La Cuisine et les Marchés de Paris

I think the single thing I love most about Paris is that I can make nearly every day about food. Shopping for food, learning about food, exploring shops that sell equipment to prepare food, it is a wonderland of exquisite nourishment.

Saturday mornings are all about the Batingnolles Bio Marché. It is small but really good and the vendors there are wonderfully sweet and helpful. The whole market is organic so it takes a bit of the thinking part out of the shopping experience. You can just gravitate to what looks or smells good and go from there.

Plus there is always some sort of entertainment at the Marché and today it was this lovely lady as a singing clown. She serenaded my children with Sur la Pont D'Avignon.

I came home with a lovely assortment of fresh vegetables which won't last long here. The good and the bad of it is that buying fruits and vegetables at market here in France pretty much means they are ready to eat within a day or two. Unlike at home when your produce arrives at your market while still trying to ripen, everything here goes from farm to table ready to eat. 

After the market we had a light lunch here at the apartment and then I gathered the family and we trundled off to the Luxembourg area for some play and some cooking. I enrolled in a cooking class on Macarons which was conveniently located across from Le Jardin du Luxembourg where the children could play for a few hours under the watchful eye of their handsome father. We had a tad bit more of a French experience getting down there than we would have liked with our bus route being shortened due to an unexpected manefestation. No one seemed sure about what the grave was about since we'd just had one on Thursday against the raising of the retirement age. As it turns out it was a series of street closures for the Gay Pride Parade.

The class was run by a fairly new outfit called La Cuisine Paris which apparently opened in October 2009. They have lots of classes at different times all days of the week so if you are a working stiff, a mère au foyer, or a student, there is a good chance you'll be able to find a class that suits your schedule.

There were 7 of us in our english speaking class. Two friends from Hong Kong by way of London, two American grandmas and their granddaughters, and me. We all had a wonderful time learning about these colorful cookies and I am sure that each on of us will be trying them on our own.

We made a green cookie to suit the green-apple vanille crème patissiere filling and then of course we did the obligatoire Chocolate Ganache.

I am excited about trying these recipes while I am here in France and having yet another excuse to go to G. Detou for supplies. I am not however exicted about the fact that I don't have a mixer and will have to use my brute strength and a whisk.

After the class, box of macarons in hand, we scooted home to make a quick dinner before the USA Ghana game. While in France we do things the French way with salad and cheese coming after the main dish. With two kids who actually eat vegetables but don't care for salad dressing, I have taken to just mixing greens in a bowl with dressing and serving salad ingredients on the side with the cheese. Here are some photos of our salad topping plate that the kids pick from while we eat cheese after our main. I added more of everything after this photo but when it comes to the simple beauty of food, less is more.

Hello strangers.

I know. I was so good at feeding you tasty posts and then I fell completely off the wagon. Life got complicated and then got very busy. The good news is that I am now in Paris, France for a few months and will be happy to report on all things food related.

We are still quite jetlagged and instead of spending my evenings blogging, I am trying to get small children to sleep when they are WIDE awake!

We are living in a lovely flat in the 8th arrondissement which is convenient to my husband's office, the kids favorite parc, and the city's oldest bio market (organic). Most people who visit Paris have the unfortunate luck to be staying in a hotel. For the past two years, my husband and I have been coming to Paris for long stretches of time and therefore have been renting apartments. However, I now realize that there are many apartments for rent here for very short-term lets. Even if you are here for a few days you can find yourself a pad with a few rooms including a kitchen. I had a recent absurd conversation with another parent at my daughter's school regarding where to stay in Paris. She and her husband were traveling to Israel and were going to stay in Paris for a few days on either end. She asked me for a recommendation of a place to stay and I then launched into how great it was to stay in apartments and proceeded to give her a list of short-term let agencies. She stopped me mid-sentence and informed me that not only would she never stay in an apartment but that she only stays in 5-star hotels. I tried to convince her of the virtues of having your own kitchen while traveling but she was fixated on room-service. I let her know we should never vacation together.

