Franco-phagie

Au revoir, les français!

2009-10-15T15:23:00.004+02:00

This is it. The contract is over, I've left the apartment, packed everything and moved to Greece. I enjoyed this year in France. Work was nice, I learned a lot of new things, I started a couple of interesting projects that I'm going to keep working on, and I'm definitely going to visit Grenoble again. The food was great, good quality ingredients were easy to find and cheap, and eating out was a source of cooking ideas almost every time, too.

But, the year is over, and this chapter is now closed. I packed everything I could carry, left my apartment and came back to Greece. I'm joining the military for six months in a couple of weeks. So, there's not going to be much posting from now on. If anything, it'd be a wrong to title it "francophagie." Thanks to everyone that read the posts and commented (in here or otherwise).

On the other hand, moving out of France and going to the army doesn't mean I'll stop cooking. I just won't be posting for a while. And I've already gotten a few of the same (or stronger) cannibalistic tendencies from interactions with the Greek bureaucracy. So, I may be back in six months, with another title... Oh, and it'll be two of us cooking from now on!

So long, France, and thanks for all the croissants!

Crème caramelée

2009-07-23T19:13:00.013+02:00

It's only a few days until vacation time, and that makes it really hard to focus on work. The unbearable heat doesn't help, either. With 3 desktop PCs always on at the office, it gets at least a couple of degrees hotter than outside. Of course, there is no air-conditioning, and when I'm typing, my wrists touch the hot surface of the overheated laptop. Unfortunately, the coolness of Mac laptops is limited to the metaphorical; the "air" should have been called "plasma" instead. Remember that wet wristbands help you cool down when exercising? For the same reason, touching the underside of your wrists on a hot laptop in a hot room for most of the day produces a constant feeling of getting burned, or to use the cooking euphemism, caramelized.

To make caramel, all you need to do is burn some sugar. Wet the sugar a bit at first, so that it will be liquid in the pan and remain liquid as the water evaporates and the sugar melts. This way, when all the water is gone and the sugar gets burnt, it'll be done evenly. Keep moving it around by tilting the pan. The moment it turns brown take it away from heat. You might need to stop it from burning further by touching the underside of the pan on some water momentarily, if you take it off the heat too late.

After a while, it starts to cool down and becomes thicker. Use a spoon to take a bit and let it flow back into the pan. When it's ready, it will have a honey-like consistency, and there will be an even string of caramel flowing from the spoon to the pan. You can make caramel baskets then, using a ladle. Move the spoon back and forth over an inverted ladle so that the string of caramel stays on the ladle. Keep moving the spoon back and forth, making crisscrossing threads of caramel on the back of the ladle. Also make some cyclic ones around the edge. The caramel thread solidifies very fast and will stay there. Use a pair of paper-scissors to cut the extra strings from around the edge, let the ladle cool down, and the "basket" should be easy to remove.

It took me a couple of tries to make an acceptable basket and unmold it successfully. Luckily, you can always recycle the failed attempts and any extra threads, by dropping them back into the pan to melt again.

At first, I just made the caramel to play around a bit, and was going to throw it away afterward. But then, I thought about crème caramelée, a nice, light, easy dessert. Spoon some of the still-liquid caramel into three ramekins so that it just covers the bottom, and set aside to cool and harden. Set a cup of milk with a drop of vanilla extract (or vanilla bean, if you have some) over medium heat, and stir occasionaly to avoid a skin from forming on the surface. While waiting for the milk, whisk an egg yolk, an egg, and three spoons of sugar, until the sugar dissolves. When the milk starts to bubble at the edges, take it off the heat and whisk it slowly, little by little into the egg mix, to temper it without cooking the egg.

Then, ladle the custard mix into the ramekins. Keep a spoon inverted close to the caramel, and ladle the mix so that it drops on the spoon and flows down, to avoid "digging" a hole into the caramel with the hot custard mix. Put the ramekins in an oven pan, move to a medium-hot oven, and fill the pan with hot water to half their height. Cook until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let the custards cool down, and then refrigerate for an hour.

To serve, run a knife around the edge, and flip over a plate.

The hard caramel has turned into a nice runny syrup. Soak the ramekin for a while before washing if there's some hard caramel left in it. If you have some caramel left in the pan, you can make extra caramel syrup for garnishing by adding some water (carefully if the caramel is hot), moving back over low heat, and stir until all the hard parts dissolve. Let it cool and it will thicken into a nice caramel syrup. Alternatively, do the same with heavy cream to get butterscotch, which is also nice for garnishing desserts and ice-creams.

I added some extra caramel syrup around the custard, and covered it with a caramel basket for garnish.

Here it is, a nice chilled vanilla custard, served with both liquid and solid caramel.

To eat, break the basket with the back of the spoon, and spoon together the bits of caramel thread, the vanilla custard and the caramel syrup.

Pizza and dessert

2009-07-20T23:00:00.000+02:00

A while back some friends that were visiting France for a conference came for dinner. We made a quick pizza with ham, tomato sauce (oil, onion, garlic, tomato, pinch of sugar, salt, pepper) fresh tomatoes, mushrooms and two kinds of cheese.

For the dough mix flour, yeast, salt, water, and an egg. Normally you don't need an egg, but we were hungry and didn't want to wait long, so I used an egg for the extra protein to make the dough more elastic faster, instead of more kneading and more waiting for the yeast.

While waiting for the pizza, I also made a dessert. We also had some chocolate ice-cream with it, a nice contrast to the hot fondant.

Is there such a thing as too much chocolate?

Chocolate soufflé moccha cake

2009-07-20T22:57:00.001+02:00

You might want to skip this one if you're on a diet. This is a cake I improvised during a weekend. It came out alright, so here it goes.

First I made a chocolate soufflé:

9 eggs, separated
1 cup of sugar
1 pound dark chocolate
1/2 cup butter

Butter and flour a tall round baking pot. Melt the chocolate with the butter in a bain-marie (or in the microwave, carefully) and set aside. Beat the yolks with most of the sugar (keep a spoon for the meringue) until they turn ivory. Beat the whites into a meringue with 1 spoon of sugar. Fold the chocolate in the yolk mixture, and then gently fold the meringue in, careful to keep most of the air. Move to the buttered baking dish, and cook in a medium hot oven until it's slightly jiggly in the center. Let it cool, unmold on a plate, and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, I made some pastry cream:

1 cup of milk
1 cup of cream
vanilla extract (or bean, if you have)
4 spoons of flour
2 egg yolks
half a cup of sugar
half a cup strong coffee

Set a pot with a cup of milk and a cup of cream over low flame. Add some vanilla, half the sugar and strong coffee. At the same time, beat one egg yolk with the rest of the sugar until ivory. Sift four tablespoons of flour in, and mix. Keep stirring and add the hot (but not boiling) milk and cream. Move to the pot over low flame and stir until it thickens. Set aside to cool, and mix often to avoid a crust. I didn't, so I had to peel the crust off when it was cold and eat it, sadly.

For garnish, I made a ganache and some whipped cream:

250g heavy cream
250g dark chocolate
1 spoon of confectioner's sugar

Whip half the cream with the confectioner's sugar until it formed soft peaks for the chantilly cream. Warm the rest up and mix with the chocolate, stirring until all the chocolate melts and the mix becomes smooth.

Then, bring it all together. Using a long serrated knife, slice the tall soufflé into three layers. Alternatively, use a normal knife to make a shallow cut all around at one third of the height, wrap the cake using a piece of thread so that it's in the cut, and pull the two ends of the string to make a very even cut. Repeat for the other layer.

Place the widest layer on a wide dish and spoon half the mocha cream on top. Put the next cake layer over, and top with the rest of the mocha. Finish with the third layer of cake, then garnish with the ganache. Pour a spoon of ganache on the top of the cake, and push it around with a spatula to cover it. Keep pouring one spoon of ganache at a time on top of the cake, and push it around with a spatula to drip evenly around the cake. Wipe any excess ganache from the bottom of the plate, make sure the cake is coated on all sides, and refrigerate for the ganache to set. After a few hours, garnish the cake on top with the whipped cream.

Overall it was nice and very chocolaty. The soufflé was nice instead of an actual cake, even though it doesn't have flour, because it was moist and hadn't deflated. The coffee flavor combines well with the chocolate and stops it from being overwhelming. I didn't use too much sugar and the chocolate was 75% cocoa, so it wasn't very sweet either, just right. If I was to change anything, next time I might try to get a little cognac somewhere in there. It is excellent with a bitter espresso.

Ratatouille

2009-07-20T22:51:00.000+02:00

Ratatouille is a fast and tasty (and vegetarian) side dish.

Ingredients

2 onions
2 cloves of garlic
a bell pepper
1 large eggplant (or 2 small)
1 zucchini
2 tomatoes
basil
parsley
dried thyme
olive oil
1 spoon of tomato purée

Start by sautéing the garlic in a bit of olive oil, over a low heat, for about 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Add the onion and sauté until transparent. Then add the eggplant in cubes or thin slices, a pinch of salt, and toss it a bit with a wooden spoon to oil all around. After a couple of minutes add the zucchini, sliced, and the bell pepper, chopped, and another pinch of salt. Stir for 5 minutes and add the herbs and chopped tomatoes. If the vegetables haven't leaked enough juice to have a thick sauce by now, add a bit of tomato paste and if necessary, a few spoons of water, a final pinch of salt, and pepper. Cook for another 10 minutes.

You can eat it like that, hot or cold. I wanted to use it to escort some fish, so I moved it to serving-sized cocottes, topped with breadcrumbs and a drop of olive oil, and put them in the oven for a few minutes to get a nice gratinée crust. Alternatively, you can eat it the next day with an egg on top.

My favorite is to spoon it with some hot just-out-of-the-oven bread. (Yes, the small breadrolls leaked some cheese again, but I'll keep practicing).

Spanakopita

2009-07-20T14:10:00.009+02:00

This is yet another post about dough. This one is a pastry dough called "phyllo", the Greek word for leaf. That name is very general, as it applies to any kind of dough that is rolled into a thin leaf. This specific one is a recipe I got from grandma, and is really good for making pitas. It's very similar to standard puff pastry (or pâte feuilletée) except there's no folding of the dough, resulting in a puff pastry with fewer, thicker layers.

The ingredients are the simplest ever: flour, water, salt. Like the original puff pastry, this one is unleavened. Start with two cups of flour and a pinch of salt, and keep adding water and kneading until you get a soft dough that doesn't stick to your hands. If you add too much water add more flour. Knead for about 10 minutes, then refridgerate for half an hour at least.

Take it out of the fridge, and roll it with your hands into a long worm, about 2 inches in diameter. Then cut that in half, again and again, until you get 8 to 16 pieces, the size of mandarin oranges. A kilogram of flour gives 16 small pieces.

Roll each piece around in your hands to make it a bit more spherical, and press it down on the table to flatten it with your palm. Using a rolling pin, roll each into a circle of about 5 inches in diameter.

Take some softened butter or margerine with your fingers, and rub it softly on each circle before you stack the next one on top. I made 4 stacks of 4 pieces each, with butter inbetween. Don't butter the bottom and top layers! Then refridgerate for 20 minutes. At this point, if you have made too much dough, you can wrap each stack in tinfoil or plastic wrap and freeze them. Take them out of the freezer to thaw the day before you need it, it's as good as fresh.

When ready to use, sprinkle flour on the table, and gently roll each stack into a thin wide sheet. It doesn't have to be extremely thin, 1mm thick is fine. Yielding to popular demand, I made mine into a spanakopita. This might seem like a sacrilege to many fellow Greeks, but I don't like feta, so my pita was cheeseless.

For the stuffing, chop and blanch the spinach for 3-4 minutes to soften it a bit, drain and mix with chopped dill, scallion and parsley. Add one egg (or two if you have a lot of stuffing), salt and pepper, a couple of spoons of olive oil, and mix. You can add feta to taste, too.

Then roll one of the sheets of dough around the rolling pin and transfer it on an oven pan. Stretch it to cover the whole pan, with some dough over the edges. Sprinkle some olive oil and add another sheet if you rolled them too thin. Spread the stuffing all over, and then transfer another sheet of dough over it, also stretching it to go a bit over the edges.

Drizzle some olive oil on top, and add another layer of dough, if it's too thin. My first top-layer wasn't big enough so I used a second, wider layer on top of it. Make sure you oil or butter the dough around the edges in between the sheets. This is not the time to cut down on fats, so use lots of oil on the edges.

