A Frosty Morn Delights

Frost is captivating. When looked at from afar, it relaxes the mind, slowing down a zigzag of pesky thoughts enough to get to the point of wanting to go on out and get close to it. The laundry can wait. And that goes for checking email too.

Solid ice in the bird bath is thumped out of its giant plant saucer. Shards lay gleaming on the frosted grass; the bath gets filled with fresh water.

Nothing showcases ice better than the hot pink of penstemon.

There's wind ready and willing to disseminate a dandelion's pollen, but the pollen says not right this moment, but thanks anyway.

A paprika heuchera stuns with picot edging of delicate lace along with a piqué interior of dots. 

A dried sedum clustered flowerhead's swaying in the wind on leggy stems isn't hampered by a newly acquired coat of rime.

Solar lamps encrusted with white accentuate the geometrical purity of a circle and a diamond.

Within sweet alyssum's flowerhead each tiny bloom bears a close resemblance to candied violets.

Weak, wintry sunshine washes over thawed Queen Elizabeth hedge roses facing east in the front garden, fading the vibrant colour into one of old, tattered, salmon-coloured silk.

Pots of lobelia adorning a series of sous sol window sills facing west are still holding onto their blooms since June! Their icy blue fits right in.

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

How frost can harm and help your garden

Mini Banana Naked Cake With Blackberry Cream-Cheese Icing Plus DIY Festive Table Decoration (Last Post Until January 2020)

Though I grew up in America, lofty, frosted, layered cakes did not figure that much in my life.  The blame can't be put on bland Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes but on all those wonderful, taste-bud-spoiling German-American bakeries that dotted NYC at that time. My preference for European styled cakes became even more entrenched after having lived a couple of decades in France. Therefore when coming across the concept of a naked cake, that is, a layered one, but without frosting or icing hiding its layers, I said this is for me. The French frequently showcasing fruits via desserts is an aspect much appreciated by me. Frozen blackberries from a late-summer harvest gives a tartness to this soft icing and colours it a delicate mauve. The cake is the dark, moist banana bread that was baked last week (my recipe) for two hours at a low temperature and of which I have a nice supply in the freezer. The icing can also be made ahead and frozen. Once the ingredients are at the ready, it is a cinch to layer, ice, and serve. Leftover cake lasts at least a day in the fridge—oh, what a nice breakfast that was the next day!

What a cutie!

The festive table decoration was put together thusly: curl, layer, and press close to the sides of a glass jar whatever greenery and berries comes your way. Slowly trickle in water almost to the top. Remove the metal casing from a votive candle by pulling on its wick, place it on the submerged foliage or float on the water, and light it. In our garden, I found sprigs of leyland cypress, ivy with its berries, desiccated hydrangea blooms, orange rose hips, lily of the valley red berries, red blueberry bush twigs, and orange-red strawberry leaves. I love, love, love its portability, the ease in which it was assembled, plus how beautifully shining and translucent it looks! To look its freshest it's best to add water shortly before presenting.

Ingredients (Makes a 7.5 cm/3 inch diameter cake, serving 2 to 3. There is enough frosting and banana bread to make several cakes, either all at once, or gradually in the future as bread and frosting can be frozen. Frosting adapted from Sally's Baking Addiction)

• Blackberries, fresh or frozen (can be lightly sugared), 1 cup which makes 2 T of blackberry coulis)
• Cream cheese, 224 g/8 dry oz
• Butter, unsalted, softened to room temperature, 60 g/4 T
• Sugar, icing, 360 g (3 American 8 fluid oz cups)
• Vanilla, extract, 1 tsp
• Salt, a pinch (1/8 tsp)
• Banana cake/bread, 3 thick slices (recipe is here)
• For garnishing, blackberries and banana slices

If you have more berries than a cup, don't hesitate to make extra coulis as it can be frozen. It makes a delicious dessert sauce especially when served over vanilla ice cream. I made the coulis from three cups of frozen slightly sweetened blackberries (they were frozen in that quantity, three cups of garden berries in six separate containers, a total of eighteen cups. A blackberry bonanza from just a solitary bush!) which gave a lot more than the two tablespoons required. If a frosting is preferred rather than a somewhat drippy icing, then reduce the recommended amount of coulis over a medium flame until halved. Also either leave out the vanilla extract or let a split vanilla bean steep in the hot coulis for around ten minutes. Remove bean, cool, and use. For an even fluffier effect, if available choose the block form of cream cheese (less introduced air than the whipped version in the tub). If not, then use more from the tub than recommended, around three extra heaping tablespoons.

