Olive Fougasse

Last week was finals week so grocery shopping was kinda low on my priorities list until after I had handed in my papers and completed my Infectious Disease Epidemiology exam on Wednesday. Then it took me a day to recover my wits so I didn't even look at the recipe until 10pm on Thursday. As a result, I started this on Friday, but didn't bake it til Saturday. That still counts as a French Friday, non? Well, it's done, and here are the results.

My mise en-place, taken before I went out back and clipped some rosemary from the garden.

Yes, this is just a mix of oil and water. I was using Fermipan Instant Yeast, so that had already been added to the dry ingredients.

Dough after ~5 minutes of mixing.

 Dorie was not kidding. This was a really, really, really soft and sticky dough. I kneaded that thing for 10 minutes and it still looked pretty much like the photo. As she had said that it should pull away from the bowl but still be soft enough to pool at the bottom of the mixing bowl, I ended up adding about another 1/2 cup of flour. It might have had something to do with my flour, which was made from hard spring wheat and therefore had less gluten.

A photo of the mixings going in here. By this point both my husband and I were tired of hearing the mixer screaming, so I just mixed it in by hand. It was still tough work though - I wouldn't have wanted to "knead" this dough without a mixer. The consistency is such that the cook basically has to beat the dough like a batter, not actually knead it.

Post-mix ins, ready for its rest.

 I made the full recipe here, so these photos only show one of the two fougasses. As you can see, once spread out they are quite large. These are half sheet pans here. I thought it looked pretty much like the photo in the book - like a leaf, albeit a stubby one - but the hubs took one look and said it reminded him of Predator's face. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

The hubs doesn't like savory things in his bread, so it's up to me to eat this whole thing (the other one went to our neighbors). Verdict? Not my favorite bread, although its perfectly good and the recipe works - I think I just can't help but compare it to focaccia, and then I decide that I like the richness of focaccia better. It's focaccia-like, but with so much less oil in the bread, it's less tender and fragrant than actual focaccia, which is cooked in a sheet pan full of olive oil. The crust is a little crunchy from the olive oil-water mix that is brushed on, and the inside chewy-tender. I had a bite of it today after it had sat out all night and it was still chewy and soft, which is nice. Good for a casual nibble and definitely pairs well with red wine, but if I were to make this again I think I'd just make little rolls so I can freeze them and reheat for a bread basket.

Almond Flounder (ahem, Tilapia) Meuniere

 

 This week's French Friday recipe was Almond Flounder Meuniere, which Dorie described as an adaptation she made from the classic sole meuniere because flounder is easier for her to find at the market. I didn't feel too bad then with the decision I made when faced with a choice of sad-looking, pre-frozen, and badly thawed flounder versus plump, fresh tilapia at the fish counter today. Above is a photo of the finished product, served with a side of Spanish rice and green beans.

 

See what I mean by plump and fresh? 

 

The almond-flour coating was a breeze to make. I threw all the ingredients into my immersion blender mini food processor attachment and was good to go with a few whirs. Brushing on the egg with a brush instead of dragging the fish through a container filled with egg saved both extra eggs and cleanup.

We chose a deep-sided saute pan, which was helpful in reducing grease spatter

The butter-browning process is like toasting nuts. It can go from not quite ready to BURNED in the blink of an eye, so make sure to keep that eye on that butter! I got distracted and forgot, but thank goodness the hubs was there to remind me, because it looked like this when I looked again:

You can see the browned milk solids well in the top of the photo

Fish is cooked nut-side-down first, then flipped. Had to add another tablespoon of butter on Side 2 to keep the pan from drying out.

Et voila! Below is an action shot of the hubs dropping some green beans inelegantly onto the plate. The beans were parboiled and then finished in the same butter that the fish cooked in. It worked out perfectly, creating a nice brown sear on the beans and did not require getting yet another pot dirty. We had begun the evening debating whether we were too tired to cook, or too tired to walk to a restaurant. The humid weather finally decided us in favor of staying home, and boy, are we glad we did. In the time it would have taken us to walk the ten blocks to a restaurant, we had a restaurant-quality meal at our own table.

French Fridays

Well, hello there. It's been a while. All the Bees have been busy. Kea and I are both back in school, while Lana has started a new job. It doesn't mean we haven't been cooking, knitting, sewing, and so on...we just haven't had time to blog it, which is a shame. I made some mean batches of sour cherry jam and blood orange marmalade this year for example...maybe I'll post about it later. After my finals. Yeah. If I do, Lana should post about her kiwi-lemon marmalade too.

