After a weekend of parties, movies, and a trip to Teddy Roosevelt’s house in Oyster Bay, I spent Monday winding things down and preparing for the week. As I was cleaning items out of the refrigerator in the morning, I discovered that I had a pound of unused carrots on the bottom shelf. I turned to the New York Times’ Recipes for Health, where recipes are broken down by main ingredient and, as the title of the website section suggests, they’re good for you.

A pureed carrot soup looked like a perfect option. I had most of the ingredients on hand, and other than peeling and chopping two pounds of carrots, preparation was simple. You can find the recipe here and some photos from my adventure after the jump.

Make sure to leave ample time for peeling and chopping, or employ the help of a friend or significant other. This soup can be a team effort.

After sauteing my onion and carrots, I added vegetable broth instead of water. I think it added a lot of flavor, but if I were to make it again, I would go low-sodium.

Once the soup simmers for thirty minutes, you’ll be able to see how the addition of the abborio rice helps to thicken the broth. Here’s the soup pre-hand blender.

You can use a hand blender, regular blender, or food mill to puree the soup, but the hand blender comes highly recommended. It’s so easy to use and dishwasher safe (most of the time). It took the soup from from chunky to potage in about fifteen seconds.

To complete my meal, I made an SAT: sprout, avocado, and tomato sandwich. Overall, a healthy, vegetable-filled dinner for one (with plenty of leftover soup for freezing).

When I think of pie, my mind immediately goes to setting up a workstation complete with flour, ice water, a rolling pin, and plenty of wax paper. I recall the careful waiting game of chilling the dough, then rolling it out (but not too much!), and trying to place it into a pie dish without ripping it. It’s a rewarding but stressful process that I’m not always prepared to undertake.

Enter the graham cracker: a buttery, sweet angel to the rescue of those who want to bake a pie but don’t want the hassle of a flour-based crust. It’s the crust of choice for chocolate and banana cream, but it’s most notably found lining the pans of key lime pies everywhere.

I made my first key lime pie this weekend for a small gathering of friends. Although I had consumed more than my weight in the pie as a child visiting my grandparents in Florida, I’d never even looked at a key lime recipe before. This was the simplest version I could find, as I wanted to skip the meringue topping.

Overall, it was one of the easiest baked goods I have ever made, save for the labor involved in squeezing the limes. No stress, no rolling pins. I was unable to find key limes in Greenpoint, I so I used regular limes, a dash of lemon juice, and 1/2 tsp. of lime zest in the filling to make sure it had the right balance of tart and sweet. My only recipe suggestion is lightly greasing your pie dish with butter because the graham cracker crust may stick a bit.

In place of photos from my baking process (I was frazzled getting ready for company and forgot to document), I offer you photos from a yo-yo competition I attended the following day at South Street Seaport.

There was a pizza disaster in my kitchen a few months ago. I tried to make a simple pizza topped with zucchini and tomato, but something went horribly wrong. The combination of bad dough and the moisture of the toppings led to a blob of undercooked, misshapen crust and vegetables that not even our agile hamster would want to nibble on. Ramsey and I ordered take-out instead.

My pizza stone and peel went unused until last week when I finally worked up the courage to try again, inspired by my abundance of homegrown basil. I was also armed with a different dough recipe and the determination to keep trying until I got it right. Luckily, I got it (mostly) right on my first attempt.

I started with a dough recipe from 101 Cookbooks deemed the “Best Pizza Dough Ever,” so I was feeling confident. The recipe had to be modified slightly because no stores near me carry instant yeast, so I just added a touch more of active yeast. I think this led to a denser pizza dough in the end, but it still tasted good.

This recipe also calls for a pizza peel and stone, however if you don’t have either, you can easily substitute the back of a thick baking sheet.

I mixed all of the ingredients together by hand, turned the dough onto my cutting board, and began to cut it into the six pieces.

Once shaped into balls, Heidi noted that they can be kept in the fridge for up to three days, or frozen for up to three months. This meant I had two nights of dinner for the week taken care of and a dinner half-prepared when I felt like having a lazy evening. Here are four of the dough balls on lightly oiled parchment paper, waiting for a sheet of plastic wrap before heading into the fridge. Make sure to cover them well or else the dough will harden where it’s exposed to too much air.

The other two are coated with olive oil, ready to go into the freezer and await a future pizza night.

