Cooking the
In-Laws

Um, I mean, "Cooking FOR the In-Laws"

A little ancillary cooking blog by me, Brian (Email | IM). You may wish to start with the Introduction post. When I'm not cooking, I'm collecting unemployment and finding ways to avoid posting at Joannou de Luxe.

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Recipe ingredients & implementation steps are not copyrightable, but the other text here is released under a Creative Commons License.

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Attack of the Quilting Club

As I mentioned in my introductory post, the boyfriend's mother is an avid quilter. Upon her return from le continent on Wednesday, she announced that her quarterly quilt club meeting would be in just two days. I vaguely recalled her mentioning the meeting to me when we were making plans to move down here, but I had kind of forgotten most of the details. Speficially, I had forgotten about this one little detail where I promised to make lemon bars for the guests. Sigh.

I sat down with the lemon bar recipe I had brought from home--it's from Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte. But I had misgivings. Sure, Amanda Hesser is crazy whack anal about her cooking, but I had never baked anything using her instructions before. And baking is the sort of endeavor where you can't just toss everything in the pan and hope it turns out right. Especially not if there's a gaggle of quilters d'un certain age breathing down your neck.

I turned to the Amateur Gourmet, a well-known Hesserphile (and fox).

A quick search of his archives revealed a botched attempt at her lemon bars, saved by switching in mid-bake to a Barefoot Contessa recipe instead! It looked like the messed up Hesser recipe had been corrected in my paperback edition (for one thing, he mentioned using 1.5 cups of flour, while the copy I had clearly called for 2 cups) but now I was sweating bullets. I needed to get the Barefoot Contessa recipe!

I don't have Barefoot Contessa Parties but I do have Google. Thanks to enterprising pirates* on Teh Internets, I found the recipe in no time. One trip to the market for lemons later, I was good to go.

BAREFOOT CONTESSA LEMON BARS

For the crust:
2 sticks of butter (every Barefoot Contessa recipe begins with 2 sticks of butter, except the ones that start with 4 sticks of butter)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cups AP flour
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

For the filling:
6 large eggs (she actually calls for extra large; I don't feel it really matters for this particular recipe)
2 3/4 cups granulated sugar (she calls for 3 cups; the awesome folks at Hanover co-op recommended cutting back on that so the sharp lemon taste is brought to the forefront)
7 lemons: squeeze 1 cup of juice and grate 2 tablespoons of zest on a microplane
1 cup AP flour
confectioners' sugar for dusting

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy; add flour & salt and combine until you get something resembling a damper version of the "large pea" pastry stage. Press the dough together with your hands into a ball.
3. Flatten dough in a 9 x 13 pan, covering the bottom and a 1/2 inch up the sides.
4. Chill for 30 minutes, then bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly golden.
5. While the crust is cooling after baking, begin the filling. Leave the oven on.
6. Gently whisk together the eggs & sugar. Add the lemon zest and juice and stir. Fold in the flour. Try to avoid making it too bubbly or frothy
7. Pour filling over crust and bake 30-35 minutes. These finished in about 27 minutes because the in-laws' oven runs hot.
8. Cool to room temperature in pan.

To serve, sprinkle with confectioners' sugar and slice with an offset spatula dipped in hot water. Place on a platter and cool in the fridge for an hour. Await the cooing response of the quilting club; only the finest lemon bars will draw their attention away from a deconstructed quilted ladies' blazer made of tomato-pattern fabric with tiny metal slug buttons. You only THINK I'm kidding.

* I kid; recipes can't be copyrighted in the US so there's no piracy involved. Not that that would have stopped me. Hell, I've been using a "borrowed" Cook's Illustrated login for the last 8 months.

Posted by Brian on Saturday, June 4, 2005 at 02:40 PM | Comments (5)

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