Yup, I’m back with another oatmeal recipe. I’m starting to wonder if I should change the name of this blog to “The Oatmeal Diaries.” But there are reasons, great reasons, for this obsession. Oats are convenient: They wait patiently in their cardboard tube (I buy them in bulk, but decant them into the familiar blue…
Michelena’s Tres Leches Cake
Until I moved to New Mexico, I had never tasted tres leches cake. And the first few times I did, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The samples I had in local restaurants didn’t have much flavor – and, shockingly, they were actually kind of dry! I couldn’t figure out how they…
Creamy Baked Ziti with Cottage Cheese and Tomato Sauce
Baked pasta is incredibly appealing, especially on chilly winter evenings. Yielding pasta, tangy tomato sauce, creamy cheese, chewy brown edges – what’s not to love? Unfortunately, baked pasta often fails to live up to its Platonic ideal. The pasta overbakes to mush, or comes out dry and unappealing; the ricotta layer that should give such…
Very Strawberry Frozen Yogurt
The strawberries just called to me. They seduced me with their incredible fragrance and forced me to bring them home. And then what was I to do? A little surfing found me this recipe, in the archives of David Lebovitz’s blog. I had once made an almond cake from his recipe, and it was divine,…
Potato and Sunchoke Gratin with Leeks
This light, elegant gratin is perfect for spring. The oven-baked gratin form acknowledges still-chilly spring evenings; the delicate flavor of leeks and sunchokes evokes visions of the first green shoots of spring. Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, are the tubers of a flower that looks like a small sunflower. They are dug in the…
Homemade Ricotta Cheese
I made cheese! I always thought this was a complex process – and still have no doubt that this is true for hard cheeses – but this homemade ricotta was a snap. Better yet, it was delicious! I found it in the “Appetizers” chapter of Best American Recipes 2005 – 2006. They cookbook suggested mixing…