Cooking Challenge, Pôts de Crumble
February 7, 2005
In French that’s pronounced poh and the term can mean everything from a pot to piss in to a pot to plant some blood orange apple crumble in. Recycling fool that I am, these pôts originally contained storebought creme caramel but serve as excellent ramekin substitutes.
This past weekend was the Paper Chef Challenge, a little game some food bloggers like to play not dissimilar from the BBC television show Ready, Steady, Cook. The group agrees to use a group of ingredients in a recipe over a finite course of time. Wheat flour, cinnamon, blood oranges and creme fraiche, with extra points for using broccoli, chorizo, stale bread and something else. After a botched batch of stale cornbread French Toast (which in Dutch amusingly translates into a dessert called Turning Bitches), I decided to do something very un-Debra and stick to the menu.
Desserts based on the apple crumble principle have always been my back-up dessert. I actually never eat dessert but perform it exclusively when I have guests and consequently dot dot dot. The blood oranges in this dessert give it extra tang, for those of us that truly don’t have a sweet tooth.
One thing - the only kind of orange I like is a blood orange, and I use every single part separately.
Another thing - there are many sorts of cinnamon but for baking only Sri Lankan stick cinnamon will do. Ignore the dried pre-powdered kind and buy a proper stick of very thin bark. The thick stuff is for making meat stews anyway. You pulverise the cinnamon into splinters between your fingers - and there are few things finer than biting into a cinnamon bit, an explosion of flavour reminiscent of the RedHots candy of my childhood.
Oh and another thing - Whole meal chappati flour ‘is not just for hippies anymore’. This finely ground wholemeal is definitely light enough to use for baking.The trick is to work with a light hand and to not over-mix the thing that should not be over-mixed, in fact, to become light yourself.
Ohm and one last thing - Creme fraiche (d’Isigny) is best taken straight up, with a spoon.
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debra at 10:05 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
I hate bread
February 4, 2005
Except sometimes and some breads.
I love cornbread and I love my little cornbread iron. Maybe because it’s bound up in a possibly made-up memory or maybe it was something that really happened. But I believe that I became covetous of my Auntie S’s when she dished up some cornbread ‘ears’ for Thanksgiving at least 2 decades ago.
A cornbread iron is a perfect iron age tool. You heat it up, grease it up, heat it up some more and then pour in the cornbread batter. Shove the lot in the oven and the cornbread takes half the time and finishes with an excellent texture and crumb.
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debra at 22:37 | Comments (5) | post to del.icio.us
How to behave like a Californian
February 2, 2005
Don’t throw away your avocado seeds! Grow them. That was my advice to KvR. Actually up here in the Polar Circle in the month of February these seeds, proof of my not always eating seasonal and local produce, will probably rot in the darkness before they sprout. They will however serve as a lesson in Californication for dear friend KvR who found my Occitanian stash and wondered ‘what the…’
It’s becoming a bit of joke down there that I don’t like to throw things away. But now that there’s a garden to plant the avos in, I don’t see what’s so funny about saving the seeds for my plantation of the future. And although ALL of the local friends chuckle when I say I want to grow avocados in the kitchen garden, if a banana tree (and a fig and a lemon) can grow, why can’t an avocado? We’re just going to have to take precautions; lots of hay and burlap in the winter once the sproutling is in a solid place.
That of course is YEARS away. 5 years before the avacado tree can go from pot to tub to a stationary place in the ground, and at least 10 before she’ll sprout some delicious avocados. I’ve got nothing but time and the changing weather patterns may eventually be on my side.
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debra at 12:44 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
