Lemon Hazelnut Madeleines

Madeleines are tender little french sponge cakes, the perfect accompaniment to an afternoon cup of tea and probably one of the prettiest confections that I know of. They are very easy to make and the only special tool you need is the fluted, shell shaped madeleine pan.

I loosely followed Susan Loomis' recipe from Cooking at Home: On Rue de Tatin. I used ground hazelnuts, as well as lemon zest and homemade vanilla extract to flavor the delicate little cakes.

A great tip for these guys is to butter the pan with a pastry brush and melted butter to get into all the little flutes. I then freeze the pan for about 5 minutes and butter again. This ensures that the fluted side will never stick and come out evenly browned.

Unfortunately, due to a tricky oven, mine overcooked a bit on the bottom. Nevertheless, they were perfect with that cup of tea this afternoon.

True Love

Monza is a new pizza parlor with an old world feel, with motorized accessories and race car driver Pizza names. Monday night, we were sitting at the bar table overlooking the kitchen. The wood burning pizza stove in the corner immediately draws our focus as the fire-tender moves the wood to flame up right before adding in the next hand-tossed pie. Looking through the plexiglass to the stacks of white plates and further to the white tile wall with bright red fire-extinguishers, I feel like I belong in this clean kitchen with it’s young cooks and trendy, dressed in black, wait staff. There is no better place to be on a last minute Valentines Day dinner than this casual wood paneled room with its steel accents and neon red signs.

The hierarchy of the kitchen is immediately apparent. A guy in his early 30s with long hair, a beard and a white bandanna flits in and out of the kitchen. Never actually cooking, clearly he is in charge this evening. A young girl, long hair with blue bandanna, follows him around. I had seen them out together weeks prior, at a trendy new cocktail bar, so I know they are a couple and you can see it subtly here as well. The small glances, standing too close, coming and going together. A very young boy, early 20s if he is even out of his teens, with a bandanna the same as the man in charge and we watch him. He cooks the pasta, tossing it on top of a blazing hot range. He plates the dessert, Tiramisu of course. It’s the most romantic holiday, so a strawberry tart is also the special this evening. He attentively plates the dessert, squeeze bottles of chocolate and cherry in hand. It’s slow tonight, unexpected and a bit disappointing. Does no one in this town appreciate the simple romance of sharing a pizza, white wine in a juice glass and a warm red glow?

The young boy is bored but in love. Not with a girl but with this place and the people who create it every day. He meticulously cores a handful of strawberries, carefully pipes in the chocolate sauce. He searches for what he needs, a long, red pick to skewer back on the green top. A strawberry filled with chocolate made whole, a surprise. Each strawberry is plated in the center of a small demitasse plate, drizzled with more chocolate. Two plates he carries to the back, through the door, out of sight. The guy in charge and the young girl are back there. The young boy returns a minute later, a slight smile on his face, clearly pleased with the reaction. He grabs the other two plates and walks to the front, to the servers station. We are leaving, walking out the door and I glance back to see him standing, a plate in each hand, patiently waiting for the two young girls to finish their tasks and discover what he has created for them tonight, to show his love on Valentine’s Day.

Truffles of the Chocolate Persuasion

Every year for Christmas, both my grandmother and my mother gift me with big boxes of Ferrero Rocher, the faux fancy chocolate candy that they even sell at Rite-Aid. I fell in love with these delicious milk chocolate hazelnut crunchy balls the first time I went to Sam's Club and had a free sample in a giant, soulless warehouse, bestowed upon me by a grumpy senior in a blue vest. I can see the concrete floors and exposed rafters every time I unwrap the shiny gold covering. What a beautiful food memory.

I wish I had a better beginning for my Homemade Chocolate Hazelnut Truffle blog but apparently I am honest to a painful fault. I still love the packaged gold chocolates and they were my first exposure to the chocolate/hazelnut combination, which is the only version of chocolate that I actually crave, being more of a "Peaches & Cream" type of dessert person. At any rate, I made some delicious chocolate/hazelnut truffles the other night and the good news for you is that they are super easy so I will probably make them again in the near future. This time I made them at home in my kitchen surrounded by friends and drinking wine. That sounds better already.

The inspiration for the truffles was some Hazelnut butter I snagged from work. I originally was going to make cookies but decided they weren't worthy of such a fantastic ingredient. Hazelnut butter is pure pressed hazelnuts with no sugar added and it smells and tastes heavenly. I envisioned a moist, almost chewy chocolate truffle version of Nutella and I completely hit the mark.

