Share or Horde?

It baffles me that sometimes people, in this day and age, won't share recipes. I mean, really, is there a recipe for anything that can't be found in some fashion online? No, it may not be your Uncle Edgar's secret recipe for dumplings, but still, the dumplings are there. And why not make it YOUR recipe for dumplings?

I think Jeffrey Steingarten, in one of his essays (gratins, maybe?) talked about an endless quest to perfect a recipe. He tweaked and puzzled and got one that he could make and make again and it was perfect. And it turned out to be nothing like the original recipe. So really, what difference does the original recipe make?

I have one recipe that I won't share. One. And I won't share it because the chef who gave it to me is someone that I respect, and he specifically asked me not to share it. I also won't flat out copy a recipe exactly from a book and post that as my own, but that relates more to my opinion of copyrights, and why it was unfair that Sam Clemens was broke so often. Otherwise, there is too much of a teacher in my blood to horde.

Chocolate Moelleux for Diane.

100 g dark chocolate (this is the meat of the thing so a good dark chocolate is in order. I prefer a 70-75% bar for deeper flavor)

70g butter (you don't have a kitchen scale? But, um, why not? Ok, 5 tablespoons)

45 g (4 Tablespoons) all purpose flour

13 g (1 Tablespoon) cornstarch

60 g (3 Tablespoons) agave syrup

a pinch of salt

2 eggs

flavoring (see gilding the lily)

1. Preheat the oven to 350. This may take longer than anything else depending on your oven, so yeah, do this first. Spray four small tart rings or one 9" tart ring (or pie pan) with pan spray and place on a sheet pan. Love the pan spray. Fear it not. It is your friend.

2. Melt together the butter and the chocolate over a double boiler, or, if you are like me, a metal bowl set over a pot of simmering water. stir together every once in a while as it melts.

3. In another, larger bowl, whisk together everything else possibly including any appropriate lily gilding. This is really tough, eh?

4. When the butter and chocolate are completely melted but not hot, whisk chocolate mixture into the egg mixture. The batter will thicken up as the chocolate cools. Spread the batter into the prepared tart rings.

5. Into the oven it goes. Now is the time to not get distracted. Before, not so bad. Now, well, this cooks up in about 10 minutes, maybe less depending on your pan, so if you hear the cat making the incoming hairball noise? Pretend it is just CNN and ignore it for a few minutes. You are cooking this until the edges feel set to the touch, but don't wait for the middle to set completely. It's going to be fudgy.

6. Let it cool in the pan. If you can. I mean, it's good while still warm. So it can be kinda hard to wait. It depends on what is happening next. If what is happening next is fancying it up, and serving for company, go ahead and do that after it has cooled a bit. If it is just an immediate chocolate fix, I recommend a nice cuppa (Earl Grey is also stellar with dark chocolate) to go with it while it is still warm. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write out recipes? Man I need another piece now...

Gilding the lily

Ok, I'm better now. The beautiful thing about this recipe is that you can do a gazillion things to it to suit your menu. Easy rustic? Mix in some chopped roasted nuts like hazelnuts, and serve with your favorite ice cream variant. Tropical? Try a sauce of passion fruit and mango nectars and serve with starfruit and lychee. Classic? A dash of grand marnier in the batter, and some candied orange zest and ganache on top. Seriously versatile. And then there is the Chocolate Mint version here, where I flavored the batter with a bit of mint extract, and topped it with ganache and some crushed sugar free peppermint candies.

Holiday Spirits for Bakers

No, no, I'm not talking about alcohol, although I do have an idea for a Christmas punch recipe that would kick. In every job, there is that same meeting every year. "This is it don't screw it up we make all our money now and you like getting a paycheck, right?"

Something to that effect.

It's the most wonderful time of the year; where clients get even more crazy and the work gets even more hectic. Suddenly you look up and see you have stood on your feet for something like 13 hours and didn't even notice even though you have been checking timers in twenty minute intervals at least forty times. Online shopping is the only thing that is saving you from disinheritance if you remember to shop at all. Your house appears to be festively decorated with fake snow, but you know that's just flour you've brought home with you.

Embrace the spirit.

I look at it this way; eventually, the endorphins will save me. I can dread it, prepare for a month of misery and exhaustion, or I can make chemistry work for me. I will come home and bake cookies after spending all day baking cookies. I will fill the house with the scents of the season - citrus, cinnamon, clove. I will think of new ideas for festiving up our regular products while churning out what I need to. I will NOT sing carols to my coworkers every day because they have limits, and I don't know who owns a gun. I will, however, try and remember pleases and thank yous because after 15 hours that can go a long way.

I will probably crochet up a few festive hats. sorry.

And then, when all is said and done, I'll rest, and let my brain do it's thing, flooding me with chemicals that will make me say, "Hey, that wasn't so bad. It was actually kind of fun. How long until next holiday season?"

And then I will duck so nothing that got thrown at me will hit me in the face.

Now with Video!

So each year, one of my favorite newer thanksgiving traditions involves my friend Samantha and panicked phone calls. It started a few years back when she asked me for a from scratch recipe to make for her family. There was a voicemail I saved for years desperately asking about the difference between corn bread and corn muffins and that was all it took. We were both hooked. Eventually, I'll get her up to cooking the bird, but for this year, it is, by her request, gougeres.

And, since I have my shiny new camera, rather than just fabulous still pictures, I figured I'd help her out with a video demo, too.



