A Blithe PALATE

Oooooooooooooooooooh Yum.

No doubt about it.  I have the best friends ever.  (Thank you Katherine!)

Don't forget:  Vosges is still on discount through the end of the month...

Scones and a Spoon of Blueberry Jam

I used to make scones once a week, indulging in a weekend tea ritual with Hubby.  Unfortunately, our somewhat hectic travel schedules this past year has precluded the continued observance of said ritual.

But lately, with momentous changes on the horizon, I've found myself yearning for the sweet simplicity of a scone slathered with Devon cream and jam.

A friend who knows I am mad about scones and tea sent me a jar of Spoon's blueberry jam recently to try.  Spoon began as a catering company based out of New York and has since ventured out into homemade jams, baking mixes and gift baskets.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to bake a batch of scones.

I like scones that are soft, moist and a bit flaky, not cake-y.  A friend of mine goes overboard with ingredients and last year presented us with a basket of dense hockey pucks overladen with a plethora of indecipherable additions.  I'm rather plebeian in that I prefer just golden raisins in my scones. I figure the goodness of a scone rests the accompanying cream and jam.

Between Pug, me and my cousins, we managed to devour most of the scones.  Hubby is coming home from another trip this weekend; I suppose we'll make another batch for him.  But alas, the blueberry jam is all gone...

Homemade Granola

I'm very fond of granola.  Always have been.  A perfect breakfast bowl for me is granola with milk and some fresh fruit.  When we were in Ireland last year, I pretty much devoured George's homemade muesli every morning; I always meant to ask for the recipe but kept forgetting.

I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to make my own granola:  there are plenty of recipes out there and it's surprisingly easy.  I suppose it was one of those things I simply purchased and never considered making from scratch.  I've been buying a particular blend of granola for a while, but with the recent price increases in food, I just can't justify $5.00 a pound for what are essentially rolled oats, dried fruit, nuts and sweeteners. 

I found an easy recipe that I liked on Myra Goodman's site.  She's one of the co-founders of Earthbound Farms Organics and has written a book, Foods to Live By, which features her Maple Almond Granola recipe.  Her recipe calls for seven ingredients and she has video instructions available online as well.  Having particular preferences, I modified some ingredients to make it wholly my own -- you can too. 

Myra's been kind enough to offer me an extra cookbook to give away -- if you'd like your own copy of Foods to Live By, send me an email [ablithepalate (AT) gmail (DOT) com] with your address by November 20 and I'll pick a recipient at random.

Vosges Haut Chocolat -- Discount!

Okay, so I'm a huge fan of Vosges Haut-Chocolat and the lovely chocolatier is offering a special 10% discount off all website purchases from November 1 to November 30. 

Go here:  VOSGES HAUT CHOCOLATE

Use this promo code: 2810WB1 when checking out. 

Ahem, family and friends: 

 

Enjoy!

Marcus Wareing's Blueberry Muffins

In seventh grade, my middle school offered home economics class.  I have no idea if they still offer such classes.  It would be a pity if they didn't.

As incoming seventh graders, all the students were rotated through a series of fine arts classes for 6 weeks:  painting; home economics (i.e., baking and sewing); music; shop (woodworking); dance and one other class now forgotten to the fogs of memory.  At the end of the semester, we selected the class we wanted to take for the remaining semester in the school year.  Selection was determined by the order of the number each student drew in a random lottery; I, by strange fortune, managed to draw number six.  Thus, I had my pick of any class I wanted.

The two most popular choices were home economics, taught by a very warm and friendly woman, and the woodworking class taught by an irascible sexist who likely would be sued for sexual harassment ten thousands ways to Sunday if he were still alive and teaching, but whose charisma made him a favorite of most students.  His was definitely the "in" class.

Guess who I, in juvenile and puerile peer pressure stupidity chose when I had carte blanche?  Yes.  Instead of baking and sewing, which I infinitely would have preferred for six weeks I ended up making a wood replica of the Playboy Bunny logo.  I am not @#$%^&*( kidding you.  Somewhere, my mother still has this monstrosity (which [cringe] is mounted on a plaque board, God help me).  Unlike my sister Kaly's Matisse-inspired collages which are framed and hang throughout my parents' house, this thing has never seen the light of day after I gave it to her because (thank God), my mother is a woman of exceptional aesthetics. 

I distinctly remember the recipe our home ec teacher taught during that trial home ec class week:  muffins.  I remember learning how to measure flours and how to measure liquids.  I remember how muffin batter is supposed to be lumpy and gooey.  I remember most of all...how warm that class kitchen felt, how holding a spatula felt so right (in a way that the sandpaper block to smooth around the Playboy bunny's ears never did), how simply at home I felt with a recipe and with measuring cups and baking tins.   

