tomato_kumato

I know that most people celebrate Halloween with candy… so how in the world did I end up spending my holiday with pasta, cupcakes and Britney Spears? I suppose I should begin at the beginning.

After a “tiring” shopping trip (tiring to the Canadian… I like wandering down the Champs Elysées), we headed back home. I went straight to the kitchen, where I had planned to bake some Belgian Brownies (love this recipe!) and some Chocolate Orange Muffins with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting, from slashfood. I had just started melting the chocolate over the double boiler when the Canadian called out, “You hungry?”

Of course, this doesn’t mean, “are you hungry,” but rather, “I’m hungry. Please feed me.” Because we were drinking that night (and also a little bit because I was already devoting all of my energy to melting chocolate), I suggested pasta. Directly after this, I remembered that a) we had finished all of the jarred pesto, b) I hadn’t replaced the parmesan cheese and c) the vat of tomato sauce I froze was frozen into the fridge and would need to be removed on a rainy day when I had a hammer and chisel. I did, however, have some tomato paste, tomatoes, and a recipe for Quick Tomato-Cream Sauce that was also on my list of things to try from Under the Tuscan Sun. Bingo.

This was one of the best tomato sauces I’ve ever tried, and it was really easy. My only qualm, as you can probably tell from the pictures, is that I made too much pasta and not enough sauce.

Once we ate the pasta, I still had cupcakes to bake. I made the Belgian Brownies no problem: this is one of the easiest recipes in the world and one of my favorites… and I don’t even like chocolate! But I had also wanted to make the Chocolate Orange Cupcakes… seeing as it was Halloween. One problem: no cream cheese. I decided to sub mascarpone, but in the end, the frosting was looking a little funny. I put it in the fridge, hoping that chilling it would help, and continued getting ready for our Halloween party. When my friends got there, I hadn’t had time to frost them, so I left them in the kitchen and just brought out the Belgian Brownies. However, they disappeared rather fast, and my friend Emese found and delivered the Orange-Chocolate Cupcake stash. And you know what? They were good even without the frosting. The mix of chocolate and orange is delicious, as always, and the crumb was dense. They were sweet without being cloying, and basically, just good. Sure, it looked very pretty on the slashfood site, but sometimes you just can’t make everything look pretty.

(The flatter ones are Belgian Brownies, the kind of bulbous ones are the cupcakes.)

Oh… and Britney? That was Emese:

Quick-Tomato Cream Sauce from Under the Tuscan Sun

Cook 4 or 5 slices of pancetta, drain on paper towels, then crumble and set aside. Chop 2 medium onions and 2 or 3 cloves of garlic and sauté in the pork fat for 5 minutes. Chop and add 1 large red pepper and 4 or 5 whole tomatoes from a can. Season with salt and pepper and cook 5 minutes more. Stir in 1/2 cup of creme fraîche and another 3/4 cup of canned tomatoes with juice. Add a spoonful or so of the pasta water to the sauce. Stir the pancetta into the sauce at the last minute to retain crispness. Cook and drain enough pasta for 4. Mix the pasta with half the sauce; serve the rest of the sauce over the pasta.

Wow… this Magazine Monday thing is not off to a good start for me. It’s because of midterms, but I know that’s no excuse… I’ve been pretty lazy with the book reviews too. Oh well… hopefully I can get back on track soon.

Anyway, two days late, my first Magazine Monday, which is really a blog (I told myself I could use blog recipes as well, because I have just as many recipes to try from y’all as I do from magazines.)

This one comes from Stephen Cooks, one of my favorite sites for food porn. I made these Espresso “Mayan” Cookies last week… but I think I did something wrong. The flavor was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but the texture left something to be desired, and mine didn’t look like Stephen’s. I tried some the next day, and they had softened a bit, which I liked. This one’s going to need a little bit of tinkering, because I loved the flavors… maybe I’ll try for something that rises a little bit more…

At any rate, the newspaper staff loved them, and when the Planet staff is happy, I’m happy.

I stumbled across The Wednesday Chef very recently, and I immediately became obsessed with Luisa’s recipes. She gets them from the New York and LA Times’ food sections, which appear on Wednesdays. I love that she even posts recipes that didn’t work out… sometimes I feel as though my fellow food bloggers prepare perfect and effortless food every day, but Luisa reminds me (not often, mind you) that not every recipe turns out exactly the way you planned.
Yesterday, I decided, like her, to try my hand at one of the recipes piling up in my recipe box, and what I tried were these: le Pain Quotidien’s Belgian Brownies. The recipe was perfect as-is, so I won’t post it here, but it’s over at her site if you want to copy it so get over there and copy it. Now. I brought a box of them in to the newspaper office while we did layout yesterday afternoon. There are none left. I only got half of one, but what I got was tender and delicious. The chocolate power is intense, and seeing as these cakes are near flourless, they are very light and moist.

On top of everything, the recipe was ridiculously easy. It’s going into my top five for desserts… I think I’ll get to taste a whole Belgian Brownie yet.

“Festina tarde was a renaissance concept: make haste slowly.”

