Monday, June 24, 2024
Good morning!
🎵 Where are all the forks? [TikTok]
This is one of my favorite cooking topics, and there is no time like a heat wave to be reminded of all of the things we can cook with very few ingredients. Complicated recipes are for cooler weather, when the produce is less exciting and needs more zhuzhing to excel, when being in the kitchen (mine lacks a/c) for longer periods of time is bearable. It is not for sticky, hot days when a perfectly good breakfast is cold cherries from the fridge. When grilled peas-in-their-pods finished with lemon and salt is a star everywhere you go. When one of the best pizzas I know how to make is topped with just summer squash, gruyere, and breadcrumbs and tastes like ten times the sum of its parts. Below, my favorite surprisingly simple summer recipes that I think should become yours too. Plus, this week we have an interview with Renato Poliafito (of Baked Bakery and Ciao Gloria fame), whose amazing cookbook Dolci! American Baking with an Italian Accent is out tomorrow.
Cheers!
Deb
My podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, launched four months ago. Our ninth episode came out last week and is the first of a two-part Mailbag episode where we answer as many of your questions as we can. You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts and I’ve set up a podcast tab/page where you can keep up on it here, too. We will have new episodes every two Mondays. We’ve been working on this behind the scenes for the last year — I hope you enjoy listening along.
blistered peas-in-the-pod with lemon and salt
New! Have you ever grilled fresh peas in their pod until blistered, finished them with some salt and lemon, and eaten them like edamame? If not, you’re in for a treat, one you’re going to want to make again and again as long as the season lasts. This is the easiest summer recipe since... a slice of watermelon on a plate. Good thing they go perfectly together. Thank you to Susan Spungen for inspiring this method!
three-ingredient summertime salsa
The best salsa is also the easiest.
easiest fridge dill pickles
These are our go-to fridge pickles, and they are ludicrously easy. Do you have salt? Do you have vinegar? You’re set. They’re not bad at all an hour later, excellent 6 to 8 hours later, and you can also enjoy them three weeks from now — though by then, we’ll be on our third batch.
minimalist barbecue sauce
A 3-ingredient (plus 2 optional ones), no-cook, 2-minute sauce for everything worth grilling, chicken or tofu skewers, or even as a base for what I call Fake Baked Beans. This is the perfect recipe to tuck away in your repertoire for when you're short on time or long on things you'd rather do than cook.
grilled nectarines with gorgonzola and hazelnuts
From a wonderful cookbook from Jess Damuck called Salad Freak, an aperitif hour [or dessert, or brunch] salad that feels vacationy right now, even if we are not. The grilled nectarines take on a pie-like fragrance even before you put anything on top, but the crumbled blue cheese, honey, mint leaves, toasted hazelnuts, and flaky sea salt coordinate blissfully into something so good, I wanted to eat the plate.
quick zucchini sauté
This is your annual reminder -- 15 years and counting! -- that my favorite summer vegetable dish takes 5 minutes to make, uses all of 3 ingredients and tastes like 10x the sum of its parts. Plus, it helps keep summer's real torment at bay: insurmountable heaps of zucchini. [Video below!]
roasted tomatoes with white beans
This is one of my favorite summer meals of all time and it's wildly simple, just cherry tomatoes quick-roasted with olive oil, garlic, and salt until saucy, and then we tumble in a can of beans and let them drink it up. Finish with basil and eat straight from the pan, or ladle it over crostini. Repeat as long as tomatoes last.
summer squash pizza
One of the best pizzas I have *ever* made, this is the very best kind of dinner: it has five ingredients including the ones to make the pizza dough. It’s seasonal and it doesn’t care what else you had planned; it wants to be moved to the front of your cooking queue.
bacon corn hash
Breakfast today has four ingredients -- crisped bacon, potatoes, corn cooked in the renderings, and a heap of scallions -- plus one very crispy egg on top and we're going to immediately wonder why we don't make this more often.
raspberry crumble tart bars
A crumble bar with only 5 ingredients that celebrates raspberries in a delightfully uncluttered way. Whatever you're doing this weekend, I hope they’re coming along.
frozen hot chocolate
This has all of the awesomeness of hot chocolate reformatted as a frosty milkshake. The chocolate shavings atop a drift of whipped cream? Not optional.