The funny thing is...I haven't baked muffins since that time, not until this past week.  I was looking to give Puggle something new to munch on in the mornings, now that he likes to feed himself (by jamming food into his mouth with a chubby fist) and Marcus Wareing's cookbook has a lovely blueberry muffin recipe.

So, twenty years three post-facto, I still regret not taking that home ec class.  I probably shouldn't be so exasperated; regardless of childhood insecurity and the inability to pick what I really wanted, my cooking self eventually found me.  It's a bloody good thing.  Can you imagine me with a bandsaw?

Miracle Max's Miracle Pill (Chocolate Coated Strawberry Ice Cream)

Hubby, being prescient (and amply aided by a piece of paper on which was inscribed everything I wanted for Christmas), got me the Kitchen Aid ice cream bowl mixer attachment.  I have never had so much fun making ice cream before. 

The first batch of ice cream was hazelnut ice cream.  The second was chocolate.  The third was coffee.  Then Hubby asked me to make strawberry ice cream, which brought to mind a particular Gordon Ramsay recipe from his book, Just Desserts, in which he dips scoops of ice cream in melted white chocolate to make little ice cream bon bons.

Always interested in anything that adds fat and calories to my desserts, I melted down some chocolate and used a melon baller to make tiny ice cream scoops, then rolled them in the melted chocolate.  I didn't get the infuriatingly perfect round bon bon that Ramsay gets, but I was rather pleased with the bon bon.

As I was plating the first few to serve for dessert, Hubby walked past the kitchen, glanced over at me and smirked.  "Have fun storming the castle boys!"

It never even occurred to me what they looked like till he said that....

What does it matter?  It tasted great.

    

Marcus Wareing's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Despite protestations that I don't care for cookies, I notice that I write a lot about them:  cantuccini, macaroons, Madeleines, lace cookies, jam cookies and my all time favorite, Russian Tea Cakes (aka The "Heroin Cookie").  And let us not forget my particular Achilles heel, the Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookie.  So maybe the truth is that I don't like certain cookies.  Or maybe I've gotten over my decades-long cookie aversion. 

I grew up eating Chips Ahoy.  Perfectly good cookie.  Processed to the hilt and overly sweet but a good proxy in a house that never made them (because my mother grew up making croissant and cream puffs, not peanut butter cookies or sandies and so wouldn't have the foggiest what a chocolate chip cookie was supposed to be).  A French friend spent a summer with us and became addicted to Chips Ahoy (having grown up on croissant and cream puffs he was enamored of the overly processed and sweet Chips Ahoy.  You see the irony here, yes?).  Staying with his family the following summer, I won huge (ahem) brownie points with the family when I made chocolate chip cookies from scratch for them.

After years of eating Chips Ahoy, Oreos and Mint MIlanos and other sundry store-bought cookies, I finally burnt out in college.  For nearly a decade and a half I couldn't bear to look at, or bake, much less consume, a cookie -- any cookie.  I can't really say what happened.  I'm odd that way:  I can go decades without eating something then suddenly desire it overnight (pineapples), or lose complete and utter interest in a particularly favorite food.  I'm not sure what changed; I think it was the cantuccini that Janine gave me at Alon's Bakery.  Suddenly there were cookies of sophisticated textures and subtle flavor to which I'd been previously unexposed.  From that cantuccini I found my way to other cookies but I never went back to the more plebian chocolate chip cookie. Until Marcus Wareing. 

This is currently my favorite cookbook:  Marcus Wareing's Cook The Perfect...He's a former Gordon Ramsay protege, and one of Ramsay's partners and head chef at Pétrus at the Berkeley, and at the Savoy Grill.   We had the opportunity to eat at Pétrus a couple of years ago and it was an absolutely stunning meal; Hubby says that after our first French Laundry foray, this was the second best meal we'd ever had.  Chef Wareing even signed his page in Off Duty, a collection of recipes from U.K. based chefs.  This cookbook is a compendium of some of his favorite dishes and does not pretend to be an haute cuisine cookbook.  He offers little tips on how best to cook or bake to achieve success; I have cooked almost every recipe in the book and not one dish went astray.

His take on chocolate chip cookies is absolutely simple and utterly delicious, although I made a change (due to preference rather than any fault of his instruction):  I prefer to shave my block(s) of Valrhona or Callebaut for nice un-uniform chunks of chocolate rather than using chips.  He recommends rolling the dough into a log and keeping it chilled, ready to slice and bake -- my freezer has about four rolls for last minute snacks or desserts (they have replaced the depleted Girl Scout Thin Mints supply).  Another recipe I'd like to try shortly:  shortbread.  I'll let you know how I like that cookie, too.

