By clotilde on Ice Ice Baby 
[Coconut Ice Cream from the Pantry] The really nice thing when you come back from a vacation, however lovely, is the fresh set of eyes you can lay on your living quarters, and all the things that make them homey and yours. Your bed, not too firm but not flabby either, and wide enough that two normal-size individuals can stretch their legs without starting a war. Your shower handle, and its nifty flow modes that you can fiddle with to match your shower mood. An oven you can trust, as opposed to an oven that scorches your apple cake the first chance it gets. And, perhaps, a still-very-new-and-still-very-exciting appliance, like, say, an ice cream maker. I knew I'd have a kitchen to call my own for part of our vacation so I briefly caressed the idea of taking my new toy with me when we left, but even I had to admit the silliness of such a plan. As it turns out, good ice cream was always available in our hour of need, in particular during a few furnace-hot days in Dordogne, when a salon de thé called La Maison de Léo* helped us cool off between canoe rides with numerous helpings of rose ice cream. Replicating this pale pink gem is high on my back-to-school to-do list, but while I do my homework and figure out the how, the what, and the how much of each, I would like to share the recipe for this coconut ice cream, which I winged and churned when we returned, having wisely left the bowl of my ice cream maker in the freezer, and all the necessary ingredients in the pantry. Even after you've set aside the ones that call for fresh coconuts**, there is no dearth of coconut ice cream recipes roaming the wild wild internet. I've found recipes that use canned coconut milk, and I've found recipes that steep grated coconut in regular milk or cream before straining it out, but I wanted -- and got -- the best of both worlds: a base of coconut milk, its authority tempered by evaporated milk***, and plenty of toasted flecks of coconut in each mouthful. ~~~ * La Maison de Léo / 14 place d'Armes / 24170 Belvès / map it! / 05 53 28 29 37. ** I've refused to deal with them myself ever since an unfortunate incident involving two members of my immediate family, an innocent coconut, and a fourth floor balcony. *** The use of evaporated milk in place of cream is a tip shared recently by my mother. The benefit is a lower fat content for a similarly creamy mouthfeel. [Click through to read more.]
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By clotilde on Nibbly Nibbles 
[Bell Pepper Caviar with Walnuts and Cashews] Sometimes, when I have a minute, I sit back and think about the world of food, how vast it is, and how many rivers, hills, and valleys remain uncharted to me: I know so little, and have so much yet to learn. I don't find the prospect overwhelming, far from it. I find it encouraging, I find it promising, I find it comforting: as long as I can read books and move around a kitchen, my life will see no shortage of inspiring ideas, happy discoveries, and exciting projects. Just this week, I've received two emails from readers offering their recipes and knowledge, should I want to explore their home countries' cuisines (Argentinian and Turkish, no less), and a review copy of the most inspiring book I've seen in a while, Moro East, in which practically every page now wears a sticky tag on its lapel. Another example is this muhammara. I don't remember how the concept fell into my lap -- did I read about it on a website? in a book? -- but this Middle-Eastern spread, made from roasted bell peppers and walnuts, appealed to me instantly. It was novel to me, I had never tasted it anywhere, but my mind's taste buds could barely contain their enthusiasm. Part of the attraction was the fact that muhammara is best made with pomegranate molasses, a popular ingredient in Lebanese and other Mediterranean cuisines that has become rather trendy of late*. Here, this sweet and acidic syrup is called for to bridge the sweetness of the peppers and the bitter edge of the walnuts. I, like most suggestible cooks who read magazines, have acquired my very own bottle of pomegranate molasses from Heratchian Frères a few months ago, but a little goes a long way, and I'm always looking for different productions to cast them in. This muhammara is, so far, the unchallenged winner, and I have officially named it my new favorite for a make-ahead apéro spread. The recipe below is the product of my usual recipe research method (gather-combine-tweak-shake-shake-shake), and the fact that I got confused about the amount of nuts to peppers. This forced me first to use cashews in addition to my too short supply of walnuts (this worked so well I will do the same in the future) and then to roast two additional bell peppers** when I realized my spread was too nutty (yes, there is such a thing; it came as a surprise to me, too). As a consequence, my first batch yielded way more muhammara than I needed for that one dinner party, but I froze the leftovers in two little tubs that I whipped back out on two subsequent occasions, with no loss of flavor and to just as much acclaim, so I wholeheartedly recommend that modus operandi. One sleeps so much more soundly with an emergency dose of muhammara in the freezer. The most typical way of serving muhammara is with pitas or lavash, but it is just as good on sliced baguette, and it is an absolute delight plopped onto thickish slices of cucumber. * Pomegranate molasses, sometimes called pomegranate syrup (mélasse de grenade or mélasse de pomme de grenade in French), can be found in Middle-Eastern stores (get some zaatar while you're at it). In France, it is most often imported from Lebanon. If you can't find it, The Cook's Thesaurus suggests various substitutions; for this recipe, balsamic vinegar seems the most appropriate. ** On the subject of bell peppers, I'd like to share my latest epiphany. You know how slimy roasted bell peppers are, and how annoying it is to remove the little seeds once they're embedded in the slime? Well, what I do now is deseed the peppers before roasting -- I know, how revolutionary. While the peppers are still raw, I carve all around the stem, pull it out, and discard the seeds that come with it. Then I hold the peppers upside down, and slap them a few times on the sides so the remaining seeds fall out (plus, the sound is fun). The bell peppers, thus decapitated and gutted, are then submitted to my regular roasting procedure in the oven. [Click through to read more.]
