Friday, October 24 , 2025
Good morning! I’ve been tinkering with my Everyday Chocolate Cake and it turns out that if you cover it with miniature chocolate chips, it’s both “so coquette!” (says Ms. Painter) and extra irresistible. Was I safer without this knowledge? Too late to find out now. [P.S. Tinkering with an archive recipe with over 1K comments is dangerous territory, but I always thought it could be better and am going to have trouble keeping my updates to myself.]
The Great Community Bake Sale organized by Natasha Pickowicz and Care of Chan last Saturday was wonderful and packed to the rafters with talent. The only photo I took was of Yossy Arefi’s gorgeous olive oil cake with roasted quince, but I think I chose well, no?
At home, we devoured this olive oil and blood orange cake from Odette Williams and now I have to lecture myself not to buy tiny flower-shaped cake pans, though I desperately want to.
Then it was off to a baby shower and gah, how good is this October light? The frittata and bacon, egg, and cheese sliders were pretty rad too.
Momos and stir-fried noodles from Lhasa. We’ve been talking almost nonstop about momos since having great ones upstate last month. Please suggest other momo favorites in NYC for me? Thank you.
At a 1st birthday party, I discovered that my friends have conspiracy theory wallpaper in their bathroom and you know I just had to share this. [The brand is Aelfie, I believe, but it’s not currently available.]
My favorite kind of fried chicken is karaage and I can never resist the appetizer at Ippudo, even though eating it leaves no room for ramen. Will I learn? No.
I will always have room for their cucumber, however, something I’ve been promising to recreate for over a decade. It’s impossibly crunchy and cold (the plate is chilled too), in a puddle of sesame oil with ground toasted sesame seeds and salt. On top is more seeds and some mild tōgarashi (I think!) pepper flakes. So what you’re hearing is that I do know how to make it, I just want someone else to do it for me.
I got to take two long walks this week, which means I have a pressing question for you: How many stoops of adorable Greenwich Village and West Village Halloween decor is too many to share?
Your answer was “more than six,” right? And you definitely wanted to see all of the wildly intricate details of this stretch of West 11th’s restaurant of horrors, right?
Delicious!
If you’re going to get bad news at the doctor (can now tick “torn meniscus” of the life list 🥳), it’s nice when it at least has a pretty view…
… And deposits you at the Union Square Greenmarket. Mid-fall farmers market don’t get nearly enough attention; it’s so much more than pumpkins and squash. There was still so much late summer produce (peaches, plums, and tomatoes) yet all of the fall greats, like Granny Smith apples for my husband, who only likes them spectacularly sour.
Also got my first concord grapes of the season. If you haven’t tried them, they taste exactly like bottled grape juice, and when I learned this, it forced me to reconsider everything I knew about grape-flavored things as I always thought they were completely artificial. [Related: Concord Grape and Rosemary Focaccia!]
I love it when this little cluster of trees on Pier 46 pops off.
I may sound like a broken record, but King Cafe is impossibly charming. Oh and they make their ham and cheese on a baguette with salted butter and a little Djion and yes, the salted is of key importance here, other cafes please take note.
✨
I’m wondering why you never (unless I’ve missed something) include directions for cooking a recipe using an Instant Pot. I LOVE my Instant Pots and in fact just added a second one because it was on sale and I worried that my old and very overworked one might fail and then how would I make dinners for both family and dogs? :-) — NanH
So, I do have an InstantPot category on the site but it’s not a big part of the archives. In general, IP recipes are transferrable, i.e. if you have a bean soup you make in yours and it takes 10 minutes on high, mine will too, so I never felt that I had a ton to add. The truth, however, is that I got rid of mine. After just a few uses, my gasket ring wasn’t sealing well (leading to me thinking a brisket would be done for dinner and it had barely started and my extended family was on their way over, oof), I replaced them, and soon had this problem with the new ones. I finally gave it away to a friend, unable to tolerate this kind of roulette in my cooking. Obviously this is a place where my cooking life doesn’t resemble the vast majority of my readership’s but since I work from home, simply putting a brisket in the oven for a few hours (which never fails) isn’t a problem for me. However, I’m happy to add InstantPot directions to any recipes that will benefit from them. [The wonderful Jessie Sheehan was a huge help in testing these for me a few years ago.]
