Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Young Hearts
So, Yates. His writing reminds me of Fitzgerald for some reason - it's poetic but clean, and often involves fabulously wistful beautiful people. Young Hearts Crying (so far) is good, but not great. Revolutionary Road on the other hand was fantastic. It's another succinct portrayal of 'men living lives of quiet desperation...', of young optimistic lovers seeking "to be wonderful in the world", while quietly wilting into the suburbs. Frank and April Wheeler have endless Parisian dreams of realizing their true potentials and living artfully - the entire novel documents their suburban yearning for something exotic and freeing, while simultaneously exposing their collective thwarted ambitions.
I swear I don't have a thing for depressing books. The themes and subtleties in Yates' writing are so easy to relate to - everyone at some level is afraid of mediocrity, and wants to be more than themselves.
The film is actually quite wonderful as well - the acting is controlled and sincere, and the score is beautiful in its minimalism.
More to come on Richard Yates once I finish Young Hearts Crying and Easter Parade. Till then, snack on some prime literary-scones - fantastic with tea and a side of Yates.
Strawberry Scones
Makes 9 large scones!
1 cup chopped strawberries
3 tablespoons sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter, in cubes
2/3 cup cold buttermilk
Topping:
1 tablespoon sugar
Preheat the oven to 400F
Sprinkle the strawberries with 1/2 tablespoon of sugar and set aside for about 10 minutes.
Combine the remaining sugar with the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add butter and combine, using a pastry cutter or your fingers. You want to crumble the butter into the flour until it resembles damp sand. Stir in the fruit, then add the buttermilk and combine with a spatula gently.
Turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead a little bit to incorporate everything. Add a tablespoon more flour if the dough is too sticky. Pat the dough into a circle about 3/4 inch thick, and cut into wedges.
Transfer wedges to a cookie sheet (leave at least an inch between each scone!) and bake 15 minutes. Sprinkle lightly with sugar, and bake 5-10 more minutes.
Enjoy, with tea.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Wanderlust
Bridgeport? - said I
Camelot. - said He."
Well, we're in Dublin. We managed to get our lives sorted out and folded into 4 overstuffed suitcases (in true tradition I forgot to pack my toothbrush, toothpaste, and running shoes) - and arrived in Dublin on a grey non-rainy day. I could go on about mixed emotions, giant bouts of happiness fused with a slight claustrophobia at such a densely populated city, but instead I'll do what I'm good at - list making.
Edible, Fantastic things in Dublin:
i) Laduree apparently opened here over the summer, which is happiness beyond words! the packaging alone does me in, nevermind the macaroons.
ii) Coco and Busyfeet cafe - small, unpretentious, friendly, wonderful soup and chai.
iii) The Bald Barista / Milk and Honey Cafe - haven't decided which one I like better, but astoundingly good coffee at both, and located serendipitously next to my morning bus stop...
iv) Fallon and Byrne - foodies unite! Imported goods from all over the place, the only place you can get your hands on both Aunt Jemima's syrup (and other north american fare) and balsamic vinegar from an obscure village in Cyprus. Amazing take-away food.
v) Butler's. All I need to say is this - they melt down best-quality chocolate and sell it under the guise of 'hot chocolate'. Heavens.
vi) General, fantastic ethnic food. Really really. The influx of ethnicities in the past decade makes Dublin an interesting city for food - the whole first year I was here, I don't think I tasted 'Irish food', as everything edible down the road is Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, Arabic, Polish, French...
vii) Avoca. Their bread and scones have gotten me through dire exams - gastronomically and emotionally.
We wandered down Grafton and up and down the wee side-streets and came across a beautiful old bookstore, with first edition James Joyce all over the place. All I could think of was my first experiences with literature when I was younger - we lived through Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Asterix and Obelix, and Tintin. Vicariously.
Enid Blyton's writing was optimistic in the most absolute way - you could always identify with someone in her stories, and the adventures and general tomfoolery that was had was relentlessly cheery and so very pure. We always had an Enid Blyton in our school bag, and on our bedside tables. Things seemed to base around either a group of children at boarding school (The Malory Towers series, the St. Clare's series) or a group of kids that happened to come across, and solve, mysteries of every nature (The Fantastic Five, The Five Find-Outers).
