brioche

Posted on 06/01/2012 by oneexpatslife

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe was Bubble-Top Brioche Rolls (recipe published here on Bon Appetit). If ever there was a week when I wish that we had had a Problems & Questions Post on FFwD, this was definitely the week. So many questions! First and foremost among them, was this recipe at all worth attempting without a (long wishes for but not yet acquired) standing mixer? I certainly had no intention
of mixing it for over 30 minutes by hand which, according to this delightful Bon Appetit article, is how Dorie originally learned to make Brioche. But, since this week’s recipe is the only one on the schedule for which I voted (I think I need to recruit more fish lovers) I decided to charge ahead anyway.

Brioche, I should mention, is one of my favorite breakfast items. Light and flaky, smeared with a little butter and strawberry jam… delicious! Paired with a creamy cappuccino… parfait! But however tasty it may be, I have until now relied on my local bakery to bake it for me.

First problem, how the heck to get the dough together without a standing mixer. After checking a few YouTube videos I decided to go with a mixed approach, starting with my handheld mixer, which I used just to get the dough going. I then switched to my food processor, which thankfully managed to get all the butter incorporated (though I am still cleaning dough out of nooks & crannies which I previously didn’t know existed), and finally, I finished off the dough by hand with 10 minutes of kneading. I can tell you that the entire time I was praying to the bread gods that all of this work would pay off.

Next the dough needs to rise, then rest, then rise again, all the typical bread making theatrics. At this point I was feeling a bit worn out and decided to make a brioche loaf instead of rolls, and freeze the remaining dough for later. And then finally into the oven, where it did not rise one little centimeter! Grr, did this happen to anyone else?

In the end my brioche was good, but not as good as fresh from the bakery. Brioche should be light and flaky, almost a croissant in bread form. Mine was a tad crusty around the edges and not nearly light enough. Oh well, as toast it was delicious and I even made Bostock, from Dorie’s Baking book, which is broiche toasted with almond cream and slivered almonds. Yum!

Now I am giving serious thought to what to do with my remaining broiche dough. Dorie lists so many tasty options in her Baking book and this Tarte au Sucre recipe looks fantastic too. Too many recipes and not enough leftover dough.

But after that, I will be leaving the brioche making to the professionals… at least until I buy a standing mixer.

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matafan

Posted on 04/01/2012 by oneexpatslife

This is going to be a better late than never French Fridays with Dorie post. Matafan (or mashed potato pancakes) was actually our assigned recipe for the first week of December, but since I was not doing much cooking that week I am only now squeezing it in.

The Matafan recipe got mixed reviews from my fellow FFwD cooks and I enjoyed one of the benefits of being late, in that I was also able to pick up quite a few tips & suggestions from reading their posts. The most common complaint seemed to be that the pancakes were a bit bland and could use a little something to pep them up a bit. Suggestions abounded and I decided to take advantage of several of them see what we liked best.

From what I understand, matafan is originally a dish intended to use up leftover mashed potatoes. Which is a great idea, but I guess it is probably a bit difficult to write a recipe for since we all use different amounts of milk and butter in our mashed potatoes. Thus Dorie’s recipe starts out with instructions for what would probably be somewhat dry mashed potatoes, and then builds them into batter for light and fluffy pancakes.

I served these pancakes for Sunday breakfast. My first batch of pancakes followed Dorie’s instructions to the letter and we ate them topped with a little butter and maple syrup. Tasty.

Next, I threw some minced onions into the batter and made a few different toppings. I topped my pancakes with creme fraiche and my husband added lox to his. Very tasty!

And finally, I added a little grated gruyère cheese to the batter and topped my pancake with a nice runny friend egg. Very VERY tasty!

Final verdict? These were great! But I do have to agree with a few of my fellow FFwD cooks that they are rather time-consuming for pancakes. Would I serve these again as simple breakfast pancakes with maple syrup? Probably not, because my standard pancake recipe is a heck of a lot quicker. Would I serve these again with a little onion, cheese, and a runny egg? Not sure yet. But I can say that these were delicious enough that I want to try to figure out if I can make them with my standard mashed potatoes. If so, I see many of these in my future.

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2011 – a FFwD year in review

Posted on 02/01/2012 by oneexpatslife

This past year I started cooking along with French Fridays with Dorie, an online group of lovely bloggers who are cooking their way through Dorie Greenspan’s gorgeous book, Around my French Table, one week and one recipe at a time. As I have previously written, cooking every recipe in the book is quite a daunting undertaking, but one which I have found to be immensely rewarding. To date the group has completed 65 recipes; as I write this I have made 56 recipes from Dorie’s book and have 9 still to catch up with. Nevertheless, it’s a new year and thus, time to do a little recap.

