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Brunch bonanza
By Ann | March 31, 2008
This past weekend saw a flurry of cooking, with food from other cookbooks (and thus unrecorded here) and also a brunch bonanza from The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics. It was All Martha, All the Time, and seriously, my back now hurts. I may be suffering from Martha-xhaustion. Is that a treatable syndrome?
From the “breakfast and brunch” chapter, I made healthy pepper hash, which appealed to my wholesome sensibilities. Except, I suspect there’s an error in this recipe. First of all, what is hash? I always thought it was a dry mixture of diced veggies, meat and potatoes — like corned beef hash — that was eaten with poached eggs. But the above recipe calls for 2 cups of stock, which created a saucy, stew-like creation that surprised me (but not really in a good way). The Penguin Companion to Food says hash “comes from the French hacher, meaning ‘to chop’… it was found in America [soon after the 17th century] as a form of shepherd’s pie or other melange of meat and vegetables.” Okay, fair enough. But the same recipe on Martha’s website does not give a specific amount of stock — and in the accompanying photo her hash looks suspiciously dry. So, you tell me — is something wrong with this recipe? Or should hash be like a stew? I’m curious.
Along with the hash, I made a decidedly unhealthy strawberry-rhubarb coffee cake (Martha doesn’t post the recipe on her website, but I found it on some Japanese person’s cooking blog — side note: Who knew they had rhubarb in Japan?!). This cake almost took over my oven, exploding out of the pan and dripping sugary strawberry-rhubarb topping everywhere. Others liked this cake (and I liked the strawberry-rhubarb part of it) but overall I found it extremely dense and heavy, with the crumb topping too sugary sweet (and I had even pruned the sugar back from 2 3/4 cups (!!!) to 1 3/4 cups). For me, this recipe was a nyet. (Photo tk.)
Finally, from the “drinks” chapter (oh yes, there’s a whole chapter on drinks), I prepared a papaya-ginger smoothie, a drink so bland and boring that I had to add strawberries to make it even vaguely drinkable. Do Martha and her recipe writers simply have a more sensitive palate than I do?
Number of recipes left: 23 (making progress)
Topics: Cooking the Books |
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