Cook Instead

The Only Brownie Recipe

Hello all,

It is August, the Sunday of months. A time when you’re meant to be relaxing, but you’re excruciatingly aware of everything that’s coming up soon (school starting, people coming back from vacation, Things Having to Get Done, etc).

(January’s Monday (obviously), and February’s Tuesday, because it’s not Monday but you can’t believe it’s somehow this early in the week/year still (Tuesdays are bullshit.) Saturday is the only real day of rest in my book, and it’s both the week between Christmas and New Year’s when time doesn’t exist, and also July. But we’re getting into the weeds here.)

My big point is, I’m taking August off. (I know it’s already August. Scheduling is my passion. Shut up.)

I’m taking August off like that weird French stereotype in the second new Muppets movie, which I never understood because the joke seems to be that he… takes too much vacation? As though that’s not aspirational in the extreme?

This is an extremely tiny image of a joke whose punchline seems to be that French people enjoy taking long vacations with their families, which is… bad? I have never understood this.

I’ll see you guys in September, on the other side of a mid-pandemic cross-oceanic apartment transfer, which isn’t listed as an Olympic event but, in my opinion, should be. Have you guys been watching? There’s a kid from Doncaster who can taekwondo his foot into the back of another guy’s head while facing him. The human body is a miracle.

Until then, please enjoy these perfect brownies.

These are the only brownies I will ever make or be making in the future. These are the only brownies I have ever made that don’t have the word “cheesecake” in them somewhere. These are the only brownies I am interested in making.

These are the brownies that make me shake my head whenever the Bake-Off contestants make some kind of unholy Cherry Bakewell Brownie disaster (with FROSTING on it, for some ungodly reason.) These brownies are so damn easy, even APART from being developed by a true Hero and Inspiration.

They might have been the first thing I learned to make that wasn’t mac and cheese from a box, or maybe fairy cakes.

I made a double recipe of these in a 10-inch square cake pan and overcooked them slightly, which is why they’re, uh, together in the photos. Usually, these have a crackly candied lid under which is basically a chocolate lava duvet studded with walnuts that you pick apart with your hands like a little raccoon.

The fact that these have “sliced” into “shapes” is the exception, not the rule. These are usually Brownie Rubble (Barney’s wacky cousin who owns a bakery), and that’s just fine with me. Make yourself a pan and dig in.

See you in a month!

Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies

Adapted from the woman herself, via PBS

Ingredients:

· 2 squares (2 oz.) unsweetened baker’s chocolate. You can substitute ½ cup cocoa, but melted chocolate works MUCH better. Cocoa powder is a paltry substitute when you can use actual melted chocolate.

· 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter. Yes.

· 1 cup sugar – These can err on the side of sweet, so if you don’t have baker’s chocolate and use bittersweet, do half the sugar and taste as you go because you don’t want them too sweet. Also, if you’re doubling the recipe, take the sugar down a smidge.

· 2 eggs

· 1/4 cup flour

· 1 teaspoon vanilla

· Pinch of salt

· 1 cup roughly chopped walnuts or pecans. I always say that nuts are optional, but they’re not here (Sorry Caroline). They contribute a beautiful contrast to the fudginess that takes these into Legendary territory.

Method:

Melt butter with the cocoa or chocolate together in a heavy saucepan over medium low, whisking constantly till blended.

Remove from heat and stir in the sugar.

Whisk in the eggs and vanilla.

Stir in flour, salt and walnuts.

Mix well.

Pour into a well-buttered and floured 8-inch square baking pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for about 40 minutes till a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool completely and cut into squares. These brownies are very fudgy and may be somewhat difficult to slice cleanly; use a sharp knife and a spatula to help them loosen from the baking dish. (Put the pan on your lap, put a spoon in the pan, put the spoon in your mouth.)

Soba Noodles with Miso Butter, Chicken, and Cabbage

This recipe came out of a desire to cook something quick and tasty, and also use up all of my sad fridge vegetables (TM). We’ve been getting Oddbox, a service that sends surplus or weirdly shaped vegetables for cheap, which is great, but then we have to figure out what to do with everything.

The heat wave finally broke this weekend, which means I finally felt like cooking again for the first time in a long time. I had wanted to make a kind of cold peanut noodle soba edamame chicken bowl thing when it was hot, but it was literally too hot to even think about turning on the stove. We boiled water once for pasta and as soon as it was done we had to fill the pot with cold water to stop it heating up the entire kitchen.

