Inductive almonds and post-party brunch

Our anniversary was on Friday, and we had a little party at our apartment. We served these almonds along with a cheese plate, spiced olives, mini puff pastry spanakopita, and stuffed mushrooms. We tried some sweet and salty spiced almonds at a party recently, and these are my attempt to recreate them. I think they're pretty great, and as a bonus, they are stupidly easy, especially if you buy roasted almonds. They are called inductive almonds because after you have one, you want one more.

Inductive almonds

1 cup unsalted almonds

1 tsp olive oil

1/4 tsp salt, or more to taste

1 tsp sugar

1/4 tsp smoked paprika

A pinch of chipotle powder, optional

If almonds are already roasted, leave them alone. If not, cook them at 400 F for 5-10 minutes. When they have cooled slightly, transfer to a glass bowl. Add olive oil, salt, sugar, pepper, and paprika, and toss to coat. Taste test a few to make sure they're good.

The next morning, Jon brilliantly suggested that we have a party leftovers brunch. Inspired by my friend Renee, I made the table pretty and used the nice bowls (which were a wedding present). In addition to the almonds (a new batch because there were none leftover), we had cheese and crackers, pickles, olives, and a salad of romaine, cucumber, grapefruit, and avocado. I think it's a nice brunch salad. To drink, I had some Negroni punch left over from the night before, diluted with grapefruit juice and club soda. Jon boringly just had water and coffee. It's easy to have a good Saturday when you start it like this.

Spinach-parmesan bagels

We made bagels for the first time on Saturday, and they were great! I used a bagel recipe from The Bread Machine Book and added some spinach and cheese. I was a little concerned that it wasn't a good idea to make flavored bagels for my first time making bagels, but they turned out great. I reduced the liquid in the recipe a tiny bit because the spinach was wet, but that was all I did. These bagels are really light with a chewy outside. I think the classic bagel is supposed to be pretty dense, but I'm no purist-these were great! The spinach flavor really comes through, so much that Jon suggests lowering the amount of spinach next time. I don't really get much of the cheese, so I might either increase or omit it next time.

We ate the first bagel hot out of the oven with a little butter. Then for lunch I had a bagel with cream cheese and roasted red pepper strips. I think these would be good for bagel sandwiches, too. I was really pleased with how well this recipe worked, and I even have a parmesan-roasted red pepper-sunflower seed batch in the breadmaker right now. I'm just sorry it took me so long to start making bagels.

Spinach-parmesan bagels

Makes 8.

4 oz spinach, or less to taste

1 egg

Scant 1/2 cup milk

1 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups bread flour

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

2 tsp yeast

1 tbsp sugar

1 egg white

2 tsp water

Wash spinach and steam with water on leaves until wilted. Cool, then wring out as much water as possible. We ended up with a scant 1/2 cup of cooked spinach.

Place egg, milk, oil, sugar, salt, flour, cheese, spinach, and yeast in bread machine. Set for "dough."

When dough is ready, remove from bread machine and punch down. Divide dough into 8 pieces. Roll pieces into balls, then pinch in middle to make a hole and roll around in your hands until it is bagel-shaped. Cover and place in a warm spot to rise for 15-30 minutes.

Bring 2 quarts of water and 1 tsp sugar to a boil. Place bagels, a few at a time, in boiling water. Boil for 1 minute, then flip over and boil the second side for 3 minutes. Drain and place on pizza stone or baking sheet. Repeat for all bagels.

Combine water and egg white and whisk a little to froth it up. Brush over bagels. Bake at 400 F for 15-20 minutes, or until golden brown on top.

Chocolate chip bread pudding

My friend Katherine sent me a recipe for the pecan bread she uses for French toast. (Side note: she is vegan and uses a chickpea flour batter for French toast. It's awesome.) My bread machine didn't do a good job of distributing the pecans, so the bread was good, but not quite what I was hoping for, so it didn't get completely eaten before it started to get stale. Luckily, there's this awesome little thing called bread pudding. When the bread was all torn up, the pecan distribution didn't matter. I went with a chocolate chip bread pudding, slightly modified from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. It was tasty and held up surprisingly well in the fridge over the course of the week we took to eat it. I think it would be really good with bananas in it too, so we'll probably add them next time.

Chocolate chip bread pudding

3 cups milk

1/2 cup sugar, or more to taste

4 tbsp butter, plus butter for the pan

Bread, enough to fill the pan (we used pecan bread), torn into bite-sized chunks

3 eggs

3 oz chocolate chips or chunks

1/3 cup chopped pecans (I estimate that this is about how many pecans were in there, so you should add it if you aren't using pecan bread)

Put the milk, sugar, salt, and butter in a small saucepan over low heat and warm until butter melts.

Meanwhile, butter an 8- or 9-inch square baking dish.

Put the bread in the baking dish and pour the milk mixture over it. Let it sit for a while, poking it now and then to submerge the top pieces of bread. Stir chocolate chips and pecans into mixture.

Bake at 350 F for 45-60 minutes, or until the pudding is set and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. (Bittman suggests using a bain-marie, but I forgot to do it, and it was fine.)

