chez pim

Alfajores - a holiday baking idea from The Foodie Handbook

 

Here's another recipe from my new book I'd like to share, and this is just the perfect time for it.  Aren't we all thinking about holiday baking these days?  Ok, if you're in Northern California you must be thinking freezing weather too - you've heard all the complaints on twitter I'm sure - so, what better than baking for an excuse to turn on your oven and warm up the house?

It will also be fun to do something slightly different than the usual sugar or gingerbread cookies, don't you agree?  I highly recommend these Alfajores, two buttery, crumbly cookies hugging the sweet dulce de leche (a sort of caramelized milk jam), your friends and relative will appreciate the novelty.  You may have to teach them how to say the name, al-fa-ho-res, but once they bite into these addictively delicious cookies, they won't mind one bit.

Don't let the fact that these cookies are so deliciously delicate - they seem to crumble under too intense a gaze - deter you.  While being made, the dough is so easy to work with it feels like Play-doh.

Roast Chicken, Christian Delouvrier's way

Recipes come to us in odd little ways.  I remember learning how to make truffle omelettes from a gigling, nearly toothless old lady in Southwest France.  Of course I took her seriously, she happened to be Marthe Delon, the famous truffle huntress who has been training a truffle-hunting pig a year for over 50 years.  She calls them all Kiki - couldn't be bothered to remember a new name each year, she said. 

This roast chicken recipe came to me from not so exotic a location but no less interesting a source.  The scene was the dining room at Manresa, the participants were Laurent Manrique, our dear friend and the famous chef of what I like to call the-dearly-departed-Aqua, his much-fairer-and-better-half Michelle, and yours truly.  We had just been served a deceptively simple truffle omelette.  Yes they certainly do omelettes at Manresa, hardly a greasy-countertop-diner-variety made from Nearly Eggless Goo^TM, but one comprised of Porcini puree, freshest farm eggs, and housemade salted butter, oh, yes, and a generous showering of white truffle at the table.  It's the kind of dish that made us stopped in our tracks.  "Elle m'a mise sur le cul", Laurent said of the dish, a French expression meaning something to the tune of being so gouud it knock' ya on yur ass, hon.  That got us talking about deceptively simple dishes that shocked us with their greatness.  That's when Laurent brought up this roast chicken recipe he learned from Christian Delouvrier. 

The best fig tart, ever (a recipe from The Foodie Handbook)

I could also call it the easiest fig tart, ever.  Really.  It has an astonishingly small list of ingredients: a pie crust*, some luscious figs, with a hidden layer of frangipane, which, despite the fancy-sounding French name, is simply a concoction of toasted almonds, sugar, butter, and egg that you can make easily in a food processor.  

The key to the magic here is the frangipane.  It's one of those things that sound far more difficult and fancy than they really are.  My frangipane recipe came from the one in Michel Bras fantastic Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts. It's basically equal quantity (by weight) of almond meal, butter, and sugar, with one egg to bind it all together.  That's a truly fantastic recipe, and one so versatile I find a use for it in practically all my fruit tarts, from the summery stone fruits to the fall harvest of pears and apples.  Right about now, with melting soft and tantalizingly sweet figs make an appearance all over the place, you can make a fig tart with a base of this frangipane and it will turn even the most ardent fig hater into a lover. 

How to make a crispy fruit crumble

I don't know about you, but I think all this talk about baking being a-precise-science-and-all-that is scaring a lot of people away from baking.  I mean, I'm sure baking a ten-layer wedding cake or five hundred tarts may well be precise science.  But baking just a pie or a few cookies, that's hardly more so than making a simple bowl of soup.  

So, if you're one of those people, I have just a recipe for you to try.  Or even if you're not, try it anyway, it's so simple and so good, you'll thank me for it later.  (Hold it with the proposals though boys, I am otherwise occupied.)

This is going to be the easiest dessert you’ll ever make.  Really it will.  It’s basically comprised of two parts, an unusually crisp crumble topping, which comes together in minutes, and a fruit filling, which can be just about any fruit in abundance at the moment.  At my market, stone fruits are just about done.  So I'm sending them off with the last hurrah with the French prune plums - quetsches as they're called over there. 

The one about salade aux fines herbes and the veggie thief

This was supposed to be a simple post about how to make salade aux fines herbes, the basic French salad with mixed herb dressing. 

