Pink grapefruit to keep your cheeks rosy

It's that time of year when an extra dose of Vitamin C is needed. Flu epidemics, coughing, sneezing people on crowded subways, and bleak weather are just some of the facts of life during February in New York City. That, and the beautiful yellow-green undertone in my face. I need sunny things, bright colors, and bracing flavors but not another roasted root vegetable. This is why I crave citrus at this time of year. Citrus in the form of food. A glass of OJ doesn't cut it. I want citrus salads, citrus desserts and most recently citrus-flavored cocktails. When I was a kid, one of my Floridian great-aunts used to send up a package of pink grapefruits every winter. I didn't appreciate it at the time, thinking then that grapefruits were too sour to be edible, but the thought of a package of grapefruit arriving at my door now seems like the best mail you could find, unless of course that package also included a plane ticket to somewhere warm. To hold me over another month or two,  cooking food that evokes warm weather (tacos anyone?) and eating bold flavors (acidic, spicy, pickled to name a few)  is the only thing I can do to keep my taste buds from sinking into hibernation for good. One easy baked good that I make fairly regularly when my Grandma comes for lunch is a simple yogurt cake (aka Gâteau au yaourt that I found on Foodbeam's original blog ages ago) but doused with pink grapefruit juice and flecked with grapefruit zest. You can use any citrus you like, but pink grapefruit is unexpected, and sweet, and tart at the same time. It also smells divine. Before you serve it, pinch your cheeks for an added glow of health. Grandma-ma will approve, even if she tells you, you need a haircut.

Pink Grapefruit Cake From Foodbeam.com 1/2 cup 2% or full-fat yogurt (I use Fage) 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder pinch of salt 1 1/8 cup sugar 3/8 cup vegetable oil (1/4 cup + 2 Tablespoons) 3 eggs Zest and juice of 1 ripe Pink Grapefruit

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Prep an 8-9 inch pan with parchment (can use a bundt pan but cake won't be that high). Mix yogurt through sugar in a bowl. Mix in oil, eggs and zest until thoroughly incorporated. Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake cake for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Flip the cake out of the pan onto a platter and drench with reserved grapefruit juice. (The cake will be very moist, and continue to soak up juice as it cools).

The Hanukkah post that wasn't

Hanukkah officially ended yesterday. Eight days of blissful fried food eating and staring at the blurry burning candles as you sink into a food coma. I enjoyed it. I ate a heck of a lot of fried food. I'll admit I'm not a big fan of Hanukkah menus and the ways they try to create a table of exotic flavors, that frankly I have never once seen at a Hanukkah party. They seem phony. Maybe I need to know more Jews from Morocco. I didn't even think of trying to create one. As for what I did fry up this year -

I finally got around to trying a Potato Nik, in place of a million little potato latkes (pancakes) from the New York Times. It was easy and delicious. I'm going to make this more in the future, even if it's not Hanukkah. It's addictive the way a Spanish tortilla is. It's very similar to a Swiss Rösti. Yum. I had some flipping problems and it wasn't a beauty, but it still tasted good. I made some quick homemade apple sauce to serve with it. If you weren't aware that homemade applesauce is a million times better than the stuff in the jars, I'm posting the recipe below.

The other dish was more ambitious and was intended to be a post here. It started when I picked up a gorgeous orange-skinned kabocha squash (seriously I used it instead of flowers for a few days on the kitchen table) at the Farmer's Market. I intended to try a Japanese recipe for Pumpkin Croquettes, basically kabocha squash cooked and mashed and breaded in panko. It seemed festive thanks to the color and it was fried for the holiday, and it incorporated one of my favorite cuisines. Success, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Either Harry Hanukkah hates me this year, or I don't have any idea how one would take mashed kabocha and attempt to roll it into croquettes for breading. It was watery, which is strange cause I had read that kabocha squash was known to be just the opposite. It was a mushy mess in my hands as I added more, and more, flour hoping to get it to hold its shape. I considered photographing it for anyone reading this to get a good laugh, but my fingers were so covered with orange goo that picking up the camera to shoot this bowl of watery mash seemed even more ridiculous.

I tell you all this cause I had almost forgot about this kind of epic kitchen failure. It thankfully had been that long. But, in the end it was not salvageable, and neither was my enthusiasm for frying anything again. At least for a little bit. Please send me words of wisdom if you know what I did wrong. Looking ahead, the end of the festival of lights means I'm on to other holiday desserts and other festive foods that do not involve squash. If you celebrated Hanukkah, I hope you had a happy, healthy and kitchen mishap-free one.

Potato Nik Reprinted from NY Times. Serve with applesauce and/or sour cream.

Applesauce Take 3-4 apples, tart are preferred, but sweet ones are fine too, the sauce will just be sweeter. Peel them, and core them and cut into big chunks. Place in a pot or a microwaveable bowl. Add sprinkling of sugar if they are sweet apples and up to a teaspoon or two if they're tart. Cook until they appear soft (or microwave for 5 minutes) and can be mashed to your desired consistency. At this point add a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg if you'd like, and cook another 2 minutes. Easy, peasy.

