Smitten Kitchen Cookery

Tis baking season!  Just when we get all snuggly and extra sedentary, the oven beckons!  Cookies! Cakes!  Interesting meals!

A person can find themselves swinging through the web looking for recipes that tempt.  There are tons of baking blogs out there.  As with any blog, I like baking blogs that not only have recipes for foods I would like to make (some have god awful recipes that you would rather DIE than even know about) but I like when there is a little essay about the food and the writer's experiences with it.

The Smittten Kitchen Blog is just lovely.  There are plenty of new things to try and the essays are wonderfully written and sound as if Deb Perelman, the site author, is speaking just to you.

She has a huge blogroll of other interesting sites on the left under Good Reads.  I've been working my way through the list.

There is a new cookbook out with recipes that have not appeared on her site.  (She says 85% have not).  Beautiful mouth watering photographs, lovely stories about the food and extra tips for preparation success make this a lovely book.

You know a cookbook is a good bet when there are more than one or two recipes you want to make and are likely to make many times.

I was intrigued by:

Brownie Roll Out Cookies   (Perfect chocolately slices)

Gooey Cinnamon Squares (like Snickerdoodle Bar Cookies)

Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats  (an intriguing take on Rice Krispy Treats)

Tomato-Glazed Meatloaves with Brown Butter Mashed Potatoes  (Tiny individual meatball sized meatloaves)

Flat Roasted Chicken with Tiny Potatoes (Golden chicken baked to perfection with little potatoes)

All Butter, Really Flaky Pie Dough  (she confesses she once had trouble with pie dough and it kept her from being the pie baker she dreamed of being.  I'm all over that).


As a small librarian side note, I was talking with another librarian about this cookbook on the desk this weekend when a woman came up and asked why we were talking about the Smitten Kitten, something she had heard discussed on the radio.  It is possible I kept saying Smitten Kitten when I meant Smitten Kitchen.  After Googling Smitten Kitten (don't do it!) I see why she may have been concerned!