Great Recipe: Chewy Sugar Cookies

Chewy Sugar Cookies by Linda McClure, courtesy of foodnetwork.com. Photo by Katherine Lee.

I discovered this recipe last year on foodnetwork.com. It is a funtastically foolproof recipe for sugar cookies that are as pleasing to the eye as to the taste. You don't even need a rolling pin and cookie cutters to make them, an added bonus for the countertop-challenged among us. That said, I have used a rolling pin on this cookie dough to cut out small circles with center circles for mini linzer tarts (maybe not the most authentic thing in the world, but it's very good).

I didn't plan ahead for Christmas this year and wound up at the supermarket on Christmas Eve. The only sprinkles left were blue, pink and yellow and nonpareils. Ideally, it would have been nice to include red sprinkles and silver ball sprinkles but in the end, it's all about the cookie!

Perfect Chocolate Cake @ The Chocolate Room

While on a wild-goose chase for a particular brand of dirt cheap wine (see next week's post), in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I came to a screeching halt at a discreet little cafe called The Chocolate Room. The dessert-dedicated menu described a trove of quintessential chocolate delights. It's a compilation of chocolate's best hits—chocolate layer cake, a brownie Sundae and chocolate pudding—together in one little darling of a cafe. The Chocolate Room even has daily specials and homemade ice cream. Menu in hand, I looked forward to someday going inside.

This past Sunday, I returned with a friend and a veni, vidi, vici spirit, to sit and sample the three-layer chocolate cake:



Here it is in the photo above: a neat slice of cake, with the exception of the front corner which I dug into before remembering to photograph it first. As you can see, the pale chocolate frosting has a subtle gloss and contrasts nicely with the dark, reddish brown cake. The texture is firm but moist. As for the taste, hang on to your laptop, it's pure chocolate splendor!

There's only one way to describe a chocolate layer cake with all the right parts—perfect! And this is just one of many dazzling options available at The Chocolate Room to satisfy your hunger for chocolate.

Skate Fish, Anyone?

One evening, at a restaurant in NYC, I ordered "Skate au Beurre Noire". I didn't know what "skate" was but the waiter described it as "a white fish" so I naturally figured it must be something along the lines of flounder, halibut or sea bass. Feeling safe with that assumption and being sold on the words "au beurre noire", I gave it a try.

At first glance, the skate looked more or less like a normal plate of broiled or sauteed fish. (The image above is very similar to what my meal looked like.) At first bite, the taste seemed OK, but visually, the skate had a strange, fanned-out, ribbed appearance that wasn't very appealing. I suspended judgement and continued eating, though a dormant icky feeling began to fester inside. I left the restaurant engrossed in conversation and without reflecting on the meal. But on repeat visits to the same restaurant, a favorite of mine, I'd wince at the sight of "skate" on the menu. My memory of skate was that of a weird-looking fish bone packed on both sides with spindly, white-ish meat .

I recently discovered that skate isn't really a fish—at least, not in the typical fish head, gills, scales, fins and tail sense. To my gastronomical horror, I have learned that skate is a type of stingray:



How gross is that? (My apologies to those who enjoy skate fish.) Maybe if I had a more positive reaction to my skate dish that night, I wouldn't be so perturbed by this revelation. But having that bad-meal memory lodged in my head predisposed me to utter nausea upon learning that the mystery fish au beurre noire was a kite-shaped sea creature.

Stingrays seem to pop up in the darndest places in my life. While working as an editor for a watch magazine, I learned that the term "galuchat", a pebbly-textured watch strap, means stingray. Alligator straps are referred to as alligator, ostrich as ostrich and sharkskin as sharkskin, but stingray as galuchat? I guess no one loves a stingray, at least not openly:




And just when I thought I knew all the words for stingray, I encounter skate. And of all places, on my dinner plate. I know the world of culinary language has its deceptions—sweetbread anyone?—but when a customer inquires 'what type of fish is skate?', for the love of God, let's call a stingray a stingray. At any rate, the waiter was completely remiss in describing it as "white fish".

I don't pretend to be too squeamish when it comes to trying new foods; I've had escargot three times. All I'm asking is to know exactly what I'm being served. And, if I can manage to live the rest of my life without any more surprise encounters with anything remotely stingrayish, I'll be very happy.

