chez pim

abundance

Counting my blessings.
Seven tomatoes,
nine eggplants,
eight Mani's mysterious peppers.

David sneaking home to surprise me.
Cynthia putting three more gorgeous tomatoes into my already full garden basket.

What will I do with these?  You mean besides being grateful?  I'm thinking my friend Rena's Greek aubergine in tomato sauce.  The recipe doesn't call for any chillies, but what would be the harm, you think?

Corn and tomato salad, fast slow food

If you've been a long time fan of Manresa, you know that corn and tomato salad is one of David's enduring classics at the restaurant.  So classic that it predates Manresa and traces its roots back to his previous restaurant, Sent Sovi.  So classic that each variation is notated with a version number, say, Corn and Tomato Salad, 4.2--a playful wink, really, at the location of the restaurant right smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.

When he cooks for me at our home, it's definitely not the food he serves at the restaurant, but it is no less profound.  We both love food that is perfect in its simplicity, like the perfect pairing of corn and tomato in this simple version we do in our kitchen.  Take sublime tomatoes--these are dry-farmed tomatoes from our friend Joe of Dirty Girl--and match them with sweet, sweet corn--passed ever so briefly in a simmering pot of water, just to tame the raw edge yet retain the fresh flavor.  Dress them with a simple vinaigrette, white wine vinegar, mustard, a smidgen of raw honey, perfectly fragrant, smooth, late harvest olive oil, and a happy sprinkle of sea salt.  Perhaps a handful of herbs, basil, hyssop, lemon balm, tarragon, or even some anise-y fennel fonds.  That's about it.  Make sure you have a big hunk of crusty bread around to sop up the perfectly delicious juices at the bottom of the bowl.  Better yet, pick up the bowl and drink from it.  Your kisses will be even more delicious after that.

This is fast slow food, requiring hardly any time in the preparation, but based on long, slow traditions of making great food and a biding respect for the land.  It's made quickly, yet best enjoyed ever so slowly, with a few glasses of good wine, on a balmy summer evening, in the company of the one you love.

Meanwhile, if you need a little help in appreciating the art of slow food, mark your calendar for this coming Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, where Slow Food Nation will be throwing down a serious fête, reveling in the art and beauty of food, very slowly.

Financiers - plain, jammy, or fruity - just the way you like it!

My quest for the perfect old-school madeleines recipe before has been quite well-documented here on Chez Pim.  I've got the recipe down now, and that's the one I go to every time I want to make a batch.  But what about the cousin of those Proustian bites, the financiers?  You might wonder why I've never written it up before.  Well, that's probably because it's hardly been a quest.  It's one of those rare, lucky times when you do something once and hit the jackpot straight away.

I supposed I shouldn't be surprised that the recipe turned out such perfect, Platonian ideal of the form considering the source, Dorie Greenspan.  Ok, it's actually Jean Luc Poujauran's recipe from his famous Boulangerie Poujauran in Paris, as interpreted by our dear Dorie.  When Jean Luc Poujauran still ran his bakery full time, they consistently turned out perhaps the best financiers in town--my friend David Lebovitz agreed.  This Poujauran-Greenspan financiers recipe was printed in "Paris Sweets", one of my all-time favorite pastry books.  Dorie even posted the recipe on her blog last year.

Meet "chef" Jasper Mirabile, or how to deal with a content thief

[UPDATE: As I said before, I was sure this wasn't an isolated incident.  It never is with these thieves.  Well, Haalo of Cook Almost Anything did the leg work on our behalf and found four more photos this Jasper guy blatantly ripped off from other innocent bloggers.  If you thought I was harsh on him before, what are you thinking now?]

So, it appears I've found yet another web content thief worth writing about.  Remember that Voncigars dude from last year?  That content-cribbing, picture-stealing, all-in-all contemptible person?  I decided to call him on it publicly last year when I discovered he stole content from not only Chez Pim but Chubby Hubby and tons of other food blogs.  Other bloggers who found he helped himself to content on their sites too joined the fray, and not long afterwards the thief abandoned his blog, never to be seen around the web--at least not the foodie web--since.

Imagine my surprise a few days ago when I woke up to an email from a Chez Pim reader called Ellen (thanks Ellen!) pointing me to a website called Live from Jasper's Kitchen by one Jasper Mirabile.  Ellen said she saw a picture that was first published here on Chez Pim on that blog.  I, of course, went to check it out.  What d'ya know, there it was, my pop tart picture from last Tuesday.  Well, my picture, but cropped so that the focus is dead-center (how predictable!) and the color revoltingly over-saturated (easy on the Photoshop there, chef).

Did someone say Nutella?

