Old-Fashioned White Bread from Sponge and Homemade Butter.

May 9, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 7 Comments

What were YOU doing at 1:00 this morning?

I was in my bathrobe, sitting on the kitchen floor and having big ideas. I couldn’t sleep. It was Sooin’s bachelorette party last night, and as I’ve been a tad under the weather and it was a forty-five-minute drive away, I decided to only go the dinner part, and to not drink. I drank about fifteen Diet Cokes, and then got home and tried to go to sleep. No luck – I was abuzz. Then I decided that I would make a bread sponge in anticipation of a luscious loaf of sourdough in the morning. But it doesn’t work that way. A sourdough starter takes three days, and if I was thinking clearly, I would have realized that sooner. So I made a regular bread sponge, because I made butter and don’t care to wait three days to eat it, and resolved to start a sponge for sourdough at 1:00 some other morning.

Sponge

SDC10245 It’s a good idea to save a knob of your last batch of dough to add to your bread sponge. I keep a little ball of it wrapped in plastic in my freezer, so that it can be pulled out and dropped into a frothy batch of sponge and allowed to ferment and grow yeasty, yielding a richer, crustier, OMG-so-much-better loaf of bread. You don’t need much – a bit of dough about the size of a golf ball is plenty.

What is a bread sponge, you ask? Well. It’s very simple. It’s a portion of the ingredients you’re going to use to make your bread, just thrown into a bowl a few hours or a day or two in advance. Science happens in the bowl, and you end up with a loaf that’s soft and chewy on the inside, with a crusty exterior that just begs to be torn into with teeth. Also, because the yeast gets its little selves in there a bit earlier, the mix ferments a bit and develops a much better flavour. You can really just whisk everything together in a bowl and then go to bed. Eight to twelve hours later, you just put the rest of your ingredients together and proceed as usual.

Sponge:

2 cups warmed milk
1 teaspoon yeast
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 little dough ball

Whisk together the milk, yeast, and flour in a large bowl. If you have a ball of dough, defrost it quickly and drop it in as well. Cover with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel, and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 12 hours.

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When I woke up this morning it was sunny for the first time in a week, so I was super-impatient, so the sponge only got about eight hours to get good, but it still smelled yeasty and sour, like the perfect start to a homemade loaf. I started in immediately, because I wanted to go out to play.

Here’s the bread recipe. For the butter, go here. Follow her steps exactly. These two in combination will give you an earth-shattering foodgasm, and you’ll be all, “Thanks, Emily. I’ve always liked you.” No really. Make the butter. It won’t save you any money, but the taste (and gloating about how you made your own butter) will be totally worth it. I’ve got big plans to use it on a barbecued ear of corn tonight. BIG PLANS.

Another recipe for white bread, but this one’s different, okay?

bread sponge (see above)
1/4 cup warm water
3 tsp. yeast
2 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. melted butter (plus extra for greasing your bowl and your loaf pans)
1 tbsp. salt
4 cups flour, plus extra for kneading

Combine the yeast and the water. When yeast gets foamy, add it to your sponge. Add the sugar, butter, and salt as well, and stir to combine. Add your flour and stir until mixed, and then dump the lot onto a floured surface to begin kneading. As always, please knead for eight to ten minutes. If you have athletic, powerful arms, it may take less time – you want the dough to become elastic – but I have flabby “looks good in sweaters” arms, so I knead for the full amount of time. Muscles are for chumps, right?

Transfer your dough to a large bowl that has been buttered lightly on all sides. Do round things have sides? I guess if you don’t know, they might as well. Cover with plastic and a kitchen towel, and allow to rise in a warm room until doubled in bulk. About an hour, hour-and-a-half. You know the drill.

dough in bowl, rising Once your dough is big and smells good, dump it out onto that floured surface again (add new flour), and cut it in half. Form the dough into two loaf-pan-sized rectangles. Place your dough into your pre-buttered loaf pans, cover again with plastic and a kitchen towel, and allow to rise again, about an hour/hour-and-a-half, until the dough has risen an inch or so above the tops of the pans.

dough in pans

Preheat the oven to 375°F. I brushed the tops of my loaves with some melted butter and sprinkled them both with Kosher salt, but this is optional. Put your loaves into your oven once it’s raring to go, and bake the loaves for 35 to 40 minutes.

Cool these on wire racks. I find that bread tastes better once it’s cooled and then reheated (toasted), because there’s a complexity of flavour that develops once the bread does it’s sciencey thing on the racks.

BREAD! I sure hope you made the butter.

Butter, homemade Butter your homemade bread with the homemade butter. Revel.

Homemade bread with homemade butter. I realize now that I promised Heather the key to easy spaghetti carbonara, and am now about a week late in following through. I don’t have any bacon at the moment, and I just made butter, so the next pasta I make will probably involve this butter and the beautiful leaves of sage that are flourishing on my deck, but that’s not to say it isn’t coming. Give me a week. Then I’ll tell you everything. I promise.

