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November 30, 2008
desserts
This lemon-ricotta cheesecake just looks really tasty. Made pecan pie for thanksgiving. With 1/8 tsp or baking powder and 1.5 tsp of white or cider vinegar, the crust ends up with good texture. Also, maple syrup is WAY better than corn syrup in this pie.
Posted by amanda at 11:18 AM | TrackBack
November 14, 2008
gratins and potpies
Winter approaches in Montréal and it's getting dark and cold outside. As a result, I am appreciating the warmth of my own kitchen more and more every day, and I am also experiencing the urge to gratinée everything in sight. I have made more stocks and roux and béchamels in the last two weeks than in the preceding two years. A couple things have stood out as particularly tasty. A while ago b took a break from his quest for the perfect potato soup recipe to try this cauliflower and cheese soup. (We replaced the carrots with parsnips since that's what we had on hand.) This turned out tasty, but alarmingly rich. The amount of cheese made it almost too thick to really call a soup. A couple days later, however, it found new life as macaroni and cheese. Since I got the mac'n'cheese recipe from a friend, I don't feel quite right posting it online for all to see, but it is your basic baked-mac'n'cheese recipe based on a béchamel sauce with some breadcrumbs on top. Surely, you can find some similar recipe somewhere on the internets. Since the aforementioned soup was, essentially, based on a béchamel with some vegetables and cheese added, I built the mac'n'cheese on top of that, adding a bit more cheese, some butternut squash, and some breadcrumbs. Really easy, and really tasty. I would also recommend this turkey-squash-lima-bean potpie from epicurious. We had home-made chicken stock, which really made the dish. It had this really nice essence of chicken despite have very little chicken meat in it (like one cup instead of the three asked for in the recipe). If you mostly use the beans and vegetables, it ends up a remarkably economical dish that's still quite satisfying. (We were too lazy to do the bacon and cheddar, btw... ::shrug:: There's only so much fattening up for the winter that I want to do, and this is already a far cry from the fish and rice I've been eating all year in the tropics.) We curried it a bit, grinding up some cumin, coriander, black pepper, a bit of cardamon and cinnamon, turmeric and spicy paprika and adding maybe a tablespoon or so of that mix. (Sorry, no exact recipe, I just dump in more cumin, coriander and paprika, a medium amount of turmeric and black pepper, and a little bit of the other things, and just make sure it smells good.) Lastly, if you're looking for something to bake au gratin, seriously consider celery root. Mix it up with your potatoes.
Posted by amanda at 01:49 PM | TrackBack