Fresh Eggs!

My wonderful neighbor brought me a dozen fresh eggs from her chickens last week. She has quite a variety of breeds and each one lays its own unique size, shape and color of egg. I love the blue and really dark varieties.

This blue egg was going into a cookie recipe for a molasses cookie for a special friends birthday package.

My Office

I wanted to share the view of my office with a faraway friend.

Bubba Sports a New Look!

After expensive and repeated surgeries to cure his ear issues. Bubba has been transformed into a Scottish Fold of sorts.

January 2011 The Beautiful

We've enjoyed the fire so much we had to add some comfortable "in front of the fire" type furniture. The World Market had a leather recliner on sale. I tried it in the store and thought I might have to sleep there. They also had some beautiful faux fur mink throws that called to me. It took some maneuvering to get the chair out of the car and into the house, but it was worth every grunt. Of course, I am not the major user. Yes, I have to scoot a protesting cat out of the chair before I can enjoy it. Sometimes the devil cat takes revenge. He jumps onto the arm and casually grabs your arm in his teeth. He has a hard time with the leather though, his former owner had him declawed on all four feet. It makes for interesting slides across the chair arms. I guess it is like an ice chair to him.

December 2010 The Good

Overall, we had a good holiday break. The weather was cold, Bubba was home and we added a few amenities to make hearth and home more comfortable. Bubba's cat flap is of the insulated variety, so no more cold drafts from leaving the door off the latch so he can push his way in. This was a bad idea in hot or cold weather, trying to get the door closed in a timely manner was a goal not often achieved. He loves the flap and he can go in or out at will anytime I am home. Since it was the holiday break, those opportunities increased to dozens of times a day.

The boldest of the new amenities was replacing the old English style gas fire with fire logs. The first few weeks they were set up to be operated manually, but then we added the remote. Point and click and the fire roars to life! Life has never been this easy. Bubba loves it and often tries to tell me to light his fire.

Here's the old and the New:

December 2010 The Ugly

December has been an interesting month. Most of the drama has been centered around Bubba Perves, the cat. First, his cat flap was installed. He learned to use it very quickly and he really thought he was the King. Then, the drama increased. He developed a hematoma of the ear. We tried treating him at home with semi-weekly visits to the Vet. This course of action was a total failure. It was finally decided that he needed to be admitted to the vet facilities. He stayed for two weeks. He was very glad to be released after this ordeal. You see he was abandoned by his first owner and was found by a real estate agent. He had been alone in the house for an unknown amount of time and had no food or water left. The agent took him to the vet, where he spent months sitting in a cage at the Vet clinic waiting to be adopted. Since then he has had abandonment issues. The trauma to his ear has left it disfigured. Here are the before and after pictures.

Yellow jackets

...and I am not referring to a particular piece of clothing. I bought some potted herbs last Saturday, brought them home and decided to park them in a raised bed along our carport. Little did I know -- Yellow Jackets had built a five story condo in the back corner of this structure. If you don't know yellow jackets like to nest underground. You can only tell they are there when you see them flying in or out or you happen to disturb them by running a lawn mower over them or sitting your flower pots over the entrance to their nest. I was lucky to only get stung once which was really enough. The best way to get rid of them is to go back in the dark of night and dig up the nest and burn it. They are inactive at night and I have never had any problems with doing this to them at night. Here's the nest prior to it burning. It was difficult to burn. All I had was Tiki torch fuel. I wonder why they don't make some fireproof building materials as fireproof as this nesting material!

Plums...Plums...Plums

I saw the most beautiful plums at the one of the local Middle Eastern shops, I had to buy some! Then I went home and scanned my cookbooks for ways to showcase them. I finally settled on Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My home to Yours. Dorie's was similar to some dessert recipes by Julia Child and Beatrice Ojakangas, but theirs were for individual cakelets. After work baking does not allow for fussing with individual baking containers.

