Olive Oil-Almond Cake

I chose this recipe for March because I like to bake and because it had a couple of ingredients that I was somewhat skeptical of: olive oil and buckwheat flour.

I know people everywhere have been making olive-oil based cakes for a while now, but my butter-based prejudices told me, "That's just weird. Nothing is as good as baked goods made with butter." I was worried about an olive-y aftertaste and that kind of greasy moistness I don't care for in a cake.

Buckwheat flour was also a hard sell for me. I remember loving the Aunt Jemima buckwheat pancakes my dad used to make us on weekends, but somewhere in the meantime I tried and hated kasha (buckwheat groats), and from then on I have associated buckwheat with bitter and rancid. Still, I do eat and enjoy buckwheat crêpes on a regular basis: in France, all savory crêpes are made with buckwheat flour. Therefore, this was an easy ingredient to procure.

OK, enough whining now. The cake comes together very easily: you just whip eggs (with baking powder at this stage because I'm weird), add sugar and oil and flavorings, and whip some more. Then come flour, buckwheat flour, and ground almonds (another easy ingredient to find). And you're pretty much done. I used some ground almonds to coat my pan for an extra almond kick.

While the cake was baking, I made some vanilla crème fraîche, since it's more available and less expensive (and slightly less rich) than mascarpone. Only mascarpone can make crème fraîche look like diet food in comparison.

This is the innards of half a vanilla bean: even though I have a whole bunch in my spice drawer, I'm still a vanilla bean miser. It was plenty to speckle the cream and make it delicious.

And here's the finished product, served with strawberries macerated in vanilla sugar (thus the dark specks) to celebrate the arrival of spring and our two guests, Bob from Pontlevoy and Katrin, an exchange student from Germany.

Did this cake win me over? I certainly liked it. I tried it by itself (not bad), with the cream (better), and with the strawberries and cream (my favorite). I didn't get a strong sense of either the olive oil or the buckwheat, since the orange and almond flavors dominate. There was no ranting and raving at the dinner table, but people seemed to have no problem putting away the cake, either. So I would say this recipe is a great "backdrop" cake: easy to put together and serve with seasonal fruit. 

Spicy Black Beans with Chorizo

 When Alicia chose this recipe, I was happy because I love black beans and rice. So easy, so cheap, so yummy. I just had a couple of hurdles to overcome.

Hurdle one: black beans. They're quite hard to find here. I asked my dried fruit/nuts/beans/rice guy at the market if he ever had black beans, and he shrugged, "I could paint some white beans for you, Madame." Uh, no.
Then I remembered that black beans are popular in Portuguese/Brazilian cuisine and that there is a Portuguese grocery in Saint Germain. Score! I had a lovely conversation with the store owner, who asked me if I was making feijoada. Um, no--not quite so many pork products in this dish. I described the dish to her, telling her that it was fairly common to eat black beans in the US. "Oh, look!" she told me. "These beans are from the US!" So much for eating local. I cooked up a bunch in my new pressure cooker early in the week and had them ready to go. Except we had eaten too many with our tacos the night before, so I had to supplement with canned kidney beans. The best-laid plans...

Hurdle two: the jalapeño. This one was my fault. It's not that hard to get hot peppers here, but I didn't buy any at the store because I was sure I had one in my produce drawer. I had one, all right, but when I pulled it out, it was definitely not fit for eating. I therefore decided to sacrifice a can of Hatch chiles that a friend from New Mexico had brought. The can says "hot", but they really aren't.

Finding cured chorizo, on the other hand, was a piece of cake. The French love to eat slices of chorizo and other cured meat as a snack with pre-dinner drinks.  I got the chorizo "fort", which would be strong or spicy, but it wasn't really. Seeing a non-spicy trend here?

 The recipe comes together easily from here: sauté sausage and vegetables, add spices and beans, simmer.

For the full experience, you need to also cook rice and fry some eggs. I am a terrible egg fryer, I must say. It's so hard for me to get the temperature just right so that the yolk is runny but the white isn't. Any tips?

