Perelman - The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

contents

List of Recipes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook and photographer, and the creator of SmittenKitchen.com, an award-winning blog with a focus on stepped-up home cooking through unfussy ingredients. In previous iterations of her so-called career, shes been a record store shift supervisor, a scrawler of happy birthday on bakery cakes, an art therapist, and a technology reporter. She likes her current gigthe one where she wakes up and cooks whatever she feels like that daythe best. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook is her first book. Deb lives in New York City with her husband and delicious baby son.

FOR JACOB HENRY ,

the best thing I ever baked

introduction

WELCOME. WELCOME TO my tiny kitchen. Wouldnt it be great if we could all fit in here? Id make us mulled cider and gooey cinnamon squares. We could talk about pie. Jacob would probably bust out his guitar (actually, its a ukulele, but dont tell him that) and sing baa baa blakk shee! because hes a total ham, and my husband would pour us some drinks. Wed have a great time.

Of course, unless you can squeeze yourself onto a fraction of a six-inch tilegrumbling, no doubt, that this was the worst party everthis is probably not going to happen. I always wanted a kitchen big enough for a crowd, but instead, I chose to live in New York City, a place where the kitchens are barely usable but nobody complains because theres no reason to cook when theres a great restaurant on every corner. Besides, as my friend Jenn informed me shortly after I moved here in 2000, ovens are for sweater storage.

And then, as if Id missed the joke (I, um, often do), I decided to cook in my tiny kitchen anyway. I think I got my if theres a will, theres a way attitude from my mother. You could say theres no way to fit the ingredients you need in two cabinets or the enormous roast youd like to prepare into a small oven; you could declare it impossible to prep any meal on a tiny work surface, with only a square metre or so to stand on or you could clear the decks, get to work, and an hour later maybe pull a killer pan of brownies out of the oven. I have a hunch that our great-grandmothers didnt refuse to cook because they couldnt fit their blender on the counter. Well, perhaps other peoples grandmothers. It should surprise absolutely nobody that I come from pesky stock.

Whenever Im asked how I got herepresumably, to a place where youd have my cookbook in front of you, not my writing lair with a bay window overlooking the sea my sofa with an explosion of wooden train tracks around meI always wish I had a better kitchen story to share. Just tell us your story! people say, but I think that theyre lying. I think that people want me to tell them a good story.

They want to hear that Im a fifth-generation chilli maker from Texas or that I only eat food that I hunt, forage, or find under the wheel of a car. That I went to cooking school and spent years on the line being yelled at by a French guy with his name over the door. Or maybe I was at a thrift store and found a collection of handwritten Hungarian recipe cards and made it my lifes work to bring an old ladys cooking back to life. People want a story with drama and excitement. They dont want to hear that Ive been a record store shift supervisor, a swirler of soft-serve frozen custard, an art therapist, and an IT reporter.

They dont want to hear that I just like to cook.

But I do, I really do.

That said, what drives my cooking is hardly so lofty. I never set out to build a website that would draw more than five million visitors a month. I never expected to have to quit my day job just to keep it up. I never looked into a crystal ball and saw my site flash across the television screen during a Google commercial, and when I read those last three sentences together, I still have to sit down until the spinning stops.

The reality of what drives me into the kitchendespite living in a neighborhood where I can get the most tender meatballs or the most ethereally smooth hummus delivered in twenty minutesis something far less bragworthy: I am picky as all hell.

And also, a little obsessive.

Its not enough for me to go to a restaurant and have a chicken dish that was mostly good but possibly in need of more acid. I have to go home and read about chicken for an hour. I have to figure out where I am most likely to find the best chicken that afternoon and then I have to buy that chicken and go home and weigh all the ingredients and make note of what size the potatoes were and exactly how far into the cooking time I turned them and the texture of the salt and the brand of the vermouth and tweak it and make it again and again until the chicken is just as I had hoped it would be on that day I first ordered it.

And then I have to tell you about it. I cannot possibly spend all of this time fine-tuning what I think makes for the most incredible roast chicken there could be and then let you make another recipe. It would seriously upset me.

These thingspickiness, bullheadedness , I mean, obsessivenesscan be terrible traits on their own but when I put them together, they seem to have grown into something so much better than their parts. And that, my friends, is because of you.

I may have known how to cook and known what I wanted my food to taste like when I registered the smittenkitchen.com domain name in the summer of 2006, but I didnt know a thing about the way people outside my head cooked until they started coming forward, through comments, and asking me questions.

Did you mean table salt or sea salt?

Would waxed paper work too?

Does this still work with own-brand butter?

How on earth am I supposed to know if a dark chocolate cookie has become golden at the edges?

What if I dont have and dont want to buy cream of tartar?

I hate sifting. Can I skip it?

Do I have to use the really expensive olive oil for this?

How is this brownie different from every other brownie on your site?

Have you completely lost your mind? I will not spend 5 on a box of salt!

For six years, I have responded to every question I could possibly answer that has come up in the 150,000 comments on my site to date (Ill admit to ignoring ones about when Ill have another kid but only because Mom, you are so busted). More than any folding/whisking/butter-softening trick Ive learned over the years, its your comments, this question-and-answer game that we play, that have fine-tuned my cooking by forcing me to question everything.

Having answered your questions, I also came to realize that the vast majority of them boil down to one most pressing detail: Will this recipe be really, truly worth it?

Ive noticed that nobody hates cooking as much as they hate the roulette of not knowing if their time, money, and efforts are going to be rewarded by a recipe that exceeds expectations. And Im no different; I dont really care if a meal is going to take more than thirty minutes to cook or if Ill have to chop three different vegetables. All I need to know is that a soup that may take a little longer and may be a little more involved will actually taste better than what Im used to.