Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Good afternoon!
Mouthing off in the NYT about boiling eggs [NYT, unlocked]
A great party trick [The Kitchn]
Milk is headed for its strangest year yet [NYT, unlocked]
My friends (or so they claim to be) all seem to be in Mexico, sunbathing on beaches, drinking out of coconuts, and dancing on the sand at night, and the 7-degree windchill just hit me so hard in the face on my mere 4-block walk home from the gym, I audibly grunted. We have so much in common! Fortunately, this newsletter is for the rest of us, the ones dreaming of elsewhere while still shivering on the clock. Below, exactly what I need a dose of right now: colorful, bright recipes ideas that get me dreaming of warmer places and seasons.
Plus, this week I’m featuring a community cookbook right from my own NYC neighborhood. We’re talking to Will Horowitz, who helped compile the East Village Cookbook: Adventures, Anecdotes, and Tales of a Downtown New York City Community Told Through Our Food, which includes over 100 recipes from East Village locals and restaurants, and benefits Trinity Lower East Side Services and Food for the Homeless, a neighborhood institution. I know I’m biased, but objectively, the East Village isn’t just any neighborhood. We’ve got Veselka and Katz’s Delicatessen and Superiority Burger and Hearth; Cafe Mogador, Contra, and Momofuku so not only does a cookbook purchase do good for the place I live, it promises a colossal level of cooking talent. Read all about it below.
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 in the depths of winter? I thought you’d never ask! Try the ginger garlic chicken noodle soup, charred salt and vinegar cabbage, creamy coconut rice with chili-lime vegetables, and oven-braised beef with harissa. To finish, I recommend the oatmeal date shortbread, the chocolate dulce puddle cakes, and/or the white Russian slush punch. 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.
“One of the winning elements of ‘The Recipe’ is that it’s not prescriptive — rather than settling on one universal ‘perfect’ recipe, the chefs explain their personal preferences, then give listeners the information they need to make their own adjustments. By breaking their recipes down ingredient-by-ingredient, digging into what each one is doing, they make the science of cooking approachable and fun.” — New York Times, 7 Podcasts to Inspire a New Hobby
“J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Deb Perelman’s new podcast gets to not only the heart of how they make their recipes—but also the why behind each decision, too.” — Esquire, The 26 Best Podcasts of 2024
The latest full episode of my podcast with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, is all about Brownies! You can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts, such as Apple, Spotify, and more.
mango slaw with cashews and mint
This crunchy/sour/sweet/spicy slaw is one of my favorite ways to celebrate mangoes -- it's colorful, refreshing, and never lasts.
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.
poolside sesame slaw
A colorful, crunchy salad with optional protein and the best miso-sesame dressing I know how to make, designed with portability in mind. It wants to tag along with you on the good life, lounging by a sparkling blue pool (just tell me what time to arrive) or wherever your week takes you. [Video below!]
crisp black bean tacos with feta and slaw
These tacos are a stealth archive favorite for over 16 (!) years now -- they seem so simple but they hit all the perfect weeknight dinner notes with a quick black bean filling, easy slaw, and pan-crisped taco shell we should never be deprived of.
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.
simple chicken tortilla soup
This simple chicken tortilla soup is a weeknight favorite and a cinch to pull off even after a long day, while not skimping at all on flavor or texture. I hope it makes its way into your repertoires, too.
coconut bread
A mile high, glossy and bronzed, with a coarse crumb from a tangle of coconut, cinnamon, brown butter, and vanilla, this coconut bread from the late, wonderful Bill Granger is impossibly delicious toasted with a pat of salted butter.
hummingbird cake
A towering, springy and almost defiantly festive cake from Zoë François’s wonderful cookbook Zoë Bakes Cakes. We found three layers of a plush and fragrantly spiced banana, pineapple, and pecans cake with a cream cheese frosting impossible to resist.
piña colada
The best piña colada is the simplest piña colada -- fresh or frozen pineapple, coconut cream, rum, lime, and a non-negotiable paper umbrella for that vacation-y vibe, even if you're impossibly far from palm trees and a swim-up bar right now.
the consolation prize (a mocktail)
This piña colada-meets-mojito ode to the craft mocktail is perfectly refreshing and tastes anything but abstemious. But, let's be honest, it's also pretty amazing with a splash of rum.