The Crust -
1 cup APF
1/2 tsp sugar
18 tsp salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed
Filling -
1 tablespoon ground almonds
1 tablespoon flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons shredded coconut
4 large nectarines, quartered
1 tablespoon melted butter
The Crust - Mix together the flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter in with your fingers, or a pastry cutter. Add about 4 tablespoons of ice cold water, mixing until the dough just comes together. On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough briefly for about a minute. Cover in cling-film and let rest in the fridge for a good 1-2 hours. When it's ready, roll out into a 14 inch disc.
Assembly - Mix the ground almond, flour, sugar and coconut together. Sprinkle into the center of the 14 inch pastry disc, leaving a 2 inch border. Arrange the nectarine wedges on the dough however you like, I did concentric circles with the skin-side down:
Saturday, October 3, 2009
measuring my life in coffee spoons
I) Make lists, usually with roman numerals and subheadings
i) Rewrite said lists, which is oddly therapeutic
II) Bake.
It really is an interesting poem. T.S. Eliot does the whole disenchanted-with-modernism thing so well - when Thoreau said 'What is called resignation is confirmed desperation', I always wonder what he would have thought of Prufrock, or of The Wasteland (that's a whole other story, good grief). I love how Eliot references absolutely everything in each of his poems - from the Bible to Buddha, Shakespeare to Khayyim, Hesiod to St. Augustine - and how you can find something different in his poems each time you read it.
Everything is interpretive. The epigraph from Dante's Inferno sums up how trapped Prufrock feels by his own thoughts and inaction, while setting up the narrative in storyteller to audience form - in the beginning this is between Guido and Dante, later in the actual poem it becomes '...you and I', Prufrock and the reader. You're suddenly inside his head and it's...resigned - he can't make decisions, he's terribly self-conscious, he wants to say things but spends the entire poem in his head instead of in life. I love the lines 'the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo...' - I imagine him awkwardly standing there, neurotic and a little sad, thinking that everyone around him is aristocratic and knowledgeable, the complete opposite of how he sees himself.
A later publication of the poem was in a tiny booklet named 'Prufrock, and other observatioins' - and that's really what it is, an observation on a person that sums up so many other people, captives of their insecurities.
Of course if you're Freudian, the entire thing is about sex and impotence of some kind, and that's that.
[I don't think i'm Freudian.]
So all of this was really to say - I love the poem, and I bake when I'm nervous. Case in point: in the four days before moving to Dublin, I was elbow-high in batter making...
3 dozen strawberry cupcakes with strawberry buttercream icing
1 dozen mini chai cupcakes
1 dozen almond and raspberry teacakes (current favourite)
3 loaves of saffron sultana bread
2 loaves of Jim Lahey's no-knead bread (one regular, one whole wheat)
a dozen banana pancakes with banana caramel sauce
3 dozen ginger-molasses cookies
2 dozen chocolate madeleines
1 chocolate cake
The cupcakes and teacakes are from Martha's Cupcake book which is absurd and fantastic. It's hard not to squeal with glee looking through it - cupcakes that look like tiny sheep, giant sunflowers, blooming roses - I have cupcake fever, and it's fierce. The strawberry cupcake recipe was spot on - not too sweet, fluffy, written clearly. The mini chai's ended up quite dry for some reason, they tasted lovely although decidedly unchai-like (I'm a bit of a tea snob, so there's a slight bias there perhaps).
The teacakes are my favourite so far, hands down - I've made them thrice since then and feel little-to-no guilt in devouring them one after another. I think it's the brown butter - it makes them smell Fantastic and keeps everything ridiculously moist (the almond flour helps with this a lot too). I hope putting the recipe up doesn't incur the wrath of Martha (and what a wrath that would be!) - it's just too good.
Fruit and Almond Tea Cakes
* The recipe uses cherries (the stems stick out the top, totally unnecessary and extremely cute), of which I had none, so raspberries it was!
1 and 1/4 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup ground almonds
1 cup sugar
1 tsp coarse salt
5 large egg whites
1 tablespoon kirsch, if you have it
about 20 raspberries
Preheat the oven to 400F / 205C. Brush the muffin tin with melted butter, and dust lightly with flour. In a small saucepan melt the butter over high heat, leave it (swirling occasionally) for about 15 minutes. You'll know when it's done - it smells nutty and kind of like toffee (refrain from drinking it).
