A French Dessert

I get to come and visit the Motherdear and other family members for a bit, and so last night we all got together and ate lots of lasagna and then I made a dessert for everyone that I learned about in France a few years ago. You may remember a previous post about pear and chocolate tarts, and having this dessert in France was what originally made me aware that pears and chocolate are really really good together. Here's what it looks like:

Pears and ice cream with chocolate sauce

You need a good quality vanilla ice cream, put pear slices on it and top it with chocolate sauce or just melted semi-sweet chocolate chips. If you use chocolate sauce it will stay pliable and will be easier to eat and you'll be able to taste the chocolate more. Plain melted chocolate will harden immediately on the ice cream and you won't get the full flavor effect because of the chocolate being so cold and hard, but it will still be pretty good. Sister-In-Law had her's with cinnamon instead of chocolate and said that was very good together too. It is nice to use fresh pears, but they should be very ripe and smooth and not hard and crunchy and gritty. These pears were a little bit hard and gritty. Little Brother suggested that we warm them up and Older Sister suggested that we cook them with brown sugar so that they would be soft and even more delicious. That got me thinking, you could probably sprinkle pear halves with sugar and maybe cinnamon and cook them on the grill and immediately serve them in this manner and that would be pretty heavenly. Here is all of us (except me) together eating and being silly. Good times.

enjoying each others company and dessert

There are a few interesting things to note in this picture. First: isn't that table nice? Little Brother (on the left) made it all by himself in woodshop class in high school. I want one too! And we are all in the house that he and his wife just bought - isn't that great? Second: there is a green package sitting by Motherdear, which used to contain seaweed. Perhaps someday I will tell you about the awesomeness of seaweed and something you can do with it so that people will eat it without being weirded out. Third: there is this girl sitting by Older Brother who was very nice and we all liked her very much and it was very cool to get to hang out with her. We even saw them holding hands, so maybe we'll get to see more of her in the future.

Cinnamon Brownies

Lovemuffin has made two batches of these fabulous cinnamon brownies from scratch, all by himself. We ate them really fast.  

8 AM, brownies are here

1 PM, brownies are pretty much gone

I don't know if it is okay to put up the recipe, because he got it from someone at work and I don't know if she wants it all over the internet for everyone in the whole world to see. But maybe we'll get permission to share it here. I will say this, if you want to make an approximate imitation, find the most rich decadent brownie recipe you can find and add several tablespoons of cinnamon to it, and then as soon as it comes out of the oven, pour some more decadent buttery cinnamon and cocoa filled frosting over it and let it cool and get nice and fudge-like. They find their way into your tummy quickly, so it's a good idea to have people to share them with. 

Happy New Year

I had this great idea that I was going to cook more and write more in this blog starting this year, but there are always  a lot of other things that I want to work on too. This skirt, for example, that should have only taken one day to finish, as well as some other sewing projects that I was able to complete in a timely manner.

The skirt that should have taken 1 day to finish.

And then my schedule changed and I thought I was going to have some more time to update, but then I had to go do this activity instead with Aunt and Friends, and that took up some time, not that I'm complaining or making excuses, oh no, just letting you know why I'm so slow with the updating of the weblog.

It really is a happy place!

"He's so tall!"

Best roller coaster ever!

What a wonderful day!

So here is a quick rundown of what has been going on with the food in my house. 

I got these marvelous cookbooks for Christmas from my wonderful family (thank you, family!), all of them are so pretty and shiny and useful. 

I cooked beets for the first time ever using a recipe from "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" with pistachios and garlic which was interesting. I'm not sure I like beets that much. I learned from "The French Laundry Cookbook" how to prepare pig's head and feet and sweetmeats in a very fancy way, but that's probably never going to happen in my house. I am going to have to modify the feeding of my sourdough to make it work with the recipes in "Breads from the La Brea Bakery," and it will be totally worth it, because those are some amazing recipes. That one and "The Bread Bible" are going to be so great to have in my house instead of having to get them from the library all the time, they are pretty great. 

I also acquired some kefir grains from Lovemuffin's Auntie, so I've done some interesting experiments, trying to make good kefir and almost but not quite succeeding. When I figure out a good procedure and ratio to make good thick kefir that doesn't taste like beer, you can be sure that I will post it here. Also, I think the kefir grains need a name, any ideas? 

I finally psyched myself up to go the the Whole Foods store that always intimidates me, but they have a nice bulk section and I bought some interesting grains and things, quinoa and amaranth and coconut flour and green lentils that I cannot find anywhere else. So when I do something awesome with those, you will be the first to know. 

This year I hope to be able to keep experimenting with food and keep writing about my successes and failures. I hope that you enjoy reading about this as much as I enjoy sharing it with you. Happy New Year!!