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By clotilde on On A Sugar High 
[Italian Cornmeal Cookies] We all have our siren ingredients, those that call to us in voices of sugar from the printed page of a cookbook -- or the pixelated page of a food blog -- and charm us into dropping whatever we're doing to run to the kitchen and reenact the recipe. Cornmeal is one of my sirens, and I find it particularly beguiling in baked goods*. This is the only way I can explain such a short TTO (time to oven) for this cookie recipe, which I chanced upon last week on Ivonne's fine blog, Cream Puffs in Venice. Crumiri, sometimes spelled krumiri, are traditional Italian cookies that hail from the Piedmont region. The origin of the name is hazy: crumiro means strikebreaker, so that can't be it, and while some say the cookies were named after a Tunisian liqueur called Krumiro (or Krumiria, presumably like the Maghreb region) that the baker-inventor liked to swill, the Internet knows nothing about this mysterious beverage. No matter. These cookies can take on different shapes, but they generally wear a ridged outfit, created by the star-shaped tip of a piping bag. Alas, I am a poorly equipped baker and my flimsy piping bag did not resist the assault of such a thick dough**. After a brief but irritating struggle, I resigned myself to forming vague lumps. Aside from this minor hurdle, these are precisely my kind of cookie: crumbly, with the teasing crunch of cornmeal between your teeth, delicately flavored, and not too sweet. And in keeping with the regional theme, I have found them to be ideal companions to a scoop of homemade Nutella ice cream***. The recipe Ivonne posted comes from a book called Italian Baking Secrets, written by an Italian priest; I modified it to reduce the amount of butter and sugar slightly. If you want to make ridged ones, make sure you use a professional-grade piping bag and tip that won't burst and poop out on you. I'm just saying. * If you share my cornmeal enthusiasm, consider trying my go-to recipe for shortbread, or these violet cornmeal macarons. ** It has to be thick, otherwise the ridges will just soften and melt away in the oven. *** Yes: before it became a world-renowned addictive substance full of transfats, Nutella was a piedmontese specialty known as pasta gianduja. [Click through to read more.]
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By clotilde on Ice Cream 
My sister's husband has a passion for Nutella. When Ferrero put out a 40th-anniversary Nutella jar* of woolly mammoth** proportions, Christian bought one and actually spooned his way through it. Not in one sitting, admittedly, but still. I love my brother-in-law dearly, so when he and my sister came to dinner a few weeks ago, I thought I'd treat them to Nutella ice cream for dessert. I considered going the classic ice cream route, starting with a custard base to which I'd add Nutella, but I was feeling under the weather and this was more work than I wanted to tackle. Instead, I used a much easier, much more straightforward formula: equal weights of Nutella and unsweetened evaporated milk (lait concentré non sucré), combined and churned into the creamiest, most indulgent concoction ever to emerge from my ice cream machine. This first attempt was wildly successful (and I do mean "I would marry you if I hadn't already married your sister" successful) yet two problems remained: 1- although the French version of Nutella contains no transfats, it still leaves much to be desired on the nutritional front, and 2- the one-to-one ratio resulted in an ice cream that was, in my opinion, sweeter than strictly necessary. It took little brainjuice to figure out a solution: replace the Nutella with an all-natural, organic equivalent, and use less of it. My organic store stocks several brands and variaties of chocolate hazelnut spread, involving different proportions of hazelnuts and chocolate. After studying the labels for a while, I set my heart on Jean Hervé's Chocolade, for three reasons: I'm already addicted to his stone-ground nut butters, a portion of the company's sales is donated to a charity that builds schools in Madagascar, and the guy has a ponytail. As the obligatory spoon test revealed***, this Not-ella is less sweet than its world-renowned cousin, and less eerily smooth, too. It would be unfair to describe the texture as grainy -- it is not -- but the tongue senses and aknowledges that real hazelnuts have given their lives for the cause. And I'm happy to report that, when enrolled in this ice cream project of mine, La Chocolade performed to the complete satisfaction of all who had a chance to taste it before the tub mysteriously emptied. The ice cream was most often paired with the best sablés in the galaxy (I'm serious): Poilâne's punition cookies, which now come in an adorable spoon shape to serve with coffee, or, for a limited time only and until the Saint-Valentin crap finally boils over, in a heart shape. ~~~ * I believe this collector's item weighed in at 5 kilos (~11 pounds).
