I love Danny Macaroons… beautiful little mountains of coconut that are small enough to almost be bite-sized. Warning: extreme close-ups ahead:
Danny Macaroons Salted Caramel Macaroon
Clarification: these are macaroons, not to be confused with macarons, the French meringue cookies that have surpassed cupcakes in trendiness in the past 2 years.
A little backstory: I started eating Danny Macaroons at the coffee shop I stop at every morning (Piada), without knowing anything about them. I soon became addicted and was picking up one every morning with my coffee. One day, there were none left. After asking the girl behind the counter what was up, she said the macaroons were handmade daily by a dude up in Harlem, so on the off-day when he was away or hadn’t baked enough, they simply ran out. I was upset about not having a macaroon that day with my coffee, but intrigued – I love when food has a story. That weekend, I was channel-surfing and happened to catch a local NYC food program (Food Curated) and lo-and-behold, they had a segment about Dan Cohen and his macaroon business.
The beauty of Danny Macaroons? Not only are they delicious, but you can taste the simplicity. There aren’t 19,000 ingredients in them and they haven’t been mass-produced so that they look pretty but taste bland. Quite the opposite – they look like they were hand-made with care – and they are! The salted caramel is my favorite – I just can’t get away from loving that salty-sweet combination.
Danny Macaroons: Open real wide and they are bite-sized.
Danny Macaroons sells a number of interesting flavor varieties, including chocolate, roasted almond, and even Baileys (!) that you can actually order online via his website.
P.S. Bonus: Danny Macaroons are gluten free.
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Danny Macaroons are available by order online or at a number of New York coffee-shops and restaurants, listed below (taken from the Danny Macaroons Facebook page)
• Bergdorf Goodman, BAR 5F – 5th Floor (Midtown) • Smorgasburg/Brooklyn Flea (One Hanson Place, Brooklyn) • Gimme! Coffee (NoLita – Mott/Spring) • RBC NYC (TriBeCa – Worth/Church) • Moomah (TriBeCa – Laight/Hudson) • Sons of Essex (Lower East Side) • 88 Orchard (Lower East Side) • Barnyard Cheese shop (Alphabet City – 9th/C) • Sicaffe (UES – 70th/Lex) • Piada (Midtown East – 53rd/Lex) • Benvenuto (23rd St./Bway) • Lula Bean (Williamsburg) • The Love Cafe (115th/Pleasant Ave.) • Lazar’s Chocolate – Great Neck • Lazar’s Chocolate – Wheatley Plaza) • McNally Jackson Cafe (SoHo – Prince/Bway) • Peace and Love Cafe (TriBeCa – Greenwich Ave) • The PIT (Peoples Improv Theater, 24th St./Lex)
My mom is a fabulous cook, she thinks she isn’t but she really is. Over the years I’ve watched her cook complex Persian dishes without breaking a sweat (how did she do it all those years while working and raising us?!), and if I can ever cook half as well as her I will have succeeed.
Aside from laborious Persian dishes on special occasions, she eats like a true Californian – trips to the farmer’s market every week to stock up on salad greens, fresh fruit and veggies. Whenever I go home to visit I look forward to fresh California salad greens with her amazing homemade salad dressing. My salad ‘dressing’ usually consists of lime juice, salt, pepper and copious amounts of balsamic (no oil because my salads always have avocado and I find that makes them creamy enough) – not really a salad dressing but more of a tooth-enamel-remover. But my mom’s dressing is creamy, peppery and tangy – and I finally got my paws on the recipe to document and use for myself!
The beauty of this recipe is you can keep adding ingredients to the bottle to deepen and change the flavor, so feel free to improvise.
Mom’s Salad Dressing over my favorite salad – butter lettuce, avocado and cherry tomatoes!
This site is in serious danger of becoming a Sadaf-fan-site. But what can I say, they have great products! I love making joojeh kabob because it’s easy, most people like chicken and it tastes great. If you’ve ever had Persian joojeh (chicken breast) kabob before, you know that it has a very distinctive tangy taste to it. It’s traditionally cooked on metal skewers over a grill, but for us city dwellers we have to make do with the oven.
Persian Chicken Kabob (Joojeh Kabob) marinating
Over the last year, I played around with a few different marinade recipes and not only did they not come out right, but they were a real hassle to make. I decided to give the Sadaf Chicken Kabob Seasoning (link) a try – and my chicken came out with the perfect joojeh-kaboby flavor!
Sandra Lee, eat your heart out.
The seasoning (which contains onions, parsley, salt, pepper, citric acid and saffron) is advertised as a dry rub – it’s good this way but chicken can be a bit dry. I’ve found that mixing it with yogurt and turning it into a marinade gives the same flavor but the chicken stays nice and juicy. You could add turmeric to the seasoning mix if you like (will give it more color as well) but I’ve found it’s great the way it is. The seasoning comes in convenient 1-ounce packets, which is exactly the amount needed for 1.5-2 pounds of chicken. Mix it with 1.5 cups of yogurt, slap it into a big ziplock back along with your cubed chicken breast. I let it sit overnight in the fridge and turn it over a few times.
Then pop onto skewers that have soaked in water for 15-20 minutes and stick in the oven about 10-12 minutes each side on 350. Eh, voila! They chicken has a nice yellow-orange color because of the spices and is traditionally served with rice (polo). For a lighter version I like to serve it with my favorite salad of cucumber, tomato, avocado and lime juice.
Persian Chicken Kabob (Joojeh Kabob)
Where can you get it? Kalustyan’s in NYC has this product as well as the whole range of Sadaf’s kabob seasoning (for other types of kabob meats). Amazon also sells it and it’s quite reasonably priced. And of course, sadaf.com as well!
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