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.

Dorm Food!

Clink on Photo for original photo source

I came across this post in 101 Cookbooks from a college student dreading his return to college and the land of no kitchens, which really struck a chord with me.

Why is it that students, most of whom would love to save money, have such limited access to a kitchen while they're at college?

No wonder the freshman 15 is a tradition. In my case it was a freshman 20. Which had a lot of contributing factors, but being forced into an exorbitant meal plan played into it . When I say forced, I mean forced. Every single freshman at my alma mater is required to sign up for the meal plan, which, if I remember correctly, provides for every single meal of the week. I don't think our food was particularly bad, and in the case of our famous brunches, was quite nice, really, with waffle makers and an omelet station and hot oatmeal, etc. But even with the best intentions, eating out is eating out even if it is cafeteria food. It's too calorific. And too difficult to regulate. It's too easy to have bacon and eggs and oatmeal with brown sugar every single morning, following by macaroni and cheese for lunch, and tacos, burritos, stir fry, etc. for dinner every night.

And without kitchens in the dorms, there were absolutely no other options.

Unless you acquired some illegal appliances. I stopped going to the cafeteria in my second semester. I decided instead to use my new toaster oven (not permitted in dorms, of course) and practically lived off cheese on toast. This was right after I had discovered Wallace and Gromit, and the way in which Wallace approaches the subject of cheese (Cheese, Gromit! he says with delight, waving his hands; this is my reaction to cheese as well. I love it as much as chocolate and bread, which is saying a lot).


I made cheese on toast (the English version of a grilled cheese) at almost every tea time. As I also had an in-room kettle (also illegal), this was quite frequently, and I don't mean tea time as in four o'clock, but tea time as in how frequently I made a cup of tea.

You see the problem here.

Seriously, though. What an odd relationship college fosters to food. We also had a snack bar that stayed open until one or two in the morning, so it was quite normal to meet up with friends at midnight and order mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, and a milkshake.

My sophomore year, I lived in a more independent dorm far away from the cafeteria, and we were also exempt from buying the all meals-all week meal ticket, so it was then that I started to learn how to cook. I bought one white enameled pan from the dollar store, brought a non-stick pan from home, and learned how to make soups, pasta, rice.

What was your school experience like? Did you have kitchens? Did you cook? What illegal appliances did you use?

What a strange experience college is, not least of which because of this food dilemma. And millions of kids are about to start school and struggle with their own newly-found nourishment independence. Good luck to them.

Summer Pizza

It's way too hot to have the oven on. But I can't go a whole summer without roasted, browned, or baked yumminess. With a fridge full of veggies and nothing to do with them, I broke the no-oven rule on a day when it was already 90 degrees, and decided to make pizza.

I made some pizza dough from scratch using the mixer and dough hook and taking advantage of the 80+ degree temperature of my kitchen, as the dough doubled in less than two hours. I pumped the oven up to 450°, enlisted the help of J to roll it out to a lovely thin disc, and we topped it with olive oil, salt and pepper, sliced zucchini, asparagus, and feta. Much as I love tomatoes and cheese, the afore-mentioned heat makes this light, "white" pizza much more appealing.

After 45 minutes or so in the oven, with the temperature in the kitchen overwhelmingly stifling, the pizza came out. It was a perfect opportunity to use up what remained of a recent batch of pesto. A delicious finishing touch.

Caneles - Take 1 - Part 1

I try not to be a spur-of-the-moment kitchen items impulse buyer because I would end up with a kitchen full of things like this:


Isn't it sleek and pretty? But I do not drink espresso unless I am in a place where the locals drink it like water.

Or this?The pan is enameled, grooved, and square. Squarely groovy. Must have!

I also have a fondness for professional-grade food service items, which really should not be available to mere mortals like me. For example:

Who doesn't fantasize about owning her own ice cream shop? But really. My own cone holder? I can't indulge every kitchen item whim I have or else we would be living in an Aga Stove surrounded by footed cake platters.

But I recently discovered that reading blog postings, rather than recipes in a cookbook, has left me even more susceptible to the power of suggestion. Perhaps it is the sense that I am being individually communicated with rather than taught something in the pedantic (but useful) fashion of cookbooks.

When I read this post on making caneles, a French regional specialty that I had only had twice before in my life - once at Boulangerie, and once at the Iron Chef event, I thought, "I HAVE to try that!"

And moments later, I was on Amazon.com debating the virtues of copper Mauviel molds:
(beautiful! delicate! idiosyncratically grooved! (I seem to have an extra weakness for grooves), but $20 each and I would need to buy LOTS of them) versus a silicone mold, which comes all of a piece with eight molds and is only $20 for the whole thing:

So what if I can make only one thing in it for the rest of my life? It's a pretty cool one thing, like with my waffle pan.

I ordered it. My first silicone bakeware (apart from my SilPat). Once the weekend came, I was all set to go.

More to come...

Buttery Tomatoes and Feta

Maybe I should just change the name of my blog to "Tomatoes and Pasta" but, well, they are delicious together. And this is a lovely easy way to incorporate the ripe tomatoes of summer into a tomatoey pasta dish without it turning into the heaviness of full-on winter comfort food. Yes, butter sounds heavy, but a pat of butter mixed with a splash of oil will do the trick.

Saute the tomatoes until they've reduced in size and gone soft and their juices have mingled with the butter and oil.

Salt to taste. Crumble feta into the warm tomatoes, toss with cooked pasta and top with cilantro.