Sweet potatoes are the best thing ever for you. Even if you get swine flu. Though if you get swine flu, call me, because I’d like to lick your door knobs.

May 7, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 1 Comment

I woke up this morning and was dying (again). Rheumatoid arthritis is a pain and I go through a lot of Kleenex and am all kinds of sexy. Fingers crossed for swine flu, though, which I actually want because I’m pretty sure I could lose, like, twelve pounds just throwing up, not to mention all the wasting away. Very convenient, much easier than fitness.

So I decided to spend the evening in pajamas watching the best movie ever and eating soup in an attempt to be fully recovered by the weekend, which is supposed to be hot and sunny, which means I won’t feel like soup at all, and you should embrace desire when it strikes you. So soup today, and then fish and chips and hefeweizen on a patio on the weekend. Oh, I’ve got dreams.

I’ve decided to share my feel-better recipe for sweet potato soup, because there’s a reasonable chance that other people are feeling battered by this weather, and because maybe you’ll make the soup and with any luck it will be the last time you’ll need hot soup until November.

This recipe makes about four bowls. Enough for tonight and lunch tomorrow anyway, even if my math is wrong.

Sweet Potato Soup

1 onion, diced
1 tbsp. minced ginger
4 cloves minced garlic
1 carrot, chopped
1 sweet potato, chopped (about three cups’ worth)
2 cups chicken stock
2 cups coconut milk
1 cup of water
1 lime, zest and juice
1 tsp. sambal oelek (or more, to taste. No sambal oelek? Use hot sauce.)
1 stalk lemongrass
salt and pepper, to taste

In a large pot with a bit of oil, heat your onions, garlic, and ginger until golden. Add in your carrot and sweet potato, and toss until coated in all that garlic/ginger goodness. Pour in your liquids, zest and juice your lime into the pot, and throw in the sambal oelek so that it can eke it’s spicy glory all over the place.

Fan out the base of your stalk of lemongrass, and let it sit in the pot. I find that too much lemongrass makes stuff taste like dying, but doing it this way lets you get just a whiff and a taste of it, which is all you really need.

Soup!

sdc102211

Simmer this all together until the sweet potatoes and carrots are tender, about ten minutes. Maybe less. You should probably test for yourself.

Once everything is tender and smells good, you’re going to want to purée this. Part of feeling better quickly is not expending extra energy on chewing. Also, smooth soups taste better, because all the tastes get jumbled together. Glorious!

I serve mine with a poached egg in the centre, which you may recall is how I served the pea soup, but don’t worry – there isn’t a poached egg in every soup we eat around here. I like it for the richness the yolk gives, and the extra bit of protein. And also, I like eggs. We buy them by the 30-pack. For the two of us.

soup in bowls, with eggs And you know, I do feel better. Sweet potatoes, ginger, and the spicy hot sambal are all terrific when you feel the weight of a thousand pounds of symptoms rattling around in your chest.

Tomorrow is my Friday, so I’d best be getting to bed so I can rest up and endure it – after that, it’ll be all feasting and frivolity and feeling fantastic. Also tomorrow, I’ll sign up for bootcamp. I really think some violent influenza would be easier to stomach.

Beets: Adventure roots!

May 5, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

The one on the right was supposed to be magical, but it had the blight. I had to throw it out.

Beets are pretty much the best ever. Fact.

I had to go to Granville Island on Sunday, because Grace bought me a ticket to Rosé Revival and I asked Nick to put it in his pocket so I wouldn’t forget it and then Grace fed us red wine slurpees and then we had regular wine and then she brought out the whiskey and it was late-late-late when we left her apartment and staggered home, and somewhere between sitting on her couch and flopping into bed, the ticket escaped. So I went to Granville Island to go to Liberty to buy a new ticket. Long story short? They said, “we have lots of tickets. See if you can find yours, and if you still can’t, come back tomorrow. You’re awesome.” So I bought a bottle of Pink Elephant, because I’m on a sparkling wine kick at the moment, and wandered the market getting all love-bubbly about produce and cheeses and Oyama Sausage and the dreamy fishmonger who talked me into buying his fresh-fresh-fresh halibut.

But we’re not into shortening long stories around here. No. In the immortal words of my grandmother, “to make a dull story long:” Beets.

Beets are largely misunderstood. I believe it’s because they come in cans and $1.09 tins of beets are kind of gross and when you’re a kid and your parents are poor and don’t notice that there’s a whole section in grocery stores with fresh vegetables, you get shit in cans, or in bags that you keep in the freezer. I kind of wonder if grocery stores didn’t have produce sections in the 1980s. I’ll bet they didn’t. Not everyone was lucky enough to have a grandmother who pickled beets in magic. I have been a beet fan since my first magenta pickle.

It’s important to me that beet biggots be shown the light. There is no vegetable that cannot be made holy: it’s all in the preparation. And for beets, that means roasting.