Mix the ground almonds, flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Add the egg whites and whisk until you have a smooth batter. Add the kirsch if you have it. Pour in the brown butter, whisk until it comes together, and let it rest for 20 minutes.
Fill each muffin cup about halfway full, and add one or two raspberries to the center. With a spoon, push some of the batter over top of the raspberries (don't add more batter on top - it makes the teacakes puff up monstrously). Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden brown. Let cool for 10 minutes, consume with a cup of tea.
Friday, September 25, 2009
The gradual instant
Sustaining really is the word for it. Wasn't Jean Valjean originally thrown in prison for stealing a loaf of bread? Bread is so ancient, every culture has a plethora of bread recipes integral to their customs, rituals and identity. Some cultures and religions use bread as they do language, laden with symbolism and representing histories or intensely personal experiences - the Eucharist in Christianity, the matzoh in Judaism. Others use it to simply feast or commemorate joy - in India puri's are eaten at weddings and festivals in heaps upon heaps.
I've been making things like banana bread for a while now, but in all honesty never really gave it a thought on a molecular level or anything along those lines. This is changing. Just a few hours ago I finally bought a copy of 'The Bread Bible' - and it's a complete revelation, gadzooks! Suddenly things make a bit more sense, and I'm amazed at how complicated and intricate the process is - yeast is apparently a tempestuous creature, the temperature needs to be just so, the salt can't be folded in until later or you actually Kill off the yeast (very counter productive), the kneading forms the gluten, the gluten forms the infrastructure, the carbon dioxide puffs the whole thing up and the alcohol gives it flavour (carbon dioxide and alcohol being given off by the yeast as it greedily feasts its way through the sugars in the flour), the combination of all of this coupled with the temperature and altitude can either blow up your dough explosively or make it completely deflate unto itself.
Who knew?
I'm only on chapter 2 of this book and am convinced that
a) I love it.
b) When I grow up I want to be Rose Levy Berenbaum.
I haven't broached her actual bread recipes yet, so here's a Rosemary Raisin Bread recipe from farmgirlfare that I had tried out a few weeks ago.
Rosemary Raisin Bread
3 and 3/4 cups bread flour
2 tsp instant yeast
1/2 cup warm milk
1 tablespoon rosemary (fresh)
1 and 1/2 cups raisins
5 tablespoons olive oil
4 beaten eggs
1 and 1/2 tsp salt
Mix the flour and yeast together well, and then add the milk, rosemary, raisins, olive oil, and eggs. Mix thoroughly forming a fairly sticky dough - add flour (an extra tablespoon at a time) if at the end the dough is too wet to work with. Turn onto a floured work surface and knead for 5 minutes. Cover and let it rests for 20 minutes. Knead in the salt - be militant with this bit as my bread ended up having a solid lump of salt smack in the middle of one of the slices (sorry mum). Continue to knead until the dough is springy and elastic, around 10 minutes. Put the dough in an oiled bowl and let it rise in a warm place for about 2 hours. Muster up any aggression in your being, and punch the dough down. It's tremendously therapeutic.
The original recipe called for 4 tablespoons of olive oil, but my loaves were a bit too dry so I'd add 5 next time. It's not exactly ideal sandwich bread as it's hopelessly flat (mea culpa though, I left it for entirely too long sitting around the kitchen), but it turned out rather lovely smeared in butter alongside an omelette, and a glass of tea.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
I really wanted each baked gift to sort of reflect the person somehow, but wasn't quite sure how to go about it. A lovely friend of the family's on the thank-you list is of Lebanese descent, and mentioned a few days ago that Khalil Gibran was actually born in the same village he was. Amazing! I think I read 'The Prophet' when I was in grade 11 and fell in love with the lush writing and illustrations. The Wee Book Inn in Edmonton had a few beautiful, wrecky old copies of 'Tears and Laughter', which was lovely as well. I'm not sure how he did it, but to be able to write poetically without coming off as pretentious or aloof is definitely a gift. It's really... graceful writing, if that makes sense. Everything is strongly paced but at the same time quiet. Our copy of Tears and Laughter has a fantastic preface by the editor - he focuses on how Gibran could write 'from the delicate to the strong...the delightful to the frightening, from the lacy sweetness to the bitter condemnation'.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.'
