MITCH IN THE KITCHEN

apricot trial and error

“Can I tell you something about apricots? 1 in 30 is a good one. It’s such a low percentage fruit.”
- Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm

I have a hard time appreciating apricots. Unlike most of their stone fruit brethren, they lack the sweet-tart juiciness that makes cherries, peaches, and plums perfectly enjoyable with only a rinse of water as prep work. They’re a little mealy and have (in my opinion) a sort of off-putting pasty texture. The only things I really like about apricots are that 1. they are cute and 2. their pits are super easy to remove. So what did this apricot-disliker do with a dry quart of fresh ones? (I refuse to make jam/preserves.)

Oatmeal Cookies with Fresh Apricots, White Chocolate, and Pecans
I finally busted out my brand new KitchenAid mixer (thank you Diana, Nicole, Pavla, Jake and blog-less Mike) to make these. They weren’t exactly the best cookies I’ve ever made. In fact, they were probably the worst. My head is swimming with ideas why but I’m not ready to blame it on the apricots being fresh rather than dried, because it’s been done. Anyway, the idea of a chewy oatmeal cookie with fruit, white chocolate, and nuts is still a good one, so I am alarmingly determined to get this one right. Get ready for cookies, friends, because I certainly cannot handle that much dessert.

Apricot Clafoutis
Just like gooseberry clafoutis (or a traditional cherry clafoutis) but with pitted apricot halves and flavored with almond and vanilla extracts. Next time: smoother batter!

Apricot and Prosciutto Flatbread
Prosciutto and fruit is always so good. You almost can’t go wrong. The idea for this came from Cooking Light and a cooking blog far more impressive than this one. I pre-baked the crust for a few minutes in a very hot oven, then topped it with ricotta, sliced apricots, and prosciutto and popped it back in the oven for a bit. After that, a sprinkling of salt, pepper, fresh basil, and grated Parmigiano cheese to finish it off. The crust wasn’t (is never, sigh) quite crisp enough on the bottom. I am starting to seriously want a pizza stone but I’m not sure we have room for one (and the wooden paddle board thingy) among all the other cool new stuff in our kitchen. Like that KitchenAid mixer.

leek and gruyere bread

Back in January (which feels like a crazy long time ago), John and I spent a week in San Francisco catching up with old friends and repeatedly overfeeding ourselves at places like Tartine, Bi-Rite, Humphry Slocombe, Chow, and the Mission (yes, the entire neighborhood). During one of our visits to Tartine, I had a slice of a moist, savory olive and ham bready loafy thing, enjoyed it, then returned to the East Coast. Months later, the New York Times told me it was a cake salé (“kek”… c’est drôle), a category of French quick breads that are ultra-portable and go well with summery wines. Um, yes please.

The accompanying New York Times recipe is pretty solid. I used leeks (the white and light green parts from 2 medium ones, chopped and gently browned in a little bit of butter and olive oil) instead of ham, but the combination of cheese and cured meat and onion-tasting things is enough of an excuse to make this again with all three add-ins. I don’t really understand how this stuff is supposed to be shared at picnics (or anywhere, for that matter) because I could easily eat an entire loaf on my own.

peachy biscuit ice cream sandwich

Forget cobbler. Instead of waiting for a dish full of fruit and dough to get all gooey and hot in the oven, I sandwiched some peach slices between leftover buttery breakfast biscuits with homemade honey-bourbon ice cream and a smear of Jocelyn’s tart blueberry jam. Incidentally, this was a break from learning about fat metabolism.

gooseberry clafoutis

Kind of like flan, kind of like a Dutch baby pancake. Clafoutis is a dessert from central France that is traditionally made with sweet cherries, which are in season right now. The batter is eggy and custardy and soft. Best of all, clafoutis is a breeze to make. I didn’t even break a sweat, even with the oven pre-heating.

My CSA cherries were too good to not be savored on their own, so I made use of some tart gooseberries in their place. I also added a bit of St-Germain elderflower liquer, which I love but have too much of, since I am not enough of a master-cocktailer to make fancy beverages with it. Clafoutis can also be made with just about any other kind of berry or sliced fruit (and other liquers and extracts, if you’d like).

recipe:

a bit of butter and a bit of flour
about 1 1/2 cups gooseberries
3 eggs
1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 1/4 cups milk or cream (or a combination of the two)
1/4 cup St-Germain liquer (optional… if you don’t use it, replace with 1/4 cup milk or cream)
1/2 cup flour
powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Butter a 10-inch pie plate, gratin dish, or cake pan. Dust with flour, then shake off the excess that doesn’t stick to the butter.

