Warm Weather Pot au Feu

Editor’s Note: This is yet another post in an ongoing series of posts from a food blog I had started earlier in the year. My idea was to eventually work up a Catholic Kitchen site.

There’s a Priest in the diocese who complains that all I think about is food. Can you even imagine? Does he even realize how much time it takes to learn Photoshop? Yet, it is an interest and as we’re called to ‘use the internet for good’, sometimes all one can do is share the journey of life…

If Catholic food blogs aren’t your thing, have no fear. I’m almost out of posts from that blog. But this warm weather soup is truly amazing; not hot, very light, filled with nourishment, and utterly delicious.

Er… it’s slightly edited from it’s original form.

I was pleasantly surprised with this.

pot au feu

Here it is in all its glory, topped with a poached egg.

With the temperatures breaking heat records down this way and no sign of rain in sight, I was a little leary about making something associated with warming up from the chill and cold. So I turned the A/C down to 65 and took a long nap beforehand.

It cooled down nicely and was nourishing and satisfying while still being a light meal.

And it makes great leftovers.

My white vinegar stash had disappeared, and so I used some red balsamic vinegar in the poaching liquid for the egg. Wonderful flavor, and it almost looks like an oyster in its shell. (Not that an oyster in its shell would be the least bit appetizing in this dish, but… you know.)

I considered this a viable option since I’ve been wanting to make eggs meurette, where you poach eggs in red wine. But that would have been a bit much for this.

pot au feu

It’s so simple. Some aromatics…

pot au feu

A medley of vegetables… simmered in the broth, topped with spinach leaves which are not shown here…

basil the great

And I even made the basil coulis to top it all off. One of my friends came over later and asked if I had cooked bar-b-qued chicken. My face was a puzzlement.

Later I realized the basil crushed in the pestle had given off a wonderfully aromatic aroma (an aromatic aroma… I’ll have to remember that one. Not!) It gave off… it filled the house with a fresh and invigorating scent. Which was mistaken by some for bar-b-qued chicken. (Must have been the chicken broth?)

The basil coulis turned the broth green, and when the yolk broke open it was a very pretty yellow against the fresh herbal notes in the broth.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m completely going to make this again and again, and again and again. It’s that good.

Bon apetit!

P.S. – This post was written as a French Friday’s with Dorie post. Be sure to check out that site sometime, it’s wonderful.

Vanilla Eclairs

Editor’s Note: This is yet another post from a food blog I had started, and which went by the wayside when I started my new assignment. It’s about some vanilla eclairs I had made, using Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table”. They are awesome, and everyone should make them at least once in their life, if not many, many, many times more. S’amusez-vous!

delicious  eclairs
Delicious Eclairs

My food blog has turned into a “French Fridays with Dorie” blog, which is hardly a bad thing. Some priorities changed, some new projects arose, and I’ve been preoccupied with some other websites and various issues…

And that distraction is very evident in my eclairs here. The taste is light as air, subtle and fresh as could be, and I love the lemon in the glaze.

But the glazing work is a bit random and je ne sais quois. They are looking , well, not as wonderful as they might.

eclair dough in the making

Pate a choux is an interesting dough. I’ve worked with it several times before so I could learn about it, and even made a Gateau St. Honore which came out amazingly wonderful and beautiful. So how were eclairs to propose a problem for me in all my splendid magnificence?

eclairs

I was definitely non confident in piping out these eclairs.

Deflated Eclairs

Gaah!

The first batch took a disastrous turn for the worse by cooking too early on the outside and being raw on the inside. I’m still secretly struggling with it.

On the bright side, the ducks at the park loved them.

A flock of seagulls terrorized me trying to get in on the flattened eclair scene. Their aggression is completely amazing. I guess they don’t get pate a choux everyday.

Poor things. Someone should start a conservancy for them.

Be that as it may, I’m tempted to take a bag of bread along with my camera just to watch their in flight feeding antics. (Never flick a piece of flattened eclair inadvertently straight up over your head when a flock of seagulls is hovering about squawking madly. It isn’t pretty.)

Back to the drawing board.

Eclairs

These came out better. Still… I could use some practice with this dough. (And, I could stand to unpack all of my belongings and find my other cooling rack.)

I’ll have to make them a few more times and get the technique down. I read through La Bonne Cuisine de Madame Ste. Ange after my deflated eclair catastrophe, and used a bit of her advice as well. I ended up baking them at a steady 375, for a longer period of time (until they were done).

Eclairs

These are really very lovely desserts, despite my incredible and inexplicable lack of focus in glazing them. That eclair on the bottom right is almost glazed on its side.

