Smitten Kitchen's Warm Potato Salad

The sun is setting at 5 PM now, so getting photos of my dinner that look nice is hard!

When I first saw Smitten Kitchen's recipe for potatoes with soft eggs and bacon vinaigrette, I knew I had to make it immediately, as it was a perfect combination of things that I love (potatoes! bacon! vinaigrette! soft eggs! some greens to make it healthy!) I made it for dinner the next night even though I didn't have all of the right ingredients on hand, and it is such a well-written formula that tweaking it to use slightly different ingredients still yields a delicious warm potato salad.

So! I have made this half a dozen times since Deb posted the recipe, and have figured out that I prefer this meal with poached rather than soft-boiled eggs (I find peeling soft eggs without crushing them to be rather difficult, alas), that it works better with greasier bacon so that there is sufficient bacon grease for the vinaigrette, that it is just fine without blue cheese, and that boxed salad greens work very well when your local grocery doesn't stock frisee.

Though I tend to make a couple ingredient changes from the original, I am just posting this as a recommended recipe, rather than posting a recipe here, because Deb's recipes are always so beautifully done and well-tested. You should make this, it is delicious and gluten-free, and by skipping the cheese it is dairy-free too!

Meyer lemon baking

I am perhaps one of the last food bloggers to have discovered the joys of the Meyer lemon, but I am glad to have baked with them finally! I love cooking with lemon because of the way the citrus can brighten a sweet or a savory dish; especially because many varieties only appear in stores in the winter, where they are like an edible ray of sunshine. Meyer lemons, though, are especially fantastic. They are a bit sweeter than a normal lemon, and smell somewhat floral. They are also only in stores for a little while in the winter here in the Pacific Northwest, which made me eager to cook with some.

I picked up a bag of Meyer lemons last week, mostly to juice and zest them, because I like to keep a little stash of lemon zest in the freezer for convenience. I then ended up making two different lemon-based baked goods. Both recipes turned out to taste quite pleasant.

First, some almond-lemon biscotti, made almost exactly the same as this recipe by the Gluten-free Girl. The main differences were that I used different flours (swapped brown rice for sweet rice and tapioca, and switched potato flour instead of potato starch) and almonds instead of pecans. I think the one thing I will change next time is to use more like a half-cup of sugar, these are more like a desert then a snack.

I also modified my scone recipe slightly. I swapped out the potato flour for buckwheat, and used 1/4 cup lemon juice instead of coconut milk. Also, I added the zest of a lemon into the dough, and added in an extra tablespoon of sugar. I felt like these needed something else, maybe poppy seeds or almonds, but they taste good regardless.

So, you should go make something with Meyer lemons while they are still in stores! They are a fantastic fruit.

Gluten-free Goddess Brownies

So I have made the Gluten-Free Goddess' recipe for brownies four different times since I went gluten-free. It is a perfect recipe, and it gets raves every time I make it. Everyone thinks it is great, from little kids to college students to my family. I brought them to a research group meeting one time, and didn't tell anyone they were GF. People still thought they were amazing.

Here is her recipe. Seriously, make this even if you aren't gluten-free. I normally use butter instead of coconut oil, and sorghum flour instead of brown rice flour, but I want to make it exactly as written sometime.

That is all.