Pastry. Still a mystery.

Well. I decided to make pastry from scratch again. I mean, how difficult can it be? It's just butter, salt, flour, and water in the blitzer. Sooo easy! Except...


...ARGH! That is what comes out of the food processor. That pile of floury-buttery crumbs. Your butter is supposed to be cold, your water is supposed to be ice cold, all the better to coat specks of flour with butter, causing microscopic bubbles in the baking process which makes a pastry flaky...so maybe this pile of crumbs is par for the course.

But I still don't quite expect it. How is that ever supposed to come together?

The answer is by sheer force of will. And when you know what I made with this pie, you'll understand why the will was there.

I made a pecan bourbon pie. Yes, fall is here.

I used a Rosie's recipe for pecan bourbon fudge pie, and when I put it to a vote whether we wanted chocolate in there, J voted for pecan and bourbon alone.

This sucker had 1/4 cup of bourbon in it. In retrospect, without the chocolate to balance it out, this is a little too much - this pie tastes of booze. Terrible, I know.

But with a tweak here and a taste there, I think pecan bourbon pie has the potential to make it in to the holiday classics folder. Crispy crunchy nutty deliciousness.

Caneles - Take 1 - Part 2

It was a long weekend when I broached making the caneles, which is just as well as the recipe from Lucy's Kitchen Notebook calls for the batter to be left in the fridge for two days. Fermented, one might say. It's a wonderful vanilla-y eggy custard batter with milk, butter, eggs, flour, sugar, vanilla, and rum. Beautifully simple and pure ingredients (which reminds me of the recent branding push by Haagen Dazs to reduce their product to the pure and simple ingredients they use in their ice cream).


After two days, it had developed the spongy, bubbly surface. So far, so good.

Where I ran into trouble this first time around was in baking them. I followed the directions to a tee:

Heat your oven as hot as it will go for 10 minutes, place the cakes on a sheet in the hot oven, and reduce the heat to about 175C/300F, continuing to bake for 40-45 minutes. Turn out from the molds immediately while hot.

And after baking for the requisite 45 minutes, this is what I pulled out of the oven:


Hmm. I was suspicious immediately. I'm not sure what it looks like from your perspective, but I had filled these molds according to directions (2/3 for silicone molds) and there was no reason those little canele bums should have been poking out of the end like that, and looking so pale!

What had happened? Had they grown so big that they had expanded out of the mold? Were they gorgeously brown inside the mold?

I turned them over onto the baking sheet and out they plopped.


Literally. Can't you almost hear the plopping sound when you look at the sorry puds in the picture? Particularly the ones in the back that can't bare the pressure of being scrutinized and just wilt under my gaze.

Pale. Anemic. And teeny. They're not remotely the size, color, or exterior texture they're supposed to be. For some reason, these suckers steamed themselves out of the mold with a huge air bubble inside that popped their little butts over the top like that.

We did eat them, of course. You can't really go wrong with the above-mentioned ingredients. I also learned something which I hadn't realized when I had eaten them before. They are supposed to be a little custardy on the inside, not cakey at all. I was going on and on about how mushy they were on the inside, but J was pretty sure that was right, and then I read Pascal Rigo's take on caneles, and bingo. They're supposed to be dark and caramelized on the outside, eggy and soft on the inside.

At least I got that part right. And I still had a lot of batter left, continuing to ferment in the fridge...

Stay tuned.

Someonion Loves Me

Ginger Scallion Chicken in a Bowl

Now that I've been writing (and learning new recipes) for 3/4 of a year (whoot whoot!), I realize I return to many of the same sources. And worthy sauces, I mean sources, they are. If you're wondering why I return to Mark Bittman of the New York Times, you'll just have to check out his blog and see the eight million recipes he's written to see that this is a man who has an idea about everything you could possibly want to make.

There I was, faced with my usual mid-week quandary. Boneless skinless chicken breasts, and not a thing to do with them.

[Perhaps this is the time to make my little aside about the ubiquity of this ingredient here. I feel about chicken breast the same way that I feel about potatoes - they're really blah unless you do a whole lotta hoopla to them. Why are they such a standard go-to ingredient?]

I googled boneless skinless chicken breasts, and it was Bittman to the rescue again! This soy-ginger-scallion sauce is a doddle, and turns a drab ingredient into a fab one (I had to, I just had to...from drab to fab!).

He suggests steaming the chicken, but I used my handy-dandy George Foreman grill because I love the way it browns the surface of the chicken.