So, without further ado, my personal favorites from 2010/2011 are… (drumroll please)…

Gerard’s Mustard Tart was my all around Favorite Savory Recipe to date. I know this one got some mixed reviews from the other cooks, but for me, THIS is french food! And I love mustard, so I guess that helps too. And, interestingly enough since I hate to make pie dough, my hands down Favorite Dessert of the year was also a tart, the Orange-Almond Tart. I did my best to mess it up and it still came out tasting amazing!

And while I’m at it, the one I never would have picked to make on my own, and thus the Most Surprising Recipe of the year, goes to Dorie’s recipe for Beggar’s Linguine. I mean dried fruits and nuts on pasta! Really? But this recipe is exactly why this experience has been so rewarding, because it was easy and delicious and I’ve made it several times since!

The Easiest Recipe of the year was Dorie’s Mustard Batons. Defrost puff pasty, smear with mustard, bake… done! Seriously simple and oh so elegant looking.

At the other end of the spectrum was Hachis Parmentier, which took two days to complete, required the preparation of two different recipes before the final dish could even be assembled, and which was incredibly delicious, thus winning my nomination for most Worth the Effort recipe of the year.

And finally a nod to my ever patient husband, who has gotten used to waiting hungrily while his dinner is being photographed, the Happy Husband recipe goes to the Cola & Jam Spareribs. After I made this one he suddenly started paying more attention to this “online cooking thing” I was doing.

Now that that’s done, bring on the 2012 recipes, I’m ready!

So how about you, what were your favorites so far?

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cauliflower-bacon gratin

Posted on 30/12/2011 by oneexpatslife

First of all, since this is officially my last French Fridays with Dorie post of 2011, I would like to take a moment to wish all of my fellow cooks a very Happy & Healthy New Year. I have had such a great time cooking along with all of you this past year and can’t imagine a nicer group to embark on this delicious project with. Thank you so much for welcoming me in as a late comer to this lovely group and for always cheering me up on those occasions when my recipe didn’t turn out as I had hoped. I have learned so much from you and look forward to a fresh year of tasty adventures to come.

Now about that recipe. This week’s FFwD recipe was Cauliflower-Bacon Gratin (recipe posted here on NPR). However, knowing that this week would be a hectic one for me, I must admit that I actually made this dish several weeks ago, as a side for my Chard-Stuffed Pork Roast. And considering that my pork did not turn out so well, I was very grateful that my cauliflower did.

While a little too decadent for everyday fare, this recipe would be right at home on any holiday laden table. It’s creamy, bacony goodness, with a little cauliflower thrown in just to make you feel good about yourself. The name of the recipe is actually a bit misleading though, because this dish is more like a savory custard or a quiche than a typical potato gratin. The addition of flour and eggs helps the gratin to firm up in the oven, though mine did need a bit more time than called for to reach the right consistency. But regardless of what you call it, it is darn tasty.

And now I’m off to get my shopping and cleaning done for tomorrow. We have a small group of friends coming over for New Year’s Eve and our apartment still looks like a post-Christmas mess!

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a bistro birthday dinner

Posted on 23/12/2011 by oneexpatslife

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Winter Solstice! Happy Saint Stephens Day! Happy New Year! May whatever holidays you celebrate this season be merry and bright.

This past week, in addition to the usual holiday madness, we celebrated a few December birthdays and I used the occasion as an excuse to check off a few French Fridays with Dorie recipes. For dinner we had Bistrot Paul Bert Pepper Steak (recipe posted by Dorie here) served with roasted potatoes (as close to pommes frites as I can bring myself to make at home) and salad with homemade blue cheese dressing. And to round out my bistro menu, this week’s FFwD recipe, Creme Brulee.

First, let’s talk steak. During my semester abroad in France I lived with a french family and ate dinner with them every night. On the occasions when steak was served I had an up close look at one of the culinary differences between typical american and french tastes.
My french family would throw their steaks into a very hot pan, sear it a minute or so on each side, and then sit down to eat a steak which, as far as I could tell, was still mooing. They would good-naturedly leave my steak in the pan to let it come to what most american restaurants would consider medium, and what they called burnt. Vive la difference!

These days I like my steak more on the rare side, which is a good thing because I still enjoy traveling to France and rare is about as well done as one can get a steak there. True to its origins, Dorie’s pepper steak recipe calls for cooking filets mignons 2 to 3 minutes on each side, and then deglazing the pan with a bit of cognac and cream (it’s a french recipe after all). The resulting steak is rare and absolutely delicious! The perfect birthday indulgence.

