Stewed pears in mulled wine

Day 2 and step 2 to a festive dinner: chicken stock, pears stewed in mulled wine, caramelized onions (Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food). The pears are refined. I had this at Oleandri's last Sunday. She read aloud the recipe over the phone so I could make them myself. We each worked with a different kind of pear, but they were from our mothers' gardens.

8 small pears or 4 big ones (a variety for stewing)
300 ml red wine (not more)
1 bay leaf
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
1 teaspoon sirop de Liège (pear/apple syrup - stroop)
2 tablespoons balsamico vinegar
juice of 2 limes (or 1 lemon)
100 g sugar (ever strict, I halved that: only 50 g !)
peel of 1 orange

Combine all ingredients except the pears. Bring them to a boil over low heat.

Meanwhile, peel the pears, remove cores, and quarter them.

Add pears to the liquid, and stew for about an hour until done. Let them cool in the liquid.

Even better the next day with some vanilla ice cream.

Cookies and citrus

Annecy in Alpine France is where Laurence Salomon is cooking in her restaurant Nature & Saveur. Here is a chef who does a baking that isn't stuffed with that treacherous evil, refined sugar. As I had some citrus in my kitchen that needed to be eaten desperately, I prepared Salomon's Chocolate chip cookies with nuts, and citrus zest from Chocolat bio, saines tentations (Eds. La plage, 2009). I simplified somewhat-by accident- I forgot the chocolate!

Biscuits chocolats et noix aux zestes d'agrumes (by Laurence Salomon, simplified version here)

200 g small spelt flour (I used normal spelt)
50 g sugar rapadura (I only used 30g!)
1,5 teaspoon baking soda
1,5 teaspoon cardamom powder
50 g dark chocolate, chopped
50 g walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon of zest from orange and grapefruit
1 egg
2 tablespoons nut oil, toasted (I skipped the toasting)
spelt milk (I used normal milk)

Preheat oven at 150 °C.

Combine flour, rapadura sugar, baking soda, cardamom and nuts. Then add the egg and the oil. Next, add the chocolate and the citrus zest. Add as much milk as needed to form a firm ball of dough (I guessed about 100 ml). Roll dough into a cylinder, and cut biscuits. Put them on baking paper and bake for 25 minutes.

Notes:
I only used the zest of grapefruit. Mmm, that's a discovery!
This yields cookies that remain soft inside. They're a bit dry, but refined in taste, despite my forgetting the chocolate.

Plums, plums, plums, and a tart

As I'm in the dark all month due to some serious renovation, I'm also in the comfort of no strangers for cooking extra muros. After a walk through an orchard where the prune trees were shedding their fruit on a dark and rainy Sunday, I went to my sister's. I looked into the family fridge. Ouch. No eggs, only cream, no full cream milk or cottage cheese. We managed a prune tart just the same. I had brought my own flour and sugar.

Crust (pâte sablée) from Taty's booklet Tartes et légumineuses (2006).

175 g flour
75 g ground almonds
125 g butter
50 g sugar (unrefined)
pinch of salt
2 egg yolks (note: I did not add these)

Mix together, if possible, let rest in the fridge for 30 minutes, but since Jason Epstein's Eating I don't bother with that. Needed a bit more flour to have a crust that I could transfer to the oven tin.

Prunes in all varieties -egg-shaped, round, green, yellow and red and purple, halved, were ready. Then a short adventure began. What to glean in a strange kitchen?

I combined 1 egg yolk, cream, a bit of semi-skimmed milk, and 1 tablespoon of sugar. And a teaspoon of a liquor made of prunes. First put the prunes on the crust, insides up. Then pour liquid.

This liquid took ages to bake, so we had to bake slowly and for a long time and at a lower temperature. Especially when using wholewheat flour, mind the temperature so as not to burn the crust. Despite the liquid from the prunes, the filling sets, but more so when the tart is cooling off.