To roast a beet, treat it like you would a potato you intend to bake. Give it a rinse, scrub off any crud, but don’t peel it. Put it on a piece of tin foil big enough to cover the beet. Salt. Pepper. A drizzle of olive oil. Wrap it up, and then throw it right on the rack of your oven, which should be a balmy 425°F. Depending on the size of your beet, the thing will roast for 60 to 90 minutes before it’s done. My beets were a bit bigger than my fist (I have adorable little paws), and took just under an hour and a half to become tender.

Prepare an ice bath. Once the beets are good and tender (stick a fork in one), pull them out of the oven and unwrap them immediately, dropping them directly into the ice bath. Let them cool there until you can handle them comfortably. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to rub the skins right off.

What do you do now? Well, that depends. If you’ve just spent the day being enticed by fish mongers and all the ways to fritter away the last of that paycheque you just got, you may want to make a salad out of them. You have all that halibut, after all.

I made that picture humongous because I wanted you to see all the beautiful colours. You can’t see them though. They’re there. Maybe there’s too much cheese.

So what do you need to make this happen? Two large beets. Or a bunch of smaller ones. Golden AND regular if you can find both. I also had a candy cane beet that was supposed to really make this lovely, but it was diseased. Don’t eat diseased beets.

A handful of very small tomatoes. I found these little orange heirloom cherry tomatoes and immediately felt that deep spiritual connection that one does when all atwitter at the sight of little tiny vine fruits and the joy of an impending feast.

Bocconcini. The amount you need will vary depending on the size. Mine were about the size of purple summer plums, so I used two.

Basil. Fresh. Chopped.

Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper.

Pairs excellently with halibut (pan-fried in butter with a capers and garlic, and seasoned sprinkling of salt, pepper, and lime zest), asparagus wrapped in bacon, and minty potatoes (roast new potatoes or chopped white, red, or purple potatoes for 20 to 30 minutes in a bit of olive oil, and toss with a tablespoon or two of fresh mint).

I used the spearmint that's growing wildly on my deck.

I love all the little fishies. Them's tasty.

Anyway, for a great meal, start with beets. Also, maybe stick a Post-It to your bathroom mirror with a reminder that you ate beets the night before so that the next morning you don’t freak out a little and think you’re hemorrhaging or dying or something. That’s no way to start your day. Beets: Exciting!

Saucy meat makes romance.

April 26, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

The thing about being flat broke most of the time is you have to plan. And you have to be able to make your own fun, usually on $20 or less.

For Nick, fun is cleaning and purging three garbage bags full of all the awesome clothes I don’t wear but still love and will someday lose enough weight to fit into again. Jerk. My idea of fun is anything but that. So Nick cleaned, and I cried, and then we had dinner, which was fantastic.

By the way, as of this evening, I have called a ban on all sesame oil-soy sauce-delicious-but-played-around-here standbys. I thought I’d done it last night – Other Emily came over to spend the night pre-move to Portland, so I made Jerk chicken and a sweet potato, tomato, and okra curry on rice fried with peas and parsley, and it was delicious and filling and then we had pudding. So, good night, and then I thought tonight I’d really give’r and we’d have something awesome and I’d bake bread, and then Nick turned the afternoon into a suckfest and made me listen to Metric, and the kitchen was disgusting, and we were hungry but too lazy to do dishes, and everything was dirty, so I had to get creative. Kind of. I did the sesame oil soy sauce thing again. But it works, so whatever. This is a variation.

Oh! About planning. We always have a freezer full of things we can use, and a bijillion things we can use for seasoning, marinades, and crap like that. And canned goods, and a few vegetables left over. Today, we had two potatoes, half a yam, and a bag of baby bok choy. And some pork tenderloin. So I barbecued the pork and the bok choy, because everything I could have used to cook either of these inside was dirty.

Grace, who is awesome, and who I’ve mentioned before, said once that anything tastes good when it’s marinated in a bit of soy sauce and ginger: this is correct. I tossed the bok choy in a bit of each, then a bit of sesame oil, and set the veg aside. For the pork, I mixed up:

1 tbsp. dark brown sugar
1 tsp. mirin
1 tsp. sesame oil
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. finely minced fresh ginger
2 cloves finely minced garlic

I rubbed a bit of this onto the pork tenderloin before I threw it on the barbecue, and reserved the rest for later.

Pork on BBQ

I let it cook for about 12 minutes, because this was a small piece of meat, and I turned it once. The bok choy cooked for about seven minutes on the top rack.

Bok choy on BBQ The pork smelled amazing while it cooked.

Grilled meat Toward the end of the pork’s cooking, I painted both sides with the rest of the marinade, because Nick was all, “I want saucy meat.” And I was like, “Of course you do, muffin.”

Here’s dinner:

Tasty! After that, we took our $20 and bought two bottles of terrible wine and biked down to Kits beach because Nick said we’d make out on the beach and be all romantic and shit, which is better than eating the rest of a five-pound bag of Mini Eggs on the couch while he watches another three hours of hockey. It was nice. The whole ride there, the air was fragrant with wood smoke and pink flowers, and I kept exclaiming, “seriously, why doesn’t everyone live here? It’s amazing!”And then when we got there, the beach was lovely and empty, except for the couple of geeks with guitars. We totally made out. Nick and I. Not me and the guitar people.

