Unless you’re living your life better than me (probably!), I bet it’s been way too long since you last had a baked potato for dinner — or, as they’re more charmingly called across the pond, “jacket potato.” And it’s a crime because they’re so cozy and uncomplicated to make, we could fix this right now.
Friends, it’s snickerdoodle season. If you didn’t know that snickerdoodles had a season, let me paint a picture for you: you’re coming inside on a blustery and colder-than-you’d-expected October day so you hadn’t dressed for it and you can’t wait to announce what my kids always laugh at me for saying when I walk through the door: “Well, that’s enough doing things for me today!” and forswear things like “being outside” and “hard pants” for the rest of the evening but what is this! What is this god-like aroma of buttery baked cinnamon sugar warmth that has permeated your senses? Is it a scented candle, i.e. the idea, but not the substance of a thing you love? No, it’s snickerdoodles. And you’re about to eat a warm one, which feels like climbing inside It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown while also, simultaneously, getting to be this dog. I’m not saying you cannot experience this sensory transcendency on a day in January or June, but it hits on a different, worldview-shifting, level when cold air is still a novel thing.
Although spinach gnudi — soft, pillowy cheese dumplings fried in browned butter and sage — are traditionally more of a spring or summer food, I’m here to make the argument we should eat them right now, in prime soup-and-sweater weather. Because did you hear the part about warm cheese? the puddle of brown butter? the earthy sage? It’s a symphony of delicious fall things and if you tell me you don’t want to curl up on the plate and take a nap in it, fine, I’ll believe you but I do think you’re in denial.
Welcome to the cake that has terrified me the most. You see, I have two favorite cakes. The first is my Strawberry Summer Stack Cake, the layered strawberry, cream, and butter cake version of the Strawberry Summer Cake in Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The second is the Opera Cake (Gâteau Opéra), a stacked and striped dessert with thin almond cake layers soaked in espresso syrup, chocolate ganache, and a rich espresso buttercream. The difference between the first cake and the second is that the second recipe was never going to happen.
Every September, I step up onto my soapbox to report for my self-appointed duty — one part desperate, one part cantankerous — to remind us that summer isn’t over yet. I beg us to put away the decorative gourds and pumpkin spice for just a tiny bit longer. It’s a slippery slope from “hooray, scarves!” and “look at that perfect rainbow of a tree!” to a very long winter where I forget what warmth feels like on my skin and I am beseeching us not to wish it away. Or, I struggle with change? Hm, it’s hard to tell!
Oh you wanted a chocolate zucchini bread recipe? Don’t you know this is a food blog? I’m contractually obligated to tell a meandering and infuriatingly irrelevant story in each headnote, keeping you from the recipe as long as possible for nefarious, possibly witchy, purposes, and I don’t want to disappoint. Next week, I’ll be celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with a guy I met because I wrote some rambling things on a blog about, like, dating and New York City and funny things that had happened, he read it, we went for a drink, I stopped dating, needed a new subject to fill the void, and Smitten Kitchen came to be one year later. [Some people have honeymoon babies, I, uh, had you.]
What did we get up to while our kids’ time away overlapped for two weeks this summer? Did we go on vacation? Did we party every night? The truth is honestly embarrassing, so middle-aged coded, Deb of the early Smitten Kitchen years would rage and weep. [“You promised you wouldn’t get lame!”] I got… orthotics. And even worse than considering this newsworthy, I love them. I caught up on appointments. I challenged myself to finish books before they were overdue at the library and occasionally pulled it off. Sometimes I drank an entire 8 glasses of water and went to bed by 10:30pm. Sure, we went out. We had uninterrupted conversations. We drank Hugo spritzes. We saw dogs playing in a kiddie pool set up in front of an open fire hydrant and lamented that the kids were missing it, then reloaded their last locations and photos from the camp stream a million more times. We said things to each other like, “I miss the kids, but not parenting.” I watched this clip and it emotionally wrecked me. I’d sleep through my alarm in the morning and nobody was there to tell me I make weird faces in my sleep or that they’d promised they’d bring homemade treats to school that day. Friends, it was wild.
High on the list of cooking things that I’ve got far more opinions on than anyone has ever asked of me (and may have even, at times, prayed I’d stop yapping about), are homemade ice cream sandwiches. Why? Because it’s devastating when you realize something that should bring us nothing but incandescent summer joy — ice cream! cookies! — rarely work as well as promised. Most cookies become so hard once frozen, you feel like you’re breaking a tooth with each bite. Unyielding cookies also squeeze the ice cream out the sides, leading to drips down your arms and an immediate bad mood (for adults; kids, naturally, love it). While writing Smitten Kitchen Keepers, I became obsessed with creating a deeply nostalgic homemade chipwich-style ice cream sandwich that did everything right and I had three big a-ha moments along the way:
I didn’t mean to get so carried away making focaccia over the last few months, but don’t I always say that? As if I forget how easily I get consumed with a very specific idea for what a recipe should be and cannot let it go, even when it’s past time to move on. As if it was someone else who made blueberry muffins 25 times one summer until she found what she was looking for. Thus, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised but I still am: I’ve made an obscene amount of focaccia this spring and summer trying to find the recipe I’ll want to use forever. Here are five things I learned along the way:
Last summer, a friend came to a barbecue and said, “We had soccer and then a birthday party and I had no time to make anything but I brought this” and started unloading items from a grocery bag. There were no clean cooking utensils so she and I proceeded to use our hands to break open balls of burrata and spread them on a plate, smash open cherries and pit them, sprinkling them over, crushed pistachios with the bottom of a pot, and finished the whole platter with olive oil, lots of sea salt, black pepper, and fresh mint we picked from sprigs. We lined the plate with rounds of storebought crostini, I snapped a picture and later when I shared it, dozens of you messaged me to demand a recipe or tutorial.
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