Happy Bastille Day! Here’s a French treat based in tradition.
Read moreGougères with Salami and Antipasto Salad
Salami, Salami, Bologna! Anyone remember the Popeye Cartoon? As I worked on these recipes the phrase kept running through my mind. I finally did an internet search and uncovered the source. If you're in the mood for some nostalgia you can view the episode via this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgvDcXN3pJo. A group of bloggers were invited by Bolzano Artisan Meats in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to choose a Bolzano Salami then create a few recipes. I choose Old School. A hard salami made with pork, garlic and lots of crushed black pepper. The company makes delicious meats using hormone free products in small batches. I was thrilled with my choice.
Salami and Gruyere Gougeres
The first recipe uses classic Pate a Choux with gruyere cheese and small slices of the salami. After they baked, I sliced them, and filled them with stone ground mustard, another slice of salami and cheese. Oh boy! The perfect party snack.
Salami and Gruyere Cheese
Gougères
125 gm water (about 1/2 cup)
1/2 tsp salt
3 1/2 T butter
2 tsp. sugar
75 gm flour (2/3 cup)
2 eggs, plus 1 egg for egg wash
1 cup grated gruyere cheese, or cheese of your choice
3/4 cup thinly sliced, then chopped Bolzano Old School Salami
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F.
In a small saucepan, place the water, butter, sugar and salt. Bring to a simmer until butter melts. Add the flour all at once, and stir. The mixture will look like mashed potatoes. Place the flour mixture in a mixing bowl, and add 2 eggs one at a time. Stirring well after each egg. Stir until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Add the cheese, reserving a small amount (2-3 T), and the salami.
Using a tablespoon or pastry bag with large tip, pipe or spoon ping pong to gold ball sized balls of dough on to a parchment lined baking sheet. Place the last egg in a small dish and whisk with a fork to loosen. Using a pastry brush, gently brush the top of the balls with egg. Be careful not to drip egg on to the parchment paper from the pastry as it will keep the pastry from puffing as well as it can. Sprinkle the tops of the puffs with extra grated cheese.
Bake for 20-30 minutes or until completely golden brown. Cool on a wire rack and serve with mustard, pickles and more sliced salami and cheese. Puffs can also be sliced across and filled for tiny sandwiches.
Makes about 18 small puffs
My next recipe is Antipasto Pasta Salad. This recipes screams of summer picnics. It's far from summer where I am, but it really put me in the mood. The big chunks of smoked cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and the salami really take this over the top. Wait until you smell it. The aroma is amazing. Find a pasta with lots of curves to trap the flavorful dressing.
Antipasto-Salad
Pasta Salad Ingredients
Antipasto Pasta Salad with Salami
1 pound rotini or fusilli or any (corkscrew-shaped pastas) 2 garlic cloves 1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard 1/3 cup red-wine vinegar 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar 1 tablespoon water 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 ounce (1/2 cup) sun-dried tomatoes 1/2 pound smoked gouda, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 1 1 pound can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 small can artichoke hearts, cut in half (smaller bites)
1-2 T capers 3 1/2 ounces sliced hard salami, cut into julienne strips 10 to 20 bottled small peperoncini (pickled Tuscan peppers)
1 cup cherry tomatoes cut in half 1/2 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes 1 cup loosely packed fresh flat-leafed parsley leaves, minced
Start boiling salted water in a large pan. Cook the rotini until it is tender and drain it. Refresh the pasta under cold water and drain it well. Using a food processor or blender, blend the garlic, the mustard, the vinegars, the water, the oil, and salt to taste until the dressing is emulsified. In a very large bowl toss the pasta well with the dressing and stir in the sun-dried tomatoes, the mozzarella, the garbanzos, the salami, the Tuscan peppers, the red pepper flakes, and capers and the parsley and tomatoes for garnish. Chill the salad, covered, for 1 hour. The salad may be made 2 days in advance and kept covered and chilled.Serves 8-10
pasta-close
Bolzano Salamis are available online and at various outlets. To find more recipes and read more about the project, you can find the other bloggers at these sites. Lori Fredrich of Burp was the curator of the project. Check them out!
