A few things about Mark Bittman:

He Twitters way too much.  I may have to stop following him, as half of his twitters are replies to people I don't even follow.   

I still love him, even though I have not read his newest book and am kind of grossed out by the idea of Wild Rice and Quinoa Breakfast Stuffing (it sounds great, I am just not eating it for breakfast).  Which is why I am not reading his newest book because I am sure he'd convince me it was a good idea.

His chocolate souffle is awesome and the individual servings fit perfectly in the Le Creuset heart shaped ramekins. I may not even wait til next Valentine's Day to pull them out again.

I have a whole bunch of things to say about my recent America's Test Kitchen run and will, someday, get around to it, I swear.

In the meantime, please check out my more local blog.

Current Sandwich Obsession, Toddler Version: Mozzarella and turkey, toasted open face, on brown bread from House of Bread. (Which always makes me think of House of Pain, which always makes me sing "I came to get bread, I came to get bread, so get out of your carseat and get bread! get bread! get, get, get, get bread!" to my perplexed son.)

Current Sandwich Obsession, Mother Version: Mozzarella and goat cheese and pickled onions grilled on the same brown bread.

I know I've made my own ricotta before, and was reminded by last week's NYT how easy it is. So I made some, and then made this pasta. I did it for my husband, because I am not a huge pasta fan, and I usually only like pasta smothered in bechamel. I certainly do not like pasta with tomato based sauces, and I especially do not like pasta with light brothy sauces. I do not know if it was the fresh ricotta or what, but I LOVED this pasta. I ate my whole serving and then some. I am going to make it again this summer- again with the broth using a base of carrots and onions and basil and fresh tomatoes all from the garden and homemade ricotta, and then I will die of smug domesticity.

I recently had an Amazon gift card and was torn between two books I've long coveted- Italian Easy and Spice. I had made a ricotta and tomato thing from Italian Easy way back when it was run in the NYT and loved it. I had also made crispy persian fried chicken and beet tzatziki and a red pepper goat cheese spread from Spice about a trillion times and was curious to see if the book had her Casablanca scallops recipe. I wound up getting some stuff from the Body Shop with the gift card and both books from the library.

Italian Easy was, well, easy. I already have the sformata di ricotta recipe and do not really need a whole book of ideas on things to put on bruschetta and things to throw on the grill with some olive oil and lemon. If I had never ever cooked before and needed a first cookbook of things that were simple and delicious, this would be great. But I don't need to buy it now.

Spice, though? This book, I need. I made the vanilla-scented carrots about five times. (Alongside just about everything, but with the tamarind braised beef short ribs they were indeed the best.) The scallop recipe was not identical to those I remember from Casablanca, but with orange-saffron butter and crispy rice cakes who is complaining? (And her method of cooking scallops- searing on one side only til cooked through- is brilliant and makes for a tender, seared, but not overcooked scallop.) Crispy roast chicken with za'atar and lemon confit. Phenomenal onion tarts. I hated to return this book and definitely will be buying it.

Lastly, do yourself a favor and make this chicken chili. Have plenty of sour cream and lime on hand.

Things Jeff loves:

-Beacon Restaurant
-Asian-ish chicken wings

We haven't been to Beacon together in well over a year, and when the LA Times ran this recipe I maybe pouted about that a bit. "I didn't even know they HAD chicken wings!"

Chicken wings are not sophisticated or snazzy, and I'd been put off frying my own chicken wings after my one attempt at Buffalo Wings. (I don't know why, frying chicken is not hard. I have two books called simply Fried Chicken both of which have gotten a ton of use. But something about Buffalo Wings was a major pain. Anyway.) But these wings were super easy to fry (I am coating all my chicken wings in cornstarch from now on) and the sauce. Oh, man, the sauce. I didn't have sake handy, so I added a little rice vinegar, and it coated the wings and they were just perfection. I could have made a triple batch just for the two of us. They were so good, I don't even need to go to Beacon and try theirs. Which is good because I always need room for the ahi tuna pizza.

The Teddy Bear Bread I Told the NYT I Was Going to Bake

Aesthetically lacking, perhaps, but very pleasing to Nathan, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

Nathan loved, loved, loved doing this. But he hated not being allowed to eat all the dough or eat the bread straight from the oven- he pitched full on tantrums, a rarity for him.

Once the bread had cooled, though, I let him eat two feet. He was quite pleased with his efforts. (Although all he really did was poke at the dough. The sadly shaped bears were all my doing.)