I love apartments because a) I don't want to have to get dressed to go get coffee in the mornings on vacation b) I generally travel with a knife kit and frankly what's the point if you have no kitchen and c) I like to have an excuse to go to food markets. Now that we are on our third Parisian apartment I will tell you that I hate hotels even more. I love being able to play with food and shopping in foreign markets is such a treat.

So even if you've never been to Paris I bet you have a good idea that fresh food markets abound here and you can't help but stumble over markets selling produce that is bursting with flavor. (see photo above of tonight's quick grab at the market located about 20 steps from my apartment) I of course had all those notions before I came to live here last summer but what I didn't know was that there is a clever little market called Picard here in Paris which only sells frozen food. The insanity of your local Monoprix with loud music, bustling families, and crowded aisles is completely contradicted by the serenity of a Picard. The store is quiet, the people shopping there are quiet and if you've come in with children, you find yourself shushing them because the place is so calm. Most everything is housed in chest type freezers and at the front of the store there are always a few cases of "la sèlection du mois". Those are the unique items they have discounted that month. The products sold here are surprisingly good. Last year we got hooked on mini-ice cream cones. The nice thing about Picard is that they are everywhere and ours happens to be on the corner facing the market street I use to do most of my shopping so when I come home with bags full of fresh produce I can easily stop in to see if they have anything good on special at Picard.

This month we are rewarded with New Zeland rack of lamb on special so I decided to try it and it was fabulous. I seared it and then added a rosemary garlic rub before roasting. Along with some leftover risotto, heirloom tomatoes, a plate of cheese, baguette, and a salad with french vinaigrette - what could be better?? Since they come frozen, I am going to grab a few more racks for my freezer for the special ends this weekend.

I am surprised a store like this has not popped up in the US. 

Dinner.....

I was aiming for a more rare piece of meat but I am still adjusting to a new kitchen with far less equipment than I am used to. I am going to have to get pretty good at the finger-press test to determine how well done a piece of meat is. I think learning to use one's senses rather than a thermometer is a good thing.

Making Candy with Kids

Sometimes the best holiday treats are so simple. I love cooking with my kids, but often there isn't much time or the recipe I am working on is complicated. I didn't invite the kids to stand at the stove with me as I cooked sugar down into a syrup and then added cream and butter resulting in a somewhat dangerous boiling mess.

Making lollipops, especially when the BFF is over, is always a huge hit. Here is a foolproof way to make something pretty and wow your kids in less than 30 minutes.

Ingredients:

Original Jolly Rancher Candies
Lollypop Sticks
Small Clear Candy bags

Preheat oven to 200°
Line cookie sheet with foil as flat and wrinkle free as possible.
Lay candies out in a pattern you like.
Place in oven gently and melt.
Keep watching until the candy is fully melted and connects.
Remove from oven and immediately roll a stick into the soft candy.
Watch your kids smile!

Kissed Red Velvet Mini-Cupcakes

Ahh kisses. This is the week to be thinking about pecks on the cheek, secret love letters, blushing, all things pink and red, and of course sweets.  This week here at Pots & Pans I will be focusing on tasty treats to celebrate Valentine's Day. 

What I love about this sugary holiday is that, unlike Halloween, most of the sweet offerings are homemade. What I don't like about it, and all the other holidays for that matter, is that it has become lost in a sea of marketing and retail fluff. Thankfully only one of my children wants to send out Sponge Bob Squarepants Valentine Cards to all his first grade classmates. The other has decided she's going to make hers the old fashioned way. 

Normally, my husband and I skip heading out to dinner on February 14th because it seems to have turned into a gimicky restaurant circus out there. We instead have celebrated the night before or after to avoid the fixed menus and herd like service. This year, with Valentine's Day falling on a Sunday, we will be making it more of a family event. 

