I started frustratingly pouring various liquids into the mixture without really thinking about quantity. So play with ratios as you would like, and generally I think yummy ingredients + yummy ingredients = yummy food, so I doubt anything will taste TOO off.

Hummus 

2 cans chick peas, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup water from chick pea cans
juice from 2 lemons
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, finely chopped 
2 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons tahini
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and pepper as needed

Drain and rinse the chick peas, saving 1/2 cup of the juice.



OPTIONAL: removing the skin from the chick peas. A surprisingly gratifying activity (as pointed out to me by Amanda) which makes the texture of the hummus extra smooth and delicious. Plus, studies show that getting really involved in tedious activities actually makes you happier! So if two people are in prison with a never-ending pile of cooked chick peas, the prisoner who spends his life removing the skin from the chick peas will probably be happier then the prisoner who just sits around watching him, bitching about the lack of interesting activities.

Naked chick peas

Finely chop the garlic and the parsley. Add all the ingredients to a food processor (or a blender if you are food processor-less like I am...although I had SERIOUS difficulties getting this stuff to blend). Add some freshly ground black pepper and salt if desired. If the mixture is too dry you can play around with your liquids.

CHOW! Delicious with veggies, chips, tortilla, pita, on a salad, or maybe even with a spoon.

Finished product! Notice the chunks of chick peas still present? Courtesy of subpar blender. 

-Iris

Rosemary Cake

Finally, our glorious summer at Bowdoin has come to an end, and we have all returned to our homes. Despite my initial feelings of sadness about leaving behind beautiful Maine and all my dear, sweet friends, I am SO happy to be back home in Colorado. It seems like every time I leave home for a long time I forget how beautiful Colorado is. The mountains, the sky, the rocks, the trees, my parents' awesome garden, and my awesome parents have made my time at home so far just about as cool as my time at Bowds. Not to mention I no longer have to buy my own groceries AND my parents appreciate a nice wine or a good local beer variety pack, so Sunset Blush has been temporarily absent from my life.

One of the best things about McComb family life are our long, relaxed mornings. I always hear about how Europeans make dinner a great affair and spend hours dining and chatting and enjoying life together, and although I think this is the right dinnertime/anymealtime/lifetime philosophy, my family is often anxious to go on an after dinner walk with our pups or have a Star Trek marathon, so breakfast has become our marathon meal of family companionship. Breakfast typically lasts though a few cups of coffee (we drink a ridiculous amount of coffee), outdoor playtime with my kitty Zati (my parents still think he's too little to venture outside on his own), and depending on how ambitious we're feeling that morning, a nice leisurely breakfast. Often times if we're feeling lazy breakfast will just be some yogurt and fruit, but occasionally my mom will whip up some scrambled eggs with green onions and salsa or our trusty caveman pancakes. One of my first mornings home this summer when I was feeling particularly enthusiastic about baking, I whipped up this delicious rosemary cake for breakfast. Although technically a cake, which suggests it is perhaps too sweet to count as a substantial breakfast, this cake is savory enough and loaded with eggs and olive oil to be considered an adequate breakfast.

Rosemary Cake
(adapted from Tamar Adler)

8 eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 2/3 cups olive oil
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
3 cups flour
2 tablespoons baking powder 
1 teaspoon salt

Heat oven to 325 degrees
Coat a bunt pan with butter then sprinkle with flour, shaking off the excess flour. 
Beat the eggs with an electric hand mixer for 30 seconds, then slowly add the sugar and continue to beat until the mixture is foamy and pale. 
Continue mixing and slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Using a spatula, fold in the rosemary. 

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Keeping the mixture on low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture. 

Pour the batter into the bunt pan and bake for 50-60 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through. When the cake is a beautiful shade of golden brown, springs back when touched, or doesn't dirty a skewer inserted into its middle, it is ready to be removed from the oven. Let the cake cook briefly in the pan, then plop it onto a cooling rack. 

I tried this cake with both raspberry and cherry preserves, and while they were both delicious, I must admit that I preferred it best on its own. The texture is deliciously moist and it tasted even better the second day after the flavors had absorbed some. The third day it was a little dry, but still yummy. 

Molto amore ai miei amici. 

-Iris

Blueberry Cardamom Cake with Melty Lemon Icing

This deliciously moist cake that I baked for Amanda's birthday has a special place in my heart because it celebrates three new loves that entered my life this summer.

1. Amanda: The driving force behind my newfound love for cooking and living well. I'm so happy I ended up discovering my fire sign soul-sister this summer and am so grateful for all the joy and wisdom Amanda brought to Pine Street Apartments. A truly beautiful human being. Inside and out.

2. Cardamom: A few nights ago we were having a game night and playing Taboo. Amanda's clue for her word was, "We cook with this a lot!" to which Rob replied, "CARDAMOM!" The answer was actually onions, but it wasn't completely foolish for Robert to guess cardamom (if you ignore the fact that the Taboo manufacturers would definitely not include a cardamom card in their family game) because we LOVE cardamom. It is the spice of our friendship.

3. Blueberries: I never disliked blueberries. In fact, I have always thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated every fruit. Blueberries, however, were always one of my least favorite fruits. When I could find a good blueberry, which seemed to be a rare occurrence, I would enjoy it, but these good blueberries seemed to be few and far between. Fortunately, summertime in Maine showed me the light. Freshly-picked Maine blueberries are unbelievable. There's no such thing as eating just a few because they are SO delicious. And the best thing is they're one of the healthiest fruits! Low sugar content and high in antioxidants. Arguably one of my new favorite fruits.

