commis for life!
This is what I got upto this weekend. I made my first batch of macaroons ever, they tasted good. Never having made macaroons before, this was a fun bumbling experience. Will make some more next weekend, hopefully the next batch will grow some cute macaroon feet. Watch out Pierre Herme lol!
I want to give a shout out to Illy @ SAVOURY AND SWEET, AND EVERYTHING ELSE IN BETWEEN for his great tips on making macaroons.
Great title! This pineapple chop dessert is made up of oven roasted pineapple, fried pastry cream, caramel sauce & whipped creme fraiche. The twist in this dessert is in the way the pineapple is cut. It is cut to look like a meat chop. Chefs have a sense of humour….
In a previous post I told you that I got Thomas Keller’s French Laundry cookbook, the book has lots of great recipes and pretty pictures. After spending a lot of time looking at the pictures and dreaming about the food in it, the book left the coffee table and went into the kitchen. Great cookbooks by great chefs can be quite intimidating, most of these chefs have 20-30 years of experience in cooking, compared to my few years of bumbling around in the kitchen. Is it possible to replicate to replicate their cooking?
A Kakuzi pineapple & the French Laundry cookbook, let the bumbling begin……..
First task was to cut the pineapple into chops. Started by chopping off the head & the bottom, then cut the pineapple into halves & then removed the core. Once cored, I cut off pineapple “flesh” on one side but left the skin on. As you can see the in the picture above, the result is a pineapple “rack” which I then cut into four chops.
Browned the chops in butter for a few minutes, then transferred into oven to roast for about 40 minutes. The aroma of pineapple & butter from the oven was intoxicating….. lovely.
The nuggets above are made is frozen pastry cream/creme patissiere. The pastry cream is made from flour, egg yolks, sugar & milk, these ingredients are cooked into a thick cream. In the book, the cooked pastry cream is supposed to set solid in the fridge after a few hours, mine did not. That is why I froze it….. I don’t know what I did wrong. Anyway, I breaded & then deep fried frozen nuggets for two minutes. In the recipe Thomas Keller uses panko, I used bread crumbs. The spanish do a deep-fried pastry cream called Leche Frita
After the pineapples were done, I tried to make the caramel sauce for this dish. The way it was supposed to be done is that you caramelise sugar in a pan, then whisk in butter. But I messed it up, I got the sugar to caramelise then added diced cold butter, then walked away for a second. When I was back it looked like the sugar had seized up & the butter had clarified. FAIL!!! Well I said I was a bumbler, I should stop saying that & speak positive. With a positive attitude this won’t happen…….. Oh well.
I still dunked the cooked chops into this faux sauce, for a bit of colour & flavour. Also whipped some creme fraiche.
Four plates for my four guinea pigs. This is the final dish sans the caramel sauce, the garnish on the creme fraiche is the tip of a pineapple leaf.
So how did it taste? Beautiful! The pineapple is intense, sweet & buttery. The Fried pastry cream was brilliant & it went so well with the creme fraiche, what a revelation……
My brother tried to eat his plate real slow, to prolong the experience. I still have the other half of the pineapple, I could do this again tomorrow…
G’day!
Second sweet corn post, my previous one was the Sweet Corn & Thyme Risotto , this week I am cooking vegetarian food. This is not new to me, I once as a result of a dare, tried to live as a vegan for two weeks, it was tough initially but I got to appreciate the lifestyle at the end of it. Not having a massive chunk of animal protein on the plate, forces you to become creative about what you eat. I also became a big alfalfa groupie…..
Vegetable puree soups are great because they are delicious and so easy to make, and they normally require few ingredients. This chilled sweet corn soup uses pureed kernels and a stock made from the cobs. Since sweet corn is naturally sweet & creamy, you don’t need too many ingredients or processes to coax or create flavour. This soup is sweet from the corn, creamy & tangy from the lime mascarpone, and has a little heat from the cayenne pepper. The cheddar tuile has a contrasting crunchy texture.
The picture above looks like some extreme risotto porn, I got carried away & zoomed in a bit too close… Anyway it looks great, doesn’t it? The risotto you are looking at is sweet, creamy & also quite sinful. I enriched with mascarpone & butter. It is pseudo vegetarian since I used dairy products, I say this because the dichotomies of vegetarianism is a vast subject. What is 100% vegetarian? Think about it…….
This risotto is made with some of my favourite ingredients, I use fresh thyme in almost all my cooking. Sweet corn is just beautiful so much so, I actually love eating raw sweet corn kernels(my mum thinks that’s weird). As an aside, I like tasting food ingredients in their raw state that way you get to appreciate the transformation that happens during the cooking process. I would not recommend this though, tasting stuff like raw chicken would be foolhardy(i’ve done it hehe). Do it at your own risk & have your health insurance in order just in case.
To make this sweet corn & thyme risotto
Last weekend I was at the Sarit Centre to check out the Egyptian & Middle east expo, the expo was heavily promoted on TV & curiosity on my part led me to check it out. What a waste of time it was, the stuff on sale was lots of kitschy junk in my opinion. I was in & out of the expo in less than 10 minutes. After the expo, I went to Uchumi to do some grocery shopping nothing spectacular, except that the deli had some fresh & great looking Tilapia fillets. I grabbed myself four fillets.
