Sweet Biscuits

This is not a biscuit. But it goes well with biscuits.

Short & sweet says it all!

Sweet Fruit Biscuits:

2 cups Flour

4 tsp Baking Powder

3/4 tsp Fine Salt

1/3 cup Sugar + extra for tops

6oz Sweet Butter(cold & cut into bits)

1 cup Cream+ extra for top

1/2 cup Fruit

• Preheat oven to 350 F.
• Mix together dries (and dried fruit if using).
• Cut in butter.
• Add cream, do not over mix.
• Add fruit, if dried, mix with dries, if fresh or frozen, toss it in last.
• Pat into square on a floured worktable, about 1/2 inch high.
• Cut into squares - you can freeze some on a sheet pan at this point (once frozen you can toss them into a zip bag and back in the freezer).
• To bake, brush with cream, sprinkle with sugar (fun sugar if you have) and bake until golden.

copyright, Modern Tea. Chef credit to Gabriell Rickard.

old cookbooks

The book automatically opens to page 261. Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts, 1974, purchased brand new, way back then. It went on a journey from my parents' kitchen in San Francisco to New Orleans, where it helped me make desserts for 300 people every week at a church across the street from where we lived on St. Charles near (believe it or not) Desire Street. It was 1983 and I didn't quite know that I was magically pregnant with my daughter.

Now, 26 years later we pull this book out for baking with almost 50 inner city teens who have nothing better to do in the Fillmore district. We are working up to selling them at the Farmer's Market this Saturday. They are actually spongecakes, not the true, brown butter madeleines made famous by Proust, but they are easy, you get to make that very fun fluffy egg spongy batter, and people still like them. We'll let the students choose which madeleine recipe will be the one we use.

It is amazing how life carries with it a chorus, repeating, echoing, reassuring in its familiarity. It can be that parachute pack as I jump out into a new adventure everyday.

Apricot Cros-tada!

Before we left for vacation, Greg & I pulled out Julia Child's cookbook, Baking with Julia, eager to bake with the season's first apricots. This is a great baking book, everything I've tried is friendly, accessible, creative and tasty.

Our experiment this time took her raspberry-fig crostata recipe into more of a south sea island experience, substituting unrefined coconut oil for the butter in the flavorful sesame-almond crust and filling it with a combination of apricots & apricot jam. You'll see my lattice is a "sun-ray" lattice - I chose to use a 12 inch tart pan (because I had so much fruit) and didn't want to weave an entire lattice over it. More fruit per bite, too.

Apricots so far have not been very flavorful due to the timing of our rains this year, but the small Blenheim's I've tasted this week have been delicious! It reminded me of this earlier attempt.

Here is the crust recipe...

Sesame Almond Dough

(enough for a 9 inch lattice topped tart)

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 cup blanched almonds or almond meal, lightly toasted & cooled

1/2 cup sesame seeds, lightly toasted & cooled

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups all purpose flour (whole wheat is ok too)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp grated lemon zest

8 ounces cold unrefined coconut oil

Optional:

1 egg & 1 teaspoon water for egg wash

sugar(fancy sugar) for sprinkling on the crust before baking

a) whisk eggs & vanilla extract together and set aside

b)process almonds, sesamed seeds & a few Tablespoons sugar until all is fine, but not oily or pasty.

c)turn the almond mixture into the bowl of a mixer and add the remaining sugar, flour, cinnamon, salt & zest. Mix on low to combine ingredients.

d)keeping mixer on low, add the coconut oil and mix until it resembles fine crumbs, but it is ok if there are still bits of coconut oil peeking out. Add the egg mixture and mix only until dough is uniformly moist and forms curds about 15 seconds.

e) turn mixture out onto a smooth work surface, knead lightly to bring it all together and wrap and refrigerate while you assemble the filling (can stay in the fridge up to 2 days ahead).

Filling wise, I used 2/3 apricots and 1/3 apricot jam - you will want the consitency to be thick. Even though the crust is pretty sturdy, no need for things to juice out. You can also add a tablespoon or two of flour for other juicier fruit (like berries). Make sure you like the flavor and add lemon juice, cinnamon or nutmeg as enhancements.

Back to the crust, time to roll things out.

The crust here is more cookie-like than pie, but that means you can

forgive yourself when rolling it out and press it into the pan.

See? Don't worry, it will be aok.

Just roll it out as best you can and press it into the corners. For the sun ray top, reroll your dough onto wax paper, slice it into strips and pop it into the fridge for a bit if it is too soft to handle.

Or you can roll out the dough and use various cookie cutters for decorative shapes on top.

Now it is just a matter of filling the tart, topping it with your crust decorations. You can refrigerate here for another 1/2 hour if the dough seems very soft (it will bake better) but we just brushed ours with the egg wash, sprinkled it with sugar and put it into a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes.

Next time, I'm going to see if I can make fig or jam bars (not rolled newtons) using this crust.

traveling along

(part of Seurrat's famous painting in Chicago)

We are on the move again, getting ready to drive back after our last day in New York.  We are doing everything on this trip, from train travel, to swanky stays, proudly served train food to 6 course tasting menues to massive amounts of home cooked Hernandez enchiladas.  Tomorrow we start our road trip back, a whole new leg of the trip...more to follow!

food inc. the movie

(click on this link if you'd like to see the 3 1/2 minute trailer for the movie.  If that doesn't work it can be found by searching for food movie inc. trailer in you tube)

Yes, the latest effort from Eric Schlosser et al is coming to a theatre near you.  It is what you think, looking at the state of the American food chain from the seed, meat, supermarket and labor angles. Eric Schlosser & Michael Pollan do much of the narration. Non-partisan, the lightest moments you will experience are in the trailer above.  If you haven't read The Omnivore's Dilemma, that might be a more humanistic and thoughtful approach to looking at the food situation.  This is more of an investigative reporting view from as many troubling angles as possible.  I thought I was pretty familiar with them, but this movie was able to point out a few more.