But they are hardly complex to put together. I’m looking forward to making a few more batches after Easter and getting the hang of things.

Also I no longer have a southern and western light in the kitchen, but a much softer, and bluer, northern light.

That’s taking a bit of getting used to.

Cheers, all.

An Orange and Almond Tart

Editors note: Earlier this year I had started an experimental food blog, before being transferred to my new assignment. I loved it and had a blast. At any rate, here is a post from my old, now defunct (or at least severely languishing,) food blog site. As the title implies, it’s an orange and almond tart. Bon apetit!

the finished tart

This is great. And as usual working through the French Friday’s with Dorie project, I learned a few new things.

the beginnings of an almond cream

The filling is an easy and delicious almond cream. I want to put it in everything.

the wrong picture

Wine?! Augh! It’s true that first I made the wrong recipe this week. Here we’re preparing the braising liquid ready for the shortribs project for next week. (There is nothing wrong with having these around the house a week early!)

blood oranges

Blood! Thankfully I had some delicious blood oranges around the house. You section these and let them dry out on paper towels. I love the name ‘blood orange’. It could almost be the name of a novel. It’s probably already the name of a color. I’m going to have to start using it.

the dough, le pate

Dryness. The tart dough was like a puffy, sandy bag of … flour and butter. The egg yolk was instantaneously absorbed into the extremely dry flour, which just screamed for more, more! More!

powder in a bag

I threw it into the refrigerator. Later I added some dribbles of cold water to help bring it together into a semblance of an actual dough, and tasted it thankfully, because it needed some salt. It’s a pretty standard sweet tart shell.

le pate in the mold

I had zero patience putting this dough into the tart pan. Failure was not an option! And neither was taking too much time! The dough got the picture, behaved very well, blind baked beautifully, and I was thankful the directions called for baking it the amount of time which it genuinely needed to bake. I almost always leave mine in longer, but here I didn’t have to.

ready for the oven

Good to go! And so suddenly.

the finished tart

Voila!

au revoir!
Voici?

Mine looks absolutely nothing like the model tart provided by Dorie Greenspan, but thankfully it is incredibly delicious. And the top of mine has a nice sort of, blood orange hue to it.

I dusted it with powdered sugar, then ran it under the broiler to glaze the sugar, then decided not to do that and dusted it again. The by product of rushing a new tart. But the taste… is outta this world! It’s going to be great after those short ribs a little later.

Bon apetit!

Un Gâteau de Crêpes

a crepe cake

A few months ago I made a crêpes cake.

Basically you make crêpes. Then layer them with whatever you want. Here we have pastry creme and a butter rum sauce, topped with a chocolate ganache and toasted almonds. And of course, more pastry creme.

It was awesome.

And it’s not expensive in the least. Although to be fair, it is supposed to be at least twice as high. It’s just that I had used up half of the crepe batter the night before at a dinner gathering.

That was back when I was photo-journaling about food, and thinking about starting a website about Catholic kitchens.

But then life changed, I got a new assignment with new responsibilities et voila, here I am.

I’m still thinking about that website. More on that later, of course… work beckons.

Shrimp Creole

shrimp creole

Sometimes it’s all about the tomatoes.

tomatoes, onions, parsley

Tomatoes and onions… And of course you have to peel a devein a few pounds of shrimp.
shrimps

I really question this whole process of blanching, seeding and dicing tomatoes sometimes, and really want to use a can of Cento or something.  Nonetheless!  Blanch the tomotoes…
tomatos

The skins peel right off…
blanch du tomates

Then dice them.  After peeling the shrimp and peeling seeding and dicing the tomatoes, the hard work here is done.
diced tomotoes

Into a large dutch oven it all goes…
ingredients a cooking

A few more ingredients at the standby:  a bay leaf, some paprika, cayenne, a bit of tomato paste will do the trick.  A pinch of sugar never hurts when it’s not the height of tomato season.
a few more things...

See, this all cooks down, the tomatoes dissolve and some carmelization starts to happen. (Did someone say Carmel?)
cook

After it cooks down, which does not take an eternity, the tomato paste goes in with the peppers.  The pepper and the paprika that is.  Isn’t paprika a pepper?
added ingredients

Then some shrimp stock, here we’re using three cups.

stock

After that cooks down, not quite a half hour, the shrimp go in.  They release enough liquid that it’s quite alright to let the mixture get toward the thick side before adding them in.
shrimps added and cooking down

The light also changed a bit, since it started pouring down rain outside.

pouring down rain

But inside, everything was looking just fine.
shrimp creole

The Rev. Kenneth Allen