Collin's Treat: Warning, This Post Contains Lots Of Raw Meat AND A Cooked Meat Update

As I write this, I'm sitting with my feet up while Collin Murray makes me dinner. This is not an everyday occurrence and so it is quite a treat. We are having steak that's been aged for 28 days (he cut the mold off at work so I didn't have to see it -- I know this sounds gross but trust me, aging the steaks like this makes for a much more flavorful and tender final product) and will be sauced with a sherry glaze, creamy polenta that Collin Murray has been whisking for about a half an hour, potatoes confit (which he is make by poaching fingerling potatoes in garlic oil...ahhh yum!) and I think at some point I have to make a salad but I think I can handle contributing that. Doesn't that sound delicious?! And all in my own apartment. I'm a pretty lucky girl and if this lucky girl remembers before she eats up her whole plate, I will take a picture. Until then, here is a couple of pictures of the steak. Isn't she a beauty? She's making the apartment smoke so much we disconnected the smoke detector but she's going to taste wonderful.





UPDATE:

Here is the finished result. It was so good that I just may marry him!

A Day At The Greenmarket

Today Collin Murray and I went to the Union Square Greenmarket with the idea of merely strolling through to check out the products and we ended up spending a few hours there enjoying all the exciting new fresh food that is coming into season. So instead of telling you about what we saw, I took my camera along and am going to let you see it for yourselves. And as a disclaimer, it is a shame that blogger.com will only let me share five photos with you because we saw some amazing stuff, I can't wait for all the summer fruit to arrive...


Purple "green" onions or Purple Scallions -- how cool are they?


Box o' pears


Raw horseradish


Carrots in a pretty light


Oh yeah, they have flowers too!

Two Tarts For The Road

We made some very pretty and very tasty tarts today, one savory and one sweet. Seeing as we had made a lot of the ingredients before hand, there is not a whole lot to relay to y'all about the preparation of the tarts but I will do my best. The first tart we made was called Pizza Rustica and it is basically a big 'ol pan lined with dough and filled with a mixture of ricotta, mozzarella and pecorino cheeses, parsley, proscuitto and salami, eggs and salt and pepper. The tart is about three inches deep and is very delicious and very rich. We made the Pizza Rustica, which the chef called Yum-Yum Pizza Rustica, with the pasta frolla dough that we had put together earlier in the week. The pasta frolla had a lot of sugar in it which you can really taste in the finished product and which I would probably change if I made the Rustica again but the filling is super delicious.


Pizza Rustica

We also used the pate sucree and the frangipane that we made earlier this week to make fruit and frangipane tarts which were an exercise in zen baking. I must say that one can become very calm while methodically placing raspberries onto a frangipane tart. Once the tarts had baked we glazed them with the apricot glaze and then divided them among the classmates. Everyone had their choice as to what kind of fruit and what kind of frangipane to use and I chose my combination because I thought the flavors naturally went well together. I think the end result is very tasty and rather lovely too.


Pre-baked tart


Fresh from the oven tart


Slice of tart

The Tarts Are In Town!

I spent a lot of time eating, cutting and arranging fruit today because we used our pate brisee to make fruit tarts. Spring is the perfect season for fruit tarts because there is just so much fresh fruit available to decorate with and the tarts just look like spring with all their bright colors. To make the tarts, we rolled out the dough and placed it in our tart pans, blind baked the dough, waited for it to cool and then filled the finished tarts with pastry cream and placed the fruit jewelery on top. The tarts were glazed with an apricot jelly that was heated just to give them a bit of protection and a lovely bit of sparkle and shine. I personally think that the tarts are just lovely when finished because like the sfogliatelle, they are just one of those things that you see in bakeries all the time and you think you would never be able to make them, but then you make them and they are pretty but the fact that you have baked them makes them even lovelier.


My fresh fruit tart


My tart, ready for its close-up


A selection of the tarts that my classmates and I made -- do you see mine?

As I said, we made pastry cream today too but we also made curd tarts, orange, lemon and lime, topped them with meringue and baked them to brown their little tops. The curd tarts were very cute but I definitely need work on rolling a little because mine did not come out with very high sides. As you will see in the photo, the side kind of shrunk and so the curd is having a little bit of an issue with being contained. Oh well though, it was my first tart and I'm sure with practice, which I know Collin Murray won't mind, my tarts with get better.


