MADE: Flambéed Fruit

As far as I can tell, there are five* driving forces behind my current flambé obsession:

1. It's ridiculously easy.
2. It's delicious.
3. It's impressive to talk about the next day.
4. It involves lighting things on fire.
5. It's an excellent excuse to keep rum in the house at all times.

Also, peaches are in season,** and I'm harboring a rather un-secret obsession with the white peaches at the Market. It should come as no surprise, then, that two weeks or so ago, in a fit of sarcasm-turned-reality, Sambert and I facetiously suggested, hesitatingly agreed upon, and rapidly enacted a peach flambé. We have never looked back.

Ingredients 
3 tbsp butter 
3 tbsp white sugar
1/2 cup sliced stone fruits, peels still on (The flambé pictured uses two small peaches, a nectarine, and two adorable apricots. Variations on this theme are allowed--nay, encouraged!)
Rum, to taste (we've been using about a quarter cup, but a bit more might result in a more successful flame)
Ice cream, preferably vanilla or sweet cream

Equipment
Something with which to light a fire (lighter or gas flame, coupled with a long candle, wooden skewer, or just a long match)

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt the butter. Add the sugar and whisk or stir until smooth and combined. Then, add the sliced fruit, spreading it out evenly across the pan. Cook the fruit for one minute on one side, then flip it, and cook for 30 seconds more.

For the flaming part of the flambé, it helps to have two people. One person adds the rum, removing the pan from heat and swirling it to get the alcohol evenly distributed throughout. The other brings the lighter or long match to the alcohol vapors at the edge of the pan, igniting them and (ideally) the rest of the surface of the dish shortly thereafter. Ooh and Aah at the blue flame-yness of it all for a while, and then, once the alcohol vapor has burned itself off and the butter-sugar sauce has thickened slightly, serve the warm, gooey, boozey mess over ice cream. DEVOUR.  

EDIT: Apparently, we would have better flaming results if we warmed the rum in the microwave before adding it to the pan. Looks like we've got more flambéing to do, Sambert! To the...Cookmobile?

*This list has been accumulating a little bit like the Spanish Inquisition. But I'm pretty sure I've got all the reasons now. If not, I'll come in again.

**GAH. AND NICE RED UNIFORMS. 

MADE: Stuffed Chicken with Wine Sauce

This recipe begins (as all good recipes do) with a simple instruction: cook a pound of bacon.

Okay, okay fine. Maybe that's not what you do on Friday afternoon. You and I are different people.

Ingredients
2-3 strips bacon
1/2 large yellow onion, diced
2 oz Cremini mushrooms, coarsely chopped
2 tsp salt
2 tsp brown sugar
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1/2 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup red wine
2 chicken breasts
2 oz soft goat cheese

Place bacon in a large frying pan and cook over medium-high heat until just crisp. Remove and set aside on a paper towel, to siphon off the grease. Keep two tablespoons (or so) of the bacon grease in the frying pan. Turn the heat down to medium and add the onion and mushrooms to the pan. Add the salt, sugar, and a dash of pepper, and stir to fully coat. Then smooth out the onion-mushroom mixture evenly in the pan, and leave to caramelize. Don't stir the vegetables often, but when you notice them beginning to brown in the pan--just before they're starting to stick and burn--toss in a few tablespoons of water and stir vigorously for a few seconds, before spreading the mixture out evenly again. Do this a few times to deglaze the mixture and speed up the caramelizing process. The whole deal should take about 15 minutes or so, or until the onions have gone from white, to clear, to a caramel-y brown. While the vegetables are caramelizing, chop the strips of bacon into small, 1/4" sized pieces.

Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

As the caramelization process comes to a close, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. When butter is melted, whisk in flour, until a thin paste forms. Continue whisking for about two minutes, then stir in the chicken broth (I used a bouillon cube dissolved in warm water) and wine. Keep stirring until mixture thickens--about five minutes. Give the mixture a dash of pepper if you're into pepper. (I am.) Once the sauce has begun to thicken, stir in the mushroom and onion mixture. (It might be beneficial to switch from a whisk to a wooden spoon as your implement-of-attack, here.) Stir for another minute or so, then remove from heat.

Butterfly (i.e. slice slightly open to create a bigger, flatter surface) two chicken breasts. To one side of each butterfly seam, pipe a line/glob of goat cheese, then sprinkle each with half of the diced bacon. Then, roll the edges of the chicken breast around this filling and place, seam-down, into an appropriately-sized baking dish. Pour the sauce over the chicken breasts and place in the oven, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Then, (if at any point in the cooking process you've tasted the sauce, this will not need saying, but,) DEVOUR.

