Tag: Sugar Spun Run

Happy new year! I remember once reading a guide to confession that said if you aren’t sure if a sin is venial or mortal, just tell the priest, “I am unable to judge the severity of my actions.” So that’s where we are, except with food. Except that I am very able to judge it; I’m just too busy licking icing off my chin to decide what to call it. 

If you don’t mind, I’ll just do a highlights reel of the last few weeks, rather than the typical day-by-day account. My camera roll is a mess, I have put on 924 pounds, and I made so much cheesecake, I blew out the oven door. More on that later!

Okay, here’s some yummy food!  

We’ll start with a cozy little pot of applesauce I made during Chanukah. I put a bunch of cut-up apples (including peels and cores) in the Instant Pot with some water and cooked them, then ran the collapsed apples through the foley mill to get rid of the debris. Cooking them with the peels on makes the color lovely and pink. Then I added some cinnamon and a little butter, and continued cooking it down in a pot. Lovely color, didn’t need any sugar. 

This was, of course, to accompany POTATO LATKES, the sine qua non of Chanukah. I had shredded the potatoes in the food processor the night before, and stored them in a bowl of water in the fridge to keep them from turning brown. If you put the shreds in cold water immediately and let them sit for a bit, they remain mostly white even after you take them out of the water again! 

I more or less followed the NYT latke recipe, which calls for eggs, flour, salt, baking powder, and pepper. It results in a puffy latke that is absolutely delightful. 

We had these for dinner as a side dish, but I can’t remember what the main was. 

Later in Chanukah, I made sufganiyot: Little jelly donuts. I’ve tried different recipes, but this time I went for the Smitten Kitchen one, which has you rolling out the dough and cutting it into rounds, rather than dropping dollops of batter into the hot oil. If I remember, I made the dough the night before, then cut it out and fried it. The recipe includes an option for filling them with jelly and THEN frying them, but I opted to fry and then fill. 

Absurdly delicious, and beautifully plump. Definitely doing this recipe from now on. 

I also, for reasons I can’t clarify, decided to make blintzes this year. (Well, last year, I guess.) I have a very old memory of my grandmother (the mean one) making blintzes when she moved into our house. Nobody was allowed in the kitchen, and I could hear her violently whacking the frying pan on the table to get the wrapper out of the pan.

I did not find it necessary to do that! Making the wrappers was a pretty steep learning curve, though, and I absolutely had some misfires, and probably my wrappers were a little too thick. (They are essentially slightly undercooked crêpes — undercooked because you fill them and then fry them.) The classic recipe calls for farmer’s cheese/pot cheese, but I used ricotta, which is very close. 

I followed Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, and they turned out wonderful. 

And yes, when I took my first bite of that combination of flavors I haven’t had since I was about six, I wept a tiny bit. My poor mean grandmother, what a life she had. Poor her, poor them, poor everybody. At least we have blintzes. 

I made a simple cherry sauce from frozen cherries. Can’t find the recipe, but it was just, like, a cornstarch, lemon juice, sugar, water kind of thing. 

INCREDIBLE. 

I do believe next Chanukah I will make EITHER sufganitot OR blintzes, but woof, everything was so good, I don’t really have regrets.

And we played dreidel! I miraculously remembered to get chocolate coins to bet with, and Sophia surprised everyone with gift cards to a local bookshop.  

I think we managed to light the candles 6 out of 8 days, and we lit the Advent candles more than half the time,

which is not a bad record for this vicinity. 

On Christmas eve, I decided I wanted to try that cinnamon star pull-apart bread I see everyone making, rather than my normal cinnamon rolls. I followed the Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe, and I even watched the video. I formed the stars and then put it in the fridge overnight, and it looked promising!

In the evening, we decorated the tree. Usually I put up lights outside the house and set up the nativity scene in the beginning of Advent, then add lights inside on the third Sunday, and then we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. 

We went to Midnight Mass That Is Actually At Midnight, Which In Theory I Love But Also Zzzzzzzzz, and Benny was serving, and it was lovely and beautiful, but also there was enough exhaustd and overstimulated weeping and lamenting from certain quarters that I decided not to even try taking pictures in the church. But many of the kids looked very nice. We did take a few pics at home. 