Then roll the dough that is hanging over the edges, to seal it around. This is my favorite part of the pita, the rolled and crunchy phyllo at the corner piece. Again, make sure it's oiled there. Finally, sprinkle some extra oil on top, mark pieces with a knife, stab it a few times to let the steam out during cooking, and bake in low to medium heat for about an hour, to an hour and a half.

Unfortunately my gas oven only heats things from underneath, so I didn't get the golden-brown color that I should...

... luckily, people still liked it.

Œuf cocottes

2009-07-18T14:39:00.001+02:00

This post has been in the draft list for a while now. So, here it is, a quick snack.

In French, cocotte is usually what in English is called a Dutch oven. It can also mean a hen, or a... woman of questionable virtue and high maintenance.

However, cocottes come in much smaller sizes too, and you can use them to cook single servings. An œuf cocotte is a fancy name for what is really just an egg in a ramequin. It's a quick snack, and easy to make too.

I made a couple of œuf cocottes a while back, with some bits of ham, cheese, tomato, basil and, of course, an egg on top. I had some stuffing left and I put some cheese over it, for a cocotte gratinée. This is also easy to do with leftover foods, and especially good with yesterday's ratatouille. A small trick: before breaking the egg wipe it and push it on the middle of the stuffing to make a small crater. Then break it close to the cocotte careful not to break the yolk, so that it rests in the middle. Cook in the oven for a few minutes depending on how runny you want the egg.

Mmm, quick and tasty.

Dough and cheese

2009-06-23T17:58:00.002+02:00

I like making bread. Kneading dough is relaxing, and also nice to punch, if you want to vent some anger. If you're not breaking a sweat, you're not doing it right. Sadly, I haven't had much time to bake recently. Even worse, I also neglected to feed my starter regularly. It's still alive (yeast doesn't die that easily) but it got a bit too sour and weak, taking too long to rise. So, I decided to kill it and start over. How do you kill a starter? Well, you bake it!

So, one day I woke up real early, and made a bread dough with all of the starter (about 3 cups), salt, and whole wheat flour. I kept the starter a bit watery, so it took around 1.5kg of flour to get the right dough consistency. That was a large batch of dough (for my standards), so it was lots of fun to knead. I left it in a bowl in the sun, covered by plastic wrap, and went to work. Sun heat did wonders, so much that I contemplated saving some of the starter, because it had risen nicely. I decided against it in the end. I think the sour starter (or maybe it was the sunlight) produced more alcohol than it used to, because the dough was softer than usual.

I deflated the dough pressing it down, and kneaded it with a bit more flour to get it back to a nice consistency. I made half the dough into a loaf, and decided to experiment a bit with the rest.

I had a camembert cheese in the fridge, and decided to make a bread with it. I thought that a whole cheese was too much for a single loaf, so I sliced it in half, rolled a bit of dough, and wrapped the two halves with dough. I also made some small rolls and a croissant with some brie cheese in the center.

I still had some dough left, so I made yet another kind of cheese pita. For this one, roll the dough into a thin long stripe, around 2 inches wide. Then grate whatever cheese you have, I used what was in the fridge, parmesan, a mild goat cheese, and some brie. I guess this will be a good one for feta, but I don't like feta. Spread the cheeses on the dough stripe, in the center, and fold it lengthwise over the cheese. Then bring the roll all around, rolling it like a snake. Ideally, you can brush it with some egg wash for color and a shiny finish, but I didn't. Let everything rise for an hour, and bake in a hot oven. Unfortunately, my gas oven has a strong flame underneath, but the heat is not evenly dispersed, and bread cooks before the top crust gets brown enough. It's still tasty though.

The small pieces were done first. Unfortunately, the cheese melted very fast, and the dough was still rising, pushing the melted cheese out. There was some left inside and they tasted good. Next time I'll use a harder cheese though, camembert and brie melt very fast.

The same thing happened with the half-camembert bread. The inside was nice and melted, but some of it escaped and got burnt.

Yet again, the pita also leaked some of the brie. It was still tasty!

Dijon mustards with tapas

2009-06-20T10:35:00.009+02:00

It's been a while since I last posted. Work is piling up, and there isn't much time to cook, sadly. I won't be in France for long, and there's a mountain of things to finish, and many places to go, before I leave.

Despoina was here a couple of weeks ago, and we took the train to Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, or Bourgogne, as they say here. It was a nice trip, albeit a bit too long for a single day, almost four hours each way.

Dijon is a nice city, with an impressive town center, full of old, stone buildings. This is a massive cathedral that looks very medieval, especially when you stand right next to it.

The town center was all pedestrian, stone-paved narrow streets, with tightly packed houses all around. The architecture looked a bit strange, the ground floor is all stone-built, and there are stone-built pillars and chimneys above, but the rest of the building (usually two extra floors) was wood and plaster. Some even had mini-gargoyles carved on the wood of the upper floors. I haven't seen houses like in the Rhône-Alpes region, but it was everywhere in Burgundy.

Here's a funny detail that we liked. The stone-paved streets were marked with triangular arrows, depicting an owl (a local good-luck symbol). The arrows mark a "scenic path" that tourists can follow to visit all the important sights. Cool!

After walking around the old town center for a few hours, we sat at an old café on a small square, for a well-deserved rest. They served an amazing capuccino ice-cream with chocolate.

Of course, when talking about Dijon the word "mustard" immediatly comes to mind. There were small tourist shops peppered all over the center, selling small jars of mustard. We bought ten kinds of mustard.

We were famished by the time we got home, after four hours in the train. So, we made some quick snacks. We made some salad with tomato, basil, mozzarela and mushroom, served on lettuce leaves. Half of the ingredients served stuffed, and the other half finely chopped. We also made two small soufflés. Separate two eggs, and beat the whites into meringue. Beat the yolks with a touch of milk, and grate cheese in them. Then fold with the meringue and bake. I used the new serving-sized petites cocottes that Despoina bought, they're great for a personal soufflé. We grilled a couple of saucisses for each to eat the mustards with, and made a few bruschettas with sliced baguette, olive oil, mushroom, basil and mozzarela.

I remembered to take a picture only after finishing my soufflé... but you can see the mustard jars! I liked one with herbes de Provence and a spicy one with horseradish.

Chicken roll with cherry tomatoes

2009-05-30T14:33:00.005+02:00

The main course should be the peak of the whole meal. This recipe seasons the chicken breast with a blend of strong flavors, a combination of herbs, garlic, anchovy and olives on the inside, with bacon on the outside, and cooked cherry tomatoes on the side. Its taste is not joking around, and isn't flirty nor subtle in any way. It is direct, and to the point...

Ingredients

black olives
an anchovy fillet
a couple of capers
bread crumbs
fresh parsley, mint and basil leaves
three cloves of garlic
salt and pepper
olive oil
a shallot
three chicken breasts
ten thin slices of bacon, or prosciutto, or parma ham
one branch of cherry tomatoes (around 8) per person

For the stuffing, pit the olives, and blend them with the anchovy, garlic, capers, herbs and a bit of olive oil, to make a paste. Add some bread crumbs if it's too runny, mix and set aside.

Wash the chicken, slice each breast once or twice if it's thick, not all the way through, so it unfolds into one thin long layer. Layer the bacon stripes on the tinfoil.

Pound the chicken a bit with a frying pan to flatten it if necessary, layer it on top of the bacon, and season with pepper.

Rub the paste on the chicken, and drip a bit of olive oil on top.

Then, carefully roll it using the tinfoil, so that the chicken is wrapped all around in bacon.

Then wrap it in the tinfoil tightly. Then put it in boiling water as is, wrapped in tinfoil, for 10-15 minutes. The meat will harden and maintain the rolled shape. Let it cool a bit and remove the tinfoil. Be careful when you roll it, so that it's not too long to fit in the pot of boiling water. I hadn't thought of that at first, so I had to unwrap it once and re-roll it thicker and shorter. Then put a bit of olive oil in a frying pan over high heat, brown the roll all around a bit, and move it to an oven pan.

Add the cherry tomatoes to the hot frying pan in the same oil (vine side up) for a minute. There's no need to cook the tomatoes all around now, just soften the underside and get a bit of fat on them.

Move the tomatoes all around the roll, in the oven pan.

Last, just before I put it in the oven, I added a couple of spoons of tomato sauce on the roll, for more color. Cook in the oven for about 40-45 minutes, medium hot.

There's no need to add water or broth, the tomatoes will be full of juice, and there's also some water left in the roll from the boiling. There's going to be plenty of juice at the end. Serve a slice and a branch of tomatoes per person, and spoon some of the juice on top.

Veggie lasagna

2009-05-29T10:14:00.002+02:00

This is a somewhat complicated dish, because you precook every ingredient, and then you layer them together and bake. The ingredients I used:

pasta dough, rolled and cut into lasagna
sautéed eggplant
sautéed carrots
sautéed onion or shallot
marinara sauce
fresh tomato
fresh green pepper

Any other vegetable will work too. The tender ones like spinach, raw, blanched or steamed, the more "robust" like zucchini or mushrooms, sautéed in a bit of olive oil. You can use boiled, steamed or sautéed broccoli or cauliflower too, just chop the flowers to smaller pieces. Anyway, these were all I had. And now for the details.

Make a standard pasta dough with two cups of flour, salt, two to three eggs and, if necessary, water or extra flour. Knead for around ten minutes, and refrigerate in plastic wrap or ziplock bag, for at least half an hour. It holds very nicely in the freezer for unspecified amounts of time (I've tried up to a month with no problem), so you can make more for future batches. While you're waiting, peel a few carrots and slice them finely, lengthwise (like for stir-fry). Also slice a big eggplant (or two smaller ones) in half-inch slices or thinner, sprinkle with salt, and let them sit in a strainer. Be careful, the eggplant will ooze a black, bitter liquid.

After the dough is in the fridge for at least half an hour it'll be more elastic and smooth. Separate it into two or three pieces depending on how big a rolling surface you have. Roll each thin, like for other pasta, until you can see light through it. It takes a few minutes, because it's elastic and will partly shrink back after you roll it. But, it's a nice exercise. If you have a pasta rolling machine, either electric or hand-driven, it will be easier. Cut each leaf of dough into large rectangle pieces, and sprinkle them with flour to avoid them sticking together. Bring a pot of water to boil, salt and drop them in a few at a time, for 4-5 minutes, or 3-4 minutes if you want them more al dente. Take them out and put them in cold water to avoid them sticking while the rest are cooked. Once you're done, and they're in cold water and have all cooled down, you can drain the cold water, they won't stick much from now on. Alternatively, if you have a lot of table real-estate, you can layer them on the table to cool off without touching each other, so there's no need for cold water.

The next step is a simple marinara sauce, for layering. Chop a shallot and sauté for a few minutes with a spoon of olive oil, over low heat, until it softens. Add tomato sauce or purée (diluted with water if necessary), salt, pepper, a couple of bay leaves, a pinch of sugar and if you want a pinch of oregano or thyme. If you have any leftover, you can save it in a jar in the fridge for a couple of days for spaghetti. Let it simmer for five to ten minutes and set aside.

By now the eggplants will be "de-bittered", so wash the salt off and let them dry for a couple of minutes. They'll still be salty, so if you want to add parmesan to the lasagna you might want to soak them for a few minutes to get rid of even more salt. Set a non-stick pan over medium-high flame, and place a bit of olive oil in a plate, next to it. Briefly dip each eggplant slice in the olive oil, both sides, and then put in the hot pan. One layer at a time. Don't fry them in olive oil, because they absorb too much, and then spit it out in the oven, you want the lasagna to be light, not too oily. Then fry the carrots in batches, in a spoon of olive oil like you would for stir-fry. If you are soaking the extra salt out of the eggplants, start with the carrots. I just washed them briefly, and didn't use salt on anything else, except the tomato sauce. It evened out.

OK, now all the ingredients are there, you just need to layer them. Get an oven pan (I used a pyrex glass one), start with a couple of spoons of tomato sauce at the bottom to prevent sticking, and layer lasagna and vegetables alternatively. Don't forget to spoon a bit of sauce in between every layer.

Finish with a layer of thin fresh tomato and pepper slices, sprinkle with bread crumbs and drops of olive oil. You can use parmesan on top, but a couple of my guests didn't like cheese. The bread crumbs soak the olive oil and taste good too.