And here's the whole shebang, plated and ready to eat. I forgot to add the hot sauce to the beans themselves, but we slathered it on afterwards (Trader Joe's Chili Pepper Sauce. Highly recommended).

There was nothing wrong with this--it's black beans and rice with an egg on top, for crying out loud!--but it didn't make a big impression, either. My favorite black bean recipe involves tomato juice, and I think I was missing that bit of liquid and acidity. Some lime juice might have punched this up a bit, or more chile. And when I dig into the leftovers for lunch very soon, I will experiment with some of those additions.

Kate's Impossibly Fudgy Brownies

 This weekend we had a special guest baker: Claire, who wanted a reward for cleaning her room. So before the rest of us left the house to dutifully visit the in-laws, I put this recipe in front of her and told her she could make it. I only got one phone call to clarify where the cocoa powder was, but apparently the rest was easy. As Claire puts it, "How can anyone be a bad cook if they have good recipes?"

So since Claire was the actual baker, I thought I'd interview her about the process:
Was there anything about the ingredients or the process that you thought was unusual or confusing?

I wasn't sure about the difference between kosher and Malden salt. (Yes, I have way too many types of salt.)
Was there anything difficult about making this recipe?
It was hard to chop the huge block of unsweetened chocolate. And I couldn't stop myself from eating the little pieces of chocolate, even though they were disgusting. And it was hard to fold in the flour. It all clumped at the bottom of the bowl.
What did you learn from making this recipe?
Brownies are delicious. Unsweetened chocolate makes you want to wash your mouth out.
Would you make this recipe again? If so, would you make any changes?
I would put in more chile because you can't really taste it. Also, I would use a tiny bit less butter. They're a bit greasy on the bottom.
What would you like to say about these brownies?
They're the best brownies I've ever had. They really are impossibly fudgy. They taste like ice cream topping: the good kind. And you can get away with eating it straight. (They do taste really good with ice cream.)

I'm with Claire: these are some fabulous, fudgy brownies. I notice the chile, but just barely. The one thing that kind of bothers me about them is some graininess: whether from the salt or the sugar, I'm not sure. But don't get me wrong: this did not stop up from polishing off these babies in record time. I would definitely make this one again.

Baked Stuffed Potatoes with Corned Beef/Pâté

 I noticed on the jacket of the cookbook that among Melissa Clark's works are both The Deen Family Cookbook and The Skinny: How to Fit into Your Little Black Dress Forever. Hmmmm. To me, this recipe belongs more in the former category than the latter, especially the pâté version I made. At least I didn't use rillettes, which is basically shredded meat (at my butcher's, it's goose) preserved in its own fat. And it's true that these potatoes are not deep-fried.
Corned beef, which would have been leaner, is a speciality product only available from Jewish butchers here in France (as far as I know). I had planned a trip to Paris to buy corned beef and stock up on cocoa for brownies, but instead I went to a meeting. Much less productive.

But what the heck. I decided that pâté (this was actually a "terrine au beaujolais") was the perfect locavore solution: my butcher's wife makes it. The recipe is basically a main-dish stuffed baked potato. You bake the potato after rubbing it in salt (a technique I hadn't tried before and was very pleased with, since I'm a potato-skin lover), and then you mash the flesh with butter, some herbs (I have a family of dill haters, so I went with my favorite herb blend) and some processed meat product (while listening to NPR tell you that processed meat will kill you. But they were talking about hot dogs, not "house-made" pâté. Right?). Then you pile that delicious mess into the potato skins, top with cheese (I used some leftover sheep cheese I had from our mountain trip), and throw them back into the oven or under the broiler until the cheese has melted/browned. I made a vegetarian version for Julia that involved sautéed mushrooms, and she loved it, even though she's not a big fan of the baked potato.

I served this with the Crispy Roasted Cabbage, which as you see was very crispy this time. Perhaps too much so. I believe the secret was that I used only one small head of cabbage for a large baking sheet, so it crisped rather than steamed. Only Julia and I ate the cabbage, which is fairly par for the course.

