Baked Mocha Custard

Plain baked custard comprising of just eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla certainly is lovely, comforting, and simple. But mocha is, well, mocha. Topping with whipped cream, a sprinkle of cocoa, and a drizzle of maple syrup makes this custard even more alluring.

Ingredients
four 177 ml/6 oz servings

• Milk, whole, 532 ml (2 1/4 cups  or 36 T)
• Sugar, 5 T + 1 tsp
• Cocoa powder, unsweetened, 3 T
• Coffee, freeze-dried crystals, 1 T
• Eggs, 3
• Vanilla extract, 1 1/2 tsp
• Topping: cocoa, maple syrup & whipped cream

Preheat oven to 163 degrees C (325 degrees F). Place the kettle on the boil. Put the milk, sugar, coffee, and cocoa in a saucepan.

Heat gently all the while stirring till smooth which should take a few minutes. The mixture should be closer to lukewarm than hot.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the eggs until the yellows and whites are blended. Gradually incorporate the warm milk while whisking. Stir in the vanilla.

Pour into cups, ramekins, or bowls. Set them into a suitably sized shallow dish. Add 2.5 cm (1 inch) of boiling water.

Bake thirty to forty minutes or until a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean. Let cool about twenty minutes. If you like warmish custard like I do, then whip up some cream, sprinkle on the cocoa, and drizzle some maple syrup. If not, refrigerate at least two hours or overnight if you desire a well chilled dessert.

The piled-on-high whipped cream, maple syrup, and cocoa makes you into an adventurer bent on discovery as you dip-in your spoon to reach the silkiness of the custard proper with its darker, slightly rough skin. 

This dessert makes a nice ending to a spicy meal, like enchiladas

In the garden, mostly everything is still dormant which is the time to do pruning. Evergreens can get trimmed also as their sap is just starting to rise so though they are prettily green they are technically sleeping.

Lots and lots and lots of laurel prunings

The grass and iris foliage are awakening.

The 'lawn' recently got it first haircut of the season

The peas planted in a pot several weeks ago are putting out growth. Soon they will provide pea shoots for delectable, early-spring greens.

À la prochaine!

Late Winter Warmers: Rich Spicy Broth with Pork Slivers & Tagliatelle . . . and coffee ice cream affogato

My having roasted a rack of pork for our Christmas dinner allowed reserving the bones for stock. The rest of the Médoc wine along with a bouquet garni, black peppercorns, onions, and mushroom stems—the caps were braised and served with the pork—were tossed into the pot. The scrumptious result was strained, reduced, and then frozen only to be thawed recently when a chilly, windy day became the perfect time to do so. As there also was homemade chicken stock in the freezer, that got added along with strips of left-over pork, red pepper flakes, minced ginger, crushed garlic, and broken-up tagliatelle. All were simmered until the pasta was tender which takes about fifteen minutes.

Its exquisite shade of burnt umber comes from 'room stems & lush red wine

An earthy soup such like this can easily sport the sun in the form of a poached egg.

The garlic was harvested from our potager last summer

If you love eggs like I do, then you have an inexpensive and delicious way of boosting your nutritive intake by topping grain dishes, soups, and toast with poached beauties. Decades of our ignoring the dire health claims made against them have been vindicated. In this case, an egg was poached in a small amount of broth, the raggedy bits trimmed, and added to a bowl of steaming goodness.

I eventually will sample eggs other than chicken like duck & quail

Now you would be right in doubting the warming effect of ice cream, but then you would be underestimating affogato's flair. Though usually it's made with vanilla ice cream, the earth-coloured theme can continue along with a double dose of coffee by subbing coffee ice cream.

Purists insist that affogato is a beverage and not a dessert. I say just drink it after the meal! And what an adaptable drink it is. For summer, put more ice cream than coffee, for winter, more coffee, less ice cream. Make expresso or very strong coffee in which your favourite coffee liqueur could be added. Put the ice cream into a chalice or a cup and pour on very hot coffee. The melting ice cream will cool down the coffee just enough so you can imbibe the creamy warm beverage with ease. A spoon can assist in securing a few extant lumps of ice cream.

Don't tell anyone I used freeze-dried coffee!

