Saffron Strawberry Peach & Vanilla Panna Cotta

I had a friend over recently for dinner who travels every year to Spain, so being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to attempt my hand at a Spanish-inspired menu: seafood paella (with chicken chorizo, shrimp, salmon, and tobiko), pan-blackened shishito peppers with smoked salt and shaved Iberico cheese (shishito because I couldn't find padron peppers at the market), and a vanilla panna cotta with saffron-infused strawberry peach sauce. Okay, so to be fair, it wasn't a traditionally Spanish meal, but the inspirations were fun to play around with! I particularly like this saffron-infused strawberry sauce. Strawberries on their own in a sauce tend to be a bit cloying and one-dimensional to me, so the saffron lends an interesting mellow exoticism. It's like that ingredient that you can't really pick out but the dessert would be otherwise empty without. I love those sorts of subtle hints. ;)

Panna cotta is one of those desserts that I just plain refuse to order at restaurants, because they're so easy and delicious to make at home! I like mine with a half-milk/half-cream mix, so that the texture is lighter and doesn't feel reminiscent of sunscreen the way that full-cream panna cottas do. But really, the name makes them sound fancier than they are! It's just milk jello, really!

Life has been cray cray busy lately, so it's nice to have this blog to escape to every once in a while without the pressures of being a regular blogger. Thank you all to those of you who still have me in your blog, email, instagram feeds. I think of you all often, and wonder what magic you're cooking up in your kitchens!


Read on for recipe....

White Cardamom and Lavender Milk Jam

Real life does not look like this. Okay, fine. Maybe your life looks like that, and if so, major kudos to you. You belong perpetually in a magazine, or on a 24/7 instagram feed. But me? My daily life is messy and oftentimes full of droning dullness and unprettiness that no one else but me would want to see. There is plenty of ugly light in my house, lots of hand-me-down furniture from ikea, carpet stains from who-knows-where, not-really-very-charming 1970's house fixtures. I live through many totally not-instagrammable, not-facebook-share-worthy times, usually involving sitting in front of a computer, staring at numbers and code, or standing in the perpetually, interminably long line at the post office, or getting annoyed by the hammering noises coming from the construction next door, or taking out the trash. And, on top of all this, while I do wear hipster glasses, it's because I'm a nerd and need major vision correction so that I'm not walking around blind and crashing into things, okay?

I'm moving houses soon, to my new job, and when I've been telling people lately that I need to furnish my new place, they ask me, "Oh, what's your decorating style?" I keep getting taken aback by this question, since I don't find myself identifying with "modern" or "French country" or "beachhouse", etc. None of those are me, because really, at this point, how about it would just be nice to *not* look like I'm still living like a grad student. Like, I'm looking forward to the day when my couch no longer has a "slip-cover" of an old sheet over it, when my kitchen faucet is no longer held together by packing tape, and when my handed-down-from-previous-grad-student $15 ikea coffee table no longer has a majorly uneven surface from when I accidentally spilled a bunch of liquid on the fiberboard and it warped like crazy so now you can't put anything on it anymore....

Because I'm a food/travel photographer and that inevitably translates to being, at some level, a lifestyle photographer, it's actually become sort of a perplexing ethical question for me about what I shoot. So much of the work I have to do for clients--or for that matter, on this blog--really glorifies some idealised, stylized life. To some extent, that's fine. Beauty involves some editing (after all, what is a photographer's eye but an editor), but at what point does it become too much of a lie, and no longer true to the artist?

All this rant is to say that I have been struggling for a long time to figure out what should appear on this blog moving forward. I don't have that complete answer yet, but I do know that I don't want to miss out on recording moments that I want to remember just because they don't meet some sort of predetermined, magazine-worthy stereotypic standard of pretty. It's a blog, for goodness sakes. Let's not get all bent up about mismatched plates from different eras or god-awful, water-warped ikea coffee tables, shall we. Let's focus instead on capturing some of the truth of life, and hope that that truth leads us, in the end, to beauty.

One of my favorite events throughout grad school was when my friends and I would have pot-luck teas, usually for all of the girls in the lab (because go, ladies in science!). Everyone would bring a dish, and I would usually raid my prop closet for teacups and wooden serving boards as my contribution because I'd be too busy during the school year to bake anything, and we'd sit down for a long morning of wonderful food and laughter and company. This tea was from a few months ago, when I actually had enough wherewithal to make a white cardamom & lavender milk jam to contribute (also, I brought a precious jar of raspberry jam that my friend's Russian grandmother makes every summer, and that she smuggles out of Russia for me :)). The milk jam, all caramel-y smooth but robustly spiced from the cardamom and lavender, worked deliciously on blinis and rice pudding, but especially--and unexpectedly!--the milk jam went perfectly with these butternut squash custards that my friend Clara brought. I love it when potlucks so serendipitously bring together food that are good on their own but even better together! Such is the true beauty of the thing!

Read on for recipe....

Spiced Pepita Brittle and Pumpkin Panna Cotta

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone! This year, I was fortunate enough to have not only one but two Thanksgivings, so I'm still stuffed to the brim. I hope everyone's Thanksgivings were equally as delicious!

I'm so pleased to announce that I will be doing recurring recipe features over the next few months on the Anthology Magazine Blog! I got to work with Anthology last year for their gift guide, and I'm excited to be a part of that world again. It's a wonderful lifestyle and design mag, if you haven't seen it yet. This month's recipe is a spiced pepita brittle and pumpkin panna cotta--a balance of sweet and savory and light and creamy for the holidays. Click on over to the Anthology blog for the recipe!

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The Café au Lait Tart, for breakfast for dessert

Well, here's one for recursion: it's dessert for breakfast for dessert! :) This idea has been floating around in my head for quite a while now, but I hadn't had a chance to properly realize it until a friend requested this week to have "breakfast for dessert," since she found herself too busy to ever properly have breakfast for breakfast. I'm never one to let friends go hungry, and so, at last, the café au lait tart was born.

My inspiration behind this tart was to make it a beautiful homage to the first meal of the day, pulling together the flavors and textures that we'd normally associate with breakfast into dessert form (minus the scrambled eggs and bacon--that's so overdone). The crust has a hint of nutty sweetness from a tinge of oat flour, and then there are layers of milk jam, whole-fruit wild blueberry jam, and espresso dark chocolate ganache, all topped with golden oatmeal praline and flaked seasalt. (You can see my diagram of the dessert in the planning stages here.) The end result is at once rich and bitter and crunchy and creamy and sweet and salty--pretty much one of the most sophisticated ways to start your day, all compressed into a single bite.

[for larger image, click photo above]

...Now, if all days started this way!

[My apologies on the short post, but hopefully the recipe makes up for it. I find myself far too lacking in words these days, having used up my quota for work purposes.]



Read on for recipe....