New Dishes I Cooked in July 2020

As food stocks started to normalize towards the middle of COVID summer, I started to take advantage and try out more new dishes. It also helped that we were FINALLY able to find yeast again!

• Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza
• hoisin-glazed baby back ribs
• oatmeal-rasin bread
• Grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce
• succotash
• vanilla icebox cookies

The Chicago-style pepperoni pan pizza was one of the first recipes I wrote down to make. However, I never seemed to have both time and pepperoni at the same time. So I finally made it. I think America’s Test Kitchen’s decision to have me precook the pepperoni to render some of the fat helped both mellow the pepperoni taste (my kids were able to eat it) and keep this from being a greasy mess.

For baby back ribs we generally either grill-roast them with Danielle’s family marinade or I smoke them with Meathead’s recipe. But for a different taste, I decided to do this Milk Street oven recipe. It was nice - a little too spicy for some people I know, but just about right for me, especially if eaten with rice.

The oatmeal raisin bread has turned out to be very good, but a rare and strange mistake in the recipe. It’s in the America’s Test Kitchen Dutch Oven book and the intro paragraph claims to have some brown sugar, but it’s nowhere in the ingredients list or the steps.

The grilled brined zucchini with cilantro-yogurt sauce and succotash were good surprises. They tasted way better than I thought they would. I’m pretty sure this was my first time eating succotash.

The disappointment of the month was the vanilla icebox cookies. It’s the first time I thought an America’s Test Kitchen cookie was kind of bland. I’ll try rolling them in some brown sugar or turbinado sugar next time for a potentially better taste and texture.

• Food