Gluten Free, Flavor Full

Fear no more the search for gluten-free cakes and cupcakes for friends and loved-ones with a gluten-intolerance. It's places like this, Tu-lu's gluten-free bakery, aka Tully's Bakery, in the East Village, that motivate food enthusiasts like me to start a blog.

Though I am not one of the 1 in 133 Americans affected by Celiac disease, I do love cupcakes; this is essentially why I'm writing about Tu-lu's, where I recently purchased two large cupcakes.

Behold:




Chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting: First off, you can smell the chocolate when you cut/bite into it. The cake itself is dense with a natural, traditional chocolate flavor. The chocolate frosting is stupendous: intense, bold, yummy. You almost want to search for a hint of brandy in there because the flavor is so intensely savory, but the only intoxicating element in this frosting is the divine taste of rich cocoa. It's also so light that it melts in your mouth.

Vanilla cupcake with vanilla cream-cheese frosting: The cake has a sturdy yet moist texture and a mild vanilla flavor that doesn't seek the limelight, it's more like the wafer cone that holds the frozen custard, which in this case is a robust vanilla frosting with a splendiferous cream-cheese punch.

As soon as I knew it, my glass of milk was empty and I was staring down at a plate of gluten-free crumbs. But in spite of having just devoured two cupcakes, I didn't feel heavy or weighed down. It made me wonder if maybe I have a sensitivity to gluten? I don't, but it's to the baker's credit that these festive treats make you ponder the presence of gluten in your diet as something potentially deleterious to your health rather than other GF baked goods that simply leave you feeling sorry for those who can't eat gluten.

So who's responsible? Quality, as I discover time and time again, is no accident, but the result of training, effort, skill, passion and ability. Owner/baker, Tully, originally from Memphis, Tennessee, studied at Le Cordon Bleu and then moved here to NYC, where she interned at Gramercy Tavern. You can read her story on her Web site which basically describes how she was diagnosed as gluten intolerant and that this twist of fate led her on a search for delicious gluten-free cakes and cookies. There were none to be found, so she strove to create a recipe of her own, ultimately arriving at a winning combination of rice flour, potato flour and tapioca flour along with natural and organic ingredients. What an amazing story of turning trial into triumph, Tully's Bakery is dharma at its most delicious.

Cappuccino with a View

After hiking through the Guggenheim's current exhibit "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936—a scattered collection of artworks from Europe's weirdly mysterious, fascist-bent, post-WWI era—I retreated to the third floor cafe, aka Cafe 3. It's an invigorating white space that follows the actual spiral of the building's design with white tables, chairs and stools, a short drink ledge and curved glass windows, illuminated by a sparkling sunlit view of the tree-lined city streets below, at least on this particular day it was sunlit. Being in such a visually absorbing setting, I never expected to be startled by the cappuccino, which to the utter surprise of my unsuspecting taste buds, was extremely creamy and delicious. What a great find: so secret, so stark, so sublime.

Vegan Chocolate Is Delicious!

On this rather august October day, I had an urge to visit Central Park and so I took the A train uptown. Upon reaching the 59th street entrance, near the giant marble fountain statue, I found myself in the middle of some kind of rally. It was an event called the 2010 Walk for Farm Animals held by Farm Sanctuary, a rescue group for farm animals. The organization holds annual walks throughout the country, and Canada, to raise awareness of the atrocious treatment of farm animals and to support rescue efforts.

"Factory farming" is the latest term to describe the transmutation of the livestock industry from wide, open meadows to filthy, cramped cages. What amazes me is how these systems get put into place. It takes a lot of engineers, builders and workers to give life to such a fundamentally inhumane idea. Then there are the meat-happy consumers, whose insufferable apathy toward how the food they eat is raised and slaughtered, fuels this monstrosity of an industry.

Thankfully, as this Farm Sanctuary event proves, not everyone is a meat-eating zombie. At the event, as you would expect, there were books and t-shirts for sale at various tables set up near the park's entrance, but what caught my epicurious eye were chocolate bars.

The cost for a 2.2oz bar was $5—pricey, but considering that the entire sum would be donated to animal rescue groups, technically, the bar itself was a freebie.

