Curried Butternut Squash with Red Chard

It's almost the end of the semester! Final projects and final exams are everywhere sucking up time like giant time vacuums! I don't even know what a time vacuum is, but maybe it removes all the trash in your time, like browsing the internet, watching TV shows and the like? With final project time vacuums, none that useless stuff is left! Success! Or something like that.

Anyways, you know what the time vacuums have not sucked away? Time spent making food. I made some pretty darn delicious food yesterday. At some point in the past month, I saw mini butternut squashes at Safeway (they call it Vons here, but really it's Safeway), so I jumped on the opportunity to buy squash that I wouldn't have to spend multiple weeks eating. This week, I finally got around to cooking it. I first roasted the squash Sunday night:

Roasted squash! I couldn't help but try a spoonful

On Tuesday night, I actually got around to preparing the squash for consumption. Since my friend had some extra coconut milk, I decided to prepare it curry-style with ginger, cumin, turmeric, curry powder, cardamom, and a good spoonful of Thai red curry paste. I heated some oil in a pan and fried the spices to "release the aromas" (as they always say on America's Test Kitchen).

I sliced up the squash, and added it to the spices. I let it cook for a while.

And then added about a quarter cup of coconut milk and mushed up some of the squash pieces. 

At SafeVons, I also found a beautiful bunch of red chard, so I decided to try it out by simply sautéing it in a bit of oil.

Yay balanced meals! The squash was super delicious, with the ginger, curry, and cardamom being the strongest flavors. The chard was chard-like, which I liked.  Also, I can make rice now....

Chocolate Cream Dacquoise

Hey ya'll, it's me again, and I have a Chocolate Cream Dacquoise to present to you: [hazelnut meringue, chocolate cream, whipped cream]x3 + [hazelnut meringue, whipped cream, caramelized hazelnuts].
 This dessert is a bit more complicated than my usual adventures, but it was christmas, which in my family means "time to eat lots of food", so I figured it would be a good time to try something fancy. Of course, as I was making it, I was convinced the meringues had burnt and that the pudding had curdled (it had, twice), but it turns out it is very difficult to make hazelnuts, cream, and chocolate taste bad.

Because this dessert is a pretty big undertaking, I'm too lazy to type up the recipe, so instead I'll entertain you with my research about dessert naming.

Dacquoise: a female inhabitant of the city of Dax, or a dessert made of layers of hazelnut or almond meringue filled with buttercream.

The red flag is Dax.

According to en.wikipedia.org, a marjolaine is a dacquoise with chocolate buttercream. However, fr.wikipedia.org makes no mention of marjolaine. In fact, searching for marjolaine in Google.fr only brings up marjoram, pictures of women named Marjolaine, and websites in English gushing about the supposedly French dessert of marjolaine. However, when I searched for "marjolaine dacquoise" in google.fr and insist on only pages in French, I do get a couple hits for French blogs making marjolaine.

Conclusions: Marjolaine is much more widely used to refer to a chocolate Dacquoise in English than in French. The small amount of usage in French is possibly due to feedback from English (French is currently borrowing a lot of words from English).


General gist of recipe (from Trish Deseine's I want Chocolate):

2 cups of hazelnuts

stirred into 12 beaten egg whites and 3/2 cups of sugar to make the meringue. This mixture is formed into 4 disks and baked for an hour at 275F.

For the chocolate cream, I beat 6 egg yolks, 1/4 cup sugar, and 2 tbsp flour until pale and frothy. I heated up 3/2 cup cream and 3/2 cup milk until almost boiling, and poured it into the egg yolks.

The yolk-cream was put back in the pan and brought to a boil (this is where the curdling happened, whoops!). Once the cream thickened, I added 4oz dark chocolate and stirred well. I cooled the cream in the refrigerator.

Now the layering! Meringue, chocolate cream,

whipped cream, grated dark chocolate. 

I made some caramel, mixed in some roasted hazelnuts, and crumbled it all on top.

The chocolate cream is kind of oozing everywhere. 

Manresa (Los Gatos, CA)

To celebrate my brother's 21st birthday (only a month in advance), my family went to dinner at Manresa. Usually we steer away from tasting menus, but my father's colleague strongly recommended it to us. Thus, we embarked on a gastronomical adventure through the Santa Cruz mountains.
The tasting menu consisted of 7 savory courses and 2 desserts, with little extras at the beginning and the end. We did not know ahead of time what each course would be.

