recipe cheat sheet

Dinas_recipes_small

I’m blatantly ripping off Amy’s angrychicken recipe cheat sheet, perfect for hanging on the refrigerator. I thought it was so smart I had to do it. I am so sick of looking for the same recipes all the time. We have gone through so much vanilla and flour (I order it by 25 lbs bags from King Arthur) than I ever used before. If you want something here, you have to bake it yourself, so there has been much baking in the last year and half. Which is good, because the low fat banana bread that I love from Starbucks, according to their website, is 380 calories. Whoa.

I hardly ever use the salt called for in the recipes, except in the pizza dough and crackers, in which case, it’s crucial. I usually use half or two-thirds the butter called for and substitute a local plain yogurt they have here, that doesn’t even have a label. The butter here is all imported from France, and it’s awesome. I also use at least partially whole wheat or white whole wheat flour in almost all the recipes, most of the time, after the year-long brainwashing from Jennifer Fulbright. Like Amy at angrychicken, these are the original recipes, I make substitutions as I go along, depending on what’s around, but I like to start with the originals. Like Amy, I don’t need the cooking instructions. I just need the proportions, I know the process and which pan to use and that most everything does fine at 350 degrees.

The recipes come from a variety of sources. Ludmilla, Peter’s sister is a baker extrordinaire and I could easily do a whole sheet of her original recipes. The pumpkin bread’s origins are hotly contested. It might be a recipe first used by Peter’s sister Helen, who cooked for a restaurant for years. But I got the recipe from Ludmilla. Years later I asked Peter’s nephew Peter for his amazing pumpkin bread recipe, he said he got it from his mother, and she got it from Milla, so it was the same recipe boomeranging around the family.

Angel Biscuits recipe from Cooking Lite magazine, circa 2000, Sky High Biscuits from a restaurant we frequented in collage, the Epicurian in Arcata, California. A friend got hired there, thank god, so she could sneak out the recipe to their amazing whole wheat biscuits. Sesame Water Crackers from a Portland local, restaurant owner and cooking show star Caprial, from her cooking with kids show. Roll the dough out in a pasta cranker and bake them in huge sheets, serve with hummus. Brilliant. Pancakes and waffles from Joy of Cooking. Carrot Muffins and Chocolate Cake from Everyday Cooking. The Apple Cake came from Camille’s first year of preschool at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center. The class baked it for Rosh Hoshana and I think every parent asked for the recipe. They baked something, usually challah, every Friday and we were always encouraging her teacher to write a cookbook. My sister is always a great resource, and luckily she’s compiled her recipes in a cookbook she gave me. Many of the recipes here I copied off sheets of paper stuffed into a recipe book she hand wrote for me when Peter and I got married.

Printable recipe sheet here.
Download dina_recipes.pdf

Comments

10 responses to “recipe cheat sheet”

  1. MamaLana Avatar
    MamaLana

    How absolutely lovely! Thanks for sharing. Like Martha Stewart says, baking is chemistry, so the correct measurements are important. I wonder why I never thought of this cheat sheet idea. Fabulous!

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  2. Ludmilla Avatar
    Ludmilla

    Hi- just to put the record straight: The recipe Helen used at the Crepe was the same one; she got it from me. In 8th grade a classmate of mine brought a loaf of it to some event (can’t remember what it was) and I fell in love with it- I’d never had anything like it before (this was back when banana bread was the new, “hip” thing and everyone was making it). I had to have the recipe. I hounded this poor girl, whose name I don’t remember. I don’t think she cared much for me but she finally gave me the recipe and I rushed home to bake it that night. The bread failed utterly- it was gooey glob of batter. I was devastated, crushed, hurt and humiliated because I believed that this girl deliberately gave me a bunk recipe because she didn’t like me.( I remember crying in the bathroom over it…Oh, the adolescent angst!) You see, I’d baked long enough to figure out that the reason the recipe didn’t work was the 1/2 c of hot water added at the end. I was so embarrassed to see her again in class because I had thanked her so profusely for it and now I thought that she must have been laughing at me.
    Anyway, I never spoke of it to anyone, but I did try the recipe again sans H2O and it was perfect! It became the recipe we all used and took with us when we left home- I never really thought of it as “mine”. Over the (many) years, I’ve tried many pumpkin bread recipes and in my opinion, none measure up to this one…

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  3. Jennifer Margulis Avatar

    My favorite recipe cheat sheet is the one from the New York Times that has over 100 ideas of stuff to make in ten minutes. Remember you saw it on our fridge Dina? It’s by Mark Bittman, whose book “How to Cook Anything” is a bible in our house.

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  4. MamaLana Avatar
    MamaLana

    Ludmilla, you figured out what was wrong and thus the recipe AUTOMATICALLY became YOURS!

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  5. Laurel Avatar
    Laurel

    Oh thank you for a walk down memory lane. Many many breakfasts of biscuits and poached eggs at the Epicurean!

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  6. Sufficientoutside Avatar

    Far Seat,concept week change father between express theatre pass potential actual upon plus touch surprise indicate meet lead husband future access assessment treaty profit addition aircraft reach extremely royal affect university possibility debate way same hard significance ball historical drawing beneath interesting document civil year particularly path hand human life production usually find consumer sex competition resource property hand year accompany expectation tone legal apparently link surface count itself want standard can river much pick match compare empty memory have ring expect far solicitor time all thus even well sex high doctor characteristic please examination

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  7. tools Avatar

    Very insightful, and informative. you dont usually make comments, as Im kind of a blog lurker, but you thought it deserved a word or two.
    Buh Bye

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  8. dad dating divorced Avatar

    Good stuff, It might just work, although it seems easier when you have a plan.
    you a blog owner too.

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  9. bubble-shooter Avatar

    place2place.blogs.com is well designed dude!!
    bubbleshooter

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  10. Padge Avatar
    Padge

    thanks for the crepes this am.Larry

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