Add this mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well with a wooden spoon until it's well combined. Add the sultanas and mix in gently. Flour a flat surface and knead the dough for about 5 minutes until smooth. Shape into a ball and place in an oiled bowl. Cover with a clean teatowel, and leave it to rise in a warm place for an hour.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
No Apparent Scaffolding
10 days since the last one! How? When? The past week has been a mixture of emotions, though all on the happy-spectrum. Almost. The impending proper move to Dublin is slightly unsettling and oddly making me nervous even though I've been there for three years. Somehow this time is different, it has a finality to it that's weighing on me. But so exciting! 10 days left, to pack and cook and read and regroup and mail out post-wedding-thank-you-cards and hug everyone possible.
I'm beyond impressed, and secretly a little envious, when people can put complex emotions into wee sentences, when you read something uttered by another and go 'aha! that's it!'. In an interview the poet Louis Jenkins was explaining his goal, really, the goal, of poets, writers, people.
"In my own writing I want, as much as possible, for the words to disappear, so that the poem becomes something like a movie in the reader's head...All poems are linguistic constructs of course, but I don't want the scaffolding to be apparent."
Exactly.
I want to move to Europe without the scaffolding being apparent, without the worry about different voltages, small apartments, rain, travel complications, currency converting, internet companies, being away from family.
I don't know if anyone really wants their scaffolding to show through, and I have a sneaking suspicion we spend a lot of time and effort trying to achieve this.
I wonder if everyone feels this way about the separate components of their lives? Wanting all things to be seamless, and for the bigger picture to sweep us off our feet.
This really isn't supposed to be pessimistic, because the rest of his interview reassures us all that these things really do have happy endings. But, in order to shamelessly insert a recipe and some glossy photos, I'll save the rest of the interview analysis for the end of the post!
In the spirit of attempting to bring strong flavours together without the scaffolding showing through - a mushroom galette, with giant portobellos and strong, strong stilton blue.
I've never been a huge blue cheese fan (growing up on loony tunes does that to a girl), but it works! Startling cheese against earthy rustic mushrooms, yes please. I found the recipe at smittenkitchen, a fabulous blog, and tinkered around with it a bit depending on what I had at home. Instead of making her crust, I recycled some leftover pâte brisée (without the sugar) and it worked, hurrah!
Mushroom Galette, adapted from Smittenkitchen
Savoury Pastry Dough - whichever recipe you're comfortable with (I'm not a purist, I imagine storebought would be fine)
2T unsalted butter
3/4 cup sliced green onions
1 minced clove of garlic
1/2 tsp chopped rosemary
1/2 tsp chopped thyme
1/2lb. assorted fresh mushrooms (I used portobellos and button), sliced
5 ounces blue cheese (I used Stilton)
Preheat the oven to 400F.
In a large pan over medium heat, add the butter and green onions, stirring for about a minute (they should get fairly soft). Add the garlic and herbs, stirring for another minute until aromatic. Add the mushrooms and increase the heat. Don't worry if the pan is completely crowded, the mushrooms shrink as they lose liquid - this should happen after about 10 minutes, with stirring. Take off the heat and let cool. Crumble the blue cheese into the mushrooms and stir in.
On a floured surface, roll out the dough into a 12-inch round - transfer to a baking sheet. Pile the mushroom mixture onto the center of the dough and spread out, leaving a solid 1-2 inch border. Fold and pleat the pastry border over the outer edge of the filling (see photo - the center filling is open). Bake for 30-40 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and everything smells lovely. Let it cool for just a few minutes, and devour happily.
I was a bit miffed halfway through the process, as I hadn't quite thought things out and was assembling the galette on a wooden chopping board, in a hot, hot kitchen (without the pan or baking paper underneath). It was melting. Fast. Sticking to everything, deforming, going from something you would order in a cafe to something you would find in the woods. And so I did what I'm apparently good at - I panicked. Then I gave up and contemplated buying sushi from Safeway. Kirk swooped in and painstakingly transferred the whole sticky mess onto a baking sheet, inch by inch, while I tried not to hyperventilate. And of course, it worked.
Optimism and pessimism in the kitchen are curious concepts. I love to cook, but I'm a sheepish pessimist at most of my own abilities, especially in the culinary ring. As is often the case, the Writer's Almanac (and a patient husband) soothed things over. The interviewer asked Louis Jenkins if his poetry was essentially optimistic or pessimistic. His reply (if I may paraphrase) was that all poetry and creative acts are in essence optimistic, as we take the chaos present in the world and attempt to order it in some way. Even the most abstract poetry is an act of order, an act of taking thoughts and emotions and categorizing them in symbols and letters that are familiar to us.
