Recipes I Have (Recently) Made and Loved
I haven’t done anything thrilling lately, unless you count luxuriating in my large kitchen trying out recipes. Let me clarify: I have a small kitchen, but before I lived here I had a kitchen that someone recently described as “Barely meeting the legal requirements of a kitchen.” It was, as I believe I have mentioned before, as wide as my dog from nose to tail. My dog is a Boston terrier.
So now I have a kitchen you can actually move in, and a full size refrigerator, and a dishwasher! And I can open the oven door while also standing in front of the oven! Aaand I’ve been trying recipes. These are a few of my favorite recent concoctions.
Eggs in Purgatory
I first learned about eggs in purgatory from - where else?! - Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel. Here’s Carla making a very delicious looking, but more complicated that I’m interested in, version of eggs in purgatory:
Now here’s how I make it, adapted from this incredibly simple recipe to be even simpler.
Pour tomato sauce into a skillet. I have done the onions like the above recipe recommends and I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. Obvs add the garlic. Add some tomato paste if you like to thicken it. I use Rao’s tomato basil sauce and Trader Joe’s tube of tomato paste. Leave the sauce in the pan over heat so it thickens. Make a hole in the sauce and put an egg in it. I crack the eggs into little pinch pots so that I can be sure they’re good, no shells, etc, and also so that I can put all my eggs in at relatively the same time. Cover the pan and leave it alone till your eggs are poached. Baked? Cook the eggs is what I’m saying. I do two eggs in a small pan and have it for lunch. Here’s a picture of the finished product ( I also sprinkled some grated parmesan on top). Serve it with some bread and BOOM, you’ve got a delicious lunch.
If I knew I’d be sharing photos of my lunch I would have thrown some basil leaves on it. But then I’d have to have bought basil leaves. And gotten bread the looked less sad. OH WELL IT’S JUST LUNCH.
Peanut Butter Oatmeal Bars
My favorite place to go for baking recipes is Texan Erin. My famous, oft requested cookies? That’s her recipe. My favorite way to use up over-ripe bananas? She made it first. And now these incredibly easy to make peanut butter oatmeal bars. They’re more than peanut butter and oatmeal, there’s also a ton of shredded coconut, and they’re sweetened with honey, and the whole thing takes about 5 minutes to throw together. They don’t need to be baked, so you just put the pan in the fridge and cut them into squares the next day. I keep them in my fridge and have one or two as a post-protein bar breakfast treat. I have made these about five times so far, which is a lot considering I first made this recipe less than a month ago. I will say, I chop the peanuts, which isn’t indicated in the recipe but I think helps. I also use mini chocolate chips, which I think works better as a topping (in the actual bars you melt the chocolate so it doesn’t really matter).
Earl Grey Yogurt Cake
This was the most made-recipe on Bon Appetit last month (according to them). And I can see why. It’s just original enough to be novel, it’s super easy to make, and it’s delicious. I made two loaves in two days because I didn’t bake the first one long enough. My toothpicks came out clean, but they couldn’t get way in there and I had a raw center to my cake. I bought some bamboo skewers (cake testers were too difficult to find quickly) and they work an absolute treat. Baked my cake 20 minutes longer and it came out perfect. You should serve absolutely slathered in KerryGold salted butter. (If you thought my picture of eggs in purgatory looks bad you won’t believe the photos I tried to take of this cake. I’ll spare you.)
Homemade Starbucks Vanilla Sweet Cream
I wrote about this already, so I’ll just direct you there. But I will say this little lifehack has saved me more money than I’d care to calculate.
Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce
This is THE tomato sauce. If you’ve made it, you know. If you haven’t, how lucky you are that you get to discover this treasure. It’s incredibly easy, it’s delicious, it’s PERFECT. Yes, it calls for 5 tablespoons of butter. And you know what? I use eight. Because that’s how much is in a stick and who has the TIME and the WILL to lop off three tablespoons of butter and save it for… what exactly? Just toughen up and throw it in there. (Apparently the original recipe from the 70s called for a whole stick, so I’m not exactly going rogue here.) This sauce also keeps very well in the fridge, and I portion out a little, microwave it, and serve over some pasta (currently VERY into casarecce) for lunch. Marvelous.