Now we’re back at home, surrounded once again by dishes, and Nick is trying to make me watch a Mastodon music video while I Internet it up and we finish the last of the wine, the one in with the sweet zebra-print label. So, romance is alive and well, kids. Don’t give up hope.

A perfectly lovely flex-Friday breakfast for one.

April 24, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 1 Comment

It’s Friday! And I’m not at work! And Spring Is Here!

Look! Spring! There it is! This is what spring looks like from my balcony.

This is all tremendous, and worthy of glorious celebration. And I am alone – Nick is at work, so once again, I can have whatever I want.

For Nick, there is no better breakfast than fried eggs, fried bacon, and fried perogies with onions and sour cream. And a can of cold beer, which he usually has one or two of, because he always saves a couple for morning and for the shower. And that’s all well and good, because all of those things fried are quite delicious. But they are not worthy of my mood today. No.

I wanted pancakes. Correction: I wanted pancake. Singular. And I wanted to sit on my deck and drink a cup of tea and look at the flowers and bask in the glow of the sunshine. So, Dutch Baby-style, I put the pancake in a ramekin and threw it in the oven. I sliced a few strawberries, drizzled the last of the cream over top, and sprinkled them lightly with sugar.

See?

So what do you need for a perfectly lovely breakfast for one? Oh, easy.

You need:

1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup milk
1 egg
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 425°F. Lightly grease a single ramekin with butter. Put it in the oven while the oven heats – about five minutes.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, milk, egg, sugar, and vanilla. Pull your ramekin out of the oven, and pour in your batter. You may find that the ramekin sits better in the oven if you put it on a small cookie sheet. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

While your apartment is filling with the smell of pancakey goodness, slice as many strawberries as you have or as you’d like, add a dribble of cream, and sprinkle the top lightly with sugar. Boil a pot of water for tea. Though, a cold, sparkly glass of prosecco would also be delightful. Note to self. For next time.

When it comes out of the oven, your pancake-Dutch Baby-thing will be puffy and fantastic. And if you greased your ramekin properly, it will just slide out. I got too excited and missed some spots, apparently, so it clung to the sides a bit. Oh well. It still tasted good – crispy on the outside, soft and fluffy and wondrous on the inside.

Serve on a plate with maple syrup or golden corn syrup, and all your delicious strawberries on the side.

Now? Oh, big day. I’m going to put on a sundress, and maybe some tights as it’s a little nippy out yet, and then, because it’s Vancouver and I live on a bike route, I’m going to ride my bike and have an adventure or something. SPRING!

Phoning it in with Focaccia Bread.

April 21, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes I have a very hard time sleeping. My nephew told my mom that there is always stuff going on in his head because he has four brains, and I understand the feeling, though I don’t think I’ve got four brains, just one that’s hyperactive and not doing much of anything but keeping me up.

I usually just pour myself a giant glass of milk and eat something soothing, like homemade bread toast or this pint of strawberries, and read a book, but I’m reading a very good book and it’s so good that I don’t want to finish it right now because then it will be over. I’m not ready for that. So I’m kind of phoning this one in, sharing an old recipe, and hoping that the plicketing of my keyboard will lull me to sleep.

Focaccia Bread

1 (1/2-pound) Yukon Gold potato, peeled and quartered
1 cup cooled (but still warm) potato water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast (or one packet)
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
4 1/4 cups flour, divided (1/4 cup will be used to kneed)
1/4 cup herbs de provence (don’t have it? I’ve used any old dried spice – basil is nice, as is rosemary)
1 tablespoon plus 1/4 teaspoon sea salt, divided (1/4 tsp. to be sprinkled on bread before baking)
1/2 pound roma tomatoes, thinly sliced crosswise, or as many small tomatoes as you think look good on top
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic, chopped (but not minced)
1/2 cup mozzarella or parmesan cheese
Two basil leaves, chopped

I never use a mixer for this – I do everything by hand, and I promise, it’s neither strenuous nor is it exhausting. Or I wouldn’t do it. But you can use a mixer, or anything you like.

Generously cover potato with salted water in a small pot and simmer, uncovered, until just tender, 10 or so minutes. Drain water into a measuring cup. Cool potatoes slightly, then mash until smooth.

Add sugar to potato water. Sprinkle yeast over mixture and let stand until foamy, about five minutes. (If mixture doesn’t foam, start over with new yeast. I have really crappy yeast at the moment, so I let it stand longer – if it doesn’t start working within ten minutes, swear out loud, dump the whole thing, and either start over or cry and then go to the store and buy new yeast. You’re only allowed to cry if you’ve invested in a full jar though. I make a lot of bread so I buy it by the jar, and that’s a lot of little organisms to have failed, so crying is okay.)