I actually made this cake twice. First I used purple plums from the big chain store and the second from the locally sourced plums. I made the mistake of using a 9" pan on the first cake. My eyeball was miscalibrated and I had thought it was 8". Needless to say, it baked too quickly and was dry. The second cake I used the correct size pan and it was moist. I wasn't crazy about the flavor of these cakes. Maybe sometime I'll try them using all white sugar or make sure I'm really using light brown as the recipe designated. I some how mixed up the various non-white sugars in my pantry and didn't label them, so who knows what sugar I used and how that effected the flavor.

End of Semester Potluck

I made two cakes and a salad, which was probably overkill but I had recipes and pans to test drive.

The Berry Bundt was made in the Nordic Ware Elegant Heart pan. What a beautiful pan and a breeze to prepare and easy to clean afterward. The recipe was from the Williams Sonoma website. The Nordic Ware Bundt cookbook had a similar recipe but it used a cake mix (Yuck!). The scratch cake was much better. The second cake I made was a recipe from the NYC Juniors restaurant. Juniors recipe claimed to replicate their famous cheesecake. It was yummy. Unfortunately, I ran out of steam when I was making it and didn't fancy it up. It was also made in a new springform pan with a glass bottom. It worked great and I didn't have to take it off the glass to serve it ( A huge bonus!). I was worried that the water had leaked through the foil and into the cake from the water bath, but it was just condensation. Next time it will be loosely wrapped in foil and hopefully -- no condensation.

Happy St Paddy's Day: Beer for Breakfast!

To celebrate this illustrious holiday, I made two Guinness cakes. The first was a Guinness Chocolate cake with cream cheese icing by Nigella Lawson from her NPR interview March 16, 2010. The second was a Guinness Spice Bundt cake by Gesine Bullock-Prado as presented so generously on her blog. Gesine is the author of Confections of a Master Baker -- great read, good recipes. I split the cakes in half as you can see. One set came to work and the other set will go to a friend's house for dinner tonight.

Gesine's blog
http://confectionsofamasterbaker.blogspot.com/

Nigella's recipe on NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124611065#124614775

Well, the cold weather is almost over (so they tell us). Someone just came back from lunch and reports, it is like Spring out there.

Too cold at home???

Start Baking!

I had all the last half of December off for a holiday break. Did I bake? Nooooo.

However, I made up for my lack of ambition over the last two weeks. I made several batches of cookies, biscottis, and some bagels.

The bagels were made from the Baking with Julia TV show recipe. Guess what? The recipes in the Baking with Julia companion book are not the same as the show. I find this very disturbing. The dvd of the show is out, but it looks like it will be missing significant numbers of shows. Amazon reports it will have 8 episodes, another source states 18. The original show had 26, what the heck? I should get the dvd this week, so a compelte analysis and mopan should be forthcoming.

2010 is not starting out as great year. I had to tear down my tenant house. I forgot all me passwords over the holiday break "use 'em or lose 'em seems to apply here".

The good news, I now have a river view from my kitchen window!

Before & After:

The French Pantry's Desserts

I fell in love with The French Pantry's Farmer Cheese, White Chocolate, Blueberry tart. It took me about 4 tries, but I finally duplicated it. I did opt for a Pate Sucre, while theirs has a plain crust.

I first made it as a regular tart but decided I liked a thicker slice, so I make it in a quiche pan. This is a prime example of my memory lapses. I forget to turn the oven temp down and the tart browned on top.

Here's my recipe:

I use a food processor to mix up the crust and the filling. I bake it in a 9” removable bottom 4”deep tin quiche pan, but a 9 or 8” spring form pan or a deep 9” pie plate should work too. You could even try baking the recipe and using a Publix pre-made pie crust. It wouldn’t be a cookie crust, but then the French Pantry’s tart crust isn’t a sweet crust either.


Tart Crust (Bake @ 375º for 20-25 minutes)
1 cup + 2 Tbsp All Purpose Flour
3 Tbsp sugar
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp of Baking Powder
6 Tbsp of very cold butter in 1” cubes
1 Large or extra large egg
1 Tbsp of Lemon Juice
2 Tbsp of jelly of the same flavor as your berries. I use Schmucker’s no sugar added Blueberry Preserves.