I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like cold soba noodles with a sweetish peanut sauce is both delicious and extremely obvious, by this point. I never tend to worry too much about food trends (“Quiche is so 80’s!”? whatever, Gladys, quiche is delicious.) But you do tend to get bored.

So: Miso.

Tiramisu

This week it’s a billion degrees in the UK, but luckily this is a recipe that requires almost nothing from you. This is truly a dessert for people who don’t cook – it requires no heat, and nary an egg gets cracked. If you can whip cream and dunk cookies, you can make tiramisu.

It’s also my grandpa’s favorite (along with pecan pie.) My grandpa is a man who wants at all times to be driving a gigantic 50’s-era Cadillac, chewing on an expensive cigar, on his way to a swingin’ jazz gig, or maybe the theater. The three-martini lunch was invented for this man, so it makes sense that the Grown Uppest dessert is his favorite one.

I used to hate it as a kid, and I suspect I’m not alone. It looks like a big sweet cream cake (and it is), but it’s got all of these grown-up flavors: coffee and booze and NON-sweet chocolate? What the heck is the point of non-sweet chocolate?

Well, once you grow up and get indoctrinated into the cult of enjoying booze and coffee, you find out.

Poached Peaches

Dear Everyone,

As short and sweet as the last few posts have been, this one is even shorter and sweeter, because my big fancy new project launches on Wednesday and I’ve been immersing myself in the world of the old and the weird. Come along, if you’re so inclined!

Luckily for you, you’re getting a threefer this week, because you can make three (or more!) delicious things from one simple recipe: Nigella Lawson’s Poached Peaches.

A good peach in the summertime is a thing of pure beauty – it’s basically sunshine in the palm of your hand.

A bad peach sucks. We’ve all had them.

In AP Psych we covered a study on addiction: pigeons are trained to push a lever and get a treat, but if the lever keeps giving them treats they’ll eventually get bored and stop, so the only way to get the pigeons to consistently keep pushing said lever is to only give treats at random intervals. (See also: push notifications, slot machines.)

This is how nature gets us to keep eating peaches – in the hope that between all the overripe and underripe, the sour and the mealy, we’ll get that one perfect sunshiney peach. Maybe this time, big money big money, momma needs a new pair of shoes.

Well, worry no more, my dear friends. Nigella’s cracked it. You can muscle even the hardest, weirdest peaches into a state of delectability through the simple process of poaching them in a simple sugar syrup. It is the Peach Fixer.

Lemon-Lime Cordial for Gimlets (and more)

We’re keeping it short and sweet this week, folks, which is coincidentally also the way I like this drink.

A few weeks ago, Joe Wicks was the guest on Off Menu, a podcast I listen to where two comedians ask their guests what their dream meal would be, course by course. Joe was delightful because he’s known in the UK as the pandemic fitness instructor guy and all he chose to eat was burgers, fries, cheese, and alcohol, which I deeply respect and which is super realistic.

Also, he and his daughter like to make what’s known in their household as an “early gin-ton” (gin and tonic at or before 5pm). His daughter’s a toddler, so she’s just getting ton and lime, but I love the idea of an early gin-ton for starting your evening off right. Earlier the better, in the summertime.

Cheers! You have no idea how much I wanted to make this the featured image for this post.
Pictured: Joe Lycett (comedian) in a speedboat on the Thames on his way to host the Great British Sewing Bee, the reality show of the week in my household. Important: this is not Joe Wicks, fitness instructor, nor is it a gimlet. Whatever. It’s about the vibe.

Iced Coffee

It’s ten thousand degrees outside, every part of you is drenched in sweat, and, like a dog or a performing seal, you need a treat in order to perform whatever new task is expected of you.

You need a good treat.

Not a low-fat smoothie or a Diet Tab or God forbid a protein shake. You need something delicious with enough pow and zap to launch your dilapidated meat corpse into whatever the next activity of the day is.

Hopefully there’s air conditioning. But even if there’s not? There’s iced coffee.

Dave’s Sweet Tea

I’ve been dreaming about outdoor patio lunches, about fancy white tablecloths and club sandwiches that come wrapped in paper napkins, about standing outside a taco truck shoveling carnitas drenched in hot green salsa and crisp white onions and fresh lime juice into my face at 2AM.

I’ve been fantasizing about giant fuck-off Cobb salads served with a haystack of herby, cheesy skinny fries for the table, and barbecue stands handing out waxed-paper cartons filled with towering piles of smoky, sticky brisket. And a pickle on the side.