Chocolate bar in hand, I scampered off to find an empty bench where I could sample this exciting treat. Would it be bland and sugary? Or bitter and funky— like some of the high cocoa-level, organic chocolate bars I've tried from Whole Foods? I was hoping for something that would at least taste as good as those World's Finest chocolate bars that high-school kids sell for charity.

I carefully opened the cardboard box, and here's what was inside:

As you can see from the left pic, it's an attractive bar of chocolate divided into neat squares. It's nicely wrapped in well-sealed plastic that is of a thick and exceptionally clear quality. Someone obviously put some thought into keeping this chocolate attractive and fresh.

No signs of the figs and nuts noted on the label, so I flipped the bar over.

WOW—Lo and behold, fruits and nuts aplenty!

There was a refined texture and vibrant flavor to this vegan chocolate—no bitterness to wrestle with, no excessive sweetness to get passed, no heavy dairy to cling to your palate. It tasted as if all the heavenly connotations of a fresh box or tin of Dutch cocoa were perfectly distilled into bar form. The fruits and nuts made it all the better.

Truth be told, I happen to be a huge fan of milk and heavy cream. Typically, I like European chocolates that are so full of milk, they almost taste like cheese. But this vegan chocolate bar actually convinced me that milk isn't a necessary ingredient for delicious chocolate.

As it turns out, this dazzling, scrumptious chocolate is made by Jean-François Bonnet, former pastry chef of Daniel, in NYC. Aha, well that makes sense, no wonder it's so good. Bonnet is now the brilliant chocolatier behind a company called Tumbador Chocolate based in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, Tumbadour doesn't have a storefront, it only sells its chocolate online.

Botequim? Boteco? Choperia or Cervejaria? Who cares? The food's delicious!

A glass of the house 'chopp', a basket of bite-sized cheese pasteis and seasoned fries served in white ceramic cups at Maria de Lourdes boutequem in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Year after year, I find that my mother's home city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has developed into something more exciting than it was before. This time around, my cousins introduced me to a lively social scene in the district of Lourdes, a stylish neighborhood with many enticing restaurants, designer stores and million-dollar properties.

It was a cool September evening—a Wednesday, I think—and the sidewalks pulsated with pedestrian traffic and animated patrons at crowded corner restaurants, though none so packed as Maria de Lourdes. Maria de Lourdes is just one of many local choices of cafes, barzinhos, botecos, botequins, choperias and cervejarias—think sidewalk taverns of varying levels of rusticity and glamour—specializing in beer, salgadinhos (sahl-gah-jeen-yooz) which are snack-sized meat patties and croquettes, and caipirinhas (kai-pi-reen-yahz). With that many names for bars with food, clearly this is a city that appreciates the art of hanging out.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for us to be seated at what looked like the last available outdoor table. The waiter brought us menus along with the house chope. Chope or chopp (shoh-pee) is draft beer. In Brazil, bottled beer, is called cerveja (sair-veh-zhah). I decided to go with the chope, but I probably should have ordered a caiprinha. In truth, I don’t enjoy beer as a beverage as much as I appreciate it as a cooking ingredient. But the beer was fine, and anyway, what I was most excited about was the basket of pasteis (pah-steh-eez).

A pastel (pah-stel), is a very thin fried dough stuffed with various fillings—typically beef. It’s very similar to the Spanish pastele or pastelito or Jamaican meat patty, but typically made with a lighter dough. For those who prefer a non-meat filling option, many places also offer cheese and cheese and palmito (hearts of palm) pasteis, which is what we ordered at Maria de Lourdes. Like hotdogs and pretzels in NYC, pasteis are everywhere in Belo Horizonte, along with chicken croquettes known as coxinhas (koh-sheen-yahs). The pasteis at Maria de Lourdes come in little ravioli-sized squares, giving this typically fist-sized street food a bite-sized neatness. As we plunged into our basket, so we plunged into the night. We chatted and munched under a handful of stars, while alongside us, the crazy traffic of Belo buzzed with mopeds and motorcycles and passing cars discharging sporadic shouts and howls for Cruzeiro, one of Belo Horizonte's two soccer clubs, who had apparently won a match that evening against Ceará, a team from Fortaleza in Ceará.

