Prepare to Drool Over Food 52’s Cream Cheese Cookies

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Perfect with a cup of tea or coffee, these cookies are deceptively rich and chewy.

Perfect with a cup of tea or coffee, these cookies are deceptively rich and chewy.

 

Cream cheese.

Just say those two words and I immediately perk up.

So creamy, thick, and oh-so-spreadable. It’s tangy, yet still mild enough to smear on just about anything in need of a little decadence.

So, when I spied the recipe for “Cream Cheese Cookies,” it gave me the perfect excuse to buy a brick.

It’s one of 60 recipes you’ll find in the new “Food52 Baking” (Ten Speed Press). It’s, of course, by the editors of Food52, the online cooking resource, and kitchen and home shop, founded by Amanda Hesser, formerly of the New York Times, and Merrill Stubbs in 2009.

Food52Baking

All the recipes have been curated by Hesser and Stubbs, who have culled home-spun favorites, the types of baked goods that don’t require special equipment or days to make. They are the types of treats you don’t have to talk yourself into making, and ones that you are sure to make again and again. Think “Yogurt Biscuits,” “Honey Pecan Cake,” and “Nectarine Slump.” For good measure, there are a couple of savories, too, such as “Black Pepper Popovers with Chives and Parmesan” and “Basil Onion Cornbread.”

Stubbs writes in the book that her mother got this cookie recipe at a Tupperware party in the 1970s.

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A Taste of the Coast at the New Cetrella Los Altos

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Uni from Fort Bragg adds luxuriousness to this linguini with clams at Cetrella Los Altos.

Uni from Fort Bragg adds luxuriousness to this linguini with clams at Cetrella Los Altos.

 

If you’ve spent time in Half Moon Bay, you probably know Cetrella restaurant, a fixture on Main Street since 2001.

Now, its Mediterranean-Californian seafood dishes have been transported to the Peninsula with the debut of a new sister Cetrella — on Main Street again, but in downtown Los Altos.

The new restaurant, which opened in August, features an open kitchen, and a long dining room done up with a mural of tree-studded foothills. With a lot of hard surfaces, just note that the restaurant can get a little loud when it’s full, especially if there are larger parties around you.

The menus at both locations have been revamped with the arrival of new Executive Chef Mike Ellis, who spent many years in the kitchen of celeb Chef Charlie Palmer. Most notably, he was sous chef to then-Executive Chef Michael Voltaggio (winner of “Top Chef” Season Six) at Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg. When Voltaggio departed, Ellis took over as executive chef.

The dining room.

The dining room.

He’s developed a sophisticated, yet comfortably accessible menu to Los Altos, as I experienced a couple of weeks ago at dinner with two friends. Although we paid our tab, Ellis sent out a couple extra dishes he wanted us to try.

Pretty in pink-purple.

Pretty in pink-purple.

Since we were celebrating a friend’s birthday, a cocktail was definitely in order. The “Foothill Collins” ($13) put a festive touch on the evening with its blend of gin, lemon, simple syrup, fresh basil and muddled blueberries. The blueberry taste was fairly subtle with the botanical taste of the gin more prominent, which allowed the drink to be enjoyed throughout the meal without overwhelming everything else.

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Battersby’s Rigatoni with Brussels Sprouts, Bacon, and Arugula

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Pasta that's virtuous and naughty at the same time.

Pasta that’s virtuous and naughty at the same time.

 

Who doesn’t love the combo of bacon and Brussels sprouts?

In fact, many a so-called sprouts hater has been turned by that irresistible pairing.

So imagine the two together with rigatoni pasta.

That’s just what you’ll find in this dish, “Rigatoni with Brussels Sprouts, Bacon, and Arugula.”

It’s from the new cookbook, “Battersby: Extraordinary Food From An Ordinary Kitchen” (Grand Central Life & Style) by Joseph Ogrodnek and Walker Stern, co-chefs and co-owners of Battersby restaurant in Brooklyn. It’s co-written with veteran food writer Andrew Friedman.

BattersbyBook

As the title implies, Battersby is all about dishes that can be prepared in any kitchen. That’s because the restaurant’s own kitchen is nothing to brag about. It’s no bigger than a studio apartment’s kitchenette, the chefs write. It is outfitted with only one oven, a six-burner stove and a slim-to-none prep counter. Yet somehow, three cooks manage to make magic every night, turning out as many as 70 meals in just a few hours.

In other words, if they can make the food in this book under those constraints, there’s no reason you can’t do so, too, in your home kitchen.

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The Taste of Sriracha In A Rub

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A lamb chop gets even more yummy with Sosu Sriracha Rub all over it.

A lamb chop gets even more yummy with Sosu Sriracha Rub all over it. Plus a few home-grown Padron peppers as a garnish.

 

Imagine the fruity heat of Sriracha crossed with the unmistakable aromatic, earthy smokiness of cumin.

That’s what you get in the new Sosu Sriracha Spice Rub.

Lisa Murphy of Oakland’s Sosu Sauces makes what is probably my favorite Sriracha sauce around. It’s aged and fermented in whiskey barrels to give it even more fruitiness and smokiness, adding to its overall complexity not found in other run-of-the-mill Asian hot sauces.

Very much like a winemaker, she produces the sauce only once a year — when peppers and tomatoes are at their peak in summer. It’s a controlled frenzy to take all that fresh produce and turn it into her Sriracha and Srirachup (Sriracha ketchup).

As a small producer cognizant of the importance of not wasting anything, she developed the rub as a way to use up the peppers used in aging the Sriracha. She was inspired by the cumin lamb skewers famed in Xi’an, China.

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Tofu Disruption

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Chef Brandon Jew preparing his tofu "burrata'' at the San Francisco Cooking School.

Chef Brandon Jew preparing his tofu “burrata” at the San Francisco Cooking School.

For some people, the thought of tofu is enough to disrupt their appetite.

But for others in the know, tofu is poised for the same geeky-chic disruption as so many other tech ventures.

Minh Tsai, former investment banker turned tofu master, is leading that charge.

The founder of Oakland’s Hodo Soy Beanery, Tsai brought together a group of the Bay Area’s top chefs and food writers last week at the San Francisco Cooking School to ponder and taste tofu 2.0 — the next iteration of thinking and cooking with the much maligned soybean product.

Tofu laab with shrimp, Asian herbs, quince and chicharron.

Tofu laab with shrimp, Asian herbs, quince and chicharron.

“We want people to talk about tofu differently, to take it to another level,” says Tsai.

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