I was watching an episode of “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home” in which they made some fancy French desserts. One of the recipes involved making pate a choux, a kind of all purpose batter that you can use to make cream puffs, eclairs, gougeres, and profiteroles (among other things). It actually didn’t look to hard, so I figured “Why not?”
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It’s been a long while since I posted about cooking, though I cook almost every single day. Of course, not everything I cook is blog-worthy, but occasionally I find something I really want to share. While watching an episode of Jaques Pepin’s More Fast Food My Way I saw him do something quite extraordinary with a few simple ingredients (that actually happens pretty often on the show, which is one of the reasons I love it so).
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My niece loves madeleine. My sister would go to Starbucks (evil!) and buy a bag of madeleines for her. So I thought why not make them myself. Luckily for Xmas I got a $50 gift card to Williams-Sonoma, so I used it to buy a madeleine pan. I had a choice of regular sized or baby sized. I went with the baby sized thinking that it would be cute for my niece to eat tiny madeleine cakes.
I googled for a recipe and TA DA! The 2nd link is a recipe from 101 Cookbooks. I read through the recipe and found it to be amazingly simple. After mixing everything and was reading to spoon the batter into the pan I realized the baby sized pan was too small. I made a big batch of batter and the pan couldn’t even hold a cup of batter. Anyways, I placed the pan into the preheated oven and waited for 9mins. Ding! After 9mins I took the pan out. Each cake was perfectly golden which was a good sign. I flipped all of them out to cool. I couldn’t wait for them to cool and ate 1. Oh it was soooo good. Warm, light, fluffy and the lemon zests were great. The outer edge was slight crispy. Hhhhmmmmm. I am tempted to buy the bigger sized pan.
I guess my friends and I are a few years late to the whole no-knead bread phenomenon. Don’t quite remember how this obsession started but before I knew it, I was eating homemade bread almost every night. Regular bread, bread stuffed with sausage and tomatoes, jalapeno and cheddar bread, and no-knead bread recipe turned into pizza dough. So after all that, I got itchin’ to make some of my own. But before I did, BOOM! Serious Eats posted a link to an easy focaccia bread recipe from The Paupered Chef. Focaccia bread is one of my favorite bread to eat and if I can make my own, I will make my own damit!
Results. Well it was definitely not difficult to make at all. My first try was good enough for me. Though mine was denser than the stuff you get from real bakeries and I totally forgot to brush a coat of olive oil on top and didn’t quite get the correct brown color on top.
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Despite growing up in what is nominally the South, I’ve never even considered making a pecan pie. Sure, I’ve eaten my fair share of it; in fact, the grandmother of one of my cousins makes the best pecan pies I’ve ever eaten (sometimes she adds chocolate chips to the pie, which is pretty mind-blowing). When I went to visit my parents recently, a friend of theirs (who happens to live in South Carolina) had given them a huge bag of pecans from the tree in her yard. My mom suggested making a pecan pie with them, and so we went for it.
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I’ve always been a little wary of baking. You usually need special ingredients and equipment, and you need to use precise measurements. This doesn’t match up with my normal use-whatever-I’ve-got style of cooking. And yet there’s also an allure to baking, especially the baking of bread. There’s something primal, almost magical, about creating what has been a staple food for centuries in your kitchen at home.
One of the reasons I had been thinking so much about making bread at home was Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (it requires a minimum of ingredients, equipment, and effort (which makes it perfect for me)), and I was planning to make it eventually. Then I saw an episode of “Jacques Pepin’s More Fast Food My Way” in which he made a version of no-knead bread with an interesting twist: you mix the dough in the pot that you cook it in, so there’s almost no clean-up necessary. On a side note, Jacques Pepin has quickly become one of my favorite food personalities, but that can wait for another post.
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