It’s taken me a long time to get to Under the Tuscan Sun, but it’s not for lack of cooking. On Saturday night, I threw a massive dinner party at my house. I invited ten people, and crafted a perfect menu: apératif of Tomato Bruschetta and Wild Mushroom Crostini, Risotto with Parmeggiano-Reggiano for a starter, and then Under the Tuscan Sun’s Chicken with Lemon and Basil. The dessert was tarte tatin. I spent all day Saturday prepping, making sure that everything would be easy once my guests arrived. I made the tarte dough, precooked my risotto (a restaurant trick I learned while waiting tables), made my salad dressing, tomatoes, and dressing for the chicken, and precooked the mushrooms. I had very little to do once my guests arrived.

… If they arrived. I guess one of the drawbacks of having so many international friends is not being aware of their customs. Example? Apparently, in a lot of South America, it’s considered rude to show up somewhere on time. So while my American friends arrived about ten to fifteen minutes late (like my mother told me, and apparently their mothers told them, you are supposed to do), the others didn’t show up for two hours.

Bear in mind, also, that this is rugby night in France, and France is playing England for a chance in the semifinals. We’ve opened the wine, eaten all the bruschetta, and the five of us have gotten quite tipsy while trying to find a way to watch the game online. When my friends finally arrived, I managed to get everything on the table (I forgot about the salad though), but my chicken didn’t brown the way I wanted to because I’d lost my sense of timing (thank you, Bordeaux), I didn’t have time to take any pictures of the plated dishes, and by the time we’d finished with the risotto and the chicken, we wanted to watch the rugby game, so we abandoned the finished pie in the cold oven and went down to the Champs de Mars.

The French lost, and the next morning I had to wash essentially all the dishes in my house. But later that evening, my friend Emese came by to help me finish the tarte tatin, and as we sat together on my couch, sharing half a pie between us, I realized that this was what I had wanted. Just to haves some friends, even one friend, over to my house, to cook something delicious, and to talk for awhile. I don’t know if I’ve learned how to make haste slowly, but I know that eating that one pie slowly was much more fun than any dinner party could have been.

The Menu:

Tomato Bruschetta

Wild Mushroom Crostini

Risotto with Parmeggiano-Reggiano

Basil and Lemon Chicken

In a large bowl, mix 1/2 cup each of chopped spring onions and basil leaves. Add the juice of one lemon, salt, and pepper. Mix and rub onto 6 chicken pieces (I used chicken thighs) and place in a well-oiled baking pan. Dribble with a little olive oil. Roast, uncovered, at 450 for ten minutes and at 350 for about an additional twenty, depending on the size of the chicken. Garnish with more basil leaves and lemon slices.
Tarte Tatin

“What sort of person am I? Where are my loyalties? And who will I remember when I grow up?”

An interesting note on which to end September. I meant to get through so much more of this book… post some kebab and baklava recipes, and really get into Middle Eastern cooking. I felt a bit like a failure, to be honest. But then I realized as I was rereading this passage in The Language of Baklava what Diana Abu-Jaber wanted us to understand: food is not just nourishment. Not just food for the sake of food. Food is about the rest of your life. Which brings me to this quote.

It’s a scary thing to have to think about. What kind of person am I, really? I project an outward image… I can’t think of anyone who would think of me as a bad person, per se, but I know that there are bad things I do, and more importantly, bad things I think that no one will ever know about but me.

Sometimes I start thinking about choices I’ve made along the way, friends lost but not forgotten. So it’s for them that I post these sambusik cookies. To Diana Abu-Jaber, this is what they meant. I’m hoping they can mean the same for me and for you.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together one cup of clarified butter and half a cup of sugar. Add 3/4 cup of milk at room temperature. Add 4 cups of flour in small batches and knead the dough by hand until it is smooth. Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cookie cutter. Combine 1 1/2 cups of ground walnuts, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and a grating of nutmeg for the filling. Place a good mounded teaspoon of the filling on each round, fold it over, pinch the edges closed, and form into a crescent shape. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned. Remove from the oven and sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar.

As promised… the cupcakes. I made two dozen, but after my friends came over last night, I think I have about six left. These are that good.

I got the recipe from epicurious, and even though some of the reviews said that they were more like muffins than cupcakes, I wanted to try the recipe… one that is probably going to be my last berry recipe of the season *sigh* because of the exorbitant prices that people are trying to get me to pay for berries now.

These were worth it though. Dense and full of blueberries that exploded with every bite and turned the inside of each cupcake a pleasing purple, these cupcakes were a lot of fun to make and to eat. (Plus, I made my own measuring cups! Yep! I don’t have any in France, so I measured out 8 ounces of water to find out how much a cup was. I know it’s approximate, I know I can’t bake bread this way, but the cupcakes turned out fine, and I don’t hear any complaints about the peach muffins from yesterday!)

It’s getting tiring to say “because I’m in France” every time I have to explain why I had to change a recipe, but it’s the truth. We have maple syrup in specialty import stores, but no maple sugar, so I used vanilla sugar. I also used more blueberries than were recommended. Here’s my version of the recipe, but you can get epicurious’ version over there. If anyone tries the real version, let me know how it turns out! Now, I believe I have some cupcakes to finish…