I have made this twice, and it was appallingly delicious both times.
Pear Upside-Down Tart
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Category Archives: food and cooking
Layered Soup with Caramelized Onions, Winter Squash and Freisago
Ray Rice Cutting Pumpkin with Samurai Sword
Caramelize some onions, roast some squash, grate some freisago and make a power of toast.
Purée the roasted squash with a little chicken stock and a little pepper and thyme.
In a buttered casserole, layer the onions, squash and toast. Pour in stock up to the top of the toast. Cover the soggy toast with grated cheese.
Repeat layers once or twice.
Bake at 375DegF until nicely browned on top. Don’t burn the hell out of it like I did a couple of times ago.
Pumpkin Stew with Kofta Meatballs and Naan
I borrowed my dad’s copy of Flatbreads and Flavors and got inspired to throw together this very loose interpretation of their Azeri kofta soup. Measure nothing! Eat with your fingers!
Thirty Injera? Wot?
Rachel brought home thirty (thirty!) injera from Shega last night, so Andrew and I cooked up a few dishes to go with it:
- ground lamb and red lentil key wot (how is this not chili?)
- yellow split pea alicha
- lamb alicha
- atkilt
My Ethiopian cooking gets a fraction better each time, but I still can’t make decent injera (hence the takeout). I need to find a teacher.
Recipes after the jump.
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Honey-Caramel Tart
I made a blind-baked pâte brisée shell and filled it with honey caramel.
1c honey
1/2c salted butter
1c heavy cream
Bring the butter and honey up to 240degF. Whisk in the cream. Allow to cool. Fill shell. The filling will be liquid at room temperature. Do not panic. Refrigerate until set. Serve cool.
It was delicious, but I’m damned if I can photograph it.
Wood-fired Earth Oven
I completed my wood-fired oven this summer after around 120 hours of work. I documented the project in an instructable that has been viewed 13,000 times so far.
It took us a couple of firings before we were able to make delicious pizza and crostata. We haven’t yet figured out how to achieve the perfect temperature and steam balance for sourdough, but that will presumably come with practice.
As always happens, the social benefits of the project (talking to builders and bakers during the research phase, asking for help during the building phase, feeding people, receiving comments from readers) have been more rewarding than the project itself. Here’s to years of baking parties!
Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan Ale
Speaking of freakin’ enormous storm surges: My brother-in-law, skiving off architecture school by building actual houses for actual people who actually need them at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, sent up a Mardi Gras care package that included several bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan ale.
On the one hand, I want to swear that I shun beers that contain ingredients other than water, malt, hops and yeast. On the other hand, my favorite beer for years has been Spotted Cow from New Glarus Brewing Company, which is amended with corn. Still, I took one look at this pecan beer and thought, “candy beer,” but ended up wrong. Whatever they’ve got going on there, it’s subtle. It winds up being very nicely balanced: malty, toasty. I never would have picked out the rogue nut esters. Crazy delicious.
Month One Success!
I compounded my third-act despair from earlier this week by spending Thursday and Friday baking instead of writing: My friend and baking idol David Bauer (of the Farm and Sparrow bakery in Marshall, NC) was teaching his “Rustic Breads for the Brick Oven” class at North House, and I was delighted to be able to attend the class and learn (or begin to learn, or begin to begin to learn) some of his techniques.
However:
Despite my best efforts at self-sabotage, I set myself up at the Java Moose for a couple of hours this morning and managed to scribble out the last few scenes. Wonderfully, the characters decided to stage a completely different conclusion than the one I had outlined for them. I like theirs better.
So:
Month One Success! Hurrah!!!
Craft and Ritual
I ordinarily bake sourdough bread at least once a week, but the routine got interrupted several weeks ago and I’ve been feeling slightly subhuman ever since. I revived my starter over the weekend, weighed out and mixed the ingredients Monday afternoon, let the dough ferment until Tuesday noon, shaped, proofed and baked the loaf a few hours after that, and today I feel like myself again. It seems to be the case with me and cookingcraft that the rituals are more rewarding than the actual product– but the quality of the product is the measure of whether the rituals have been performed properly. But maybe everyone is like this?
Diabolical Chicken
I finished drafting my allotted second-and-a-halfth scene late this afternoon, and then set out to use our newly-built fire pit to make a wood-fired pollo alla diavola similar to the one described in Cucina & Famiglia, a charming and useful cookbook co-written by Stanley Tucci’s mom. The diavola is supposed to refer to pepper and not to chicken-charring flames from hell. I knew this, but had to re-learn it the hard way.
I went into today thinking that the scene-drafting was going to be hard and the troll-editing was going to be easy, but I was wrong. Evidently the step between first draft and next draft is a doozy. I will now go and open a bottle of beer (homebrew, but more on that later.)