Sick!

Luckily I got my pyjamas finished - buttons and all - just in time, and knitting and movies to while away the hours.

Speaking of, I was delighted to discover this blog post about the two starlets I've been most entranced with of late - Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers. Apparently both were avid knitters when not lighting up the screen!

In my most recent binge, I've watched Barbara in The Lady Eve and Ginger in Roberta and Flying Down to Rio and The Gay Divorcee.

I have to say, I never cared for the line about Ginger doing everything Fred did, except "backwards and in high heels" - Fred's greatest performances were solos after all! But Ginger is far the better actor; she has a great sense for comic timing, and shone in roles with no dancing at all (e.g. The Major and the Minor, or Monkey Business). I don't think any director cast Fred in a non-dancing role, and unlike Ginger, he never won an Oscar for his acting.

Both played smart, funny heroines - no shrinking violets they! Barbara I think will always be my number one for her performances in Double Indemnity and Ball of Fire, but my whole life I've wished I could dance like Ginger.

And now, I think I'll take some cough syrup and fall asleep to Fred's soft-shoe sandman routine in Top Hat.

Picnic pie!

I have wanted to make one of these ever since the Picnic Pie finale on The Greak British Bake-Off, so when a friend invited me to a potluck picnic it was an obvious choice! The recipe I used is from Jamie Oliver.

I started early in the morning, when the kitchen was still cool (west-facing windows mean it gets hot in the afternoon). And there was a lot of cooking involved in prep. Eggplants got done on the grill:

... as did the zucchinis. Red peppers and squash and garlic were roasted in the oven.

Once the prep was done, the assembly began. Fresh basil and parmesan:

Zucchini:

Red pepper, wilted spinach, and ricotta:

Caramelised red onions and goat cheese:

And finally the top! Ready for the oven. This was when I realised I'd forgotten to include the squash. Whoops.

Here it is, out of the oven! But I had my doubts about whether it was really done - I translated 180 C to 350 F, but I think I should have put it in at 375 and left it in longer.

Here it is after some dithering and eventually deciding on a second bake:

Still had some structural integrity issues though. Lessons learned for next time!

More Easter baking

A long weekend is the perfect excuse to work on baking and projects!

I am finally thisclose to finishing my work on the bedroom. Walls are painted, shelves are built, pictures are hung. I finally finished the trim on the window box seat, although looking at this photo makes me think it could use another coat of paint. Other than that though, I am pretty pleased with my peaceful little corner - a perfect place to sit with a good book and a pot of coffee to watch the rain.

For Easter dinner, we decided on duck - easy and festive. I like this recipe from Epicurious. Super simple.

Served with spring asparagus, braised red cabbage, a potato gratin, and homemade bread.

For dessert I wanted something light and springlike after a rich main course - and Ontario rhubarb is already in the shops! So I opted for a classic rhubarb custard cake. I found a number of variations on the same recipe online - funny sometimes you see things on blogs with beautiful photos and recipes that don't quite make sense. It is so obvious that the pictures are borrowed because the blogger has no idea what they are talking about! In this case, the miscreant in question suggested you could turn this gooey-bottomed, fluffy-fruity-topped cake out onto a rack, and then flip it right side up again. Sounds like disaster to me! Others made it in a square pan and served directly from the pan; I wanted to be a smidge less casual, so I used a springform. Worked perfectly.

Rhubarb Custard Cake

1 1/2 cups diced rhubarb
2 tbs sugar
2 tbs water
4 eggs, separated, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup butter, melted, room temperature
3/4 cup all purpose flour
2 cups milk, room temperature

Simmer rhurarb, 2 tbs sugar, and water over medium heat until rhubarb starts to soften. Drain and set aside.

Beat egg whites will stiff peaks. I like to use a copper bowl for this.

In another bowl, beat yolks with 3/4 cup sugar till thick and lemon-yellow. Whisk in vanilla and melted butter.

Whisk in flour and milk alternately. It will be very runny.

Fold in egg whites gently.

Pour into a very well-buttered 9" springform pan. Spoon the rhubard over top, gently, so as not to crush the egg whites.

Bake at 325f for 60-70 minutes, or until it doesn't wobble terribly when you jostle the pan.

