The recipe is from Café Zuni, which is just over the bay, but it’s a pretty expensive joint, and doing it yourself is not too hard. Smitten Kitchen’s summary (which is what I linked above) suffices here, except I will make the following notes: (1) I only had 10 hours to salt the chicken, though 1-3 days is the recommended salting time (it still turned out quite good and I’ll do it right when I inevitably repeat this recipe someday). (2) It was very difficult to find a chicken quite small enough. To be fair, I only had time to look in one store (see the first note) but I went to Andronico’s which has fairly good meat selection. I managed to find a 3.68 pound free-range chicken, so that’s what I used. (3) Once in the oven (which you start at a whopping 475˚F) the chicken was very good at hissing and spitting and getting chicken fat all over the oven’s heating coil (oh how I wish we had a gas range) which led to a lot of smoke; long story short I ended up removing the batteries from our smoke detector.

As you can see, I served it with the bread salad (recipe also in the above link). For dessert, Brandon (my guinea pig for this dinner) and I had poached pears, also a first!

Pears poached in spiced vin santo

• 2 small pears (pref. d’Anjou) peeled, but not cored or stemmed
• 1 750 mL bottle of Italian dessert wine such as vin santo or marsala
• 1/2 cup of water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick, broken in two (this is harder than it sounds to do)
• 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste (or a real vanilla bean)
• 1/2 inch ginger root, peeled and finely chopped
• for serving: whipped cream or 1/2 cup mascarpone cheese, honey and powdered cinnamon to taste

Combine the wine, water, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and ginger in the smallest (but still deep) saucepan you can find. Bring to a boil on medium, then reduce to right below a simmer and add the pears (position them so that the liquid covers as much of the pear as possible). Cook for 20-30 minutes or until tender (so that it yields to a fork), rotating them occasionally so that they pears poach evenly. Once they are soft, remove the pears to a serving dish and reduce the remaining poaching liquid by half. Serve the pears standing up (you might have to slice off the bottom to make them stand) covered with the poaching liquid/syrup (strained, of course), and with a small dollop of whipped cream or honeyed mascarpone.

Anyway, now I have a leftover chicken carcass and poaching liquid. Probably I will turn the chicken into chicken stock and also chicken-and-barley stew. The poaching liquid will probably get added to hot apple cider to create INSTANT HOLIDAY CHEER. Science!

Both times I’ve made the loaf I have had to add a little bit of water after the kneading process, but not a huge amount..  The bread tastes pretty good by itself. It is sweet, but not overly strawberry flavored. I find that it actually tastes more strawberry-like when it’s made into french toast, but even then don’t expect to be hit with an intense strawberry flavor. It’s very subtle (but delicious!)

For french toast, I recommend cutting the loaf into about 12 slices for thick-but-not-too-thick french toast.  I admit that I don’t follow an exact recipe for french toast, but the basic gist of it is to warm up a griddle or frying pan (be sure you have some kind of substance to help the french toast not stick – butter, pam, whatever..)  I usually soak the bread in a mixture of eggs,  milk, vanilla and cinnamon until it is saturated – but not excessively dripping.  The strawberry bread is very dense, so it helps if you poke the bread a few times with a fork while soaking to let it go all the way through. Then cook the bread on the heated surface until it’s golden brown (and not dripping liquid ).    Top with maple syrup or strawberries and whipped cream or even just a little pat of butter… and enjoy!

The first is for a strawberry shake (from the “Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home” cookbook):

Ingredients:

• 1 pint fresh strawberries (cleaned and stemmed)
• 1 cup plain, vanilla or lemon nonfat yogurt (I’ve used vanilla each time I’ve made this)
• 3-4 tablespoons of orange juice, apple juice or apple-strawberry juice
• 2-3 tablespoons of maple syrup

Put it all in a blender until smooth. I’d recommend chilling it a little bit before serving so it’s nice and cold, but it still tastes good right out of the blender.

Second recipe is for egg-free chocolate chip cookies (from allrecipes.com). They may be just as bad (calorie wise) as other cookies, but for some reason using yogurt makes them seem healthier to me.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar (you can reduce the amount of sugar a little bit and it will still taste plenty sweet)
• 1/4 cup margarine or butter
• 1/4 cup shortening (I actually just used a little bit more butter instead of shortening)
• 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease cookie sheets.

In a medium bowl, cream together the sugars, butter and shortening until light and fluffy. Stir in yogurt and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt; stir into the creamed mixture, then mix in chocolate chips. Drop teaspoonfuls of dough 2 inches apart onto the prepared cookie sheets. (Recipe, in theory, makes 36 cookies)

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges begin to brown. Cool for a minute on the cookie sheets before moving to wire racks to cool completely.