We staggered home with the addition of Elijah, who spent the night on the couch. We lugged all the presents and stockings out and sprinkled candy around according to tradition, and got into bed by 2:30. I left a note for the kids to please take out the cinnamon bread and let the dough warm up when they get up. (They are allowed to get up whenever they want and open their stockings, which have candy and a few small presents; but they can’t wake us up to open the rest of the presents until 8:00.)

So I got up and baked the bread, and it was not great! Just didn’t keep its shape, and I thought there was too little cinnamon and sugar for the amount of bread.

No one really complained, though. we had tons of bacon, oranges, grapes, and pomegranates, orange juice and eggnog, and candy and chocolate galore. The kids gave each other such excellent presents. 

Moe joined us via video (he’s currently working two jobs and couldn’t get here in person, alas), Clara came over in the morning, and Lena came by later in the day. So a lovely day all around, much laughing and goofing around. Later, we had our traditional takeout Chinese feast

and all was well.

I haven’t yet mentioned that, right before Christmas, I baked and sold a large number of cheesecakes. I think a total of 14? It’s possible this is a legal gray area, but they were delicious and nobody arrested me, so we have that going for us. I even sold the one that got caught on the oven rack and half the top got ripped off.

I gave the lady a discount and showed her a photo of how it was damaged, but check out how I fixed it:

I do like making pretty food! I also offered strawberry sauce and blueberry sauce. 

After Christmas day was a bit of a blur. Like lots of other people, we ate a lot of candy and hung around in our pajamas and watched movies. We watched Stranger Things (still have to see the final episode), which we enjoyed with some heckling, and Wake Up Dead Man, which we all LOVED. At some point I made a double batch of buckeyes.

This is a recipe that I used to have to assemble all my montessori powers so I would be cool with the kids rolling the dough into balls with their grubby hands and coming out with buckeyes of all uneven sizes, and then not freaking out when they splattered hot melted chocolate all over the place while dipping them. Oh how times have changed! This time, I made the dough and nobody felt like making buckeyes. So it stayed in the fridge for several days, until I finally got tired of looking at it. The dough was a little dry, so rather than rolling it, I scooped half-balls with a melon baller

and rather than dipping it in chocolate, I just drizzled melted chocolate over the top. 

The kids called them “gentrified buckeyes.”  The only downside to this model is that, when you refrigerate them, it’s super easy to flick the chocolate off and eat the plain candy underneath, if for instance you can’t each chocolate but you certainly can eat 927 plain balls of peanut butter, butter, sugar, and vanilla. I’m just saying, if they’re completely robed in chocolate, you have to work harder to denude them, and you only eat maybe 600 of them. 

Eventually, we wobbled our way toward eating actual food again. I made beef barley soup and challah one night.

Here’s my soup recipe:

and here’s my challah recipe:

I did one loaf with sesame seeds, one with “what the hell happened to my bagel?” seasoning, or whatever the off-brand is called

Honestly they were a little dry and not as chewy as you want challah to be, but still nice. Can’t beat freshly-baked bread. 

Another night we had just plain old broiled pork ribs, seasoned with salt and pepper and shoved up under a hot broiler, turned once. This remains one of my favorite ways to serve pork ribs. 

Looks like we had mashed potatoes, too. Aren’t you glad I’m here to narrate this perplexing imagery? 

The other night, we had oven-fried chicken and some bare-bones pasta salad. 
 

Here’s my recipe for oven-fried chicken:

As you can see in the background, I had started my next goofy project, which was Sophia’s birthday cake. She once again requested to be surprised, which is honestly the one thing I can guarantee, with my cakes. She did ask for a strawberry cake with lemon cheesecake frosting, and I was feeling ambitious for some misbegotten reason, so I decided to make a fresh strawberry cake without artificial strawberry flavoring. I once again turned to Sally’s Baking Addiction, and followed this recipe, which has you puree strawberries and then simmer them until the volume is reduced by half. The idea is that you impart strawberry flavor into the batter without making it too runny. 