Place a sieve (or a Foley mill) over an appropriately sized bowl and add the berries. With a large wooden spoon squish, mash, and push their juice through the sieve. Make sure the spoon by which the sieve's bottom is scraped from time to time is clean. Reserve two tablespoons and if not using the extra soon, freeze the surplus.

If using a stand mixer: beat butter and cheese until fluffy. Add sugar and beat. Add the salt, blackberry coulis, and vanilla (if using). Beat until smooth. Doing it by hand: in a large mixing bowl, work the softened butter with a fork until fluffy and light-coloured. Add the cream cheese and continuing working with a fork. 

Whisk in gradually the sugar.

Add the blackberry coulis, salt, and vanilla (if using).

Whisk until smooth.

Cut thick slices from a loaf of banana bread. Use a jar whose mouth basically covers most of the slice without going over the edges. With a sharp knife, cut straight down around the diameter. Repeat two more times to get a total of three round layers. The cake cuttings can be toasted and used as croutons for fruit salad or toasted, crushed, and layered into a parfait.

Spread the icing thickly over the bottom slice, top with a second, and spread more icing, top with the last slice and spread icing. The more liquid the icing is, the more there will be an attempt for the cake to resemble the Tower of Pisa. In that case, gently coax it back into shape. Garnish with a blackberry and a banana sliver.

It slices well to give three portions.

Lovely in looks, gorgeous in taste! I am so glad that I have enough ingredients in the freezer to turn out more of these delicious beauties. Though I adored the icing soaking the cake, for the next one I will try the instructions following the ingredients list towards the beginning of this post to see how a fluffy frosting works out. I will report back.

See you in January!

Truffade Auvergnate

For a rustic treatment of potatoes and cheese, look no farther than France. There's Tartiflette (my recipe), also Aligot (my recipe), and then there's the glorious Truffade Auvergnate. The latter two dishes come from Auvergne where la France profonde (heartland) does its thing with excellent and just a few ingredients, serving up an unforgettable taste without much fuss. Truffade is gooey and substantial like another great comfort food, Macaroni and Cheese.

Sorrel, with its lemony taste, is managing to grow in our December garden. It makes a perfect topping for Truffade and per its saucy nature, mostly melts upon contact with the potatoes and cheese served piping hot from the cast iron skillet.

The cheese used traditionally in this recipe, that is, Tomme fraîche du Cantal, may be hard to come by so the very melty Comté can be substituted. I preferred Comté aged twenty months which has deep, complex flavour and welcome any opportunity to eat it. Here's an excerpt from my post on this fabulous cheese:

The flavour hovers between tangy and sweet tinged with caramel, and I mean hover, you're never quite sure which of those two tastes will dominate, keeping your palate awake. The texture is similar to the richest nougat, unctuous beyond belief with a touch of gooeyness before giving way to an umami cloud pervading every nook and cranny of my very fortunate mouth. 

Ingredients
2 ample or 4 smaller servings
adapted from Sarah's Kitchen

• Potatoes, all-purpose, 500 g (I used Rosabelle potatoes from our potager)
• Fat, duck or goose, 1 T (I used olive oil)
• Tomme fraîche du Cantal or Comté (which I used), 200 g
• Garlic clove, large, crushed
• Salt and freshly ground pepper
• Sorrel, fresh, a small handful

Cut the cheese into 1 cm/.4 inch cubes and the peeled potatoes into 2 cm/.8 inch cubes. The size is important allowing the potatoes to be cooked tender within the allotted time and for the cheese to melt quickly.

Peel and crush or mince fine one fat garlic glove.

Heat the fat or olive oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet, preferably cast iron. Toss in the potatoes. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cook for twenty minutes over a low to medium low heat. Move the taters around with a sturdy spatula, scraping underneath them, from to time.

