Pork Cracklins: Best of 2011

At the start of 2011, I started tagging some of our favorite recipes of the year. Larry and I sat down today and pared that list down to our favorites. We didn’t have a pre-determined number of items, so we ended up with eight things that were our favorite, and most memorable of the year. This is the food that stood out most for us. It was fun to go back and talk about what we liked about the different things I made – food is so tightly wound with memories. Here are our favorites – outside of the number one item, none are in any particular order:

• Sticky Sticky Buns. This was hands-down our favorite recipe of the year. It’s a gorgeous brioche dough with lots of caramel. It’s ironic that our favorite thing of the year was something I made on a whim. So happy I found fresh yeast, and that I added Joanne Chang’s Flour to my cookbook library!
• Black Pepper Tofu (favorite vegetarian main). Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi is a terrific cookbook, and this dish elevates tofu to its full potential. The texture is incredible, the flavors are perfectly balanced. I could eat this every day (although it was a tough choice between this and the Black Pepper Tempeh).
• Hungarian Chicken Paprikas (favorite non-vegetarian main). This is a homely, unassuming dish that’s served at our favorite restaurant in Reno. But it’s incredibly satisfying and the ultimate in comfort food.
• Rachel’s Very Beginner Cream Biscuits (favorite side). We’re still in awe that something with so few ingredients can be so amazingly good. We could easily eat an entire batch of these light, fluffy biscuits.
• Salty Honey Pie (favorite pie). This is not just our favorite pie, but probably our favorite dessert of the year. Larry doesn’t quite share my obsession with honey, but he definitely shares my appreciation for good local honey. This pie, from Four and Twenty Blackbirds in Brooklyn (where I had my first bite), is the perfect way to show off a favorite honey – mine is an avocado honey from Amen Bee.
• Lavender-Blueberry Sorbet (favorite frozen dessert). I’m particularly excited that this sorbet made it onto this list. I made a lot of really good ice cream over the year, but this one was my own recipe, based on a virtual bake-along hosted by Abby Dodge. I tend to be very recipe driven and don’t often come up with my own variations. For this sorbet, I combined my love for fresh blueberries with the lovely lavender that grows in my neighbor’s yard every year, and ended up with something irresistible.
• Salt-N-Pepper Sandwich Cookies (favorite cookie). These are from another favorite cookbook – Baked Explorations. I don’t know if I would have made these, except they were on the schedule for my Baked Sunday Mornings Group. They’re fabulous – a grown-up version of an Oreo. I’m a sucker for salty sweets and I love the addition of pepper in this cookie.
• Maple-Apple Pear Butter (favorite condiment). Larry did the hard work on this one, pressing the cooked fruit through the food mill. But it was worth it – the final result is outstanding.