Apr 13 2013
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recipes

coconut-or-vanilla flan

coconutflan03When you’re cooking, you learn there can be too much of a good thing.

Last Thanksgiving, my mom surprised us by baking a coconut flan. It was a surprise because, first, she doesn’t love to cook. Second, the flans she’s made in the past have all been of the plain vanilla variety. They’ve been good, no doubt, but always vanilla — simple, no frills, direct.

That time she baked the flan in a loaf pan, and when it came out it looked sleek and modern, words that don’t often pair with something so homey as a baked custard. It was lovely, it really was.

Mom surprised me again recently by suggesting we make it together so she could teach me how it’s done. I looked forward to it as soon as she shared her plan.

It was a fool-proof process … until I decided to change my mother’s recipe. Continue reading «coconut-or-vanilla flan»

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Mar 31 2013
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recipes

sweet cherry compote

IMG_0817Technically, it is spring. In reality, however, the calendar feels like a joke.

This week it snowed, it’s been cloudy for days and I’ve been blessed with my second cold in just as many weeks.

Looking for a spring break of sorts, I figured it was time to play with fruit. Apples and pears were feeling too autumnal, and berries seemed like a mirage in the horizon. Figured the best way to embrace the season was to head to the market and hit the freezer aisle.

True, fresh fruit is the best fruit. But sometimes you have to adjust. At school, instructors assured us that frozen fruit was picked at its peak, that even canned purees would make more than adequate substitutes. With that in mind, I planned for a tart cherry compote. Continue reading «sweet cherry compote»

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Mar 30 2013
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recipes

first-time yogurt

IMG_0852When you work in a professional kitchen, you see a lot of things that make lasting impressions.

Like the carcasses of lamb in a walk-in freezer. Miles of bread dough flattened cracker-thin through a sheeter. Or, lately, for me, gallons of yogurt incubating in tanks of temperature-controlled water like something out of a chem lab.

Deciding to skip the lamb — and having once been the one cranking out those crackers — I went for the yogurt.

It’s a simple, but precise, process. Heat up milk, which you then cool before introducing some hungry bacteria that over several hours multiply and thicken the milk to yogurt. Continue reading «first-time yogurt»

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Mar 21 2013
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misc.

strawberry seeds before sorbet

IMG_0686Said goodbye to winter with toasted hazelnuts. Saying hello to spring with strawberry seeds.

Can’t say I have a green thumb. I love gardens, can appreciate the fine fragrance of a gardenia and I think there’s nothing prettier than the ruffled layers of a peony. But over the years I’ve learned that if it’s growing in a pot, I’ll probably kill it.

Working in farm-to-table restaurants, however, has given new meaning to where a recipe can start. In one place, there were a couple of times I had to run to the raised beds in the back to snip off basil leaves for the cheese plate. In another, the bounty of the farmer’s market meant picking off leaves and twigs and rinsing grit off pounds and pounds of tiny berries before even reaching the first step of a recipe.

If I can do this at work, why not try this at home? Continue reading «strawberry seeds before sorbet»

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Mar 20 2013
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recipes

hazelnut butter and chocolate tarts

627It’s the last day of winter, there’s snow on the ground and Callebaut chocolate in the cupboard.

I thought of work, where we do this homemade gianduja ganache we serve with poached pears and a sweet red wine syrup. It’s also the basis for our hazelnut gelato, which also shares a spot in said dish. At home, though, there was just some dough in the freezer and a longing for warmer weather. To this end, I figured a good send-off for winter would come in the form of some hazelnut ganache tarts. Rich but relatively simple, given what I already had on hand.

To me, the coolest thing about the poached pear dish is the hazelnut paste we make to incorporate into the ganache. It takes only hazelnuts, sugar and a pinch of salt to concoct a thick, nutty butter a shade or two lighter than bronze. No need for any oil, the nuts take care of that on their own.

Playing editor, I pared the list of ingredients to two for my lazy winter version. Here’s what I did. Continue reading «hazelnut butter and chocolate tarts»

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