MADE: (Old-Fashioned?) Banana Cream Pie

I remember vividly the first time I watched a cream pie being made. To be fair, it was only a few years ago, in college. (I'm late to the cream pie party, alright?) My brilliant culinary friend decided to make some kind of cream pie, for some reason or other. (Really, college is just one big blur of stress-baking in my memory.) In the process of making the custard, she started whipping spoonfuls of hot cream and egg back and forth, whisking several concoctions together in a variety of bowls, seemingly against the laws of physics. Where did she get all those extra arms? And how did she know how to do this?

"It's called 'tempering,'" she said, in response to my goggling eyes and lolling jaw, "and you have to do it, or the eggs will cook. You'll have a banana quiche instead of a banana cream pie. Gross." And, with a wrinkle of her nose, she went back to her whisking, pouring, stirring.

I've never forgotten that moment, and I always replay it when I'm making anything custard-y. If the house is particularly empty, I occasionally say it out loud: "It's called 'tempering,' eggs. It's so you don't turn this pie into a banana breakfast scramble. Get with the program! Whiskwhiskwhisk!"

This is why I keep a recipe-book/blog, and not a vlog. (Slightly) reduced levels of personal embarrassment.

Banana Cream Pie

Crust 
(Many of my recipes say to start with a pre-baked crust. However, crusts annoy me, and I like crushing things, so I like to make my banana cream pies with graham cracker crusts instead.)
1 package (about 1.5-2 cups) graham cracker crumbs
6 tbsp butter, melted

Filling
3 cups whole milk or half and half
3/4 cups white sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
3 egg yolks, slightly beaten
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla
3-4 bananas, medium-ripe

For the crust:
Pour graham cracker crumbs into a 9" pie pan. Pour melted butter over crumbs and stir together until a crumbly paste forms. Press the mixture flat against the bottom and sides of the pie pan with a fork or spatula. Place in refrigerator to cool while preparing the filling.

For the filling:
Preheat oven to 350 F. In a medium saucepan, scald the milk over medium-high heat. In another medium/large saucepan, whisk together sugar, flour, and salt. Once milk has scalded, pour slowly into the dry mixture and stir to thoroughly combine. Return mixture to heat; cook until thickened, stirring constantly. Once mixture has thickened, cover and reduce heat to medium, stirring occasionally for another two minutes.

Tempering: Have the slightly-beaten egg yolks in their own bowl. After the custard mixture has thickened, begin adding small amounts of the hot milky mixture to the bowl of eggs, whisking thoroughly after each addition. Then, once you've incorporated enough of the custard so that the bright yellow egg yolks have been diluted to a paler pastel color and have gotten used to the higher heat, pour the smaller bowl of custard/egg yolk mixture into the larger saucepan (which you've been occasionally stirring all this time--hope you remembered to grow extra arms!). Cook for one minute longer, stirring constantly, then remove from heat. Blend in butter and vanilla.

Pull the crust out of the fridge and slice the bananas into the bottom. Pour the cooling custard over the bananas, then pop the whole thing into the oven for 12 minutes. Once out of the oven, chill for an hour. Then, top with extra banana slices, whipped cream, or a meringue that you ambitiously whipped up out of the leftover whites from the eggs. DEVOUR, thinking of science.

MADE: New Year's Eve Gougères (Pictures Coming Soon)

Sometimes, you decide to go to Times Square for New Years Eve. Sometimes, your friends tell you that you’re crazy, and bribe you away from such wild ideas with promises of dinner parties and copious alcohol.

For BlissandTell, the joyous 2011-2012 crossover was one of those times.

The resulting party was all that was promised: delicious food, hilarity with friends, and freely flowing libations. While nothing can top the power of pure, unadulterated FRIENDSHIP, I’d have to say that the highlights of this dinner party, culinary-wise, were the puffs of cheesy dough that have been popping up all over my internet life lately, yelling “BAKE ME. BAAAAAKE MEEEEE”: gougères.

Usually, I’m not so good at poufy pastry-type adventures; I simply don’t have the patience required for things like “setting” or “rising.” I tend to regard instructions like “refrigerate, covered, for one hour” as guidelines rather than rules, and while some recipes can withstand such cavalier treatment unscathed, puffy French pastries are not generally among them.

For me, that’s what’s great about gougères. They have all of my favorite parts of cooking—beer, cheese, stirring, just a little bit of alchemy—and none of those frustrating “patience” parts. Plus, they’re wacky good; at our party, we consumed all of them pretty quickly, and could easily have eaten a second batch. I’m officially stamping this recipe “Will Be Making Again Soon.”

