The holiday season is upon us, and my husband and I are finally starting to get into the holiday spirit.  Maybe it’s the festive cappuccinos or the warm vin chaud and the carolers singing in the streets, but either way, the holidays are here and I can’t wait to start some new traditions with my husband during our first Christmas abroad.  For me, the holidays are a season of giving.  I consider myself blessed because my entire life I basically have never had want of any necessities of life, and the holidays were always filled with an abundance of love, family, and food – and I enjoy giving gifts to show my love and affection to friends and family I care about.  I agonized over what to give my husband for Christmas for weeks – and then it dawned on me that the reason it was so difficult is that he really doesn’t need anything.  Neither do I.  We don’t need anything.

But that is not the case for all Americans.  In fact, there are children in the U.S. right now who are hungry.  Next year, nearly one in four children in America will have to face being hungry.  One in FOUR!  It’s a shockingly high statistic.  So instead of simply buying more things to wrap in boxes and bows just so we can open them for each other on Christmas morning, we decided to also incorporate a different sort of giving this year, and I encourage you to do the same.  This season, in the spirit of giving and sharing, I joined up with the progressive dinner hosted by Share our Strength to raise money in support of their No Kid Hungry campaign.

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Read the rest of Stuffed Acorn Squash – Share our Holiday Table

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Do you ever develop emotional attachments to your cookbooks?  I certainly do – I tend to get sentimental about books anyways, but especially my cookbooks – after all, they have been with me through some failures and successes, repeated trials, discovering new techniques and all of the crazy adventures that go with learning how to cook.  For example, I feel like Marcella Hazan taught me pasta in her Classic Italian Cookbook.  The first time I made it I totally freaked out, but her directions were so clear that after reading I felt like she gave me all the confidence I needed.  Confidence is really the most important ingredient in cooking.  You have to believe in what you are doing – like if you try to make macarons and get all nervous and anxious about it, I’m convinced that the cookies somehow know and will misbehave accordingly.  Or maybe I’m just very superstitious  But over the years, I have come to depend on my cookbooks always being there, offering guidance when I felt lost.

So you can imagine the small feeling of panic when I realized I could not bring my entire library of cookbooks (well, enough to fill a couple bookshelves at least) with me across the ocean.  I told myself I could find whatever I needed online or buy them again here.  I ended up bringing just a couple of books and making the decision of what to pick was agonizingly painful, it was like saying good bye to a long time friend.  So now I am here, and when my parents came to visit a few weeks ago they brought me a gift – a cookbook from Ladurée – there couldn’t have been a better housewarming gift (well, maybe the macarons that they brought too, those were pretty darn good – and naturally gluten free!).  I love the soft velvety cover and gold lined pages, it feels so special.  And I’m totally going to use the ribbon as my bookmark, haha.  Translating and cooking from it (as it is in French) will definitely be a learning experience, and I fully intend to be able to convert the recipes I make to be gluten free.  I decided to start with a basic tarte shell, the pâte sucrée aux amandes.

The first time I made some basic apple tartes and the 2nd time I changed my proportions around a bit and decided to make David Lebovitz’s tarte au citron.  It’s fantastic by the way, and the next time I may be tempted to not even bother with the shell and just eat the lemon curd straight out of the pan.  I almost sat myself down on the couch and did just that after tasting, it was so irresistible – but I managed to bring myself to pour the curd into my tarte shells and set them in the fridge overnight.  That took an unbelievable amount willpower! But anyways, back to these tartes.  They worked really well both times – gluten free crusts are not so hard because there is no stretching or rising required in a crust, so gluten is not so important.  But there are still some techniques that make working with gluten free dough a little easier, and I totally cheated and did most of this in the food processor.  I think my 2nd attempt at the crust had more flavor, so it’s the recipe I am showing here.

I apologize up front for not having volume measurements.  One of my first purchases for my kitchen was a scale.  It reads in grams.  I am a chemist, mass and metric units make sense to me, and everyone should really weigh their ingredients anyways – if you are going to take the effort to measure out your ingredients you might as well be precise and accurate.  If you don’t believe me, then believe Michael Ruhlman – he knows what he’s talking about and describes just about how much variation volume measurements can have.  Mass measurements are definitely the way to go.

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Hi.  I’m Jenn and I am a chocoholic.  I eat chocolate every day.  I love dark chocolate that isn’t very sweet.  In fact, the higher the percentage of cocoa solids in chocolate, the better as far as I am concerned.  And next to eating delicious chocolate, I love to cook with it.