There may not be a better way to start off the week than with Red Velvet Cake. A cake that has been around seemingly forever and has its fair share of theory and speculation. Despite what you may think, this is not a white cake with red food coloring. The cocoa powder gives the cake a mild chocolate flavor and yes, food coloring does play an important role in its color but theory would have you believe that was not always the case. It is thought that in the early to mid-twentieth century, the use of unprocessed cocoa powder along with the buttermilk caused the batter to turn slightly reddish. The unprocessed cocoa powder contains anthocyanin, a food pigment, that when combined with an acid, like that found in buttermilk, reacts, turning the mixture slightly red. Nowadays, we use Dutch Processed cocoa powder which does not contain anthocyanin and so we must use some kind of food coloring to achieve the red batter. With all that said, contemporary kitchen experiments have not shown much proof in this pudding so we can't say with complete certainty that it was the anthocyanin and buttermilk that made the red in Red Velvet Cake. The cake recipe I use can be found on epicurious.com. However my favorite buttercream frosting recipe is from a 2001 issue of Food and Wine.

Cake Batter

• 2 1/4 cups sifted cake flour (sifted, then measured)
• 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tablespoon red food coloring
• 1 teaspoon distilled white vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 350°F. Add liners to 2 muffin pans or 3-4 mini-muffin tins. Sift sifted flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into medium bowl. Whisk buttermilk, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla in small bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat sugar and butter in large bowl until well blended. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating until well blended after each addition. Beat in dry ingredients in 4 additions alternately with buttermilk mixture in 3 additions. 

 

Fill liners. Bake cupcakes until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 15-20 minutes depending on the size of your cupcake. Cool in pans on racks 10 minutes. Turn cakes out onto racks; cool completely.

Bon Appétit  | June 2003

Buttercream Frosting

1. 1/4 cup egg whites (about 6 large whites)
2. 1 1/2 cups sugar
3. 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4. 3 sticks (1/4 pound) unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons and softened  

Directions

1. In a double boiler, beat the egg whites with the sugar over simmering water until the sugar has dissolved and the whites reach 160 degrees on a candy thermometer, about 7 minutes.
2. Pour the egg whites into the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the whisk and beat at medium speed until stiff, glossy and cool. Beat in the vanilla. At medium-low speed, beat in the butter, a few tablespoons at a time; continue beating until the buttercream is fluffy yet firm.

Fresh Pasta and a Product Review!

I adore fresh pasta. The dough is pretty simple to make but where it gets complicated is creating all those fun shapes you see in the boxes that line supermarket shelves.

With the tools I have, my only options are linguini in two sizes or ravioli, unless I want to hand cut or roll the pasta, which I don't. Last night I had a hankering for something sagey and butternut squashie so I made a sage infused pasta dough, caramelized small diced squash, and made the pasta in a carbonara sort of way. It came out well with the flavors of butternut squash, sage, pancetta, and parmesan intermingling on my tongue, but I would have rathered the pasta in a bite sized pasta shape like rigatoni or penne.


My sister-in-law is just that lucky. She has a new toy I covet and hope to have in my own home sometime very soon. She was generous enough to share a review of this gadget in my very first guest-post here on Pots & Pains.

Product Review:  KitchenAid Pasta Press Attachment for the Stand Mixer

by Christine

We love making fresh pasta at home, so a few years back we bought the KitchenAid pasta plates that attach to the meat grinder attachment for the stand mixer.  The results were always lackluster -- gummy pasta and tubes of rigatoni and penne that collapsed during cooking.  The plates quickly moved to the kitchen gadget graveyard in the back of our pantry.   We'd given up on making fresh penne and rigatoni at home until we discovered the KitchenAid Pasta Press from Williams-Sonoma.  The press attaches to all KitchenAid stand mixers and extrudes pasta into six different shapes:  penne, rigatoni, spaghetti, bucatini, fusilli, and small and large macaroni. 

We were a bit dubious before using the press, but our first batch squashed any doubts we had.  We've used the press about a dozen times so far and have not been disappointed! It is a well-designed piece of equipment and very straightforward to use.  It comes with a thorough instruction manual that includes pasta dough recipes specifically developed for the press.  We've only tried the basic recipe (see a slightly adapted version of the recipe below) to make penne, rigatoni, bucatini, and spaghetti.   The pasta maintains a perfect al dente texture, which is not always easy to achieve with fresh pasta.