The recipe is adapted from the French Laundry Cookbook, because that is what I served her when she had them, but you know, I think I still prefer a combination of milk and water rather than simply water. So my version would be like this:

.5 cup water
.5 cup milk
7 tablespoons (3½ ounces) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon kosher salt, or more to taste
Pinch of sugar
1¼ cups (5 ounces) all-purpose flour
4 to 5 large eggs
1¼ cups grated Gruyère (5 ounces) or cheddar, or cheddar and parmesan, or you know, cheese.

You'll have to find your own distractions while you wait for 10 minutes.

Sometimes, the big companies can do something right

If I came up with peppermint tootsie pops, I would be livin' large now. This is hands down my favorite commercially available seasonal candy. Even more good than Cadbury mini eggs. Seriously.

On Welcoming the Power of The Cookie in Your Life

It's become reflexive for so many people.

"No, no, don't do anything special for me..."

Well, why the hell not? I'm certainly guilty of it too, particularly where food is concerned. We have translated cooking into, instead of an act of community, survival, sharing and comfort, an act of effort, of time lost, of conditions and obligations. As a professional, I worry that someone will hold themselves up to impossibly high standards when really, I'm so damn flattered that you would make anything for me that you could probably poison me and I'd still say thank you. Maybe. Depends on the gentleness of the stomach pump.

And when I'm doing the cooking? Well, man, this is what I DO, how I'm wired, this is my "to be". I don't care if it is nut gluten sugar fruit chocolate dairy egg free (although that would be depressing. And tricky. Steamed rice cake, maybe?) I want to cook for you. Hell, it's a chance for me to show off, and if humans didn't want to show off they wouldn't have invented language.

The Power of the Cookie works because we are flattered by generosity when we receive it, and because we get a similar rush of good feeling when we DO it. So rather than deny myself those happy endorphins from giving to others I just bake. And it doesn't matter what time of year it is.

It's just nice that right around now, people are so much more willing to take generosity of spirit as it is offered, and enjoy it, without feeling obligation.

Now if I could just get more people to act that way in July.

sugar free sweet potato madelines

42 Days

It doesn't seem like very much time, does it?

Going Native

There's a strange thing going on in my kitchen. My eggs are from Kookoolan farms. My honey is native fireweed honey. The Deep Roots folks supplied me with black kale last week, collards this week, and then there is the bacon ends, ham hocks and sausage from Sweet Briar farms. I have my turkey on order for thanksgiving and awesome examples of fractals in nature from the cauliflower I picked up yesterday.

I know where all of this stuff came from.

And strangely enough, some of the market vendors are starting to recognize me. I chat about work while I buy coffee. And when I need good local grapes for a galette I end up with stunning interlochen from here. The woman who I buy them from was the same person who trusted me to know what to make with those fabulous fresh italian plums. It's like I'm living in an actual community, or something.

In the past, produce came from giant trucks. Or sometimes smaller vans, but still, the vans were not driven by someone who would say, "Sorry I couldn't get these too you yesterday but we were picking to catch up from the rain earlier this week." Instead they were driven by guys who would ask me if there was a way to tell if a cantelope was ripe from the outside. Or, in the best of times past, the produce would come from a market, yes, but one which brought things in from all over the world, nary a farmer in sight.

Here, it is all so close, so accessible, that it is carrying over to what we eat at home. Now if only I could figure out how to grow a cacao tree indoors.

They totally taste like Apple Jacks

Cinnamon macarons with pippin-cox apple butter.

Branding myself

So, what do I want to be when I grow up? Going to pastry school, I had to reevaluate what that meant for me. I came to a conclusive, absolute decision.

I am never going to know what I want to be when I grow up.

(My friends are laughing at me right now, because of how true to me this statement is.) I can make a list of things that I would like NOT to do, and some of them even relate to the food industry. The thing is lately, I'm starting to formulate an idea of what I would like to do. Or at least, aspects that I would like to incorporate into something that could become the thing that eventually is what I do.

Um, does that make sense?

It starts, of course, with the food. That is the easy part. A list is forming, recipes being played with, tested. In many ways, this is the fun part; I'm covered in terms of my living expenses, this is just time to fail, retry, succeed and just come up with wacky schemes without risk. Time to define and refine what I'm looking for.

It is a deeply personal thing, these products. They are, more than any words, a direct reflection of my heart. My spirit in sugared form. It's funny, I'm sure there are cooks out there, chefs even, who could come to this point and not see this as so deeply their own. Me, I don't know any other way to do it and have a chance for it working.

And maybe that is why this work can be so heartbreaking.

For now though, I'm still having my first crush.
(pandan ginger and lemon saffron lollipops)

My, how things do change

My grandmother has been slowly dumping old cookbooks on me for a few years now. It's kind of a funny situation because I am very picky about having lots of cookbooks. My parents had a huge number of cookbooks, filled with lovely, fascinating recipes and they never cooked ANYTHING from most of them. I don't want that to happen to me, so I have one shelf of cookbooks. That's it. But so far, most of the ones from my grandmother have managed to claim a coveted spot on that shelf.

Yeah, like I'd throw away all of MFK Fisher, or that old James Beard.

So the one I received yesterday was 'Home at the Range with George Rector", copyright 1939. Rector did a few things with his life - restaurants, a hotel, some film roles as himself - and he writes as though the reader of the book would consider him a household name. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page, now. IMDB has him listed, though.

What fascinated me about the volume is the commentary about his restaurant and food in general. Japanese food was simply derivative of Chinese. Chinese food (as well as some Spanish dishes) was quite complicated, given the number of ingredients. Canned food was indistinguishable from fresh (He suggested a blindfold taste test, like the kind they use for cigarettes). Stock is something everyone would have around the house.

He even touched on seasonality. He lamented the availability of out-of-season items to everyone, because what could restaurants then use to surprise and delight their guests?

Huh.

Stuff that is in season, maybe?