Measure out four cups of flour and dump into a bowl. Add 1/4 cup herbs de provence, and one tablespoon of salt. Add the mashed potatoes and oil, then pour in your yeast mixture. Mix it all together until the dough is very soft and sticky, then drop the dough onto a floured surface to begin the awesome task of kneading. This is my favourite part of bread-making, and is particularly delightful with this bread because of the herbs, which smell like warm sunny countries that I haven’t been to.

As usual, you’ll want to knead this until the dough is quite elastic, about eight to ten minutes.

Scrape dough into a lightly oiled large bowl and cover bowl with oiled plastic wrap. I always oil my stock pot, and the lid, and put it in there with the lid on for this. Let dough rise in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled, 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Generously oil a cookie sheet.

Punch down dough (do not knead) and transfer to baking pan, then gently stretch to cover as much of bottom as possible (dough may not fit exactly).

Cover dough with oiled plastic wrap and a kitchen towel and let rise in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled, 1 to 1 1/2hours.

Preheat oven to 425°F in lower third part of oven (near the bottom, but not the whole way).

Soak tomatoes for ten minutes in balsamic vinegar, then arrange tomatoes on focaccia (do not overlap), then sprinkle with basil, cheese, chunks of garlic, and remaining 1/4 teaspoon sea salt and drizzle with remaining 1/4 cup oil.

Bake until center is firm, and top and underside is golden (lift to check), 20 to 25 minutes.

Loosen focaccia from pan with a spatula and slide onto a rack to cool slightly. Cut into pieces and serve warm or at room temperature.

Well, now … that didn’t work. I’m still awake, and nowI am getting all food-lusty for bread. Nick is snoring away in the other room, and I’m all stimulated. Probably the strawberries, which may have been a bad idea – too much fruit = the scoots. And now I’m oversharing. Make the bread. People will love you and think you’re the best, and then you can be all, “I am! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Ugh. Maybe I do have four brains. Four parrot brains that don’t really do anything but annoy me at bedtime. Good night.

Vegetabletarian? We serve your kind here.

April 20, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ Leave a comment

Wow. Been a real keener with this blog stuff lately. Been cooking a lot too, motivated in large part by this non-pink camera and my desire to learn how to take non-blurry pictures. Also, would be okay with someone coming over to take pictures for me. So I invited Chris Gerber, Nick’s friend with the good camera, over to eat. I like Chris Gerber.

A lot of kids aren’t eating meat these days. Weird, right? Some of them came over for dinner tonight. I’ve found that the challenge with vegetarian cooking is that people don’t really “get” vegetables. They get meat though. Meat is the main course, and that’s that. So vegetables are kind of an afterthought – just dump some hollandaise sauce on them, and they’ll be good to go. Much as I love a good litre of hollandaise, one cannot coat everything they eat in egg yolk butter sauce. Bad idea. Pretty sure that’d kill you.

The challenge tonight was to approach vegetables in a way that allowed vegetables to behave like a main course without everyone feeling like the vegetables were either imitating meat or that the whole dish was suffering for the lack of meat. For someone that keeps a jar of bacon fat in the fridge and dreams of the many uses for schmaltz, this is no small thing. But not impossible. No. Not impossible.

The solution? A little pea and asparagus risotto with bulgur and a rustic onion and fennel tart, adapted (and improved upon) from this month’s issue of Food & Wine magazine. Also, a side salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, avocado, and basil, all drizzled with delicious olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I got the basil from the plant on my balcony. It was real good.

It’s quite late and I don’t actually have a recipe for the risotto … it’s all in my head and I don’t feel like trying to remember it now. I am going to try and remember it later, and tell it to you again – I may have to re-do it and take notes throughout the process so I can report back. If you know risotto, it’s made the usual way, only with vegetable stock and peas and asparagus thrown in. I added the bulgur for nuttiness, and because I have a freaking ton of it, because I was on a total bulgur kick a few months back. So you get the onion-fennel tart thing, and some lovely pictures, a few of which were provided by the talented and artistic Chris Gerber. The crappy blurry ones are from me.

Rustic Onion and Fennel Tart

(Adapted from Food & Wine Magazine)

Dough

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
6 tbsp. unsalted butter, frozen
5 tbsp. ice water

Filling

4 tbsp. butter
1 large sweet onion
1 bulb fennel
6 thyme sprigs
2 tbsp. sour cream of crème fraîche
salt and pepper, to taste

1 egg beaten with 1 tbsp. milk

To make the dough, measure the flour and salt into a bowl. Using a cheese grater, grate the frozen butter into the bowl, and toss together lightly. Using a fork or a finger, pour the water gradually into the mix. You want the dough to form a ball, and to be relatively firm. You may not need all of the water. When a dough-ball is formed, wrap it in a sheet of plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge.

