Good but not great

My cooking has been good but not great for the last week or so –

The worst was Monday. Dinner was a pretty good idea: Marcella Hazen’s lemon pasta (simple, it’s cream, lemon juice and zest, fettuccine, and Parmesan), salad with the end of a honey-mustard bottled salad dressing and a few shots of Rachael’s Salad Girl curry-fig, and roasted broccoli using the secret trick I got from Cook’s Illustrated years ago (when Christopher Kimball was still there) – a pinch of sugar to help it brown. And there in lay the problem. I must’ve not washed the broccoli enough and it was just a little bit gritty. Just a little, so that you couldn’t really tell if it was really sandy gritty, or the normal consistently of the florets. Sigh.

Previously on Sunday I made blueberry muffins, from my regular trustworthy recipe – and moved it over to the new recipe blog, too. They’re good but just a little too crumbly and not risen high enough. I think I put too much liquid in the batter.

Saturday for dinner I made beef enchiladas, another trusted recipe, that I posted on the new blog, but they came out kind of brown. I started off intending to make a really big batch of sauce so I’d have some extra to freeze, but I ended up using most of it for two pans of enchiladas, one with six and one with eight (and froze one of those) so only froze a little dab of sauce to freeze. Given the color, I think that’s probably a good thing. I’m thinking I’ll hide it in some future pot of Mexican rice.

On Sunday evening, I tried this recipe for what Epicurious called “Millennial pink” shortbread. It didn’t come out as neat and tidy as the pic on Epicurious:

But they were tasty – at least the first few days. Now that they’re almost a week old, they seem to be getting a bit of a dusty taste from too many poppy seeds.

On Thursday night I made two types of cookies for a tea at the Information School. Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace, that are a regular (I believe these are from 2015), at a smaller size, in the holiday cookie pantheon, and sugar cookies, another Dorie recipe, made as slice & bakes rather than rolled. I had ambitions of shelling and chopping salted pistachios, or chopping roasted salted almonds, to roll the sugar cookie logs in before slicing, but in the end did not carry out either plan. Nor did I sprinkle the slices with coarse sugar. So they’re a good, plain cookie. Good not great.

Probably the best thing I’ve made in the last two weeks was the long rise no knead whole wheat bread that I baked a week ago Thursday. Everyone seemed to like it, so I made another loaf today. The crust looks even better than last week’s but there was a kind of ammonia smell in the kitchen while it baked – do I blame my Cuisinart Dutch oven from Target that Al gave me a few Christmases ago? Something in the dough? My King Arthur parchment paper? I dunno. The bread seems fine and the smell is clearing. We’ll eat it tonight with gnocchi Bolognese and a salad. Come to think of it, one of the things we had for dinner on Thursday, a dinner of leftovers while the dough for the cookies was chilling, was avocado toast – that bread toasted and buttered, topped with mashed avocado and Maldon salt – and it was pretty great.