Put the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and chunks of butter in the food processor with the cutting blade and pulse until the butter is the size of a large pea. Add the egg and lemon juice and pulse until it just comes together. It doesn’t need to form a ball. Remove the dough from the processor, add chill it. Remove from the frig and roll it out and line the pan with it. I use a tin tart pan so I have to brush the pan with butter using a pastry brush so the tart won’t stick. If you are using a regular pie pan, I would just spray it with PAM or similar. I don’t use PAM on any of my baking pans because the lecithin leaves a film and eventually everything sticks to it. Lecithin buildup will ruin non-stick surfaces too. Prick the dough with a fork. Line the dough with aluminum foil sprayed with PAM and add rice, dry beans or pie weights to hold down the crust. Bake for 20 minutes, remove the crust from the oven and lift out the foil with the beans. Put the crust bake in the oven for another 5 minutes. Remove crust from the oven and paint the bottom and sides with the jelly/preserves. You can double and triple this recipe to make more crusts. Store them in plastic bags in the freezer for later. If you are baking the tart after the crust, be sure to turn down the oven to 350º to bake the tart.

TART FILLING (bake at 350º)
I have never used a premade pie shell, but it should work and I am guessing a single recipe portion of the tart filling would be about right. For a spring form or quiche tart pan that’s deeper use a double recipe. The recipe was written originally for a tart pan which is 10” in diameter but only 1 ½” deep. I wanted a deeper tart, so I doubled the recipe and used the quiche pan.

Single Recipe
½ cup heavy cream
1 ½ ozs of Baker’s White Chocolate grated
1- 7 ½ oz package of Farmer Cheese
¼ cup of Splenda or sugar
1 Egg
1 tsp Corn Starch
¼ tsp Lemon zest
1 ½ c Berries (I use fresh and they don’t get mushy or release a lot of liquid)

Doubled Recipe
1 cup Heavy cream
3 ozs of Baker’s White Chocolate grated
2- 7 ½ oz package of Farmer Cheese
½ cup of Splenda or sugar
2 Eggs
2 tsp Corn Starch
½ tsp Lemon zest
1 ½ c Berries (I use fresh and they don’t get mushy or release a lot of liquid)


Grate the white chocolate into a heat proof bowl, Heat half the heavy cream until hot, but not boiling. Pour the hot cream over the white chocolate and stir until the chocolate is melted. Add the other half of the cold cream. Put the Farmers cheese, splenda, cornstarch and lemon zest in the processor bowl and pulse until cheese and ingredients are slightly mixed. Add the eggs and pulse again. Add the cream and pulse until mixed and smooth.
Pour the berries into the pie shell coated with jelly and then pour the cheese mixture over the berries.

Bake @ 350º for 20-25 minutes for a single recipe or 40-45 for the doubled recipe. It’s done when the center has a little jiggle but the sides are set. Over baking it won’t hurt it.

Williams-Sonoma sells the tin quiche pans with removable bottoms for under $10. They are 9” or so in diameter and 4” deep. Don’t buy non-stick or the shallow tart pans. You want the deeper quiche pans with the shiny silver surface for a crisp crust and a deep filling. These are also the best pans for baking quiches.

The French Pantry - not mine, the local eatery...

The French pantry is well and above the best eatery in town. I don't call it a restaurant, because it is more of a bistro. Their food is heaven on a plate. They make their own breads and desserts, the latter of which I will deal with in-depth in a future entry. They do provide take out, but to call in your order was a major task fraught with frustration--they don't have a printed menu. All the items are printed on blackboards, which isn't helpful when you are on the phone. I solved this problem by photographing the blackboards and transcribing the items and prices here. I don't guarantee the items are always available. I am also sure the prices of items fluctuate, but here goes...

