december food blog

simple baked goods and complex savory pies

i want to start this end of year food blog by thanking you all so much for being here. i am incredibly grateful for your support and friendship, and i am very much looking forward to continue cooking with you in the new year.

starting with dessert first, i ate a lot of cookies and cinnamon rolls and made a pretty great crumb cake. many late december mornings began with reheated potato brioche-ish cinnamon rolls (notes for how to reheat are at the bottom of the recipe), which brightened every morning and started me on a sugar high that powered me through puzzling. i hadn’t made cookies in forever, but they’re always nice to share with family and friends, so i made a triple ginger (dried, fresh, and candied) molasses cookie - which was only okay. the flavor was there, but i found them to be too cakey, and while soft they just didn’t crack apart, which i really adore. so, if you have a chewy soft ginger molasses cookie you love, please send it my way! i also made my family's favorite, chocolate chip cookies. this is a recipe i was developing a few years ago (i think i did over a dozen rounds of testing) and then ate so many i got sick of them and kinda forgot about them. i will no longer gatekeep the recipe; they are too tasty to not share. i’ll do a few more rounds of testing and then get it to you all in march.

i really love breakfast cake, and used to make them all the time. to break up the cinnamon roll breakfasts, i made a gingerbread crumb cake one morning. for a first stab at a recipe, it was great. i hope to tweak it a bit and maybe release it next year in december? let me know if you want the recipe.

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speaking of recipes you maybe want, I have received a number of requests for a pancake recipe after posting the november food blog. I’m gonna get that for you in february, but I need to know which of the pancake recipes you want.

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i have been thinking about savory pies a lot recently. i made a beef shank one last month (i also saw that someone made it from the notes i wrote and loved it too, which made me so happy!) have been scouring the internet for images and tutorials on savory pies (thinking about serving them at our wedding), and even worked on a puzzle with a game pie in it. with savory pie on my mind, i decided this month i would make more of them: chicken pot pie with a hot water crust, beef wellington, and a mushroom pithivier both made with inverted puff pastry.

my family's favorite is chicken pot pie. i make mine sorta like the ina way. i start by roasting chicken bone-in and skin-on, but i cut the amount of chicken in half. while that bakes, i prep all the veg. i start by replacing half the chicken with mushrooms, sautéing those in butter and thyme, and finishing with white wine. i then take those out and cook the mirepoix (+garlic) with more thyme. i then dice up the roasted chicken, add some frozen peas to the mix, and set this filling aside to cool. while that cools, i make the sauce, starting with a roux that gets a combination of white wine and chicken jus added to it, finished with cream. once the sauce is ready, i combine it with the rest of the filling and let this all cool down again while i make the dough. since i was going for a deep dish pie, i made a hot water crust. which also happens to be the easiest crust you can possibly make - i always use this recipe from erin jeanne mcdowell. while the crust is easy to make, it is nearly impossible to make decorations with. i wanted to add a braided crust on this pie, but it was just too difficult.

this was my first time making beef wellington. it’s always been so daunting, but it ended up being less scary than anticipated — but requires some planning. the first thing i did was make inverted puff pastry (a link here to a super detailed recipe for those who want to try), but this is an extra step that is absolutely not necessary, as ina would say, “store-bought is fine.” then made the mushroom duxelles, deglazing with cognac instead of wine, to complement the sauce. followed by a spinach crepe as opposed to a regular one for a pop of color (the crepe is added to keep the juices from the meat and mushrooms soaking into the pastry.) i quickly seared the tenderloin (not to cook through, just to get a nice crust) and then rubbed mustard over all of it. i then cut the spinach crepe down to the size of the tenderloin (length x circumference) and placed it on some cling film to help with rolling. i covered the crepe with a few pieces of prosciutto (which added great flavor), followed by a thin layer of mushroom duxelles. i then placed the meat at the edge of the crepe and using the cling film rolled the meat inside the crepe. i wrapped the meat up tightly in the cling film and let sit in the fridge to firm up. when ready, i rolled out the puff pastry and encased the filling inside it. i gave it an egg yolk and heavy cream wash, and then did some decorative scoring. placed this back in the fridge for a few hours and baked it for a total of 28 minutes at 400 degrees until the pastry was golden, as recommended by the internet. next time i’ll bake at 350 at the beginning and increase the heat to 425 at the end, this is what i did for the mushroom pithivier (below) and leads to a flakier and better cooked puff. we ate the wellington with an au poivre sauce (made with lots of peppercorns and deglazed with cognac), spinach with garlic, and pommes anna - for a french-inspired wellington. everyone loved it, and four of us polished off the whole thing.

as for the mushroom pithivier - i was inspired by a savory pithivier/pie i ate at lords this fall (one of my fav restaurants in nyc) , which was duck and chanterelle, over a super silky sauce. i got lucky and found some chanterelles for a good price with my wholesaler and sautéed them in butter, garlic, thyme, shallots, garlic, and white wine. these chanterelles were diced and mixed with the remaining duxelles. i then put the mixture into a bowl lined with cling film and froze it. once frozen i re-rolled out the scraps of the puff pastry from the wellington to cover the mushrooms, brushed with egg wash, and baked the pithivier until golden. while it baked i made a sauce of white wine, chicken jus, mushroom stock, and heavy cream. heaven!

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enough cooking, onto dining. théo and i dined out two times this month, both restaurants from the same owners, jenn saesue and chat suansilphong. we have dined at fish cheeks a few times, and at this point we’ve tried over half the menu — we love the khua kling, which we order every time. we also dined at their new restaurant, bangkok supper club, we loved everything but both agreed that the sea bass (pictured above) and goi (not pictured because i dove right in) were perfect.