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StrawberryPlum Turns 2!

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Afternoon at the Kitchen TableJust like that, a year came and went and my little blog is celebrating another birthday.  2!  It’s been 2 years since I started arming myself with the camera upon entering the kitchen.  2 years of using my blog as a reason to spurge on figs at the grocery store.  2 years of sharing words, pictures, and recipes.

Let’s use this milestone as an excuse to take an afternoon coffee and cake break (like I need an excuse…) and spend a moment looking back on some of the best recipes and my favorite posts of the year.  Thank you for being here!

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Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Caper & Parsley Sauce

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Roasted Chicken with Lemon & Caper Sauce

Ever since we entered September, all I’ve wanted to do is lie in bed, wrapped up in a quilt with the breeze blowing through my open window, and read.  Well, that and gorge on comfort foods (ahem, see that time I baked and ate way, way too many chocolate cookies).

My latest addition to my fall comfort food repertoire was these roasted chicken thighs.  I baked the chicken with sliced red potatoes and made a 2-minute pan sauce with capers, lemon, parsley, and a few dots of butter.  It ended up being exactly what I was looking for–minimal effort with big comfort food results and just the sort of thing I’d happily eat any night of the week.

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Chewy Chocolate Cookies with Rum-Soaked Cherries

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Double Chocolate Rum Cherry Cookies

I have a complicated relationship with chocolate.  I spent the first 20 or so years of my life not liking it at all.  Marbled birthday cake?  I’ll just eat the white parts, thank you very much.  Oreo cookies?  Yup, I was the type to lick out the centers and try to pass off the slobbery wafers on unsuspecting siblings.  Chocolate ice cream?  Honestly, I’m still not into it.

But at some point, a little chocolate seed in my food brain started to sprout and now I find myself craving it from time to time.  You don’t see a lot of chocolaty recipes around here, because my cravings tend to require immediate action–no time for recipes or pictures.  When I need chocolate, there’s usually not time to wait around for butter to soften or ovens to preheat, it’s more of a how-can-I-get-half-a-bag-of-chocolate-chips-into-my-mouth-as-quickly-as-possible sort of situation.

Well, I found myself in a days-long chocolate mood last week.  My pantry was in rough shape–not a chocolate chip or baking bar in sight.  I cleaned out my freezer, hoping to find a forgotten brownie or slice of cake.  No luck.  I tried concocting a frothy/sludgy iced mocha with cocoa powder; didn’t work.  I needed intense chocolate, something I could hold onto, chewy, fudgy, and decadent.  I needed to do it right.  I needed a big batch of cookies.

These cookies are everything I could’ve asked for and most definitely worth a trip to the grocery store/waiting for the oven to preheat.  They are intensely chocolaty, fudgy in the center, chewy around the edges.  I snuck in a handful of rum-soaked cherries but I imagine chopped walnuts or candied ginger being equally delicious.

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Zucchini Chèvre Soup with Basil-Mint Croutons

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Zucchini & Chevre Soup with Basil-Mint Croutons
It feels like I did little more than blink and somehow summer came, went, and we’re back to the sort of days that are just meant for soup.  Cloudy and drizzly outside always translates to chopping and stirring inside.  It’s time to get back into my kitchen and back into my soup game.

This is a really simple zucchini soup that’s swirled with creamy goat cheese.  Crunchy baguette croutons, smeared with fresh basil and mint oil, garnish the soup and distinguish one bite from the next.  It’s a celebration of late summer produce, with a good dose of fall comfort. 

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Plum Pecan Streusel Coffee Cake

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Plum Coffee Cake with Pecan StreuselWhen I’m driving home from work at the end of the night, I always find myself doing a mental inventory of my fridge.  What little bits and pieces do I have on hand that can be thrown together?  What can I come up with for dinner without buying any new ingredients?

This is what I was exhaustedly doing this past Saturday.  It had been a late one so I wasn’t really thinking dinner or even a midnight snack.  My head and belly were already on to Sunday brunch and, sadly, all I could picture in the refrigerator was a carton of questionably old yogurt, a couple of stale bread ends, and a few fuzzy strawberries.  Ugh.  Then panic really set in when I remembered I had scooped up the last of the coffee that morning.  What good is a Sunday morning if you don’t get to linger over coffee with a decent breakfast?

So that’s why I found myself at the 24-hour grocer at 1:30 am, wandering bleary-eyed through the aisles, concocting my Sunday morning breakfast plan.  I picked up a bag of plums, sour cream, pecans, and coffee, then went home and slept hard, dreaming of the plum coffee cake I’d make in the morning.

Thankfully, the coffee cake hit all the notes I was hoping it would and was totally worth subjecting myself to the other oddballs that do their grocery shopping in the middle of the night.  The wedges of plum baked into the top are juicy and sing “summer’s not over yet” while the tender cinnamon-spiced cake warms you against the like-it-or-not fall briskness that has crept in to the mornings.  And, of course, the pecan streusel.  It’s the streusel that’ll having you reaching for your second (third?) piece.

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