After letting the dough rest in the fridge overnight, I pulled it out two hours before baking time, flattened it slightly, oiled, and covered.

After making the sauce from my meatball recipe and heating the oven and stone for 45 minutes, it was time for the hard part: stretching the dough to the desired pizza shape and thickness. I was somewhat successful, but hopefully my technique will improve with time.

Eight minutes in the oven and the pizza was done. I need to add a bit more cheese in the future and track down some instant yeast, but overall it was a successful pizza night.

I took my second foray into candy making on Sunday afternoon. My first was with chocolate truffles for a New Years Eve party and this time around, I decided to take on salted caramels. The inspiration came from a Barefoot Contessa episode I saw a few weeks ago, during which Ina Garten made Fleur de Sel Caramels rolled into small circles and topped with a sprinkling of salt. They looked delicious and easy to make, as long as I had a candy thermometer and kept a close eye on things.

The caramel adventure began with a hunt for a small container of Fleur de Sel, but I couldn’t find anything priced lower than twenty dollars in my area. Now is not the best time for me to be dropping that kind of money on a jar of salt, no matter how wonderful it is, so I settled for regular sea salt and followed Ina’s recipe. The result was a batch of oddly-shaped caramels coated in a layer of butter. I traced the issue back to a part of the recipe that instructs you to pour the hot caramel into a pan and immediately put it in the refrigerator. When this kind of rapid temperature change occurs, the butter and other fats can separate from the sugar, resulting in the greasy layer. Here’s an image of one of the caramels after being refrigerated for a bit, the butter now hardened:

Yikes. 

Refusing to be defeated by sugar and cream, I decided to give caramels another try a few hours later, armed with another recipe and my newfound butter knowledge. The new recipe came from Jacques Pépin and involved the word “foolproof” in its introductory paragraph, so I knew I was on the right track. My only modification to the recipe was adding a teaspoon of sea salt to the cream and butter mixture and then sprinkling some on top of the caramels once they were flipped out of the loaf pan. 

Here’s the sugar boiling. As the sugar begins to caramelize, you’ll see a golden brown color develop around the edges and begin to spread. 

Although the amount of the ingredients seems small, make sure to use a tall-sided saucepan. The mixture boils up, briefly doubling or tripling in volume when you add the cream mixture. It settles down, as you can see above, but no one wants to clean hardened caramel off of a stovetop. Also pictured: my new candy thermometer. At $12.95, it’s a great kitchen investment. 

The caramel cooling at room temperature in a lightly oiled loaf pan. 

The cut caramels, pre-salt sprinkling. I made them a bit smaller than the recipe instructs. 

For easy storage and serving, I wrapped the caramels individually with wax paper. Cutting the paper to 5″ x 4″ pieces seemed to cover any variations in caramel size.

As I was finishing up my holiday shopping in SoHo in early December, I sensed my blood sugar levels taking a turn for the worst. The answer was pit stop at Kee’s Chocolates on Thompson Street for a few truffles and a lychee macaroon. While not the healthiest afternoon snack, it was the perfect indulgence for a Friday afternoon in Manhattan. 

Kee’s Chocolate’s got me thinking about truffle making and how involved it may be. It’s really just chocolate ganache with a few flavorings dipped in melted chocolate, right? How difficult could it be? I decided to find out last week.

After running a few searches, I decided to try out this recipe from Alton Brown. The first steps were easy. I modified the filling recipe by making the chocolate and cream base and then splitting it into three smaller tupperware containers to add flavorings in place of the brandy. I added 2 tbs. of Irish cream to one batch, 2 tbs. of raspberry preserves to another, and 2 tbs. of the original brandy to the last. 

After letting the filling harden in the fridge, rolling the balls, and letting them set, I discovered the difficult part of the truffle-making process: coating with melted chocolate. I didn’t have the heating pad recommended in the recipe, so I created a double boiler using a stainless steel bowl, some water, and one of my saucepans. The first dozen truffles were coated in optimal-temperature chocolate, but as time went on and the chocolate level in the bowl was reduced, the temperature became more difficult to control. 

In the end, the chocolate was scorched with two truffles still waiting to be coated. Next time I’ll track down a heating pan or find something thicker than a stainless steel mixing bowl for the double boiler. The truffles that did make it into the chocolate and were subsequently rolled in various coatings turned out pretty well though.