Seriously, how much fresher than fresh could this prune tart be?

Fall Ice Cream: Apple-Quince-Lemon verbena

It's become harder to blog on a regular basis. I write less frequently, with sudden bursts of posts. Somehow I continue my average diet of 10 posts a month. Here we go.

A major disadvantage about cooking at night in Fall-Winter is the lack of natural light. I'm counting: only 122 more days to go to Spring. If you consider ice cream in combination with artificial lux an anomaly, don't think just yet that your ice cream maker should go into hiding.

Here is ice cream with Fall fruit, from Peter Bauwens' book on ice cream, IJs en sorbets uit eigen tuin (isbn 9789044716399) - Ice and sorbets from your own garden. The apples and quince were self-picked.

Apple-Quince-Lemon verbena Ice Cream

2-3 apples
1 quince
agave or maple syrup
a handfull of fresh lemon verbena leaves

Peel and cut the apples and quince in wedges, and stew until tender over low heat, with no extra water, or else the tiniest amount, in an enamel-coated pot. The idea is to let the fruit stew in its own juice. Start with the quince, and after about 20' add the apple. Let cool.

Add 1-2 tablespoons agave or maple syrup to taste, and add the verbena leaves. Give this a brief mix, then transfer to the ice cream maker. Make sure you add some syrup, Bauwens says, because the ice cream tends to taste less sweet afterwards.

Serve at once or store away in the freezer.

Meanwhile I have ogled Dr. Ben Kim's method of banana ice cream: by freezing pieces of banana and by later putting these pieces through the champion juicer. Out creeps creamy delight. So don't store away the juicer either.

At home with a minor bout of flu: apple charlotte

The swine flu season may have blown over, winter may be on its last legs, and here I seemed to breeze through it, were it not for that little flu bug that finally did catch up with me. First giveaway: not wanting coffee in the morning. Second giveaway: throat and a severe cough.

For a situation veering towards bed my favorite resources are linden tea, and buttered crackers with honey, and if I ever may, a honey. But my slightly fevered brain was prone to some strange dietary choices. Some energy may be derived from a slice of apple charlotte, but perhaps not the best kind. And the Sugar Rant was Off. Third giveaway.

Apple charlotte

Serves 4
From Françoise Bernard and her zillion adventures in French cooking.

1 kg of sour apples (e.g. renet - I used a mixture of boskoop and granny smith)
50 g butter
150 g sugar (*) (or 9 tablespoons)
100 g raisins
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

(*) Note: my quantities were slightly off. I had a small yellow baking tin which fitted 500 g apple slices, 50 g butter, 96 g sugar, and 70 g of raisins and dried cranberries. I used dark brown muscovado sugar.

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Slice the apples in thin slices.

Butter a high baking tin with 1/3 of the butter, coat with 1/3 apple, 1/3 sugar, and 1/3 butter, then add a new layer of apple, etcetera, until the tin is full, and end with sugar, butter and cinnamon (if you forget to add it sooner).

Press the mixture firmly.

Bake in the oven for 75 minutes with baking foil or a lid over the tin.

Let cool completely before serving.

At home with a minor bout of flu: chocolate (rated X)

So coffee is off when felled by a bout of flulike symptoms, and judgement is severely impaired. This hot cup of chocolate by Françoise Bernard out of her book of French cooking was the poorest decision I could make, as under normal circumstances I'd criticize this concoction as lethal. But I had a small cup of it anyway. At your own peril...

Hot Chocolate (Rated X from a sane dietary perspective)

Serves 4

130 g dark chocolate
25 cl cream
45 cl whole cream milk
1 vanilla bean pod
4 teaspoons sugar

Scrape the vanilla seeds from the pod. Add every ingredient together to a cooking pot, and bring to a low heat, let the chocolate melt.

When the chocolate has melted, put a lid on this, remove from the heat, and let stand for 15 minutes. Whisk it up a bit.

