Fewer things are more satisfying than sitting down to a fine meal that you’ve cooked yourself, from scratch. You might even sneak your cell phone out of your bag to take a surreptitious, lo-res photo of your lunch at work.
In my defense, that there is tuna salad (one of the first things I ever learned to make by myself) on homemade bread. I finally got around to trying to “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day” recipe my mother clipped from the newspaper for me while I lived in France. It took me five years to try making this bread, and I don’t know why. It’s quite easy, and very good. It didn’t rise as much as I thought it would, but that ended up making it perfect sandwich bread. I just sliced the loaf in half like a roll.
Next to it is homemade corn chowder, from a recipe that popped up in my blog feed a while back. It is very easily, not too sinful, and really satisfying. Certainly the best (well, and only) use for frozen corn kernels I’ve ever encountered.
In addition to that flurry of cooking, I indulged in some baking. After all, who wouldn’t want to celebrate a holiday that combines nerdy wordplay with baked goods?
I spend a lot of time at work reading food blogs (it’s part of my job, really!), and Momofuku Milk Bar Crack Pie has been popping up with increasing frequency. None of the descriptions adequately explained the popularity of a sweet that contains neither chocolate nor cinnamon. I just had to taste it for myself. Enter Pi Day, the ultimate excuse to bake.
It was really quite easy to make, though the cookie crust is an extra step. The pie is magnificent—sweet, gooey, buttery, vanilla-y, and yes, almost impossible to accurately describe. A palpable hit, and a recipe that I will definitely make again—provided that I have several people on hand to help me eat it. I have thus far avoided having partially-eaten pies in my refrigerator overnight, and at 20-odd grams of fat per slice, it needs to stay that way. (Oh, LA Times, why did you have to include the nutritional information? In cases like this, I prefer blissful ignorance.)
And the requisite blurry cell phone cross-section, because I was too busy eating and trying to sneak leftovers into my friends’ pockets to photograph at home:
In short, last weekend was great. I could very happily spend every weekend making two different soups (the other one wasn’t as good), homemade bread, and insane desserts.