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Making chicken stock (some photos have become corrupted in this old post, but the info remains correct.)
Broth with chicken, pasta, greens, Parmesan, poached egg & bread crumbs

RELATED LINKS

How to make your own coffee liqueur

Different Covers

A hoary frost covers the potager this morning. A thick, puffy duvet covers me. The frost is gone in about an hour while the duvet remains for longer. My faire grasse matinée (making the morning fat = oversleeping) can be blamed on my companion, a large, musty, second-hand book on French wine. I kept napping between chapters. The early riser chez nous, The Calm One, told me that he brought in some plants to be on the safe side. I carry the lettuce/herb seedlings mini-greenhouse back out checking that its cover is secure.

In the foreground, perennial candytuft already has flower buds

The bird baths are covered with a thin film of ice which gets broken with my trusty mallet.

Gregarious starlings adore these baths almost as much as I adore watching them cavort

The cover of oak-leaf mulch on the to-be-pea-bed is brushed away a bit to see if the prepared soil is too soggy for planting. 

Soil sticking to spade signals a no-go

Hopefully the sky will stay mostly cloudless long enough to allow the sun to do its thing.

Sweet violets, daffodils, and Italian arums cover a shaded, raised bed.

I let the moss have its way with the cement retaining wall

Ensuring our plates are covered with warm food, I make grilled cheese.

Edam is a staple chez nous

A stack of them, in fact.

Later on, apple crumble/crisp provides an excuse to use the oven on a nippy day.

We didn't want our plates to be cold so we kept covering them with apple crumble.

Fur covers Dirac the Young Cat which of course doesn't stop his burrowing under duvets especially when they are covering people.

Celadon eyes with matching duvet

À la prochaine!

I Heart Hot Cocoa

We can of course enjoy appealing heart shapes all year round and not just on Valentine's Day. I plopped some frozen, whipped-cream hearts into hot cocoa, but eventually the remaining scraps of frozen cream will make our coffee a plebeian version of affogato.

Sweet violets abound in our garden at present

Spread whipped cream in a shallow, lidded plastic container to a height of 1.2 cm (1/2 inch) and freeze for about two hours. Fold some paper in half and on its fold, draw one half of a heart. Cut out and open. Voilà! You have your template. If you have a heart-shaped cookie cutter, you are already ahead of the game.

Prepare your hot cocoa. Briefly place the bottom of the container under running hot water and ease the frozen cream onto a cutting board. Place the template and cut only what is needed for the moment with a knife. Return the surplus if any to the freezer (any shapeless scraps are as tasty as the shaped ones). Place onto a cup/bowl of hot cocoa.

As it melts, the floating heart resembles in texture a simple semifreddo.

In the garden, everything is soaked through and through because of abundant rain. Heather along with . . .

. . . daffodils are providing flowers.  Roses are in the process of being pruned.

A thicket of calla lilies, pruned rose, heather, and daffodils

Garden gloves are essential. They protect hands from cold, thorns, dirt, cuts, and abrasions. My pruning pair are long, suede/leather, comfortable, and resistant enough to allow grasping of nettles and brambles plus their chocolate-brown and chartreuse colouring is beyond fashionable. The pair for weeding affords flexibility and easily can be cleaned daily by keeping them on as I wash my hands!

The pruning pair gets brushed as needed

Garlic/shallot/onion sets are waiting patiently for the rain to cease long enough so they can be planted into their beds which were happily prepared months ago.

Corno di Toro Rosso (horn of the bull) sweet red pepper seedlings are being pampered by keeping them in their warm incubator overnight and then placing them on a garden table in a mini-serre (greenhouse) during the day.

Flourishing in the lengthening daylight

Moroccan mint (Mentha spicata) is deeply textured and has a superb spearmint flavour and when summer arrives, will be tossed into tabbouleh, and not to mention, steeped in cream to make refreshing, pale-coloured, mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.

When the gloomy deluge dampens my spirit, I crush a leaf and inhale deeply

À la prochaine!

Cheddar Crackers . . . and early-spring planting starts!

Though dainty in size, these fresh crackers pack a wallop of cheddar. Now these do taste like they descended from the heavens and not from a supermarket packet. But that's not the only reason why I try to make most of what we eat from scratch. Concocting my own is just way more gratifying than opening prepackaged boxes. The sights, sounds, and fragrance of a well-used and appreciated kitchen fosters fun, learning, and accomplishment.

These beauties are both crisp and fondant (tender)!