The recipe for the cake was borrowed from this blog post by Joy the Baker (one of mine and Amanda's favorite food bloggers) but I opted for blueberries instead of strawberries and skipped the upside-down part.

I absolutely love cakes made with sour cream. It makes them so moist not too sweet. Mmm.

For the icing:

Combine:

1 stick butter (room temperature)
3 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk--we only had skim milk (yuck) so replaced it with half and half
The juice of 1.5 (or however many suits your fancy) lemons

Mix with an electric mixer! This icing was VERY drippy, which ended up working out well because with all the blueberries on top of the cake we ended up having to haphazardly stick candles in the icing, but if you want something thicker experiment with adding more sugar

Ice the cake, top with blueberries, and ENJOY!!!

Cake, champagne, and sunflowers. Does life get any better?

-Iris

Mini Sandwich Bar

We have had no shortage of delicious meals in Pine C. In fact, I may even go so far as to say that EVERY NIGHT we ate a yummy meal, scrumptious leftovers, or a salad made by a creative genius (not to brag...but I am a true salad artist). So, choosing a favorite meal would be a difficult and daunting task for me if it weren't for the accidentally-awesome sandwich bar that took place at our almost-failed grill-out.

Dinner parties are not a rare occurrence for us. We love to cook, we love friends, we love to give (typical Leos), and we love Sunset Blush, so dinner parties are an obvious outlet for our passions and skills. Although never planned out very far in advanced, our dinner parties usually have a fairly reliable turnout and we have plenty of food to go around with minimal leftovers. Of course, one day when we decided to host a grilling FEAST, it seemed for awhile that no one was going to show up, and the three of us (Me, Robert, and our dear pseudo-roommate, Isabelle) would be stuck eating/preserving a copious amount of chow. Fortunately, the universe is on our side, and at the very last minute our wonderful friends showed up to enjoy our feast with us.

This meal was kind of an unplanned accidental miracle. Earlier in the day we baked some rosemary bread (our first REAL bread of the summer) adapted from this recipe. We doubled the recipe (these loaves are tiny), used olive oil in stead of margarine, and replaced white flour with wheat flour to give it a nice rustic look. I've tried this recipe with both olive oil and butter, and much preferred the texture and taste of the dough when I used olive oil. Butter made it SUPER sticky. 

Rising Dough

Fresh out of the oven. Yum!

The grilling part of our evening (which almost ended in a piney, firey disaster, thanks to my pyromania) consisted of drizzling sliced sweet potatoes, red peppers, portobello mushrooms and eggplant with olive oil, lightly salting, and then poppin' on the grill until cooked through. In the future, it would probably be wise to roast the sweet potatoes a bit in the oven before grilling because by the time they were cooked all the way through, the outside was pretty charred. Personally, I'm a fan of the charred sweet potato, but others may not be as enthusiastic about the burnt taste as I am.

Yummm. So many veggies!

Isabelle: Grill master extraordinaire 

The rest of the meal just naturally fell into place. Isabelle whipped up some delicious guacamole (recipe to be included in a future post?) to eat with chips and we had some fancy cheeses from the farmers market (including a brie, a gorgonzola, and a pepper jack), so after the veggies were done grilling, the obvious thing to do was to make miniature sandwiches! Amanda had received a peach pepper and a garlic onion jam for her birthday (classic foodie gift), so we brought those out, set up a buffet-like table, and let our guests treat themselves to homemade, personalized, vegetarian sandwiches!

My sandwich (I was only able to indulge in one, having non-stop munched all day) consisted of guacamole, portobello mushroom, gorgonzola, and some peach pepper jam. So tasty!

Robert's open-faced baby sandwich! Guacamole, eggplant, cheese, and red pepper.

For dessert we had some decadent brownies and graham-cracker cupcakes with a lemon icing. 

This dinner was a beautiful thing because everything just fell into place. We made foods that sounded yummy on their own, then realized how wonderful they would be combined and ended up with a fun, versatile, and healthy sandwich bar. Couldn't have asked for a better grilling experience. 

Have faith in the universe and faith in your friends, because most of the time, everything will be okay. 

-Iris

And so it began...

in the kitchen of Pine C, an off-campus apartment deep within the ancient pines of Bowdoin College.  Three friends, Iris, Amanda, and Robert, turned the mosquito-bitten, franzia-soaked, and poverty-ridden nights of a college summer in Maine into an excuse for indulgence.  In food.  Local food, healthy food, good food.  As an admitted escape from our exhausting workdays, we started our cooking tradition in good company, strong appetite, and a passion for delicious (and sometimes decadent, yet always worthwhile) culinary curiosity.


As our summer began to wind down, it crossed our minds that our upcoming fall semester would bring about some inevitable changes to our daily and weekly patterns: more specifically, Iris would be leaving for a semester in Italy; Amanda, a semester in Spain; and Robert would be spending his semester on campus.  


In this light, we decided to pay homage to our summer fun, and to the forest of pines where our adventures started.  We decided that, if we couldn't be together, among the pantries of Pine C, we would unify our culinary passions in the form of a blog.  A blog of local food, healthy food, and good food.  From three friends, three kitchens, three countries,  but only one sentiment:  in order to live well, one must eat well.