I knew that I should follow some semblance of a recipe so I started looking. Some books at work yielded several recipes but all required a grocery store trip so I vetoed those. And I don't have internet at home so I couldn't just mess around searching for a recipe that fit my pantry ingredients. The Johns Island library had no chocolate truffle books (big surprise) and only one candy book, Candy for Dummies, which yielded some pretty basic truffle recipes that I molded to fit my needs. Basically I heated heavy cream and sugar and combined it with bittersweet chocolate. I proceeded to whisk in the hazelnut butter. So easy. It went in the fridge to harden for about an hour. The book then suggests that I temper chocolate to dip them in. That requires several rounds of heating and temperature taking. No fun. So I just skipped that part and rolled them around in some sweetened cocoa powder. I would have loved to roll them around in chopped hazelnuts but those are expensive and also absent on Johns Island. Cocoa it was, and since they didn't have a chocolate layer first, they only looked pretty for a day but then you just roll them around in more cocoa powder. No one will complain about more cocoa powder.

See how they look messy and dirty??? This is how chocolate truffles were originally designed to look, resembling their fungi counterpart covered in dirt. I wish I could say this was a picture of my truffles but they all got eaten before I could take one. They did however look exactly like the ones above.

Have your pie and eat it too

I told The Boyfriend recently that I'd make him a pie. Any pie he wants. This was before Thanksgiving so I'm thinking maybe apple is his favorite? Pumpkin? Mincemeat? The response...

Chicken and Mushroom Pie

Okay. So not exactly what I had in mind but delicious nonetheless. And luckily for me, many of the same principles apply. We'll start with filling. I started by cooking onions in butter in a saute pan until translucent. Then I added thinly sliced carrots followed by sliced mushrooms and frozen peas. Herbage consisted of thyme and sage picked right off the plants. I sprinkled the whole mess with some flour to help thicken it up while cooking in the oven since I knew that the mushrooms and peas would continue to release moisture. Now gravy. The sauce component of this pot pie is technically a veloute. Start with equal parts butter and flour. Once this cooks and loses its raw smell, you add chicken stock to create what is for all purposes, a gravy. Instead of butter, I used duck fat leftover from a duck I cooked coated with Chinese Five Spice powder. So this duck fat has an extra, exotic spice to it. Very subtle but tasty. The gravy and filling get mixed together and set aside to cool slightly.

Of course the most important aspect to this is the pie crust. I have never bought pie crust and personally never plan to start. Homemade pie crust is far better in both flavor, price and time. Yes I said time. In the time it takes you to drive to the store, you can have one finished. Customization for the dish at hand is also possible. A pie crust for Chicken Pot Pie needs to have great flavor but also all over brown-ness (if I can use that as a word.) It should be light and flaky but still substantial enough to not get soggy. The following techniques produced that perfect crust.

Start with everything cold, cold, cold. Butter, lard, flour, milk. All cold. I started by cutting in 1/2 stick of unsalted butter and 4 tablespoons lard into 1 1/2 cups flour with a large pinch of salt. Once the butter is the size of large peas, I added milk a splash at a time until it began to come together. Began is the key word here. Not all of it is in a ball, there is still loose flour. I put it in some plastic wrap to form the ball and created layers by folding the dough several times. This went into the fridge to rest while the filling was prepared, about 45 minutes. I divided the dough into two pieces (top and bottom) and rolled them out for a small, oblong casserole dish. I am now deeply enamored by this dish. First of all, it is green. If you know me, you know that if anything is green, I love it. But most importantly, the dish is clay. Not glass, ceramic or metal. Clay pie dishes brown crusts to perfection because they distribute heat so well. This particular clay dish is Emile Henry and was *free* to me because I work in a kitchen store and sometimes we get free samples. This dish produced an astounding crust. All over flaky and delicious but best of all the bottom crust was brown and crispy with no leakage.

Perfect Chicken and Mushroom Pie.