Start cutting the onion – thin slices. Do the same thing with the fennel bulb. Thin. Get your butter melting in a pan. Once melted, dump your onions and fennel into the pan, with four of the sprigs of thyme, and sprinkle lightly with salt. Start the pan on high, cooking until softened, eight to ten minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook until onions are golden and caramelized. The recipe says 20 minutes, but it lies. It’ll take half and hour. Once the onion-fennel combo is complete, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the sour cream/crème fraîche, and season with whatever salt and pepper you feel it needs.

Preheat the oven to 375°F, and butter a cookie sheet.

Grab your dough ball out of the fridge. Lightly flour your rolling surface. Make sure it’s clean. Dough doesn’t hide the crusties you let harden on your countertop. Pat the dough ball down, and roll the thing out. Once it’s thin and rolled, fold it back into a ball-like shape, and start again. You want the flour and the butter to be all inter-mingled and stuff so that when you bake it, the pastry gets all flaky and luscious, not hard like shingles. When it’s all rolled out, move it over to your buttered cookie sheet.

Pour your cooled onion-fennel mixture onto your pastry. You want there to be about an inch and a half border around the mixture, because you’ll be folding the edges of the tart in, making it look all rustic and homemade, which is totally in right now. It looks like you tried hard that way, even though this was super easy and monkeys could do it.

Lay the remaining two sprigs of thyme over top your crust, and brush with your egg-milk mixture.

Your pre-baked tart should look like this:

Pre-baked tart. Bake for 40 minutes. I thought I had a really good picture of the tart, but I get really distracted really easily, so I guess I forgot to take it. Your finished tart will look like the thing at the top right of this photo: Tart with other food. The other stuff there is the risotto and the salad, which were also good. At least, I thought they were good. The thing about these food blogs is that it’s kind of my word against anyone else’s. But, to be fair, no one gagged or was all, “Ew, WTF? Why are you feeding me poison?” So, awesome show. Great job. IT ALL TASTED GOOD.

There was also dessert. I made mango upside-down cake, but it got a little botched when I tried to take it out of the pan. Solution? Cover that shit in caramel sauce. Caramel hides flaws. And helps the broken parts of cake get stuck back together.

Cake! Oh! I used my last vanilla bean in the whipped cream. Well, not my last, but the last in that open container. Glad that story line is now all wrapped up.

I’ve included some of Chris Gerber’s actual attractive images below. He didn’t give me all the photos he took, which leads me to believe that the others were way too good to share, so instead he’s taken them home to paint them for me in watercolours, so that I can get all Cook’s Illustrated on this blog.

Chris Gerber takes sexier pictures of dessert than most people could.

Chris Gerber photographs yesterday's shrimp recipe. My penmanship is really nice, so I take half-credit fot the artistry of this one.

Conclusion? Vegetables are tasty. People should eat more of them. Unfortunately, they do not possess the sedative-qualities of large hunks of meat, so it’s 1:04 am and I am still wide-awake. Thankfully, there was wine left over. Good night.

Cooking without Borders

April 19, 2009April 2, 2015 ~ wellfedemily ~ 1 Comment

Panna cotta in pot As it turns out, I’m quite a terrible photographer. I’m pretty sure with the pink camera, all my pictures would have been number-one Annie Liebowitz-esque, but it’s probably best not to dwell on that for too long. I made a lot to eat last night, and I tried to take pictures that would show how much fun it all was to make and how sumptuous it all was to eat, but everything turned out kind of blurry and sad. Apparently I have the shaky hands. Excellent for whisking, terrible for photo snapping.

Above? That’s a pot of milk and sugar and gelatin and vanilla bean, simmering until the sugar and gelatin was melted. We had panna cotta last night, because strawberries were on special and I had to use two more vanilla beans up before they dry out, standing in their lidless container. I used one, so anticipate one more vanilla bean recipe before too long. I’m starting with dessert this time, because panna cotta is among my favourite things to eat, and because I’m sure once you try it, it’ll be one of your favourite things too.

The recipe is adapted from The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook, an invaluable resource as I’ve come to find.

Panna Cotta

Butter (for greasing six ramekins)
1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 packages, or four teaspoons, unflavoured powdered gelatin
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 vanilla bean
1 1/2 cups heavy cream (whipping cream)

Lightly grease six ramekins with butter. Set the cups on a small baking sheet.

Pour one third, or 1/2 cup of the milk into a small pot. Sprinkle the gelatin over top, and let sit for about three minutes. This is about where I stopped reading the recipe, and also where I began to do everything wrong … but it didn’t matter, because it turned out well anyway.

The deal is you’re supposed to add the rest of the milk and the sugar and heat it until the sugar and gelatin is dissolved, then take the pot off the stove and stir in the cream and vanilla. I added the cream as well, and the vanilla bean, which I’ve found needs a good whisking to make it less frog’s-eggs-goopy and stuck together. The recipe says that the panna cotta needs at least six hours to set, and that’s if the recipe is followed, so I got a little worried. When everything that needed to dissolve dissolved, I poured the mixture into six ramekins. I filled the baking sheet between the ramekins with ice cubes, and then added about a cup of ice-cold water, to speed up the cooling-down process.