Whisk eggs in a large bowl until frothy. Blend in sugar and salt, then add milk/cream and liquer. (Or maybe try soaking the gooseberries in St-Germain? I didn’t do this, but it might be a way to temper the tartness of the berries.) Gradually add flour while stirring gently to get everything well blended (there may still be some lumps, which is okay).

Spread gooseberries out evenly in the buttered and floured pan. Pour batter over the berries. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes, or until top is lightly golden and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool, then dust with powdered sugar before serving.

Note: I am eating a cold wedge of this stuff as I write. The leftovers make a decent breakfast.

cream cheese rolls with kiwi jam

I love cinnamon rolls, but I thought I’d improvise and make use of a lonely block of cream cheese whose bagel friends had already been eaten. And it’s like 100 degrees outside, so of course I felt like ripping the battery out of the smoke detector and cranking up the oven.

These little buns weren’t yeasty and gooey the way my favorite cinnamon rolls are. Instead, they were fluffy and biscuit-y and oh god do I love buttermilk in baked goods. A perfect accompaniment to yummy kiwi jam made by Jocelyn, Ashwin, and Hayes.

To make the filling, I combined 8 ounces of cream cheese (softened at room temperature) with 3 tablespoons of sugar, 1/8 teaspoon of salt, and a little bit of lemon zest.

For the dough, I followed this recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (favorite food magazine by the way, thanks Mom!), swapped in my cream cheese filling for the brown sugar cinnamon mixture, and omitted the glaze. I am currently fantasizing about a savory, cheddar-crusted version of these pull-apart rolls. Hang on to your pants people, it’s gonna be good.

cream biscuits

I woke up this rainy Sunday morning and thought, “Let’s make oatmeal for breakfast.” When I discovered that we had only a scant 1/2 cup of steel cut oats left I thought, “Let’s make biscuits for breakfast. And then slather them with butter and honey.” Don’t be fooled by the whole wheat pastry flour; these biscuits are pretty fluffy and fatty (the whole batch has around 1900 calories, around 60 percent of which are from fat) and don’t really need extra butter slathered on top, in my opinion. You could also skip the whole wheat pastry flour and just use 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour.

(recipe adapted from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Cooking)

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour*
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
up to 4 teaspoons sugar (optional. I used 2 teaspoons and the biscuits were just a little bit sweet)
3 to 6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (I find that 3 tablespoons make them plenty rich, and 6 is just too too much)
3/4 cup cream

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Combine flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar in a bowl. Add butter and combine using a pastry blender, until the butter is the size of small peas. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the cream, and pour the rest into the flour and butter mixture. Using a fork, mix just until combined. If the dough isn’t coming together and seems too dry, add a little bit of the reserved cream.

Knead the dough lightly in the bowl until it seems smooth-ish, then put it on a lightly floured cutting board or counter. Roll dough about 3/4-inch thick, then cut into squares or circles (I used a shot glass to make little biscuits). Arrange biscuits on a parchment-lined baking sheet, then brush the tops with reserved cream. Bake for 17 minutes (for my tiny-sized biscuits), or until tops are golden brown.

* Pastry flour contains less gluten (the protein component of wheat) than all-purpose flour. Gluten is what makes things like pizza dough elastic and bread chewy (which is why bread flour is on the other end of the spectrum from pastry flour: it has a higher gluten content than all-purpose flour). Gluten is also the thing in wheat that those with celiac disease react to. Okay fine, I guess I should save this for a wheat post someday.

gingersnaps with lemon ice cream

milkmadeicecream:

Back to that ice cream sandwich idea. Here’s one we whipped up with lemon ice cream and gingersnaps. I love love love the combination of lemon and gingery baked goods (I used to keep a box of Carr’s ginger lemon creme cookies at my desk, and we’d eat these whenever we could in Berkeley). The lemons were grown by a friend in San Diego, and hand-imported in economy class by my personal fruit smuggler. The hardest part about making these is not eating all of the cookies and ice cream before they’re ready to be sandwiched together in perfect harmony.

