Breakfast Turnovers

A few posts ago, I promised I’d tell you what I did with the rest of my puff pastry. I’m sorry it took me so long! I used 1/3 of the puff pastry to make some breakfast turnovers for Jeff. If you like eggs in the morning but seem to be unable to put in the time (and wash the dishes!) they require, you would love these. I usually make a double recipe, freeze the turnovers on a baking sheet, then slip each one into its own individual baggie and pop the baggies in the freezer. The morning you want to eat a turnover, all you have to do is pull the turnover out of the bag, place it on a baking sheet, and bake it off.

Daring Bakers: Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Wow – what a deceptively difficult challenge! For a short & sweet recipe, with a mere 4 ingredients, it sure was a doozy. The discussion board was ablaze with chatter about the finer points of baking macarons. Should the egg whites be aged? Double up on baking trays? How best to dry the macarons? And most importantly – just HOW does one achieve the elusive feet?

I guess I should back up. I’ve never eaten a macaron, but I have certainly seen my fair share of them in pastry shops and on other folks’ food blogs. I always assumed I wouldn’t like them because I had the impression they tasted like meringue, which isn’t my cup of tea. But due to their growing popularity, I’d all but decided to give them a try when, bam, this challenge arrived. I knew these little buggers were reputed to be tricky, so I readied myself for a fight. Though I love the really complex Daring Bakers challenges, I also find some of the most valuable ones to be those that require us to hone in on and perfect a particular technique.

The main challenge here was getting the consistency of the macarons just right. They should have crisp outer shells but remain chewy on the inside. Most importantly, they should develop feet – a distinctive puff around the bottom of the shell. I baked 3 trays of macarons and only got about 1/10 of them to turn out as they should. For some reason there were two rows (on two different trays) that developed feet and a shiny, crack-free shell. The rest of them… not so much. Since they were all from the same batch of batter, my theory is as follows: the ones closest to the heat source did the best. Perhaps my oven temperature needs adjusting. Or maybe I shouldn’t have chosen chocolate macarons for my first go-round. If they’d been a lighter color I probably could have gauged doneness better. Also, they seemed to benefit from sitting out on the counter a bit after they’d been piped. I couldn’t fit all three trays in the oven at once, so I baked one, then the other two. The second two trays were the ones that had the” good” macarons. Interesting…

Luckily, the failures are just as delicious as the successes. We shared some with friends last night and have been munching away on them since then. I couldn’t resist making them a little Halloween-themed. I sifted 2 tbsp. cocoa powder in with the almond flour and confectioner’s sugar. A little orange food coloring in the vanilla icing and tada! Halloween macarons.

White Beans with Kale and Cabbage

I know you’re going to look at this picture and the title of this post and think: “Thanks, but no thanks.” It just doesn’t look or sound like anything special. But, please, stay just a moment longer and hear me out. This was one of the best recipes I’ve made all year.

Deborah Madison is a well-known cookbook author who is passionate about connecting folks to local farmers and food. She specializes in vegetarian cuisine and is therefore a master at creating recipes that center around the flavors and textures of vegetables. Though I grew up eating cabbage only in its raw form, via coleslaw or salads, I’ve come to appreciate its sweet flavor and buttery texture when cooked. And kale has been my best vegetable friend for more than a year now, after showing up weekly in our winter CSA box last year.

Southwestern Shepherd’s Pie

Don’t ask me why I haven’t capitalized on this fact in the past, but it just dawned on me that the library has a wealth of cookbooks available for checkout. I’ve been visiting our downtown branch about every other week lately to check out books on tape for my commute to Raleigh. Each time I visit, I pick out a couple of cookbooks to page through at home in the ensuing weeks. One of my more recent picks was The Foster’s Market Cookbook by Sara Foster. For some reason I don’t have this book, although I do have Fresh Every Day. For those of you not from this area who therefore don’t know about the wonder that is Foster’s Market, check out this website. Be prepared to drool.

This cookbook immediately had about 1/3 of its pages tagged with sticky notes. It was hard for me to pick the first recipe to try. But since my class schedule has been forcing me to prepare meals earlier in the day to reheat when Jeff and I return home, I focused on those that could be prepared entirely in advance. This has meant a lot of casseroles around here. It’s a good thing cooler weather is on the way, because I think my slow cooker is going to be my best friend in the coming months.

Daring Bakers: Vols-au-Vent

It’s that time again! The September 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan. There were many, many creative and interesting twists on this recipe out there in Daring Bakersville this month. Check out the blogroll to see some of what was made.