** Did you know woolly mammoths had a flap of hairy skin over their anus to keep out the cold? Can you think of a more endearing feature? or a more appropriate topic to discuss with your V-Day date?
*** The spoon test should be conducted as follows: take spoonful, place on tongue, close mouth, draw spoon out, close eyes, swish, chew, swallow. [Click through to read more.]
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By clotilde on Vegetables 
[Grated Carrots and Beets] I used to think winter produce was drab, and that the cook's only option was to wait the cold months out, squinting into the distance, longing for asparagus and strawberries to appear ("Anne, Sister Anne, do you see nothing coming?"). Now I can't imagine how I could ever be so blind: what of mâche and winter squash, what of flower cabbage and broccoli, what of endives and leeks and chard, what of carrots and beets? Do they count for nothing? Perhaps it has helped that the Paris winter has been so mild (again) this year and that -- in my memory, at least -- the sun always seemed to be out on Saturday mornings, as I vélibed to and from the greenmarket. Whatever the reason, this is the first year I registered a distinct pining when my habitual provider confessed he would have no more winter pears for me (it's been such a good season for pears!) and when I saw, a few stalls down, the first crop of fresh peas. "Oh, no!" I sobbed in my turquoise scarf, "this is too soon! I'm not ready to let go of winter just yet!" And then I thought, "I must write about the grated carrot and beet thing before everyone moves on to greener pastures." So there you have it: my favorite go-to lunch of the Winter 2007/08 collection, the salad I've made and relished on a weekly basis over the past few months, so much so that an estimated 27% of my body mass is now made up of grated carrots and beets. This salad is based on a simple deduction: grated carrots rule and, although that is a much more hush-hush fact, so do grated beetroots. Ergo, the combination of the two is a civil union made in heaven. Plus, I'm lazy, and crudivorism is the path of least resistance from basket to mouth. If you've never tasted the root of a beet in its raw state, I urge you to give it a try, whether or not you (think you) despise cooked beets, for the two provide very different taste experiences. Granted, the addition of grated beets to a grated carrot salad does not cause any sort of quantum shift, but it does add a deeper note to the chord, sweet yet throaty, and it colors the whole thing with the beetroot's infectious purple enthusiasm. I've written this salad into a recipe below, because that's what food bloggers do, but the truth is I never make it twice the same way. It always begins with (approximately) the same weight of carrots and beets that I peel, grate, and toss with a bit of oil and vinegar, but I then switch to improv mode: I just pluck from the rows of bottles and jars that crowd my kitchen counter, and I pour, dash, sprinkle, and pinch as my mood commands. I suggest you do the same.