Participating Bloggers:
Rebecca from CakeWalk:
Molly from Peanut Butter & Pickles:
Melanie from From Fast Food to Fresh Food:
Anna from Tallgrass Kitchen:
Lori and Paul from Burp! :
Pizza Rustica - Baking with Julia
What a difference a week makes! Last week, I was planning to make this recipe and serve it for dinner with salad. Well, things have changed. Our household has turned into a heart-healthy, diabetic diet zone. Can you believe it? Gary's back from having a cardiac tune-up, and I'm joining him in solidarity. Never fear, I'm not closing my pastry business or considering dropping out of BWj. We'll just need to find good homes for many of the delights. As I've been perusing a whole new world of cookbooks and recipes, I've decided to blog about the adventure. So, my 2nd blog is Cooking for our Health. I'll review tips, tricks and recipes for low fat, low carbohydrate meals. Please check it out, and join in with your ideas. When I read through the Pizza Rustica recipe, I thought it sounded a little cheese heavy, and maybe not so good. Yes, even a Wisconsin girl can have too much cheese. I was also wondered about the absence of sliced or some sort of tomato sauce. My worries were unnecessary. The pizza tart/pie was delicious and really pretty. The crust was easy to manage and the filling easy to put together.
I made a call to our neighbor with three children. It seemed like a sure thing that the pizza would be a hit. The results came in, and the boys loved it! They added salsa for extra zip, which sounds pretty good.
One of my favorite parts of this recipe was cutting the strips for the lattice. I have this little tool from Paris that I've had for about 12 years, and never remember to use it. It's a pastry cutter. I believe it made by hand by the same man who makes the rolling pins for E. Dehillerin, the famous cooking equipment shop. I've included a photo later in my post.
The dough rolled out to just the right size. Here's the dough and the boxwood rolling-pin I mentioned.
The lattice wasn't browning as much as I liked, so I tented foil around the browned edges and let it bake a little longer. It never browned as much as I would have liked, but all the components seemed to be fully baked.
Well, Wordpress and I are having trouble working together. My last photos don't want to upload a just into the post. I'll keep trying, and hopefully you'll get to see the finished Pizza Rustica!
The next recipe is Lemon Loaf - Very Springy!
Chocolate Darlings - Cocoa Sables from FFWD
This week's French Friday's with Dorie recipe is Cocoa Sables. Sweet, crisp, chocolatey little darling French cookies. The should be an accent over the "e". I've been trying to figure out how to create that character without much success. From here on, please pretend it's there. Sables were the very first recipe we made in pastry school. For those of you sick and tired of pastry school stories, please skip ahead. This is a good one though. Our class went to the very first demonstration where we carefully watched the chef make a variety of sable, or butter cookies. He stacked butter cookie dough on chocolate dough and made beautiful stripes, swirls and lunettes (eyeglasses.) One sable he called "dee -a -monde". The translator repeated the word Diamond. The name reflects the way that the tube of dough is brushed with egg and rolled in coarse sugar to make it look like it's rolled in diamonds. There were a few moments when I can think back and know they had me. This was one of those moments.
I used a block of bittersweet chocolate and chopped/grated it very fine. It added a lot to the cookie, and I would highly recommend it.
Back to school. When we got into the kitchen, we were introduced to weighing ingredients for the first time. The recipe called for 5 grams of salt. If we had thought about it, how much salt can there be in a cookie recipe? Well, we set off to the salt bin carrying mixing bowls that could have held 10 pounds of bread dough! We can back with what equaled about a teaspoon! We can laugh now. At the time, all business.
Dorie's recipe uses a creamage method, using room temperature butter and gently mixing in all the dry ingredients. I really liked adding the chopped chocolate for a little extra boost of chocolate taste. I don't have a lot of how-to pictures this week. Here's the dough sliced and ready for the oven.
The dough is rolled into logs and chilled. During the chilling time, I pulled them out a few times to reroll and reshape the logs. As the soft dough chills, it can get a flat bottom. Rerolling, helps make the roll even and not lopsided. The dough sliced easily. A few of the disks had to be schmoosed back together. The smell of the cookies baking a amazing! Here's a tip. When you can smell chocolate in the room, you can be sure that your dessert is almost done. I always wondered how the chefs knew that things were finished before the timer ever went off.
The Sable are so good. This is a great dough to have in the freezer to quickly slice and bake for an impromto dessert, or to satisfy a chocolate craving! No need to defrost, just slice and bake.
Have a great weekend, next week is Crab and Grapefruit Salad- curious?
Irish Soda Bread - Baking with Julia
Happy Belated St. Patrick's Day! I'm not Irish, and don't really have any Irish traditions so this was a nice way to start one. The recipe has only four ingredients. With so few, they have to be good, and they have to be treated and executed well. Don't overmix, bake enough, don't over bake. And most of all, don't dilly-dally around once the buttermilk is combined with the dry ingredients. Baking Soda, the star of Soda bread, needs two actions to start the CO2 flowing. Liquid and Acid. The buttermilk provides both. Once it's added, the magic begins. The key is to mix quickly and completely and get the bread into the oven so it can start baking and rising even more. My dough took off right away. You can see it start to spring just after I made the slashes on the top.
The bread baked evenly and had a nice hollow thump when tapped. We tryed to wait overnight to have it for breakfast, but we couldn't wait. After about 15 minutes of cooling, I cut off two slices for tastes. It was really tasty. I added golden raisins, which added a gentle taste and texture. If you'd like to try the recipe, Carla and Cathleen , are the Tuesday's with Dorie/Baking with Julia hosts and will have the recipe on their blogs.
Here's the finished Irish Soda Bread, a new tradition!
Our Dear Julia
Over the past few weeks I've been thinking and referencing the great works of dear Julia Child. Her personality radiates through the pages of her books. At the recent demo day at Bekah Kates, a kitchen store in Baraboo, I used Le Crueset cookware to demonstrate its wonderful uses. The recipe I made was Julia's Boeuf Bourguignon. I made it three times, actually. Once at home before the store opened for tasting during the morning, and another while people shopped. The smell of the deep, rich sauce greeted shoppers as they entered the store. Several times people asked me, "it that "HER" recipe?", or, "did you see the movie?" We all knew who we were talking about. It just wasn't right not to make it just one more time the next day while spending time with friends. Julia would have insisted! As the leaves fall, give it a try!
About a month ago, I had a surprise arrive in the mail. I had pre-ordered a cookbook and it arrived. Not just any cookbook. One of the best I've seem in a long time. Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking With Julia, just wrote another amazing book, Around My French Table. Each recipe is well written and looks delicious. While it's a beautiful book, it will be used and will be marked with the little sauce here, and a drip or two there. Ms. Greenspan has a great blog if you're interested in learning more.
Another piece of Julia news! In late October, ahead of schedule, As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto is being released. I can't wait! It's hard to imagine a book being better then her My Life in France but it will be fun to see.
My most recent Julia moment was on Friday. I made a wedding cake with spice cake and apricot lekvar filling. The lekvar recipe was Julia's from Baking with Julia. It's a delicious apricot paste with almonds and hint of brown sugar. It's similar in consistence to thick applesauce. The color is a deep pumpkin color which makes it a wonderful topping for scones, too.
Here's my recipe: 1 bag dried apricots (about 1 1/2 cups) 1/2 cups slivered almonds 1/4 - 1/3 cup brown sugar 2 tsp. grated lemon or orange zest dash of lemon juice 2/3 cup water
Simmer the apricot, water and zest until the apricots are soft. Combine apricots, brown sugar and almonds in a food processor and mix until smooth. Spread in a pan, and cool, covered with plastic wrap. Enjoy on scones, muffins or even as a cake filling. Will keep 7-10 days in the refrigerated.
Enjoy autumn baking, cooking and entertaining. Until next time, Bon Appetit!