To conclude our Valentine’s dinner, we decided to make chocolate soufflés after I found out the shocking information that my husband had never eaten one before.  ”Are you kidding?” Who has not enjoyed the paradoxically light and airy yet incredibly rich delight that is the chocolate soufflé?  My jaw dropped to the floor.  To correct this problem, I immediately decided that we had to make soufflés for Valentine’s Day.  I’d never made a chocolate soufflé before, but I have made cheese soufflés and figured they couldn’t be that difficult.  In fact, they aren’t.  They just take some work.  Ok a lot of work.  Prepare for your arm to be quite sore from all the whisking afterwards.  In fact, take a couple weeks beforehand to lift some weights and develop those biceps.  Ok, I’m joking, but whisking constantly for a while does take some effort.  Don’t let that hold you back though, because the end result is totally worth it.  Like your world will come to a screaming halt and you will instantly be lifted to a higher plane of being upon taking your first bite.

Just make sure to serve them tout de suite before they start to fall!  My husband was laughing at me as I was frantically trying to take a couple of quick pictures.  In the picture above the soufflé had already fallen about halfway, but you get the idea.  Light and airy, dark and mysterious, all in one complex little dish.  Just wonderful.

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I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s -all those silly chalky conversation hearts that taste like Tums just don’t do it for me.  Most years it just feels like another “Hallmark holiday” – I mean, if you truly love someone, do you really need a special day during the year to tell them?  I follow the belief that you should celebrate love every day, no matter what the occasion

Maybe living far away from all of our friends and family changes that sentiment a bit though, because this year we both felt that we needed to properly celebrate Valentine’s Day.  We didn’t do anything extravagant or exciting, just a fun home-cooked dinner with some wine, staying warm together inside watching the Olympics while outside the sky teased us with hints of snow flurries.

What could be more elegant than soft, buttery cod that literally melts in your mouth with every bite?  No need for a knife with this meal.  That’s the beauty of poached fish – it is relatively inexpensive and so simple to make, but when done correctly can elicit such rich taste that you have to make an effort to tell yourself that you are not sitting in a 5 star restaurant.  This is not a traditional beurre blanc sauce.  Normally you would cook the shallots and reduce wine with vinegar, only adding in the butter off the heat to make it creamy and smooth.  For this, I did things a bit differently.  Shallots and thyme were sauteed in a lot of butter, and then wine was whisked in.  The filets were then poached in the wine and butter until soft and tender.  When I lifted them out of the pan they were already flaking apart beautifully, just the way cod should be.

To accompany the fish, we made spiced lentils out of my current favorite cookbook, Gordon Ramsay’s Maze. We ate here in NYC as a mini celebration for each other right after our anniversary, so it seemed perfect to make something that came from one of our favorite restaurants.  My husband made the crème fraiche mashed potatoes with rosemary and chives and brought out the chilled Sancerre, finishing the last component to the meal.

So while we are not big on the gushy gushy stuff, Valentine’s was the perfect excuse for making a decadent private dinner for us to share.  Love does not have to be said with big boxes of candy hearts.  Sometimes it can be said just by the act of cooking and eating together.

Submitted to this week’s What Can I Eat That’s Gluten Free?

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Warning – this post is NOT gluten free!!

The title is fitting for the day after Halloween, no?  My only guess as to why these are called “fly cemeteries” is that all of the currants in the filling look like a bunch of dead flies.  In reality, it’s a shortbread-like sandwich filled with a thick currant filling.  Quite tasty, actually.  I had never had currants before – they kinda look like raisins, but I really liked their flavor.  The apples and currants made it very sweet without even needing to add sugar! Well, I did on the top anyways.  Sugar makes it pretty

This recipe was created by an old family friend, Maisie.  Maisie was  from Ireland, and while she was alive  (she passed away about 15 years ago) she was specifically known for making this traditional dessert, fly cemeteries.  In fact, they were so well known that it made it into the church cookbook! Actually, she hated that name and refused to call them fly cemeteries.  I’m not sure what she called them, but that’s what everyone knows them as.  Ha, can’t say I blame her.  After all, “fly cemeteries” doesn’t sound very appetizing, does it?

It was requested of me to make these for a tea service done in “Scottish fashion” today, which was really fun – once I figured out what I was doing.  But then, that is half the fun of baking, right?

You see, while there is a written recipe for Maisie’s Fly Cemeteries, she never actually wrote anything down.  So the recipe is a combined collective guess of what should be done based on how several different people watched her make it.  Unfortunately, everyone’s impression of how to do them is a bit different, so the recipe is a tad vague.

And then of course, one of my other friends, from Scotland however, Maude, heard that I was going to attempt Maisie’s Fly Cemeteries and gave me some very specific instructions.  She told me that no one has ever gotten the pastry recipe right and that I should use this other recipe instead for it – she then handed me a little book called Bake the Scottish Way and flipped it open to a specific page.  ”Here, use this for the pastry crust.”  Ok, got it – use Maisie’s Irish filling, but this Scottish pastry crust.  Is there a difference between the Irish and Scottish styles of this dessert? I have no idea.  But Maude will know if I got these right or not, and she will definitely let me know whether or not she approves.  Best to follow her instructions!