<00, Mitch

lemon meringue bars

These pretty Meyer lemons are from John’s trip to San Diego last month. They’re a cross between true lemons and some type of orange, so they taste a little sweeter than “regular” lemons. While I’ve made limoncello, hot toddy ice cream, and lemon-shaped lemon pancakes with lemon curd in the past, I thought I’d try something different this time: lemon meringue pie. I used this recipe, which calls for an un-fussy graham cracker crust. Then I put everything in a 9 by 13-inch pan instead of a pie plate and called it “bars” instead of “pie”.

The result? Weepy, under-whipped and under-baked meringue. Sigh. I’ll have to take another shot at this sometime.

gougères

I think I have a new favorite thing to bake. Gougères are a savory pastry made with pâte à choux (the stuff used to make cream puffs and eclairs) and Gruyère cheese. John and I take the “serve fresh out of the oven” instructions very seriously; we can wordlessly polish off a hot tray of these in record time.

This recipe is from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one of several fine cookbooks and food magazine subscriptions I received over the gift-heavy months of December and January.

1 cup water
6 tablespoons of butter (3/4 stick) cut into pieces
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
pinch of nutmeg
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
1 1/4 cups finely shredded Gruyère cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Bring water, butter, and seasonings to a boil in a 1 1/2 or 2-quart heavy-bottomed saucepan. Boil slowly until the butter has melted. Meanwhile, measure out the flour.

Remove water and butter mixture from heat and immediately pour in all the flour at once. Stir vigorously with a wooden spatula or spoon for several seconds to blend thoroughly. Beat over moderately high heat for 1 to 2 minutes until mixture leaves the sides of the pan and the spoon, forms a mass, and begins to film the bottom of the pan.

Remove saucepan from heat and make a well in the center of the paste with your spoon. Immediately break an egg into the center of the well. Beat it into the paste for several seconds until it has absorbed. Repeat with the rest of the eggs, mixing in one at a time until the paste is well blended and smooth. Mix in 3/4 cup of the cheese.

Scoop small spoonfuls of the paste (about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter) about 2 inches apart from each other on baking sheets (you’ll probably need 2). Top gougères with remaining 1/2 cup of cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until puffs are golden brown and have doubled in size.

Remove from the oven, and pierce each gougère with a small knife. I think this is supposed to let steam escape so that the puffs don’t get all soggy. Set in the turned-off oven and leave the door ajar for 10 minutes. I don’t know what this last part does or how necessary it is, but I had the patience to do what Julia Child instructs, and the result was good. Then stuff your face with these delicious little things.

Instant update from Miguel D:

if you want to do it up one step, after piercing and setting, fill each gougere with uber-decadent sauce meuniere or bechamel, or even just any simple white cheese sauce.

ham and cheddar drop biscuits

I meant to post this from home (The Nut, CA), but realized too late that my parents do not have photo software that can convert raw image files. For me, the holidays are a chance to escape to blindingly sunny southern California, say hi to my very large extended family, and drink beer in a high school friend’s garage. Every year, my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. (and this year, future in-laws!) all come over on Christmas Eve. It’s a pot luck, more or less, with everything from Chinese noodle dishes to pastries from a local Cuban bakery to yellow chicken curry. My mom always makes her famous spare ribs, and I usually pull something together at the last minute (while causing my mom to fret that her only child, now 27, still has no grasp of time management). Along with fresh guacamole, I whipped up some bite-sized savory biscuits. They taste excellent fresh out of the oven (but that didn’t stop me from eating all the stale leftovers for breakfast the next day).

makes about 60 (if I remember correctly)

1 cup butter (2 sticks), very cold
3 1/2 cups flour
1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 cups milk
4 oz ham, diced
8 oz cheddar cheese, shredded or diced

Combine flour with baking powder, salt, and pepper. Cut butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender until the granules are the size of small peas. Add milk and stir just until combined. Gently fold in ham and cheese.

Scoop by the tablespoon-ful onto a parchment or foil-lined baking sheet. Bake at 425 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes, or until biscuits turn lightly golden.