Pull-Aparts

Today, Christmas Eve, we are spending time with Pricklypear's family, watching movies, making weird food, and making our favorite -- pullaparts. We call them pull-aparts because they you pull them apart to eat them. Pretty clever name, eh? This is the only food tradition that we really have at Christmas and we eat them on Christmas morning. This year we ate them on Christmas Eve for dessert.

making the pull-aparts

Raw pull-aparts after rising for 30 minutes, see the cinnamon coating splitting?

There isn’t really a recipe. Motherdear always just used leftover bread dough of her whole wheat bread and dipped blobs of it in melted butter and cinnamon and sugar. I think the best ratio of cinnamon to sugar is 1:3, so 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to 1 tablespoon of sugar. The batch size we made today needed a cup and a half of sugar, which would need half a cup of cinnamon.

Baked pull-aparts, so yummy!!

This Christmas, I am very glad to be able to come see my family and eat fun food with them. I love them so much! Happy Holidays to everyone!

More on Persimmons

My attempt at persimmon jam was pretty unsuccessful. My one week's worth of experience with persimmons failed to prepare me for how much they would not act like other fruits that I have canned in the past. Here is what the jars looked like, and yes, I know I could turn them upside down to mix them together more, but I want you to see how little fruit there is compared to gelled sugar. Pretty much the whole bottom half is sugar/pectin.

Here are some things I learned from this experiment:

1) Use very very ripe persimmons---I used some that were quite firm still, but they should be mushy so that if the skin is punctured the innards want to come spilling out (what a description!) and you can easily peel and mash the innards with very little effort. If they aren't ripe enough the jam will not be juicy enough and you will have half of it be gelled sugar without any fruit to speak of in it, like mine. Also the flavor of the less ripe persimmons is quite delicate and cooks right away in the 5 or so minutes it takes to get the mixture cooked enough for the pectin to set up. This is really hard because for most fruits, if they are this ripe you throw them away because they are rotting. This is why it would be nice to have previous experience with persimmons, to know how they act at different stages of maturity.

2) Add a fair amount of something acidic-like lemon or lime juice, or even citric acid powder-because the persimmons themselves aren't acidic enough to preserve correctly without it. I used lime juice and a little zest, and at the end that was all I could taste in the jam. Next time I will do citric acid, I'll just have to figure out how much.

3) Start with one batch, don't commit to more than one until you have fine-tuned the recipe, or until I fine-tune it for you :)

Today I found some extra mushy persimmons at the market and I rushed home to taste them. They are a strange fruit, they taste delicious this way, but they have an extra weird texture. Kind of slippery, like raw fish. Now I understand why they are typically turned into pudding instead of eaten raw and fresh. The texture is just wrong for eating this way. But I saw a couple of recipes briefly at the library today, one for ice cream and one for quick bread, and a reference to a fresh persimmon pie, that sounds delightful. I think I'll be experimenting with these lovely mushy ones. The one on the right is not ripe yet, and I think you can see the difference. And you can see the insides, all shiny and soft.

Snow Day in Wyoming

I'm in Wyoming, visiting the Motherdear. We got a lot of snow in the last two days, this is how it looked on the first day of snowing, and there is even more snow coming tomorrow.

It was a great time to work on making pies for Thanksgiving, an apple and a cherry lattice pie, aren't they pretty? The cherry filling is from a can, to make it easy, and I'm pretty impressed with the vents I cut in the top crust of the apple, usually they don't look as neat or as well-centered.

I made extra apple filling, but not enough for a whole pie, so I made a cute rustic tart sort of thing that I didn't get a picture of before we demolished it, but maybe in the next picture of the half that is left you can see how flaky and delicious the crust is and how melty the apples look. And of course, the remainder is going to be breakfast tomorrow. My favorite! And if you want to see the other projects that were good to work on for a snow day, go to www.flickr.com/sizzle04. 

Persimmons and Privacy

Last night I had this terrible dream that someone had found old information including pictures of myself and my husband from years ago from this blog and from blogs of old friends and they started writing their own little blog, dissecting our home life based on very little evidence, and they somehow hacked into my account to put up links to it from this blog to make sure that I and everyone I know saw it. It was very distressing, I had a hard time getting to sleep again. I decided to take it as a warning, and now I will be using nicknames for myself and my husband and anyone else I know to protect the privacy of everyone. From now on, my husband will be called Lovemuffin (heehee!) and I will be called Pricklypear and if you want your own nickname, let me know (privately, of course) and we will go from there.

Now that the official business is out the way, I have to tell you how excited I am for these crazy fruits! I knew they existed, I think my Grandma made a persimmon pudding one time, but until 3 days ago I had never eaten a fresh persimmon. They are super cheap at a produce stand in downtown PG, so I bought about 10 pounds, and I'm going to do some experimenting. I'm thinking I'll make a persimmon pudding on Sunday to feed some guests that we'll be having over, and today I'll try to make some jam. Why is there a banana in this picture? I'm trying to get them to ripen faster, to make sure that they'll have the correct amount of natural pectin. I have never seen persimmon jam, I'm not sure if it's possible, but I found a few recipes online that seem interesting. I will let you know how it turns out.