A Macaroon for the 21st Century! (And holiday cookies, too)

These are rough times. From our European vantage point, the Old Country seems to be unraveling (tax cuts for the rich, billions being spent on two wars, Wiki-leaks shenanigans). Meanwhile, over here, climate change has made it colder not to mention snowier, which has resulted in late, overcrowded trains. And in our Berlin neighborhood, even as the grimy snow piles up on the sidewalks, so, for some reason, does the garbage. It looks a bit like an ugly bomb exploded here. So, in order to bring some more balance and sweetness to the world, I figured I'd spend this Sunday baking holiday cookies and some macaroons, and then sharing the recipes with you (because I'm all about redistribution of wealth). That doesn't make much sense, I know, but either does anything else going on these days.

Here's something that does make sense: My new macaroon invention! I had set out to make the Barefoot Contessa's coconut macaroons, which are ridiculously simple: Mix up 14 oz. sweetened shredded coconut with 14 oz. sweetened condensed milk. Add some vanilla and some whisked egg whites. Bake. Thing is, I had come home from the store with unsweetened coconut and unsweetened condensed milk. And this being Germany, stores aren't open on Sundays (don't get me started).

Luckily, macaroons are marvelously flexible. And luckily, yesterday when I was cruising through Punjab's market, which is an amazing mixture of Indian grocery store, Halal butcher and "Afro Shop" (one entire row is dedicated to hair extensions and associated products), I picked up this huge container of vacuum packed dates for next to nothing. I had found the sweetness for my unsweetened ingredients. The super sweet dates alone probably would have sufficed, but I wanted to push the macaroon envelope. So I made this magic sauce: Start with some butter or ghee in a pan, throw in some fresh ginger, add two sliced bananas and a handful of pitted, chopped dates. Sautee it all until the bananas and dates shine with the butter, then add enough water to cover the fruit. Cook, stirring, until it all turns into an unappetizing-looking mash (a few chunks are okay). Add more water if necessary.

Date banana sauce. Looks bad, tastes great

Now taste. Yum-mo-lishious, no? Save a bit to sweeten tomorrow morning's oatmeal, then add the rest to your 14 oz. of unsweetened condensed milk and mix it up well (it wouldn't hurt to cook this a bit, too, if you want). Add the 14 oz. unsweetened coconut and stir it all up. If it seems too watery, add a bit more coconut. In a separate bowl, whip two egg whites until they have firm medium peaks (mine never peaked, and it didn't seem to wreck things). Fold the eggs gently into the coconut milk mix. Scoop into little piles onto a baking sheet. Bake in a 325 degree oven until the little tips of your coconut bergs are burnished brown. Keep an eye on the bottom of the macaroons, as they might burn if you have a crappy baking sheet. Let cool. Eat. Want to experiment? Try using coconut milk in place of the condensed milk. I can't wait to try that one.

The finished macaroons with their earthier color and more complex flavors.

Okay, macaroons are not really traditional holiday treats, so the kids and I threw together some great little cookies with which they can bribe their teachers, too. When I make Christmas cookies, I prefer to make a big hunk of base dough, and then add variety at the pre-baking/decorating stage. And my favorite base dough comes from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. I take Alice's lemon-clove cookies and remove the cloves (because cloves don't quite go with everything, while lemon pairs well with everything from chocolate to chicken -- and no, I'm not making chicken cookies. This time).

So, if you want to try these, go to the link and follow the recipe. You should end up with a couple of logs of dough in the refrigerator (I like to double the recipe and get four logs). Now's the time to get creative. As the dough chills, come up with your own mixtures for topping the cookies. We did: Lemon zest-black pepper-salt-sugar; candied ginger-dried cranberry; sugar-lemon zest; walnuts-chocolate. Though it sounds weird, my favorite by far turned out to be the lemon zest/black pepper one. To make it, I covered a plate with freshly ground pepper, sprinkled some turbinado sugar onto the pepper, added just a tiny pinch of salt, and some lemon zest. I then took one dough log and rolled it in the mixture, pressing hard so that the spices all get stuck in a fairly even layer on the whole log. Then, I sliced the log into 1/4" slices (each one a cookie) and put them on a baking sheet. If you want some more flavor, top the cookies with the same mix you put on the sides. Bake at 350 F until the cookies are golden brown.

Rolling the cookie dough log in chocolate/walnut/cranberry topping

Give a few away. Eat the rest. Feel better about the world.