Gougères

Makes about 2 dozen

Ingredients

8 tbsp butter

1/3 cup milk

2/3 cup beer (or water, if you’re SUPERLAME not into beer)

1 tsp salt

Scant 1 cup flour

4 large eggs, room temperature

1 ½ cup delicious cheese, shredded (I used sharp white cheddar this time around, but cheese experimentation is always encouraged here at BlissandTell)

2 tsp spices (I used a blend of black pepper and ground fennel, with a dash of chili powder and a dash of paprika)

Cooking Instructinos

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. In a medium saucepan, melt butter over medium high heat. Add beer, milk, and salt and bring just to a boil, then reduce the heat to about medium/medium-low. Add the flour and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring for a minute or two, then remove from heat and stir some more.

Let the mixture cool slightly (over the course of five minutes or so away from heat, with your stirring to help it cool evenly) so that the eggs don’t cook themselves when you add them. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring thoroughly after each addition until batter is fluffy and thoroughly combined.

In a small bowl, mix together the shredded cheese and the spices. Fold about a cup of the cheese-spices mixture into the dough until just combined. Then, immediately drop by heaping tablespoonfuls onto a baking sheet, leaving at least 1 ½ inches between each dough dollop. Sprinkle the remainder of the spiced cheese over the tops of the gougères -to-be.

Bake for five minutes at 425, then turn down the oven heat to 350 and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the gougères are a lovely golden hue.

Then—DEVOUR your way into a new year.

Happy 2012 from BlissandTell!

MADE: Bacon-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Dates

I usually talk a lot about the recipes that I include here before I get to the recipe itself. This time, though, I'm not going to do that. Look at the title of the post. I just looked at it and I'm salivating already.

Onwards to the recipe.

Bacon-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Dates

Ingredients
12 oz dates, pitted
8 oz soft goat cheese
1 lb bacon, sliced and uncooked

Cooking Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
First things first--fill dates with cheese! Smush the cheese into a plastic bag and snip off a small corner. Use the bag as a pastry bag and pipe the cheese into the dates, being as generous or as stingy as you'd like.

Second--wrap the dates in bacon. Cut each bacon strip in half, and thoroughly wrap the date, as though your'e giving it a little bacon-y sweater. The bacon will shrink as it cooks, so make sure you've provided enough bacon-overlap so that this shrinkage won't unwrap your dates.
When you've done these two steps--Congrats! You're done! Pop them in the oven for twenty minutes, until they're sizzly and delightful. Then--you know what to do--DEVOUR.

Variants: These can be made with turkey bacon (the ones in the pictures are made with turkey bacon), or with a different kind of cheese. I'd like to experiment with a ricotta/gorgonzola mixture next time around. Also, if you're using turkey bacon, don't bother making the strips terribly long--they won't shrink very much at all while cooking, so you can basically just use enough to wrap fully around each date.

Upcoming: Produce Basket Week!

Hello there, food blog. Long time, no see.

Today, PresentPaula got a present from PastPaula, who ordered a coupon-funded produce box delivery several weeks ago. In a turn of events surprising to neither PresentPaula nor PastPaula, MovingThroughTimePaula completely forgot about this order, and is now pleasantly thrilled to have found a box full of veggies (and a bit of fruit!) on her doorstep.

Some of the contents include:

• A grapefruit AS BIG AS MY HEAD. Okay, that's hyperbole, but it is the biggest grapefruit I've ever possessed. Breakfast tomorrow is going to be EPIC.
• Several kiwis. (Kiwi? Kiwii? Kiwis?)
• Something resembling a squash with a sticker proclaiming it "Delicata". I do not know if this is its name or a catchy adjective describing its flavor. 
• BEETS.
• A large bulb of fennel.

The haul.

I'm incredibly excited about this stash, but I have no idea what to do with some of it (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FENNEL). Here are my tentative plans for the week:

• Curry with radishes, tomatoes, cauliflower, and sweet potatoes
• Squash soup, with a caramelized apple and onion drizzle.
• Something involving fennel? (Meredith suggests fennel, radish, and grapefruit salad. Hmmm...)
• BEETS I WILL EAT YOU NOW.
• Roasted tomato soup, a la smittenkitchen.

I'll post pictures and recipes if I do anything noteworthy! For now, I'm just roasting the beets, chopping them, tossing them with some sea salt and nutmeg, and eating them.

BEETS. IMMUNNAEATCHOO.

MADE: Quinoa-Stuffed Tomatoes

Well hey there, cats and kittens. It's been a while.

I could give you excuses for why I've been gone so long. It's not that I haven't been making food, because I have. It's not even because I haven't been taking pictures of my food, because I've been doing some of that, too. It's CERTAINLY not because I have been away from the internet for any amount of time. Don't be crazy.

Things I can potentially use as excuses:

• I moved from one house to another house.
• I battled a dragon.
• I accidentally found myself working two jobs this summer.
• I spent the month of July doing a meditation-based hiking tour of Mount Ranier while blindfolded.
• I got a pair of mittens stuck on my hands and couldn't type.

