document.write("\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlissa Moghtaderi's Blog\n\n\n\n\n
\n

10th June 2010

\n
\n
\n\nThursday 09:28 pm : Results of Morning Snack Shopping en Route to Work
\nOne small container of tamari almonds.
One large container of smoked almonds.
One small container of peas (sans wasabi).
One small container of mixed nuts.
One small container of peppermint candies for afternoon refreshment.
One box of parmesan cheese twist crackers.
One small container of fresh papaya.*
One large container of watermelon.*
One small plain 2% Liberte yogurt.*
One pint of grape tomatoes.
One half pint of blueberries.*
One small red pepper.

*Consumed during working hours today.\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

27th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nSaturday 11:10 am : Two-Year Transplantiversary
\nToday is the two-year anniversary of Sam's bone marrow transplant and he is still lymphoma free. He's not without post-transplant problems, but two years ago we didn't even dream about being this happy and healthy and content. And tonight we're going to Daniel for dinner to celebrate.

Thanks for the stem cells, Normy. Top quality. We both appreciate it quite a bit.\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

26th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nFriday 07:17 pm : Matzoh Ball Soup
\nI admit that I was 20 before I had matzoh ball soup, but that's because I didn't move to New York City until I was 17 and it took me a while to become interested in dumpling soup because, frankly, it doesn't sound all that appealing when it's explained to you. But after I first made it, I loved it. Carrots, parsnips, celery, onions, floating doughy masses, what's not to love?

From Food


Sam had never had matzoh ball soup before, despite eating lunch in a kosher cafeteria through medical school and residency. So I introduced him to it at dinner on Wednesday night.

From Food


And here is a batch of matzoh ball soup--circa 2004--in my old kitchen on Central Park West. It wasn't a bad kitchen, even if it was a little small and the oven wasn't quite full sized and there wasn't a dishwasher and Sam didn't live there with me. But other than that, it was wonderful!

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n
\n\nFriday 07:10 pm : He Told Me So.
\nWhen we did our wedding registry, Sam registered for six of these round au gratin dishes from Crate & Barrel that I just despise. Aside from their limited utility, I object to them on the grounds that they are difficult to store, because they don't quite stack properly and those handles are cumbersome.

From Food


But I finally found a use for them. Pot pies.

From Food


And though I still think they are cumbersome and not particularly useful, I object to them less when they are filled with creamy mix of potatoes, carrots, pearl onions, green peas and broccoli and topped with a flaky crust.

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

20th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nSaturday 06:12 pm : Chocolate Chip Cookies
\nI don't much care for the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's not bad, but I like chewy cookies with a cake-like texture. And I have an .rtf file on my hard drive with a recipe for old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies. I've been using it for years--for long enough that I had to convert it from .wpd--and I have no memory of its provenance, but it is incredibly reliable and incredibly delicious.

So when I brought home chocolate chunks and told Sam I was going to make cookies, he took me aside and said that we needed to talk about cookie texture. He said he doesn't like those thin, crisp cookies, which is how Tollhouse cookies always turn out. I told him not to worry.

The thing about these cookies is that there are a few little tricks to making them work perfectly. The first is that I measure them to make sure each cookie is perfectly even and equal to all its brothers. Helps them cook evenly, too. Anyway, we have a wonderful Salter scale that has revolutionized my baking with its precision. Each of these cookies is 1.5 ounces.

From Food


The other trick is that I leave them in the oven for precisely 11.5 minutes. 12 minutes is too long, 11 isn't long enough. They never look done enough at that point, but after five minutes of cooling they are perfect.

From Food


Sam said that he had never had a cookie as good as these. He kept gushing and gushing over them, and ate five of them the first night. (That's 7.5 ounces of cookie!)

From Food


They are definitely a good cookie.\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n
\n\nSaturday 06:10 pm : Purple Carrots
\nI love purple carrots. I love things that are gimmicky and there's nothing more gimmicky than a purple carrot.

It turns out that carrots used to come in a whole array of colors on the spectrum from yellow to purple, but the orange ones were so prized that they became standard. Which is a pity, because these beauties are far more impressive to me.