The first amuse-bouche was olive madeleines and cubes of red bell pepper paste. The pepper paste was sweet but slightly spicy.

The second little appetizer looked like little donuts, but we were told to eat them in one bite. Each ball was filled with liquid foie gras and chestnut which gushed into the mouth when eaten.

The last of the pre-courses was the Arpège egg, a dish borrowed from the Parisian restaurant L'Arpège. The egg was opened at the top and filled with a light mousse. At the bottom rested the partially cooked yolk with sherry vinegar and spices.

For the first actual course, we were served a cold dish of razor clams, geoduck clams and sprouted lentils covered with jellied chicken broth. The grassy flavor of the sprouted lentils made an interesting contrast with the sweet clams and the savory broth.

Next came the raw scallops with onions, seaweed, avocado, and broccoli tempera. I liked the delicate flavor of this dish. The combination of the sweet scallops and creamy avocado was very good.

The next course was introduced as "A walk through the vegetable garden," and it lived up to its name. On our plates was a salad of colorful and flavorful leaves, flowers, and roots tied together with a savory foam. Hidden beneath the leaves I found various sauces, some citrusy, others vinegary. What was interesting about this dish was that each mouthful tasted different from the last one because the leaves and flowers had their own distinctive flavors.

The "Midwinter Tidepool" was our favorite dish. In our bowls was a warm broth that burst with flavor. It was briny like seawater but was also savory and sweet. In the broth I found clams, sea urchin, enoki mushrooms, seaweed, and even a thin slice of foie gras. It was delicious.

Compared to the previous dish, the partially cooked trout was disappointing. The trout seemed to have been shredded and reconstituted and was served with fresh fennel, caramelized fennel, and honey.

After this dip in quality the flavor came back up. The next dish was goat confit (prepared in the same way as duck confit) with compressed persimmon. The salty-sweet worked very well, and the portion was perfect.

Next came the last savory dish: venison cooked "sous vide" (in a vacuum) with quince purée and a chanterelle mushroom. The venison was tender but appropriately strong tasting. The quince purée was surprisingly starchy rather than sweet.

The first dessert was citrus tapioca with yuzu sherbert and toffee pieces topped with a light citrusy cream. It was light and tasty.

The second dessert was strange but good. We were served mushroom ice cream with maple syrup and chips with cinnamon and a churro. The mushroom ice cream with the maple syrup reminded me of bacon with maple syrup. 

As a link back to the beginning of the meal, the servers brought us chocolate madeleine with strawberry paste.

And finally, because it was my brother's birthday (kinda), we got an extra dessert to share: a lemon cake!

Manresa was all in all, a wonderful experience.

Tobe's Candy-Cane Cookies

In my last post I mentioned my suitemate Tobe's delicious candy cane cookies, and she has kindly agreed to let me post her recipe on this blog. As I wrote earlier, my roommate Sophia and I made 2 batches of these cookies because we could not resist the warm combination of the soft almond cookies and the crunchy-sweet peppermint topping.

Tobe's Candy-Cane Cookies

Ingredients:
    Dough:

• 1 C soft shortening 
• 1 C powdered sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 C flour
• 1 tsp salt 

    Topping:

• 1/2 candycanes, crushed
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

Procedure:

1. Pre-heat oven to 375F.
2. Mix the first 5 ingredients together by hand. (I used a whisk)
3. Add the flour and salt. (I used a spoon at first and then switched to using my fingers)
4. Divide the dough into as many parts as you want colors and knead in food coloring until the desired color is achieved. 
5. To make candy cane shape: Roll 1 tsp of each color in to a strip about 4" long.  Place strips together side by side and twist together. Curve tops down for candy cane effect.
6. To make thumbprint shape (for people who fail at making candy canes like me): take 2 tsp of dough, roll it into a sphere, and press down in the middle with your thumb. (This shape is good for holding a lot of topping)
7. Place on ungreased cookie sheets and bake at 375F for 9 minutes.
8. Combine the crushed candy-canes and the sugar in a bowl.
9. Remove cookies from baking sheet while warm, place on paper towels and sprinkle with topping.

Holiday Baking!