Cook for 20 to 30 minutes in a medium hot oven, and serve. They taste very good the next day too. The total time for preparation took a bit over an hour, with some overlapping time between making sauce and sautéing the vegetables. It's a light, elegant, summer dish, nice for dinner because it's fulfilling and still light. The meat version would have been too heavy for a summer dinner I think, especially among other meat dishes.

Crispy, herby, breaded chicken drumsticks

2009-05-27T22:58:00.005+02:00

I liked this one, it's easy, tasty, and looks good. I served one small-size drumstick per person, as a first course. Wash the drumsticks and cut around the bone with a knife, to remove the skin from the bottom third (where there's no meat). Chop the end of the bone away, a punch on the knife ought to do it, the bone is not that hard there. Slightly score the skin that remains with the knife a few times. Don't cut deep into the meat, just the skin, so it gets more crunchy. Salt and pepper them generously.

Put a couple of spoons of olive oil in a hot pan, over high heat, and "seal" the drumsticks all around, for a few seconds. You only need to slightly brown the outside, to keep the juices in, they don't need to cook all the way. Transfer them in an oven pan and cook in a medium hot oven for half an hour.

While they're in the oven, put in a food processor a few leaves of basil, parsley, mint, a couple of spoons of olive oil, and a cup of breadcrumbs. I save any stale bread and break it in the food processor when it dries up, so I always have a plastic container of breadcrumbs in the fridge. Process everything until the leaves are gone, and the whole thing looks like green sand. Set aside.

After the drumsticks are cooked for half an hour, take them out of the oven, and while they're still hot, rub a spoon of mustard on each. The mustard will melt from the heat, and its flavor will be absorbed nicely by the dried skin.

Immediately, as they're still sticky from the mustard, roll them in the green breadcrumbs, and rub some on until they are coated. Return them to the oven for another five to ten minutes, for the coating to dry up and make a nice, aromatic, green crust. Take them out of the oven and serve, before the crust softens at all.

This is how it looked finally, on my plate. You can tell from the picture that I had just finished the appetizers. They taste very good, if you seal them properly at the beginning in the hot oil, they're moist and yet well-cooked, and the herby breadcrumbs and mustard make a very nice crust with a great smell. My guests liked them too.

(Citation: I got the green breadcrumb crust idea from a youtube video with G.Ramsey)

Salad appetizer

2009-05-25T18:56:00.003+02:00

Some friends came over for dinner yesterday, and we had a lot to eat and drink. I decided a full menu post would be too long, so I'll break it apart and write about each dish separately, as I have time.

This one is a simple appetizer, following a "Greek salad" idea. As with all salads, and raw foods in general, the quality of the ingredients is what makes it taste good, so this post is only about the presentation. After all, the recipe for the best Greek salad you've ever had is trivially simple: just get the best tomatoes you've ever had, the best cucumber you've ever had, the best olive oil you've ever had, the best onion you've ever had, etc, and combine them!

This presentation gives three servings per tomato. You need a tomato, a piece of mozzarella, cucumber, and parsley or basil (or both) for garnish.

Use a peeler to cut the cucumber in thin slices, and cut the tomato in three equal pieces, each spanning a 120-degree angle. Then slice each tomato piece another three times, careful not to go all the way through.

Cut slices of mozzarella and stuff each slice in the tomato, so that at the end, each tomato third, expands to look like a half. Stick a bit of parsley or basil in the middle slice. You can also use slices of hard-boiled egg or avocado (or even of feta cheese, if that's your thing) instead of mozzarella.

Then, using two long cucumber stripes make a cross on a plate, put a piece of tomato on the cross, and turn the edges to wrap it. Keep in place with a toothpick. Salt, and dress with a spoon of olive oil, or maybe a simple vinaigrette of olive-oil and red-wine vinegar.

Here is how it looks like with a bit of crab dip on the side, my two appetizers. To make the crab sauce, blend crab meat with some crème fraîche until smooth.

Main course: Oven ragoût

2009-05-02T12:30:00.004+02:00

Ingredients

around half a kilogram (a pound) of lamb, no fat, no bones, chopped into bite-sized cubes. (I started with 700g of leg, and took the bone and fat out.)
4 potatoes, in 1-inch cubes
5 medium-sized carrots, quartered widthwise
3 shallots
1 onion
pinch of salt and pepper
2-3 cups of chicken stock
1 cup of red wine
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon of olive oil

Cooking

First, clean the lamb from any bones and fat, and chop it into cubes. Then put it in a ziploc bag with the wine and a crashed clove of garlic, and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours. Put the shallots and carrots in a tall oven pot. Chop the onion and put in a frying pan with the olive oil, on low heat. After it softens a bit take the meat out of the marinade and add it to the pan. Brown the meat for 1 minute on each side. Deglaze the pan with the chicken stock, and pour everything from the pan to the oven pot, over the vegetables. Salt and pepper, add water to barely cover everything and put the pot in a medium-heat oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Then add the potatoes on top (don't stir) and add water if necessary to barely cover them. Return to the oven for another hour.

Came out nice and juicy, and almost with no fat at all.

Serve it with a spoon to get a lot of liquid, it's quite tasty, specially for dipping a slice of this loaf.

First course: mushroom tortellini in broth

2009-05-01T00:32:00.004+02:00

Remeber the carrot pasta dough from a while back? I had some left in the freezer. I used it to make a few tortellini, to serve as a first course. I didn't have much dough left, nor many mushrooms, so I served the tortellini (4 per person) in broth. It was light, but tasty. And the good thing about home-made tortellini is you can make them as large as you like.

For the filling

4 big mushrooms. I used simple white mushrooms, but if you can mix various kinds, even better.
1 shallot
half a teaspoon nutmeg
half a clove of garlic
a spoon of flour
pinch of salt & pepper

Process everything in a food processor until it's a paste. Add a spoon of water if necessary for processing. Then transfer in a non-stick pot, and stir over low heat for 10-15 minutes, until the water from the mushrooms evaporates and the paste thickens a bit. Set aside to cool. You can add parmesan cheese if you want; I didn't.

For the tortellini

Roll the dough thin, and cut circles, about 3-inch in diameter.

Spoon some stuffing in the center of each circle.

Water your fingers and touch the circle around, and then fold it in half and press to stick the dough together.

Fold again, parallel to the first fold, and bring the corners together.

Water your finger and press the corners together to form the tortellini.

If you use 3-inch diameter circles, you'll end up with pretty large tortellini, with a lot of stuffing.

Then I cut up another mushroom, and I put it in a big pot with salt, two cups of beef broth and two-to-three cups of water. After it boiled for five minutes, I dropped the tortellini in to cook for another 3-4 minutes. Then I ladled four tortellini and some broth per person.

Sprinkle some chopped chives or green onion on top, for a bit of color.

It was quite good. Depending on how reduced and strong your broth is, you might want to use more or less water. The broth wasn't as clear as it could have been, but I was too bored to strain it through a cheesecloth. Ideally, your broth should be crystal-clear.

Hors d'œuvre: Canapés au saumon fumé

2009-04-30T23:00:00.004+02:00

A small, quick and tasty snack, nice to use as an appetizer. Pulse some smoked salmon in a food processor for a few seconds, and then add créme fraîche and process until smooth and creamy. Spoon some on a base of multi-grain wheat and rye bread (I made some with a sourdough starter), and top with a couple of capers. I served each canapé in an endive leaf, which added a slightly bitter, refreshing taste.

I set the table with two on every plate before the guests arrived, so we'd have something to escort the first glass of wine, before we started with the first course.

Detail of France

2009-04-26T12:12:00.003+02:00

A picture Despoina took in Lyon.

Crêpe aux pommes et au caramel

2009-04-24T14:01:00.006+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I made crêpes with a mix of wheat and rye flour.

Crêpes are easy to make, so you can make a pile and store them in the fridge for a few days. Then you wrap a bit of cheese or jam in them, and you have a nice quick snack.

I thought a funny way to serve a sweet crêpe with apple filling and caramel on top is to wrap it like a giant tortellini. First pour a bit of the filling on the crêpe next to the center, and fold in half, over the diameter. Fold again in half, parallel to the first fold, and finally bring the edges together to form the tortellini shape. Then burn some sugar into caramel and use it to glue the edges on top of each other, and also pour some on top with a spoon to make crunchy caramel threads.
Here it is, surrounded with a bit of butterscotch caramel. OK, maybe I overdid it a bit, but I like the combination of apple with caramel.

I used a bit of compote de pomme for stuffing. I bought a jar from the farmer's market, it's a jam-like apple compote, but it doesn't have much (any?) sugar, so it's far less sweet than jam, more like apple purée. I warmed it up and added a spoon of honey and half a spoon of butter, before using it to stuff the crêpes.

Cabbage pattern

2009-04-15T16:35:00.004+02:00

This is a photo from a while back, when the farmer's market was full of cabbages. I thought the pattern looked cool.

I made a simple salad by chopping this and adding some croutons and dressing. Make croutons by cutting stale bread in cubes, mix with a bit of olive oil and dry in the oven for a few minutes. To make the dressing blend an anchovy fillet and a small clove of garlic, add yogurt or fromage blanc or sour cream, salt, pepper, and mix until smooth. The dressing is strong and assertive, so adjust anchovy and garlic content to taste. If it's too thick, add a spoon of water to make it more liquid.

Carrot pasta

2009-04-12T17:06:00.006+02:00

Remember the carrot leftovers from making all that stock? I puréed the carrots (peeled) in the food processor, and spooned it over about 2 to 3 cups of flour. I added two eggs, salt, and kneaded until I got a nice, soft, orange dough (add more flour if necessary, depending on how much water is in the carrots).

I put the dough in a plastic bag in the fridge to rest for an hour or so, and then it's ready to make pasta!

I rolled some dough thin, and cut it into tagliatelle.

Then, I laid the tagliatelle to dry overnight. Unfortunately, making tagliatelle was a bit time-consuming to do by hand. Maybe I should invest in a "pasta-rolling and cutting" machine (probably an inexpensive hand-operated one) for next time.

Too bored to roll the rest of the dough, I pulled the rest turned into shells (like thin gnocchi) as I showed in a previous post. I let the shells dry overnight with enough flour to avoid sticking, and put them in the freezer next morning.

The tagliatelle had also dried by next day.

Tagliatelle al forno

Here's how I cooked the tagliatelle the next day. Very fast and tasty.

Boil the tagliatelle for a couple of minutes, and drain them. At the same time, chop some mushrooms.

Sauté the mushrooms in a spoon of olive oil and mix them with the pasta. Top it with bits of reblochon cheese (rind side up), and ladle a bit of the water where you boiled the pasta over everything. Finally, put everything in a hot oven for 10 minutes.

Reblochon is a creamy cheese with a lot of flavor, and it melted quickly all over the pasta: Très bon!

Beef stock

2009-04-12T15:17:00.004+02:00

I just have to finish this "stock" trilogy, don't I? Beef stock is essentially the same as all other stock, i.e. use whatever vegetable you have available, with one extra step. You need beef, preferably parts with bone. To get a nice dark broth, put all your beef in an oven pan, spoon a couple of tablespoons of tomato purée on each piece, and roast in a very hot oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until the edges of the bones and the tomato on the bottom of the pan start caramelizing (that's an euphemism for "burning"). Then put your meat in the pot along with all the vegetables, deglaze the pan over a medium flame on the stove using water and add that with everything else. Fill up with cold water, bring to a boil, and simmer for a long time.

The goal is to get all the collagen from the bones for full flavor. That can take up to 8 or 10 hours of simmering! If you're not afraid of accidents and getting burned in your sleep, you can do that overnight. I do it on Sundays when I stay at home all day, and have to read papers, or clean up, or read books, etc. After you're done, the bones should be full of "dots", and break with almost no effort. Wait until it's cold, skim the solid fat from the surface, and bottle. Again, this can be frozen for a couple of months, but only lasts two to three days in the fridge.

Vegetable stock

2009-04-11T11:32:00.005+02:00

After the last post on chicken stock, Sophia asked about vegetable stock, so here it is. This one is easy, and way faster, since you don't need to wait until you break down and extract the collagen from any bones.

