Folks, it is official, I'm a blogcrastinator. Not by choice mind you, so I hope you will let me slide again this month. I just didn't realise how busy life has gotten lately, I can't say I have had much time for myself, let alone for B and the pup. Quite sad actually and I feel sooooo drained. I don't know how working mothers do it. Props to them because all I have is a husband and a pup. Oh! Back to the challenge for the DB's this month is held by none other than Mary and Sara . I present to you...FRENCH BREAD!!!!!!!  read more »

Clockwise from foreground left - Marzipan Snowballs, plain with tempered dark, Crystallized Ginger rolled in Gingersnaps, plain topped with cocoa nibs, peppermint rolled in mint hot chocolate powder, plain. Marc and I have gone through many truffle travails the last two weeks, and even though I feared we would be defeated, we (Marc mostly) pressed on and prevailed. Among other things, my rather unpleasant flold (103 degree flu, sniffly cold), and the general speedy lunacy that is the holiday season, really threw a monkey wrench in our chocolate adventures. My fantasy, (oh…how naive) was that we’d make a few different flavors of truffles over a couple of days, and tra la la, have beautiful pictures for posting and tasty truffles to bestow well before Christmas. Hmmm…apparently there was another plan at work, and it included me having to take a back seat role for fear of delivering more than just chocolate (i.e., cooties) to our loved ones, and we finally finished the last batch today…December 30th. Truthfully, we did create some delicious chocolate treats, but they are just a little late. AND we have some good pictures, but they took an inordinate amount of doctoring on Marc’s part to be presentable. Making ganache (truffle filling) is easy, fun and incredibly versatile. If I had really known how much precision is necessary with tempering, I would have practiced and gotten through the learning curve some other time of the year, and just made what we knew worked, right before the holidays. Temper, Temper Before we get into truffle making in a general sense, there is a little background you should have on tempering chocolate. All chocolate bars you buy commercially are tempered. They have a clear glossy sheen, and snap crisply when you break them. Whenever you melt chocolate, it loses it’s temper. Meaning that if you just melted it, and then it hardened, the chocolate wouldn’t return to that crisp glossy state. Tempering chocolate is a precise chemical series of events. The effects of tempering come from the formation of beta crystals. When you melt tempered chocolate, you melt those beta crystals, and if you want to re-temper, you need to bring the chocolate up to a high enough temperature to melt completely, but not above 125, otherwise it’s scorched and can never be tempered again. Then you need to bring it down to a low, but still melted temperature to encourage the beta crystals to form. Then the key is reheating the chocolate to a particular 2 degree range in order not to let all other detrimental (gamma, alpha, etc.) crystals form, but still maintain beta crystals. Tricky, huh?  read more »

Oh mince! I had forgotten about those beets! I had to find something to do with them, n’est-ce pas ? Nothing hurts me more than tossing food because I forget about it. I could have done something I knew well how to, but I did not feel like making neither a soup nor a salad , although these sounded both good too. I was in fact looking forward to something new to use my bunch of soon-to-fade beets . So when P. walked into the kitchen on Saturday morning to tell me I take that we stay here this weekend, don’t we? , he gave me a brilliant idea. Inspiring! Of course, we were staying in! There was really little chance that anything more exciting and adventurous could happen with my turned-black foot still bothering me — and that’s a mild way to put it as I have never had such a pitch black bruise. Within a few days, I’ve mastered the hopping technique like a pro and I can even cover distances in the house — from stove to couch — quite fast. I think I even like it. “ Gnocchi ?  read more »

I know, I know. WORST. BLOGGER. EVER. But you have to understand, since my last post, I've been slowly going a bit insane. I finished renovating my house. I sold my house. I went to Cuba. I bought another house. I got a new job. and I'm having a GIRL! So yeah, it's been a little busy!  read more »

Yep, you read that correctly. Once printed, this recipe was 18 pages long! It had 13 steps and took 12 hours for me to produce the two lovely loaves you see above. At first, I thought our hostesses (hostessi?), Mary and Sara, had lost their minds. However, what's not to like about trying something challenging on for size - particularly if it's a Julia Child recipe!! I didn't join the Daring Bakers for nothin'!  read more »

Today's fruit pizza recipe: A thin cookie 'pizza' crust topped with sweetened and reddened rhubarb. Surprisingly good! "Is it healthy?" asked the first taste tester, age eight, upon learning that the rhubarb atop her slice of rhubarb pizza -- yes, you've read that right, rhubarb and pizza in the same sentence -- is botanically a vegetable. Uh. No. Rhubarb pizza is hardly a 'health food' but it sure is 'fun food'! But hey, if laughter contributes to good health, that qualifies rhubarb pizza as health food, yes? Okay, not. Still, this rhubarb pizza was truly much fun and it ranks right up there with the recipes for Kool-Aid Pickles and Green Smoothies as outright food oddities . The recipe comes from my dear Auntie Karen, who always writes when she collects a big pile of rhubarb from a good neighbor. So when I made the rhubarb pizza, using a recipe she shared a couple or more years back, I wrote her too, saying, "I finally made your rhubarb pizza! It's excellent!" Imagine, a few hours later, my surprise while flipping through a box of old 3x5 recipe cards: the exact same recipe , clipped from a magazine many years ago. Ha! The universes collide. Rhubarb pizza tastes much better than it sounds. It's essentially a thin cookie topped with rhubarb, with the color and sweetness bumped up by a box of strawberry jello. It's very sweet, but the sweet-sour mix of sugar-rhubarb was oddly addictive. I was muchly glad it didn't last long since all the taste testers loved it, kids and grown-ups alike. 4TH of JULY RECIPES So if the blueberries had been worth buying on the 4th, I would have added blueberries for a red-white-blue dessert. But I couldn't figure out what to use for the white. Any ideas?  read more »