Someone did, didn't they.  Well, here you go, Nutella Pop Tarts.  I made them a little smaller so they won't take so long to cook and risk drying out the Nutella.  So I took some leftover dough from the pop tarts with quince and mandarinquat jam I made this morning, rolled it out into a very thin sheet, and cut about three-inch rounds out of it.  I filled the dough, folded it in half, and crimped the edges like I would a normal pop tart.  The results?  It's Nutella, need I say more?  They were super yum, but in the end I found that the ration between crust and Nutella was a little off.  So, instead of filling one half and folding it into a half moon, I used two rounds of dough with a bit dollop of Nutella in the middle--not having to fold them in half meant I could load it more with the good stuff, namely the Nutella. 

Now these were perfect!  How much would people pay for one of these, I wonder? 

How to make your own homemade "pop tarts"

Ok, these are not pop-tarts exactly, how about just-like-pop-tarts-but-without-the-stuff-you-can't-spell (or say)?  It's super easy, all you need is a good butter pie dough and delicious jam of your choice.  And if you're one of those who think a great pie is all about a good crust--I am of course one--these pop-tarts are perfect for you.  They are filled with just enough delectable jam to punctuate the flavor without obscuring the buttery, flaky goodness of the crust.

I've been having so much fun making them (and eating them) lately, I thought I'd share a few tricks I picked up along the way with you so your pop-tarts come out perfect every time.  Like this one in the picture just below--a "pop-tart" filled with homemade Reine Claude plums and vanilla beans--which I polished off in three seconds flat right in front of Lulu's at the Octagon in Santa Cruz.

Reine Claude (Green Gage Plum) and vanilla jam

So, what do you do when you find a big box of the fabulous Green Gage Plums at the farmers market?  Make jam, of course!  Green Gage plums are called Reine Claude in French.  These particular ones, with greenish-yellow skin and occasional red blush, are called Reine Claude Crottée I believe.  No matter the name, Reine Claudes are particular great for jams and preserves.  In the raw state, they are fragrant, sweet and so juicy as to be almost watery.  When cooked down into compote or jam, the liquid concentrates and the flavor intensifies.  There's also a good amount of acidity to balance the sweetness and plenty natural pectin in the skin so there's no need to add any more.

I first bought about three pounds of these gorgeous fruit from Patrick at Thomas farm.  Took them home, and made a quick batch of compote with a couple of vanilla beans, which is a recipe more or less cribbed from Christine Ferber's Mes Confitures book.  They turned out so amazingly delicious that I ran back to the market just before it's closed and bought ten more pounds.  Yeah.  Ten.  I went plum mad.

The first batch I made was so simple.  Just the plums, sugar, a vanilla pod or two and a little lemon juice.  The plan is to make a yummy jam to be the filler for my pop tarts.  Even if you've never made jam before, or just the mere mention of preserving and canning is enough to send you to hide behind the sofa, you really should try it.  If you find the whole preserving business too daunting, just make a small batch of jam and keep it in the fridge.  It's really easy to do and you can have the flavor and consistency just the way you like it.

Wednesday at Lulu's in Santa Cruz

Pennsylvania Dutch Pot Pie

Also known as Aunt Alice Ann's pot pie.  Or you might think it's not a pot pie at all.  And you might even be right.  Pennsylvania Dutch's "pot pie" is not a normal pot pie as we know it--you know, the kind with chicken stew topped with pie crust and baked?  Uncle John, Aunt Alice Ann's husband, explained to me that the Pennsylvania Dutch name "pot pie" is actually a bastardized form of the original German term bot boi.  It refers to a thickish chicken soup (usually with corn kernels) with homemade noodle (typically cut into squares.)  I'm sure the noodles are there to stretch the soup much farther than it otherwise would be.

Still curious about the term bot boi, I texted Thomas the (real) German boy to see if he knew what it meant.  "Potpourri", he replied instantly.  Hmm.  Odd.  "How about something regarding food, or perhaps something phonetically similar but not the exact spelling", I tried again.  "Ah, it's an antiquated expression for a thick stew, which in modern German is eintopf", he explained.  Eintopf, according to Thomas, has a starch element from mashed beans, peas, potatoes, or lentils, which are cooked with chunks of meat to make a thick stew.  I suppose when the Pennsylvania Dutch migrated here from Germany they imported the idea but adapted it to the more readily available ingredients, namely flour and corn.  So what they now call pot pie is typically a thickish stew of chicken or other meat, with corn and homemade noodle made with plain flour, eggs, and butter.  Ron, David's dad, told me when he was growing up they had bot boi with pretty much every meat or game imaginable.