It really is simple, just a basic vinaigrette with a mix of chopped parsley, chervil, chives, and tarragon - about equal amount except for a tiny bit less of the pungent tarragon.  

So I was just setting up a shot of the salad greens and herbs I just picked from the garden.

 

Then Miss Ella got a little interested and came to investigate.

 

Thai cucumber salad (Yum Tang Gwa)

I picked four fat cucumbers from my garden the other day.  This is my first time growing cucumbers - in fact my very first time growing a garden of my own.  I've never before tasted cucumbers this fresh from the plant.  They were crisp, sweet, and perhaps - no, definitely - the best cucumbers I've ever tasted.  I am sure these cucumbers are the best tasting in the same sense that my cat (or your dog, or your kid for that matter) is the cutest thing ever.  But hey, why burst our bubble?

Anyway, since these cucumbers were the best ever, I couldn't possibly just use any recipe for it.  I grew these babies with blood, sweat, and tears.  Ok, not  really, I put the starter plants Cynthia gave me into the grown and gave them water and they practically grew themselves.  Hmm, now where were we, oh, yes.. growing them with blood, sweat, and tears - or just dirt and water, rather - I wanted something special the celebrate them.  A little bit of tinkering in the kitchen produced this recipe, a salad of crisp cucumber slices.  It's not exactly Thai, but the inspiration certainly is from that general direction.  

The dressing here is a classic Thai blend of lime juice, fish sauce, chilli, and a pinch of sugar.  I don't want the lime juice to be so pronounced and to overpower the brightness of the cucumbers, so I use a little less and temper it with a bit of rice vinegar.  If your fish sauce is old and getting quite stinky, I suggest using a bit less and adding some salt instead as well.  You want the dressing to be light, bright, and delicious, not stinky, sharp, and muddy, so be careful.  A little bit of herb gives the salad a lovely complexity, so I suggest Tia To or Vietnamese Perilla if you can find it (regular Shiro leafs or just plain mint will do in a pinch), and also a bit of cilantro.  Finish the salad with a generous sprinkle of toasted coconut flakes and fried shallots, and there you have it.  The salad in the picture has some poached shrimp in it, since I had that for lunch and thought I needed a little protein.  You can skip it entirely, or use poached chicken torn into strips, or tofu, or nothing at all.

Oh, you want a recipe, that was it.  Ha. Ok, not really.  

Brown Butter Ice Cream, or, how to make ice cream in a blender

 

I'm a bit ice cream crazy right now.  Not that I really needed to point out something that's out there for the world to see, both here on the blog and on my twitter feed.  I blame it all on summer, and on that David Lebovitz.  It's his new book, The Perfect Scoop, that's got everything churning, eating and talking ice cream!  If you haven't got it yet, I'd get one, immediately. His recipe for Malted Milk Ice Cream -which my friend The Amateur Gourmet Adam loved so much he composed a song about it on his blog- is what's on my dessert menu this weekend.   

Ice cream is not, however, my only infatuation of the moment.  I've also gone mad about brown butter.  For this I blame Jeffrey Steigarten and his brown butter article in Vogue a month or two ago.  (It doesn't appear to be online so I couldn't link to it, sorry.)  In it, Jeffrey not only sang praises, no, composed odes, to brown butter.  He also gave an ingenious cookie recipe from a friend in Thailand, which I'm going to try very soon.

The French name of brown butter, beurre noisette, came from the wonderful hazelnut aroma that develops after the butter has been melted and cooked until golden brown.  It adds such an intense aroma and wonderful flavor to pretty much anything.  Most of the flavor in brown butter comes from caramelized fat solids, the brown bits floating in the sea of golden butter.  Though most refined French recipe calls for straining the brown butter before use, I find that if the brown butter is cooked correctly, that is to say it's not overly burnt, it's actually better to leave the brown solids in it.  (Michael Ruhlman did a thorough piece on brown butter a while back, go there if you need more information on this.)  

My brown butter ice cream recipe is a result of an experiment.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a quest: one to see how much brown butter I can get away with adding into a pretty classic, basic ice cream base recipe.  I want my brown butter ice cream to actually taste like brown butter, not just hinting at it.  I also don't want any other flavoring that would interfere with the pure flavor of brown butter, so you won't find gratuitous vanilla or brown sugar or anything of the sort here.  It's just ice cream base and brown butter.   The amount I ended up with is the ratio of 1:3 butter to other dairy, that is to say, a @#$% load.  (Yes, that is a technical term.)  