This was such a fun challenge. From what I’ve read in the Daring Bakers forums, many people were as surprised as I was to find out that puff pastry is actually quite easy and not that time-consuming. The process really only takes 10 minutes start to finish, but because there is resting and chilling involved, you have to commit a few hours to being around the house. Luckily, time stuck in the house is easy to come by when you are a full-time student with readings coming out of your ears, half-written papers lying around, and midterms to study for. Student or not,  I will only be buying puff pastry in a pinch from here on out. Making it yourself is much cheaper and you get the added bonus of knowing how your food was made and what was put into it.

I kept it simple with this challenge and went with a very traditional mushroom filling for my vols-au-vent. I can’t think of a better combination and have been drooling all month just thinking about it. My recipe for this filling, made up on the fly, is the last item in the recipe list found below.

The recipe for the puff pastry made what I would imagine is akin to 3 sheets of the storebought stuff. We only needed 1/3 of it for the vols-au-vent. Consequently, I was left with 2 more recipes worth of puff pastry. I’ll post about what I did with the rest of it in the near future, so come on back!

End of Summer Tomatoes

It’s the official first day of autumn. My favorite season is slowly creeping in. I anticipate this moment all year long and am looking forward to welcoming fall flavors in addition to fall temperatures. With the humidity today, it looks like I’ll have to wait a bit longer, which means I can still savor some summer recipes.

Here in the South this is a transitional culinary period for us. The farmer’s market is beginning to fill up with radishes, greens, beets, green beans, and pumpkins. However, they also have the last of the corn, peppers, and tomatoes. Tomato pie has been all the rage this summer, showing up in magazines and food blogs alike. My first inspiration for it came from Aunt Anne, who was gifted with a beautiful lime green pie dish for her birthday. Grammie gave her the present one night when we were all at the beach. She exclaimed that it would be perfect for Uncle Glenn’s favorite green tomato pie. This immediately piqued my interest. I never got a chance to ask her what the green tomato pie consisted of (Anne? Are you reading this?) but I began searching for recipes when I returned home. I quickly learned that green tomato pie is traditionally made with the same spices as apple pie, and probably has a quite similar taste. Though that thought was intriguing, I decided to put it on hold for the early fall. I then did some searching for a more savory tomato pie.

Chocolate Cake

A few weeks ago I developed an intense craving for a piece of chocolate cake. Not a cupcake, which are too often dry, or a restaurant version, dudded up with flavors and twists. Just a plain old piece of moist, cocoa-ey cake with some chocolate icing on top, served up with a cold glass of milk. I drink milk no more than once a year, so all this made for one awfully strange craving. After a few days of ignoring it, the desire only grew stronger. So I bit the bullet and made a cake.

The problem was that I didn’t have a wealth of time, nor did I have a crowd of people around to help me eat an enormous layer cake. I love to bake, but almost always find that Jeff and I can barely put a dent in a batch of cookies/bread/brownies/muffins before it goes stale. I wanted a cake that I could bake in a single baking dish, so I wouldn’t have the challenge of eating and storing a double-decker layer cake. After spending some time perusing recipes online and in my cookbook collection, I settled on an Ina Garten recipe that received an extraordinary number of rave reviews on the Food Network website. With 1/2 cup oil and 1 cup buttermilk, it seemed to have enough of the right kinds of liquid to keep it moist. I baked it in two 8×8 baking pans so that it would be nice and thick, which would aid in keeping it moist, and topped it with a single layer of frosting. You could also half the recipe quite easily. I enjoyed being able to make two cakes with one recipe. I was able to keep one for myself and give one away – to my best teacher friend Emily, who deserved a sweet treat after bringing home her new baby, Rachel.

Tomatoes & Shell Beans

I don’t remember eating black-eyed peas as a child, but somewhere along the line, I developed an intense love for them. They sell them fresh at the farmer’s market in the mountains and I experimented with them a few times many years ago, but couldn’t quite figure out how to cook them properly. No one in my family knew what to do with them, so after a few discarded batches, I gave up.

A few years later, I was living on my own and discovered that they sold them during the summer at one of my local Whole Foods stores.  I figured out how to turn them into hoppin’ john, which became my regular summertime lunch from then on. It took some time, but I eventually convinced Jeff that yes, he does like shell beans, and also, hoppin’ john does in fact make a delicious and satisfying meal.