Gazpacho

Chilled Gazpacho Soup
Source: Simply in Season

It has been ungodly hot around these parts lately. With a dry, baking desert heat shimmering through my house this weekend, the only thing I could imagine eating was an ice cube. Terwilliger was out of town, so ice for dinner was actually conceivable, but since that’s not particularly nutritious, I made myself a colorful batch of gazpacho with the last of our garden tomatoes. I had quite a lovely time with my own company — I put on some music, cracked open a beer, and then chopped vegetables for a few years.

Thin and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Thin and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Baking: From My Home to Yours
Makes about 5 dozen not-huge cookies

Count me among the thousands of bakers in search of the perfect chocolate chip cookie. For me, it’s a thick, two-to-three-inch cookie with milk chocolate chips and a chewy, just-this-side-of-dough middle. To be frank, when I make chocolate-chip cookies, I find the dough to be the best part, raw eggs be damned. Maybe it’s because of childhood deprivation: when I was a kid, my teenage brother Tim would whip up a batch of cookie dough, throw some plastic wrap over it, and then leave in the fridge as a snack for himself. Had I been allowed to get my darling little hands on it, I’m fairly certain I would have eaten it all at once. But alas, any time I pointed at it with a whimper and pleading, glassy doe-eyes, my mother would chide me and say “That’s Tim’s. He made it for himself. Here, have an apple.”

A trip east to eat

This recent lull in posting is because I’ve been visiting my parents back east in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. (Just so you know, you will never, ever see a recipe for shoo fly pie on here. I may have gone to high school in the land of Dutchy, but I have never much enjoyed the stick-to-the-ribs Amish eatin’.) My mom and I made ourselves comfortable in the kitchen and assembled spring rolls, tweaked the Toll House recipe to experiment with cookie texture, and beat up an excellent batch of chocolate fudge. On Saturday, we spread out a bunch of newspaper on the back porch table and picked half a bushel of Maryland blue crabs. (We lived in Maryland when I was much younger, and I’m pretty sure I was given a wooden hammer at age three and have been smashing and picking crab ever since.)

Peaches & Cream Tart

Crunchy and Custardy Peach Tart
Source: Adapted from Baking: From My Home to Yours
Serves 6 – 8

First off: Go make this. Get thee some ripe summer peaches and put them in this tart. It is so, so good. I made it a few weeks ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Second: If you’re itchin’ to make a somewhat complicated recipe, let me give you one piece of advice: read the recipe the whole way through before you start, and then when you’re working, take your time.

Blondie Fail

Oh, so sad.

Several months ago, I followed a recipe for blondies on the back of a bag of coarse sugar. The results were delicious. The coarse sugar didn’t dissolve but instead lent a crunchy-sweet texture that was hard to resist. Those blondies weren’t exactly thick n’ hearty, but they rose appropriately.

This time, they didn’t rise at all, and the outsides became crispy while the insides were pretty close to raw. I mean, it still tasted damn good — butter and sugar and flour is a pretty fail-safe flavor combination — but it’s not pretty. Not at all.

Behold: