Wrapping Up, and Up Next

You may or may not have guessed this, but I've run out of steam with Nigella. I like the concept of the book, and I've certainly found a few new favorites (keema and the Vodka-Marinated Steak spring to mind), but this book feels unreliable to me. There were an alarming number of misses. Cheesecakelets were a mess. Hot cross buns were disgusting. The Quadruple Chocolate Cake, while delicious, included a step that resulted in Saran Wrap melting into the entire exterior of the cake. The cut-out cookies held up well, but had no flavor. Didn't like the Chili Con Carne. Maple-Roast Parsnips were waaaaa-aaa-aaay too sweet.

I'm out.

I'm going to keep Feast, because there were a few recipes that I did really love, and there are others that still look enticing. It's just so unreliable, though. I wouldn't run out and buy it, if I were you. This is especially disappointing to me, after I had so much success with Nigella Kitchen, which continues to be one of my most-used books. Oh well.

Plus, the book is now falling apart. Awesome.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to focus on my next book: My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy's Undiscovered South.

How beautiful is that cover? The whole book is gorgeous.

Calabria is the region to the south of where I live now (Campania). I'm pumped about this book because A) I'm trying hard to learn to cook Italian food so I can replicate the flavors that I love so much after I return to the States, and B) I can buy all the ingredients I need for these meals at my local supermarket. It will save me buckets of time each week if I don't need to make a trip to the Commissary (40 minutes from my house). I went there today and loaded up on peanut butter, English muffins, American cheese, black beans, and brown sugar, so I should be able to avoid going back for a little while. I hope.

Oh yeah. Easter.

I totally forgot to post about the two Nigella recipes I made at Easter. Woops.

I was supremely excited at the idea of baking Hot Cross Buns this year. Growing up, we always had supermarket hot cross buns around Easter (not necessarily on Good Friday, per the tradition). I loved them. Not that they tasted so great, but I loved them anyway. In general, I figure that anything that's okay store-bought is usually phenomenal when it's home made. Live and learn.

The spice mixture in Nigella's recipe piqued my interest immediately. Cardamom pods, clove, orange zest, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground ginger are a promising flavor base for just about anything. These are used to infuse melted butter. Sounds good. As I was cooking, I realized that the dough did not include sugar. At all. This alarmed me at the time, but I figured maybe the glaze would provide all necessary sweetness.

I was alarmed again when I saw that the dough is supposed to have a long, slow rise overnight in the fridge. I have never had luck with recipes that say the dough will rise cold. I've tried several, and they've never budged. However, calmed by Nigella's comment that you "need the patience to sit around while they rise and the faith to believe they will," I did not modify this as I've done my bagel recipe, by leaving the dough out for 2-3 hours, then putting it in the fridge overnight.

Suprise, surprise, the dough didn't move. Not one bit. The problem was not old yeast. I've baked bread with the same yeast since then, and it worked just fine.

I removed the bowl from the fridge in the morning and let it sit out all day, hoping it would spring into action once it warmed up. By 3 pm, it looked exactly the same as it did when I started.

Out of ideas, I proceeded with the recipe. I shouldn't have bothered.

I curse you, Buns.

These were hard, disgusting little hockey pucks. The dried fruit and bottoms of the buns burned when baked at the specified 425 degrees. Even if they'd risen perfectly and baked properly, the dough was nasty. It needed sugar. There was no spice flavor. Awful. Wrote "HORRID" with a big black X in my book. I tossed the entire batch in the trash.

After that disaster, I was nervous about bringing Easter Egg Nest Cake to my friend's house for Easter, as I'd never tested it. I'd already bought the ingredients, though, so decided to forge ahead. This cake is a flourless chocolate cake that is meant to crackle on the edges and sink in the middle. The sunken center is filled with chocolate whipped cream, then decorated with pastel candy eggs. SUPER CUTE.

Fortunately, this was delicious. Chocolate whipped cream might be my new favorite thing in the world. I could do without the candy eggs, but they do look cute. The cake vanished quickly. Charlie was angry that he didn't get a piece. (I offered. He didn't want any while it was available. As soon as we got home, he started asking for cake. GRRR.)

This one was a winner, and I'd definitely make it again.

FFWD: Leeks Vinaigrette with Mimosa (and a few others)

I wasn't particularly excited about this week's French Fridays with Dorie recipe: Leeks Vinaigrette with Mimosa. Absolutely nothing about boiling leeks, tossing them with a mustard vinaigrette, and then shredding a boiled egg on top appeals to me.

No surprise here, but I hated this. In general, I'm not a huge mustard fan, and I've found that I strongly dislike all of Dorie's mustard-centric recipes that I've tried, with the exception of the batons and the chicken a la diable.

I took one bite, then scraped the remainder off my plate and back into the serving bowl, for fear that it touch the rest of my dinner.

Matt said it wasn't as terrible as I'd set him up for, but neither he nor my mom had anything good to say about it.

I have, however, been stepping up my make-up game.

