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.

Quick strawberry soft ice cream

Don't spend your seasonal fruit on smoothies, use the frozen version of the fruit, Taty says. She means: eat the seasonal bounty without ado. I didn't have to feel guilty when on Sunday I threw frozen strawberries in the blender to make a frozen smoothie, a concoction resembling soft ice cream. Dairyless, but not vegan, on account of the bee pollen. And watch it, ice cold!

Quick strawberry soft ice cream

2 very ripe bananas
1 pack of frozen strawberries
1 tablespoon nut butter (hazelnut-peanut)
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1 tablespoon bee pollen

Combine everything, blend, scoop, eat. Look ma, no sugar!

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?

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.

Sunday snack (2): semolina pudding with orange-banana salad

On another Sunday full of chores, I prepared this pudding or flan right after breakfast. So that at snack time it was a Quick & Easy move. For this plan The Swiss Guy chimed in (see next post: reply to Lucullian Delight's call for fave' cookbooks). The Swiss guy was talking about making pudding with whole wheat semolina.

Semolina pudding with orange-banana salad

From: Gesund und leistungsfähig durch richtige Ernährung Part I by R.Müller (see also next post, and see label The Swiss Guy)

1 liter water
100 g whole wheat semolina
2 tablespoons agar-agar
2-3 tablespoons nut paste (mixture of roasted hazelnuts and almonds)
50-75 g brown sugar*
bit of salt**
1 small pack of real vanilla powder (and not the chemical vanilline, as R.Müller warns)
fruit (oranges, banana)
liquid cream

Let the water come to a boil, add the semolina, and keep stirring.

Add the agar-agar, mix very thoroughly to avoid lumps, and let boil for 10 minutes.

Turn off the heat, remove from oven top and mix with the remaining ingredients: nut paste, sugar, salt, and vanilla powder.

Pour the pudding in small ramequins. Let cool.

Peel one orange per person, and remove everything except the flesh, cut half a banana per person, and mix both fruits with 1 tablespoon of liquid cream.

Notes:
*Sugar: drastic as I am, I used only 2 tablespoons of muscovado sugar.
**I didn't add salt as this heavenly nut paste from a brand called Monki already contains salt.

I liked this, but as a fan of The Swiss Guy I'm pretty much biased. Serving this to eaters able to voice (dis)like would be a good litmus test-I'll bet that on account of the jellification and the brown color, most wouldn't be too fond.

August ends with plums

A very quick appetizer, gleaned from a suggestion with melon made by my local supermarket. Only, I used small yellow mirabelle plums. August ends with plums.

500 g tiny yellow plums, sliced in two halves
a few slices of Spanish or Italian ham
mint leaves

Cut the plums, chop mint leaves, and present every item in layers in a glas.

Serve at once.

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.

Bounty

Solitary strawberry plant, in soil instead of in planter.
Election Day, June 13, 1.37 p.m.

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.

At home with a minor bout of flu: banana milk

Lastly, the sanest choice from Françoise Bernard's French cooking besides the usual choice of herbal teas and cool butter milk: a simple banana drink. No further ado here.

Banana Milk

Serves 2 or at 50% of said quantities, 1

500 ml milk
2 bananas
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 ice cubes

Blend everything.

Serve to those whose throats could do with a bit of quenching.

Yuletide Wishes with a Stewed Pear Variant

Merry Christmas! Especially for readership from Down Under here's a variant I cooked yesterday during our Christmas Eve pot luck family meal: stewed pear, presented in halves, filled with cranberry compote. It was received well by some young and picky eaters.

Try to use pears that are inedible, best used for stewing. I used some that my mother had picked from her own tree at peril of falling into a ditch. I had them in my cellar since mid October and they were still okay. It was mother's proud contribution to the meal.

Pears, deseeded, peeled, cut in halves
a little water
a little sugar
a little butter
spices from my sister's cupboard: cinnamon powder, 1/2 vanilla bean pod (I had forgotten to bring star anise, see my previous post on stewed pear)

Put the pear halves flat side down in a cooking pot, add the water, and bring to a high boil. When boiling, add the sugar, the spices, and reduce the heat a little bit, let this cook for some time until the pears are soft. When the pears are taking some pinkish color and the water is somewhat reduced, add the butter so as to caramelize the juices very slightly. This can be done beforehand and right before the meal everything can be reheated. Fill with cranberry compote (prepared by following package instructions - also with sugar and water). Serve one filled half on each plate.

I was two hours late for meal preparations, which nearly had my brother-in-law into some serious Christmas stress, as he later admitted. But we sailed through the preparations with even keel and were done in no time.
See next post for details on our Christmas menu.

Special Breakfast: Millet

December started with a shift: a diagnosis of (minor) hypertension. I asked for four to five months extra time to introduce a couple of lifestyle improvements. One, no salt. Two, less caffeine. Third, less fretting and more cardio.

I started with variations on breakfast and my beloved oatmeal: cooked grains such as millet (gierst) or quinoa as first meal. I simply cooked millet for 20 minutes (5 extra minutes resting time) in 2,5 times water the savory way: with some dried oregano.

I added cottage cheese, a speck of Argentinian honey and the luxury item: dark berries flown into the supermarkets from South America. Add pollen and add nuts.

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.