I was completely skeptical about the idea of putting pâté in a baked potato, but I really enjoyed it. In fact, I think I like pâté better in a baked potato than on bread. Heresy! The rest of the family enjoyed it as well: once again, no leftovers. I think if I did it again with pâté, I would add a bit of whole-grain mustard. But I'd love to try this with corned beef, because I do love corned beef. Someday.

Chile-Coconut Short Ribs

When we returned from vacation last weekend, we had those post-vacation I-have-to-go-back-to-work/school blues. What better remedy than some comfort food in the form of braised beef in a tangy, spicy sauce?

So I went shopping for a few things: see my extremely fatty short ribs. My butcher asked me what I wanted to do with them, but I didn't want to shock him with the chile-coconut thing. Also, I'm not sure my French is up to describing this recipe. Especially considering that every time I order from the man, he screws up his face in intense concentration to understand what the crazy American lady wants now. Anyway, I just let him believe I was going to use the short ribs for a pot-au-feu or beef soup. That's why he gave me the marrow bone to the right: "to make the sauce more unctuous". Let me just say there was a lot of trimming involved, both before and after cooking.

And there is the cubed, trimmed meat (and marrow bone) in the pot with all the yummy aromatics: ginger, garlic, chile, lime. I only put in the juice and zest of one lime at the beginning of the cooking time, and I finished with the second lime when the meat was done. I think that freshened up the flavor. I also used a fat separator to degrease the sauce--it really needed it. Melissa may say that there's lots of "good fat" there, but I would like to respectfully disagree on that point.

I considered making the coconut rice and peas to go with the stew, as Melissa suggests, but that seemed like too much coconut for one meal. So I just made brown rice with peas. Claire objected to the rice being brown, but it was otherwise a nice accompaniment.

The verdict? The three of us who eat meat loved this. Once the meat was removed from the fat, it was fall-apart tender and delicious. And the sauce was just the right balance of spicy and tangy and sweet/creamy. There was none left after I had, ahem, cleaned the kitchen. It was a great way to ease back into the real world.

Gingery Split Pea Soup

Let me begin this post with a travel tip: if you're leaving for a week-long trip to a fabulous mountainside apartment, you probably shouldn't pack your things at 5 AM with a raging fever. You'll probably forget a lot of random things, like sunscreen and long underwear and sharp knives. All this to say that although I cooked this soup in idyllic conditions (above is the view from the apartment we were loaned for the week), the cooking conditions were not exactly ideal.

If you've ever cooked in a vacation apartment, you'll know that the equipment furnished is generally sketchy at best. Dull knives are a given, and things like graters and peelers don't always exist. But I had remembered my cookbook and a bunch of important ingredients (though I also forgot a few), and I was determined to cook the soup and stay on schedule.

 So the vegetables got an, ahem, rough chop. This was kind of a problem for the ginger. I had brought my remaining red lentils, but they weren't enough. The minimart at the ski village where we were staying didn't stock split peas, but the kitchen we were staying in had green lentils, so I threw them in. And I had forgotten to bring rosemary and bay leaf, so I threw in some herbes de provence. Close enough, right? And I used a bouillon cube because it was there.

But check it out--I cooked the soup in a pressure cooker--probably one from the 70s. It scared me, but it did not in fact explode, and the soup cooked really quickly--by the time I had cleaned the kitchen and set the table, the soup was done. Such is also the nature of the vacation home kitchen--sometimes you have a pleasant surprise.

It was kind of fun to cook in this tiny kitchen, with the two-burner stove and tiny fridge and toaster oven. It was very similar to the kitchen I cooked in when I was a college student in Germany. Except I had better knives even back then.

And the soup? Well, it all got eaten--I'm beginning to really appreciate that about Melissa Clark's recipes. But no-one really went crazy over it. The ginger didn't get chopped finely enough (yes, that's the blame-avoiding passive right there), and so it dominated a bit much for my taste. The rosemary would have added a nice touch,  and I also think I would have liked the soup better with split peas. I guess to summarize, I wasn't thrilled with the soup as I made it, but I believe the soup as it was originally conceived would be really good. I'll have to try it again now that I once again have a clear head and a well-equipped kitchen.