Unlike some people I have a vision of myself in my golden years, spending each morning writing lengthy letters to my newspaper, my representatives, and companies far and wide. Being a full-time or even part-time crank sounds awesome. (Of course, nowadays I guess all any of us need for that is a blogger account.)

Nonetheless, I am now well on my way to seeing that vision realized. (I won't tell you about the stack full of letters to and from Henry Waxman in my drawer.)

Highlights and lowlights from the June/July Cook's Country:

-Smokehouse burgers. Yum. Ginormous (the friends we had over for this took half of theirs home for lunch the next day. Jeff and I scarfed ours down but I did give some of mine to Nathan.) Excellent with pickled onions.

-Chopped Cobb Salad. Possibly my favorite salad ever- sauteeing the chicken in the bacon fat was an inspired bit of fat recycling. It's not wasteful AND it's delicious. I'm not usually a fan of blue cheese dressing, but either the Stilton I bought or the recipe was exceptionally mild.

-Chipotle-grilled Pork Tacos. Not my favorite use of pork tenderloin, but the pineapple-chipotle slaw topping is worth remembering.

-Crispy chicken salad wraps. At first I though the problem was the less pliable (but more delicious) handmade tortillas I used. (Handmade by Trader Joe's, not by me.) Then I thought, why would you heat chicken salad? Why? Still, I am going to add a dollop of sour cream to all my chicken salad from now on. I'm just not going to wrap it in a tortilla and fry it.

Wilted red onions, pickled beets, Humboldt Fog

Wilted red onions, pickled beets, Humboldt Fog, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

If you pickle some vegetables the night before you can have supper on the table in two minutes. Add some sourdough from House of Bread and you can make little pickle sandwiches.

(From Lee Bailey's Country Weekends. A fine resource even if it is not the weekend and you are not in the country.)

I am not a vegetable lover so when I find a vegetable dish I love I get really excited. I get excited when I find a vegetable dish I like, in fact. But love is even better, especially when it is a new vegetable, because one can only eat roast asparagus so often.

Last night I was making this caramelized ginger chicken saute (in which the chicken is more poached than sauteed, but whatevs, Cooking Light) but did not want to make steamed bok choy to go with it as suggested because I may be cooking light but I don't totally hate myself. Which is what I tend to assume about people who eat steamed vegetables. So I turned to How to Cook Everything and as it turns out I love stir-fried bok choy.

Heat a big pan over pretty high heat for a few minutes. Add some peanut or canola or other high-heat tolerant oil and directly after that add some minced garlic, grated ginger, and thinly sliced scallions. Cook for just a smidge and then add a mess of bok choy that's been cut up into nice slices. Saute, stirring, for a few minutes. Then add a good amount of chicken broth and continue to cook until the liquid's all gone. Then add a little salt and pepper the heck out of it.

Beet and goat cheese salad with peppery cider vinaigrette, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

I cannot believe it is salad season already. But it is so, so hot here right now I don't think I ever want to turn the oven on. I'll miss you, pizza.

Fortunately I have beets in the backyard and they are phenomenal. Of course I had to turn the oven on to roast them but it was worth it. I've been pulling up other beet recipes and found both Deborah Madison and Lee Bailey recommend chopped beets with a red onion pickle so I am definitely all over that next. Even though I could eat them with goat cheese and cider vinaigrette day in day out.

I just read the Omnivore's Dilemma and feel that Michael Pollan really didn't stress enough the best part of growing your own food- it tastes amazing. A month ago I made my standby spinach lasagne with spinach from the garden- the recipe calls for mature spinach which is hard to find anywhere, so I had always used baby spinach. I let my spinach grow and then used that and was shocked at the difference- the mature spinach DID hold its spinach-y flavor throughout the cooking process. (Why I thought Cook's Illustrated was lying about that, I do not know.)

I'm trying to go through little used cookbooks and cull out the ones I don't really need. So this week I pulled out The Silver Palate Cookbook which I had bought and then set aside because I looked at the famous Chicken Marbella, thought to myself, "Prunes?" and never opened it again. (A snap and unfair judgment, I'm sure. I also irrationally think the whole book is determinedly "eighties.")