Schizophrenia in the Kitchen

Lobster for Dinner, Tater Tots for Breakfast

Yesterday was a long day. I taught the signature demonstration class at the store for a steadily growing class. The night before I had 12 people signed up, I walked in at 12:30 to a total of 18 and somehow by the time class started at 2:00, I had a grand total of 22, two of whom had signed up literally 5 minutes before it started. The mood was slightly chaotic to say the least. Luckily, the class went smoothly but of course, I now had 22 people to clean up behind. So done with most of the cleaning at 5, I moved out onto to retail floor as manager and store closer. Meanwhile, I had to keep ducking into the kitchen to finish up all the cleaning. And as always, people crowd into the store from 8-9, making closing at 9 tricky. Where do these people materialize from? I suspect they are leaving dinner and we are the only store open at 9. Luckily closing also went well and I was able to walk out the door at 9:45.

I always leave work fairly hungry and eat when I get home around 10:30. Last night I was particularly eager to return because I knew that the Boyfriend had lobsters at home! Why??? His employee went to Maine and brought us back two live lobsters. He steamed the big guys with celery, dill and shallots and we ate them with a really nice, salted melted butter which sells for about 10 bucks for a 1/2 pound. We only use it for special food and I do believe lobster counts. Normally, I like lobster but love crab. Lobster is a nice treat but I honestly find it slightly boring compared to crab. Apparently, I have just never had a good lobster because these two last night blew crab out of the water. The meat was SO flavorful and buttery on it's own. Dipping it into butter didn't make it seem buttery, just more intensely lobster flavored. With a nice arugula salad with heirloom tomatoes and some salt and vinegar chips, all washed down with a cold Peroni, this was a perfect meal. I had that giddy, falling in love with life feeling that always envelops me when I am surprised by the deliciousness and perfection of a particular meal. Life is good.

Then you try to go to bed and the damn cat won't stop attacking your hair. You can't catch it and by the time you do, you can't get back to sleep. So in the morning you wake up exhausted and starving and cook Tater Tots for breakfast. Yin and Yang. Thus is life.

Bernaise is good for you..

Seriously! It's half eggs and eggs are good for you. It also has fresh herbs and shallots plus wine which is good for your heart. Okay, so maybe the stick of butter is not exactly health food but at least it's not lard!

Maybe I should just leave it at Bearnaise is good. Seriously delicious stuff using the glorious natural sauce that is an egg yolk. Bearnaise has hollandaise as its base, which people have been scared out of making due to the possibility of the sauce either breaking or worse, curdling. I first made hollandaise 3 years ago and got it perfect on the first try. Not because I am so amazing in the kitchen but due to the fact that it is actually not that hard. For those of you who may not know, hollandaise is that wonderful yellow sauce they pour over your Eggs Benedict at brunch, you know, the one you pay obscene amounts of money for despite the fact that you are eating approximately 1 dollars worth of food (and your eggs are probably cooked wrong anyways.)

Basically, you heat egg yolks over a double boiler, whisking until thick. Then you whisk in butter, half in cold cubes, the other half melted. Then you season. For Bearnaise, your seasoning is a mixture of shallots and tarragon cooked in wine and vinegar until syrupy and then cooled.

I served my Bernaise over a fantastic grilled Flat Iron Steak. These are similar to flank steak but a little more fatty and tender. I marinated the steak in a mixture of soy sauce, Worcestershire and rosemary and then it was grilled with a little hickory to give it flavor. On the side, I served Brussel Sprouts sauteed in a little bacon grease and a nice baguette. This was a simple yet rich weekday meal that will also impress any dinner guests.

Have your cake and eat it too..

Let's face it, crab is expensive, unless you want to go catch your own and then it is merely a huge time suck. I am also completely over crab cakes. I love hot, freshly steamed crab that drips down your arms served with a little drawn butter but the cakes are only mildly interesting to me. So instead, last week I made some fantastic fish cakes using Tilapia, sour cream, tarragon, shallots, garlic and lemon. Fish cakes have some similar tasty attributes to crab cakes: crispy on the outside, fried in butter and served with a mayonnaise based sauce. They are also much lighter in flavor and texture as well as being a lot more affordable.
Try these at home, it's easy! Mince the garlic and shallot first and then process the fish and all the ingredients in the food processor. Just be careful not to overprocess, just pulse a couple of times. If you don't have a food processor, you can finely mince the fish with a knife. Divide the mixture into even balls, approximately 2 inches and then roll them in either fresh or panko bread crumbs. Pan fry in a little butter, pressing down lightly to form a cake, and brown on each side. These cakes are best served over a mixed green salad. I also made a lemony garlic aioli to serve with the cakes and the aioli serves double duty as a salad dressing.