What’s your opinion on weighing ingredients vs. measuring cups and spoons? — Ashleigh
I’m very pro-weighing for two reasons:
Accuracy: Do you realize that, depending on how you measure a cup of flour, it can weigh anything from 120 to 190 grams? The difference between these amounts of flour in a cake, cookie, or bread dough is staggering. Weights will never do this to you. There are also ingredients that it actually hurts my brain to measure in cups because you will never get the same weight twice. At the top of this list is almond flour (which you can press and pack to almost double the volume in a cup), followed by flaked coconut, oats, nuts, and [actually cringing while writing this] chunks of fruits or vegetables.
Ease: An inexpensive scale will last you years and years and — this is key! — give you far fewer dishes to do. You simply add the first ingredient to your bowl until you hit the weight you’re looking for, tare it out (i.e. zero the scale), then the second, then the third. And you will never again have to do something I find maddening — measuring things like mayo, peanut butter, or honey in measuring cups (all of that pushing and tapping down just to painstakingly need to scrape it out or have an inaccurate amount). Weigh your peanut butter and you’ll never look back, promise.
Shoutout to measuring spoons, however, for very tiny amounts: Do I have a gram scale, i.e. a scale that’s highly accurate in small amounts and often is made by brands like “G Dealer” suggesting that maybe it’s not marketed for cream of tartar precision? Yes, I do, but I’m a pedant and a person who develops recipes for a living, so it makes sense for me. But for a half-teaspoon of cinnamon? A quarter-teaspoon of baking soda? It’s going to be fussier to try to get a read on a 10-pound scale than it is to just scoop and level it. [I love these measuring spoons, btw, as they fit in small spaces. Mine are in perfect condition after 9.5 years.]
What do you do when you’re in a cooking rut? It must surely happen to you too! — Sophia
I get in ruts all of the time. Sometimes, life is just too busy and it depletes my creative energy. [I never post fewer new recipes than I do every September on SK, usually because the new school year takes me out.] Or, maybe I’m feeling out of step, like the world wants, say, apple and pumpkin recipes but I want to cook with the tomatoes and peaches still going strong. [Another September problem for me.] Or maybe everything I’m making comes out bad and wrong and my cooking mojo is just off for a week or three. Do you know what I do? As much as I humanly can, I let it be. I ride it out. I try not to fight it. We have frozen potstickers or tortellini or simple quesadillas or spaghetti aglio e olio for dinner or order takeout, i.e. solid and good food that doesn’t terribly inspire me. I basically don’t push myself any more than I absolutely must and wait for my cooking curiosity to return to me. Not fighting it usually allows it come back sooner. And I’ll often use this time to dig into archive recipes I’ve been wanting to revisit and bring up to a 2025-level of recipe development.
[Some updates over the last year: Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls, a Strawberry Tart, Red Bean Chili, Blood Orange Margaritas, Balsamic Brussels with Pancetta, Classic Lemon Bars, and this Leek Bread Pudding.]
Have a question? Ask me here
Not a true “Real Life Menu” as there’s no wipe-off board to share but here’s what I’ve been making for dinner, please excuse the horrible lighting in the evening:
Last Friday: Chicken Fajitas with All The Works
Tuesday and Wednesday: Ginger Garlic Chicken Noodle Soup, an absolute rock star of a recipe from Smitten Kitchen Keepers
Thursday: Pork and Vegetable Potstickers but don’t let it sound that simple, I actually made Pork-Cabbage Potstickers and Vegetable-Tofu Potstickers, i.e. separate recipes, and then (who could have seen this coming) it took forever to get them made and we had dinner at 8pm. We do, however, have enough leftovers for the next two nights, so there’s that.
Cheers,
Deb
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I did the momo crawl in Jackson Heights last month (most spectacular way to celebrate my birthday!) and my group’s agreed-on favorites were Himalayan Yak (came in third in the crawl!), Gang Chen Bodkyi Momo (which is a truck, not a restaurant), and Aama’s Kitchen. We didn’t make it to either of them, but Om Wok and Nepali Bhancha Ghar were 1st and 2nd place.
I am really enjoying this new newsletter. Thanks! Also, thanks for being honest about when you are in a rut. I've been in one for months and I'm just starting to come out of it.