Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Good afternoon!
Liz Prueitt of Tartine SF fame, and a talented gluten-free baker, has started a recipe newsletter. Don’t miss it! [Have Your Cake]
Welcome to, it seems, April Showers! Here’s something fun: A couple weeks ago, I asked people on Instagram to share with me some of their favorite words. I trimmed the list down a little and shared the final list here: Favorite Words. We’ve been having great fun with this at the dinner table and hope you enjoy it too.
There are a few fun things in this week’s newsletter too! First, in case your cooking energy falls into a slight rut while impatiently waiting for the spring produce to arrive, I’ve got 10 recipes perfect for right now — bright and spring-like but enlisting ingredients easy to find in the grocery store. Plus, we’ve got an interview with cool cookbook author Von Diaz, whose stunning new cookbook Islas, a celebration of tropical island cooking with big flavors and great stories, is one of my favorites this year.
Cheers!
Deb
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 now that spring is finally here? I thought you’d never ask! Try the sesame asparagus and carrot chop, double shallot egg salad, leek and brie galette, toasted ricotta gnocchi with pistachio pesto, and fettuccine with white ragu. To finish, I recommend the bee sting bars, mango curd tart, and/or the carrot cake with brown butter and no clutter. 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.
My new podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, launched over a month ago and our third episode, out last week, is all about Buttermilk Pancakes. You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts and I’ve set up a new 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.
avocado salad with carrot-ginger dressing
This restaurant-style avocado salad has the most unmissable, habit-forming carrot-ginger dressing and makes enough for leftovers, which is good because we will want to eat it again tomorrow and all the days after that.
carrot salad with harissa, feta and mint
Grated carrots are boring, right? This salad, spiced with paprika, caraway, cumin, harissa, mint, garlic, parsley, lemon and feta, never got the memo. It's also bright and cheerful; I hope the weather gets the memo.
spring chicken salad toasts
Chicken, chives, dill, and a dollop of horseradish crème fraîche assembled messily with cucumbers and radishes on thin rye toasts in my favorite chicken salad ever. It’s springy and light.
shakshuka
I bet it's been way too long since you last had eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce, showered with feta and parsley, and there's no time like today to fix it.
crispy tofu pad thai
This is one of my favorite dishes and my best effort to do it crispy/crunchy, sour/sweet, salty/funky justice at home. The best part? The speed. Once you get a little prep out of the way, the faster you cook it, the better it tastes.
fresh spinach pasta
Weekend cooking project? Homemade, handmade, old-school fresh pasta with deep green specks of real spinach is doable and delicious. Serve with absolutely nothing save a drizzle of olive oil and parmesan; this is total centerpiece material.
bacon, egg and leek risotto
A breakfast-inspired risotto that feels hearty enough for any meal of the day.
layered yogurt flatbreads
A tender, stretchy, yeast-free flatbread that gently puffs with an inner accordion of layers. It took me about 5 years to get these right and we think they were absolutely worth the wait.
morning glory breakfast cake
How would you like to wake up to this tomorrow, a hearty, spiced morning glory muffin reformatted as a one-bowl breakfast cake that will also make your kitchen smell spectacular? I know I would, very much.
banana bread crepe cake with butterscotch
When the intersection of banana bread and a classic crepe gets carried away. You can just make the banana crepes. You can make the crepes and dollop them with the filling. You can stack them with the filling and dust them with powdered sugar, cake-style. Or, you could make a little pot of salted walnut butterscotch sauce and pour that over the top of your crepe stack and show no remorse whatsoever. You already know what we did.
AN INTERVIEW WITH VON DIAZ
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 Von Diaz. Her cookbook, Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking, came out last month.
1. What inspired your cookbook?
I love islands. I was born in Puerto Rico, and although I grew up in Atlanta I spent a lot of time on the island as a kid. I was so fascinated by island culture that I dedicated both my academic research and personal travel to those geographies, and over the years started noticing surprising similarities. Despite vast distances and distinct cultures, I found that islanders cook in ways that reveal immense creativity and resilience, using techniques that are steeped in history. In a time where the impacts of climate change are both looming and immeasurable, I was inspired to study the ways that islanders cook, and preserve their recipes for generations to come.
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?
Pescado Frito or Fried Red Snapper! Frying a whole fish can be daunting, scary even, and misunderstood as being unhealthy. But actually, frying a whole fish is quick, easy, and resourceful. The key is using a lot of oil (that you can subsequently strain, reserve, and reuse a number of times - once it cools, of course), which cooks quickly and produces a delicious crispy skin and tender, juicy flesh. Most of the oil drains off, so the resulting dish is fresh and light. For me it’s among the best preparations for whole fish, and is a technique that’s easy to master. Folks who live in places with an abundance of fresh fish should check this recipe out.
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?
My Sazón Chicken Breasts are a fan favorite! Sazón is a spice blend of cumin, coriander, oregano, garlic powder, black pepper, and annatto, and is commonly used across Latin America. You can choose the marinating time at your own speed—overnight, in the morning before heading to work, or 30 minutes if that’s what you’ve got—and can be prepared on the stove top, in the oven, or on the grill. It’s also very pretty, and a great recipe for batch cooking, as you can make a large portion one day and stretch it out during the week as a main course, a topping for salads, or tacos. And my favorite thing about this recipe is that kids love it, even if they’re not familiar with the seasoning.
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
Islas is much more than a cookbook. It’s a repository of ancestral cooking techniques, beloved recipes, and stories from innovative, resilient people who provide strategies for survival, and for making delicious, nourishing meals despite the challenges of island life. I hope that people will pick up this book with a desire to learn about the people who live in these beautiful places, and master cooking techniques that will enable them to make incredibly flavorful, dynamic food with simple, accessible ingredients.
Thank you, Von! You can order Islas right here on Amazon or here on Bookshop. You can also find Von on Substack or connect with her on Instagram.
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. I recently added several new favorites I’ve bought in the last year. 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!