Maisie’s recipe looks simple enough – currants, apples, cornstarch, and water for the filling.  Ok.  Directions? Also simple.  Fill pan with water to 1″ above the currants and boil with the apples.  Hmm….like so?

Haha, yes I know better than that.  I assume that means peel the apples, dice into small pieces, and then add to the pot.  Not too hard to figure out.

Now onto the Scottish shortcrust.  The entire directions said to make the pastry using 12 oz. flour and 6 oz. margarine (1st substitution – I don’t use margarine.  Real butter it is). Yep, that’s it.  Hmm.  By my 2nd attempt I had figured out that “make the pastry” means:
1. soften the butter.
2. beat the butter.
3. gradually add in the flour until you get crumbs.
4. gradually add cold water a tbs. at a time (about 6 tbs. total) until you get a dough you can roll
5. roll out your dough on a floured surface and then place in your ungreased pan.

Haha – glad that was clear! I obviously don’t know enough about standard Scottish baking practices.

But don’t worry, I will make this clearer for you.  You shouldn’t have to make this multiple times to figure out all 5 steps that are just assumed when someone says “make the pastry”, lol, because I just did that work for you.  Unfortunately I did not have enough filling left after my 2nd attempt to work out a gluten free version, but next time I will! One might experiment with adapting a GF crust recipe though…

So how did they turn out?  They were a huge hit!  Everyone raved about them, and my friend Maude even said, “They are spot on.”  It’s good to hear that they were done correctly and to know that these were authentic (well, as much as an Irish/Scottish combined recipe can be)! I hope that Maisie is looking on somewhere and that she is proud of my attempt to recreate her fly cemeteries!

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While it is still warm out during these last few days of summer (hello Autumn! You officially started today!), we had a family BBQ with some slow cooked hickory smoked ribs, and a delicious mango sauce.  This recipe was adapted from a recipe found in one of my favorite cooking magazines that I subscribe to, Cuisine at Home.  Of all the years I have subscribed to various magazines, this one has consistently been my favorite.  By far it is the most useful, practical, and technique based, with a focus on good food and flavor rather than necessarily “easy” or “convenient”.  I like this approach to cooking.  I honestly do not mind putting time into making food if I know that time is well spent and in the end I will have created a delicious meal.  It seems a bit of a counterintuitive paradigm for food preparation in today’s culture of speed and instant gratification, but I get my pleasure from not just the end result, but the act of making food.  You know the phrase, “It’s not the destination but the journey that matters”?  I feel that this is especially true in cooking.  Yes, it is great to eat tasty food.  But that tasty food is even more rewarding when it was made through age-old techniques that do not sacrifice flavor for time or convenience.  I enjoy putting work into food, and I enjoy putting time into cooking.

And so does the rest of my family – here is a rare precious photo of my husband and my dad enjoying some bonding time by the grill:

The act of cooking can be as involved or not involved as you want it to be.  In my family, we have an entire culture around food – food brings people together, and allows for great memories to be made – not just of the flavors tasted, but of the people it was shared with.  So I bring you these delicious slow cooked mango BBQ ribs.  May they bring you a great dinner with friends/family, and great memories.

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Remember the peach “cobbler” I made that I said tasted like a cookie on top?  Well, it gave me the idea to experiment a bit.  Ok, not experiment in the true sense.  I am a scientist by trade, and typically experiments involve well thought out, meticulously recorded tests with only small changes in each one.  This was nothing like that.  This was more along the lines of “hmm, let me try to make cookies out of this!  I’ll just throw it together and see what happens!”  That’s mostly how I cook anyways, maybe because I am a scientist.  I need to throw a little chaos and randomness into my life, and I choose to do that with my food.  Everyone needs an outlet, right?

Well, it turns out baking is not like cooking.  When I cook, generally I can just throw stuff together and magically it becomes a tasty meal.  Baking though, is actual chemistry in action in your oven.  If the ratios of ingredients are slightly off, you will no longer be making what you thought you were making.  A simple error is hard to fix, and TWO errors make it near impossible.  But despite that, in the end, I still came up with cookies.  Just not what I expected.

When I first pulled these out of the oven, they were crunchy on the outside, and chewy in the middle.  My husband and I had to do everything we could to keep from devouring them.  They seemed perfect!  But once they cooled I quickly realized that things didn’t go the way I had planned.