Okay, so I only have two excuses, and they're not terribly good ones. Sorry.
I do have a recipe success, though! Unfortunately, I don't have pictures to go with it, at the moment. However, I'm planning to re-make this tasty dish when I head to the family homestead in a few weeks, so hopefully I'll take pictures then and upload later. It'll be like they were here all along...

EDIT: PICTURES

CHOMP

So these tomatoes.

(First, a detour.) Some people reading this may know a guy who used to sit at my house table as part of something informally called "The Square." The Square was a group of three guys known for entrapping anyone foolhardy enough to sit in the fourth seat at the table (thus, Completing The Square) in thick and twisty philosophical discussion. At one point, I may have completed The Square, or I may simply have been in firing range, because I got into a conversation about human awareness, desires, and consciousness. Specifically, degrees of want. So, "I want ice cream" is a first-degree want. But "I want to NOT want ice cream, because I'm on a diet" is a second-degree want, because the want-er is aware of one level of desire, and is exercising a different level of conscious control, confounding the first-degree desire because of the perceived superior importance of the second-degree desire.

So basically, how I feel about tomatoes.

That's what I told The Square. That I have a number of second-degree desires regarding food. I want to like tomatoes. I want to enjoy watermelon. I want to reap the social benefits that go with the eating of these foods--the connotations of summer and picnics and sunshine and the camaraderie of the universal brotherhood of people-who-think-that-fresh-from-the-garden-tomatoes-are-delicious. To that end, I try out these foods--that otherwise set me gagging--once every couple of years, in the wistful hope that maybe, maybe my tastebuds will have mutated just a teensy bit, and I will finally be able to take part in the summer that is watermelon and tomatoes and red checkered picnic blankets.

After I gave this answer, The Square chatted a bit about how social pressures could be an incitement to second-degree desires, and then probably went on to talk about Plato and the mutability of market forces. I don't remember. But now I can't think about any of those second-degree want foods--tomatoes, watermelon, beer, goat cheese--without thinking about that conversation. (It always comes back to meals at the house table, doesn't it? Call me, UChicago. I'm ready for my alumna soundbite.)

This meandering preface is simply to say that I've achieved one of these second-degree wants. I've developed a taste for tomatoes.


Anyone who has known me for several years or more, now's your chance to freak out.

...
...
...

And done. Freakout over. Pull yourself together. Geez. How do you think I feel? Anyway, recipe. It's full of all the summery things I could find in my fridge, plus some that I found at the farmer's market. The quinoa stuffing was intended to draw the moisture out of the tomatoes, which it did admirably. It also had the added benefit of crisping on top, much like a crust of bread crumbs would have done. The dual-natured quinoa--crispy on top, soft and tender inside--was my favorite surprise of the recipe. Apart from how delicious it was, of course.

Quinoa-Stuffed Tomatoes
(makes 2 servings)

3 medium tomatoes, halved--I used roma tomatoes, sliced lengthwise, to give me a bit of a long boat shape
1/3 cup quinoa
2/3 cup water
1 slice bacon
1 tbsp crumbled feta cheese
1/2 tsp brown sugar
Pinch nutmeg
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tbsp pesto
2 oz goat cheese
Olive oil, for drizzling

Preheat oven to 325 F.
Cut/scoop out the innards of the tomato halves. I did this simply using a knife dragged around the line between rind and pulpy, seedy flesh. Remove innards to cutting board and dice.

Empty tomatoes, waiting to be filled with delicious.

In small saucepan, heat water on medium-high to just boiling. Add quinoa and lower heat to a simmer. Toss in the diced tomato guts and juice. Keep heat on for one minute more, stirring to make sure all the quinoa is evenly cooking, and then cover, turning off heat entirely.

Chop the strip of bacon into nice 1/4 inch chunks. Once quinoa seems sufficiently bathed in steam and tomato juices (quinoa should be translucent, instead of bright white, with some stem showing), add the chopped bacon and feta. Stir, grinding and sprinkling in the sugar and spices. Set aside briefly.

Now, it's time to fill those tomatoes! Hooray! Put the tomato hulls on a baking sheet or in a shallow baking pan. Line each one with a spoonful of pesto.

Then add a heaping spoonful of the quinoa/bacon/feta/allofPaula'sfavoritethings mixture to each. It's fine if it overflows a bit--the tomatoes will probably get a bit collapse-y anyway. Then, top each tomato with a slice of goat cheese, smushed out to roughly cover the stuffing. (The coverage isn't important--don't worry.)

Drizzle the whole thing with olive oil and place in the oven for 20 minutes, or until the tomatoes start to get collapse-y and the topping gets nice and brown and crispy. Then, while pondering the social forces which led me to this recipe, DEVOUR.

The tomatoes that live on my back porch.
Sometimes I eat them. Right off the vine.
You don't know me.