I’ve written three cookbooks and I’m a tiny bit biased, but I think you’d love them all. Wondering what you might cook from Smitten Kitchen Keepers for these warm summer days? I thought you’d never ask! Try the zucchini cornbread and tomato butter, two-bean salad with basil vinaigrette, spinach spiral bread, tomato and corn cobbler, and lamb skewers with crackly vinegar glaze. To finish, I recommend the big crumb pie bars, the blondie chipwich, and/or the strawberry summer stack cake. Were you looking for a list of all the recipes in each of my cookbooks? I’ve added these in a separate page and hope it makes it easier for you to find everything you want to cook.
AN INTERVIEW WITH RENATO POLIAFITO
My shelves are full of wonderful cookbooks I don’t get to talk about enough, so I’ve added this section so you can get to know the cool people behind them. Today we're chatting with Renato Poliafito. His cookbook Dolci! American Baking with an Italian Accent is out tomorrow, 6/25.
1. What inspired your cookbook?
Here's the long story: When I left Baked in 2017, I spent some time trying to figure out what I wanted my next steps to be. I had considered going into coffee (another one of my passions), writing another cookbook or staying in the industry and opening my own place. Â
I had set out to write this book in 2017, I had written a proposal for a cookbook that leaned a bit more personal, a bit more auto-biographical with more of a travel diary feel, exclusively with Italian recipes. It didn't really go anywhere, so it sat on my desktop.Â
Fortunately, however, I did get an opportunity to open a cafe in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and as I developed the concept, look and menu, I realized that Ciao, Gloria was a physical version of the book I wanted to write. Which eventually led to the creation of Dolci! I guess I just took the long way around.
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?Â
I really don't know why this is such a difficult question for me to answer. I really do love all of them. I would have to say that the Crostata Della Nonna is such a sweet and lovely recipe to make. It's a frolla dough, filled with pastry cream and topped with a lattice, a few pine nuts and some powdered sugar. It's an amalgam recipe: part Crostata and part Torta Della Nonna, which you will find at most Italian pastry shops and restaurants.Â
3. What recipe is so low-effort, high-reward that it's worth cooking for dinner tonight, even if we're tired and don't want to cook?Â
I'll give you a few here:
Biancomangiare: This is a simple, SIMPLE recipe that's made on the stovetop and is similar to panna cotta. Granted, it's a bit of a make ahead (needs to chill for at least 4 hours), but the reward is creamy and delicious. Topped with some honey... I don’t know, Deb. It's just one of my favorite things.Â
Black and White: The NY institution gets a little glow up with a honey lemon ricotta cookie base, making it tender and flavorful, and not just a vehicle for the topping, which is more in the frosting category than the glaze category, which was inspired by my favorite black and white found at the iconic Glaser's bakery, which closed its doors a few years back.Â
Biscotti: Either version, really. These do require a twice bake, but I have been known to enjoy them just as much baked once. Â
Italian Krispy Treats: This is a no brainer. I gave them a bit of an adult flair by adding rum and espresso and a bit of mascarpone to give them a tiramisu flavor profile, but honestly, we serve these at the cafe from time to time, and kids like them just as much as adults do.Â
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
That it was really written from the heart and was truly a passion project. Running a bakery and writing a book simultaneously is no easy feat. Early on in my career at Baked, I met Gina DiPalma, who really became, unbeknownst to her, a bit of an icon to me. She truly embodied all that Italian and Italian American desserts embodied. Sadly, she passed away a few years ago, but I always kept her in mind when writing Dolci!, while still holding true to my experience, and toeing that line of what it means to be an Italian American. Aside from that, If you are an Italian, an Italian American or just an Italophile, you will probably really enjoy this book.Â
Thank you, Renato! You can preorder Dolci! right here.
shop my favorites
Ever wonder where I get my cutting boards, paring knives, offset spatulas and more than you see when I cook? I've created a page on Smitten Kitchen with links to some of my favorite kitchen items, the ones I'm asked about the most — yes including the new braiser! For each item, I've attempted to provide a range of shopping links so we're not just focusing on one giant retailer.
See you next week!