Continue reading "Carottes et Betteraves Râpées"
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By clotilde on Desserts & Sweets 
Among the many things I learned during that memorable conference on molecular gastronomy, one idea has been whirling around my brain with particular insistence since then, and it is that of farine torréfiée*, or roasted flour. It was introduced to us by way of a truism: raw flour is bland, browned flour isn't. This is why we bother to make roux, and why the crust of bread is tastier than the crumb. With this simple fact in mind, why not bake with roasted flour? The finished product would no doubt benefit from the heightened flavor. Of course, exposing flour to direct heat cooks it. This changes the structure of its starch and gluten molecules, and thus it behaves differently from raw flour; one notable change is that it loses some of its elasticity. Consequently, the primary use Hervé This suggested for roasted flour is in sablés, i.e. cookies with a crumbly, sandy consistency, for which a weak gluten network is desirable. I found a recipe for sablés à la farine torréfiée on Pierre Gagnaire's website** and it looked exciting (it uses cooked egg yolks! exciting!) but for my first roasted flour experiment, I was more curious to alter my -- or, should I say, my mother's -- basic recipe for sablés. I did follow Gagnaire's instructions to roast the flour, and after just a few minutes I could tell that this was going very well: already my kitchen smelled like the bakery around the corner***. When the flour had cooled and I used it to make the sablé dough, however, I realized it would not come together as obligingly as it normally does, but seemed rather to wish to remain a mound of sand. I sensed that adding more butter would do the trick, but I like the moderate butter content of my mother's recipe (most call for equal weights of butter and flour) so I proceeded as planned, and tried to form the dough into lumps however I could. The easiest (and most fun) way was to just squeeze it by the handful, a technique that resulted in these odd-shaped cookies I naturally decided to call squeeze cookies. I find their funky look endearing, but if you're worried that someone in your household (and I'm not naming names) might liken them to slugs or caterpillars, you can also shape them into balls, or pucks, or pack the dough in an even layer in a pan, following the instructions in this shortbread recipe. More important than the shape, you'll agree, is the flavor: I deliberately omitted any sort of flavor booster (vanilla, spices, citrus zest...) the better to judge the effect of the roasted flour, and I'm not afraid to say the effect is absolutely wowing. In fact, the same person who was so full of gastropod metaphors declared them the best sablés I'd ever made. Grilled notes of chocolate and hazelnut come through in every bite, the consistency is a fine crumbliness unlike that of any sablé I know, and all that comes from a simple twenty-minute roasting step. See how the baking horizon has suddenly broadened? Don't you have a favorite baking recipe you should be experimenting with, right this minute? ~~~ * The French term torréfier (to torrefy) has a slightly different meaning from rôtir (to roast) but has, to my knowledge, no exact equivalent in English. Torréfier is defined as "exposing to intense heat until the early stage of carbonization." The most frequent use of the term -- and the process -- is the roasting of green, raw coffee beans, which turns them into a browned, intensely fragrant version of themselves. ** Pierre Gagnaire and Hervé This engage in a monthly conversation (in French, of course) wherein the scientist explores a chemical or physical phenomenon and the chef offers a recipe to illustrate it. *** They say you should bake a loaf of bread before people come to visit the house you're trying to sell, but, as it turns out, just roasting some flour should do the trick.
Continue reading "Squeeze Cookies (A Roasted Flour Experiment)"
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As mentioned in the previous post, I've been on the look out for easy recipes that will appeal to both children and adults lately. This one has not been tested on the toddler yet for the simple reason that so far he is resistant to the lure of peanut butter. I'm pretty sure that - like his chocolate aversion, which disappeared recently - it will go away in time and he'll gobble PBJs like any other red-blooded (half) American child. In addition, I just thought the 
Over the years, my garden has had its ups and downs. It has never come close to the glorious fruit and vegetable producing garden of Eden that I plan each spring. Either I start well and then procrastinate planting out, or I start too late. In the past seven years that I have been attempting to create an inner-city vegetable patch, this year was the first year that we didn't leave on holiday in the month of August, leaving the garden to the mercy of inattentive cat-sitters who never remember to water. On the rare years that I have managed to plant seeds on time and plant out early, the August drought has managed to kill all but the most hardy plants. 
It's getting cold out there. So let's make it warm inside. Creamy polenta is a great way to warm yourself up, as are earthy mushroom in a red wine and cream sauce.
January is not a very inspiring month for cooking. The choice of seasonal vegetables is slim and very starchy. You've used up all your best festive ideas over the holidays. And the stress and excitement of Christmas and the new year means your defences are down and you catch the mother of all colds. I have to say that this dish was an antidote to all of the above. The lemon gives you vitamin C and revives your taste buds with a fresh zing. The chicken and garlic give you strength to face a cold January day. And the cream, well, is comforting and indulgent, as it always is. And the best part, for me, is that it was a tiny chink in the artichoke-resistant armor of the Critic. He thinks he doesn't like artichokes, but I am slowly starting to change his mind.
I have never asked my mother, but I suspect she is not a fan of cauliflower. I don't remember eating it much when I was growing up and so came to love it rather late in life. It's a homely vegetable and I can see why many people don't like it. As with all members of the cabbage family, it leaves a lingering smell that isn't really all that appetising, especially once dinner is over. It's easy to over-cook and when you do it turns into a smelly, mushy unattractive mess. But when it's treated well and given a little spicy lift, it can be truly delicious: filling and full of flavour and wonderful comfort food. This dish brings out the best in the humble cauliflower and I'm going to be making it again. I might even try it on the Critic (who thinks he doesn't like cauliflower).
Last Thursday I received an email from my friend Ami about picnics. I was coming to the end of a long chicken-pox infected week on my own with the boys, so I jumped at the idea. Friday or Saturday?? Count me in for both! Big brother was past the contagious stage and the weather in Paris had suddenly blossomed into luxurious summery sunshine. I was ready to venture out and have me some adult conversation. 
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