Add garlic and stir well, getting the tiny bits mixed throughout. Cook for another five minutes or until the largest potato cube is tender and all is golden brown.

Take the pan off the heat (don't forget to turn the burner off). Crush most of the potatoes with a fork or masher. Toss in the cheese cubes, steadily stirring until cheese is melted and has coated totally the potatoes, that is, you can hardly see any potato for the cheese. You can serve as is or you can compress and shape the cheesy mass into a thick pancake with a spatula or a potato masher. It then can be browned on both sides.

Top with chiffonade of sorrel (wash, dry, trim, stack leaves, roll into a cigar shape, and slice thinly). Perhaps because I substituted Comté for Tomme fraîche du Cantal, my version resembled the New York City street food like pizza and knishes with which I grew up, meaning warming food eaten out of hand. The tremendous amount of cheese becoming one with the  potato means the melty fusion passed to a stretchy, stringy state and then one of congealment so quickly that only determined fingers can take on the challenge of pulling off a chunk at least when it's served in a bowl. A challenge I met with gusto. I have since found a local source for Tomme fraîche du Cantal, the cheese used traditionally in this dish. When I remake this I will use that cheese and report back.

Any left-overs can be shaped into a pancake, put in a covered container, refrigerated, and reheated in a skillet with no additional fat. Eventually served on a plate, it was easy to cut with a knife into small pieces.

À la prochaine!

Banana Bread a la Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook

This dark, moist banana bread presents serious competition for a certain holiday bread. That's right, fruit cake, I am talking to you! Though the more common and lighter coloured version of banana bread can benefit from the addition of semi-sweet chocolate chips, walnuts, and cream-cheese frosting, this unadorned beauty stands its ground in the holiday season just by the dint of it being baked at a low temperature for two hours.

It's so good that instead of making banana bread for the express purpose of using up bananas too ripe to eat out of hand, I can envision my snapping up any over-ripe bananas at the market and/or leaving some bananas to ripen too much on purpose.

This fabulous recipe comes from The Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook mostly unchanged except for my substituting maple sugar for brown sugar.

By maple sugar I don't mean crystallised maple syrup but white sugar with the addition of maple syrup in a ratio of two tablespoons of syrup to 237 ml (American 8 fluid ounce cup) of sugar.

Ingredients
makes 1 loaf (I used a 25 x 10 cm/9.5 x 4 inch pan, but the more typical 23 x 13 cm/9 x 5 inch bread pan is fine also.

recipe can be doubled

• Bananas, very ripe, 3 medium
• Sugar, granulated, white, 100 g (1/2 American 8 fluid oz cup)
• Sugar, granulated, white, 100g (1/2 American 8 fluid oz cup) with added:
• Maple syrup, 2 T
• Baking soda, 2 1/2 tsp
• Salt, coarse or Kosher, 1/2 tsp
• Eggs, large, 2 (I used 3 medium)
• Yogurt, plain, whole milk, 177 ml (3/4 American 8 fluid oz cup)
• Oil, Canola (I used safflower), 4 T
• Flour, all-purpose (I used French T55), 250 g/2 American 8 fluid oz cups)
• Unsalted butter to grease pan

Place a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat  to 135 degrees C/275 degrees F. Grease the pan's insides well with butter. Trace with pencil the outside bottom of the pan onto parchment paper and cut out. Place into the pan and grease this bottom liner. If using a food processor fitted with the steel blade, puree bananas until smooth. Add both sugars, baking soda, and salt. Mix until combined. Add eggs, yogurt, and oil. Mix again. Transfer mixture to a large bowl and add the flour. Stir just until all the flour disappears and batter is nearly smooth. If mixing by hand, mash bananas in a large bowl using first a potato masher then a wire whisk once it becomes more liquid. Whisk till smooth which took me about five minutes from start to finish. Ooooh, such a lovely fragrance!

Add both sugars, baking soda, and salt. Whisk until incorporated.

Crack eggs into bowl, add yogurt, and pour in the oil. Whisk well.

Add flour and stir with a wooden spoon until all the flour is dissolved and the batter is mostly smooth.

Spoon or pour batter into the prepared pan. My pans were filled to just a bit under the top edge. Bake for around 2 to 2.5 hours.