The key to a successful outcome with the press is definitely a well-made pasta dough.  As you can see in this video, we weighed the ingredients for our dough.   Weighing the ingredients, even the beaten eggs, ensures a consistent final product.  When made correctly, the dough has a consistency similar to Play-Doh.  Extruding the pasta is simple.  You break the dough into small pieces and drop them into the press.  The press is equipped with a built-in slicer that allows you to cut the pasta to your desired length.  Usually, the first few inches of extruded pasta don’t come out perfectly.  All you do is simply roll the dough back into a ball and drop it in the machine again.  It is that simple!

The KitchenAid Pasta Press has been a great addition to our kitchen and we recommend it to anyone who enjoys making fresh pasta at home.  

** Side note from Shannon: If you've made it to here without clicking on the link to the video, go back and click. It is a great short video on the steps involved in making pasta. Such a good video, I'll repost the link HERE! **

Basic Pasta adapted from the KitchenAid Pasta Press manual
Serves 4
The first time we made the basic dough recipe from the manual, we measured the ingredients according to the recipe and then weighed the measured amounts.  We figured that weighing the ingredients would help us achieve consistent results in the future.  The only change we made to the original recipe is the addition of one more tablespoon of water. 

Ingredients
490g all-purpose flour, sifted

208g lightly beaten eggs

18g salt

2 tablespoons water

Directions
Place flour and salt in the bowl of the stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.  Turn the machine on to Speed 2 and gradually add eggs and water.  Mix for 30 seconds.

Replace the paddle with the dough hook and knead the dough on Speed 2 for 2 minutes.

Remove the mixture from the bowl and place on a clean surface.  Knead the dough by hand until it is smooth and holds together in a ball.


Rigatoni with Mushroom Ragout
Serves 4

Ingredients
1 Basic Pasta recipe (see above), extruded into rigatoni

Olive oil

2 shallots, thinly sliced

24 ounces cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced

1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, reconstituted in warm water, drained, and roughly chopped

2 sprigs fresh thyme

1 cup dry white wine

1/2 teaspoon sea salt (we like Maldon Sea Salt)

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 cup heavy cream

2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley

Pecorino Romano  or Parmagiano Reggiano to shave over plated pasta

White truffle oil to drizzle over plated pasta (optional)

Directions
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add a generous pinch of salt.

While the water is coming to a boil, heat a large skillet over medium-low heat and add 1 tablespoon of olive oil.  When the oil is hot, add the shallots and sauté until they begin to soften, about 5 to 10 minutes.

Add an additional tablespoon of oil to the pan and then add the mushrooms and thyme, being careful not to crowd the mushrooms.  Sauté the mushrooms until they begin to brown slightly and shrink down, about 15 minutes.  If necessary, sauté the mushrooms in batches or in two pans, using additional oil as needed.

Once all of the mushrooms have started to brown,  return them to the pan and add salt and pepper.  Continue cooking for 5 minutes.

Add the white wine to the pan and bring to a boil while scraping all of the brown bits with a wooden spoon.

Once the mushrooms have absorbed most of the wine, remove the thyme sprigs from the pan.  Reduce the heat to low and add the heavy cream and one tablespoon of parsley.  Stir to combine.    Add salt and pepper to taste.  Keep ragout warm on the lowest heat setting.

Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook until al dente, about 4 minutes.  Using a slotted spoon or skimmer, transfer the cooked pasta to the pan with mushrooms and toss until combined.

Divide the pasta evenly among plates.  Garnish each plate with remaining parsley and shave cheese over the pasta.  If using truffle oil, drizzle a small amount over each plate.

Creamy Shrimp & Asparagus Risotto

See what deliciousness pancetta can bring? Just look at those crispy nuggets of gastronomic joy! As I mentioned in yesterday's post, cooking up diced pancetta is how I always start my risotto. 

I think nearly everyone loves a well executed risotto. Unfortunately, it can go terribly wrong if it is under or overcooked. I find that ordering it in restaurants is a little risky because it can so often fall into one of those two categories. The crunch and grit of an underdone risotto or the glutenous mush of an overcooked risotto is so disappointing. 

