Short Attention Span Girl

Summer Strawberries

Posted August 17th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

This past week I bought more berries than I could eat for breakfast and needed to do something with the rest before they became mushy. One thing we hadn’t made yet this cool summer was ice cream.

Then what should arrive in the mail but the new issue of Saveur magazine complete with ice cream recipes. Strawberry was not on the list, but I took the ice cream base recipe and adjusted it a bit and came up with a winner.

This recipe uses a cooked base which I prefer. If I’m not having an ice cream emergency I prefer to chill the base overnight and make the ice cream the following day. This base doesn’t contain eggs, but uses corn starch to thicken it rather like some gelato recipes. It also contains a little bit of corn syrup which helps keep the ice cream from getting too icy.

Check out the magazine for options like corn and black raspberry or beet with poppy seeds. For now, I’m quite happy with this strawberry.

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

adapted from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, Saveur Aug/Sept 2011

2 C milk, divided

4 t cornstarch

1 1/4 C heavy cream

2/3 C sugar

2 T light corn syrup

1/4 t kosher salt

3 t sour cream

fresh strawberries, pureed to make 1/2 C puree

In a small bowl combine 1/4 C milk and the cornstarch. Stir until smooth and set aside.

In a sauce pan stir together the remaining 1 3/4 C milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook, stirring, for 4 minutes. Remove pan from heat and stir in the milk and corn starch mixture. Return pan to the heat and return to a boil. Cook mixture, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes until thickened.

Spoon sour cream into a bowl and slowly whisk in the hot milk mixture until smooth. Chill mixture until cold.

Stir in strawberry puree and pour into an ice cream maker. Freeze until set.

printable recipe - strawberryicecream.pdf

- – marcella

More Birthday

Posted July 29th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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What? You don’t celebrate birthday week?

Around here we stretch out the birthday fun as long as possible. A birthday week is really the minimum.

On my actual birthday-day my husband came home from work early. He had told me we were going on an adventure to San Francisco to “pick something up”. Other than that, I had not a clue.

You have to understand that my husband would pretty much rather venture anywhere than go to San Francisco. The traffic, the parking, the craziness…it holds no appeal for him. Clearly I am a spoiled birthday girl.

We made two stops. First we stopped at Mitchell’s Ice Cream. Actually for a nearly sunny day the line wasn’t too bad and we were able to get inside the door right away. We debated, ok, I debated all the different flavors, he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. One banana ice cream cone and one scoop of sweet coconut with hot fudge later we were out on the sidewalk enjoying our afternoon treat.

Down the street a bit further and we lucked into a parking spot right near Tartine Bakery.

You might remember that I recently baked a really nice loaf of bread from their baking book. This was our chance to try the real thing and see how close we were.

My husband had ordered a loaf each of the country bread and the walnut.

Aside from the shape the loaves were actually pretty similar in both appearance and taste. Pretty exciting!

And, in the box?

Birthday dessert, of course!

A coconut cream tart just the right size for sharing.

- – marcella

Dinner in an Orchard

Posted July 27th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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As you can see there were lots of peaches hanging on the trees and Farmer Al was nice enough to let us sample a few.

When we arrived Chef Richard Blais was hard at work. In spite of all the hustle in the kitchen tent, he was kind enough to talk about what he was making, sign autographs, pose for pictures and still turn out dinner for 175.

Here he was using liquid nitrogen to make little frozen horseradish pearls to top the oyster appetizer.

My husband loved these oysters. My favorite appetizer was the beet tartare which was diced beets topped with little flakes of candied wasabi. You got this sweet hit from the beets and sugar and then a little spice from the wasabi. There were also little mini grilled pimento cheese sandwiches that were hard to grab quickly enough.

The first course of hamachi sliced over a smoked aioli, pickled radish and crispy fried chicken skin was my favorite. Never, ever would have dreamed of putting fried chicken skin on anything let alone raw fish. Delicious! Smooth fish, crispy salty chicken, sharp radish; perfection.

Still boggled over how this fried petrale stayed so crispy. It was topped with amazing tomatoes and a salty anchovy butter.

The pork belly managed to stop the conversation at our end of the table. It was cooked sous vide for 48 hours and then grilled and served with cauliflower and a peach relish. What was surprising was how many comments I heard about the cauliflower. Usually it’s not the most popular of vegetables but it was really delicious.

Dessert was plum ice cream that was frozen with liquid nitrogen while we watched. It was scooped into yummy sugar cones made by Ici and disappeared too quickly for me to photograph.

Who knew dinner in an orchard could be so elegant?

- — marcella

Saturday Baking

Posted July 25th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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It’s true I took a super shortcut with croissants on Friday. Saturday, however, I baked something that involved a bit more work.

Now that we have our house back I’ve been working through the cookbooks I received for Christmas. I’ve been really wanting to bake some bread out of the Tartine Bread book. This week there was finally time to do it and it was cool enough to consider having the oven on.