Panna cotta, pre-set, in ramekins It worked, and the whole thing set in under four hours. Awesome. If I’d read through the rest of the recipe, which I usually think I’m too cool for, I would have found a very helpful hint about releasing these from their ramekins … apparently if you remove these from the fridge once set, you can place these on a towel warmed with hot water for up to two hours – this should loosen the bottoms and make them easier to get out. I didn’t have any trouble though – I ran a knife around the outsides and tipped them onto a plate. It worked just fine.

I topped these with a warm sauce of strawberries and blood orange juice, whipped cream, and sliced fresh strawberries.

Panna Cotta with Strawberries There were other things to eat last night, things like gomae, pork fried rice, firecracker shrimp tossed with avocados and cucumbers, edamame, sushi, and chicken wings marinaded in a delicious Sooin-inspired marinade. I couldn’t find a recipe that pleased me for the shrimp, so I made one up – I wrote it down as it developed.

Firecracker Shrimp with Avocado and Cucumber

1 tbsp. butter, melted
1 tsp. fresh finely minced ginger
3 cloves finely minced garlic
4 tsp. honey
1 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. sesame oil
1 lime, zested and juiced (half juice reserved)
1 tsp. sambal oelek or hot sauce
70 to 90 uncooked, peeled, and deveined shrimp
1 avocado
1/2 long English cucumber
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 cup chopped fresh scallions

Firecracker shrimp marinade Mix butter, ginger, garlic, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, lime zest and juice of one half of the lime, and sambal oelek (or hot sauce). Add shrimp, and skewer – we ended up needing five skewers for these. If you’re using bamboo skewers, make sure to soak them in water for an hour or so before using.

Shrimp on skewers I threw these on the top rack of the barbecue on a sheet of tin foil and cooked them until they turned pink, turning them once to be sure they were cooked on both sides. It didn’t take long … eight minutes? That sounds about right.

When they come off the barbecue, toss them with the avocado and cucumber, the rest of the lime juice, and the cilantro and scallions.

Firecracker Shrimp with Avocado and Cucumber I took some fairly inadequate pictures of the rest of the feast … I’ve included them here with captions!

Barbecued chicken for sushi. Weird? Yeah, I know. Nick really likes it.

Cheelful sushi! Loose and kind of crappy-looking sushi rolls on my favourite platter ever.

Gomae up front, edamame in the back. Which sounds kind of ... awesome, like a terrible sexy euphemism. — Gomae up front, edamame in the back. Which sounds kind of … awesome, like a terrible sexy euphemism.

Pork fried rice, and evidence that it may be time for a new wooden spoon.

The Help: Nick loves dinner parties. LOVES THEM. See how happy he is?

Dutch Babies: Good to Eat

April 10, 2009 ~ wellfedemily ~ 4 Comments

Nick asked me the other night to tell him my favourite thing to eat. Choose one thing? Who am I to say that a beautifully roasted duck breast and a chewy, buttery lobster tail aren’t equally worthy, or that peanut butter cookies, wonton soup, Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, or beet carpaccio aren’t equal and each distinguished in their own right? I couldn’t pick one. But, if I had to pick a favourite thing to eat in the morning, it would be Toad in the Hole – Yorkshire pudding with sausages and onions baked in, all fluffy and crispy and meaty. Yorkshire pudding on its own is pretty fantastic.

So Nick got me thinking about my favourite things, and among my favourite things: Yorkshire pudding. Right. I believe we established that. A few weeks ago, we made a brunch date with two lovely friends, Aimee and Evani, and so while planning a mid-day stat-holiday feast, visions of puffed batter were dancing about in my head.

I had two savoury dishes on the menu already – tortilla with cucumber and avocado salsa, and “potato stuff,” which is a genius of a thing that comes from every kitchen of every person I’ve ever met’s mother (1 can Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, 1 cup sour cream, 2 cups grated orange cheddar cheese – don’t use white, it turns out gross-looking, and most of a bag of hashbrowns, stirred together and baked covered in a Corningware dish for 30 minutes at 450°F). So, no Toad.

Ooh! I forgot to mention – I bought some lovely fresh free-range happy-UBC-farm-chicken eggs the other day, so I had another reason to make something Yorkshire-puddingy.

Anyway, so I thought – why not add a bit of sugar and top them with a warm raspberry-lemon compote and way too much whipped cream? It turns out such a thing already exists and has a name (with or without any version or variation of the compote or anything else) – and it’s a fairly awesome name at that – who doesn’t love joking about eating babies?! “I can’t think of a better use for them!” “Hahaha!” Ahem. You want the recipe? Of course you do. It’s quite simple/excellent/fun to make fun of babies.

I scraped a little bit of vanilla bean into mine, because I have some (though, since Nick tossed the lid to the container during a mad clean-freak sweep of the kitchen, they may all dehydrate before long). You can use a teaspoon-or-so of vanilla extract if you’ve got it. Almond extract or a little maple syrup would also probably be quite tasty.