Ideally, you want a creamy plate of food where the grains of rice are distinguishable from one another and the flavors of the other ingredients marry well. To attain the creamy texture, many recipes and chefs call for cream itself. I never use cream in my risotto, instead, manipulating the grain to release just enough starch to create a smooth and comforting texture.

Most of my friends make risotto, and make it well, but I have had a few people ask me to give them a demonstration on the process. So here goes...

Per the food porn picture above, I always start with pancetta because it brings great flavor and natural salt into the dish. After the pancetta is cooked until crispy, I remove it from the pan and drain off about 50% of the rendered fat. I use the other 50% to sauté my onions.  Layer the flavors!

The basic outline of cooking risotto goes like this:

1. Sauté onions in fat

2. When translucent, add risotto grains to pan and cook/toast until you hear them crackle a bit.

3. Add wine and cook until fully absorbed.

4. Start adding your stock. (which should be warming in a sauce pot nearby.) 

Add enough stock to cover the rice and simmer until it is mostly absorbed. Then add more stock.

5. Follow this pattern until the rice is almost al dente. It has more of a crunch than you'd want to eat but seems to be close (maybe 5 minutes away) to being done.

6. Turn off heat, add a handful of parmesan, a knob of butter, a few grinds of the pepper mill and the cooked pancetta. Stir to combine and put the lid on the pot for 5 minutes.

Seriously, 5 minutes off the heat with the lid on. Go set the table or send a few emails and then come back to it.

Steps 2 and 3 are critical points in the process for creating a creamy texture in your final dish. By toasting the rice before liquid is added and then adding a wine before the stock, you are breaking down the outer shell of the grain to release the starch.

Risotto is like a blank canvas upon which you can add so many other flavors and ingredients. Depending on your dish, you will want to add those items at different times during the cooking process. For fast cooking things like shrimp or delicate vegetables, I add those during the last five minutes so they don't over cook. If you have something with herbs, you'll want to add those as you are toasting the rice so they can impart flavor as the rice cooks. If you've got something that really needs to cook, you may want to sauté that with the onions or add just before the stock so it cooks along with the risotto. Just keep in mind that large pieces of ingredients that take a while to cook may not be ideal for risotto. The rice really should only take about 18 minutes of cooking plus the 5 minutes of resting at the end. 

Pancetta getting crispy and the fat rendering off. As you can see on the right side of this photo, a layer of flavor has formed on the bottom of the pan that I scrape up with my wooden spoon when I add the wine. When the pancetta is done to your liking, remove from pan and drain on a paper towel.

1 medium Onion, diced, sautéing in the rendered fat of the pancetta. The color comes from the pork bits left on the bottom of the pot not because I have cooked them until they are browned. 

Above is about how much wine I add to 1 1/4 cups of risotto. Well, I guess not all of it. To the left is what I get to drink while cooking!

After you have added stock twice and cooked it until it has been absorbed, taste your risotto. You need to take a bite to figure out where you are in the cooking process!

When you think you are ready to turn off the heat and cover the risotto, add things that will over cook fast like asparagus, shrimp, or peas. Don't forget to season with some pepper. If you've used pancetta you likely won't need additional salt.

Sorry for the poor lighting and messy composition of the photo above. It is here just to show you that I've added the pancetta, parmesan, butter, asparagus, and if you can see it the shrimp are nestled snugly into the risotto to cook. Lid when on fast and I left the room with my glass of wine to watch 5-minutes of whatever news program was on.

Five minutes later we had this. A creamy, buttery, shrimp and asparagus risotto.

Lemon Curd & A Double Birthday

As much as I hate being cold, I really do love Winter. Living in the Boston area we get a lot of Winter every year but it isn' always white. Often we are forced to suffer through the low temps with no snow to play in and seriously by June that can get kinda old. This year however, we have been rewarded with lots of gentle snow storms and thankfully, no snow days yet. (I also like summer and want my kids to get out as early as possible so we can play on the beach.) I love sitting at home, like I am now, quietly watching the white flakes fall from the sky with a fire going and some classical music on in the background. This serene atmosphere just makes me want to do one thing, cook up something cozy, warm and comforting. So while I love Winter, it isn't such a great time of year for my waistline.