Overall, I would say this movie wants to overwhelm you into action, which is a tall order.  Overwhelm tends to numb and fuzz me out.  It is not a movie to see with your children.  But I had never seen inside an industrial chicken coop or meat processing plant (or a CAFO, which stands for "concentrated animal feeding operation) so I guess I have done that now.  I wish there had been more balance to the movie so that we could be left with a sense of purpose, not a sense of how completely messed up things are.  But perhaps it will speak to another layer of people that were not aware of this mulitfaceted insanity and effect at least one change in each of them.

I did leave with resounding appreciation for one of the panelists after the movie.  I mean all of the panelists were amazing I am sure in their own right, having already effected some measure of change in their area.  But Helge Hellberg, Executive Director of Marin Organic, didn't request that we get angry and sign a petition or vote against another legislative measure, he asked us how we were feeling.  He said that he felt pretty terrible and that he thought the movie was not appealing.  That bringing back the love and beauty is the way through this and if we each do one thing more towards this nurturing that we are helping.  He said it better than that, but it was timely and pleasantly shocking in its own right.  

The movie does touch on buying at a farmer's market or planting a garden (even a small one) as ways to help and has some enjoyable moments with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms (and some in your face moments too), but they are not enough of a breather for me.  Enjoy the trailer.

One more thing, as I was gliding down the escalator, contemplating how lucky we are (afterall, I'm eating a delicious local organic greek salad as I write this) I saw this poster in a drugstore window:

                                     

Don't know if it is for real, but it was a tongue in cheek reminder that we would rather create a fix it product than undo what we have done.

Breakfast of Champions

We didn't run the Bay to Breakers Sunday, but it was a gorgeous summer day with much to do.  More shelves for our storage area & making dessert for 40 well deserving teachers - homemade butterscotch pudding and torta di mandorla.  The above picture though, is of Alicia's whole wheat chocolate chip brownies - a great way to begin this day. While Alicia debates whether or not to share the recipe(Alicia, will you?? pretty please?), here is a link to another pastry chef-food blogger's recipe for the torta di mandorla, an almond olive oil cake that smells so fantastic, it must be good for you. 

Gina DePalma's discussion of almonds vs. chocolate as a gift of love is worth the read. Here is the link seperately under a combined foodie blog, Serious Eats:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2009/02/almond-olive-oil-cake-recipe-torta-di-mandorla-italian-desserts.html

Checking out the world today, the outfit on Muni on Mondays for job hunting is light blue button down shirt, yellow tie, some with, some without blazer. Still hopeful faces, still empty briefcases.

simple fruit salad

I had done my version of the Las Vegas Spin this past Saturday and was still not quite awake when presented with this great antidote to travel-lag by Greg on Sunday morning.

My version of the Las Vegas Spin is taking a crack of dawn flight into LV, spending the day at a tea convention seeing wonderful friends (what are we doing tasting tea in a place like this?), then flying back the same day, getting home shortly before midnight.  Long enough to smell like the invisible cigarette smoke that permeates every hotel there, but short enough to have enjoyed myself more than trashed myself.  I have to tell you, the smell of oranges and mint was a wonderful reminder of how lucky I was to not still be in Las Vegas.

Even though these oranges have been lurking in the fridge for the last month or so, they were still clearly flavorful and delicious.  Yes, if you are not sure what to do with those oranges, they seem to be one of the few fruits that can be stored in the fridge for a long time - they will keep their flavor and not mold away like they do on the counter.  Just plan ahead if you don't want to bite into ice cold fruit.

Putting this together is easy and Greg simply peeled the oranges (get those bioflavanoids!) instead of the fancier, messier supreme method ("soo-prem", french for what it sounds like, refers to the supreme cut, in this case, the way to cut oranges into membrane-less sections). Get those youngsters to help you hand peel- the results will impress them too.  

The magic is in assembling shortly before serving and using fresh mint - somehow it connects with the honey in a luscious way. I forget about fresh mint and what a great herb it is.  Actually, less or more of any of these ingredients should still yield accolades. And come to think of it, there are many other combinations of fruit you can use, so I've suggested some below. 

Simple Fruit Salad

4 small oranges/apricots/peaches

1 blood orange/1/2 cup strawberries/ 2 plums

1 Tablespoon honey

1 handful fresh mint leaves, washed & minced fine (chiffonade)

Peel or chop up the fruit, mince that mint and combine just before serving.  To make the honey more liquid, put the jar in a bowl of hot water for a few minutes and stir into thinner consistency before you pull some out.

I'll add a little detail on chiffonade soon but here is the short on it: 

• stack 5 or 6 of the leaves at a time
  
• fold the stack over as if you were turning tabacco into a cigarette (tighter gives you more control but remember the leaves are kinda tender too) 
  
• then slice crosswise as thinly as possible.  
  

I went a little overboard on the chiffonade, so we left out some of the mint when making the salad to make sure we weren't overdoing it - then forgot about it.  It dried in a few days on a plate and will make a delicious tisane.