So this week's menus are all pulled from the Silver Palate and last night we had minted pea and spinach soup. This was probably a very unfair choice because a)I don't actually like soup all that much and b)I have an amazing and beloved pea soup recipe in my repertoire already. Plus I was making unfair judgments while cooking like, "A half a bunch of mint is supposed to yield one cup of leaves? How big were bunches of mint in the eighties?" (I have no idea how big a bunch of mint is now, I have an herb garden.) And then, "They want me to strain out the peas and spinach and process them separately in the food processor? Wouldn't it be easier to just put the whole mess in the blender? Just how enamored of their food processors were they in the eighties?" As it turns out, they had good reason to do that- then you can add some of the broth back in and some heavy cream and make yourself a very thick soup. A very thick, delicious soup, which you can then spoon up on hunks of bread. It's not like my other pea soup at all but it will make you want to have two pea soups in your repertoire. (And my 11 month old, who hates being spoon fed as much as he hates spinach-- he let me spoon feed him a whole bowlful.)

Tonight we had pork chops with black currant preserves (apparently they liked to waaay overcook their pork chops in the eighties- I checked mine less than halfway through the designated 20 minutes and they were done) along with a carrot and sweet potato puree (again with the food processor). The sauce masked the overdone chops well, at least, and the puree was great (although they used a lot of butter in the eighties- you can cut that butter amount down by quite a bit, and if I'm cutting out butter, a recipe has too much butter).

Tossed Lasagne Gratin with Spinach and Goat Cheese

Tossed Lasagne Gratin with Spinach and Goat Cheese, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

I totally love the spinach lasagne from Cook's Illustrated but it is super fiddly and a pain to make, so I only make it when someone is having a baby (and then I make one for them and one for us) or when I'm feeling super ambitious and am making dinner ahead.

When I ran across a recipe for lasagne noodles tossed with bechamel and goat cheese in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone I thought, hey, that looks easier.

And it was. I had some garlic herb goat cheese from the farmer's market, so I did not make an herb bechamel, just a regular one- and I did not follow Deborah Madison's instructions to heat the milk with some sauteed onion first before straining into the roux, because that seemed fiddly, but I did warm the milk and she was right about using hot liquid- no lumps. Just a bechamel thick enough to stand a spoon up in. Fortunately you loosen that bechamel up with some heavy cream before baking. I also was not about to make fresh spinach pasta so I used plain fresh lasagne noodles and stirred cooked chopped spinach into the bechamel along with the cream and goat cheese.

Serve with extra bread to wipe up the bechamel.

General notes:

Refrigerator cookies are amazing but a terrible, terrible idea if you are someone who has no self-control when it comes to cookie dough.

If something is too spicy for your husband, it is also too spicy for your child. This is okay- more for you.

This macaroni salad is actually quite tasty and not gloppy. If someone in your house has a fondness for gross supermarket macaroni salad, you can make this instead and keep your dignity. The pork chops are excellent, too.

Butternut squash galette

Butternut squash galette, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

Jeff tolerates tarts, but barely. I love tarts, which means Jeff endures a tart every few weeks. This tart had roasted butternut squash and barely mashed roasted garlic cloves along with sage and onion, and Jeff ate half of it. It was rich and wintry, and once you split and seed the squash, very simple.

Nathan loved the leftovers, too, which is more than I can say about the broccoli puree. He hated that, and when I made the leftovers into a frittatta for lunch he hated me even more, because he kept begging for some. I'd give it to him, and he'd put it in his mouth all excited (he LOVES eggs) and then spit it out in horror. Then he'd put it back in his mouth again. Poor broccoli loathing baby.

When I was growing up, each Thanksgiving dinner, we got to choose one food that we did not have to eat at ALL the whole next year. I always struggled between broccoli and squash. Broccoli usually won, and I still hate it, though I cook it occasionally and try to stir-fry it or dip it in cheese or put it in soup. (Squash, though, I love.)

So Jeff was surprised when I put broccoli puree on the menu this week, from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I was more than surprised- I was shocked- to find that I liked it. I liked it a lot. With scallions, and butter, and a splash of cream and a very, very healthy grating of nutmeg? Broccoli is pretty good. I had three helpings.

We'll see how Nathan likes it at lunch today- he is pretty over purees now that he can feed himself. Yesterday we had forgotten to go to the store so we had scrambled eggs and roasted sweet potato fries for lunch. Did you know you can eat scrambled eggs with your hands? Nathan can, and I had scrambled three eggs, thinking that would be plenty for the two of us, but Nathan ate more than half of them. I can't imagine where he got such a good appetite.

New Year's, originally uploaded by hannahcooks.