One of my wee lemon tarts



Tiny Tart Tins just because they are pretty

Sfogliatelle, Cannoli, Pate Sablee, Pate Brise, Pasta Frolla, Orange Curd AND Frangipane -- No Wonder I'm Tired!

Dear faithful blog readers...So sorry to have been absent these past couple days; I was feeling a little under the weather and believe it or not, this blog is a lot of work so I was trying to put a little more effort into resting and less into blogging. So sorry for the absence.

The past couple days at school have been full of little pastries and pie and tart doughs. Yesterday we made a fancy-pants Italian pastries called sfogliatelle (my Italian friend informed me that you say this s-fog-la-tell) and it was a rather intensive process. We used a pasta machine and made the dough paper thin, covered it with butter AND lard and then stretched the dough and rolled it into a fat lard-soaked log. We then cut the log into pieces and used our hands to make little baskets or nests (apparently sfogliatelle means little nests in Italian) that we then filled with a ricotta, sugar, candied orange and cinnamon filling. Then we baked the sfogliatelle and all the rolling that we did looked like little lifted layers when they came out of the oven. Collin Murray loved these when they were warm because they were quite soft, but when they cooled, the were rather crunchy. Still, they were beautiful and I cannot believe that I actually made them because they look so fancy.


This is a bad picture but the best one I had of the log after it was cut. All the layers in the dough are from us rolling it up. We took these little disks and used our fingers to push them into little cone shapes that we then filled with the ricotta filling.


When we baked the sfogliatelle, they puffed up and looked very purty


Lots of little sfogliatelles -- Look at all the layers!

We also made cannoli yesterday and they were very picky and fickle. The cannoli dough was rolled with the pasta machine until very thin and then cut with cookie cutters and rolled over cannoli tubes (basically just little metal tubes). The tubes were then deep-fried and when they cooled, we filled them with a ricotta, sugar, cinnamon, candied oranges and chocolate. The reason that they were fickle is that the dough had to be rolled paper thin but it was a very flimsy dough so it was hard to get it just right and also, it was difficult to know when they were done frying because you wanted them to be cooked through but not overdone and it was a balance that our group just didn't quite master.


My three best cannoli -- one is dipped in chopped pistachios, one in chocolate and one in candied orange rind just for decoration


A close-up of the orange-rind cannoli

Today we made three types of dough for pies and tarts -- pasta frolla, pate brise and pate sablee. We also made orange curd which was very tasty and deserving of its own blog post because it was also very easy and something that I think everyone could easily learn. We also made pistachio frangipane. I'm not entirely sure what frangipane is yet. Chef said that it can be used to make tarts as a filling but it can also be used as a dough itself. We shall see. Other people made almond frangipane or walnut but our pistachio one, that you will likely see tomorrow, was tasty and had a really pretty pale green color.

So tomorrow, though I'm not entirely sure, I think we are going to be working on fruit tarts. Whatever it is though, it's not bread and for that I am very thankful because the carb intoxication was taking its tole on Collin Murray and I.

Three Tarts

Since it was such a hot day yesterday (and today too for that matter) I figured that the best thing we could do was to eat an ice cream sandwich to cool down. Earlier in the week I had received an email from a website that covers foodie events in New York called Tasting Table that there was a promotion at a little bakery in our neighbourhood. The bakery is called Three Tarts and the promotion was a buy one, get one free ice cream sandwich -- how perfect! Of course when I saw the bakery and its location, I decided to check out their website and that is when I learned that Three Tarts is actually owned and operated by three women who graduated from the same culinary school that I will one day. I find it really neat and also even though it is corny to admit this, a little inspiring to see people who are graduates from the school to be out in the real world with very successful businesses. It gives me hope.

Since it was so close, Collin Murray and I had to go for a visit to Three Tarts, how could we not? We both had an ice cream sandwich, mine was predictably chocolate and caramel and Collin's was lemon and lavender and they melted/were eaten before I could take a picture, so sorry. We also tried a few of the other offerings there like a praline and chocolate confection, a hibiscus tart, a couple of truffles (the earl grey tea was our favorite), a yuzu marshmallow that made Collin's eyes all googly it was so good and a few cookies. Now before you gasp at our over-indulgence, all the offerings were pint-sized or as my Mama would say, they were all 'very cute and very sweet'. They were delicious and uniformly perfect and so tiny I wanted to pinch their non-existent cheeks. They were presented in a glass case like art, were not that expensive (hence our ability to purchase so many treats to taste) and the sales boy who helped us was so friendly and knowledgeable that even if the sweets tasted bad I probably would still go back.