Early in the week I pulled the starter we brought home from our pizza class out of the fridge and started feeding it the recommended blend of bread and whole wheat flour.

Friday I mixed up the dough. Part of the dough became pizza for dinner which was really delicious. The rest went into a basket and into the fridge for a cool 12 hours.

Saturday morning the oven and the dutch oven were preheated to nice and hot temperature. Carefully I turned the dough out of the basket and into the pan. This maneuver is nerve wracking enough for me when the pan is cold, it was even more stressful with the pan at 500 degrees! Fortunately I singed nothing. On went the lid and into the oven it went for 20 minutes to bake.

Then the lid was removed for the remainder of the baking time.

Clearly, I didn’t score the loaf deep enough and the crust ripped, but it’s still a pretty good looking loaf.

After another 20 minutes it looked like this and was ready for cooling

The loaf had a great crust that crackled and popped as it cooled. It’s always so hard to resist cutting into a loaf immediately!

More good food coming up this week.

- – marcella

Cheating at Baking

Posted July 22nd, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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I have been craving sour cherries since I was 9 years old.

Crazy but true.

When we lived in Colorado there was a little sour cherry tree in the back yard. Every summer I happily and secretly nibbled those sour morsels. My mother didn’t bake things like sour cherry pie and had no interest in the fruit of that tree. Then the neighbor next door who did bake things like that discovered the tree and mentioned it to my mom who happily offered to let the neighbor have the cherries. After that I had to limit my cherry filching to when the neighbor wasn’t in the back yard picking all the ripe cherries for herself.

Then we moved to California where we don’t get enough chill hours for sour cherries. I turned my secret nibbling in other directions.

Sure, there’s a big cherry growing area here. But, as an adult when I lived smack in the middle of it and went to the famous (but not helpful nor particularly friendly) cherry stand and asked about sour ones the owner scowled and snapped that she didn’t grow or import them and no one wants those around here anyway. I did, but my searching was for nothing. I found a place where I could order 20 pounds of frozen ones, but that’s hardly the same thing.

At any rate, hearing that there were actual fresh sour cherries at a local market sure caught my attention. My friend graciously offered to take me to said market and show me around.

I am happy to report that they still had sour cherries which I scooped up! They also had currents which I hadn’t had since Colorado either when the cherry loving neighbor took us hiking and picking. Those went into the basket too.

This market has more than produce. In the freezer they had frozen raw croissants. Score! I spied some almond ones and they jumped into my basket too with the produce and the cheeses, and lets just say I bought a bit at the store.

This morning we had fresh baked almond croissants for breakfast.

So simple. They thaw overnight and spend 20 minutes in the oven in the morning.

Happy, happy Friday!

- – marcella

Vegetable Happiness

Posted July 20th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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We just started a new CSA program.

Our old loved farmers changed how things were done – and sadly chose to keep growing the dreaded agretti. So, this spring we’ve been trying out other local farms.

The current pick delivers to our house. How wonderfully convenient it that? No sitting in after school traffic jams. No jam packed streets hunting for parking. No gauntlet of trash and recycle bins to wade through.

Just this bursting box on my doorstep when I get out of bed.

Here’s the top layer of lettuce, corn and broccoli

Followed by the next with lemon cucumbers, yellow cherry tomatoes, avocado, melon, onion and plums

I will dream of delicious ways to eat all of this as I drive, drive, drive today to some long meetings.

First, I need to deal with my sourdough starter which is growing to enormous proportions. Following that recipe direction of covering the bowl with a towel is proving to be a messy bad idea.

- – marcella

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Posted July 12th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

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The first time I made them it was a complete disaster. Growing up we were not allowed in the kitchen. We were not wanted under foot and we weren’t allowed to like the spoon anyway. I knew nothing about cooking at all. In junior high I took a cooking class. The teacher was wonderful and wanted us to learn how to cook read food. No mixes and no cookies. She said we all knew how to make cookies anyway. Well, some of those kids might have, not me.

At any rate, I guess my mother thought that one semester of cooking in school made me competent in the kitchen. She handed me her recipe card for chocolate chip cookies and told me to make them.

I gamely followed the very sketchy directions as best I could. The ingredients were listed at the top. After that it just said mix together, bake at 350. Not enough for a never had made cookies before 12 year old. I knew she made cookies with the mixer so I dumped all the ingredients in and turned it on.

You know what happens when you try to mix all those dry ingredients into not creamed butter and eggs? You get a dry powdery crumbly mess. It was wrong. I knew it, but I really thought I had followed the direction correctly. I went and got my mom and told her something was wrong with the cookies.

She took one look and started laughing. She asked me if I had creamed the butter first. What’s creaming? We had made potato salad and quiche and baked alaska in my cooking class. We never creamed anything.

She helped me make a new batch of cookies the right way and I signed up for the second round of cooking class at school where we made a cake from scratch and I learned all about creaming ingredients together.

