kitchen firsts: berry tart with lemon-vanilla pastry cream

This week was one of those weeks where you don’t notice it’s Friday until several hours into Friday, and I realized it was practically the end of the week and I still had no plan or idea for my kitchen first of the week. I have a running list of things I’ve never cooked, eaten or done in the kitchen to choose from, but it is not exhaustive and I was not inspired by anything on it. Then, I went to the store and found gazillions of berries (organic, no less) on sale for ridiculously good prices, and some echoes of blog posts I’d scanned but not read started to coalesce into an idea. This week, I must try something very new, and make my first tart.

simple party food

This is a long-overdue post of the array of snackables we tried out for New Years Eve, and with the Super Bowl on the horizon I thought I’d share some of my favorites for those of you who, like me, tend to decide at the last minute that some appetizers are in order! If you’re looking for something easy and cheap but a little more elegant than jalapeno poppers, tater skins and lil smokies, these will serve you well!

The more parties I host, the more I realize the importance of simple but delicious flavor combinations. Even if you plan days in advance, when you’re putting together a selection of snacks, you really can’t afford to be running around from store to store buying a zillion specialty ingredients, or spending hours putting just one appetizer together. You need snacks that can be easily assembled with a minimum of prep work, and you need to be able to do your prep without a lot of fussing over the timing of serving things perfectly hot. Basically, you need things to be as low-maintenance as possible, ideally with an ingredient list less than five items long.  The snacks listed here satisfied those requirements for me, and they all proved simple to whip out en masse for a crowd.

crostata di marmellata

Sometimes, when looking through a cookbook, you come across a recipe that you just know you have to make.  For me, this seems to happen with above-average frequency when I am flipping through something from the people at Cook’s Illustrated, and half the time it is something totally random that I’ve never even thought of cooking but that I now know I must cook.  This crostata di marmellata, from the Italian Classics cookbook, was one such recipe.  I had no particular occasion in mind, but it needed to happen; a “weekend” type recipe to be sure.