Anyways, I'm back now, and for a reason - I joined the scores of other cooks who dish it up every Friday on French Fridays with Dorie!! I had purchased the book back in December to enjoy during our one-week staycation, after eying it longingly since before it was published (didn't think there was much point in buying another cookbook when I was working crazy hours and going to school). Since then I've been cooking my way sporadically through it and - remarkably for a cookbook these days - met with delicious success every time (except once, with the clafouti. That was such a spectacular failure there must have been a typo somewhere). So I made it official and joined the group. After all, no matter what else is going on in your life, a girl's gotta eat.

First up then, is the Navarin Printanier, aka lamb stew. This is not the first recipe I cooked from the book, but the first recipe I cooked from the book for the French Fridays group. Here's the mise en place:

As you can see, pretty basic ingredients. Just like the majority of the recipes in Around My French Table. But looks can be deceiving.

Veggies getting their color in my Greenpan/wok.

After a quick browning, the veggies go in the pot with some flour, tomato paste, herbs, and beef stock. Bring to a simmer, then stick in the oven and let the dutch oven do its magic.

Apologies for the two pot photos. The second, post-oven shot was the last picture I took before we dug in, and I completely forgot to take a "plated" photo. Besides, stews are not particularly photogenic, and my photography skills are basic, to say the least, but trust me, the navarin was outstanding. Some friends stopped by while this was in the oven and remarked at how wonderful the house smelled. We would have invited them to stay for dinner as there was plenty, but they were vegetarian. Hehe. More for us.

Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

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Sourdough Starter, Day 1

Guess Kea and I are both back in grad school and have bread on the brain!

Last spring I started a new masters program in Public Health that took up all my non-work time, thus the lack of postings on this blog. Having taken the summer off from school, I've been happily filling all my free time with seeing friends that I ignored, picking up knitting projects I'd set down, and using cooking equipment that had been gathering dust.

One of my goals for this summer is to create a nice, healthy starter so that I can take that next step into breadmaking and tackle sourdoughs again. A few years ago I tried making a sourdough starter by following instructions from the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. The starter went through all the textbook phases and was fine, but I was never happy with the bread that I made with it. Looking back, I was still too new to breadmaking, terrified of making any small mistake, and probably set my expectations too high (for myself and my bread). That, plus I couldn't bear throwing away all that starter every time I wanted to refresh it. This time, I am using instructions from Maggie Glezer's "A Blessing of Bread." Her starter instructions are the only ones I have come across that starts off by saying that she uses the minimal quantity of flour and water to reduce waste. Ahh...girl after my own heart! She also reassures her readers that organic flour, distilled water, and (after the starter is established) weekly feedings are all unnecessary, thus taking a lot of the expense and pressure out of the endeavor. What's not to like?

Unlike Kea, I can't complain of the same difficulty in finding good bread. Here in DC we have our fair share of respectable bakeries, but there is an undeniable gratification about making your own bread, and especially one from your very own starter. So for the next few weeks I will be documenting the process of my starter on this blog and hopefully inspire my fellow Bees to try their hand at one of their own, too. Wish me luck!

Bread in London

Greetings from London, everyone. I haven't posted here in almost a year. I don't know if any of you still check this site, but I figured I'd come and say hi to anyone who might be listening. I'm most of the way through my master's degree, exams and term papers are over, Boyfriend's been "kidnapped" for a family vacation, I've got the house to myself for a week, and for the first time in months I have free time on my hands. And I need an excuse not to start working on my dissertation right away.

Since this is a food/craft blog, let me start by saying that bread in England is bland. Well of course bread is bland, you might say. It is bread. But the grocery store bread you get here does not even taste like bread. It tastes like...nothing. The white bread tastes like styrofoam. The brown bread tastes like cardboard. I gave up on grocery store bread and went to the local bakery. It was marginally better, but still tasted like a puffy matzo cracker. Compared to British bread, even the humble, standard Hong Kong "Garden" loaf is bursting with nutty aroma. I can't understand it.

So now that I have free time, I've taken matters into my own hands and started making my own bread. I am operating under the general principle that the more egg, milk, butter, cheese and cinnamon (but not at the same time) I add my dough, the better. I have no idea how any of this works scientifically, but I don't care as long as it turns out anything but bland. Or burnt. Burnt is bad.