Let cool on a rack for 10 minutes before removing the sides of the spring form pan, then allow to cool completely befre serving.

Best served with whipped cream!

what i did on my summer vacation day two: lumber & cookies

the lumberyard wasn't open on the holiday monday, so it was back to town to pick up supplies for a raft and anchors.

i also had to pick up additional chocolate chips - the ones we got at the country cupboard tasted worse than a brown crayon! the yeast we got there was deader than a doornail, too - so i baked a loaf of bread and hamburger buns that we could have used as paperweights! my plan had been to bake more later in the week for the fair, but that flew out the window.

and unfortunately i made a tactical error with my anchors - i thought i needed 3 bags cement total, but i needed 3 per tire! whoops. i was a bit bummed, as the concrete needs 3 days to cure before you can use the anchors, and by the time i realised it, it was too late to get more. sigh. at least i got one done.

and of course there is always time for knitting on the dock!

a busy week of baking!

i am so behind on everything (as usual, again).

last week was crazy busy with out of town visitors and multiple appointments with the kid's docs. all on the same day. so it was basically take kid to doc (in distant corner of city), drop him off at school after, pick up a few things, go home, prepare buffet dinner for seven (poached trout with mayonnaise verte, green salad, potato salad, roasted asparagus, rolls, cake), pick up kid again, drive to other doc (in same distant corner of city as before, except farther, and at rush hour), come home to house full of dinner guests.

and it worked!

key was planning a menu of cold/room temperature items, and getting things done ahead of time where possible. the rolls were made the night before, using a recipe from the amazing amazing woks of life:

i made a loaf of bread, too!

also made ahead, was the clemetine cake from smitten kitchen. tastes better on the second day indeed!

note: the pattern on top was done by sifting icing sugar over a paper snowflake. if you are doing this, do it moments before serving - or the sugar will completely dissolve!

Macarons!

This is something I had wanted to try forever! I even procured a giant bag of almond flour. And then... Life.

Sick, busy, or both, weekend after weekend. Happily, Easter is a four-day weekend, and no one was ill, so I finally had time for an attempt!

I followed David Lebovitz's links to bravetart's recipe. first step is beating the egg whites. Looked suspiciously like our ceiling.

Somewhere, in all of my reading, I read that you can save time by drawing circles on a piece of paper, and putting it under your parchment when you pipe. Seemed to work. But the only thing I was able to find that was the right size to trace was an old New Year's Eve noisemaker.

They are lumpy on top! But they have little feet!

And many cracks on the surface!

These are among the prettiest:

Much more practice is required. Lots and lots. I think I needed to crush out more air when adding the almonds. I was a bit afraid to do that. The chocolate ones are a bit better than the plain for that reason - I made one batch of batter, piped out about half of it, added 1 Tbs cocoa to the remainder, and squished out more air while mixing it in.

Also, for the record, I made a half-batch of Swiss meringue buttercream - 5 oz egg whites, 5 oz sugar, 1 lb butter - and flavoured half with caramel, half with raspberry puree. The raspberry... well despite a full punnet of berries, it had no flavour, and looked kind of grey. It's still edible, I have no problem eating it by the spoonful, but it isn't what I hoped for. Luckily, the caramel half was more than enough to fill all the macarons, with a bit leftover. So next time, it will be 2.5 oz of whites and sugar, and a half pound of butter.

april fools!

it's april fools' day!

for the kid's lunch, we have alpahbet soup, as inspired by chickadee magazine.

well, it may look like alpahbet soup, but it is actually butterscotch pudding from smitten kitchen, topped with some alpha-bits cereal!

that's sort of healthy, right?

i added some food colouring to the kid's serving, to make it look more tomato-y.

i'm taking one of the plain ones for my lunch.

buns!

i recently discovered a food blog called the woks of life, and fell in love! i want to make everything, everything. all of the yummy dim sum things. things i might previously have imagined to be impossible, but the recipes are refreshingly manageable.

too late for the lunar new year, unfortunately.

i decided the bbq pork buns (cha siu bao) would be first. i started with the recipe for chinese bbq pork (cha siu), which is so tasty we've just been snacking on the leftovers in the fridge non-stop.