With the leeks, I served Muenster Cheese Souffle. Okay, so I substituted muenster with emmenthaler, and doubled the amounts, because I only have a big souffle pan. When it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that these substitutions mean that I actually made the basic cheese souffle again, but since I added cumin (per the MCS) instead of nutmeg (per the BCS), I'm calling it as a new recipe.

I've been disappointed by souffles in the past, but this time, it came out totally delicious. Score!

Mussels are locally farmed in the lake I see from my house. The lake is man-made, but the men who made it were ancient Romans, and they're the ones who started farming mussels there.

 Matt and I stopped and picked up 2 kilos of mussels the other day, came home, and made Dorie's recipe for Moules Mariniere. Technically, Matt made it, because by the time I finished helping him debeard and clean all those mussels, I was cranky and didn't want to do kitchen stuff anymore. Debearding mussels is awful. As such, I have no input regarding the preparation of this dish, but the outcome was excellent.

My friends had a get together last week. I brought Sable Breton Galette with Berries. I missed it last year, and have been waiting for strawberries to be in season so I could make it properly. Instead of lemon curd, I subbed a tangerine curd that I'd made during the winter. This was SO good, but the crust did get soft pretty quickly. Not sure if it was from the toppings or from the humid air.

Okay, I think that's all I've got for now.

FFwD: Baby Bok Choy, Sugar Snap Peas, and Garlic en Papillote

I'm going to keep this pretty short. The doctor put me on some medication yesterday because of some respiratory problems I'm having, and it's making me veeeery sleepy. I don't like it. Anyway, I'm going to blast out this post and take a nap, since my Mom is here to watch Charlie.

I was so happy to find bok choy, that I didn't care that it wasn't "baby." The size did complicate things a bit later, when trying to wrap the vegetables up in a foil pouch.

 I wound up folding them over onto themselves into a great heap. Didn't look great, but it worked. I couldn't find sugar snap peas, so I used snow peas, and I couldn't find the onions Dorie specified, so I used shallots. The peas worked fine, the shallots were a mistake. Maybe if I'd cut them into smaller pieces. They were bites of raw onion. No bueno. 

All in all, the vegetables came out okay. I liked the orange zest + mint action. I felt it needed a bit more oomph to make me want to cook it again, though.

I also made up a recipe: the Vegetable Barley Soup with a Taste of Little India. I remember that a lot of people said the soup could use a protein component, so I added rotisserie chicken. I loved it.

This is the chicken soup I want when I'm sick from now on. I added a lot of extra homemade garam masala and turmeric, and thought it tasted perfect. Loved it, loved it. The barley sucked up the liquid super-fast, though. By the time Matt got home from work, there was no broth left in the pot. Woops.

FFwD: Ginger-Pickled Cucumbers

Once again, I cooked a make-up recipe for French Fridays with Dorie. The scheduled recipe is Quiche Maraichere, which I cooked and posted about during one of the club's freebie weeks in 2011. (For the record, I think this quiche is awesome.)

The savory dishes that I missed were often skipped because of lack of motivation, so it's no surprise that I'm not loving most of these catch-ups.

Last night, I made Ginger-Pickled Cucumbers. I'm not a huge pickle fan, and nothing about this appealed to me. It's so easy to make that I could hardly get away with avoiding it forever. Just salt some chopped up cucumbers to pull the water out of them for a half hour, then mix them up with rice wine vinegar, hot pepper flakes, and ginger. Let them chill for a few hours.

If gingery, vinegary cucumbers sound good to you, you'll like this recipe. I ate what I served myself, but have no desire to make this again. Check another one off my list.

On an unrelated note, I just want to say that one of the reasons I love Around My French Table so much is that I've gotten my picky boy to eat more food from this book than any other single book I've used. I cooked two of my favorites this week, after far too long of a gap--Beef Cheek Daube and the Swiss Chard Pancakes. Charlie gobbled both. High five, Dorie!

He's eating swiss chard, I tell you. SWISS CHARD!

He hadn't had those pancakes since we moved to Italy, so I'm glad to find he still likes them.

Taking It Back

I can't do Giada's Feel Good Food. I just can't. There's not much in there that excites me, or even sounds decent. I've been trying for a while now to make myself cook a few things, but I get depressed every time I look at the book. Not really depressed, just an "Oh my god I'm on a diet" kind of depressed.

Let's just pretend this never happened. (waves Jedi hand).

FFwD: Tuna-Packed Piquillo Peppers

This week's French Fridays with Dorie recipe is for a basic cake called Visitandine. I'd posted about this cake a long time ago, when I'd been working on Around My French Table without any knowledge that there was already a cooking group dedicated to it. I wasn't overly in love with it, so I figured this was a good opportunity to make up another recipe.

I've been stalling to make Tuna-Packed Piquillo Peppers for months. I've had the ingredients on hand for ages, and could have cooked it with the group, but was so uninspired that I let it slide. Might as well get it over with.

Instead of stuffing roasted red peppers (I couldn't find piquillo peppers) with the tuna/caper/olive/lemon zest and juice/parsley combo, I sliced the peppers and piled everything on top of arugula.

Not bad, not good. It just is.

Check it off the list.