I've got some whole grain-ish, eggy, milky, buttery dough rising right now, and I'll post pictures when it's done.

Aside from the bread and the sausages (don't get me started on the sausages - ick), I am enjoying quite a lot of the food here in London. I can get so many ingredients that were rare or ridiculously expensive in Hong Kong. Like almond powder. Or whole wheat flour. And the yoghurt! It is so cheap and plentiful, I don't have to make it at home anymore. Boyfriend is in love with the cheese. And the Vietnamese food here is much better than what you can get in Hong Kong.

But seriously? How does every single commercial bakery in this country screw up bread?

3 Chicks + 3 Recipes = New Friends!

My boss is fond of telling me that I am an introvert, and it's true. I enjoy spending quality time with just a few people versus large groups, but because I also enjoy my "quiet time," it means that I am usually slow to make new friends. I am delighted to be able to say then, that I have two new friends - Liz and Kim - with whom to share my love for cooking and eating. It all started when Liz decided to pop in a DVD of Julie and Julia on a transatlantic flight. Liz hadn't been too enthusiastic about the movie but figured it would do for some mindless entertainment. Ironically, she loved it so much that as soon as Liz got off the plane she wasted no time and started a blog, cast an open call for partners, and picked out a cookbook.

And so, that was how my DH and I found ourselves at Liz's house with her husband Tri, Kim (Liz's cousin), and Kim's BF on Sunday evening, faced with a mountain of red chili peppers, several pounds of ground sirloin, a package of truffle butter, a dozen different spices, and more.

While the guys heated up the grill and sipped wine on the deck, Liz, Kim and I got to work deciphering three recipes from the Top Chef cookbook/web site:
spicy fire wings with pineapple-jicama slaw,

black truffle burgers (sorry, cookbook-only recipe),
and strawberry apple crisp.
Despite some glaring editorial mistakes that required some educated guesses on our part (three QUARTS of chili peppers, people? Really??), the food all turned out excellent, if you can't tell from the photos, and we had a great time getting to know each other and messing up Liz's kitchen in the pursuit of a Top Chef-calibre gourmet meal. You'd never have guessed that Kim and I had never met before this, and that the three of us had never been in a kitchen together before. We made an super team and got dinner out on time, in a good humor, and without any major snafus. Two hours of cooking passed in a blur of happy chattering and a coordinated dance around each other and the butcher block island.

Thanks Liz! Can't wait for the next lesson!

Photos are all courtesy of Liz's DH, Tri, who is a fantastic photographer. Aside from working a 9-5 job, Tri also photographs local boxing matches for an online boxing magazine. Check out his other great pictures at www.tringuyenimages.com!

Holiday Baking

Yesterday was the perfect baking day. It started raining at 12am and didn't stop all night. By late morning, the rain had turned into big, wet snowflakes. It was cold and messy outside, so I stayed home and made a stew and dessert. The plan had been to start making candies for my holiday care packages, but it was too humid so it had to be cake instead. Well actually, a tart. An Austrian Linzertorte, to be exact.

I love Linzertortes. I love to make them, because the results are a lot more impressive-looking than the actual effort - they are as beautiful as making a perfect lattice-top pie, but much quicker and easier. I love the way they taste, and I love that if I have any extra dough, I can make Linzer cookies with them. I could also do away with the entire tart and go straight for the cookies, which are just as gorgeous, and travel well in holiday cookie tins.

I used this recipe from epicurious.com because it called for almond flour, which I had on hand.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Linzertorte-109549


Traditional Linzertortes all use a nut flour - usually almond, sometimes hazelnut or walnut. The recipes that didn't use ground nuts I passed on, because then I would just be making a spiced tart, not a Linzertorte. The nuts are usually what the store-bought versions skimp on too, which always makes for a huge disappointment. I don't have a food processor so I prefer to buy the nut flour. Almond flour is the easiest to find and least expensive. The large proportion of nuts to flour in the dessert makes the crust particularly fine and crisp-crumbly. While it's baking, the butter baking with the almond makes the most amazing sweet, rich, nutty aroma. Although the recipe is straightforward, the use of nut flour and almost a full jar of jam makes it a relatively expensive dessert to make, but oh, so worth it. You be the judge.