the bread dough was something amazing. i used to make bread now and then, and then i lost the touch somehow and made bricks for a while until i gave up. then i discovered the new york times no-knead bread that everyone went crazy for a few years back, and had success with that, and started tiptoe-ing into the world of yeast again, mainly with our weekly pizza nights.

but this dough is something else, you start by making "tangzhong," which is something like a roux, and adding that to the flour along with the other wet ingredients. it also required 15+ minutes of kneading - making me realize just how out of shape i am! apparently getting zero exercise can interfere with baking, who knew.

the really tricky bit is forming the buns so that no filling escapes.

i pulled four points to the centre and sealed the edges...

... and then folded them in to the middle to make the buns nice and round.

will have to work on my technique - i did end up with a number of leaks, sadly!

but they still looked gorgeous and tasted amazing.

that said i do have a bit of an upset tummy today after three buns for dinner... and two for breakfast... and one for lunch...

summer cherry picking & picnic mini pies!

summertime! everything is so lush and lovely right now, including the fruit trees. it's hard to get excited about buying groceries when there is fresh fruit all around for the taking, if you have access to a tree.

fortunately, we have a local organisation called not far from the tree which connects tree owners with fruit pickers. the spoils get dividing between the owners, the pickers, and various charities.

i had been "wait-listed" for a bunch of picks, but finally got a chance to pick some cherries the other day. woohoo! it wasn't a giant haul - you never know what you're going to get, harvest might be anywhere from 5 to 50 pounds - but it was enough to make something. and with a planned picnic on the island with some friends, i wanted something portable.

and so: mini pies!

the great thing about these is that since i baked them in a muffin tin, they fit perfectly into a cupcake carrier for taking to the beach.

i used smitten kitchen's all-butter flaky pastry, and mixed the cherries with a bit of sugar and cornstarch.

the key to making this a weensy bit easier: waxed paper. strips of waxed paper (along with buttering and flouring the muffin tin) allowed me to lift the tarts out easily. and it was also the easy way to transport the woven lattice tops onto the top of the fruit.

once again, i overfilled them. sigh. a lesson i will never learn.

they look a little messy, but wow, do they taste of summer!

tart tatin!

i had always wanted to try making a tarte tatin, but had never quite gotten around to it. then this week, we had a pile of people coming over for dinner, and a bunch of organic apples from our veg box, so the timing seemed just right!

i did a bunch of research and read a number of recipes - jamie oliver's, smitten kitchen's, canadian living's, and then i found this wonderful article in the guardian that compared and contrasted the various techniques while discussing the history of the dish, and decided that was the recipe to go with.

then i remembered that on of our party is dairy-free, and "buttery" seemed essential to tatin success, so i decided to switch to smitten kitchen's simplest apple tart instead.

i made the pastry with a couple of tweaks; shortening instead of butter, i swapped out some of the all-purpose for pastry flour, and i upped the salt and sugar a wee bit. when it came time to bake, i started melting some margarine to replace the melted butter that you're supposed to brush over the apples, and thought - screw it, i will make a tatin!

so i winged it. i dumped a bunch of sugar in the pan, caramelised it (remembering the guardian suggestion that it needed caramelising before the apples were added), decided it wasn't enough, and added more. cut and arranged the apples (a mix of red delicious, which you're not supposed to use for pie, and spartan, because my son is crazy for ancient greece) according to what i remembered of the canadian living recipe. i love the smitten kitchen technique of using a melon baller to core apples; will be doing that again! cooked on the stove top for a while. worried that the apples were cooking only on the bottom and not the top, so cooked them covered for a while. worried it was getting too soupy, so through it in the oven for a while. then finally topped with the pastry, which was too big a circle, so i folded over/rolled in the edges.

the apples were a stunning deep caramel colour and meltingly rich, the pastry was a perfect light crispy contrast. and the rolled-up edges contained the caramel nicely.

it was delicious!

so i have concluded tarte tatin is somewhat foolproof. really, anything with caramelised sugar is delish. but next time i will use butter.