French Pantry 6301 Powers Ave 32217 (904) 730-8696

Bang Bang Shrimp Salad $10.00
Ceasar Salad $9.00
Cheeseburger & fries $8.50
Chicken Bruschetta $10.00
Chicken Ceasar Salad $9.00
Chicken Panini $9.50
Crab Cakes $10.00
Eggplant, Red Bell Pepper Goat Cheese Bruschetta $9.50
French Dip $8.50
Fried Green Tomatoe and Fried Shrimp Salad $6.00
Ham & Swiss on Rye $8.50
Hot Italian on a baguette $8.50
Hot Pastrami on Rye $8.50
Hot Roast beef with cheddar $8.50
House Salad w/ shrimp, portobello, goat cheese $10.00
Mediteranean Salad feta cheese and vinagrette $9.00
Mediteranean Salad w/ chicken $11.50
Muffalatta $8.50
Portobello Panini $8.50
Proscuitto Artichoke Mozzarella Bruschetta $9.50
Rare Roast Beef with Boursin, Red Pepper mayo $9.50
Raspberry Salad mixed greens, blue cheese, pecans, sundired cherries, Rasp Vinagrette $9.00
Raspberry Salad mixed greens, blue cheese w/chicken $8.00
Reuben $8.50
Shrimp artichoke and goat cheese Bruschetta $8.50
Shrimp Po Boy $8.50
Shrimp, Leek, Mozzarella Bruschetta $9.00
Sicilian Roast Beef Sandwich $8.50
Thai Chicken Salad $8.50
Tomato Bruschetta $8.50
Turkey & Provolone on a baguette $8.50
Turkey, Goat Cheese & Pesto $9.00
Turkey, Goat Cheese and Pesto $8.50
Turkey, Swiss, Guacamole, & bacon on 3 cheese bread $8.50
Foccaccia $5.00

Desserts
Farmer Cheese White Chocolate Blueberry tart
White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Tart
Strawberry Cake
Carrot Cake
Key Lime Pie
Brownies
Cheesecake w/ Strawberry
Cookies
Coconut Cake
Chocolate Cake w/ fudge icing

Artisan Bread? Yes, but Artisan Rolls too!

Keeping up with the rest of the baking world, I had to try Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I made several loaves of bread and then added rolls to the repertoire. I used the KAF hamburger bun pan, which worked great to keep these puppies round.

Miniatures: just the right bite

I've been intrigued by miniature food lately, Thanks to Francois Payard and others who have published some wonderful recipes in books like Bite Size. To the right is the Lamb burger on a Cumin roll with Harissa-yogurt sauce. The salt crystals and black sesame seeds were my addition, since the poor rolls looked so naked. At less than 1 ½" in diameter this little beauties packed a large flavor punch. I have a few left and stored them in the freezer. Soon they'll get their taste test for freezeability.

Well, with the cold weather - it was a Madeleine kind of evening. I had been on a Madeleine kick recently and had made numerous batches of large Madeleines. My favorite recipe of late is Dorie Greenspan's Earl Grey Tea madeleines. The glitch being I had only one pan and the 12 produced from that pan didn't last very long. Solution: buy a second pan. I debated and then broke down and headed to the closest WS after work. Alas, they only had the classic pans in non-stick, not very classic in my opinion and twice the price! Backup plan: buy two mini Madeleine pans. That worked, but I still wanted that elusive larger size, just not in non-stick. They graciously called the other store further down the road and hooray, they had the large pan. Drove to the next WS, and purchased the larger pan. Now I had 2 large and 2 minis, perfect for a perfect evening of Madeleine debauchery. I doubled the recipe and it made two full pans of minis and one pan of traditionals.

Madeleines for dinner, bedtime snack, breakfast, mid-morning snack and who knows.... Seriously, it allowed me to make enough that I could take them to work and share.

New Oatmeal Cookie Recipe

I tried a new oatmeal cookie recipe and it took me 3 times to get it right. It is from the new book Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts by Claire Clark. She is Thomas Keller's pastry chef, and he also appears as co-author. I always seem to have problems with cookies. I am beginning to think that the moisture in my flour at home differs considerably from the restaurant's. I had to add an extra 50 grams/ 2T of butter to this recipe so the cookies would hold together enough to get them on to the cookie sheets in some sort of cohesive ball. The first time I made the recipe, they just fell apart and no pinching (as described in the book) would hold them together.