Thanksgiving - Pear Pie with a Gruyere Crumble topping

Thanksgiving for me is about comfort food and sticking with tradition, maybe throwing in a new twist here and there to keep it interesting. I didn't cook Thanksgiving this year, and in fact, except for one year, I have never been responsible for hosting the holiday. Generally, I volunteer to bring a dessert, since I feel like dessert should always be homemade on Thanksgiving. I've eaten my fair share of grocery-store bought pie, and it just doesn't cut it. I started making pumpkin pie around 17 years old, and that's always a staple. This Thanksgiving, I made a pie that I first tested last year at a pie contest in Brooklyn that I think I'll be adding to my list of traditions (for the record, I heard it came in the Top 10). It's a pretty simple recipe, with pears and a crumble top mixed with shredded Gruyere cheese, and a dash of Cayenne pepper for some unexpected heat. In my opinion, you'll always need pumpkin pie at the table, but this is a pie you'll always want at the table once you give it a try.

Pear Pie with Gruyere Crumble This recipe is more of a blueprint than a recipe. Vary the types of cheese. vary your spices, or if you want add additional fruit.

For the pie filling: 5-6 pears peeled and sliced (use whatever kind is in season for you) 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 cup brown sugar 3 tablespoons cornstarch 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 Unbaked pie crust

For the crumble topping: 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 1/2 cup brown sugar 2/3 cup shredded Gruyere (+ 1/4 cup for topping, optional) 4 tablespoons butter 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Toss sliced pears with lemon juice in a large bowl. Mix in the mixture of brown sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon in a separate bowl, then mix into the pears until evenly coated. Set aside.

Roll out the pie dough (homemade is best), into a 9 inch pie plate. Fill the pie with the pear mixture. Set in refrigerator so pie crust can hold its shape while you prep the crumble. Mix all ingredients in a small bowl, then add the butter in with your fingers, until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Top the pie with the crumble topping and bake for 45 minutes, or until golden brown. If you wish, in the last 15-20 minutes of baking, sprinkle another 1/4 cup of shredded cheese on top so that it can melt. Let cool on a wire rack before serving.

Sunchokes and a twist on patate pizza

At the Union Square greenmarket late on a Saturday, I stopped at the Paffenroth Gardens stand looking for some butternut squash. Two of the women working at the farm stand table were discussing the miracle-like qualities of sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes, to cure diabetes. I stood there long enough to pretend to be examining the produce left on the table to overhear claims of how eating these little knobby tubers regulated a woman's blood sugar levels. I was intrigued. Maybe I should be eating these? Why aren't I eating these? I grabbed a green net pint box and started filling it up with these unimpressive looking veggies. I quickly checked with the above mentioned sales lady, "I cook these just like a potato?", I asked. "Yep," "However you like your potatoes, you'll like these. Roast them, or mash them." I threw them in my bag and off I went feeling brave and adventurous, completely forgetting about the obligatory butternut squash. 

I went home and all my plans of roasted sunchokes went out the window when the memory of Jim Lahey's Patate Pizzathat you can get at the Sullivan Street Bakery suddenly came to mind. And that's all I could think about. Forget roasting and mashing, I needed to know if the supposed delicate flavor of the sunchokes could star in their own version of a pizza. Lahey's potato pizza is the stuff of my dreams. Bread and potatoes and cheese being high up there on my list of foods that make me happy. I'm a simple girl, really. If you have never been to the Sullivan Street Bakery, you need to go. If your scared of carbs, I can only suggest you stop living in the past, and start embracing the staff of life. I used the dough I already had in my refrigerator for the pizza dough. It was a whole wheat dough from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day that I keep in there to make batches of bread, but it also works in a pinch for pizza, as long as you're down with whole wheat pizza. That's where my "healthy" pizza attempts max out. I'll admit I could use a little work on the shaping of the crust. For the record, I was attempting a nice rectangle shape. At this point I was sort of winging it after consulting a few non-tomato sauce pizza recipes. I flavored the sunchokes much in the same way I would have had I roasted them - sauteing them in a pan with a little olive oil, some sliced garlic, fresh rosemary and salt and pepper. I sliced them on a mandolin first to ensure they'd be paper thin and pretty looking. For full disclosure, I should tell you that in addition to the amazing healthy properties sunchokes can have on your body, I have also read a lot about them being hard to digest, and causing some embarrasing gastro issues. I didn't notice any problems, but I did take the time to peel them first, since some sources suggested the culprit was in the skin. For a better discussion of the effects, see the very scientific and very opinionated comments on this post. If I was the type of person to have cocktail get-togethers in my fabulous loft, I would consider serving this in slices. However, I am definitely the type of person that pushes the limits on how much sugar she consumes, so I will consider eating more insulin- regulating-vegetables that can be served in the form of pizza. And, so should you.

Sunchoke Pizza Use a fresh store-bought dough, or your favorite pizza dough recipe. If you are an Artisan Bread in 5-Minutes a Day convert, use any of the recipes they suggest for Pizza dough.

1 pint of sunchokes, sliced on a mandolin (peeling is optional) 2-3 garlic cloves 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, or to taste 1-2 tablespoons olive oil 3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese

Scrub clean the sunchokes and slice them on a mandolin, or in even slices about 1/8 inch thin. Slice garlic cloves.

Heat olive oil in a saute pan until hot, add the sunchokes and garlic and rosemary and cook until the sunchokes taste almost completely cooked, meaning not totally mushy soft, but wilted. Keep an eye on it to not burn the garlic. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Roll out your pizza crust. Brush with olive oil. Top with sunchokes, overlapping them as you fill the pizza surface. Leave an inch around the edges for the crust. Sprinkle the top with cheese.

Let cool slightly, slice and enjoy.

Bake at 450 degrees Fahrenheit on a pizza stone for about 10 minutes or until the crust appears done and cheese is melted.