Blue Ribbon Smoked Salmon Toast

The Salmon Toast at Blue Ribbon Bakery Market on Bedford St., NYC. On this particular day, they were out of capers, but it was worth having anyway.

Salmon lovers, prepare to be KNOCKED OUT. While it seems that every cafe or bakery has a salmon sandwich item on its menu these days, Blue Ribbon Bakery Market's smoked salmon toast is entirely different, amazing and special. A thick tile of fresh bread, perfectly toasted, is coated with a hefty layer of three-onion cream (what a brilliant idea) and heaps of the most pristine and delectable smoked salmon, drizzled with olive oil, then sprinkled with capers and chives and served with a bright wedge of lemon. The result makes for a heavenly breakfast or light lunch that goes well with juice, coffee, or even chocolate milk. Buyer beware, last I checked, the small bottle of Ronny Brook chocolate milk, cost $4 (you get a dollar refund with return of the bottle).

Not just pretty on the plate, salmon is a supremely healthy food choice. The ample portions of salmon on this open-faced sandwich make it an exceptionally energizing breakfast before a bike ride, city trek or museum visit.

Baked Goods @ Aroma Cafe

Messieur Almond Croissant, Herr Apple Struedl and Señor Alfajores. These three international pastries of intrigue can be found behind a glass case at Aroma cafe on Houston Street, New York City.


I completely overlooked the baked goods at Aroma. It's probably because I find the cafeteria-like environment to be a little too demanding of customers: long lines, red-plastic trays and uniformed employees barking names and receipt numbers into microphones. I understand that breaking down the order process in this way allows more people to be served more quickly, but I don't enjoy the procedural stress and anonymity that goes with it. To my surprise, however, in spite of the impersonal, fast-food environment, the pastries at Aroma have a fresh, rustic goodness to them.

Let's start with the apple strudel. Unlike traditional strudels, Aroma's strudel is wrapped in filo dough, giving it the flakiness of a 700-year-old book. But my are those crumbly pages tasty! Baked within this highly frangible pastry is a hearty apple and cinnamon flavor that doesn't rely on butter for flavor—not that there’s anything wrong with that. After looking up the word strudel in the dictionary, l learned that it is the German word for “whirlpool” or "vortex”—a reference to the way the pastry dough is rolled up. Well, this little strudel is more than a vortex of apple, dough and cinnamon, it's the perfect storm.

Next on the plate, Aroma's almond croissant. This was my first almond croissant ever. Are they all this good? Crusty on the outside, fluffy on the inside, with a moist, custardy center. Delicious! If only I were a mouse, then I could gorge on a torn-off croissant corner while doing the backstroke in a giant cup of tea.

On to the alfajores. This ever so delicate and sticky little sandwich cookie is—and this must be said with total Oprahesque enthusiasm—senSAAAAAYtionalll!!!! Behold, a closer look:




An alfajores is composed of two corn starch cookies with dulce de leite sandwiched in the middle, lightly rolled in shredded coconut. Cookies made from corn starch have an ultra-fine consistency that literally melts in your mouth. This cookie is so soft and fragile, you have to treat it with great care; think of it as the cookie equivalent of kissing a baby. What an incredible discovery, sheer joy!


Photos by Katherine Lee

Brrp-brrrr!

Welcome to Various Comestibles, a blog on everyday food encounters, recipes and food-related topics for the curious epicure.

Good food is a wonderful thing. From green leafy salads to thick, rich chowders, food gives us so much to savor, so much to share. Call me naive, but in a world full of puddings and petit fours, who needs crack?

The name of this blog comes from a passage I came across in an art history book that referenced Alice in Wonderland, specifically, Alice's encounters with "various comestibles". Comestible, meaning, any article of food. The phrase resonated with a part of myself that has always delighted in life as a great big wonderland of food. I can't say I've ever had a magic mushroom, but I have had mushrooms that tasted like magic. And so, with visions of farfalle, fruit tarts and farmer's markets dancing in my head, a food blog was born.

So, here it is gentle reader,Various Comestibles, an online chronicle of foods—and drinks—that I have encountered and, like Alice, have had a heightened reaction to. Although, in my case, the reaction is purely emotional.