Flourless Chocolate Cake

The year we were invited to a potluck Passover seder, which calls for flourless desserts.  Since J. loves to cook w/chocolate, we went for this:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/01/shf-27-chocolat-1/

The seder was lovely and had too much food, as potlucks often do.  The density of this cake led to very little of it actually being consumed.  We were sent home with the remainder.  Luckily, we were invited to another casual potluck Passover seder the following weekend.  Guess what we brought?

This cake is rich, intense, and can cover your social obligations at two potlucks!

Indian Kale

In keeping up our goal of cooking one dish from each issue of Sunset we receive, we made this:

http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/winter-greens-curry-50400000133934/

We used pre-chopped kale from TJ.  The dish did not impress for several reasons:
- the kale stems were still in
- the seasoning was overwhelming and way too sweet

Chocolate Chip Macadamia Cookies

Recipe from The Science of Good Cooking Book.

The results were not as chewy as we were hoping for, but tasty nonetheless.

Seasoned Bok Choy

We had some bok choy laying around.  This is what we did with it:

http://www.food.com/recipe/the-best-sauteed-bok-choy-280807

Kale, Sausage, Beans

Tonight we made yet another incarnation of what's becoming our quick weeknight standard:

This stir fry includes:

- kale
- beans
- sausage
- garlic & other spices
- whatever's been kicking around the fridge too long (today it was kalamata olives)

Remade:
01-25-2014 for dinner at David's house - used purple kale
06-08-2014 enhanced with red peppers, lemon juice, and bacon fat:

Persimmon Bread

N. occasionally likes to volunteer with an awesome organization, Village Harvest, that picks excess fruit from backyards in Silicon Valley and donates it to the hungry.  However, only perfectly intact fruit is accepted by the food banks.  Anything damaged is kept by the volunteers.  This is how we ended up with lots of mildly imperfect hachiya persimmons:

Due to the quantity of this loot, we immediately started looking for ways to use persimmons in baking.  This is how we came across James Beard's persimmon bread recipe, as adopted by David Leibovitz:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2005/11/persimmon-bread/

In the process making this, we learned that the hazelnuts we have in our fridge are actually super delicious when roasted :)

The final result is extremely rich, moist dessert bread that has strong hints of whisky:

Deep Chocolate Brownies

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Deep-Chocolate-Brownies-242608