Notes:
Extremely unctuous and high calory. I even added more milk than said quantity. Still, I couldn't believe this recipe. Serves the quantity of about 4 espresso cups, and luckily for all of us not one drop more.

Strawberry Sunset

No idea whether we are walking out of Strawberry Street any time soon, but I always pretend we are and grab on to any strawberry crate in sight. I was supposed to eat this earlier in the day, but after a warm day at sunset this dessert was just as satisfying.

Blogger Oleandri has honed her Budwig creme making skills and her own recipe for blooming form and motherhood can be found here. This dessert uses the cream.

Strawberry Sunset Dessert

Serves 1-2

250 g-500 g strawberries
2 tablespoons of white fresh cheese
1 tablespoon linseed oil
1 tablespoon agave syrup (optional)
sesame seeds
pumpkin seeds

Wash strawberries, and eat as many as you can during preparation.

Whip linseed oil vigorously in the white cheese, do the same with the agave syrup.

Ladle spoonfuls of white cheese as little heaps in a dessert plate, and put strawberry parts on top. Sprinkle strawberries with sesame seeds, decorate the white cheese with some pumpkin seeds.

Share a portion with someone else at sunset.

Note:
I did add the agave syrup. For once.

Gooseberry Galore

Oh, yes, I did stuff with berries this month. Very simple handlings only: go to the vine, pick berries, eat them. Though I had a modest harvest of yostaberry of my own, I couldn't resist a batch of gooseberry.

Gooseberry Galore

Wash + cut 'em, macerate 'em with the slightest soupçon of muscovado sugar, serve 'em with fresh cottage cheese with 1 tablespoon of linseed oil vigorously whipped in, is all I call a procedure.

Fresh berries in a tart

During more than seven days of blazing sun I checked them everyday by eating some. They were turning dark and big enough to let tartness become sweetness: the antioxidant bombs in my garden. I was nervous. I picked my first crop of berries. Would I be able to do the right thing to do these riches justice?

At Marmiton.org, in a Tarte aux cassis with a pâte brisée crust, the filling consisted of:

400 g berries
3 egg yolks
100 g sugar
25 g flour
and 200 g whipped cream.

Never one to obey, I turned the filling into this:

2 egg yolks
40 g ground almonds
78 g agave syrup
and 250 g white cottage cheese.
And I simply used more berries (560 g).
Fresh berries in a tart

Make the crust (250 g flour, 10 cl cold water, 125 g butter). Put it in the baking tin. Preheat oven at 180 °C.

Pick berries: yostaberry, black currant (cassis/ribes niger or nigrum), and red currant. Combine them with the ingredients serving as filling.

Bake for 35 minutes.

Mission accomplished: a filling that did justice. An extremely fresh, tart berry taste.

Rhubarb-Strawberry Crumble

As to strawberries, I'm still sticking to the regimen of eating 500 g a day and plain (in Dutch: uit het vuistje). Exception: last night. I put 100 g of strawberries in a rhubarb crumble. Good call to add strawberries, as it turned out. The recipe from Taty is quite frugal.

Rhubarb-Strawberry Crumble

500g fruit: e.g. rhubarb and a handful of strawberries
100 g bread crumbs
100 g oat meal flakes
40 g butter
70 g unrefined sugar
125 g white cheese, cottage cheese or ricotta, drained
2 tablespoons ground nuts

Preheat the oven at180 °C.

Wash and cut the fruit, put it at the bottom of a buttered cake tin or tart form.

Mix bread crumbs, oat meal flakes with butter and sugar, until you reach the consistency of wet beach sand. Add the cottage cheese and the nuts. Put this mixture on top of the fruit.

Bake for 25 minutes.

Note: good, but on account of the bread crumbs a bit frugal. A random guinea pig liked it, but next time I'll add something else instead of the crumbs. I did add all the sugar (muscovado, from dried fruit) contrary to my wont, on account of the very sour rhubarb. Good idea to add (sweet) strawberries as extra natural sweetness.