When I made these cookies, the consistency was more muffin-like than cookie-like, but they still tasted delicious. I think next time I am going to divide the batch in half – one half of the dough for making cookies and the other half for eating raw. That’s one of the major perks of cookie dough without raw eggs!

1. FUCK YOU, GUATEMALA.  For the love of God, don’t go to Guatemala anticipating a beautiful meal that tastes delicious.  The local meats are no good, and cow doesn’t have ‘cuts’ so much as ‘parts that probably came off of a cow somewhere.’  The water is undrinkable, which means the salad is untrustworthy.  The Spanish word for “hummus” is apparently “homma,” which sounds so damn different from “hummus” that if you order “hummus,” your Spanish-speaking waitress will not understand a damn thing you say.   (This isn’t fair. My mom had a truly extraordinary shish kebob, which had onions and beef and eggplant, but the beef was nothing to write home about, and you have to work magic to make a shish kebob look beautiful enough to photograph.)

2. Fanta made with sucrose is the most delicious soda.

3. The national beer of Belize, Belikin, is truly delicious if you have spent all day baking in hot hot direct South American sunlight.  It is kept in the thickest damn bottles I have ever seen, so much so that you can’t tell if you’ve finished your beer or not.

4. It is incredibly hard to cook spaghetti properly on a boat.

5. If a crazy tanned man ever hands you homemade mango vinegar, accept.  I can guarantee you that it’s incredible, flavorful but still light, and emulsifies beautifully with a little mustard and olive oil for a simply perfect vinaigrette.

6. On the subject of mangos: DON’T TRUST CHILDREN.  You think you have to pay one quetzale for a mango.  In truth, you can get 10 mangos for 5 quetzales!  According to this handy chart, I had common mangos.  I could not shut up about mangos. Corellary to #1, you can go to Guatemala for the express purpose of eating mangos.

7. Allspice leaves smell just like allspice seeds, if not moreso.

8. Corellary to #6: If your boat’s bathroom decides to spontaneously break, then mangos are the worst food to have.  Seriously.  It’s like woo WOO, all aboard the express train to your worst goddamn nightmare.

9. Thanks to the Restaurant Villa del Chef in Flores, Guatemala (also home of the delicious shish kebob), I have discovered my new greatest hope for the Obama administration.  I want him to mend ties with Cuba and stop making Cuban goods illegal, so I can have a Cuba Libre.  It’s just a rum and coke with some lime, but godDAMN.  The Cuban rum I had was the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted, and I can’t wait until that shit is legal stateside.

And finally, the most delicious food I had during my Spring Break:

10. A fucking ham and cheese sandwich.  NOT KIDDING.  We went on a five-hour hike through Tikal, Guatemala, which is the site of a very famous Mayan ruin.  We had five minutes before our tour to eat, and half of the sandwich survived to be eaten after climbing 80,000 perilously stupid steps.  It had thick-sliced white bread which was just a little crusty, and had a normal piece of American cheese and a normal slice of ham.  But there was some spiced mayonnaise on it which I will endeavor to reproduce soon, which made the whole thing taste both fulling, aromatic and savory.  My mom saved hers all the way to the last temple complex, and we were all really, really jealous.

And now, since I didn’t take any food pictures, Mayan ruins! Wooooo!

1. Apparently, muffin papers are a “seasonal” product at your local K-Mart. That season is “about two weeks before Valentine’s day, but not one,” in case you were wondering.

2. But if you grease and flour a nonstick pan this works fine, too. I think it may have made the cupcakes dry out a bit faster, but if yours are all getting eaten in one fell swoop this shouldn’t be a problem.

3. As the recipe will tell you, the glaze does not taste very champagne-y once it cools. I splashed in a bit more champagne than the recommended 1/4 cup – because let’s face it, you bought a whole (or half, whatevs) bottle of champagne for this thing; you have some leftover.

4. The recipe doesn’t note this but it’s good to glaze the half-strawberries for the top separately, dipping them in by the green bit or a toothpick, if you are me and cut off the leaves because they were getting wilted. Makes them stick better and makes them look prettier; everyone wins.

5. My glaze, alas, did not come out as pretty as Karen’s – I have a feeling this may be because I ran out of sugar. Terrible, right? Also out of my neighbor’s sugar. So I substituted some powdered sugar – I think this did not turn as clear when simmered, and thus the cupcakes looked sort of frosted with delicious rather than encased in clear, shiny delicious. Not as pretty! Thought it may also just be that I’m an idiot when it comes to anything like candy-making – if there is boiling sugar involved, I should probably be elsewhere.

6. These taste like approximately the most delicious thing in the world if you eat them while drinking the aforementioned the leftover champagne.

That’s it! These get an amazing reception, also, because they are just so pretty. They’re one of those foods that magically look like a whole lot more work than they are.