There are all sorts of chocolate chip cookies. Crunchy ones and soft ones, but I like the chewy kind best. I also would frankly like them better without the chocolate in them, but then they’d be something else entirely. These cookies are big. Big because it gives the cookies time to bake and give nice crunchy edges while still leaving the centers chewy (without that under baked soft sort of middle – unless you like that and they you can certainly do that on purpose)

The mixing technique is different and doesn’t involve creaming. Instead the butter is melted and the sugars and eggs are whisked in, given a rest and whisked again and again. This ensures the butter fully melts the sugar giving the cookies the just right chewy texture.

If you like chocolate chips more than I do, you might want to add a few more to satisfy your chocolate chip love.

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

adapted from a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated, May 2009

makes 16 big cookies

1 3/4 C unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 t baking soda

14 T unsalted butter, melted

1/2 C sugar

3/4 C packed dark brown sugar

1 t salt

2 t vanilla

1 egg

1 egg yolk

1 C chocolate chops

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with parchment or silpat.

Stir together flour and baking soda and set aside.

Pour the melted butter into a mixing bowl. With a whisk, blend in the sugars, salt and vanilla. Add the egg and egg yolk and whisk thoroughly until the mixture is smooth.

Let mixture rest for 3 minutes then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process two more times.

Stir in the dry ingredients until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Divide the dough into 16 balls and place 8 on each cookie sheet.

Bake cookies one tray at a time until golden brown and edges are set, about 10 – 14 minutes. Cool cookies on rack before serving.

printable recipe - chocolatechipcookies.pdf

- – marcella

French Fridays – Beet Salad

Posted July 1st, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

4 Comments

I picked up some golden beets instead of the usual red ones for this dish. The cookbook gave us several options for cooking them. I tried steaming, which was new to me. Usually I roast beets but wasn’t feeling like heating up the kitchen just for one ingredient. The steaming worked really well and it’s definitely a technique I’ll use again.

The cooked, peeled and chopped beets were stirred up with a quick vinaigrette and chilled in the fridge for an hour.

The red onion was sliced up and given a soak in ice water. I love this technique too. A few years ago I learned it from my favorite greek salad recipe. The ice water soak helps to remove the hot, sharp flavor and leaves the onions really crispy.

At serving time all there was to do was drain the onions and toss them with the beets and dressing and toss in some freshly chopped herbs.

We both liked the salad very much straight up. The recipe also suggests dressing it up with greens and goat cheese which would be good too. This time simple was perfect with our dinner.

- – marcella

Roasted Rhubarb

Posted June 17th, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

9 Comments

Rhubarb is one of my favorite dessert fruits. I love it in pie particularly. Recently I added it to some strawberry jam. This morning it became breakfast.

The recipe suggested serving it as a dessert over cake, but spooned over plain yogurt in the morning appealed more to me.

The recipe was very simple. For us, however, it took considerably longer to cook than the recipe suggested.

Simply wash and cut the rhubarb into 1 – 1 1/2 inch pieces. Stir them together with some sugar and orange zest and roast covered and then uncovered for the last 5 minutes. While the recipe claimed roasted perfection in 20 – 25 minutes I let it go 35 and frankly, it still had crunch.

We liked it very much, but the leftovers did go back into the oven for further cooking. I suspect we’ll like it even more when it’s fully softened.

The orange zest added a really nice flavor to the sauce. Don’t be tempted to skip that!

See how others like the recipe here.

- – marcella

Vegetable Pot au Feu

Posted June 3rd, 2011 by marcella and filed in food

5 Comments

It’s the end of May and it’s raining! How can that be? So not the usual weather here.

At least our Friday recipe fills the bill. It’s a soup like – stew like – warm dish for a cold and wet day.

A friend and I braved the farmer’s market in the pouring rain. Pouring. This is where I realized that my nice hooded jacket, my only jacket with a hood, was left in a hotel room down in Cambria. sigh. So hood-less, in the pouring rain we went vegetable shopping. Crazy.

But they are beautiful and all chopped up and ready to go.

Then I went out on the deck to pick some herbs for the pesto to swirl in at the end and I got distracted by this.

Actually there were two, but the other one kept bounding away and hiding in the brush and crawling under his mother. Really cute. Cooking stopped for a while.

Ok, back to business because we do have to eat eventually.

The onions and friends get a short saute then the carrots and potatoes are added with some lovely homemade chicken stock and simmered until tender. Easy, yes? Finally in go the quick cooking veggies like asparagus and spinach and it’s nearly dinner.

The recipe called for a poached egg on top. I love poached eggs. I hate to make them.

(pretty eggs from the farmers market)

Poached eggs just seem so darn fussy. My husband bought me these, but I cannot find them. They must be in the last dreaded box to unpack. Or I put them somewhere but can’t remember where that is.

Whatever

Rather than simmer water and chant incantations and try to swirl that egg white into submission, I went another route. I did the soft boiled egg of the asparagus salad recipe instead.

Delicious!

See how other’s enjoyed this weeks’ French Friday with Dorie recipe here.

- – marcella

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