How do I go about blending 8oz of liquid fat into an ice cream base?  With a blender.  Yes, your regular old blender.  It does the work for you with no sweat at all.  The result? Smooth, creamy ice cream that is unmistakably brown butter-y.  So easy I can say it's almost fool-proof.  Try it and you'll see how beautifully it works.  This method has been working so well I'm now fantasizing about how to use all kinds of other liquid fat in my ice cream.  That olive oil gelato, like the one I love so much at Otto, might just be next.  

Thyme Flower Ice Cream - glace aux fleurs de thym

There is something magical about herb flowers.  Don't you agree?  They are like a softer, more feminine, and altogether prettier version of the herbs themselves.  It's a pity they are not used more often in the kitchen.  That might perhaps be because they are not easy to come by, if you buy herbs at the store you probably wouldn't see the flowers.  Most commercial growers - or even the more diligent of home gardeners - snip them right off as soon as they appear, to prevent the herbs going to seeds and die.  But if you're one of the lucky ones with an herb pot or two growing by the window, or better yet a patch of herbs in your garden, try letting a few go to flower, you'll love the results.  Rosemary flowers are great sprinkled over meat dishes, especially the ones cooked with the herb already.  I love using cilantro flowers in salads, they work wherever I'd use regular cilantro leafs.  And my current favorite, thyme flowers.  

Most people think of thyme as a rather strong herb, suitable for something equally strong, like lamb chops.  I beg to differ, use judiciously, thyme can be subtle and don't overpower more delicate dishes like fish or even -wait for it- ice cream.  Yes, ice cream.

I'd take credit for coming up with this brilliant idea but, as Goethe purportedly said, there's nothing new under the sun.  I remember having an ice cream made with thyme flowers in France years ago.  I also remember tremendously enjoying the deliciously creamy, old-fashioned custard-based ice cream and being delighted by the unexpected and savory flavor of thyme in it.  

So, when my thyme bloomed this year, I set out to replicate that ice cream.

Pad Krapow Moo - spicy stir-fried pork with Thai holy basil

 

I have Bai Krapow growing in my garden.  They are called Holy Basil around these parts.  I put two itty-bitty starts in the ground four weeks ago, and they now look so happy and thriving I've decided it's time to harvest some.  So last night I did.  I made a favorite fast Thai dish, Pad Krapow, which is basically a spicy stir-fry with the holy basil as the star flavor of the show.  

Pad Krapow is a ubiquitous fast food dish in Thailand.  You can walk into just about any food shack on any street corner and ask for Pad Krapow, they'll make one for you.  You can also have it with just about any protein you want, pork (minced or cut into bite size chunks), chicken (ditto), beef (yup, ditto too), or even tofu.  Some people like to add cut up onions or sweet bell peppers to add a little more interest to the dish.  But the best thing about it, besides being really delicious, is that it's so simple to make you hardly need a recipe.  So I'm not going to give you one.  Instead I'll tell you how you can easily make it at home.  If you can't find Bai Krapow or Holy Basil, you can even use the regular Thai basil you can find at any Asian markets near you.  In which case you'll technically be making Pad Horapa (Stir-fry with Thai Basil) instead of Pad Krapow (Stir-fry with Holy Basil), but it'll be good just the same.  

Lard, your fat of choice?

Going through the pictures I took in New Orleans, I stumbled upon this cute sign inside the fantastic Kitchen Witch bookstore in the French Quarter.  It got me thinking about lard.  Even with renaissance of our love affair with pork, I don't hear much about lard as the fat of choice in our cooking.  I myself love lard.  When I was growing up in Thailand, there was always a crock of home-rendered lard right above the gas stove, from which our cook would scoop up the semi-congealed fat by the ladle every time she stir-fried or deep-fried something.  If I had a choice, my last meal would be crisp Thai-style omelette fried in lard, on top of fragrant steamed Jasmine rice with lots of Sriracha (see-ra-sha) sauce.  It had to be lard, of course, because other fat would not fry the eggs as fluffy and as crisp.

What about you?  Are you, too, happy because you eat lard?  Or are you afraid of it?  What's your fat of choice in your cooking, and why?