I took the test versions of cookies to work and made the recipe available on the table next to them. Something happened which never crossed my pea brain. The recipe was in grams with the equivalent weights in ounces. One of my co-workers picked up a copy of the recipe and made it that night at home for her husband. The next day, she stopped by my office to ask me why the recipe didn't work for her. The cookies melted and baked into one big flat cookie mess, the opposite of my problems. They tasted good but she stated hers didn't look like mine. It was only after a few minutes of discussing her disaster, that I realized what she had done. She had made the cookies from the recipe thinking the ounces were volume measurements. She must have had a soupy mess of a cookie batter. I converted the recipe into American volume measurements for her. We will have to wait and see if she is successful in her second attempt.

I also found that the author's had not included any salt in this cookie recipe. Without salt the taste seemed pretty flat. I added 1½ tsp of table salt and that brightened up the flavor considerably. I even tried adding a couple of teaspoons each of honey and molasses. This seemed to help too, but in the final batch I left it out - next time I'll have to try adding those again ???

I have a few more recipes to try in this book and hope they are less problematic than these first cookies.

Foams and Whips

I am trying out new recipes to create hot and cold foams and whips (whipped cream). I am using a Liss bottle that takes nitrous oxide charges. I made a rum whip cream for a dinner party using one of my guest's favorite rums (Meyers) to flavor the whip cream. He loved it- "best whip cream he ever had." I had a really weird thing happen, when I ordered a pint bottle from Liss they sent me a bottle that wasn't theirs, at least we think it wasn't. It may have been a bad production model. As soon as we notified them - they fixed it. We are going to mail the weird bottle back and see if they can solve the mystery of its origin. It had too many threads and the Liss heads won't fit tightly enough to hold a charge.

For my Friends in far places who aren't cooks - these are called whip cream whippers. Can you pick out the bad bottle???

Kitchen Improvements on a Shoestring Part 1

I finally got a chance to take a photo of my new pot rack, formerly a bathroom towel rack

Christmas Cookies 2008

I bought myself some cookie cutters for Christmas. I had a blast with them. The cookies were several different recipes including gingerbread, white chocolate, Cream Cheese, and Almond Paste cookies. The gingerbread disappeared in minutes at work.

2008 Set Jay on Fire Camping Trip

This year was special for 3 reasons.
1. No Jay to burn
2. The opossum was back
3. A wild horse spent hours in our campsite.

This was our annual camping trip to Cumberland Island. We usually have Jay on board to harass but he didn't make it this year. We missed him a lot but still managed to have fun. First night out was a Tapas feast not to be missed. I was not impressed by the snails or the quails egg, but maybe it was the brand or preparation that was less than perfection. Second night out was Low Country Boil night. Last year, something stole our shrimp, we believe it was a coyote or bobcat. That thing was FAST! We searched the underbrush the next day. We didn't find a trace of the shrimp but we found a sketch book that had been stolen by a critter more than 6 months before. I say stolen, because no one would be in this underbrush without a desperate mission like finding lost shrimp. Anyway 2008s Low Country Boil will be remembered as the first where we had not only shrimp, but crab and lobster added to the mix. Last night out we had fried turkey. All this glorious food is an odoriferous insult to all those who come to the island to primitive camp with their PB&J or dehydrated foods.

D & F Birthday Cake

Well Dennis' and Frank's birthdays were recently. Apparently they are a year and a day or so apart and best friends. The are also bar-b-que buddies and have won a few contests for their efforts. What better for this event than a Pig cake. I wanted to mark off the various cuts, but it wasn't working with the edible markers. Here's the pink porker in all his glory. Pink fondant over chocolate cake with vanilla pastry creme filling.

Bike Trail Adventures

Tuna Texas Birthday Cake

My new boss' birthday was coming up and she is from Texas. I had a few bits of cake left over from a previous cake this week and found a suitable cake design in one of my cake books to copy. I didn't have time to make the thorns, which I think are the best feature of the original. The thorns would also hide my bad piping. This was chocolate cake with chocolate pastry cream filling. The icing is cream cheese buttercream piped on with a star tip (I definitely need more practice), It is sitting on a base of crumbled pecan sandies cookies to replicate real sand. The cake was delish!

2006-2008 Cakes Part Two

2006-2007 Cakes Part One

Cat meets Bread

I was teaching a friend to make bread the other day and her cat was intrigued.