You could start by sautéing or roasting the onion-like vegetables and carrots in a bit of oil for extra flavor, but I just boil everything together. I used four leeks, two onions, a couple of carrots I had left, six cloves of garlic (crushed), a couple of pieces of ginger, three pieces of clove, a branch of celery, parsley, three (small) fennel roots and 4-5 mushrooms for color. Don't use fresh small white mushrooms, they don't have much taste. Instead, use leftover mushrooms you haven't used and they've opened underneath, and the black seeds are visible. Or you can get them from the "old vegetables" section in the supermarket, much cheaper.

Another thing you can do for vegetable stock is use all kinds of leftovers from ordinary cooking. I have a plastic bag in the freezer, and I add anything I don't use when cooking: carrot and potato peels (wash the vegetables before peeling), stems from parsley, dill and other herbs, seeds from green peppers, etc. So, add your bag of frozen leftovers to the vegetables, put everything in the pot, cover with cold water, bring to a simmer and simmer for about 2 hours uncovered to reduce.

If you want to make vegetable soup, add also a potato, don't use peels or add anything non-edible, chop vegetables finely, and stop cooking after 30-45 minutes depending on quantity. This way, you'll have a tasty broth, and the vegetables won't have lost all flavor and texture. To thicken the soup mash the potato and add it back, or just use potato flakes, and optionally finish with milk. It's a very nice soup. Alternatively, without potato, just add shrimp during the last 10 minutes. Also a very nice soup.

For general-purpose broth, take all flavor out from the vegetables by boiling for another hour. Then let it cool, pass it through a cheesecloth on a sieve (or just a strainer, up to you) to get clear stock. Since I'd used the vegetable leftovers, I threw away the solids. I only salvaged the carrots, they were the only that were easy to separate without much hassle. More on what I did with the carrots in a future post. I bottled the stock in freezer-friendly plastic milk bottles. Again, no salt. My freezer is now packed with bottles of beef, chicken and vegetable stock.

This stock is really good for making risotto, or for substituting for milk in mashed potatoes when one doesn't eat dairy products. And of course, for soup.

Chicken stock

2009-04-04T23:43:00.011+02:00

This morning I went to the farmer's market. There was someone selling farm-raised poultry there, and I decided to make chicken stock. So, I bought a chicken, herbs and vegetables, and headed home. I've never bought meat from the farmer's market before. There was some extra overhead that you don't get with meat from a normal butcher. For example, I had to chop the head off from the chicken! Also, there were some feathers left on the skin, and I had to get rid of those over a flame, but then the whole house smelled like burnt hair.

I cut the chicken roughly into portions (although that's not necessary,) and put it in my stock pot. Then I added:

Celery, stem and leaves
4 carrots (I didn't peel them, I just washed them very well, and scrubed them with the hard side of the sponge)
Parsley, about a cup, coarsely chopped, including stems
Two onions, quartered
6 cloves of garlic, smashed
Two leeks
One star-anise
Three cloves
Around 15 peppercorns
Dried sage
Dried thyme

I covered everything with cold water, and set it on the stove. This is my stock pot or "marmite" in french. It's quite big, with a capacity of 14 liters.
When it started to boil, I lowered the heat to low, and left it to simmer. After a few hours, the water had reduced quite a bit, and the house smelled very nice.

Then I strained the liquid and let it cool. I'm going to skim off the fat tomorrow after it solidifies in the fridge, bottle it in plastic bottles, and put it in the freezer.

As I've written before, this is much better than stock-flavored cubes, or even the stock you can get boxed from the supermarket. And low overhead, too, you just put everything in the pot and it takes care of itself. It takes a few hours, but it doesn't even need stirring.

The solid leftovers

Unfortunately, there's not much taste left in the solids after boiling for a few hours. Plus, the chicken had almost dissolved into fibers, and there were a whole lot of tiny bones everywhere. Normally, I just throw it away. This time, I had a different idea. I went through the solids to remove the small bones, by transferring small batches with a fork into a bowl, and throwing away any bones that came up. Very tedious and time consuming, I won't make a habit of it. Fortunately, you can multiplex this part, and also talk on skype, listen to the radio, or watch a movie (or all of the above) at the same time.

After the boring "separate from the bones" phase, I also took the carrots out. The carrots were the only thing in the solids that looked like itself, everything else had melted into tiny pieces, all mixed together. Remember I hadn't peeled the carrots before, so I peeled them now. Then I puréed them with the food processor, to get a nice, bright orange purée. I'm going to use it to color and decorate things.

The rest of the stuff was about 1.5 liters of dissolved solid leftovers to experiment with. After looking for ideas online, I decided to try making patties out of them. I took about half a cup and mixed it with a quarter of a cup of breadcrumbs. Then I added salt, pepper, and half an egg, and molded it into small kefte. I fried these in a stick-proof pan in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. They came out quite tasty!

I still don't know what I'll do with the rest. I might just make everything into kefte and fry it too, but I'm itching to try something new now. I'll keep you posted.

Bagels

2009-03-30T16:36:00.003+02:00

I started to make more bread yesterday. After the dough had risen once, I punched it down and was about to make a loaf, when I had a crazy idea. I haven't had a bagel since I last was in the US.

So, I rolled some dough into small balls instead, and then made a one-inch hole in each. I smoothed them and set them aside. Then I put an inch of water with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar in a frying pan, and boiled it. I dropped the bagels in the boiling water for 3-4 minutes, and then put them in the oven for another 25 minutes.

Here they are, my own bagels, fresh and hot out of the oven. These are with whole wheat, rye, and multi-grain flour (with various nuts and sesame). No yeast, just my sourdough starter, but they weren't sour at all. Next time I'll try white wheat flour with cinnamon and raisins, or maybe rye with poppy seeds. I'm definitely going to repeat this experiment.

Tiramisu

2009-03-29T15:37:00.006+02:00

I like the combination of coffee and alcohol in this dessert. It's very light, creamy and uplifting.

Ladyfingers (enough to layer the bottom of your containers)
4 egg yolks
3 egg whites
2-to-3 tablespoons granulated sugar, depending on sweetness of liquor
1 teaspoon confectioner's sugar
250gr of mascarpone cheese
1 cup Madeira wine. That's what I had available, but you can also use Porto, Vin Santo, Marsala, or any liqueur-sweet wine you can find. Coffee liqueur is also good, and brandy works, too.
1/2 cup espresso coffee
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
cocoa powder for dusting

Preparation:

Separate the eggs.
Beat the egg yolks with one or two tablespoons of sugar (depending on how sweet is your liquor) until it has a light ivory-yellow color.
Move the bowl to a double boiler over simmering water, add 1/3 cup wine (or other liquor) and whisk until it thickens. Set it aside.
Using a rubber spatula, press and mix the mascarpone cheese until it's a thick cream.
Stir a spoon of the sugar in the espresso, add to the mascarpone and mix until it's smooth.
Whip the cream with a drop of vanilla, and a teaspoon of confectioner's sugar until it forms peaks, and put it in the fridge.
Make a meringue of the egg whites (I used 3 egg whites, not all 4) and fold it into the now cold zabaglione.
Pour the liquor left in a dish and dip the ladyfingers in there for 5-10 seconds, sugar side down. Layer the bottom of a container (a tarte-pan) or individual cups, wine-glasses, etc. I used 5 large teacups.
With a spatula, cover the ladyfingers with mascarpone, then zabaglione, and then cream. You can make 3 or 6 layers on top of the ladyfingers by repeating with mascarpone, zabaglione and ending with cream. I guess you can even fold everything together and fill the cups up. I used 6 layers, this way it looks cooler, and probably you keep more of the meringue air bubbles, which give it a very light texture.
Put in the fridge to set, for at least a couple of hours
Dust with cocoa powder before serving

It looks better in transparent cups or wine glasses, but the teacups were all I had. It tasted quite good, not too sweet, and very light and airy.

Sourdough bread

2009-03-29T13:58:00.007+02:00

I made a sourdough starter recently, and I use it to make bread, instead of yeast. The process is extremely easy: just mix a couple of tablespoons of flour with a couple of tablespoons of water, leave it in an un-capped glass jar (or plastic container), and every day add another spoon of flour and water. After a few days, it'll start to froth and grow, and smell sour. There, that's a starter, you can use half of it to make bread, and add flour and water to the rest for next time. After it starts growing, keep it in the fridge, then it doesn't need feeding every day.

I read somewhere that you get different strains of yeast and bacteria depending on where you live, the yeast living in the flour you use, etc. My non-statistically significant experience hints that's true. When I made a starter in the US, it doubled in size in about 2 hours after feeding it, and the bread wasn't very sour, if I wanted more sourness, I added more flour after the first rise, and had the bread rise twice before making a loaf. Here, I got a completely different behavior. After I feed the starter (or knead it into dough), nothing happens for 3 to 4 hours, and then, within an hour, it doubles in size. It's also more sour.

I made two loafs, one with white wheat flour, and a multi-grain with rye flour and whole grains.
This is the wheat flour bread, not very sour, but more sour than the simple supermarket-yeast bread I made before. This is good to escort food, or dip into stuff.

The whole-wheat, rye and multi-grain bread had a much stronger flavor, as expected. It was a meal on its own, best eaten with just a bit of butter, or with cheese.

Dinner menu

2009-03-03T10:51:00.004+01:00

A few friends came over for dinner on Saturday. I made a salad, one main course with two sides, bread, and dessert. I was planning to make an appetizer too, but I ran out of time. So, here's the menu for five.

Green salad
This was easy. I got three kinds of lettuce-like salad greens, chopped them coarsely, added finely chopped green onion, chives and parsley, salted and dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

Main course: slow-roasted pork, with a caramel coating
Get two smallish rolls of pork with no fat chunks. Luckily, they sell them rolled and tied. Stab the meat and plant thin slices of garlic in the holes, total about one clove of garlic for each roll. Then mix:

a pinch of chili powder
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

Add a bit of olive oil and make a paste of these, then rub it around the meat. Put a slice of bacon on each piece of meat, the goal is the bacon fat to drip on the (otherwise lean) meat as it melts. I put the rolls in two small oven pans and in the oven, on low heat (setting 3 of a scale to 8). Slow roast for about 2h to 2h30.
Then mix:

3-4 tablespoons of brown sugar
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon mustard

Make a paste of these, spoon it over the meat, and cook in the oven for an additional 30 minutes, increasing the heat a bit. The sugar caramelizes a bit, making a nice coating around the meat.

When serving, take out of the oven, move the meat to a dish and slice. Then move the oven pan over a stove on low heat. There should be bits of burnt seasoning, bits of caramel, oil and fat and maybe a bit of meat juice left. Sprinkle a teaspoon of flour in that, and stir it in. Then, deglaze by adding some beef stock, and stir until all the burnt bits are dissolved, and you have a nice thick gravy. I poured the gravy over the meat, and served.

It helped to have two oven pans with the two rolls of meat, because the second one was in the oven while we were eating the first, and I took it out just when the last slice of the first roll was gone. Deglazing to make the gravy takes 2-3 minutes, so it's easily done "online" at the latest possible moment.

Side dish: Mashed potatoes
Mashed potatoes is a very standard dish to serve with roast and gravy, and easy to make. Usually you boil and peel the potatoes, mash them, add salt, milk and butter, and serve. Well, I had a small constraint, I couldn't use milk in the food. So, I substituted that with vegetable broth. I make vegetable and beef stock and store it in the freezer, it's easy and much better than the "cube" things, or the broth sold in paper boxes. I'd made this broth from leeks, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, parsley, fennel, and probably other stuff that I forget now. So I used the broth to make the mashed potatoes instead of milk, and a bit of olive oil. I should have used less broth than I would milk, the mashed potatoes tasted more "light" and less filling than normal but also a bit more aromatic. I think it was good enough for a side dish.

Side dish: mushroom risotto
This one is easy too, except it takes a bit of stirring. In a sauce pan over low heat add a tablespoon of olive oil and a finely chopped shallot. After 2-3 minutes add a tablespoon of butter, and chopped mushrooms. If you have many kinds of mushroom add them in the right order so that they are all cooked to the same consistency at the end. The softer ones are easier to cook, add them last. Then, add two cups of risotto rice, and stir for a minute to coat it with the fat. Have some hot beef stock ready, and with a ladle add a cup of broth, salt and stir. Stir often, and add more cups of hot stock when the previous cup is absorbed. You have to stir often, so that the rice on top (that is not covered by the liquid) is also cooked. Keep doing that adding one cup at a time for about 25 minutes. It took 4 cups of beef stock, if I remember correctly, maybe 5. After it's done, turn off the heat and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and chives.