Ingredients
makes several cups
recipe adapted from here

• Cheddar, extra-sharp, grated, lightly packed, 473 ml/two 8 oz cups
• Flour, 237 ml/one 8 oz cup
• Butter, 57 grams  (4 T or 2 fluid oz)
• Salt, 1/2 tsp
• Milk, 2-3 T

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C/375 degrees F. Combine flour and salt. Add the butter, tossing so as to coat it. Right in the bowl, cut butter into chunks using a knife. Using your fingertips (clean of course!), work the butter into the flour until the texture is similar to very coarse cornmeal.

I used double the butter by mistake! A bit rich, but still just fine

Add the cheddar. If grated finely it probably will result in crackers less mottled than mine.

Coarsely grated cheddar

Knead the cheddar into the butter and flour mixture which should take less than a minute. Add the milk, tablespoon by tablespoon, while tossing the mixture making sure your fingertips get under the dough to feel for excess moisture. Use just enough milk to allow the dough to form a mass when it is lightly pressed against the bowl. Knead a few times to form a ball, divide into two, and refrigerate at least fifteen minutes.

One ball can be frozen for later use. Or you could roll out both balls and freeze one tray of the squares (once frozen, they can be put in a freezer bag). On a floured board or a pastry silicon mat, roll out to .3 cm (1/8 inch) thick. Using a pizza cutter or knife (a straight edge would come in handy also), cut into 2.5 cm/1 inch squares. Gather any scraps into a ball and roll those out. Dock (to let out steam so they don't get too puffy) each one in the centre with the back of a wooden toothpick.

Shortly after putting them into the oven I realised they weren't docked so out they came.

Bake about ten to twelve minutes. The edges and bottoms should be nicely browned. Let cool. They can be stored in jars and will keep well in the fridge for several days.

Each one was a delight to eat. Before I knew it they were gone.

In the potager, the daffodils are out!

Our nursery order arrived last week. The annual herbs and lettuce are just beginning to poke out in their mini-cold-frame while sweet red peppers have yet to do so in their mini-hothouse. The strawberries have been transplanted into well-hilled mounds in their bed and the Moroccan mint/common thyme in pots. The fifty or so seed-potatoes are soaking up sunshine on the sous-sol's window sill. Once the soil dries out a bit, in goes the peas, spinach, carrots, beets, parsnips, garlic, shallots, onions, and leeks.

Chitting, that is sprouting, takes about a month

À la prochaine!

Pasta & Potatoes Minestra

The Italian version of mirepoix, a sauteed mixture of celery, carrot, and onion, is called soffritto. Rome-based food blogger, Rachel Roddy, begins her simple but satisfying pasta and potatoes soup with it.

Garnished with Parmesan shavings and rosemary

Our fridge was missing the celery, so the soffritto became subtracto, but was tasty quand même.

A sprig of rosemary fresh from our winter potager puts a smile on subtracto's face

There is lots of olive oil in this soup, enrobing the ingredients in a silky sheath.

My pasta choice was linguine broken into small segments.

Ingredients
serves four

• Onion, 1 medium, finely chopped
• Celery, 1 stick, finely chopped
• Carrot, 1 medium, finely chopped
• Rosemary, fresh, a sprig (scrape the leaves off, saving a few for garnishing) or 2 bay leaves
• Potatoes, 2 medium (about 600 grams of any kind — I used all purpose), peeled & chunked
• Olive oil, extra virgin, 6 T
• Stock or water (I used homemade chicken broth), 1.4 litres
• Pasta, 170 g (quadrucci, pastina, farfalle, or broken spaghetti/linguine*)
• Salt, freshly ground black pepper
• Pecorino or Parmesan

Warm the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot. Toss in the onions, carrots, and celery. Stir occasionally—soffritto means stir fry—over moderate heat for about ten minutes. The veggies need to be translucent and aromatic.

Add the potatoes and the rosemary or bay leaves. Stir for about a minute to coat them with oil.

Pour in the stock or water and cook for about fifteen minutes or until a test potato is soft enough to be crushed. Add the pasta and cook for another ten or fifteen minutes or till the pasta has the desired tenderness. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Serve in soup plates and garnish with Parmesan or Pecorino shavings and chopped fresh rosemary leaves.

The hot soup melted the Parmesan shavings into a delectable gooey mass

Minestre which are thick Italian soups/stews are named thusly because the soup is dished-out, that is, administered by the head of the household. A lovely soup in flavour and fragrance, I am looking forward tomorrow to administering myself another bowl or two.

I am guessing it will taste better if that is even possible the next day

À la prochaine!

Related Links

*Pasta shapes and synonyms
Rachel Roddy's blog