Cobblestone Aioli

My grandparents were farmers. Their place was in the Animas Valley, in southwestern Colorado. They had dairy cows, and corn, and veggies, and sheep. It was a tough life, I think, but they had a lot of kids -- seven -- around to help out. My mom was one of them. So, as a child, she was a farmer, too, by default. Folks from the valley remember her and her sisters picking raspberries and selling them to passersby.



That pretty much did it. My mom swore she'd never be a farmer, that's for sure. And for about 50 years she succeeded in keeping that vow. Until now. Not long after Wendy and the girls and I moved to the North Fork Valley, my mom, Jan, and stepdad, Gary, moved to a little place on Hanson Mesa, outside of Hotchkiss. At first, they just had a pretty big garden. Then, last fall, they planted 600 garlic plants. They harvested them this summer, and have been selling the Cobblestone Farm varieties (a bunch of them) to the local outlets and a couple farmers' markets. Now, they are farmers.


Which leaves them exhausted. But it can be really great for us, because we can pick stuff right out of the field, and pretty much have a meal. Last weekend, on a scorching Saturday afternoon, we got: basil, garlic, fennel, squash, squash blossoms, chard, new potatoes, and eggs from "The Farm" (which is exactly how we referred to my grandmother's house when I was a kid). We then stopped at Delicious Orchards for some Avalanche chevre and a bottle of Plum Creek sauvignon blanc.



Back home, after I started swilling the sauv blanc, Wendy stuffed the squash blossoms with the chevre and lightly sauteed them in butter. I made pesto and some pasta and marinated the squash for grilling and we got the potatoes roasting. Then, my favorite: the aioli. In case you don't know, aioli is essentially homemade garlic mayonaise. It's also divine, when prepared correctly and with good ingredients, and, like bacon and butter, it makes any food taste good. But where bacon and butter are imbued with a sort of loose lasciviousness, aioli is more erotic; or perhaps that's just me thinking about the look on Wendy's face when she eats aioli.

I stole the idea of using roasted garlic rather than fresh garlic from the brilliant cookbook: Artichoke to Za'atar, by Greg and Lucy Malouf. It mellows out the garlicky edge. In fact, this whole recipe is an adaptation of the Malouf's.

Cobblestone Aioli

• 2 very fresh egg yolks
• 1 head of Cobblestone Farm garlic
• A dollop of Dijon mustard
• A dollop of honey
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (if it's very strong oil you might want to substitute a bit of canola oil for 1/4 cup of the olive oil)
• Some fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 cup white wine vinegar

Start off by roasting the garlic until it's nice and soft, then squeeze all the garlic meat out of it's skin and into a blender (yes, a blender, with my apologies to the mortal & pestle purists out there). Add egg yolks and vinegar and mustard and honey to the blender and fire it up. As it whirs, drizzle the oil in one drop at a time. This is important -- drip it too fast, and your aioli "breaks," a condition that can be repaired only by drinking large quantities of wine and going hungry for the night. When the aioli emulsifies, you can go more quickly with the oil. Stir in the lemon juice and salt and pepper. Spread it generously on everything, as there's nothing worse than being stingy with the aioli. Eat it sooner rather than later.

For another lovely aioli recipe, check out david lebovitz's blog.

Chocolate Truffles (real ones)

The English language is constantly being perverted by modern culture, especially by the commerce side of things. And nowhere is that more true than in the realm of food. Witness, for example, Starbucks' corruption of Italian coffee names such as macchiatto; coffee snobs would say it's a shot of espresso "stained" (the literal meaning of macchiatto) with a tiny bit of hot or cold milk (and maybe some foam, though that's up for debate). Starbucks, meanwhile, has this sickly sweet and syrupy drink. Which could hardly be called coffee, let alone a macchiatto. It's not mere semantics, either: I've personally witnessed the mayhem that ensues when a Starbucks fan orders a macchiatto from a real barista.

Yeah, that's just evil corporations for you. But another name has been misused by the entire candy industry, even the aficionados: chocolate truffle. Go to a chocolate boutique and order a truffle and what are you likely to get? A nugget of chocolate ganache coated with a harder chocolate shell, perhaps drizzled with some sort of decorative fluorish to indicate the flavor within.