Dessert: chocolate and strawberry cake
I might have gone a bit far with how chocolaty this one was. Isn't that great?

For the cake:

2 eggs
100g butter
1 2/3 cup flour
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup cocoa powder
vanilla extract
1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (or 1 teaspoon baking soda)
pinch of salt

Butter and flour a cake pan, and set the oven to 180C (350F). Beat the butter and sugar, add the eggs, and beat for 5 minutes. Then add the milk, sift the solids through a sieve, and add them while mixing, little by little. Pour the mix in the cake pan, and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean from the center. Set aside for a while to cool down.

While it cools down, make the strawberry filling.

1 packet of strawberries
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup white dessert wine: Vinsanto would be nice here, but I didn't have any, so I used one I found on the local grocery store.

Wash and chop the strawberries in half-inch cubes, sprinkle with the sugar and set aside for 5 minutes.

Then put a frying pan on low heat, and melt the butter. Add the strawberries with any liquid that they've sweated, and the wine. Simmer until it thickens a bit. Let it cool.

Then, make a ganache. Warm up some heavy cream, and pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until smooth and shiny. Set aside to cool. I didn't measure the quantities, it was a big bar of chocolate (minus the bits I ate), and about a cup of cream.

When everything has cooled down, cut the cake into layers. I cut it in three layers. You can use a long serrated knife and try to make the layers have the same width everywhere. Or, you can use a knife to draw a shallow "guide" around the cake, wrap it with a piece of thread that goes in the guide, and pull the thread to cut it evenly. I wanted it to be moist, so I made a quick syrup by mixing another cup of the sweet wine with a bit from the liquid in the strawberries, and I spooned it in the three layers. Using liqueur instead of the wine would have been better, maybe dark rum, or Grand Marnier, or kirsch, or a mix of brandy and fruit syrup, or something like that. Well, I didn't have any, I only had the sweet wine.

Assemble the cake carefully, starting with the layer that was on top of the cake as it was baked, so that you'll end up with the nicely round-shaped bottom part on top. Spread half the cooked strawberries on it, and then pour some of the ganache on them, not much, you want to be left with half the ganache at the end. Add the second layer and repeat. Add the third layer so that the round bottom-part of the cake is on top. Unfortunately, I managed to break my top layer in two, when transferring it, but managed to hide it at the end. After it's assembled, spoon some of the ganache left on top, and carefully spread it so that you barely push it to drip on the sides. Add more ganache on top and keep doing that, until the ganache has dripped all around the cake. Smooth carefully around the sides if necessary to cover all of it. Try to avoid pouring all the ganache at once, and then pushing lots of it over the same side, because you'll end up with a partly iced cake, in a pool of ganache, not good. Then wipe the plate all around the cake with a napkin to make it look better, and put it in the fridge for the ganache to set.

After a couple of hours, it's ready to decorate. I melted some white chocolate and poured it on the cake with a spoon to make random shapes, then chopped two strawberries and sprinkled it. Here's how it looked.

This is the inside view, it was quite moist, very chocolaty, and the sourness of the strawberries broke the heaviness of too-much-chocolate, balancing it out.

I was left with a cup of sweet wine, not enough to serve to my guests, and I don't like sweet drinks too much, so I decided to make a zabaglione sauce with it. Usually people make that with champagne, but sweet wine will do. In a metal bowl put two egg yolks and two tablespoons of sugar. Mix immediately, otherwise the sugar will dehydrate the egg-yolks and "cook" them, and you'll have bits in your sauce. Put the metal bowl over (but not touching) almost-simmering water, and mix. After a minute add the wine, and whisk until it's foamy and thick. You can serve it like that, warm, over fruit. Alternatively, whisk some more to make it like a mousse, and then you can serve it cold too. I added a spoon around every piece of cake.

Here's a piece of cake, served with a couple of spoons of zabaglione sauce around it. The sauce could have been served to look better, but I didn't care for appearance much at that point.

Panna cotta

2009-03-01T18:20:00.005+01:00

Here's an easy dessert, the only drawback being you have to do it a few hours ahead. I made some one night, and had one for breakfast the next day. Put some milk over medium heat, add sugar and some vanilla, stir every now and then so that it doesn't stick, until it is close to a boil but not boiling. In the mean time, dissolve some gelatin in cold milk. When the milk is almost boiling, take it off the heat, add the dissolved gelatin. Pour the liquid in the ramekins and put in the fridge overnight. I made some caramel syrup and poured on top in the morning, it would have been better with marmelade or fruit syrup, but I didn't have any. A light, refreshing dessert.

UPDATE: I just thought you might want to know that gelatin is not vegetarian food, it's a meat product.

Vegetable couscous

2009-02-27T23:34:00.002+01:00

A few days ago, I returned home from work late and wanted to make something fast, but I didn't want to fry a steak again. So I opted for couscous. In a tablespoon of olive oil, add half a teaspoon of yellow curry powder, and set it over low flame in a pot. As the curry started smelling nice, add a finely chopped shallot and a leek, and soften them in the oil. Then add a tomato chopped in half-inch cubes, two cups of vegetable broth, and salt. As soon as it comes to a boil, turn off the heat, add the couscous and stir. Cover it and wait until all the liquid is absorbed. The curry colored it a nice yellow, and the vegetables add bits of color, here's how it looks.
Then I had an artistic inspiration, and added a bit of carrot.

Lentil experiments, part II: bread

2009-02-22T19:35:00.004+01:00

As I wrote in the previous post, I saved half the lentil-paste to make bread. I used a bit of lukewarm water to dissolve a pack of dry yeast, added some olive oil, salt, the paste, and enough flour to make a soft dough. I kneaded that for around 15-20 minutes. It's easier if you have a bread machine, but kneading is a good exercise for the grip, i.e. good for climbing :-)
Then I let that rise until almost double in size, punched it down, and made a loaf. I gave it around 10 minutes for a second rise and put it in the (hot) oven.

It's ready when tapping on the crust with your finger sounds hollow.

I let it cool for 5 minutes covered by a towel, just enough time to write this post. I cut a couple of slices (you can see the corner slice is already missing). It tastes good, more interesting than simple bread. The lentil and ginger flavors are definitely there, and the olive oil in the dough adds too.
I'm now going to have some hot bread with butter...

Lentil experiments

2009-02-19T10:02:00.009+01:00

I like lentils a lot. I usually cook them into a stew, but I felt like experimenting last night, so I started browsing for lentil recipes. Almost all that I found online are for stew variations, or for using them boiled in a salad. Since I was in the "really crazy experiment" mood, I looked up lentils on wikipedia to get some ideas. It turns out lentils have a lot of protein and fiber. So, I googled for "lentil bread" and, lo and behold, there's plenty of recipes for that. So I set out to try and make lentil bread.

First, I washed, then boiled about a cup of lentils, drained the water, and put them in a blender. I added a bit of fresh ginger, and blended everything until it was a smooth paste. I moved it in a big bowl, and started adding flour.

Just when I was about to add yeast, I thought about pasta. So I kept half of the lentil-ginger paste to make lentil bread, and the other half to try and make lentil-pasta.

Lentil pasta
For the pasta, add salt, and enough flour to make a kneadable dough. I didn't add egg to make egg-pasta dough, I'll try that next time. I've made pasta without egg before, it just comes out more white, and less al-dente, but otherwise OK. I was hoping that the extra protein from the lentils would partly make up for the egg, too. So, I kneaded the pasta dough for about 7-8 minutes, until it was somewhat hard and elastic, let it rest for another 10 minutes, and then I rolled it to be 1cm-thick.

Then I cut it into squares to get 1cm-edged cubes, and I rolled those into small balls.

Then I pulled some into gnocci with a fork, and others into shell-pasta using two fingers.

I boiled 2-3 from each, to check which shape is better, and I decided to go with the shells. Gnocchi didn't cook to the center, and there's no starch in lentils, so it doesn't come out as good as potato gnocchi. Shells are not particularly thick at any point, so the pasta cooked more evenly. So I pulled the rest of the dough into shells, and boiled it al-dente (about 1 or 2 minutes in salted boiling water). No sauce, I wanted to feel the lentil and ginger flavor. I only grated some Swiss gruyère on top.

As for the lentil-bread, I'm waiting for it to get baked as I'm writing this post. I'll report on that next, if it comes out any good, that is.

Cabbage rice

2009-02-18T11:52:00.002+01:00

After a trip to the US and a trip home for a job interview, I'm back for good. I haven't cooked much since I returned, I'm at work all day, and only have an easy baguette+cheese snack when I get home, usually late. But, I went skiing last Saturday. It was good and fun, albeit a bit colder than I could stand. The temperature was around 0C in the city, and around -5 at the village on the mountain where the ski resort was. We took the cable-car (télépherique) to the first plateau, where it was around -10C. And then, we took the lift to the second top, to a freezing -15 to -20C. Ouch. That. Was. Cold. Unfortunately, I wasn't dressed warm enough for that, maybe well enough for -5C, but not good enough for -20C. So, by the time I skied down to the -10C plateau, I thought I'd freeze solid, and they'd find me when I unfroze some time in Spring... Anyway, apart from the low temperature, it was fun to ski, I fell less times this time, I only got a couple of small bruises.

I got back home around 8pm, tired and hungry. I've been browsing a book on traditional greek recipes my grandma gave me, and I came across a winter-food recipe, for cabbage-rice. This one is vegetarian (vegan, even), and turned out easy to make and quite tasty and filling, plus cabbages are in season now, I'd got one from the farmer's market.

1 small cabbage
1/2 onion
1 leek
1/2 cup olive oil
salt, pepper
1 cup of rice
3-4 tbsp of tomato puree

I started by finely chopping half an onion, a leek and the cabbage. If you don't have leeks, use one full onion, if you don't have onions, use two leeks. Set a pot over low flame with the olive oil, the leek and onion and sauté them for 5 minutes. Then add the cabbage, and stir for 4-5 minutes. Add the tomato, salt, pepper, and enough water to boil a cup of rice, depending on the kind of rice you use. I used long grain pilaf-rice, it said 2.5 cups of water per cup of rice on the pack. When the water comes to a boil, add the rice, and stir every now and then, until the water is gone and the sauce is thick. I didn't want the cabbage to be too crunchy, so I used 3 cups of water and let it simmer for 10 minutes before adding the rice.

Tasty, light, vegan, and probably healthy. OK, I admit I had a bit of sausage and cheese to go with it, but why not? I was out on the mountains freezing all day, after all...

Chocolate truffles

2009-01-14T14:25:00.004+01:00

These chocolate bites are very easy to make. I experimented with them yesterday, and the end result came out pretty good, for a first attempt. The main idea is mixing chocolate with cream to make a ganache, add some flavor or liquor, and then mold it into bite-sized chunks after it starts solidifying. Flavoring can be whatever, I've seen recipes that use orange zest, sweet liquors like cherry liquor or Grand Marnier, mint (yuck), even whisky!

In my case, whisky-flavored truffles were out of the question--why waste a nice single malt by mixing it with anything? So, as I didn't have any sweet liquor or zest, I decided to use vanilla and honey to flavor the truffles.

A bar of dark chocolate
A bit of crème fraîche (about 5 tbsp)
A bit of butter (1 tbsp)
Honey (about 1 tbsp)
Vanilla (1 tsp extract)

First, chop the chocolate in a bowl.
Then melt it in a bain-marie or carefully in the microwave, with the butter. Add the honey, vanilla and crème, and stir until smooth.

Put it in the fridge for a few hours, until it sets a bit. It thickens without hardening, and becomes like moldable plastic, in texture.Then, with two teaspoons, make small bite-size pieces, scraping one teaspoon with the other, and roll them in cocoa powder. You can also use confectioner's sugar, but I didn't have any.
Put them in the fridge again, until they harden a bit more (they'll still be soft).

Enjoy. They are good with a bitter espresso.

See you all soon!

Happy new year!

2009-01-09T23:37:00.002+01:00

Hello everyone, and a happy new year! I'm back from the break, 4 kilos heavier. I went home for the holidays, but unfortunately I didn't cook at all there, so no new cooking posts yet. I started with all the good intentions, planning to cook a lot and post a lot of recipes, but I hadn't counted on one factor: proximity to mothers' food. So, instead of cooking a lot, I was just eating a lot, for almost two weeks.