The All Guinness Meal.

I've been reading Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques.  Now that my day job consists of working for non-lunatics, dinners have gotten back to normal:  instead of rush, harried and thoughtless meals or take out, I can actually plan and prepare good suppers for my boys.  Goin is an alumna of Chez Panisse, so it's understandable that she marches the seasonal cooking road; and I've decided that despite the paltry access to fresh and seasonal produce here, I'm going to try to cook and eat seasonally, if for no other reason than to make sure that Puggle is getting the right fruits and vegetables at the proper time.  I am so looking forward to Annie's love (Philip) planting in the garden for us...

In any case, there was a recipe for saffron chicken that made my brain go, "YUM!" but when I brought it up at lunch with Hubby today, he frowned and said, "It's St. Patrick's Day though.  We should be making corned beef and cabbage."

Ick.  "Do you want corned beef and cabbage?" I asked.

He paused.  "Actually, I'm thinking a Guinness stew might be nice."

During our trip to Ireland, we enjoyed several versions of Beef and Stout stews; and yes, of course it's St. Patrick's Day but it was 70 degrees out today and hardly the right time of year for something so rustic.  But also in Goin's book is a St. Patrick's Day menu which included a chocolate and Guinness cake with Guinness ice cream.  Goin swears that she's not the type to make dishes out of weird ingredients but says the stout really does enliven the cake and ice cream.

And being a whore to my blog, it was hard to resist the challenge (and conceit) of an All-Guinness meal.

I learned two things from tonight's dinner:  1) you simply cannot go wrong with stew regardless of time of year; and 2) it is entirely possible, despite previous sentiment otherwise, to overload on Guinness.  The stew:  absolutely delicious and fulfilling; the cake:  kinda iffy and a little on the icky, weird side; but the ice cream was a pleasant surprise.

Lance and Margie, two of our cohorts from the Ireland trip, had given us an Irish cookbook on our return, and there was a recipe for Guinness and Beef which looks deceptively simple  -- it's actually a 3 hour process, but the dark, flavorful stew at the end is entirely worth it.  First you brown the meat and saute mirepoix and leeks;  Guinness Stout and reduced beef stock are added, then simmered for 90 minutes or until the meat is tender, after which the meat is removed, the liquid drained and the vegetables discarded; then streaky bacon bits, shallots and mushrooms are sauteed in butter, and flour is added to lay the roux, which thickens the liquid; and finally, the meat returned to the pan.  Ladled over piping hot mashed potatoes made from heirloom fingerling potatoes, it is not possible for a stew to be more perfect. 

Alas, would that the same were true of Goin's Chocolate Guinness cake.  Now, to be fair to her, I did miss an important step.  I forgot to add the cocoa powder so essentially I made a Guinness bundt cake over which I poured melted bittersweet chocolate in a post facto attempt to add in the chocolate.  The cake, however, was just funky -- too spicy (it has cinnamon, nutmeg and whole cloves) and too...mealy to be luscious or enjoyable.  It looked pretty but certainly didn't live up to its aesthetics (kind of like a culinary version of, "Don't ruin it by talking.").  The Guinness and molasses were overpowering in the cake and while I'm aware that the taste problems may (and probably do) rest on my accidentally forgetting the cocoa, the resulting cake was so bleah that I have no wish to repeat the exercise, even with the correct ingredients.  But the Guinness ice cream was absolutely outstanding:  rich, creamy and just  right sweet, like a vanilla-scented pint of plain.   Who knew such a bizarre concoction could yield something that could stand up to its principal ingredient with aplomb?

So two out of three isn't bad for the All Guinness meal.

Pug's First Birthday (The Best Year Ever)

             

Pug turned one on Friday. 

To celebrate, we drove to down to Florida, where Ong and Ba Ngoai live, and where Grandma and Grandpa happened to be visiting.  Among my most treasured photos are those of birthdays in which I was surrounded by grandparents, siblings and cousins -- a madhouse of familial cacophony.  It was a great (if deafening) indoctrination for Pug.  Pug's first birthday was spent with both sets of grandparents, Uncle Bo and numerous extended family members including second and third cousins.  Uncle Stan very nearly made it too, but had a last minute work situation arise; Aunts Hani, Souris and Kaly were in between phases of traveling but all called to wish him a happy birthday. 

When I was growing up, my mother made all of our cakes; I could not imagine outsourcing Baby's first cake so I made one based on the baby blocks cake from my shower.  The cake was a lemon pound cake with cream cheese frosting and wrapped in colored sheets of white chocolate linen, which I use in lieu of fondant.  I find the taste of fondant revolting; the chocolate linen serves the same function, but with superior flavor.