And since no birthday is complete without dessert, let’s talk about Dorie’s Creme Brulee. Now, I’ve cooked many a creme brulee in my life, and I’ve eaten many more, but I’ve never come across one with jam. Yes, jam! Dorie’s recipe calls for a spoonful of jam as the base layer of her creme brulee recipe. Definitely a first for me. And, as I currently have a rather large number of half-finished jars of jam in my fridge, I decided to use a different one for each dish so that we could taste test and see which one we liked best. My favorite turned out to be the pear-ginger and my husband’s was mirabelle, but aside from the lemon curd (which we both agreed was the only one which didn’t work) they were all quite tasty.

As for the more technical aspects of this dish, this was the first creme brulee recipe I have ever seen which did not call for the custards to be baked in a water bath. In fact, every other recipe I have ever read pretty much insists that a water bath is the only way to cook the custards evenly, however, Dorie’s came out perfectly cooked with no problems. I’m still wondering why that is. Are all the other recipes just overly cautious? Or is Dorie’s recipe different in some way which makes it possible to bake without the water bath? I’m stumped.

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speculoos

Posted on 16/12/2011 by oneexpatslife

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, the Potato Chip Tortilla, is one that I actually did a couple of weeks ago for “Cook’s Choice”. This simple little tortilla was quick and tasty and I am looking forward to finding out how my fellow FFwD cooks liked it. In the meantime I am catching up with a recipe which the rest of the group did last December, Speculoos (called Spekulatius here in Germany).

Speculoos or Spekulatius cookies are best described as cinnamon snaps, because they are similar to a ginger snap cookie, but with cinnamon as the primary spice. And, as I discovered earlier in the year when I tried to find some for the Cinnamon-Crunch Chicken recipe, spekulatius cookies are only available around Christmas time in Germany. So what better time of year to try my hand at homemade cookies? And, since it Tis the Season after all, why limit myself to just one cookie?

I LOVE baking Christmas cookies. My family in the US always turns cookie baking into an event and I’m always sad to miss it those years when we can’t make it home for the holidays. Last year when I was in the US, we all met up at my aunt’s house and spent the afternoon mixing dough and baking batch after batch of cookies. My aunts bumped into one other in the kitchen as they competed to see whose cookies would win the most accolades. We cousins assured our aunts that ALL of their cookies were equally wonderful, and then whispered to our respective mothers that THEIR cookies were of course actually the best. The kids sat around the dining room table with overflowing bowls of colored frosting, decorating cookies and taste testing the results. Each year old favorites are mixed in with new experiments. Each year it’s one of my favorite days of the season.

This year we are celebrating the holidays in Germany and that means that I am the primary cookie baker. So this past weekend my husband and I went to pick out a tree, invited over some friends to share the calories, and got to work in the kitchen. I chose Dorie’s Speculoos (recipe posted by Dorie on her website) and, one of my old favorites, Snickerdoodles. My husband picked two from Martha Stewart’s Cookies book, Chocolate Crackles and Brown Butter Toffee Blondies.

For the speculoos cookies, I rolled them out to about a quarter-inch, and then shaved a minute off the baking time to ensure that I got chewy instead of crispy cookies. I know this isn’t how they are intended, but what can I say, in the great chewy versus crispy cookie debate, I have always fallen squarely into the chewy camp. I found the dough very easy to work with and my cookies held their shape pretty well in the oven. And, while all of our cookies were delicious, we agreed that the speculoos were the most Christmasy of the bunch. Partly because I used my Christmas cookie cutters, but also because of the lovely spice aroma which permeated our apartment while they were baking. Another winning recipe from Dorie!

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chard-stuffed pork roast

Posted on 09/12/2011 by oneexpatslife

First off, a heartfelt thanks for all of your well wishes. I am feeling much better and made it back into the kitchen for this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Chard-Stuffed Pork Roast.

I hope that I am not the only one, but there are a few foods which I love to eat but hate to cook. Pork is one of them. The trouble with pork, from my perspective anyway, is that it has this tiny little window of perfection; take it out too early and it is dangerous, too late and it becomes dry and inedible. When cooked properly (something I have only managed a couple of times in my life) pork is juicy, flavorful, and delicious. But in my hands, not so much. I will admit here that part of the problem is sheer laziness. The Germans know a thing or two about how to cook pork and so why should I stress about cooking it at home when there are about 20 restaurants in my neighborhood which do a much better job of it? See, laziness.

But I really would like to learn, and Dorie’s stuffed pork recipe looked so darn tasty that I was looking forward to giving it a try. Though I decided to cut the recipe in half, just in case.

Dorie’s recipe calls for a pork loin to be split open and stuffed with sautéed onions and chard. As per her suggestion, I also threw in some dried cranberries for a bit of seasonal color.