I'm back for almost a week, and believe it or not, I haven't cooked yet, still eating the food I brought with me from home... So, I'll try to do the next best thing, and list some of the things I had during the break, that I'm going to try and replicate in the future:

Stuffed pumpkin with chestnuts, pinenuts, rice, minced meat, pulled chicken, raisins, various herbs and spices (I couln't tell all of them), melted cheese, dried plums and probably other stuff that I've forgotten now. It was unbelievable.
Lamb fricassée with wild bitter greens.
Grandma's leek-pita (of course with home-made fyllo).
Slow-roasted beef with dried plums, cooked for a few hours in a cast iron pot in a wood-oven (and other roasts in the wood-oven).
Eggplant and tomato-wrapped pork "bites" with melted cheese on top.
Soufflé with cheeses.
Stuffed turkey.

No wonder I gained weight... I still feel like I won't be hungry for some time.

The greek pressure cooker

2008-12-19T04:44:00.006+01:00

It looks like the whole country has gone postal back home: SNAFU. I hope it cools down soon.

Returning...

2008-12-16T15:52:00.004+01:00

It's been a while since I posted anything, mostly because I haven't cooked anything of interest lately. Usually I get home late from work, and then I'm too tired to feel like cooking, so I just throw together something quick to snack. But, work went well, I got some things finished and out of the way, and I'm going home for almost two weeks, so I'm going to try and blog more now.

For now, I'm just posting a couple of pictures from the Alps that I took on Sunday, on the way to try skiing. The scenery was breathtaking, the pictures don't do it justice.

Skiing was nice too, I'm definitely going to do it again... as soon as my shoulder stops feeling sore. Next time I'll try to avoid nasty falls, though.

A post with no pictures

2008-11-26T16:32:00.003+01:00

When we got back from Paris last week, it was well into the night (we got home around midnight), but we were very hungry. Unfortunately, we didn't have anything readily available in the fridge, as I'd been away for 6 days and I had thrown away everything that wouldn't last. There were two eggs, a small unopened bottle of whipping cream that was still OK, a bit of butter, and some shrimp in the freezer. On the shelf I had a couple of potatoes, a bar of chocolate, and a jar of flour. All in all, perfect scenario: tired, hungry, time-constrained and with limited ingredients.

I put a potato in a pot with water and set it on the stove. The shrimp went into a second pot in water, on low heat, to defrost. While I was waiting for the potato to boil and the shrimp to defrost, I used one egg, the small piece of butter and half a bar of chocolate to make the chocolate fondants (see previous post) and put them in the fridge for later. In the mean time, the potato was boiling, and the shrimp water was getting warm on low heat. The potato wasn't done after only 15 minutes of boiling, but we were getting too hungry to wait, so I took it out and finished cooking it in the microwave. Next time I'll do it right, though. After a bit in the microwave, the half-boiled half-microwaved (yuck) potato went outside on the balcony table to cool down a bit for a few minutes. Then I peeled it, mashed it with a fork, put it in a big bowl, along with half cup of flour, salt, a teaspoon of olive oil, and the remaining egg. I mixed and kneaded everything (adding a bit more flour) until it wasn't sticky, but was still a soft dough. Normally you'd let the dough rest for a bit (20 minutes), but no time--too hungry, so I put it in the freezer for 5 minutes. I have no idea if this is equivalent, but I couldn't wait for the 20 minutes it needs to rest, so I thought I'd give it a "nap" instead.

While the dough was in the freezer, I put a bit of olive oil in a frying pan, put it on medium fire, and sprinkled it with some pepper and tarragon. In a few seconds they were warming up and started smelling nice, so I fished the shrimp from the hot water with a straining ladle and added them in the pan. After one or two minutes of sautéing the shrimp like that, I put it out with a bit of liquor (I used French "eau de vie", but you can use raki, or ouzo, or vodka), and then I added a bit of heavy cream, lowered the flame to minimum and let it thicken for a bit.

After that I took the dough out of the freezer, rolled it to about half an inch thick, and then cut it into half-inch thick cubes. I rolled each cube into a small dough ball, and using a fork (on slightly floured table, if it's sticky), pulled the dough-balls into gnocchi. In the mean time, the water I used to defrost the shrimp had come to a boil, so I used it to boil the gnocchi in three batches, for about 2-3 minutes per batch. The shrimp cream sauce had thickened by then, so I split the gnocchi into two plates, added the shrimp with its cream sauce on top, opened a bottle of red wine (I didn't have any white), and started preheating the oven, so that it'd be ready for the chocolate fondants when it was time for dessert.

I think it took about an hour to throw everything together, and it came out pretty good in the end.

Chocolate fondant

2008-11-24T20:40:00.003+01:00

Hello, I'm back. After a couple of trips back home, and to Paris, I'm back at work, and finally have some time to write a small blog entry.

A couple of days ago we had a nice dinner with Despoina, and we made chocolat-fondants for dessert. This is an easy and very tasty dessert, the recipe is from Ioanna (thanks!)

I'm not sure about the quantities, I just mixed things until the mix looked proper. I think this is about right.

Butter and flour the ramekins, and put them into the fridge.
Melt some (half a bar) of chocolate with approximately 40-50 grams of butter in a bain-marie.
Beat an egg with a bit (3-4 spoons) of sugar until smooth.
Combine, and add flour, about 2-3 spoons.
Pour into the ramekins, and refrigerate for a while.
Preheat the oven.
Put them in the oven until the outside is done. This should only take a few minutes, you don't want the whole thing to thicken, just the outside.

After they were done, I flipped them on a plate, and put a bit of cocoa powder to garnish them.

Here's how it looks when you take the first spoonful out, and the melted chocolate inside appears... It tasted as good as it looks.

Mountains

2008-10-27T18:05:00.002+01:00

This is not a cooking post. On Sunday, I went to one of the mountains around the city, and climbed a bit. The view was breathtaking, the city is surrounded by lots of mountains. The little white spot you see very far in the distance is Mont-Blanc, it was a very clear day and it was visible. Awesome, literally, inspiring awe.

This was a 5c route, I think. It should be around a 5.8 or maybe 5.8+ just because of the first move. It was around 20m high, and I saw a couple of small lizards on the way up.

I climbed easy and not-so-easy routes, 5a to 6a. I'm still sore today, but not too much, and I'm definitely going back. Climbing on rock, rocks!

Weekend cooking

2008-10-26T07:56:00.011+01:00

Vegetable Soup update

I made some more soup. Here's how to serve it with a bit of crème fraîche and parsley. The white side is yogurt, more about that later in the post.

And with some baguette, and eggplant salad, here's my all-vegetable lunch.

Yogurt

I woke up at 4am on Friday, and couldn't go back to sleep, so I made yogurt, which turned out to be much easier than I expected. All you need to do is mix a live culture (existing yogurt, from the supermarket) with milk, and keep it warm for a while. I only made a little bit, this being the first time. I took full fat milk, and warmed it up over low heat. I didn't boil it, but it was getting close, the point was to kill all the live bacteria that are in the milk, so that the yogurt culture will have no competition. I let that sit for a while until it was lukewarm, and I could easily hold the pot with my hand, and then I dissolved two full spoons of existing yogurt in it. I got that from the supermarket. Then I put the whole thing in a bowl and in the oven, in the very lowest possible setting, so that it'd be kept around body temperature, or a few degrees more. I let it there for 4 hours, and then moved it in the fridge. Done! My own yogurt.

Being Greek, I prefer strained yogurt, so I strained my yogurt through a cheesecloth. I hanged it to strain, collecting the whey in a bowl underneath and went to work. I stayed at work until late in the afternoon, so it was way too strained when I got home, it looked like a cheese, too solid. So I mixed a little of the whey back in, to make it more like yogurt, and saved it in the fridge. It tastes normal. I didn't throw away the whey either. Why waste protein? I made some bread, and added the whey in the dough instead of water. In theory, the extra protein should make the dough more elastic, but it wasn't that much, so I don't know if it makes a difference. We'll see how the bread comes out.

At first, (thinking it'd be similar to making a bread starter) I thought you could somehow harvest yogurt culture from the air, but it's not like normal yeast. You can't get yogurt culture from nature, it has to be from someone that makes yogurt, I found out. The reason is that people have been making yogurt for a very long time (some millenia), and the original bacteria used have evolved to adapt and can only feed on lactose, no other sugars. So nowadays they are not found in nature, only in man-made yogurt. Creationists, no yogurt for you!

Tarte Tatin

Some time ago I was looking for french food recipes over the net and came across this one, which is a cool idea. Instead of putting the dough first, and then the filling for the tart, you can put the dough on the filling, cook it, and then flip on a plate. I had gotten some apples from the farmer's market, and on Friday I thought about making an apple tart, or "tarte aux pommes." I made the dough, filled up the tart-pan for a normal tart, and there was some dough left. Thus, I decided to try out this idea, and make a Tarte Tatin with the apples instead. The catch here is that you need a frying pan that can also get in the oven. What better occasion to try out the cast-iron frying pan that I got last week, I just hope the oven doesn't hurt the "seasoning" of the iron.

Parenthesis.
Apparently, with cast iron cooking utensils, you need to "train" them at first. At least that's what the manual said (yes, a frying pan that came with a manual). The pan should be oiled at all times, so I oil it after washing it with a napkin, and I re-wash the oil away before using it every time. One should do this for a while, and after a few times the cast iron becomes "seasoned" and you can use it and store it normally.
End of parenthesis.

I made the dough for tart. First, rub the flour with butter.

Then add one yolk, a bit of water (not too much 1-2 spoons) and mix.

Then I used a big jar (for lack of a rolling pin) to make it flat.

Finally, I put it in the tart-pan, punched holes with a fork, and put it in the fridge. Here you can see the leftover dough I used for Tarte Tatin.

Back to the Tarte Tatin. Preheat the oven, I have no idea in what temperature, I used a 5 on my oven's non-linear scale to 8. Peel and chop the apples, each apple in half, each half in three. I coated the pieces with lemon, so that the first pieces wouldn't oxidize and go black until I was done with all the apples.
Put some butter in the pan, melt it, take it away from the flame, and sprinkle 2-3 spoons of sugar on the butter. Then put the apples in. Return to a low flame and caramel-fry the apples until the sugar is caramelized (brown, not too dark) and the apples are also slightly caramelized (but not too much, they shouldn't be done).

Take away from the flame, and let sit for 5 minutes. Roll the tart-dough on the frying pan, and push it down near the sides, around the apples. I did that quickly so I wouldn't burn my fingers.

Then I put the whole thing in the oven, and waited. About half an hour later, I took it out, and flipped it on a plate.

The dough had hardened (as it wasn't touching any liquids) and was biscuit-y, and the caramel was running thick, downwards on the apples, which looks quite appetizing.

It makes for a nice "show-off" dessert, and it's easy too. Some apples were left stuck on the frying pan, and I used a spatula to put them back on the tart, and also to scrape off the extra caramel from the pan. It'll be nice with vanilla ice-cream. I'm keeping this recipe.

While waiting for the Tarte Tatin, I made the filling for the other tart, which was the reason for having leftover dough in the first place. I didn't have many apples left after the impromptu Tarte Tatin so I decided to make two kinds of fillings to make up for the loss. I chopped the two apples left into small bits, and put them in a saucepan.

I added a spoonful of honey.

This was a strong honey, too sweet, made from lavender(!). It is white, and doesn't look a lot like normal honey, but it smells unbelievably. Unfortunately it's too sweet, so next time I'll use half or less than what I used now. I added a bit of cinnamon, a drop of lemon, and set the pot over a low flame. After a while the apples were soft, and caramelized but not like with sugar, it wasn't as burnt. The apples gave out their juice, which mixed with the honey and gave a thick sauce. It smelled nice, but the lavender honey dominated the apples, unfortunately.

In a separate pot I put pieces of lemon. I used the whole lemon, chopped, similar to the apple. I wanted the yellow color from the skin, and the sour taste from the inside.

Unfortunately, I didn't add only those two, I added the whole thing, which also includes the white, bitter part between the peel and the juice. This made it a little too bitter, but I'll know better next time. So, I boiled the chopped lemon in water with a bit of sugar for quite a while, until the liquid was yellow and a little thick. I used a sieve to take out the lemon pieces, and threw them away. I then mixed flour and corn starch in a bowl with cold water and poured it in the hot lemon-liquid to thicken it more.

I emptied the two saucepans on the cold dough, across from each other, and smoothed them to resemble a yin-yang shape.