Well, I will cut the suspense and tell you the cake did not turn out great. It did taste like strawberry, but it was really dense and a little gummy. I don’t know if this is my fault — cakes are not my forte — but that is how it turned out. I did bake it in a bundt pan, because I wanted that shape, but I don’t think that was the problem. However, since I did have a cake with a hole in the middle, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I filled it with Skittles. 

But first I made a lemon cream cheese frosting, using this recipe from Sugar Spun Run, and it was absolutely delicious. Fluffy and creamy and perfectly sweet-tart.  

Anyway, back to the surprise part! Sophia loves Conan Gray, so I decided to model the cake after his newest album cover.

So I ended up with a vaguely hat-shaped cake (I used a second pan to make the top part) with a slightly blurry little fondant sailor perched on the brim. 

You can’t really tell, but one of his wee hands is curled up so he can clutch one of the candles. Here he is before I added the water or sky or whatever

Did I mention the frosting was delicious? I don’t know, little kids are much easier to please! Anyway, Moe had come over to stay for a few days, and Clara and Elijah came by, and we all had lovely calzones

Here’s my basic calzone recipe. (I just use premade pizza dough.)

And then, after presents and cake, the youngest and the oldest in the family shuffled off to bed and left the birthday girl and pals to watch Zoolander and eat this charcuterie board I made:

That’s pretty, right? I was pleased with it. I made the chocolate leaves when I was drizzling the buckeyes, and had leftover chocolate. I just piped them onto parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer until it was time to use them. And I realized I now know how to make pie crust roses, strawberry roses, AND salami roses. 

This birthday was actually Jan. 1, which means I didn’t mention our New Year’s Eve! Which is, you’ll be surprised to hear, food-centric. We had sushi and pork dumplings. I usually make the pork dumplings from scratch, but couldn’t find dumpling wrappers anywhere in town, so I just bought some frozen ones. 

For the sushi, I got some good rice and made a pot of seasoned rice.

I got tons of nori sheets, and . . . let’s see. Smoked salmon, raw ahi tuna, steamed shrimp, avocado, mango, red caviar, cucumber, carrot matchsticks, fried SPAM, and an assortment of sauces, hot mustard, and so on. Sesame seeds and furikake. I forget what else. 

and everyone made sushi and we had fun! Oh, and Benny made taiyaki filled with nutella and jelly. I was honestly just crushingly tired by this point, so I don’t have much in the way of photos. I do have a short video I took by accident, and I watched it six times before I figured out what the hell I was doing. Then I realized I was cleaning off my phone’s camera lens with a napkin, frowning at it, LICKING it, and cleaning it off with a napkin again. If you send me $900 I will share the video. 

That night, we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, which we saved for when Moe was here, and then we counted down to midnight, shot off the cheapy little confetti guns I got at Walmart, had some sparkling cider in plastic cups

and staggered off to bed. 

The very last thing Damien did in the year 2025 was to go down in the basement and thaw out the bathtub pipe, which had frozen even though we left it running a trickle; and then on the very first day of 2026, the oven door broke. I was actually just peeking at the calzones to see if they were done, and the glass inside the oven just kind of fell apart and slid off the door. It didn’t look to me like it had exploded at all, so I uhh went ahead and fed those calzones to my family, and they enjoyed them, and nobody died. 

Then today, Jan. 2, our new dryer arrived (Damien has been going to the laundromat for the family for over a week now), and he is taking out the old one and putting in the new. Because of my past cleverness, this involves unscrewing about forty screws with which I attached plexiglass to the laundry room door last summer to keep the rain from getting in, and also dismantling the makeshift greenhouse I set up on the back steps to keep my pomegranate trees from freezing. SO YOU SEE, marriage isn’t 50/50, if you want it to work. It’s 100/100. He puts in 100% of the work actually keeping the household functional, and I mess around with fondant and pomegranates, 100%. And that’s our secret!  Anyway, don’t forget about the video. $900 firm. I know what I got. 