Dutch Babies

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups milk
6 large eggs
1 tbsp. granulated sugar
1 tsp. salt
1/2 vanilla bean
Butter

Preheat your oven to 450°F. Butter six ramekins and place them on a baking sheet, and toss them into the oven.

In a single bowl, combine your flour, milk, eggs, sugar, salt, and vanilla. You used the butter to grease your ramekins, remember? Don’t worry. You won’t need it again. Work quickly, whipping everything together – make sure you don’t leave lumps. If your vanilla bean refuses to spread out and act normal, go in manually – use your fingers to separate the blobbies – that’s what they’ll look like: little black blobs, sort of like frogs’ eggs, but less gross.

When your batter is ready, pull the ramekins out of the oven and divvy the batter up between them. This recipe makes just enough for six. When the batter’s in, put it all back into the oven and set the timer for 30 minutes. Monitor their cooking via the oven light: You are not allowed to open the oven door until they are done. They will go flat, and then your brunch guests will not be as impressed.

When they come out of the oven, don’t wait too long to serve them. Drizzle them with a bit of sauce, and serve with whipped cream. For my raspberry sauce, I used two cups of frozen raspberries and the zest and juice of one lemon, reduced until the mixture was thick and nearly jammy in texture – I started them in a pot over medium-low heat about an hour before I had to serve everything, and didn’t watch them too closely, just stirred them occasionally.

I was quite pleased with the way these turned out – I think the eggs were really what made them. The yolks were a fantastic golden colour, and imbued the Babies with a very springy yellow hue. I wish I had a camera to show you! I will get one soon, I promise. And then I’ll make them again, and post pictures, and you’ll be all, “wow, those are lovely. It’s a good thing she’s a baker and not a breeder, because her real life Dutch babies (well, half-Dutch, which is funny, because she’d totally have gone Dutch on the genes for those whippersnappers) would probably not be nearly as good-looking.”

I wonder if it’s necessary to mention that brunch means you can get drunk during the day without everyone shouting “ALCOHOLIC!” and pointing at you. Nap time!

UPDATE: Toad in the Hole is shown on This is why you’re fat. Goddamn it.

Another meat fest, now featuring potatoes au gratin!

April 5, 2009 ~ wellfedemily ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday, Nick bought a barbecue, which I think means that “we” got a barbecue, so I may be out of luck for a birthday present. I think this decision, which has been long in the works, was largely influenced by a burger on a cooking show we saw on Friday that involved two hamburger patties smooshed together, but not before being stuffed with a handful of cheddar cheese and some chopped bacon. Apparently, an improved version of this will be on the menu tonight, with Nick “doing the cooking,” which mostly means that I’ll assemble and prepare all the food, but Nick will man the fire and flip things and bask in all the praise. I’m hoping that Nick isn’t planning on “doing the cooking” for my birthday next weekend …

Being something of an attention whore, and not content to let Nick take all the glory for the feast, I’m planning some sumptuous sides, in particular Jeffrey Steingarten’s potatoes au gratin dauphinoise, the recipe he detailed in It Must Have Been Something I Ate (required reading). Steingarten attests that a true gratin contains no cheese; these should take on a cheesy taste through the cooking process. And my, they do! I add bacon to mine, because anytime I see a recipe containing half a cup of butter and a cup and a half of cream, I figure it’s probably going to be a contributing factor in my inevitable coronary, so what the hell, right?

I’ve made these in both a glass pan and an enameled cast iron pan, and I liked the cast iron better, which is what Jeffrey Steingarten advises – it makes for a crispier bottom. Butter the pan thoroughly, on all sides.

Potatoes au Gratin Dauphinoise á la Jeffrey Steingarten

1/2 cup of butter
1 cup whole milk
1 large garlic clove, crushed
1/2 tsp. white pepper
3/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1 1/2 lbs thinly-sliced potatoes
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
5 slices bacon, chopped (optional)

Using a good dollop of the butter, grease the inside of your pan on all sides. Preheat oven to 425°F.

In a pan on your stove, bring the milk, salt, pepper, garlic clove, and nutmeg to a boil. Remove from heat and turn off the element.

Line your pan with potatoes and bacon (if you choose … but I don’t know why you wouldn’t).

Put your pot of milk and spices back on the stove – bring it to a boil once more. When it’s come to a boil, pull the clove of garlic out, and pour the mixture over the potatoes. Bake, covered, for 15 minutes.

Bring the cream to a boil. Remove from heat, and turn off element.

When the potatoes come out of the oven, bring the cream to a boil once again. Pour the boiled cream over the potatoes, and dot the whole thing on the top with the remaining butter.

Bake, uncovered, for 20-25 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

The last time I made these, they were perfectly crispy on the top and bottom, and delectably creamy on the inside. I figure that eating them caused me to gain eight pounds. Since we’re having these again tonight, with burgers stuffed with cheese and meat, I bet I’ll be adorably chubby by bedtime. Also, am wondering where to buy those pants with the adjustable waistband.

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