Isn't that fabulous? And so comforting! Applicable to innumerable things, including culinary adventures, which can result in creative afternoons whether we planned for them or not.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Ode to Autumn
2 giant butternut squash were idly hanging around the kitchen, so I put them to use. By 'I', I mean my sous-chef, who can manoeuvre a giant santoku through a gourd like butter. We picked up the squash a few days ago and apparently autumn was already on my mind - I have a slight habit of bursting into song or prose in grocery stores. There were piles and piles of manicured fruit, pyramids of peaches and, off in the distance, a sturdy hill of squash and pumpkins. And so, eyes closed - 'SEASONS OF MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS!' - I love Keats, and anyone that can make gourds and hazel shells sound sexy. My husband had meanwhile run off to hide in the egg/cheese/butter aisle (excellent taste) until I was done. Hmph.
Man cannot live on squash alone, so we found some gruyère and grainy mustard for a tomato-tart-thing. There was a recipe online that looked good, and another in one of Laura Calder's books (French Taste) that looked Good.
The soup was a tiny but too thick but a touch more broth fixed that up. The only other thing - fiddle with the bacon to your liking. I tried being a good girl and followed the recipe exactly but good grief it was too bacony (the husband assures me there's no such thing as too much).
Butternut Squash and Apple Soup! - adapted from Fine Cooking
8 slices of bacon, crisply cooked and sliced
2.5 lbs cubed squash
1 diced apple (I used granny smith with happy results)
1.5T chopped sage
1tsp salt
half a tsp pepper
1 quart (about 4.5 cups) broth
Over medium high heat in a large pot sauté the squash until browned, about ten minutes. Stir in the chopped apple, sage, salt and pepper, and cook for another 5 minutes until the apple softens. Add the broth and scrape up any browned bits stuck to the pot. Bring to a boil, and then lower the heat to a simmer. Cook barely simmering for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool somewhat. Add the chopped bacon to the soup and puree in batches or with an immersion blender. Season, and serve right away, garnished with whatever you have on hand!
Now about this tomato thing. Laura Calder's recipe is more of a free-form tart, slightly more informal and quick to make. Thing is, I needed an excuse to make a proper formal pastry crust because...I've never made one. I've been carrying this around for most of my life with terrible shame. For some reason proper pastry crusts always had serious gravity in my mind, the kind of thing only professional chefs and ancient grandmothers can make properly. So, momentarily courageous after reading Keats, I did it. Not to sound like an culinary egomaniac but it was fantastic, and oddly therapeutic.
I used Martha Stewart's Pâte Brisée recipe, found on her website. Assembling the tart took a bit of time, and so I cheated, and skipped skinning and seeding the tomatoes. Whoops. Don't skip this! Learn from the error of my ways! It made the whole thing a bit soggy and the skins turn slightly bitter after so long in the oven. Universal solution to such situations - smother in grated cheese. Mmmmmm. If only that applied to everyday life.
The tart seems perfect for a light lunch, and it followed the soup well. It's so...light somehow, and french, and comforting. So thank you Keats, for your Ode to Autumn, for a day of cooking, and overcoming fears. The only downside to the day? I have a primal urge to make crusts one after another, smother them all in warmed nutella, and see what happens. It would make for an interesting post, no?
4lbs plum tomatoes, halved
Quarter cup olive oil
1T thyme (I used dried, fresh would be wonderful)
salt
2 cloves garlic, sliced
half a batch of savory pastry (I used the aforementioned pâte brisée)
2T devon cream
1T grainy mustard
Half a cup grated gruyère
Ideally, seed the tomatoes right at the start. Toss them with the oil, thyme, and some salt. Bake them (skin down) at 350F for about half an hour. Remove from the oven, let them cool slightly, and remove the skins. Put them back on the rack, toss the garlic over them, and bake for another half an hour. Set aside and let cool.
While all this is happening - line a 9-inch tart pan (with a removable bottom) with the rolled out pastry, folding in the overhang and trimming any excess. After the tomatoes are out of the oven, blind bake the pastry for about 30 minutes with pie weights, and for another 5 minutes without, until slightly golden.
