sliced egg sandwich

When things are quiet around here, one of two things are usually happening: I’m busy with a side project or traveling far from the physical Smitten Kitchen. Or, I’m really obsessed with eating something that I don’t expect to interest anyone but me. This month we have two for two. For the three weeks before I was briefly in San Francisco and Napa last week, I was absolutely fixated on this sandwich. Fixated! I craved it everyday. Sometimes it was breakfast; sometimes it was lunch. I could walk by a bagel shop wafting with warm everything seeds, by a cloud of bodega bacon egg and cheese sandwiches, and still beeline home to put a cold boiled egg on a roll with arugula. I know I make no sense. I decided to keep this weirdo thing myself but then I returned from California and yes, I had a suitcase full of Model Bakery english muffins and a stash of Dandelion Chocolate hot chocolate mix, and I still just needed this. I have finally accepted that the only way to move on, at least for long enough that I could tackle the rest of the amazing things I have on our cooking agenda for the summer, was to exorcise it, whether anyone cares to join in my strange little preoccupation or not.
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Recipe

easy strawberry lemonade

I would like to make clear from the outset that I do not think we, this site, or even the internet necessarily needs a new recipe for lemonade. I’ve covered lemonade that’s picnic pink (with any berry you like), with watermelon, with cucumber, with maple syrup and bourbon, and even lime and mint. But the thing I ran into when my kids left me, once again, with a basket of overpriced strawberries on their last legs — fruit they’d asked me to buy but then mysteriously lost interest in eating when it was presented to them at breakfast — and I decided to instead turn strawberries into strawberry-ade, so to speak, was that every lemonade recipe I’ve already published contains steps I lacked inclination to do.

Recipe

smashed chicken meatball sliders

There was a moment a dozen or so years ago when sliders were all the rage on restaurant menus. Precious little burgers (the traditional slider) and more clever ones like meatballs and fritters would teeter with tweezer-applied toppings on tiny buns and unless you unhinge your mandible to engulf (slide?) your wobbly prey whole, it was a bit of a mess too. So why am I channeling the year 2009? Sliders have been having a renaissance in my kitchen this spring because I finally realized their size is perfect for smaller eaters and makes for far more appetizing leftovers than, say, a cold burger with several bites removed, sogged into a day-old bun.

Recipe

hash brown patties

It’s not entirely healthy or sane, but I can fiddle with a recipe for years before finally getting it out the door. What is done? What is ready? Aren’t we all works in progress, forging paths to even more greatness? Sometimes it’s obvious when a recipe is ready to laminate and tuck in our forever files; I love those days. Sometimes, the longer I leave it, the more it metamorphosizes. What I’m trying to say is that in 2020, this was a tater tot recipe. In 2021, it became a giant tot, i.e. a thick hash brown patty, and also gluten-free. In 2022, because I’m so attached to the Trader Joe’s version stashed in my freezer and wanted these more like that, it became thinner.

Recipe

baby wedge salad with avocado and pickled onions

Merely three weeks ago, I lamented the mediocrity and afterthought-ness of most meatless entrees, so often cobbled together from sides of other dishes. Because I love a plot twist, it seems only right that this week I tell you about my favorite salad which happens to be — you guessed it — cobbled from the sides of other dishes. I used to order it from a taco place in our neighborhood before they changed the recipe, and even though I knew it was just the most filler-y lettuce, the pickled onions, sliced radishes, pepitas, and crumbled cotija they’d use to garnish their other offerings, masquerading as a salad, I did not care. Sometimes it works. Here, it sings. It’s absolutely perfect: crunchy, bright, creamy, and inhalable.

Recipe

carrot cake with coconut and dates

I realize that sharing a new recipe for a carrot cake the day after Easter is about as useful as a new latke recipe the day after Hanukkah ends or a perfect buche de noel on December 26th. I’d intended to share this a week ago and — hubris alert! — I was patting myself on my back for my own cleverness, the first sign things are going to head south. What could be more perfect for a week that contained both Easter and Passover, while also saving so many people the work of having to adapt a gluten- or dairy-full cake to not include them? Nothing! But I was unraveled by dual forces: first, some confusion about whether or not baking powder, a leavener, is allowed on Passover, a holiday that prohibits leavened breads [turns out it is!] and also by our own Seder preparations [we had 16 people here on Wednesday night; I’m criminally bad at outsourcing so I cooked for 3.5 days straight]. And that brings us up to today. A lovely thing about having a 16 year-old for a cooking blog, however, is that even poorly-timed arrivals tend to find their rightful place in the archives. When you come looking for a flourless carrot cake, be it today, next week, or next April holiday season, this will be here, seemingly right on time.

Recipe

bean and vegetable burritos

While I haven’t been strictly vegetarian in a long time, I still hold petty grudges, grudges that I work out here in the form of the dishes I’d have preferred as options, over the mediocrity, the afterthought-ness, of most meatless entrees (gloopy pastas or vegetables cobbled together from sides from other dishes), sandwiches (cheese and sometimes soggy lettuce or tomato), and burritos (so much filler). A recent trip to a Tex-Mex chain left me surprised as not much had changed. And as I chewed down my football-sized wrap that was 80% rice, 15% beans, 5% salsa and cheese, my old resentment came back in full force. Vegetarian entrees, sandwiches, and tacos can be so much more! Let’s start here.

Recipe

easy freezer waffles

A few months ago, and honestly not for the first or realistically the last time, my family betrayed me. It started, almost predictably, with the youngest. I made waffles one morning, so proud of myself for remembering to start the yeasted waffle batter, my favorite, the night before — and my daughter told me that she prefers the waffles at grandma’s house. “What kind does grandma make?” I asked. “They’re in the freezer,” she told me. “I think they say ‘egg’ on them?”

Recipe

pasta with longer-cooked broccoli

I’ve been working up the courage to tell you about this dish for a few years. Why courage, you might ask? What’s courageous about the timeless combination of broccoli and pasta, Deb? It’s the cooking time. This broccoli is not al dente. It does not “retain a crunch,” “still have some bite to it,” or keep any of the verdant green hue it entered the pan with. And, even more audacious, it doesn’t wish to. This broccoli applies a philosophy of vegetable cooking times fairly polarized from our current moment, when the minutes we walk vegetables by the fire have plunged so far that some of us even advocate for eating cauliflower, asparagus, and even broccoli raw. [Or, in a twist on the words of a steak cooking chart I once saw on the wall of a restaurant in Texas: A good farmer could still save the vegetable.]

Recipe

cauliflower salad with dates and pistachios

a clean-out-the-fridge salad

I spend a possibly unhealthy amount of time … oh you thought I was going to say scrolling TikTok and watching other people clean their apartments? I mean, yes, that too. But I was going to say debating whether one *needs* a recipe for something I like to make, such as a salad. Doesn’t everyone just grab random things that need to be used up and assemble them with a dressing? Yet my other favorite thing on social media is when something appears in my feed that I didn’t know I was craving and I spontaneously must stop what I’m doing and kick all of my existing cooking plans to the curb to make it. What if this is the one that provides this for you?