eric's culinary nonsense page

I recently rediscovered our deep fryer, and decided it was time to learn to make french fries. Super easy. Peel potatoes, slice up, soak in water to remove some of the surface starch. Fry once at low (320 degree F) for 5 minutes, remove, drain and cool. Fry again at higher (370 degree F) for 8 minutes, until nice and golden brown, and remove, drain, salt and eat. Yum!

I saw a varation of this done by Jacques Torres on TV. The bottom is puff pastry. The top is blackberry jam with fresh blackberries.

Homemade pasta, filled some combination of chicken, artichoke hearts, thyme, marjoram, rosemary, and olive oil. It appears there are several ways to fold tortellini shut. Mine were folded square, and not triangularly, before twisting them around. Worked out ok, though the filling could be better.

Pretzels turned out to be remarkably easy. Add yeast to water, sugar, and salt. Add to the flour. Put in the mixer for 8 minutes. Let the dough rise until doubled. Punch it down, and split the dough up into chunks. Make each chunk into a long braid, which you then twist into the proper shape, and then let rest for a minute or two. The dough is amazingly elastic at this point. Very easy to play with. Then, stretch the dough out, and toss into a boiling water and baking soda solution for about a minute after it floats. This supposedly kills the yeast to prevent further rising, and leaves the pretzels with that taste you associate pretzels with. Transfer to a greased baking sheet. Repeat until the sheet is full. Toss salt all over the pretzels. Bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes.

The tricks:

• Don't let the dough dry out. If you do, it'll shred when stretching, or will crack when being cooked. I misted mine with water, which seemed to help a lot.
• Remember to do that extra twist in the middle of the pretzel, or it'll be hard to stretch out.
• Don't let 'em bake too long if you want a big, soft, chewy pretzel.

I made profiteroles right after my friend Laura gave me a copy of "The Professional Pastry Chef". They're not hard at all, even though it was the first time I'd made choux pastry. Making choux pastry (also called "pâte à choux") is very similar to making a roux. Melt butter with some water, add flour when the butter is all melted, and stir until the dough starts to come away from the edges of the pan, then take off the heat, and add in some eggs and mix together. Take this dough (almost more like a very thick batter), and put it in a piping bag. Squirt out small balls onto a baking sheet, and then pop in the oven for a while. Presto, puff balls. While they cook, the balls become hollow inside. My biggest challenge here is taking them out of the oven too early, before they get a little crispy on the outside.

The other step is to make some sort of cream filling. The recipe I used was for a Bavarian Cream, but really any sort of heavy cream filling would work great. Once it's mixed together, put it in a pastry bag, poke a hole in each cooked puff ball, and fill it up with cream. Stack 'em up on a plate, and dust them with powered sugar. If you stack them into a pyramid or cone and coat them with caramel, you've just made a croquembouche.

I poked holes into the sides of my profiteroles to add the cream filling. If you look closely at the picture, you can see where it leaks out on the side. To make 'em look better, they should probably be filled from the bottom.

Fancy schmancy cooking places will sell you branding irons for your steaks, presumably to make your mark on your food with your initials. Chris and Laura gave me one that says "EAT". I hope they didn't think my cooking needed that instruction!

The steak turned out much better than the picture, and was served along with potatoes freshly harvested from the garden, wrapped in parchment paper, and baked along with butter, salt, and onion bits.

This year, we had quite a few different kinds of plums from trees around the neighborhood. This was a sampling of what was available.

More things to do with found fruit. The plums and the blackberries were harvested from around the neighborhood, and served on a lovely tart filled with pastry cream.