Conquering Chocolate Mousse

One of last week's new recipes was a variation on Julia Child’s Perfect Chocolate Mousse. I adapted David Lebovitz's adaptation (I'm just not a fan of rum in anything but tiramisu) and I have to say, I'm a convert. I've always like the idea of chocolate mousse, but I've just never been crazy for it the way I get for ice cream or brownies (or tiramisu). This mousse might just have changed my mind, though.

To Go or Not to Go...to Pastry School

I've been thinking about going back to school to study baking and pastry. I've devoted more than a few weekends to trying out new recipes and tweaking old ones. There were some awesome successes and a few complete failures, and while it was frustrating, it didn't make me want to give up baking (well it did, but only for about half an hour). A lot of my free time is spent cooking, baking, jotting down ideas for recipes and flavor combinations, and reading through cookbooks. I don't lack for ideas, what I'm missing is the knowledge to make those ideas into something tangible (and edible). A lot of people are happy to just follow recipes, and that's great, but I want to understand why breads rise and pastry crust doesn't (it's partly because bread flour has more protein than pastry flour) so I can really do whatever I want to instead of always being tethered to recipes. Don't get me wrong, I love recipes, but for me cooking is a form of expression; I'll never be an artist with a paintbrush (believe me, I've tried), but perhaps I can be with a pastry brush.

A Tasting Menu of Fish

It seems that I'm really getting into Asian flavors this month. Jake recently said that he sometimes envies me because I like so many more foods than he does, so I decided to make a tasting menu for him on Saturday night. (Just when I said I was done taking on too many things at one time...) I made 2 different types of fish (salmon and grouper) 3 different ways. Five of the six varieties were Asian or Asian inspired and it turns out, he likes some flavor combinations he didn't know he did.

Broken Glass, Blood and Pickles

It seems some higher power decided that one day last week was to be broken glass day in our house. My husband came home from a trip to the store to find that the light fixture cover in our bedroom closet had shattered (or fallen and shattered? we're still not sure) into several hundred pieces. It was everywhere. I'm still finding random shards over a week later and I'll need to be very careful the next time I put on my Uggs, just in case I missed any.

When I got home later, Jake was craving the chocolate-covered cherries from Sprouts that my mother had put in his Christmas stocking so off we went to get them...and about $60 worth of random stuff that we apparently just had to have. Isn't that always how it works? One of the impulse purchases was a large jar of Nathan's kosher pickles (I've been thinking about kosher pickles for about a week so perhaps it wasn't that impulsive.) and when I tried to open them, the lid just would not budge, so I did what I always do and reached for a butter knife and proceeded to hit the top of the lid in various places to loosen the seal.

But the lid still wouldn't budge. Even Jake (who has a near perfect track record with husbandly duties like opening stubborn jars and retrieving objects out of my reach) was unsuccessfull in attempting to liberate the pickles. So I picked up the knife and hit it a bit harder.

Thunk...thunk...shatter.

Taking a Step Back from the Chaos

When I decided that I wanted to really try to incorporate new things into my life and my kitchen I jumped into it head-first, and a couple of weeks later I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed. In the span of 2 days I tried to make a couple of flatbread pizzas, try out 2 new pie/tart doughs, create a hazelnut chocolate ganache filling for the tarts, whip up a batch of salsa, bake shortbread cookies, make another batch of udon noodles with almond sauce and try out a new fried rice recipe. The pizza was great but the tart dough was dry, the ganache wasn't as thick or smooth as I wanted it to be and only about 1/3 of the cookie dough got baked (the rest is in my fridge). While I love spending time in my kitchen experimenting with doughs and trying new recipes, trying to do too many things at once isn't working for me.

With that in mind, I'm going to take a deep breath and a step back. Instead of trying to do 6 things a day, I'll keep it to maybe 2, and do one thing at a time. Hopefully this will let me enjoy what I'm doing, and make a tart shell that isn't so dry.

Butter

I love butter. When I was a child, I used to eat sticks of it, until my mom replaced the butter in the fridge with margarine and then I ate spoonfuls of that. Considering all the odd and raw food I ate, the fact that I didn't come down with some awful food-borne bacteria as a kid is a miracle.

While plain butter was the love of my childhood, compound butter is definitely the love of my adulthood. I keep it in the fridge at all times now. My favorite is roasted garlic butter with herbs. Traditional, I know, but a classic for a reason.

A New French Press From World Market

 Let me start by saying that I love World Market. I love all the moroccan-themed candles and japanese figurines and french-style art. But what I love most is the food and kitchen sections. Yesterday I went in to see if I could find French salted butter caramels; they don't have any, but they did have several things that ended up coming home with me.

Miso Ramen? Yes please. Miso Hoison sauce? Sounds like a wonderful marinade for fish. Dry udon noodles? What a great alternative to the ramen-like packages that are all I can find anywhere else. And who doesn't need a couple of containers that only hold a few tablespoons of miscellaneous items that I'm constantly transporting in Ziploc bags? I also purchased a mini 6" whisk (yes, you read that right) but I had just used it so I didn't want to photograph it with Greek yogurt dripping from the wire. My reasoning was that it could come in handy for making caramel sauce, which I've already done twice this week; I could pretend the second batch was for a higher purpose, like a tarte or something, but it wasn't.

And there's the beautiful green french press. I've been through a few electric coffee makers since college, the last of which was given to Goodwill when we moved year before last; in general I find that I don't use one enough to justify the space it takes up on my countertop. But for a while now I've been thinking (and reading) about french presses. While I love my instant iced vanilla latte in a premeasured package for the mornings, I'm too sensitive to caffeine to drink more than 1 cup per day, which downright sucks for someone who loves the taste of coffee. So I thought I could use a french press to make decaf in the evenings to sip on after dinner. I also have fond memories of my brother-in-law making us coffee in his brand new Frieling french press during one of the days that Dallas completely iced over and life as we know it screetched to a halt last winter.

Is my brothers-in laws' dog not the cutest thing ever, romping out there in the snow?