My pans (I doubled the recipe) are thinner and longer than a regular bread pan, and they took 2 hours to finish baking. Make sure that the top springs back when tapped rather vigorously and/or when a wooden toothpick is inserted, it comes out clean.

This luscious sweet bread is versatile. In the below photo a thick slice (I suppose one could do thin slices, but why bother? The scrumptious texture needs at least 2.5 cm/1 inch of thickness in order to be duly appreciated) is taking a rest before it gets slathered with unsweetened, creamy, natural peanut butter which makes a wonderful quick breakfast or a snack.

For dessert, it will eagerly take on a deluge of maple syrup (see below photo) or a mound of ice cream or both! It can be topped with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Its delightful sponginess could take a good splash of alcohol, allowing it to be used in trifle (cut banana bread slices into sticks to mimic lady fingers) or a square-shaped rum baba. It could be cut into different forms like circles or stars and stacked, an architectural mound layered and filled, perhaps with mascarpone cream, in the manner of small, individual naked cakes. The bits left over could be crushed for layering and topping parfaits or toasted for croutons in fruit salad.

As for a savoury presentation? I am thinking a nice slab of banana bread accompanying eggs scrambled with blue cheese. All of this is possible just in time for the holidays because there is a full loaf plus a good chunk of another one sitting in our freezer. This bread will retain its flavour when frozen for three months.

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Tortillas de Tiesto a la Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook

Raisin Challah a la Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook

Bialys a la Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook

Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez with Julia Turshen

Mini Banana Naked Cake With Blackberry Cream-Cheese Icing

The Cool Banana: Nog, Smoothie & Agua Fresca

RELATED LINKS

Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook at Amazon

Hot Bread Kitchen Website: Handmade Authentic Multi-Ethnic Breads, Preserving Tradition, Rising Expectations

Winter Preparation 2019: Storage of Glass Ornaments & Frost-Tender Plants Plus Preservation of Carrots

The other day, I did the last preparation for the winter garden which was to bring indoors the four, handblown glass flowers—a bluebell, a burgundy digitalis, and two mottled pansies—positioned in the potager's centre bed of sweet alyssum. It was just in time as upon awakening today I saw the garden covered in hoar frost.

Bluebell

Digitalis

One of the two pansies

As appreciative as I am of their beauty, when they are tucked in the bed's four corners, they serve as hose guards.

However sunny, cold days alternating with the typical nightly winter temperature drop means the glass will be subjected to quite a lot of stress. They could be boxed up but then I won't be able to marvel at them. Sooooooooo . . . The Calm One came up with the idea of inserting a large vase into an earthenware urn. The vase was swaddled with bubble wrapping and foam peanuts were stuffed into the vase. They get to see the garden from my office, and I get to see them.

About a week or so ago, several osteospermums and a couple of lantana were dug up from their garden beds and put into pots. Soon after, they along with an already potted bougainvillea were transported into the sous sol and placed near a sunny window.

Several days ago, all the carrots were spaded, rinsed off with a hose, sealed in containers/plastic bags, and placed in the sous sol's fridge. The variety is Carentan (a slightly different strain of Chantenay), a husky bruiser, insisting on developing despite any stones in its way, and believe me, there are lots of tiny pebbles in our soil. The upper third of the carrot is where most of the growth is, that is, lateral growth, so though they tend to be stubby in our garden, there's still a lot of carrot there. The large, carrot-filled colander in the below picture is a small fraction of the total haul.

The process of preserving is still ongoing. They are scrubbed well, sliced or diced according to need, put in a cauldron of boiling water—lots of boiling water to proportion of carrot—and boiled for three minutes to kill any taste-destroying bacteria that would grow, albeit slowly, while the carrots are frozen. They are then drained, dried, and packed into freezer bags while squeezing out as much air as possible. Though this preparation is labour-intensive at the moment because of the large number of carrots, in the future all I have to do is get a bag of prepared carrots from the freezer. I am looking forward to that!

