Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Banner Banana Cream Pie & the Chuseok Holidays

This pie was all sweetness :)



A sweet cookie tart crust sealed with white chocolate (which kept the crust perrrfectly crispy for an entire day), sliced bananas, and pastry cream lightened with whipped cream (I definitely know how to make that now)…



And topped with more white chocolate curls.



Bananas and cream (and white chocolate!) – how can you go wrong?

I shared this with my new “colleagues.” We are all in the process of choosing where to be placed for the next two years. I don’t think I’ve ever mulled over a decision this long, this intensely. Well, that’s not true. I always mull over things forever and as if my life depended on it. I just always seem to make the wrong decision... Perhaps this time I should make a decision and then do the opposite. Will that set things right?

Anyway, it’s really nice to know that there are 14 other people in the exact same position as I me (well, maybe not exactly the same; I’d like to think they have better decision making skills). Nothing mitigates turmoil like knowing others are in it with you!


***


The Chuseok holidays were five days long this year, which seems to happen once in a blue moon. I thought about cooking up something special for the exceptionally long holiday. But that requires a lot of prior planning, and I’ve been quite busy of late with the decision-making and all. But then I couldn’t do nothing...

So, I decided to just catch up on my baking! I made a ton of crusts (all sorts), and a lot of puff pastry. Unfortunately, the puff pastry making experience was even worse than last time (butter actually melted off in layers). I am learning that crust-making skills are not transferable to puff pastry making. So crust-making skills, arduously acquired, are really only good for, well, crust-making. Argh! Luckily, the chicken stock I made for the upcoming chicken pot pies came out better :) I’ve had a chicken carcass (from my chicken-deboning phase) in my freezer since March and I finally put it to good use.



Chuseok dinner featured pesto, which I tried making for the first time. I love herbs, I love pesto – it was delicious!

On the down-side, my basil plant looks denuded now. Like really. A few months of basil-growing, gone in a few bites!



And I baked all my crust scraps into cookies. This freed up my freezer a lot!


All in all, I’d say it was a pretty productive break. 
If only I could make a decision about my placement…



Sunday, September 15, 2013

Shepherd’s Pie and Coconut Ice-Cream Pie


















A savory pie & a sweet pie.



Quite different. But equally challenging.               



Challenge number one: a leg of lamb.

I was mildly worried about how I would cut this up (or maybe I would have to boil it whole?). But I was so excited at finding lamb at all, in the Halal meat section of the foreign food market, that I summarily dismissed all worries.

Yes, it was a nightmare to work with. You have to flex the leg to find the joint, which reminds you that this is an actual leg, which makes you realize you’re working with lamb and not sheep. That’s sad:( It did not help that it was also nearly impossible to cut through the joints – with my skills and knife, anyway.



But somehow it was done.

And then it was topped with a mashed potato and homemade crouton “crust.” OK, the croutons were added because I didn’t make enough mashed potato to spread all the way to the edge, but they ended up giving the dish a nice rustic finish (not to mention some crunch).



Challenge number two: the coconut.

How to open a coconut (literal directions): poke holes in the eyes, drain the milk, crack open the coconut, and separate the meat. It’s really quite simple, if you leave out the fact that the shell was probably as hard as my skull. I thought about dropping it from my 11th story window, but thought that it would probably just dent the sidewalk.

How to actually open a coconut: check out Youtube.



Every layer had some form of coconut in it, from crust to topping :)

I even managed to find a street cocktail vendor willing to sell me just a couple of shots of coconut rum (to spike the ice-cream and whipped cream). He seemed very skeptical about my request, but I’m used to that by now!



And we had a feast.

I thought the shepherd’s pie was a nice British counterpart to the French boeuf bourguignon I made several months ago. Truth be told, I think I prefer the French dish because of its nuanced depth of flavor. But shepherd’s pie was definitely heartier, and even gave off a vague air of the holidays. Can’t really pinpoint which one, but something about the meat and mashed potatoes made it feel like I should be sharing it with a large group of people wearing funny matching sweaters… Ah, must be my quasi-Anglo-American (and somewhat imagined) upbringing!


And the coconut ice-cream pie reminded me of my sister. She’s loco, I mean coocoo for coconut! 



Saturday, September 14, 2013

Fresh Berry Tart

Simply classic.



“All” it called for was a basic cookie tart crust, pastry cream lightened with gelatin-stablized whipped cream, and a topping of fresh berries. It really doesn’t get much simpler than this, as pies go.

 Except I managed to mess up quite spectacularly. I was so afraid of the pastry cream curdling and clumping that I undercooked it and it never gelled. (*Explanation: Pastry cream, the lovely vanilla-specked cream found in French pastries, is thickened with corn starch. Corn starch is only activated at a full boil, but it becomes clumpy if you overcook or underwhisk.) And then I dumped in the whipped cream, hoping that it’d magically thicken it somewhat... What I ended up with was a huge bowl of watery, starchy, pretty much useless cream. Argh! I keep meaning to document my mess-ups as well as my happy successes. But somehow in the black-hole of disappointment that inevitably follows every catastrophe, I forget to reach for the camera. It’s too bad because they really are the more interesting moments – in retrospect.

I discarded the batch (I think clogged arteries are the price you pay for yumminess, but it’s not worth it for the crappy mess-ups), and started over. I briefly considered giving up, but the crust had already been baked and the blueberries bought, and they would just taste sooo much better with pastry cream…



It was heavenly, if I do say so myself :)

Who doesn’t like berries and cream on cookie crust? And you can even delude yourself into thinking that it’s good for you because blueberries are apparently the king of healthy fruit (according to this NYT article).

So was it worth the extra effort? Absolutely.



Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Peach Tarte Tatin and Cheese Straws

Summer has ended very abruptly; mornings and evenings have become quite chilly, almost overnight it seems. Ah, the cool breeze of fall! It’s like God’s gift for summer’s enduring patience.   

To celebrate the cool weather, I decided to tackle puff pastry again! This time I tried making “quick” puff pastry, where the butter is incorporated into the flour (much like pie crust) and then the dough itself is layered to achieve the flakiness. This is in contrast to the alternating butter and dough layers of “classic” puff pastry. The quick kind was quite good (what wouldn’t taste good with all that marvelous French butter?), though less flaky and more cookie-like. It is, however, magnitudes faster and easier to make. So, something very good requiring a ton of work versus something pretty good requiring much less effort… For the tired perfectionist, this will be the cause of many a kitchen dilemma!



These just may have been the last peaches of the season. Well, it certainly was the last peach pie of the project. Quite a glorious ending to the fruit, I might add. Huge chunks of sweet, syrup-drizzled peaches on pastry crust… Yum!



I also made cheese straws (flavored with paprika and parmesan) with the leftover pastry scraps. You can see my overgrown basil and mint pots in the background. I wish pastry grew on trees like my herbs…



I had a nice outdoor picnic with pie, pastry, coffee, and conversation. I think this is how I will fill my weekends for the time being (or perhaps indefinitely :). Also, this marks the halfway point of my project! I feel like I’ve made thousands of pies and I should be nearly done by now, but all this was just half and not quite a hundred. I don’t think I realized the immensity of the project when I started (does one ever?). But it’s been tremendous fun and a great source of energy (you know the kind where you spend energy to re-energize). And it does mean that I’ll have to step up my pace in the months ahead. So, here’s to even more baking!