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

14th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nSunday 05:17 pm : Quiche Redux
\nWe reheated the quiche for lunch today and hooooooo my goodness. Wow. 20 minutes in the toaster oven compensated for the not-quite-crispy crust last night.

Look at that flakiness!

From Food


I also made creme patissiere with the leftover egg yolks from the angel food cake. Sam and I licked the pan clean in a very literal way.\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n
\n\nSunday 12:22 pm : Family Dinner
\nLast night we had Sam's mom and his aunt and uncle over for dinner.

From Food


They are Persian and they eat Persian food, and when they eat American food, it's usually American foods that are the closest approximation to Persian food that they can find. I am not skilled with either Persian or ersatz Persian cuisine. Bad manners to invite someone to your house and feed them weird foreign food, no doubt, but what's a girl to do?

I did what I always do when I don't know what to do. I made pastry dough.

From Food


From Food


And then I chopped vegetables--mushrooms, bell peppers, and onions.

From Food


From Food


From Food


And I made a quiche. I have been startled by how much I have forgotten how to cook in the last couple years. I made such an amateur mistake--one that I was prone to in my early 20s but thought I had conquered in my late 20s--and failed to pre-bake my tart crust long enough. It was okay, but it would have been amazing if I'd just left that sucker in the oven another four minutes before I filled it.

From Food


I also roasted some root vegetables--parsnips, carrots, yellow beets, rutabaga--in a honey orange glaze and they turned out beautifully. I had made a similar combination a few weeks ago for lunch and I hadn't been able to stop thinking about it.

Before:

From Food


After:

From Food


And salad, too, which is notable only because the colors are nice.

From Food


For dessert I made an angel food cake, which I'd only done once before. I was not optimistic about its prospects for coming out of the bundt pan, because it seemed rather committed to sticking to the side and those fluted edges aren't really conducive to being knifed out. But in the end, we managed.

From Food


For an accompaniment, I made a raspberry coulis. The only hard part of that is pushing it through a mesh sieve to get out all the seeds. That is tedious, time-consuming, and dangerous. Luckily I didn't splash any raspberry puree on anything outside the sink, but we had some close calls.

Assembly is easy. Mix powdered sugar into raspberry puree.

From Food


And there you have it.

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

11th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nThursday 08:20 pm : Crepes
\nWe made crepes for dinner last night. Another of the French meals that were strangely quotidian in my childhood. We usually had them rolled with asparagus and a cheesy bechamel.

From Food


It's been a long while since I've made crepes, and I was a little out of practice. The result? Some spotty browning and unduly crispy edges as I tried to control the temperature on two pans at once.

From Food


But they ended up delicious, filled with ham and cheesy bechamel, with broccoli and salad on the side. It was wonderful. Sam had a long and trying day and I am so happy I had dinner waiting for him. It made me feel like Betty Draper, but actually much better. Because I worked all day and went to the gym before I cooked dinner and had it ready for my hard-working husband. Of course, Sam has many qualities that Don Draper lacks, and I was wearing gym clothes instead of crinolines and a chintz dress. I guess really I wasn't that much like Betty Draper after all.

From Food


And these close-up photos are thanks to my new macro lens that arrived this week in a mysterious and unexpected package. Thanks, Sam! Now I can do this!

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

9th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nTuesday 08:59 pm : Citrus, Barley and Caramel.
\nSam and I had the Sabets over for dinner on Sunday night and it was such a pleasure! First of all, they are positively charming. Sam and I really like them--and not just because they are a Persian and a girl trying to learn Persian.

Sam and I made a dinner of a Smitten Kitchen recipe we'd made once before and loved, and a salad that I pretty much invented on the fly.

From Food


I had all this beautiful citrus that I'd been plucking from different markets as I found nice things. Grapefruits from Garden of Eden, navel oranges from Chelsea Market, blood oranges from Whole Foods. So I layered it with arugula--the pepperiness to contrast with the sweetness--and smothered it in a nice sherry vinaigrette.

From Food


The entree was this mushroom barley pie that SmittenKitchen made a while ago and that we made once back in Pittsburgh. This time we added a few embellishments: oil-cured olives and green peas. And shitake mushrooms instead of cremini. It was so lovely! We use DuFour puff pastry, which is vastly superior to anything else on the market and even to anything I could make myself.