I thought that the two sauces had similar colors, and it wouldn't show, plus I was just having fun with it, so I decided to stress the separating s-shaped line. I needed something dark to draw that line between the yin and the yang, and chocolate is the closest thing to Zen I can think of! I tried scraping a piece of chocolate with a knife, and using the bits to draw an "S" between the two sauces, but it wasn't very successful. Next time I should have some ganache, and use agarnish-thing (not sure how it's called) or an empty ketchup/mustard bottle to draw a thin, continuous chocolate line.

OK, I stopped fooling around at that point and put it in the (preheated) oven. After about half an hour I took it out and let it cool down overnight.

The next morning I put it in the fridge, and Saturday afternoon I had a piece. It was OK, but, sadly, not exactly what I was going for. The dough was good, but the apple side had too much honey, and the lemon side was a bit bitter. Oh well, lesson learned. At least the apple Tarte Tatin was good. I feel like trying again, but I still have a lot left, there's only so much I can eat, and I don't want to throw it away. I need a roommate to help with the eating, any volunteers? Thano, help!

Samedi soir: sauce au poivre
I was experimenting with a beef and pepper sauce today.

Sauter l' oignon en trois cuillères d' huile d' olive, epuis ajouter le beuf, coupé en petits pièces, et aussi demi cuillère de poivre gris. Stir, or shake the pan, until slightly browned, and add the cognac/brandy. I tilted the pan a bit and the brandy caught fire, satisfying the pyromaniac in me. It doesn't make a difference in taste, it only adds to the effect. Then I added two glasses of water,
and one cup of chicken broth (the one that I have left). I capped the pan and let it simmer for about an hour (depending on how tender your meat is, this could be less), until it reduced a lot, becoming a thick sauce with bits of meat. I wanted more sauce, so I sprinkled half a spoon of flour on it, and mixed. Then I added the rest of the chicken broth (about half a cup) and it thickened fast. I mixed in 2 spoonfuls of crème fraîche, and I got a grey-brown thick sauce with
bits of meat, that smelled and looked good. I had a bit with bread (the bread I made using the whey from the yogurt, it was good) for dinner, but I think it'd be best served alongside a risotto, or on a base of basmati or maybe couscous (without crème fraîche for couscous). I could filter the bits of meat out of it, and then maybe use it to escort a steak, I think. Mushrooms would be fantastic in
this sauce but I didn't have any, unfortunately. I should get some from the farmer's market next time, I think this is the best season too, it's quite humid, and still not too cold. They have a big variety, but I don't know enough about mushrooms yet to know the right ones.

Variation: Then I got too decadent, and chopped a bit of raclette cheese (emmental would also be nice) in small pieces, and added them to the pan, where it melted. Sinful. I think this variation would be best on pasta, probably linguini or fresh papardele. I'll save this recipe for cold winter days...

Vegetarian soup

2008-10-23T12:02:00.003+02:00

On Tuesday I made vegetable soup.

1 beet
1 leek
1 potato
tomato purée
1/2 cup of milk
1tsp salt, pinch of pepper, curry
2tbsp olive oil
water

I peeled the potato and the beet and cut them in 1inch cubes. Chopped and washed the leek. Put everything in a pot with water, and let boil for a while (until potato and beet were soft and done). Then I kept the liquid through a sieve, and put the solids in a dish. I put the potato pieces, the beet pieces, and a bit of milk in the blender, and blended them to a thick crème. I added this in the liquid left in the pot and set it on low heat. Then I added the tomato purée (about half a box, ready made). I didn't have fresh tomatoes, but 2-3 tomatoes in the blender would probably be better, I'll try it next time. Added 1tsp of salt, a pinch of curry and a pinch of pepper, and stirred until it boiled, then I added 2tbsp of olive oil and let it boil for a couple of minutes more. It tasted good, I think.

I might try to serve it to other people next time for feedback. I think a nice presentation will be to put the soup in cups, add a spoon of crème fraîche in the middle of each cup, and a bit of fresh parsley on top of that. I poured the soup left into an empty wide-neck orange juice bottle, capped it an put it in the fridge. Took it to work the next day, it was a nice lunch, and very nice for the chilly weather, too. I'll have to find something to do with the boiled leek that is left, I didn't want to blend it with the beet and potato. I think I might use it as a filling to make a pita (as soon as I get a roller to make phylo).

A funny detail: I poured the soup in the bottle while it was still hot, and capped it. That caused the metal-cap security seal went inwards as the soup cooled down, and the next day it went "pop" as I uncapped it, as if it was bought. Heh.

Dinner for 5

2008-10-20T15:30:00.007+02:00

It's been a long time, so I forgot most of it, since the last post. I took the rabbit out of the marinade and threw away the marinade. The rabbit went quite good. I caramelized it a little bit in oil, threw away the oil, put it in an oven pot, added onions, a bit of chicken buillion (I made that too, I'm now sold on home-made buillion instead of cubes, its much much better, if you can afford the 5-6 hours it takes), 1 cup of wine, 3 cloves, a pinch of cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar, and of course lots of love :), and I let it in the oven (in low heat) for about 3 hours. I think it was quite good, because there was nothing left.

But, first things first. The menu for the day:

Aperitif: stuffed cherry tomatoes (2 kinds) and salmon/avocado wrap.
Entrée (i.e. appetizer): Bruschettas with various toppings (too easy, I know, but oh well...)
Salad: pretty standard, green, dressed with mustard and honey vinaigrette.
Main course: rabbit with onions slow-cooked in the oven.
Intermission: lemon & rose-water sorbet (see last post)
Dessert: Chocolate-mocha cake with "framboise" (raspberries) on top.

OK, now in detail (as far as I remember, that is).

Apéritif
I would have 4 guests, so the goal was 3 tastes for 5 people. I got about 15 cherry tomatoes, washed and uncapped them so that the cap stays connected but "opens" up. I used a teaspoon and carefully emptied the interior, as best as possible, without breaking the tomato. Kept the interiors/seeds, and put the emptied tomatoes upside down on a paper to drain from liquids for a few minutes. Then, I took black olives (about 10-12, not sure), took the core out, and chopped the flesh very finely. I also took 1 achovie, took out the bones, and pressed it into a pulp with the olives. Don't worry, it only works as a flavor enhancer and substitutes salt, it doesn't stink like fish. Added pepper, 1 tablespoon of cognac (brandy), 1 tbsp of olive oil, basil, and 5-6 capers, also pulped. Mixed everything together, to make olive paste. I stuffed 5 of the tomatoes with olive paste, and set aside. I then took a bit (1/2 tablespoon) of the olive paste that was left, and mixed with fromage blanc (I think that's like yoghurt). Then I crashed a bit (1/2 piece) of garlic, and mixed it in, and stuffed another 5 of the tomatoes. I was out of tomatoes by now (even though I got 15 from the market), because I crashed 2 on the way home, I also ate 2 through the process, and I accidentally opened one all the way down when trying to dig into it with a teaspoon, so I ate that one too...
OK, so the goal was 3 different bites, with 3 different tastes for aperitif. And I couldn't make a 3rd stuffing for cherry tomatoes, so I opted for a salmon bite. I got two slices of smoked salmon (1mm thick), and an avocado. I opened the avocado, took the pit out, and spooned the inside into a bowl. Added a bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and mashed everything together. Then I took the paste, and layered another 1mm of it on the salmon slices.

I rolled the salmon slice and avocado together, pinched it with toothpicks, and cut at bite-sized distances. That was easy, and it yielded about 12 bites. I ate two, of course, and had 10 for two bites each later. I put every aperitif on a plate and in the fridge.

Entrée
I got one of the big baguettes (they call them "flutes") from the bakery and sliced it diagonally to get 0.5inch thick slices. I got 1 piece of garlic and sliced it in very thin slices, as thin as I could, and with my knives, that's quite thin. I put a teaspoon of olive oil on every bread slice, and topped some of them with 2-3 thin slices of garlic. Then I got a bit of reblochon cheese (that's the smelly-feet, soft one that melts), a bit of another creamy cheese (not sure about the name, think of brie, only smellier, but not stinky feet), and a bit of hard yellow cheese (not sure about the name again, think Gryviere, only nuttier, fuller taste, I should be noting the names down, but I'll recognize it when I go to the market next time). I put a bit of cheese on some of the bread, not mixing cheeses. I kept some bruschettas without cheese, one of my guests doesn't eat dairy stuff. I also sliced a bit of "saucisson sec" (french, hard, dried sausage) and sliced it thin, 0.5mm slices. I used these to top the bruschettas so that I got lots of combinations. I also chopped and used the cherry-tomato seeds and interior for some bruschettas, under the cheese (why waste it?). I put it on a wide oven pan and set aside. I put them in the oven for 5 minutes, just when I took out the aperitif, and by the time we each had 4 bites of aperitif, they were ready.

Salad
Lettuce from the farmer's market. I got two kinds green and red, the french call them "salades," quite fitting. I tore these by hand roughly into 1inch-wide pieces. I personally prefer finely chopped lettuce (it gets more dressing on it), but I learnt this is how they do it here, so "when in Rome..." I chopped 2 green onions (these by knife, not by hand) into 1mm thin slices. Added dill, parsley, and half an avocado (I had it lying around, why not..), finely chopped. I made a vinaigrette with 0.5tsp of honey, red wine vinegar, mustard, olive oil & salt (not in that order...) and warmed it up to thicken it a bit but not too much and make everything dissolve better, and set it aside. Just before serving the salad, I chopped half an apple in small bits (last moment, so it wouldn't oxidize and go black), poured the vinaigrette on top, and mixed. Simple salad, no fancy tricks here, the parsley, dill and vinegar work as a kind of a palate cleanser. I won't use honey next time, a palate cleanser shouldn't be very sweet I think, except before dessert. Well, nobody complained, so OK.

Main course
I described that, I'm not going over it again, here's what it looked like.

After main course
Sorbet, a palate cleanser before dessert.
I got this recipe from Elise, thanks! (My sorbet wasn't as perfect, but I'll keep trying.) Probably a chocolate dessert doesn't need a clean palate as much as a lightly, subtly flavored dessert does, but I had all the spices, wine and onions in the main course, and I didn't want interference, and also I like sorbet anyway (and got to eat the rest later by myself). Maybe next time I should also use a "coloring agent" for the sorbet, lemon and rosewater don't have color, and it looked like just snow, someone said (and then "hmmmm, it has taste").

Dessert
Chocolate cake with mocha cream filling, covered in ganache and with "frambois" (raspberries) on top. This was quite an improvisation, but I think I'll keep it. I made the cake mix: butter, sugar, eggs, cocoa, flour, milk, baking powder (I usually use baking soda too, half and half, but didn't have any), and vanilla extract. I beat everything in a bowl (start with sugar & butter, until fluffy, butter should be soft and sliced, then add eggs, then dry ingredients and a pinch of salt). I put this in the oven in medium heat (until a toothpick at the center comes out dry). Then I sliced it in half to get two layers, and set aside to cool down.

For the filling, in between the two layers, I made a mocha creme. Milk, sugar and vanilla, set on low fire, bring to a slow boil. I made a cup of strong coffee and added it in. Meanwhile, I mixed a bit of cold milk, flour and corn starch, and as soon as it boiled I poured it in and mixed, turning the heat off. It thickens pretty quick. Set aside to cool down a bit. I also made a syrup: mix sugar, cocoa (even parts) with water, and set to boil. It looks almost thick (but not really) after simmering for a couple of minutes. Set aside to cool down a bit. Of course, I made everything at the same time (although I wouldn't recommend it, it could go awfully wrong, has in the past...), but somehow I managed to keep stirring two boiling pots, mix cold ingredients and cut a cake in layers, with no major accidents, so all was well after all. When the chocolate syrup cools down a bit, I added a bit of brandy in it, and then spoon by spoon I fed it to the cake. Be careful, the cake is VERY easy to break after it gets soaked, and unfortunately I couldn't can't feed the syrup to the second layer after putting it in place, because it doesn't have "holes", it's smooth from baking it. So I put the syrup in while it was flipped, and then *very* carefully flipped it on the rest of the cake. Next time I might just "shave" off the shiny part and make it easy to add the syrup without moving the cake afterwards, because it's very susceptible to falling apart when wet. I didn't want to put the shiny side down on the creme either, because I wanted to maintain the "risen, swollen" shape of the original cake. OK, the cake absorbs the syrup and becomes ready to melt in your mouth (hehe) and very unstable.