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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

• olive oil
• 1 medium onion or red onion, diced
• 1 Tbsp minced garlic
• 3-4 medium carrots, peeled and diced
• 2-3 lbs beef, cubed
• 16 oz mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
• 6 cups beef bouillon
• 1 cup merlot or other red wine
• 29 oz canned diced tomatoes (fire roasted is nice) with juice
• 1 cup uncooked barley
• salt and pepper

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot. If using Instant Pot, choose "saute." Add the minced garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions and carrots are softened. 

   
   

2. Add the cubes of beef and cook until slightly browned.

3. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the beef broth, and the merlot, plus 3 cups of water. Stir and add the mushrooms and barley. 

4. If cooking on stovetop, cover loosely and let simmer for several hours. If using Instant Pot, close top, close valve, and set to high pressure for 30 minutes. 
   

5. Before serving, add pepper to taste. Salt if necessary. 

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Challah (braided bread)

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups warm water
• 1/2 cup oil (preferably olive oil)
• 2 eggs
• 6-8 cups flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 1.5 tsp yeast
• 2 egg yolks for egg wash
• poppy seeds or "everything bagel" topping (optional)
• corn meal (or flour) for pan, to keep loaf from sticking

Instructions

1. In a small bowl, dissolve a bit of the sugar into the water, and sprinkle the yeast over it. Stir gently, and let sit for five minutes or more, until it foams.

2. In the bowl of standing mixer, put the flour (starting with six cups), salt, remaining sugar, oil, and eggs, mix slightly, then add the yeast liquid. Mix with dough hook until the dough doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl, adding flour as needed. It's good if it has a slightly scaly appearance on the outside.

3. (If you're kneading by hand, knead until it feels soft and giving. It will take quite a lot of kneading!)

4. Put the dough in a greased bowl and lightly cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap. Let it rise in a warm place for at least an hour, until it's double in size.

5. Grease a large baking sheet and sprinkle it with flour or corn meal. Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Roll three into "snakes" and make a large braid, pinching the ends to keep them together. Divide the fourth piece into three and make a smaller braid, and lay this over the larger braid. Lay the braided loaf on the pan.

6. Cover again and let rise again for at least an hour. Preheat the oven to 350.

7. Before baking, make an egg wash out of egg yolks and a little water. Brush the egg wash all over the loaf, and sprinkle with poppy seeds or "everything" topping.

8. Bake 25 minutes or more until the loaf is a deep golden color.

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Oven-fried chicken

so much easier than pan frying, and you still get that crisp skin and juicy meat

Ingredients

• chicken parts (wings, drumsticks, thighs)
• milk (enough to cover the chicken at least halfway up)
• eggs (two eggs per cup of milk)
• flour
• your choice of seasonings (I usually use salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and chili powder)
• oil and butter for cooking

Instructions

1. At least three hours before you start to cook, make an egg and milk mixture and salt it heavily, using two eggs per cup of milk, so there's enough to soak the chicken at least halfway up. Beat the eggs, add the milk, stir in salt, and let the chicken soak in this. This helps to make the chicken moist and tender.

2. About 40 minutes before dinner, turn the oven to 425, and put a pan with sides into the oven. I use a 15"x21" sheet pan and I put about a cup of oil and one or two sticks of butter. Let the pan and the butter and oil heat up.

3. While it is heating up, put a lot of flour in a bowl and add all your seasonings. Use more than you think is reasonable! Take the chicken parts out of the milk mixture and roll them around in the flour until they are coated on all sides.

4. Lay the floured chicken in the hot pan, skin side down. Let it cook for 25 minutes.

5. Flip the chicken over and cook for another 20 minutes.

6. Check for doneness and serve immediately. It's also great cold.

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

• 3 balls pizza dough
• 32 oz ricotta
• 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
• 1 cup parmesan
• 1 Tbsp garlic powder
• 2 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp salt
• 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
• any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400. 

2. Mix together filling ingredients. 
   
   

3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.