Frozen Budwig

Would Johanna Budwig frown upon a cup of frozen Budwig? As I was extremely hungry coming home from work, I wanted some fruit, in milkshake or ice cream, and I threw together this concoction.

Frozen Budwig

2 ripe bananas
300 g pack of frozen exotic fruit (quickly rinse off frost)
250 g white cottage cheese
2 tablespoons linseed oil
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1 tablespoon bee pollen

Put everything in blender and carefully scoop in the loveliest of glass holders.

Beware of brigands.

Herb cottage cheese ice cream, but which herb?

Without even having repotted herbs yet, one herb that I planted last summer resurfaced without ado. One problem: I don't know its name. Perhaps pineapple something. Was it pineapple sage? Duizendblad, you royal purveyor, can you help?
Anyway, 20 fresh leaves were picked -still immaculate before the onslaught of summer insects, and I impulsively got out the ice cream maker and Peter Bauwens' ice cream manual to make herb cottage ice cream.

Herb cottage cheese ice cream

20 freshly picked leaves of a green herb, well rinsed
1 tablespoon agave syrup (or any other natural fruit syrup)
2 tablespoons of fresh cream

Combine all three ingredients, and mix them. Put this extremely tasty and fragrant appareil (as the French say for anykind of preliminary mix) in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

Get the ice cream maker out of its winter burrow.

Combine the appareil with 250 g of white cottage cheese. Mix by hand, then pour over in the ice cream maker and make ice cream.

The result: very dense thick mix, really very much cottage cream still, as in my ice cream maker the result is merely rendering this mixture cold quickly, but imagine feeding this in small scoops to a table of four.

Passing the Tropical Fruit Test: Green Mango Dessert

The other day I was watching a TV series on the preparation of a huge Franco Dragone show. The show followed some gymnasts from Brazil. I saw them buy limes at one of our local supermarkets for making caipirinhas. I winced. Limes here are famously dry and unjuicable. I shrunk in anticipated disappointment. Interestingly, the Brazilians had not juiced the limes, nor mashed them in quarters bits with peel left on, but used whole limes, peeled. But their comments were cleverly cut from the program.

Here is a quick fruit snack using small green-skinned but ripe mangos that do pass a Severe Tropical Fruit test in our northern hemisphere.

Passing the Tropical Fruit Test: Green Mango Dessert

Serves 1

1 small ripe green mango, peeled, flesh removed and chopped
2 tablespoons cottage cheese
1 teaspoon lin seed oil
1 speculoos cookie (can be substituted by bee pollen).

Whisk the lin seed oil in the cottage cheese.

Reduce speculoos cookie to crumble consistency with a fork.

Take a glass, fill with mango, add the cottage cheese on top, and end with the crumbled cookie.

Some Baking Laws Defied: Bread Pudding from East-Flanders

The Laws of Baking stand indomitable and tall: defying them sounds a little like questioning Newton on the apple. The quantities are precise; woe befalls the poor soul who deviates from them.

I decided to do precisely that: defy the laws on bread pudding, and I have to admit: when the pudding came out of the oven, it had the texture of crème anglaise. I was almost cursing my war on sugar, but behold: by morning, in the pale morning light, this is what had emerged.

Bread Pudding from East-Flanders

Based on a recipe on p. 158 of De keuken van ons moeder - The kitchen of our mom (Homarus)
Note: the recipe gives quantities for 5(!) bread puddings at once - some moms... Here are quantities for 1 pie.