Finals are over! And it turns that finals week was the week where I had the most free time. What did I do with this frightening abundance of free time? I baked cookies! I think I baked 8 times in 8 days. Not only cookies though.
Saturday afternoon, my friend Nicole wanted to make shortbread cookies for her professors, so I volunteered to help out. We used this joy of baking recipe and shaped some of the cookies as stars and hearts and other cookies shaped as hippos and elephants. The fizzix professors have a slight obsession with rhinos, so we figured hippos would be close enough. Unfortunately the hippos ran away before I could photograph them.

 

I tried filling shortbread cookie dough with nuts and brown sugar! Pecans, almonds, and cashews all worked well.

That same day, my dorm was having a potluck, so my roommate, Sophia, and I made Sophia's favorite apple crumble recipe. The apples were simply sprinkled with sugar and lemon juice. The topping was a combination of butter, oatmeal, brown sugar, and flour. Usually she uses pecans, but almonds were cheaper.

 

We brought the crumble to the potluck, but it turned out that only 2 people had brought savory foods, so we had a lot of desserts: crumble, apple pie, sesame balls, cookies...

The next day I helped Sophia make the biscotti she makes every year for Christmas. These are delicious almond-anis-raisin biscotti (I liked them even though I usually don't really like anis or raisins.)

 

 The last batch of cookies we made was Tobe's (our suitemate) Candy Cane cookies. Sophia and I agree that these are the best cookies we have ever had. The dough is flavored with almond extract and the cookies are sprinkled with crushed candy canes and sugar. Tobe's instructions said to color some of the dough red and twirl the different colors together to make candy canes, but neither of s was able to do it. Instead, we made trees and mushrooms and flowers, but we discovered that the simple thumbprint cookie was the best at holding large quantities of the candy cane sugar.

Poached Pears with Vanilla and Ginger

Well, I just finished my chemistry final, and I wasn't doing any productive (unless playing with mini magnets counts as productive) so I figured I should blog. I was on fall break this weekend so I went home and my dad and I made some poached pears for a dessert at our friends' house. Neither of us had ever made poached pears before but I decided that we should not poach the pears in red wine because in my opinion that would make them untasty. If I am making a dessert, I want to like my dessert. So we settled on a vanilla-ginger syrup with real vanilla beans and fresh ginger.

When we went to the grocery store we discovered that the price of vanilla beansis inversely correlated to the quantity you buy: A bottle with 1 vanilla bean cost $10, 2 vanilla beans cost $8, and 3 beans cost $7. I can only imagine how cheap 20 vanilla beans would be.

Anyways, my dad cut the pears into quarters while I heated 1.25L of water with 250g sugar, 2 tblsp chopped ginger, and half a vanilla bean.

To extract maximum flavor from the vanilla bean I sliced it lengthwise and used a knife to scrape out all the black seeds where the flavor is stored. I put the seeds into the water and I stuck the pods in for good measure.

The seeds are on the tip of the knife

So, I am sure that you are all wondering: What makes vanilla taste like vanilla? Well, the vanilla pod is the fruit of a genus of orchid (a genus being a group of species) that must be either hand pollinated or pollinated by one specific species of Mexican bee. The main flavor compound in vanilla is the vanillin molecule:

Vanillin

and artificial vanilla flavor is basically just vanillin dissolved in water and alcohol. McCormick's "Premium Imitation Vanilla" contains: "WATER, ALCOHOL (26%), NATURAL FLAVORINGS (INCLUDING EXTRACTIVES OF COCOA
AND EXTRACTIVES OF TEA), VANILLIN AND OTHER
ARTIFICIAL FLAVORINGS, CORN SYRUP, AND CARAMEL COLOR." (http://www.mccormick.com/).
So what makes natural vanilla different? Well, vanilla beans also contain lots of other compounds that add more dimension to the vanilla flavor. Natural vanilla extract is made by macerating vanilla beans in ethanol (alcohol) to extract the flavors.

Anyways, back to poached pears. After heating the water with the sugar, ginger, and vanilla, we added the pears to the liquid and let them simmer for 20 minutes, until the were soft. Then we took the pears out:

and boiled down the remaining liquid to form a syrup:

which we then poured back onto the pears (first removing the vanilla pods):

The pears went very well with a Basque butter cake our hosts served up for dessert because the cake soaked up the pear syrup on our plates.