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
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 