Here are a few of the little nuggets that we tasted:


Sesame Truffle -- not sure I liked the sesame flavor but they sure are purty.


Raspberry Linzer cookie that Collin Murray said was just ok. We found that we liked the cookies the least out of all that we tried but they were so beautiful that it was hard to be too critical


Chocolate Praline Mound -- the initial taste was so-so but the after taste was good


A hibiscus tart with a floating meringue top


Three Tarts has a lot of gluten free items and this is one of them, a coconut macaroon dipped in chocolate

Easiest Ice Cream On A Hot Day

So I'm not gonna lie, I didn't make this ice cream today but I did eat it today so maybe that means it can still count as a blog entry for today...right? It was so hot today that I can't even tell y'all. It is May 1st and it was about 30C out. All I can say is that I am going to be in serious trouble in August and thank God for Dad and Pat negotiating an air conditioner into the apartment lease and thank God I had the sense to buy an ice cream maker.

Ice Cream is expensive. I mean really, it is expensive! At $6.99 per tub for low fat ice cream, the thought struck me that I should really be a little bit better about making my own. Not only does it taste better but in the long run, it is a lot cheaper. At home I have a cookbook, a wonderful cookbook, called The Perfect Scoop. The book is by a man named David Lebovitz who is a pastry chef that lives in Paris and has actually written several books. Since I am a cookbook lover I am rather critical of books and I am critical of Mr. Lebovitz's book too. He chats too much about nothing and his voice annoys me a little but his recipes are outstanding. In the book there is variety in technique, flavor and skill and despite the criticism, it is always the book that I recommend for ice cream.

In The Perfect Scoop, there is a recipe for Philadelphia-Style Vanilla Ice Cream. This ice cream is va-va-vanilla and so if you are more of a va-vanilla, feel free to decrease the amount of extract or bean in the recipe. I used to make this ice cream for tastings at Williams Sonoma back in the days when the store didn't sell its own ice cream starter and it was a favorite of one of my favorite managers, Margie Marg (Hi Marg!). She liked super-intense vanilla flavor and as I said before, this recipe easily delivers in both vanilla flavor and also in ease of making. I'm not even sure I want to say how easy it is to make because then Collin will think that I didn't slave over the ice cream maker for hours! However, it is easy. Really easy. I will provide the recipe below with a couple of changes that I've made and I hope you try it and enjoy it on a hot day.

THE PERFECT SCOOP'S PHILADELPHIA-STYLE VANILLA ICE CREAM (adapted)

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk (I use skim with no problem, use what you have in the fridge)
3/4 cup granulated sugar (if you don't like a really sweet ice cream, I'm sure you could decrease this a little bit without too much of a problem)
1 vanilla bean (I used half a bean because they are darn expensive to waste a whole one on ice cream!)
1 teaspoon good vanilla extract*
1 tiny pinch of salt (this helps bring out the vanilla flavor)


In a saucepan, combine one cup of the heavy cream, all the sugar, the pinch of salt and the vanilla bean (assuming that you are using one at all -- you don't have to, you know!). Warm the mixture until the sugar has dissolved, it should take just a few minutes on medium heat. When the sugar is dissolved, add the other cup of cream, the milk and the vanilla extract and chill the mixture in the fridge till Very cold (I chilled it in the fridge for an hour and in the freezer for a half an hour -- just make sure it is super cold for the next step even if it means allowing the mixture to chill overnight). Now when the mixture is cold, simply pour it into an ice cream maker through a strainer to get rid of and vanilla bits and freeze according to your ice cream makers directions. It is really that easy. Remember that you can add in fresh fruit or caramel or cookie crumbs, anything your heart desires into the ice cream maker during the last minute or two of churning.


*As a note, don't add the vanilla before the recipe says just for convenience. The reason that it is added after the cream and sugar is warmed is because warming the vanilla would cause the alcohol and thus the flavor, to be eliminated from the mixture because alcohol evaporates when heated...just a tip from pastry school that blew my mind when I first heard it!


I served the ice cream with the strawberry rhurbarb compote that you may remember from a previous post and it was just delicious.