I got for Christmas from my brother-in-law Gregg, and I was eager to try the black eyed pea fritter recipe that I saw when skimming it. However, Delta took a few days getting our luggage back to us, so I grabbed the first black eyed pea fritter recipe I could find.

Now, I am usually a canned black eyed peas heated up with some leftover ham person, because it is easy. But I could not find any canned peas, either, so I got some fresh ones that they now sell in the produce section. (America!) However, I did not think that maybe I should cook them before pulverizing them for the fritter, so my fritter batter was more like fritter crumbs and they deep fried into, well, crispy fried bits. I totally blamed the recipe but in retrospect it would have been fine if I had cooked the beans.

(The whole New Year's Eve dinner was a disaster- I could not decide what kind of sauce I wanted with the pork chops, and wound up messing that up, too. Rarely is the frozen dessert from TJ's the high point of a meal for me, but last night that Peppermint Joe-Joe Cheesecake was the meal.)

Today, on New Year's proper, I was glad to have more fresh black eyed peas on hand for a second go round. I cooked them, this time, and served them with parsley and marjoram and tomoto and feta and a lemon vinaigrette. Jeff, who does not like black eyed peas, loved it. I do not normally like bean salads, but this was so light and fresh tasting. We ate huge bowlfuls this afternoon and will hopefully have good luck all year. But I suspect there are always a few kitchen disasters ahead, no matter how many black eyed peas I eat today.

(The second recipe was from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which is also the cookbook I have resolved to use more often this year.)

Some people I know have a long running argument about cake v. pie. I have always been partial to pie but lately have been making more and more cakes- cakes are easier and a nice way to round off Sunday dinner with the in-laws. Southern Cakes is my new bible and I am wondering how I ever landed in the pie camp to begin with- a truly great cake (like last night's brown sugar pound cake with caramel glaze) is so fricking EASY.

I think it is because despite the fact that cake is so easy, there are so many bad cakes being made out there. I don't know why that is- I don't think I've ever made a bad cake, and I am not a master baker, but I have certainly tasted a billion bad cakes. Pie is trickier and I've had some pie disasters but even the world's worst pie is usually delicious. I am not sure why that is, but it is a culinary fact.

When I reviewed Jamie's Italy for MSNBC.COM I wrote: "Fried pizza, for instance, sounds like it could be great, but would probably need more frying time than Oliver allows and definitely a lower-moisture cheese than buffalo mozzarella. Of course, it also sounds like something invented at a frat house around 2 a.m., but Oliver insists it is how pizza was originally made."

I briefly contemplated at the time trying to tweak the recipe and make an awesome fried pizza but decided pizza did not need to be fried. Fortunately, Mark Bittman did not agree. And his fried pizza is AWESOME and super easy. It is not crispy like regular pizza at all but it is still very, very tasty.

In other NYT food news, my in-laws and husband were nuts about this meatloaf burger although I would have cooked the bacon separately- it did not get that crisp under the broiler and the fat rendered out all over the burgers, making them greasy. And if I think something has too much bacon fat in it, it surely does. This apple cake was a slam dunk, though. Am I the only one who only makes the vintage recipe when Amanda Hesser does this feature? I always look at the update and think, "I'd probably eat that in a restaurante but no way am I making a souffleed crepe at home." Either this means I am culinarily stuck in the 1950s or I am a cook, not a chef. Or both.

Lastly, despite or perhaps because of this recipe's use of frozen hash browns it was totally awesome. Like, I wish I had made the full 4 servings for the two of us instead of halving the recipe awesome. However, when Gourmet says to use a nonstick pan? Gourmet means it.

You may feel guilty making Nigella's tiny meatballs to serve over store bought pappardalle if you are in the middle of reading Bill Buford's Heat (which incidentally and two years behind the times may be my favorite book- I have never understood people who read books more slowly to make them last longer, because I usually just reread them, but I am portioning this one out because I am not sure what I will do when I am done with it). However, they are still really yummy and if your husband is not reading about handmade Italian pasta and butchery, he will totally love them and spend days afterwards bringing the meal up at random, as in, "Man, that was a great dinner we had five nights ago."

I was tempted to save a meatball to see if Nathan would eat it but am not giving him meat just yet- however I am totally over pureeing and am pretty much letting him try anything that is not meat or berries or nuts or honey. He will try anything and I am amazed by the foods he really goes for- lentils? and pickles? He had mango this morning and I think he was mad at me for waiting so long to bring mango into his life.