My brother & I decided we were going batter & fry the tilapia, and also have along with it some thyme scented oven chips & a little parsley salad. To make the batter we incorporated whipped egg whites to the usual flour,water & ice cubes. We didn’t use any beer. The egg whites idea came from recipes I had seen on the interwebs. The idea is to whip the egg whites to stiff peaks then fold them into your batter. Quite impressed with the results, especially the very crisp light crust. During frying the batter swells spectacularly when it comes into contact with the hot oil. The heat in the oil causes the air bubbles in the batter(from the whipped egg whites) to expand. Expansion is explained by Charles Law , cooking has some great science behind it. For the chips I prepped them using the method in my egg & chips post
I don’t have a specific recipe for the batter, I just used instinct & sight to obtain the right consistency, then added whipped egg whites from two eggs. Next time I’ll try this with a beer batter, until then…… have great day/night.
Just wanted to share this amazing banana bread I made today. I got the recipe,from joyofbaking.com, this is my favourite banana bread recipe. Try it out, its great.
This was my first crack at cooking from the Alinea cookbook. Flipping through this massive book with beautiful food porn(photographs), I am filled with a sense of awe. This is not every day cooking, Grant Achatz & his team are really pushing cooking as we know further. by the way he writes a great column here.
Back to me flipping the book, I was searching for easy recipes to start with, most recipes in the book require a massive mise en place(ingredients).
The liquefied Caramel popcorn was just popcorn, sugar, salt, butter, water & soy lecithin(which I didn’t have). It is so easy to make, the only part where i tripped up was the caramel froth that was supposed to go on top of the liquefied popcorn. According to the recipe, I was supposed to make caramel from sugar, water & simple syrup, which I did. After that was adding soy lecithin & blending the caramel with an immersion blender to aerate it and create a wonderful froth. Well I failed, I had no soy lecithin(which helps stablise foams) & used a regular blender which resulted in no froth.
Anyhoo, my first sip of the liquefied popcorn had me doing cartwheels in the kitchen, this really popped in my mouth. It is sweet, salty, buttery & popcorny at the same time…. Oh my! It rocked. I know you are reading this & can’t share in my excitement or think i’m insane.
So how is it done, since I followed Grant’s recipe in the book verbatim, I can’t reproduce it here. But i’ll run down what I did.
That is it, back to scouring the alinea book for more stuff to try…..
This lovely soup is about all the peas you use, so taste the peas raw before deciding if you want to use them to make the soup. Tasting will also help you decide if you want to tweak the sweetness with some sugar. The method I used to prep this soup is loosely based Thomas Keller’s english pea puree & his big pot blanching technique, which are found in his French Laundry cookbook.
Great soup for a sunny day, it is very sweet & refreshing…
No precise measurements needed to make this soup, just go with your taste & instincts,
08 Apr 2009 at 23:31
Kiplagat
French Lessons by Justin North, La Technique by Jacques Pepin, Random Recipe
Sometime last year I had lunch at Caveau a great little restaurant in Wollongong. Head chef at Caveau is Peter Sheppard, a protege of Liam Tomlin. Anyway, the lunch special on that day was a chicken ballontine with potato puree, mushrooms, buttered spinach & cepe(porcini) sauce. The chicken was cooked perfectly, I am still trying to work on my chicken doness radar, my chicken is always seems overdone. The chicken at caveau was the best I’ve had in a while, it actually took me back to the roast chickens from Kenchic outlets in the 80′s. Back in those days Kenchic roast chickens were done so well, plus the chickens here in Kenya still tasted like chicken.
Below is what the Caveau meal looked like done by a real pro. The spinach was buttery beautiful, chicken was amazing, those two little button mushroom pieces were amazing. Can’t remember what the cepe tasted like though…
Ok back to my cooking
Flipping through Jacques Pepin La Techique, I found the technique on how to debone half a chicken to make a small ballotine. Deboning was lots of fun, it took me a while(5 mins, pro’s would do it in seconds), just make sure you have a really sharp knife, with a sharp knife you won’t hurt yourself plus you will cut through the chicken like you are cutting soft butter.
The stuffing in the ballotine is just the thigh & leg meat diced up with a little cream, coriander, salt & white pepper. Mushrooms & spinach would also be great as stuffing along with the diced chicken.
In this dish also I incorporated a carrot jus, the recipe was from Justin North’s French Lessons. I have been looking at this jus recipe for a while, just could not figure what it would taste like. Maybe just like carrots, sometimes I expect some uber-new taste experience, but I have come to appreciate when something simple just tastes like what it is. This jus is so simple, its just carrots, bit of thyme, salt, pepper,butter & water. Treat this ingredients with care & you have something beautiful. In his book Justin recommends this jus to be served with roast poultry, meats or even as salad dressing.
Brownies are supposed to be easy to make but the three brownies I have had recently at different cafes here in Nairobi have not done it for me. First one was very dry but very buttery(a good thing for me! hehe), second was dry with almost no chocolate, & third was a dry brick. I was thinking of naming the cafes but though against it, Nairobi is too small. I don’t need enemies now.
I like my brownies really gooey & fudge like, with intense chocolate flavour. I really love chocolate, but I will not admit it in public. Imagine a thirty something African male chocaholic, not likely.
Anyway, so instead of whinging about other people’s brownies, I just made my own.
My brownie is real easy to make, you should try it;
