double chocolate zucchini bread

Oh you wanted a chocolate zucchini bread recipe? Don’t you know this is a food blog? I’m contractually obligated to tell a meandering and infuriatingly irrelevant story in each headnote, keeping you from the recipe as long as possible for nefarious, possibly witchy, purposes, and I don’t want to disappoint. Next week, I’ll be celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with a guy I met because I wrote some rambling things on a blog about, like, dating and New York City and funny things that had happened, he read it, we went for a drink, I stopped dating, needed a new subject to fill the void, and Smitten Kitchen came to be one year later. [Some people have honeymoon babies, I, uh, had you.]

Recipe

grilled chicken salad with cilantro-lime dressing

What did we get up to while our kids’ time away overlapped for two weeks this summer? Did we go on vacation? Did we party every night? The truth is honestly embarrassing, so middle-aged coded, Deb of the early Smitten Kitchen years would rage and weep. [“You promised you wouldn’t get lame!”] I got… orthotics. And even worse than considering this newsworthy, I love them. I caught up on appointments. I challenged myself to finish books before they were overdue at the library and occasionally pulled it off. Sometimes I drank an entire 8 glasses of water and went to bed by 10:30pm. Sure, we went out. We had uninterrupted conversations. We drank Hugo spritzes. We saw dogs playing in a kiddie pool set up in front of an open fire hydrant and lamented that the kids were missing it, then reloaded their last locations and photos from the camp stream a million more times. We said things to each other like, “I miss the kids, but not parenting.” I watched this clip and it emotionally wrecked me. I’d sleep through my alarm in the morning and nobody was there to tell me I make weird faces in my sleep or that they’d promised they’d bring homemade treats to school that day. Friends, it was wild.

Recipe

chipwich ice cream cake

High on the list of cooking things that I’ve got far more opinions on than anyone has ever asked of me (and may have even, at times, prayed I’d stop yapping about), are homemade ice cream sandwiches. Why? Because it’s devastating when you realize something that should bring us nothing but incandescent summer joy — ice cream! cookies! — rarely work as well as promised. Most cookies become so hard once frozen, you feel like you’re breaking a tooth with each bite. Unyielding cookies also squeeze the ice cream out the sides, leading to drips down your arms and an immediate bad mood (for adults; kids, naturally, love it). While writing Smitten Kitchen Keepers, I became obsessed with creating a deeply nostalgic homemade chipwich-style ice cream sandwich that did everything right and I had three big a-ha moments along the way:

Recipe

focaccia with zucchini and potatoes

I didn’t mean to get so carried away making focaccia over the last few months, but don’t I always say that? As if I forget how easily I get consumed with a very specific idea for what a recipe should be and cannot let it go, even when it’s past time to move on. As if it was someone else who made blueberry muffins 25 times one summer until she found what she was looking for. Thus, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised but I still am: I’ve made an obscene amount of focaccia this spring and summer trying to find the recipe I’ll want to use forever. Here are five things I learned along the way:

Recipe

burrata with crushed cherries and pistachios

Last summer, a friend came to a barbecue and said, “We had soccer and then a birthday party and I had no time to make anything but I brought this” and started unloading items from a grocery bag. There were no clean cooking utensils so she and I proceeded to use our hands to break open balls of burrata and spread them on a plate, smash open cherries and pit them, sprinkling them over, crushed pistachios with the bottom of a pot, and finished the whole platter with olive oil, lots of sea salt, black pepper, and fresh mint we picked from sprigs. We lined the plate with rounds of storebought crostini, I snapped a picture and later when I shared it, dozens of you messaged me to demand a recipe or tutorial.

Recipe

cucumber crunch salad with tofu

Is it too hot to cook? Does the thought of even turning on the microwave feel like it might tip you too close to the surface of the sun? We are long overdue to talk about my favorite heat wave meal, one I’ve been holding out on you for five too many summers. As the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, I had my reasons. What if you’re not as obsessed with inhaling a pound of fridge-cold cucumbers as I am? What if the mere whiff of peanut sesame noodle dressing doesn’t make you want to climb into a vat of it? What if my favorite salad tofu — firm silken — isn’t your favorite salad tofu? What if you don’t have a favorite salad tofu? [Six question marks in a paragraph might be a record!]

Recipe

slushy paper plane

A few years ago, Alex and I started batching cocktails and keeping them in the freezer. Batching may sound fancy and professional but at most we were participating in rudimentary math (“one ounce? nah, one cup!”) and advanced laziness (ahem, preparedness). Having cocktails ready to go and super, super cold so that they won’t immediately water themselves down by melting ice was a win. And, as the habit has continued, it’s always fun when a friend stops by and you remember you already have perfect manhattans ready to go, as if you were trying to medal in the impromptu hosting olympics.

Recipe

one-pan ditalini and peas

Until recently, I was fairly ambivalent about one-pan pasta recipes. I appreciate them in a pinch [here’s a longtime favorite; and this is my total comfort food], but I sometimes find that when the pasta is cooked in a sauce the whole time, it doesn’t quite get that al dente definition and structural integrity that it does when cooked in water. I’m so glad I didn’t quit on them, though, because with this recipe, not to be dramatic or anything, but I feel like I’ve finally cracked the code.

Recipe

eggs florentine

It’s probably no surprise that if choosing between having brunch at a restaurant or making it at home, I’m squarely on team Brunch At Home, especially when we find a way to pull it off and still sleep in. There’s nothing worse than waiting too long for a table only to be served an overcooked, unseasoned omelet, home fries with those gnarly bits of green pepper in there (I will die on the hill that nobody has ever longed for green peppers in their potatoes), or soggy bacon. Maybe at home imperfections also happen but those imperfections don’t cost $150 for a family of four.

Recipe

challah french toast

Everyone needs a recipe for classic, foolproof skillet french toast, even stubborn people like me who, despite making it at least once a month and more often when there’s leftover challah, are so easily bored by and restless with simple recipes that I’ve resisted writing this up for almost 19 years. I’ve filled the french toast vacuum on the site instead with customizations: casserole-style baked french toasts with cinnamon sugar toast and, uh, bailey’s (ah, the child-free years). There’s even a fancy french toast akin to individual crème brûlées. But eventually, through a combination of friends texting on random weekend mornings [“Do you seriously not have a challah french toast recipe?!”] and the existence of a teenager, who I cannot teach to make french toast for us if I haven’t written it down, I’ve come to my senses. I mean, mostly.