From Food


It tasted wonderful, and didn't look so bad either! That's the magic of an egg wash at work there.

From Food


But what really matters to me is dessert, so I made a classic that Sam had been angling for since we got back to Manhattan. And who am I to deny a man some caramelized sugar?

From Food


It's a dangerous business, caramelizing sugar, as my right ring finger can attest based on the burn from the time I wasn't quite careful enough sometime around 2001. I'm extra, extra careful now. You probably cannot even comprehend a level of carefulness that exceeds my default state of extreme carefulness, but this is it.

From Food


And this is the result.

From Food


It's pretty, but it's not as pretty as this picture that I took of a creme caramel from many years ago. Of course, that one was taken with a Canon Elph and this was taken with a Nikon D80, but still.\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

5th March 2010

\n
\n
\n\nFriday 08:49 pm : Shopping bags to plate in 45 minutes.
\nChilean sea bass should never play second fiddle, because it's the butteriest, most delicate, most delicious fish there is.

But there's something irresistibly nice about fuchsia couscous with bright green edamame. The broccoli rabe was good, but clearly out of its league with the couscous and fish.

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n
\n\nFriday 08:44 pm : The Nut Pendant
\nThis light has been previously mentioned, but it's so lovely that I thought it deserved its own post, with a photo that better captures its charm.

From Blogging
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n
\n\nFriday 08:26 pm : Dinner with the Moghtaderis
\nI suppose this beautiful kitchen is having a magnetic effect on me. It's just such a lovely, spacious, heavenly place that I am happy to spend a lot of time there. I can stand at the counter and watch the news while I chop vegetables for the mise en place, package up sliced fruits for snacks, and wait for Sam to get home from work. I can have souffles in the big oven and muffins in the Breville oven, if I want. I can sit on those Emeco stools if I have fine detail work to do. It's just all so indulgent and wonderful that I want to make food that's indulgent and wonderful, too. Compounding the splendidness of the kitchen is the fact that we live so close to Whole Foods, and I walk right past a fresh fruit and vegetable market and a fish market on my way home every night. So how can I not make something nice for dinner?

Lately we've had a lot of nice things for dinner. Last night I made cheese souffles, which are in fact an Elliott family staple. I grew up in a funny house when it comes to food, but in almost entirely good ways. I didn't eat a store-bought jam until I was well into elementary school and our bread was always homemade. Macaroni and cheese invariably started from semolina, egg, and Tillamook cheddar. And my mom took a French cooking class when she was young, so my palate became accustomed to souffles and crepes and cremes patissieres before I was old enough to realize how unusual that was. At least in Salem, Oregon.

From Food


But there it is, I came to think of souffle as a quick, easy thing to throw together for dinner on a weeknight. And so since I left home at seventeen, I've been making souffles without any real thought for how difficult they are supposed to be. You just whip some egg whites into a cheesy béchamel and bake. What's so hard about that?

From Food


Clearly nothing.

From Food


Though that's not to say I am completely consistent with the Elliott tradition. Our family's habit was to make one big souffle, but I prefer individual ramekins. Of which I usually eat two, of course.

From Food


From Food


Though this time we had a lot left over, so there was also a medium sized jobby.

From Food
\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

20th February 2010

\n
\n
\n\nSaturday 11:50 pm : Alissa's Triumphant Return to the Kitchen!
\nThis kitchen, this kitchen is wonderful. It's new and shiny and has a dishwasher, and you can watch TV or stare out through the floor-to-ceiling windows while you're chopping vegetables or cutting butter into flour. I feel like I'm living in a fairy tale, so I'm doing the best I can to enjoy this amazingness before an evil stepmother or crafty trolls shows up to ruin things. Which is to say that I'm cooking again, after a two-year hiatus.

Sam started his job as a big-time attending physician at Montefiore this week and apparently hand surgery is a busy business because for the most part he hasn't been getting home until 8:00 pm or 9:00 pm. That has its obvious drawbacks--mostly the reduction in time available for curling under a big blanket on the couch to watch Mad Men episodes--but the hidden benefit is that it gives me plenty of time to go to the market after work and cook dinner and clean up before he gets home.