Tonight, we were at a restaurant with Ong Ba Ngoai (Grandma and Grandpa continued on their trip and will meet up again with us in two weeks) and Uncle Bo.  Our server, noting the table littered with baby toys and homemade food laughed.  "What did you ever do before a baby?" she queried.

Pug was a little more exhausted than usual; his birthday party yesterday began at 5 pm and ran through midnight, Pug conking out an hour later than his normal 8:30 pm bedtime; nestled in his sling in my arms, he rested his head on my chest and fell asleep.

What did we do before our Puggle?

We had forgotten how to appreciate the joys of discovery.  Blasé and world weary, we have rediscovered how to enjoy long-forgotten "firsts."  The first feel of rain on a cheek.  The first taste of jam.  The purring of a cat when a chubby hand is taught to stroke her back (and her startled shriek when a chubby fist grabs hold of her tail). 

We did not know that hearts can literally melt when Baby smiles his first toothy grin.

We did not know there was such good in the world; or see a world of such danger.

We woke and slept at will; but we have accepted that the giggling we hear in the morning is the best wake up call imaginable.

We worked and earned a buck, but now with direction and purpose.  Everything is for Puggle.

Before Puggle I did not know how warm a baby's body feels when he falls asleep on your chest, or how full he makes your arms feel. 

The only other thing that overflows as much is your heart, and especially when you see your husband cuddling with your son.

I could go on and on.  When Puggle was born, my aunt Lori sent me a message:  "Welcome to true love," she wrote.

So back to the question:  what did we do before Pug came along? 

We were waiting to discover this true love in the best year ever of our lives.

The Heroin Cookie: Russian Tea Cakes

For someone who has long avowed that she does not like cookies, I'm finding that I protest overmuch because I'm slowly discovering that yes, in fact, I do like cookies.  But I am particular about the cookies I eat.  Adulthood has moved me away from Chips-Ahoy and Keebler and brought me into the celestial sphere of high end, gourmet and utterly delectable cookies.   First it was cantuccini.  Then Madeleines.

In my last post about cookies, I mentioned my thin-mint-a-holism.

Shannon left a comment about a frosting covered sugar cookie that she and her husband refer to as the Heroin Cookie.

Well, these are my version of heroin cookies.  I kid you not.  You start eating them, you can't stop.  My sister Kaly is my pusher.  She started making them years and years ago and these are her specialty, so much so that last year, she baked 800  (yes, 800, but that is due both to the fact that she is a) kind and b) a Hong and therefore given to these freakish fits and starts) of these cookies in her tiny stove in her elegantly petite Manhattan apartment.  How tiny a stove?  It could fit only a 16" cookie sheet.  ONE AT A TIME.

I've known about Kaly's Russian Tea Cakes for years, but as she began making them prolifically and proficiently long after we no longer lived under the same roof, I wasn't really aware how good they are.  My first inkling came when Hani mentioned that Souris had requested, and received, a box by mail, of these famous cookies.  And I thought, Kaly ships?  So last January, for my baby shower, I asked Kaly to send a shipment to serve with the tea party the girls were hosting for me.  When the box arrived, I found 100 cookies all nestled gently amidst individual layers of bubble wrap to prevent them from being smashed.  Being careful about quality assurance,  I lifted one and took it to have with my tea. 

And decided promptly that there was enough food and sweets for the tea party and I would not need (nor did I want) to share these cookies.  They are that amazing, yes.  When Joetta and Jenn arrived, I offered some to them.  We all agreed that these did not need to be shared with the rest of the crowd...

And so it began.  That confectioner's sugar on the cookie?  May as well be pure grade A heroin. 

When next I encountered them it was at Dad's 75th birthday party.  Kaly baked 150 cookies for him and the family made relatively short work of nearly half of them.  After they left, I made off with the rest.  Mom had put the box in the closet and I went deep inside the closet repeatedly and refused to come out.

When I depleted my father's entire store of birthday cookies (which, I should also note, he and Mom routinely hide from THEIR guests, so it should tell you how coveted they are), I realized I was in big trouble.  So a furtive late night call to Kaly:

Me:  Kaly, I have been a bad bad bad cookie monster.

Kaly:  What happened?

Me:  I ate all of Dad's cookies.

Kaly:  Ki!  Those were Dad's birthday cookies.

Me:  I know.  I know.  I have to make another batch to restore his stash.

Even though Kaly gave me the recipe over the phone, I had no time to replace Dad's depleted supply, but since Dad and Mom do not have addictive personalities, I don't believe they're any the wiser since the (unknown-to-them-empty) box remained in their closet.

I made some earlier this week for a friend's tea party, but am resisting the urge to make any for myself.  I know my weaknesses.

"Hello.  My name is Cath.  I am a cookie fiend."

"Welcome Cath."