Then I poured the ganache on it. For the ganache, I melted 1 and a half bars of chocolate, and mixed it with whipping cream (not whipped, liquid). It was a big overkill, because I could have covered the cake top with melting half a bar of chocolate probably, but no worries, chocolate ganache is a nice leftover, I poured it on some fruit, and had it the next day (It's strange I'm not 200lbs, not yet). Anyway, I poured the ganache on the cake top, spoon by spoon, letting it run to cover the whole top surface. It even dripped around making a nice effect.

Then I got the raspberries, and drew a circle of them on top of the (still liquid) ganache.

Then I put everything in the fridge to help the chocolate solidify, and make everything a bit more stable.

Next time, I'll use more fruit on top, and maybe a layer of raspberries (or other berries, or cherries) in the middle. But then it'll be like a black forest, without the white part... Well, there's nothing wrong with that. Here's what the cake looked like when cut.

OK, that's all folks. Luckily my guests were satisfied, or at least they were polite enough to fake it.

Oh, I almost forgot the drinking... Oh, the drinking. When the first two people showed up, we started with a light red wine (Côte du Rhône) while waiting for the others to arrive, and finished the bottle. When everyone was in, we had some nice belgian and czech beers with the cold fish-aperitif and also with the hot bruschettas (a bit unorthodox, but it mixed well with cheese and sausage toppings...).

Then everyone switched to chilled white wine with the salad, and we finished the bottle (it doesn't take more than 1 hearty glass for each if it's five people, so bottles were easy to deal with). Then we switched to a serious red wine with the main course. This one I had bought from the local Cave, suggested by the old granpa-looking owner as very good to escort my "lapin aux oignons" (rabbit with onions) dish. That wine wasn't kidding, you could tell it wanted meat for company. Naturally, that bottle was easy prey too, bringing the total wine-bottle casualty count of the evening to 3, not counting the half bottle I used in the food. OK, OK, I used only a cup of that to make the food, and the rest to "escort" my cooking...

It was time we "cleansed our palate" with the sorbet (which did have a bit of raki, but was only very subtly alcoholic, I don't think one could tell after a glass of wine). So, after that we cut the cake, and well, serious dessert wants a serious "digestif", (the brandy in the cake doesn't count), so we had a shot of raki to help digest. We then had a second shot of raki just to make sure, and, by the end of the night, the 1-litre raki bottle was empty, and I think at least two of my guests promised themselves never to drink again (until next time...)

Dinner for 5: preparation

2008-10-03T15:27:00.005+02:00

Tomorrow I have invited some friends for dinner (not the same people). I'm making Stifado, ala Polyvios (somewhat improvised)

Marinade:

2 sp sugar
1 tbsp honey
about 2 cups wine - I didn't measure it really, I just used whatever was left in a couple bottles from previous dinners.
4-5 cloves
1 sp red wine vinegar
a pinch of cinnamon - a piece of cinnamon would have been better, but I only have ground cinnamon now
1-2 sp. salt - yes I know it sounds too much, but i'll throw away the marinade tomorrow and keep only the meat
1 tbsp of olive oil - it's too little I know, but I don't want the meat to be oiled too much, that'll prevent the alcohol from the wine to interact with the meat and bring out the smells and flavors. Maybe next time I won't use any oil in the marinade.
1 rabbit - Yes, bunny rabbit. I'm eating Bugs Bunny! Yummy!

Prep:

Mix everything except the rabbit in a saucepan and warm up a bit, until everything dissolves. Set it aside.
Cut the rabbit into portions, here's what I did: Each leg (with shoulder) is one piece, lower back (between the back legs) is one small piece, the middle back is one piece (cut perpendicular to the spine), the ribcage is two pieces (also cut perpendicular to the spine, with care not to break the ribs), and the head & neck is one piece. I also kept the liver and kindeys, I'll either put them in, or make paté, I'm still thinking about it. I threw away the lungs. You don't have to cut through bone at all, cut the flesh, and break the bones/spine by hand, then cut the rest of the flesh. I took care, cause I don't have a bone-knife, and I didn't want to harm the chef's knife I use (THANKS FOR THE KNIFES!)
Put the pieces of meat in the marinade, so that it's (mostly) covered. Put in the fridge. Goodnight, we continue tomorrow.

Oh wait, I also prepared some sorbet:
Warm up water and dissolve a cup of sugar in it (a lot of water, I made a full teapot, or one big tupperware container of sorbet). Let it cool. Add juice of 1 or 2 lemons (I added 1.5, saved half a lemon in the fridge for tomorrow), also 2-3 shots worth of rose-water (I didn't count, but it was around that). Also add a bit of raki (and have a shot for yourself)--I was generous with the raki, but carefull cause alcohol lowers the melting temperature... Put in the freezer, and stir every now and then, to stop big chunks of ice from forming. It gets to be like snow(?) if all goes well.

Ok, goodnight, we continue tomorrow...

dinner for 3

2008-10-01T15:22:00.003+02:00

I had two friends over for dinner. The menu was:

Apéro (from aperitif, "before food"): Toasted bread with avocado dip and eggplant dip
Entrée (in French it means appetizer): Oven potatoes flavored with salted lamb
Main course ("plat de resistance"): My own version of "imam" a turkish oven dish (vegetarian)
Salad (Yes, here they serve the salad last, to refresh your taste buds before dessert. I was surprized to find that out)
Chocolate soufflé (individual soufflés) with melted chocolate on top (overkill I know, but it's allowed in chocolate, "non"?)

And now the recipes.

Toasted bread
Very easy. I got two baguettes from the local boulangerie, sliced
and toasted them slightly in the oven - yes I didn't make bread
myself, the boulangerie still beats my bread by far...

Avocado dip
Two avocados, juice of half a lime, salt, pepper. Mix.

Eggplant dip

Half an eggplant (it was leftover from the main dish).
One clove of garlic
Salt, pepper

Preparation:
Cut the eggplant in 2cm-thick slices, salt very generously and let sit for 1h to get the bitterness out. Beware, a black liquid will drip and make a mess. Wash the salt away, put a bit of the family olive oil in a pan and fry the eggplant slices for 30 seconds on each side, they will suck up the oil, don't worry that's normal. Set aside for the excess oil to drip out, for about 2min. Heat the oven (i was already cooking 2 other things, so it was preheated). Put on an oven pan the eggplant slices. Peel the garlic and slice it in half (slice in the dimension that gives thin halves). Put the garlic in the oven pan with the eggplant, salt and pepper to taste, and put it in the oven. Wait until the eggplant is done, I think I let it about 1 hour, you can test with a fork, it should be soft and dissolv-y. The garlic should be cooked too. Take out of the oven, let cool for a bit, drain
the excess oil (they will spit out some of the oil they soaked during frying). I peeled them and threw away the peel, but that's up to you, i guess it's good if you leave it in, too. Mash with a fork until smooth. Served both hot and cold. The French called it "caviar d'aubergines" which I though made it sound more gourmet than it is.

Entrée
Oven potatoes with a bit of lamb for taste.
OK, I know this isn't really an entrée dish, it could be a main course. But I liked cooking it so who cares. To explain this I have to give context, so, here's the whole story.

The other day (1 week ago, maybe more, I don't remember), I had some friends over for dinner (not the same ones). I wanted to make a lamb dish, but the butcher would only sell me the whole 1.7kg of lamb shoulder, not just 700gr of it, as I very politely asked using my awful, broken, immigrant's French. Oh well. So I got home with a lot of lamb, I cut it into pieces, took out the 700 of mostly fatless meat that I needed, and was left with bones, pieces of fat, and more meat. I threw away most of the pieces of fat and was left with two big chunks of meat, and some bones (with meat on them). So, I made buillion from the bones (what else) and saved it in the fridge for later, it tastes much better than the buillion cubes... I took the bones, meat and vegetables left from the buillion making to work the next day and had a nice, quite healthy lunch.

Anyway, I was stuck with the two chunks of lamb meat that were left, but I didn't want to cook more lamb in the same week. So I decided to cure the lamb. At worst, I'd throw it away. I made a cure-liquid (I don't know a better word for
it) with salt, water, sugar, and a few spices (thyme, oregano, pepper), by boiling everything together for 2mins. I let that cool to room temperature, put the meat in a tupperware container, poured the juice on top, covered it and put it in the fridge. I have one piece left still, maybe I should take it out, wrap it and dry it for a month, see what happens.

Back to the task at hand, I wanted to use a piece (small, admittedly) of semi-cured/salted lamb to flavor my oven potatoes. I got small red-skin potatoes, washed them thoroughly, and cut them in quarters leaving the skin on. I put a bit of salt(i should have avoided that, given the meat), pepper and oregano on the potatoes, a bit (about 3-4 spoons) of olive oil and mixed
until all potatoes were oiled--this oil wasn't from my family's produce, it was from Despoina's, just as good!

Then I washed the lamb piece, put it among the potatoes, added a cup of water and put the oven pan in the (pre-heated) oven. I checked every now and then, and added a bit more water when it had dried up, but that depends on the oven. I'm still learning my new oven, so it needs care now in the beginning. It came out quite good, the lamb fat melted and the potatoes tasted very nice. The lamb was a little salty compared to my usual outcomes, but then again I don't like too much salt, my guests quite politely said they liked the meat too. So that was entrée (appetizer).

Main course
Imam (almost):

3 eggplants
2 bell peppers: 1 green, 1 yellow
2 tomatoes
1 zucchini
4 onions
2 cloves of garlic
5 spoons of tomato puree
1 pinch of sugar(optional)
salt, pepper
plenty of olive oil (about 1-2 cups, for frying)

Preparation:
Cut and salt the eggplants to take out the bitterness. Usually I slice them at length, and then stuff the slices with the other vegetables. This time I cut them in round slices, around 2cm thick. Fry (slightly) the eggplants and layer the bottom of an oven pan. If you have leftovers you can make eggplant dip. Cut the onions in rings or half rings, and fry them until slightly soft (not much). Layer on top of eggplants. Same with the zucchini (cut in 1cm slices). Cut the peppers thin and layer on top, and tomato slices above (don't fry the peppers and tomatoes). Add salt and pepper, and a pinch of sugar. Throw away the left frying oil (some recipes pour it on top, but that's too oily then). Add the tomato puree as evenly as you can. Slice the garlic very thin and also spread evenly on top. Add herbs if you want, I added a bit of parsil, basil & oregano. Pour half a cup of water (more like sprinkle it) to take some of the herbs spices and puree down with it to the rest of the vegetables (depending on your oven, the water might be unnecessary, then you might want to put the herbs in with the layers,
not on top). Put in the oven (medium/low heat), and wait. It took me less time than I expected to prepare everything, so I left everything in the oven for 3 hours, in low heat (gas oven, set to 2 on a 10-scale). It all came out well cooked, but not dissolved (just right). I guess the vegetables could be done in under 1 hour on medium/high heat, and so could the lamb, but I overestimated the prep
time...

Salad
Some kind of lettuce I got from the farmer's market torn by hand (I learned that you're not supposed to cut lettuce with a knife in France...) , small cherry tomatoes halved, green onions chopped, a bit of dill, and a vinaigrette (mustard,
honey, balsamic & wine vinegar, olive oil).

Dessert
Chocolate soufflé: In chocolate we trust.

5 eggs separated: make marengue with the whites, beat the yolks with a bit of sugar (I didn't measure, it looked to be around 1/2 cup) until pale.
Melt 200g chocolate (1 bar) with a bit of butter (fresh butter I bought from the I-sell-100-million-cheeses-guy at the farmers market this morning), let cool, and slowly pour in the yolk mix (keep stirring).
Fold marengue in, lovingly and tenderly... (Which reminds me, I need a rubber spatula, I miss my old one).
Butter and flour the ramequins, pour the mixture in. One could put it in the fridge for 2h and serve as a chocolate mousse, but you have to trust your eggs to serve them raw...
I put it in the fridge for 1h, and then cooked in medium pre-heated oven for 10 mins. Being cool helped keep the interior slightly uncooked and melt-y.

It was nice....

OK, we ate all that, we started with light lager beer, then we split a Chimay blue (trappiste beer, nice!) during the lamb and potatoes, and then we had a bottle of white wine with the main course and a last glass with salad. I served dessert with cold raki, I think I got them a bit drunk.