Based on the amount I already have processed, I would say I grew enough to last six months. Yay! That's another item that The Calm One, the official grocery shopper chez nous, doesn't have to lug into his shopping cart for a while. He hasn't needed to buy potatoes since August, and they should last another two months. I love growing vegetables as they are fresher and tastier than store-bought, but they are also much more convenient as they are never too far away, either in the garden or in the freezer. In the coming months, the carrots will appear as a side of peas and carrots for our Pot Roast Of Leg Of Lamb, in Chicken Pot Pie (changes from this old post is that I now make the pastry with butter and reduce the amount of broth a bit), in Cream Of Carrot Soup (below photo), and . . .

Served with a slab of Coulommiers and some rye crackers

. . . Minestrone (ingredient list from this very old post is still valid, but I now start the soup with a soffrito/mirepoix of garlic, carrots, porcini, peas, greens, tomato paste, basil, bay leaf, and with potatoes added towards the end of sauteing before adding stock and the remaining ingredients) which included our frozen peas harvested this past early summer. There's probably enough peas in the freezer to last another month. Sadness always descends even after growing food for ten years when I run out of our garden produce. Of course, I am glad our supply of vegetables and fruits can be topped up from the supermarket. But still . . .

Served with freshly grated Parmesan

À la prochaine!

Cream of Mushroom Soup Redux

There's an old post with a recipe for cream of mushroom buried somewhere at the beginning of my seven years of blogging. Its tang came from crème fraîche, and it tasted good enough. However the consistency was not as pleasing especially after being defrosted which became watery and clumpy at the same time. A batch soup hostile to freezing isn't what batch cooking is all about. Through time, I conveniently forgot to make it. I always suspected the proportions of butter, flour, and stock was off hence the disappointing texture. After a little research, I tried different amounts of those ingredients which resulted in wonderful mushroomy flavour along with an equally wonderful creaminess that held up through defrosting.

Ingredients
around four to six servings, recipe can be doubled

• Mushrooms, fresh,  554 g (1 pound) I added a small handful of rehydrated porcini
• Onion, large, chopped
• Thyme, fresh leaves, 1/2 T
• Broth, chicken or veggie or dried porcini 'liquor' (I used a mix of half chicken broth and half porcini 'liquor'), 946 ml (32 fluid oz/1 quart)
• Flour, all-purpose, 5 T plus 1 tsp
• Butter, unsalted, 90 g (6 T)
• Heavy cream, 237 ml (8 fluid oz)
• Dry sherry or unsweetened apple juice (which I used), 4 T
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Garnish: a few fresh mushrooms and crumbled blue cheese (I used Bleu d'Auvergne)

If using porcini whether for a mixture or the total amount of stock, pour boiling water over the porcini in a small bowl to submerge. Let sit around twenty minutes. Via a sieve placed over a large mixing jug, drain well. Put the porcini back in the small bowl and cover with fresh cool water. Sieve and drain again. Repeat until water runs mostly clear, making sure the sediment is caught in the sieve. Reserve the amount of the dark 'liquor' needed before its runs clear. Clean the fresh mushrooms by wiping them with a paper towel to get rid of any compost flakes. Usually there's enough moisture on the mushrooms so most likely the paper towel won't need to be slightly moistened. 'Srooms quickly absorb moisture, diluting their flavour so no running them under a free-flowing faucet. Thinly slice the fresh mushrooms. If large, halve them first and then slice the halves. For decades I use to go to the trouble of finely mincing them because a certain cookbook insisted on doing that for best flavour. They are actually more tasty when sliced.

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pot, preferably a cast-iron one. Saute the chopped onion for around ten minutes or until soft, yellow, transparent, and fragrant. Add sliced mushrooms and the porcini if using. Sprinkle some salt and pepper, stirring from time to time for ten minutes. Add flour while stirring well until it is all incorporated. Pour in the sherry or apple juice and give it a good stir. Add the stock and the thyme and bring to a boil. Reduce flame and let simmer, partially covered, for twenty minutes.

Remove half the soup and blend smooth (I used a stick mixer). Pour the blended soup back into the pot and add the cream. Adjust seasonings. Reheat gently.

Slice some mushrooms thinly and float a few in each bowl. Top the slices with crumbled blue cheese. Don't tell the older recipe languishing forgotten in the dusty archives that this one is much better.

À la prochaine!

RELATED LINKS

Health benefits and nutritional content of mushrooms