Tuesday night we had grilled Brie-and-apple sandwiches. Wednesday I made corn chowder and biscuits. Thursday we had omelets. Friday we had monkfish, sauteed broccoli and cornbread.



Saturday we had Audra over for tea, so I put together a fruit plate and threw together some scones.



It's been really nice to be preparing food again and as much as I thrived in my kitchen on Central Park West, I feel completely overwhelmed by this new kitchen and can't even imagine how delicious my life is going to be from now on.

Another nice addition to my life is this Lewis Cho dress, which I bought at a sample sale in Chelsea Market on Friday. Three weeks ago I probably wouldn't have given it a second look, but since Sam and I have been spending so much time in the world of Sterling Cooper, it reminded me of something Joan Holloway would wear and I snagged it. And I love it. I wore it out on a date to Matsugen with Sam tonight.

And check out that Nut pendant light from DWR reflected in the window! It was a housewarming present from Sam's mom and we are totally bonkers over it. It gives the effect of a Mobius strip made out of the thinnest veneer of cherry, and it gives the loveliest, warmest light over the dining table.

\n
\n
3 Comments - Comment on this
\n
\n

3rd February 2010

\n
\n
\n\nWednesday 12:21 pm : For reals.
\nAll my internets happen on Facebook and AlissaMoghtaderi.com doesn't get a lot of attention.

But life is a fairy tale. Sam and I both moved back to Manhattan--he from fellowship in Pittsburgh and I from his mom's house in Connecticut--and we are settling into a beautiful apartment we rented on the Upper West Side. Sam hasn't started work yet, so we're spending a lot of time together, cooking, organizing, and having friends over to hang out in an apartment that's big enough and convenient enough for hanging out!

Life is sweet.

\n
\n
1 Comment - Comment on this
\n
\n

5th November 2009

\n
\n
\n\nThursday 07:37 pm : 13.1
\nEven though I'm running the Philly Half Marathon later this month, on Sunday I ran the Spirit of Pittsburgh Half Marathon. I expected it would be hard, because a half marathon means you run a lot. Like 13.1 miles. But it turns out, not so hard. No so hard when you've been training at 6000' above sealevel and then run at about 700' above sealevel.

It just could not have gone better--it was a total pleasure with no pain and almost no discomfort. And running around Pittsburgh and over the West End Bridge, the 31st Street Bridge, and the Hot Metal Bridge. Oh, and past our apartment!

You can tell how much I was enjoying it, because I was all smiles at mile 8.

\"Looking\n
\n
1 Comment - Comment on this
\n
\n

4th September 2009

\n
\n
\n\nFriday 04:24 pm : Alissa's Got Big Plans!
\nI have been running quite a bit lately. Mostly for lack of better opportunities, but I can run ten miles very slowly but very reguarly now so it's not all bad.

And since I stumbled into being able to run ten miles, why can't I purposefully run thirteen and a tenth? No reason. So I signed up for the Philadelphia Half Marathon on 22 November 2009. If you're going to be around, please feel free to make a \"Go AMo!\" sign and hang out with Sam along the course.\n
\n
2 Comments - Comment on this
\n
\n

30th May 2009

\n
\n
\n\nSaturday 05:36 pm : A few favorites.
\n













































\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n

24th May 2009

\n
\n
\n\nSunday 09:23 pm : Sam & Alissa's Wedding Photos
\nThe wedding photos are in! Sam and I had some very particular requests about our wedding photos: we wanted candid shots and we none of the usual misty images of upswept hair or the sixty-eight permutations of group photos. And we found the perfect photographer who not only did an amazing job, but who immediately gave us the confidence that we had the perfect photographer. I knew these pics were going to be just what we wanted after just talking to her. Thanks, Joan!\n
\n
1 Comment - Comment on this
\n
\n

17th May 2009

\n
\n
\n\nSunday 10:48 pm : The bride had gone to pick flowers...
\n... but she ultimately said \"baleh!\"

The wedding turned out great, start to finish.



\n
\n
Comment on this
\n
\n\n\n\nYou are viewing the most recent 20 entries.\n\n
Powered by Blurty.com
\n\n\n\n\n")