tarte tatin

2/3 cup all purpose flour
1/3 cup pastry flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp sugar
6 tbs shortening
a few spoons of ice water
1/2 cup margarine (or butter!)
1 cup sugar
6 or 7 apples

combine flours, salt, and sugar. cut shortening into pieces and cut into the flour with a fork. blend in water just until it holds together. form into a disc and chill for at least 30 minutes.

roll out the dough till it's about 1 1/2" bigger than the skillet you are using for the apples. move to the freezer to rest.

peel and core the apples and cut into eighths.

melt the margarine-or-butter in an oven proof skillet with half a cup of sugar. let cook over medium till deep amber. stir in the remaining sugar and arrange the apple wedges standing up in the pan. if necessary, cut come of them into thinner wedges to fill in the top so it is somewhat level. cook over low till the sugar is bubbling up all brown around them, then cover and cook 10 minutes. uncover and cook 10 minutes more.

top with pastry, rolling up the edges to tuck in around the apples. bake on top shelf of 400f oven for 30 minutes.

let sit for 5 minutes, then flip upside down onto a serving plate. i was a bit anxious about this, due to all the warnings on jamie oliver's recipe, but i put on my oven mitts and it was actually easy.

happy valentines: a romantic dinner for 5 with black forest cake

we had family over for dinner for valentine's day, so since we have heart-shaped cake pans courtesy of a garage sale, of course we had cake for dessert! my father-in-law isn't a big fan of sweets, so i thought, what's not too sweet - maybe a bit tart? cherries. and chocolate. black forest cake!

cherries are not in season, so i bought a jar of sour cherries to start with. i used about half the jar, i think. i started by straining out the syrup, sweetening it a bit (they were very sour cherries), and thickening it with a bit of corn starch. i also added a bit of cognac (one of these days i will break down and buy a bottle of kirsch).

the cake itself was a half-recipe of david lebovitz's devil's food cake. it was absolutely perfect, the most even and lovely cake i have ever baked! i only did a half recipe because i foolishly worried we would have too much cake otherwise. does that even make sense?

i really wish i'd taken a picture of the putting-together process. i am generally bored to tears by blogs that have endless pictures of everything (look! an egg! look! a mixing bowl with some sugar in it!) but one pic could have been quite useful. i sliced the single heart-shaped layer horizontally to make two thin layers, coated the cut edges with a thin layer of cocoa buttercream, and then - here's the clever bit - piped a thick edge of buttercream around the edge of the bottom layer, and another thick heart outline in the middle. then i chilled both layers before assembling.

basically, i was trying to recreate what i remember of the swiss pastries black forest cake i remember from childhood. the idea is to use the butter cream to create a vessel for the cherry filling, so you can get more cherry goodness inside without it squooshing out the sides. you can sort of see what the edge-barrier looks like in this photo.

anyway, i did that, then filled it up with as many cherries as i could get inside without overflow (and saving some cherries for decoration), and filled any outside gaps with more cocoa butter cream. then i grated enough of a bar of bittersweet chocolate to sprinkle over the top, and melted the rest with some heavy cream to make a ganache (no measurements, just eyeballed it), and used that to cover the whole cake.

then the cream! i always get organic or small-dairy cream, or really any cream that doesn't have ingredients other than cream. lots of commercial cream now has sugar and thickeners added. meh. i will add my own stuff if i feel like it. (i added a bit of icing sugar and vanilla, actually.)

i spread the cake with whipped cream, sprinkled with grated chocolate, piped a few dollops for the cherries, and then because i still had some cream in the piping bag, did a heart/arrow on top as well.

it was delicious! but my father-in-law still wasn't interested. ah well, all the more for us! it didn't last long, really. next time, full recipe of cake, and more layers.

also, i finally took a picture of my january sewing project. pyjamas!

sushi for dinner!

just because the kiddo asked for it. hadn't made it in years, and it may be a few more years before i try it again! used the instructions from make my sushi, which i found easy to follow. next time i will use a bit less rice for the cucumber rolls, and a bit more for the inside-out california rolls. they were mighty tricky.

and, i will make less rice. i started with 2 cups of rice, and it was way too much for our family of three! this is why i was wondering about freezing sticky rice earlier. turns out, you can.