Mix the cream and mustard together, and spread over the bottom of the tart, sprinkling the cheese on top. Arrange the tomatoes (cut side up) in pleasingly concentric circles (or whatever pattern fits your obsessive-compulsive side) and bake for 30 minutes.
Yum.
On learning not to brûlée Everything
This posed a great deal of problems for everyday life. Breakfast was doable, as brûléed oatmeal is a thing of beauty. Lunch was harder to figure out, and dinner nigh impossible. I hit brûlée-rock-bottom when, after a proper workout, I tried brûléeing cottage cheese. I had healthy, protein-filled intentions! Honestly! Unsurprisingly, it was awful. And so began the weaning process - I gave my demerara sugar to a neighbour to abolish any and all temptation.
That being said, one of my first truly Happy memories in Dublin centered about crème brûlée. I know it's a pretty fantastic thing, to be able to live in Europe, really I do. But when I first started out in Dublin I was...overwhelmed. Everyday had a strange sense of inertia, if that makes sense. Kirk came to visit right around his birthday, and I wanted to show him my gratitude the only real way I knew how - through food. I was focused and militant in my prep work, but apparently slightly distracted by my company - I forgot about time, time to cool the custard, time for the water bath, how much time it takes start to finish. By the time I was ready to let it cool in the fridge, it was 2am, I was tired and a little weepy. And embarrassed. I may have bragged slightly about said brûlée to said man. So, dejected, I went to sleep with a wee sad space in my stomach (and ego).
But. Jet lag reared its head, and we were up around 6am, and famished. Opportunity is best appreciated when it presents itself as an edible thing. We fired up the broiler, threw in the chilled brûlées, and had an absurdly decadent post-birthday-breakfast.
There's a sentence in The Hours (Michael Cunningham) where Clarissa Vaughn, the modern Mrs. Dalloway, says to her daughter -
"I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."
Our poor stomachs ached from the cream, egg yolks, sugar, coffee, more cream, more sugar. Jet lag struck again, and we slept till noon, impossibly full.
It was happiness. Right then.
Monday, August 31, 2009
'de duivige duizel...'
I also got married, which is ABSURD to see typed out like that. Married! We planned for a year and it still came out of nowhere! And just like that my Indian family blossomed into an Indo-Scottish-Dutch clan, and I love it. Tonnus Oosterhoff, a Dutch poet, captured my summer in one of his poems with the line: 'the dovey dizziness' - I love this.
So the other day I was assigned the task of making dessert for a get together with the newly joined MacKinnon clan and Grandma Betty - quite the mixing of cultures and traditions - they perfected chicken vindaloo and coconut rice, and I drank scotch (woohoo! I'm getting better at it - 2 Christmases ago I had 4 sips of scotch and felt my toes curl, thinking my throat was on fire).
I knew I wanted to make something sort of french, but crème brûlée seemed a tad heavy. So instead - petit pot au chocolat, with a bruléed top. Mmmmmm. With a generous glug of Kirsch underneath it all.
The recipe worked! Jubilations! It felt...healthier, although let's be realistic about the caloric consequences of chocolate, cream, brown sugar. But still. It's not overly sweet and still worked well as a dessert, and as always, cracking through the top made me smile.
Recipe - Chocolate Strawberry Brûlées (for 6)
250g strawberries, halved or quartered (about a cup and a quarter)
2T Kirsch
2 cups cream
115g semisweet chocolate, melted then left to cool
1/2 cup brown sugar
-Divide the strawberries among 6 ramekins (preferably cute ones!) and sprinkle with the Kirsch
- In a large bowl whip the cream until fluffy, add the cooled chocolate and whip until thick. Spread the mousse over the strawberries, cover with cling film and freeze for at least 2 hours
- Preheat the broiler to high, sprinkle sugar fairly thickly over the mousse and place under the broiler until the sugar caramelizes. Be sure to watch it lest it burn! It only takes about one and a half minutes. Let the brûlées sit for about ten minutes, spruce up with fresh mint or strawberries, and feast!
One last thing. Dutch women above the age of, say, 40, should be allowed to say whatever they want, at all times. The cracking of tops, cluttering of spoons, and soft chocolate sighs were followed with one of the most whimsical compliments I've ever heard, courtesy of Betty:
Alsof een engeltje op je tong piest
[As if an angel peed on your tongue]
They have a way with words.