That's crazy, of course, because chocolate truffles were named after that tres cher fungi worshipped by foodies and known by the French as le truffe. And they don't have hard chocolate shells; rather, they look dusty and brown -- a bit unappetizing in fact. True chocolate truffles look the same, dusty and brown -- thanks to the cocoa dust coating -- and thus the name. The candy folks probably thought they looked a bit like turds, so they went for the snazzier chocolate shell, but kept the old name.

Problem is, the revised truffles just don't give the same experience. A real truffle should first assault the mouth with a dry and bitter cocoa dust, which gives way to creamy, deep chocolate ganache. The contrast delights the tongue, and the flavors move all the way through the mouth.

In an attempt to keep true chocolate truffles alive, gin + gelato made some last night for a Paonia rager. People at the party looked at them funny, but after they were assured that they were, indeed, edible, they ate them enthusiastically. The ecstatic looks on their faces said it all. Here's how to do it:

Ingredients:
1 cup bittersweet chocolate (I use Ghirardelli's 60 percent cocoa chips)
1 little square of unsweetened chocolate
7 tablespoons of butter
4 tablespoons of heavy cream
High quality cocoa powder

Put the first four ingredients in a saucepan and melt it all over hot water (if you can't come up with a double boiler setup, you can also heat the cream and butter and then add the chocolate, stirring constantly over very low heat).
Stir often -- the goal is to have a silky, shiny chocolate ganache without any chunks of melted chocolate.
Chill the chocolate in the refrigerator for an hour or so, until it's firm, but pliable enough to shape with your hands.
Cover a plate with cocoa powder, have another plate nearby on which you can put the finished truffles (it's a good idea to dust this plate with cocoa powder, too).
When the ganache is ready, scoop out a teaspoon at a time, mold each piece of ganache with clean hands into a little ball, and roll it in the cocoa powder.
Voila! Truffles.

Now, I must confess, gin + gelato did their own part to pervert the truffle name. They like to play around with different coatings, from curry powder, to chili powder, to crushed nuts, to saffron to beet powder, which makes for a beautiful bright red contrast to the dark chocolates.

Finished truffles can be kept in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a few days or more, but they should be eaten at room temperature.

World's (second) Greatest Smoothie Recipe

Now, you're probably wondering why this jerk is giving you the recipe for the SECOND best smoothie in the world, and not the first. So, just to make you feel better, I'll first give you the recipe for the BEST smoothie in the world:

Ingredients: 1 beach in Costa Rica; 2 mangoes, freshly picked from a nearby tree; 1 papaya, ditto; 1cup of homemade yogurt; a handful of ice; a blender; and a beautiful, scantily clothed person of the gender of your choice to deliver it to you on the beach, followed by a massage.

There.

Now, I've been making smoothies just about every morning for at least five years now (without a tropical beach, mango tree, and you wouldn't want to see me scantily clothed). And I've played around with recipes a lot. For a long time, all of my smoothies included frozen fruit -- berries, strawberries, mangoes, etc. But frozen fruit are expensive. So, recently, I started experimenting with banana-based smoothies. Here's what I came up with -- utter simplicity with a hint of the exotic.

Ingredients (makes enough for two)

2 ripe bananas (the miracle fruit)
1/2 ripe avocado (optional, but highly recommended)
1/2 cup yogurt (homemade is best, Brown Cow vanilla or plain are good, too. Add more if you want extra creamy).
1 cup orange or pineapple juice or similar blend
2 tablespoons flaxseed oil, flax meal or wheat germ (or a combination thereof)
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon curry powder (Yeah! Curry. I like it spicy).
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
handful of ice

Throw it all into a blender, and blend thoroughly (I've got a "smoothie" setting on my deluxe blender, which pulses the mix for a whole minute). For a thicker smoothie, add more banana or avocado. For a lighter one, add water or more juice.

My friend Amy, who is a practitioner of Ayurveda, likes the fact that I add curry and cardamom and ginger to my morning meal. You see, ginger gets the digestive fires going (along with a lot of other benefits), which is a good thing when you're all sleepy and stuff. The spicy stuff in curry gets the fires going, too. And turmeric (prime ingredient in curry powder) is good for everything from boosting immunity to increasing mental clarity.

Of course, Amy also recommends not mixing fruit and dairy, which this smoothie does (look for a later post -- after I interview Amy -- explaining why, and giving more details on Ayurveda). But I figure all those good spices, plus the great taste of this smoothie, offset whatever side effects there are.

Yummy.