Pizza Grilled Cheese

This grilled cheese. This made me no longer want to bake a cake. It was so good, so complexly flavorful and exciting and fun to make that I lost desire to throw myself into making a cake.

I also lost stomach capacity.

But not to worry! Cake will be back soon.

This recipe is brought to you by the struggling basil plant on our back porch, pine nuts the people we're subletting from (our superletters?) left behind, and parmesan cheese nubs. It's also brought to you by good, crusty bread.

Shoutout to my sister-in-law's dad, who subtly packed up leftover bread after a 4th of July BBQ and handed me the bag on my way out. I have been the beneficiary of their kindness and food many times--some kale from their garden made its way into my eggs the other day, too!

Anyway. This grilled cheese is brought to you by the letter A, as in mozzArella, which I never know how to spell. It's brought to you by the glory of butter sizzling in a skillet. By the power of a bit of olive oil and a lot of heat to bring out extraordinary sweetness in otherwise ordinary tomatoes.

Another single meal, but easily adaptable to however many mouths there are to feed. FYI: I plan to put the extra pesto on pasta tomorrow night, then put the pasta in a frittata the following night. It's a piggyback kind of return on investment. Knock yourself out!

Pizza Grilled Cheese
Yield: one sandwich, easily multiplied

Ingredients:

• a bunch of basil
• olive oil
• salt
• a garlic clove
• a few tablespoons grated parmesan
• a scant quarter cup pine nuts

• 1 small tomato
• 5 or 6 small balls of fresh mozzarella, or a few slices of a big ball
• two slices crusty bread
• butter

Method: 

1. Roast tomato: slice it up, put on a sheet pan (foil makes clean up much easier!). Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and put under the broiler. Keep an eye on it while you make the pesto, below. Roast until soft, with browning edges. Take out and set aside.
2. Make the pesto: [Note: I used a mortar and pestle but this can easily be adapted to a food processor.] Pound the garlic clove with a pinch of coarse salt until it's entirely broken down into a paste. 
3. Toast pine nuts for a few minutes in a skillet on the stove, then add to the mortar. Grind up. Add the cheese and grind again. 
4. Then, coarsely slice the basil, add, and grind more. Drizzle in olive oil and keep grinding until its consistency is to your liking. Taste, add salt/pepper, cheese, etc.-whatever you think it needs.
5. Heat a skillet over medium-low heat. Butter one side of each slice of bread, then layer on the pesto, cheese, and tomatoes. Cook for a few minutes, until golden brown
   and starting to melt, then flip. If your cheese looks like it needs some help melting (though putting hot tomatoes on it helps that along a bit), throw a lid on the pan while the second side cooks to capture heat.
6. Cut and serve. Pick your jaw up off the table so you can keep chowing down!

Inspired by Food52 and Joy the Baker.

Chocolate Macarons with Dulce de Leche filling

Mistakes are delicious. I've learned this through many screwed up recipes that my family nonetheless devoured, complimented, and that I found myself eating and loving too.

P.S. If your macarons crack or are hard or don't have feet or bubble or fuse or whatever it is you think is imperfect, other people are just so impressed that you even attempted macarons. It's all about appreciating that someone took the risk and cares, not the aesthetics of the product. And it means that next time you can try again to make it better!

P.P.S. This applies to mistakes in life too.

These are lumpy, brown, cracked, and taste fantastic, especially when they've been in the fridge for 5 days.

They also pair fantastically with homemade chocolate ice cream (post soon!), which, as a bonus, uses up the 5 yolks you will have sitting in your kitchen after trying your hand at macarons.

My first time making dulce de leche was a roaring success! If you haven't tasted it....well, it's one of those life experiences you should just do. 978 things to do before you die:
583. Eat dulce de leche off a spoon
584. Eat something that has dulce de leche in it.

It's basically sweetened condensed milk that you heat to caramelize the sugars. You can heat in the microwave, directly in the can in boiling water (but people worry about chemicals from the can leeching in so this might not be the best way, although it is the most popular in the blogosphere), in the oven in a pie plate, or, like I did, on a double boiler. See instructions here.

Or you can buy it at the store, too.

Did you know the French have dulce de leche too? They call it confit de lait, which translates as milk jam. And they spread it on toast. That is a good life choice.

Love yourself and your cracked crunchy macarons, and eat some dulce de leche.

Chocolate Macarons with Dulce de Leche filling

Ingredients:

4 ounces blanched almonds or almond flour, or whatever nut you like
7 ounces powdered sugar
1 ounce cocoa powder
2 teaspoons espresso powder (optional but delicious)
5 ounces egg whites (144g)
2 1/2 ounces sugar
the scrapings of 1 vanilla bean or 2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp (2g) kosher salt

Method:

1. Bravetart has a fantastic recipe and explanations of how to achieve macronage (which, I think, was what went wrong with my macarons this time...I overbeat the batter)
2. Fill macaron shells with dulce de leche (don't worry if it splurts out, it probably will), sandwich, and enjoy.

Macarons

It's summer! Joy and Tracy have been getting folks on board with their summer bucket lists, so I was inspired to return to my bucket list.

And it hit me.
Macarons.

These are different from macaroons, which are coconut or almonds covered in sticky sweetened condensed milk, mounded up into little haystacks, and baked. Sometimes people cover them in chocolate. They're really smart.

No, although macaroons are on my bucket list too, macarons were the project du jour. Supremely light and yet totally chewy (we all love a good chewy cookie, amirite?), these are perfect for the warmer weather.

I used Bravetart's method, which is fantastic. These are great summer baking.

Wait, you're saying. Macarons, they're killed by humidity, right? According to Bravetart, no. After all, pastry chefs make pastries whether or not it's humid, hot, dry, raining. No biggie!

Because I'm lazy, and because I love chocolate, I made ganache instead of buttercream...just boil some cream in the microwave (1 minute and then 30 second bursts on high), add an equal amount of chocolate by weight, and whisk until smooth and supple.
Supple?
Yup.
Add a pinch of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, chill and fill!

It's for summer. They go in the fridge. They stay there. It helps the flavors get mellow with one another and keeps the chocolate from splooshing everywhere.

I'll be honest with y'all. Half of my macaron shells didn't get feet and cracked on the top.

You know what? They still taste amazing. Yeah, sure, it's not the pinnacle of macaron glory, but no one's complaining when it's this good.

Summer bucket list:
Tackle something hard.

Check!

The recipe I used was Bravetart's basic macaron.
She also has fantastic posts on the Ten Commandments and the Ten Myths of macaron making.

Thanks Stella!!