Into the oven went my roast. After 20 minutes it registered 118 degrees… after 10 more minutes, 120 degrees… and after a final 10 minutes, 145 degrees. Grrr. Overdone and dry! The end pieces were completely inedible. The middle pieces were a bit better, but still much too dry. Obviously this is no fault of Dorie’s. In fact, she specifically warned me that, “because pork is so variable” it should be checked early and often. Maybe someday I will learn to cook pork properly, in the meantime I am happy to let someone else do it for me.

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cinnamon-crunch chicken

Posted on 02/12/2011 by oneexpatslife

This week, while the rest of the French Fridays with Dorie cooks have been making mashed potato pancakes (which sound delicious by the way) I have been home recovering from minor surgery and cooking very little of anything. Therefore, I will have to catch up with the rest of the group later in the month. Instead, today I am posting a FFwD recipe which I made a couple of weeks ago, another one which I missed the first time around, Cinnamon-Crunch Chicken.

The holidays are here and that means that the grocery stores are laden with all manner of Christmas treats, which in Germany, include spekulatius cookies. And, while I have encountered these crunchy little cinnamon cookies before, it would never in a million years have occurred to me to serve them with chicken! Leave it to Dorie.

Her VERY simple recipe calls for minimal ingredients and almost no effort. Quick sautéed chicken is served with a sauce made of creme fraiche and spekulatius cookies. No kidding. And you know what? It’s surprisingly tasty. Really!

But I kind of already knew that it was going to be good because all my fellow FFwD cooks had already told me that it would be, and they are usually right. They also warned me not to expect any crunch, and they were right about that too. So now I am looking forward to reading what they have to say about those potato pancakes. Sometimes I wish that I could always do the recipes a week or so behind everyone else.

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potato chip tortilla

Posted on 24/11/2011 by oneexpatslife

Happy Thanksgiving! This is my very favorite holiday of the year and I hope all my fellow americans are enjoying their turkeys, cranberries, and pies.

As for me? Well, since we obviously do not celebrate Thanksgiving in Germany, today is a work day like any other. So no turkey and stuffing for me tonight. But this expat simply cannot imagine skipping Thanksgiving alltogether, so on Saturday we will have some friends over and serve all my holiday favorites. I can’t wait!

In the meantime, this week was cook’s choice over at French Fridays with Dorie, meaning that each of us gets to choose whatever recipe we want. As I flipped through the book, trying to figure out what to pick, I felt like a little kid in a candy store. One year in, there
are still so many amazing recipes yet to be tackled and it was really quite difficult to narrow it down. But in the end, practicality won out, and I decided that with all the other cooking and eating to be done this week, my French Friday recipe needed to be something light and easy.

Ok, so in the end the Potato Chip Tortilla was easy, but not so light. For some reason I had this idea that there would be a little handful of chips in this dish and not the full bag. That’ll teach me not to read the ingredient list more carefully. I was actually a little sad because salty snacks are a weakness of mine and I was so looking forward to munching on the leftovers. Normally I can’t keep chips in the house because, while my husband has absolutely no self-restraint when it comes to sweets, he is bizarrely immune to chips and other salty snacks and then I end up eating the whole darn bag myself. Never a good thing!

There were so many chips in this recipe that they kind of took over the egg mixture. In fact, as I was stirring it all together, I had to reread the ingredient list about ten times to make sure that I had gotten the amounts right. It just really didn’t look like it was going to work.


But then in the pan it somehow all came together, the eggs managed to absorb all the chips and come out looking like a spanish tortilla. I should have learned by now to trust Dorie. Paired with a simple salad it made a very tasty lunch. And while it may not have been as light as I’d first thought, no worries, I still have plenty of room for pie 🙂

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braised cardamom-curry lamb

Posted on 18/11/2011 by oneexpatslife

Well the stores and streets are decked out for Christmas and I think I just heard my first holiday commercial on the radio. Let the festivities begin!

But first, a short pause from the season’s traditional flavors. A quick read through this week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe, Braised Cardamom-Curry Lamb, was not conjuring up the holiday spirit for me, and after the disaster which was my braised pork, I went into this week with more than a little trepidation. Memories of throwing away a big pot of bone dry pork kicked in while I was at the market and prompted me to buy a half portion of lamb, just in case.

It turns out that I need not have worried. After simmering on the stovetop for over an hour, the lamb came out of the pot tender and perfectly cooked. With the addition of potatoes, apples, and a fragrant melange of spices, the sauce was also delicious. And yet…

Maybe it was my curry powder, or maybe it was the addition of apples and honey, but this recipe was discernibly sweet instead of spicy, and I prefer a curry with more heat. That said, I thought this was a great cooking method and will use it again, but next time I’ll leave out a few of the sweeteners and add more heat. Lots more!

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