Luckily I had already planned a day of cooking for yesterday because when I woke up we had a surprise inch of snow on the ground and the storm was just getting going. I clearly hadn't watched a weather report in a long time. The only troublesome part about yesterday's storm was that it made the roads a mess here in our small town and I was hosting 16 women for dinner to celebrate the birthday of our dear friends who are identical twins. When I say identical, I mean, seriously they should have done the Doublemint Gum commercials all those years ago!

Our group of women is a mixture of people from here, not from here, old friends and new friends. The twins happen to be two of my oldest and dearest friends from high school. It was a pot luck dinner and I made the cake or should I say cakes. While trying to figure out what to do for the cake it dawned on me that perhaps they often have to share a cake and blow out the candles together. So I decided to make two rolled cakes so they each could have an obnoxious amount of candles to blow out all on their own. What a good friend I am!

Clearly one should be chocolate cake and the other white cake to satisfy the differing tastes of such a big group and to accomadate my need for BOTH. The chocolate would be rolled with fresh whipped cream and raspberry filling. For the white cake I decided to fill it with a lemon curd and brush the cake with a Malibu Rum simple syrup. One of the twins loves drinks made with Malibu Rum so I figured I'd give that a try. As you can tell, I am always trying to inject something new into recipes.

Both turned out really well and as you can see from the photos below, I got a lot of skinny candles in each one! Horrifying. I know.

TECHNIQUE

If you have never made a lemon curd or a rolled cake before you should put it on your list of things to try. They are both fairly easy to accomplish with care and attention.

The Curd is simply whisking eggs and egg yolks with sugar and lemon juice. Butter and gelatin are added at the end to help with the structure of the curd. I used a recipe on page 477 of Martha Stewart's Cooking School book which uses both eggs and egg yolks. The recipe below is from Gourmet courtesy of epicurious.com.

A rolled cake is simply a génoise cake batter baked in a thin layer for about 6 minutes and then rolled in a clean tea towel while warm. After the cake has cooled all rolled up, unroll it and fill it. Re-roll the cake and chill. It is really that simple. I used the génoise recipe on page 464 of Martha Stewart's Cooking School book.

Recipe below photographs.

 lemons. some zested. juiced. curd. cake. 
the confectioners' sugar balances the tart lemon so nicely.

whisking lemon curd. rolling up white génoise cake.

 two cakes. twins.

*Monday's Upcoming Events Post will be rescheduled soon. Got busy preparing for the birthday party yesterday!*

Recipe Updates

Each week I will be trying new recipes and if I don't have time to immediately update you all on how they went, I will do my best to do a weekly recipe recap on the weekend. So here we go...

On Monday I posted about Tweaking Sullivan Street Bakery Recipes but never gave you guys the results. Got too busy getting ready for The Martha Stewart Show!!

• The folding of the edges several times during the rise worked well in bringing in more air bubbles.
• After 15 or so hours of rising I had a nice dome under the tea towel covering the dough.
• While I had the dough rising all day in a warm spot in our house, the chill overnight did some damage to the rise and air bubble factor. When I came down Tuesday morning it had clearly lost lots of its umph and all of its dome. Grr.
• I preheated the oven to 500 degrees with the cast iron skillet on the bottom rack. Just after I slid the bread on the upper rack, I poured water into the hot hot skillet creating steam and quickly closed the oven door. I then turned the oven temp down to 450. I set the preheat temp to 500 because I knew the door would be open for a bit while I was pouring the water into the skillet and didn't want to lose too much heat in that process.
• THE RESULTS: The crust was lighter and crispier than previous attempts and the interior definitely had more holes. However, it was still too dense in my opinion so I am going to keep trying.
  