1/5 pack of zwieback (beschuit)
5 slices of peperkoek (a specialty from the low countries baked with rye flour and spices)
50 g macarons (type of cookie) (I used 2 marzipan filled whole-wheat cookies and some speculoos)
4-5 Betterfood cookies (the type you give to toddlers in the afternoon)
800 cl milk (*)
40 g corn starch
60 g flour
120 g brown sugar (*)
1 egg
1 knifetip cinnamon
1 knifetip banda foelie
candied sugar syrup (*)

My changes (*):
Instead of milk, 800 cl oat milk "chai": oat milk flavored with cinnamon-clove-ginger-cardamom;
Instead of 120 g brown sugar, 4 tablespoons of apple syrup;
Instead of candied sugar syrup, apple-pear breakfast paste (sirop de Liège).

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Bring all bakery goods in milk to a boil over high heat. Stir well, the cookies will dissolve.

Add the rest of the ingredients: egg, sugar, spices, corn starch flour. Don't stop stirring, and mix really well. Cook for a few minutes longer. Remove from the heat, let cool au bain marie in cold water.

Before putting the mixture in the cake tin and in the oven, add the candied sugar syrup to the mixture.

Bake for 60 minutes at 200 °C.

Note: bread pudding is mostly made with stale bakery pastries or stale raisin bread.

Retro 1: Kugelhopf

Heart of the Matter #31 for November has chosen Retro Dishes as the monthy theme. Do participate, as there is still plenty of time. The link says how and where to post a recipe.

Here's a dish from France's Alsace region: a type of raisin bread that looks like a cake and that's baked in a high cake tin with hole: Kugelhopf. A Jewish classic. If by name alone this isn't retro, I don't know. I also used a retro brown ceramic dish.

Chef Peter Goossens gave his version in last weekend's paper, and this prompted me to bake it twice this week. As it is low in butter, milk and sugar contents, I give it here, with 3 changes (*).
Kugelhopf, by Peter Goossens of Hof van Cleve fame

170 g flour
10 g yeast
70 cl full cream milk
30 g sugar
1 egg
2 g salt
30 g butter
8 g lemon juice
80 g raisins (marinated in 1 cl rum)
13 g orange candy (*)
shaved and whole almonds

Knead all ingredients (by hand) in a bowl except the fruit. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.

Mix in the fruit (by hand), and let the dough rest again for 15 minutes.

Make the dough form a ball, then press it flat. Make a hole in the middle (*).

Butter a cake tin, toss in shaved and full almonds, and place the dough on top. Let rise for about an hour in a warm place.

Preheat the oven at 200 °C (*), and bake for about 45-50 minutes.

Remove from the tin, let cool, and sprinkle with confectioner's sugar.

My changes:
1. Instead of candied orange peel I use 13 g coconut shavings or 13 g of ground almond.
2. After letting the dough rest for the second 15 minutes, I immediately transfer this very sticky dough to the cake tin. I cover with plastic foil for rising.
3. For my oven, 200 °C is too hot. My first Kugelhopf was too burnt on top. I prefer 180 ° C and 45 minutes.

Great treat on silent Armistice Day, November 11,when we remember the fallen of World War I.

The Truth on Banana Ice Cream

July ends with a note on home-made banana ice cream. August begins with an accelerated pace here: more time on my hands, more variety. But back to bananas.

The Donvier (see: Gadgets) made banana ice cream twice: once with bananas so ripe, they seemed a few steps away from making alcohol from them, and a second time with primly seasoned bananas.

I looked at one of the How To Ice Cream Videos, and decided this would do:

4 bananas
500 ml whole fat milk (the organic "Zuiver Zuivel" label with the pretty cows: best milk ever)
1 tablespoon of sugar

Mash the bananas with a fork until the chunks dissolve and the mixture gets creamy.
Add the milk and sugar and continue evening the mixture with a whisk or fork.
Pour mixture into ice cream maker and follow instructions until you get ice cream.

The overripe bananas produced a darker brown ice-cream with quite an overbearing taste. Not a good idea. Together with the special guinea pig that I prepared this for, I much preferred the ice-cream from normally seasoned bananas. But what really stood out too was the great milk taste. So the dairy one uses for Home-Made Heaven, be it cream or milk, has to be beyond reproach.