This was the recipe from the “cobbler” that I decided to use for the cookies – no changes, just as is:

For the cobbler crumb:
1/2 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup sorghum flour
1 cup sugar
4 tbs. butter, melted
pinch salt
1 egg

Everything mixed together great, just like last time.  I noticed that the dough seemed a bit drier than before, but silly me thought nothing of it.  After all, they worked very well when I rolled them into 3/4″ balls of cookie goodness.  I sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar and they were ready to bake in the oven:

I did only 9 to a sheet because I wasn’t sure how much they would spread.  I think 9 worked out really well.  Right after I took them out of the oven, I sprinkled yet more cinnamon sugar on top.  So far so good.  But once they cooled, no more chewy center.  They were just rocks of cookies.  They looked pretty though.

What went wrong? Well two things.  1.  I wasn’t paying attention and used only half of the butter by mistake.  Thinking about this though, they would have spread too much if there was more butter in them.  So I’m not sure if this mistake is necessarily a bad thing. 2. This recipe is for cobbler goodness.  It’s meant to be sugary and rich and mix with baked fruit.  Soft chewy cookies were never meant to have that high of a sugar to flour ratio.  And so, when they cooled, the sugar in the cookies hardened and thus, so did the cookies.  Thinking about it, it was really kind of silly to think that I could just take the recipe and magically bake them to become cookies.

But not all is lost!  I may try this again, as a bar cookie instead (thinking more height will make it more cake like and chewy), and I will cut down on the sugar.  There is a really interesting book I want to get sometime called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman – it’s all about what ratios of ingredients are needed to make certain dishes.  As a totally novice baker, this knowledge is not inherent to my kitchen skills, and I could use some study here.

What to do with these cookies?  Well, being that they are so crunchy, I decided they were perfect for grinding up in my food processor and storing in my pantry. They will make the perfect GF cookie crumb crust for a pie!

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OMG yes, eclairs, and yes, gluten free!  I about died when I came across this recipe posted on Gluten Free Dogs and People.

I have never made eclairs before.  Or really any French pastry for that matter, despite my very prevalent French heritage.  But late is better than never!  You must know that eclairs are quite possibly one of my favoritist desserts ever, next to maybe Napoleons.  There are a number of things you can make with choux pastry, so I thought if I could get this airy light pastry down, then I could open up a whole host of doors in my burgeoning gluten free cooking endeavors.  This feat was not without its trials, emergency calls to my mother on the phone, finding a new cookbook (well new to me) that has become my pastry bible, and a few missteps here and there, but the overall result was fantastic.  They are not perfect by any means, but I know how to improve them.  Those useful tips I made sure to include in this recipe.  Also, take a look at this pictoral step by step guide for gougères.  Same basic principles with the pastry, so you can see what it’s supposed to look like at each step of the way.

Chocolate Ganache

For this I used the recipe in the original blog post.  It’s pretty much your basic ganache recipe, but I increased the chocolate content by over 50% and used an entire 12 oz. bag of chips.  For the light corn syrup, we find as long as we use Karo brand, no one in our family reacts.  This may or may not be the same with you if you are gluten sensitive.

Assembly

So because my eclairs kind of collapsed since they were still too moist inside, instead of traditional eclairs I assembled eclair sandwiches out of two of them.  This worked fine.  The profiteroles held up better, though some of them I turned into sandwiches too.  Here you can see what I mean, this is a profiterole I sliced with a serrated knife (yes, I know it’s blurry sorry):

Just LOOK at those air pockets!! Yes, this IS gluten free!! I know amazing isn’t it?  THAT is what cooking gluten free should be like in the ideal world.  Now if I can just make GF bread look like that on the inside….

But I digress.  You can see how the centers really are too moist.  Oh well, live and learn.  Next time I will sacrifice one to be a test to cut into before deciding to pull the whole batch out of the oven.

So what you are supposed to do, is slice each pastry in half with a serrated knife so that you don’t squish it.  Then hollow them out, fill with cream, add the top, and cover with ganache.  Since some of mine collapsed, I went the “sandwich” route, and used one for the top and one for the bottom.  Know what?  They were still yummy. And that’s what I have photographed up top.  My eclair and profiterole sandwiches.  Eating one totally put me in a happy place all day

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Warning – this post is not gluten free!

Tonight I made this beautiful tart from one of my favorite cookbooks:

This book is the Stonewall Kitchen Harvest book, which focuses on the traditions of Maine and various dishes correlated with the seasons.

This recipe was a 5-onion tart, made with onion, shallot, scallion, leek and garlic.  I added in some mushrooms as well, cause they needed using and I thought they would work.  The recipe has you mix it in a cream sauce with crushed bacon and some gruyere.  Pour it all into your tart pastry crust, and bake and enjoy!!

Note – I used a spring-form pan because I don’t own a tart pan, and while I am clearly no good at making crust aesthetically pleasing, it worked great.  I could’ve let it brown just a little bit longer, but this worked just fine.

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