The Roman Gnocchi Experiment

I am happy to report that the recipe I posted in 24 hours in Manhattan: a food & fun recap is a good one! I have tried it twice since yesterday and it turns out nice semolina gnocchi, which IMO are hardly gnocchi because they were too easy! Here are my thoughts:

• The first batch I tried in a baking dish and they didn't brown all that well and took much longer in the oven than the recipe called for.
• For the second batch (pictured), I decided to up the temp to 450 and I preheated my cast iron skillet so I could get a good bottom crust on these guys. Once the oven was preheated I took the skillet out, quickly doused it with olive oil and then slide the round "gnocchi" into the pan. 
• I returned the pan to the oven on the middle rack for about 15 minutes. I then put the pan on the bottom rack for about 5 minutes to get the bottoms good and browned, and then cranked the broiler to brown the tops.
• THE RESULTS: A crispy top and bottom with a wonderfully creamy center. YUM!
  
• I served it for lunch to the kids with some red sauce and they gobbled it up.
  

Tweaking Sullivan Street Bakery Recipes

It's early. I hear my husband stirring getting ready for work and I look at my iPhone/alarm clock/everything else and see that it is 5:45 am. However unappealing it is to climb out of my warm bed, there really is no better time to get fresh bread started.

I shuffle downstairs to a very cold kitchen and decide to warm up a cup of yesterday's coffee b/c I just can't wait for a new pot to brew. Today I have decided to play with one of Jim Lahey's "no-knead" bread recipes from his Sullivan Street Bakery cookbook. Last summer my family had the incredible fortune to live in Paris for 3 months while my husband worked on a European-based project for his company. We quickly became addicted to vrai french baguettes which was a hard habit to break once we landed back home in October. After trolling my entire area sampling all the "baguettes" nearby, I realized no one is doing it right around here. Some are too sourdough in flavor, some have too much crust, all of them have dense interiors with not enough holes, and most others are just plain undercooked or bland. While we have some artisan bakers up here, IMO they are not doing a good enough job of pumping out authentic french baguette. Maybe that's not their goal. The best I can find close to home are the baguettes at Whole Foods but the best I have found since returning states-side are those at Isabelle et Vincent in Fairfield, CT. They are a true french boulangerie/patisserie and bake their flavorful baguette all day long so nearly anytime you walk in you can ask for a warm stick of bread right from the oven. Trips to Isabelle et Vincent have now become a regular occurance when we visit our dear friends in Fairfield.


A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law emailed me an article, found here, discussing tweeking Jim Lahey's recipe to get a bread that has a thinner crust and more holes. Although I am pleased with the flavor of the Sullivan Street Bakery recipes, I'd love to see if I could make them a bit more eh, how do we say, uh, French!

So while the sky warms its horizon with shades of pink and begins to light up my snow covered back yard, I get to work on combining the 400g of bread flour, 8g of table salt, 1g yeast, and 300g of water. Today though I add in an extra splash of water to make the dough a bit more moist.


I am going to let this thing rise for a full 24 hours this time and during that time I am going to fold the edges in on the bread as the article suggests. Tomorrow when I get around to baking it off, I will try to get some steam action going in my very hot oven. Since I have two ovens, I thought it would be a good experiment to do one with steam i.e. a pan of water at the bottom of the oven, and one dry. Unfortunately, I only have one baguette form pan. Maybe I'll bake them off separately since they don't take too long.

Until tomorrow....

French Cheese Fondue

Or also known as Fondue Savoyarde,  is perfect for a cold winter day!

It is chilly in these parts and I was inspired by The Passionate Foodie's post about the Beacon Hill Bistro now offering Fondue as part of their Sunday Evening menu. Apparently this offering begins today and will last through much of the winter. Click the BHB logo below for more information.

Cheese fondue is not hard to make and doesn't take much time. You should have however an enamel or cast iron fondue pot instead of a metal one. The latter is better for meat fondues cooked in oil or broths.

Pair a Fondue Savoyarde with a roasted chicken and a salad and you won't feel so overstuffed at the end of your meal. Here are some snapshots of our dinner tonight and the recipe below....

Click HERE for more information on the history of cheese fondue and its variations.