Miso butter

I got this idea from an NPR piece about miso that referred to this David Chang recipe for roasted asparagus with poached eggs and miso butter. I heard the phrase "miso butter," and thoughts of complex fatty, salty, umami deliciousness filled my head. I didn't recreate the dish perfectly, but I got the idea across, and it was pretty good. For Valentine's Day, we had beet soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and steamed broccoli with miso butter. It was a great meal. (For those of you pooh-poohing grilled cheese for Valentine's Day, Jon makes great grilled cheese, so don't knock it until you've tried it!)

We even cleaned the table, put out some flowers (dried, not fresh, but still nice), opened a bottle of raspberry wine, and poured water from a pretty pitcher. What a fancy dinner!

Anyway, back to the miso butter. I'm not going to put a recipe up, because it depends a lot on your taste. The recipe called for a 5:8 ratio of butter to miso, which we thought had too much miso flavor. I added more butter to get the ratio probably around 1:1, but you can play around. I'm sure there is a wide range of acceptable tastes, and it varies based on whether you want it to be subtle or distinctive. To make it, just mash miso into softened butter until it's fairly well combined. To use, melt a bit for easier drizzling.

What to put it on? Obviously, we've gone with the asparagus dish and steamed broccoli. We wholeheartedly endorse its use on any green vegetable. It would probably be good on corn, mixed into mashed potatoes instead of plain butter, or thinly spread on a sandwich that was going to be grilled. We considered adding it to our V-Day grilled cheeses but didn't want miso overload. We still have a bit left, so we will be experimenting with other uses.

Buttermilk bonanza: maple-buttermilk pie

The last recipe of the buttermilk bonanza was a maple-buttermilk pie from 101 cookbooks, and I think we definitely saved the best for last. This pie received a lot of praise from mathematicians in two cities because I made it right before going to UIUC to visit one of Jon's collaborators. I've never made a buttermilk pie before, and it worked perfectly. It's a little tangy, but mostly sweet, rich from the buttermilk and egg yolks, slightly mapley and slightly lemony, and the part-rye flour crust added a little something too. I didn't use either of Heidi's recommended crust methods, just my usual: use pastry cutter to incoroporate fat into flour, add liquid (in this case beer) a little bit at a time until dough comes together, roll our, and transfer to pie dish. Her suggestions are probably puffier and better, but mine is easy and more than acceptable.

I really enjoyed the buttermilk bonanza. It gave me the impetus to try some nice new recipes and get a little more familiar with buttermilk. Plus, I pinned a bunch more buttermilk recipes that I can try the next time I find myself with 8 cups of buttermilk and no plan.

Buttermilk use: 2 cups

Buttermilk bonanza total: 8 cups, and we're out of buttermilk.

Buttermilk bonanza: baby, it's cold outside edition

Of course, it was a requirement to try buttermilk biscuits during our buttermilk bonanza. There are a ton of biscuit recipes out there, but we settled on Alton Brown's because we like him. We split the work on this one: Jon did the measuring and mixing, I did the shaping and baking. They were really good fresh from the oven, but they didn't age well. We probably should have halved the recipe. I included a picture of the spread on our table that night because it makes us look sophisticated: biscuits, lentil-kale soup, grapefruit-avocado salad, and grapefruit-gin spritzers with rosemary.

The day after we made the biscuits, we took a day trip to the Indiana dunes. I am filled with trepidation about my first winter in the midwest, and I am trying to take opportunities to enjoy the outdoors in the cold so I will not become a lump on my Ikea chair during the winter. We packed a nice picnic, including a thermos full of buttermilk potato soup. I based it on this recipe from Homesick Texan, but I basically made it less interesting by omitting the jalapeno, bacon, and cilantro. I did add a bit of smoked paprika to get some of the bacon smokiness, but I wasn't sad that the soup wasn't popping with flavors. It was a nice, warm, thick, creamy potato soup that made a picnic on a snow-covered picnic table much more delightful. For those keeping score, the soup called for 1/2 cup of buttermilk. By the way, we had a fantastic day at the dunes. If you like looking at goofy pictures of us, you can look at our facebook album of the trip here.

Buttermilk in today's recipes: 1 1/2 cups

Buttermilk bonanza total: 6 cups

Buttermilk bonanza: salad dressing

I didn't photograph it, but one of the things I wanted to try during the buttermilk bonanza was a salad dressing. I'm not really into creamy dressings, but this one was pretty nice. I based it on this recipe from smitten kitchen, but I adapted it to the ingredients in my fridge and my dislike of raw aliums.

This was pretty good. It won't become a staple because both of us prefer oil-and-vinegar or my lemon-sesame dressing, but it might appear again as a change of pace. It was pretty runny, probably in part because I subbed yogurt for mayo, and my yogurt batch was on the runny side, but I didn't mind the runniness.

Evelyn's buttermilk-dill dressing

1/2 cup buttermilk

2 tbsp yogurt

2 tbsp cider vinegar

1 tsp sugar (reduced from 1 tbsp in original recipe, but I would probably omit altogether in the future)

1 1/2 tsp dried dill, or more or less to taste

Salt and pepper to taste

Shake. Taste. Adjust.

Buttermilk used: 1/2 cup

Buttermilk bonanza total: 4 1/2 cups