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL HOROWITZ
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 Will Horowitz, who helped compile a new cookbook that includes over 100 recipes from East Village locals and benefits Trinity Lower East Side Services and Food for the Homeless. East Village Cookbook: Adventures, Anecdotes, and Tales of a Downtown New York City Community Told Through Our Food is out now.
1. What inspired your cookbook?
After a couple years of work and a lot of help a small group of friends here in the East Village that met during Covid in the Tompkins Square Dog Park came together to self-release this non-profit “old fashioned” East Village Community Cookbook to support one of our longest running and most important neighborhood soup kitchens at the Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish. Which with minimal funding, a kitchen in disrepair and a small elderly staff manage to feed hundreds of thousands of meals a year here in Alphabet City.
With the pro-bono help of a remarkable local design agency named Champions Design and some very caring HarperCollins editors working off-hours we put together a magnificent book. Every page filled with stunning original illustrations, maps of the neighborhood and over 180 unique heartfelt recipes of old and new local residents to famous celebrities like Alan Cumming, Susan Sarandon, Richard Hell & Chloe Wise to a never before seen amount of top Michelin, old guard and mom & pop chefs and restaurants in the area from Katz’s, Momofuku, Superiority Burger, Veselka, Casa Adela, Wylie Dufresne, Andrew Carmellini, Hearth, B&H Dairy, Russ & Daughters, Wildair, Ivan Ramen, Nam Wah, Ray’s Candy, Claud, Veniero's and Cafe Mogador to many more!
What began with just a local chef, schoolteacher and church pastor stapling Julia Child themed posters to phone poles asking for recipes has turned into almost a historic snapshot and treasure chest of recipes and stories from an incredibly strong and resilient NYC community brought together by so many of the diverse creative individuals and businesses that truly make it special. It has been a humbling experience on many levels for me personally as a chef to see so many different people come together during such unsettling times over both their love for food and helping others in need.
2. What recipe are you the most proud of in the book, or felt the most triumphant when you got it right?
There are so many incredible recipes in the book and many of which I’m still working through. But, some of my favorites so far are Chef Daniel Burns’s (Noma, Fat Duck, etc…) incredible “DB brownies”, Pastor Will Kroeze’s Danish “Aebleskiver” which are almost like small holiday pancake cookies, Jeff Bell of Please Don’t Tell’s classic “Benton’s Bacon old fashion”, Chef Wylie Dufresne’s (Stretch Pizza and WD-50) family Thanksgiving stuffing and of course for anyone up for a bit of a challenge we share our famous smoked pastrami from Harry & Ida’s Meat and Supply Co and smoked goat recipe from Ducks Eatery.
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?
Without question the traditional Turkish Menemen by the incredible chef Ali Sahin of famed C&B Café on 7th st. With just a handful of ingredients that most of us tend to have in our fridge there are very few things as heartwarming and satisfying to wake up to on a cold winter lazy day. The trick is barely cooking the eggs and having a great piece of bread to go with it!
4. What's something you wish more people knew about your book?
This book could not be more of a grassroots labor of love put together by so many incredibly special and talented people. Every dollar of the book goes directly into helping support our community soup kitchen and the families it helps feed daily. With enough success we already can’t wait to begin working on the next edition and turn it into a long-term way of bringing together our neighborhood around both food and such an important cause.
Thank you, Will! You can order East Village Cookbook right here or here.
poolside sesame slaw
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 the Smitten Kitchen x Staub Braiser (currently out of stock but we’ll have more in soon!). 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!