I’ve been thinking about sitting on the hood of the car outside the Dairy Queen at dusk, eating a chocolate dipped cone and talking about nothing and watching the thunderclouds roll in. I’ve been meditating on hot dogs.

I’m deep in Summer Outdoor Food Nostalgia, is what it is. We’ll be diving deep into this fantasy-based cooking in the coming weeks. Get ready for cherry pie, and pulled pork, and breakfast burritos and maybe donuts? And limeade and chicken shawarma and really good cold sandwiches for when it’s too hot to even think about turning on a burner on the stove, much less the oven.

A summertime eatin’-stuff moodboard: drive-thrus, puddin pie, Ferris Bueller, Brad Pitt eating in every scene of Ocean’s 11, fresh cherries, Corny the Sweetcorn at the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival, who is a known associate of this blog.

But you’re not getting through any of the above without a drink. Good, cold drinks are the cornerstone of summer eating: horchata, iced coffee, lemonade, milkshakes. The ever-wonderful movie theater Coke, which is essentially syrup poured over a mountain of crushed ice. Ideal.

Sweet Tea is movie theater Coke’s mellower cousin – you can control the sweetness at the beginning, with how much honey you put in, and at the end, with how much ice you serve it with.

Essential Mac and Cheese

I’m going to level with you guys – last week was all fun and games with the elaborate frosting techniques, but, much like Icarus, I have flown too close to the sun, and by “flown” I mean “walked” and by “the sun” I mean “the ground”. Did you guys know I walked OUTSIDE? To get VACCINATED? That was a mistake on my part (the walking, not the vaccination). I’m ready for the peg leg. I could switch it out for a wheel when I need to go fast, or a ski in the wintertime. If you have working feet and ankles, give them a little smooch. Moving around is a privilege, not a right.

Long story short, it’s getting very Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine in here. (Grandma Josephine is what I call the pile of sixteen pillows I use to keep this foot elevated.) It’s like for the home stretch (hopefully?) of pandemic quarantine existence I get to do it on Turbo Mode.

So, as I write you this from my 1930’s baby cage, we’re gonna talk about something I don’t have to get up and go make, because I’ve made it a billion times before. We’re making it in the glorious kitchen wing of my mind-palace, which looks exactly like Ina Garten’s kitchen in the Hamptons. We’re making mac and cheese.

Raspberry Ripple Cake

Did you ever want a cake to be both a parade float and a fluffy cloud? Hi. Welcome. Fantasy awaits.

This is the Platonic ideal of a white cake – this is the kind of cake you dream of every wedding cake being, but wedding cake universally sucks (except for the people whose weddings I’ve been to – yours was great obviously.)

This cake is everything – soft and tender, sweet but not too sweet, rich but light, heady and flavorful without being overpowering, with just a HINT of tartness to take it into the stratosphere. I love this cake.

For those of you not in the know, raspberry ripple is one of the basic UK ice cream flavors that you don’t really see in the US. In its finest form it’s just beautiful fresh cream with a light streak of raspberry jam running through it – not too sweet, but perfectly balanced between the creamy smoothness of dairy and bright, tart berries.

You can always make a cake and slap some jam between the layers and call it a day – it’s delicious and you should. But there’s something about this buttercream that makes everything Fancy and Deluxe.

Midnight Pasta

Whenever my dad goes out of town, my mom makes something called Snaffles Mousse, which is ~~the drag queen who gets kicked off Drag Race UK in week one~~ a military-grade garlic dip pungent enough to kill a vampiric horse. Eat it on Ruffles, or use it to fumigate your house!

Many of us grew up with a healthy fear of Too Much Garlic, but I don’t live that life anymore. This spaghetti made me rethink my entire relationship to the garlic arts. Welcome to the Cult of the Midnight Pasta. We have fabulous robes, and we don’t care what our breath is like.

This recipe comes from Ina Garten, but you can find versions of it everywhere. It’s called midnight pasta, because apparently it’s the comfort food chefs make for themselves when they get home at 3am after a 15-hour shift. It’s middle-of-the-night-staring-into-the-fridge food. It’s macaroni and cheese if you’re fancy as hell. It’s butter noodles on steroids. And it uses an entire head of garlic.

Best of all, it takes literally 20 minutes, and it makes a sensational frittata for lunch the next day. Like nearly all good pasta sauces, it’s thrown together quickly with stuff you have around. It’s Italian stir-fry. All you need is parsley, red pepper flakes, garlic, and parmesan.