Dinner in the Yellow House

Foodtv.ca cooking club for June: Meringues

The Food Network blog, called Food for Thought, has started issuing cooking assignments each month.  This month, the assignment was to try a meringue recipe from French Food at Home.  I haven't seen the show, but based on the title, and my experience with this recipe, I think I'll have to watch it. 

Laura Calder calls her meringues crisp and chewy, and boy is she right.  My seven-year-old is crazy about the meringues from a local bakery, but compared to these, the bakery ones seem dry, brittle and with a flavour resembling sawdust.  The inside of the Laura Calder meringues were like marshmallows, but creamier, and the outsides were, yes, perfectly crisp. 

I don't have a pastry bag, but I made my own by cutting a hole in the bottom of a Ziploc bag and working really fast.  It went pretty well.  My favourite meringue, which I insisted on eating myself, had a little mousetail on it. 

As you can see, my meringues didn't get toasty-looking, but they were definitely ready to take out after 90 minutes. 

The recipe specifies either vanilla or orange-flower water or maple extract for flavouring and I went with the orange-flower water.  I never buy this, but my friend Farheen gave me half a bottle when she was moving once.  She uses it, among other things, in her Eid shortbread.  After she gave it to me, it didn't see the light of day for a couple of years, until I made the meringues.   

I was the only one who wasn't crazy about the orange-flower flavour.  I couldn't shake the feeling that I was eating a cookie that I had spilled some perfume on.  However, my spouse, my daughter and her friends all loved the orange-floweriness.  So maybe I was just overly sensitive to it because I was the one who actually put the stuff in. 

The biggest fans of these were the three seven-year-old girls, who gobbled down the whole bunch for dessert last Friday night in record time.  I even managed to get some cauliflower in them beforehand, using the promise of meringues as a reward. 

I'm going to try them with the maple extract next.

Kicking the California Cherry Habit

The locavores would have my hide for this.  And I'm a little disgusted at myself as well.  Ever since I bought California cherries to make crêpes this past weekend, I have been craving those things.  And indulging that craving.  Yes, despite knowing that they're picked before they're ripe and knowing that I should support local farmers and knowing that they had to get here in a truck, that drove for days, and used up gallons and gallons of unrenewable energy resources in the process, I have been buying bags of California cherries.  Three, to be exact. 

I mean it's very well for the locavores; they live in California.  I live in the Great White North.  California is a long way away.  The Okanagan, on the other hand, is just over the water.  But I just can't wait! 

There's the little matter of expense.  My latest 2 pound purchase cost 11 dollars!  Yikes.  Think how many sweet delicious BC apples I could have bought for that amount! 

But the worst part of it is not what I'm doing to the earth, to my own soul, or to our family's fragile financial situation.  The worst part of it is what I'm doing to the kids.  They are going to grow up thinking that the cherry season starts in May, not in July.  They'll see the (ornamental) cherry trees blossoming and think, poor souls, that they're about to start eating cherries.  Then they'll go to the grocery store and realize that yes, they could have cherries, provided they're willing to shell out the CDN$172.50 a pound they'll no doubt cost by the time Sahsez gets her own place. 

Some have suggested it's time for me to start going to CCA meetings.  I don't think I'm quite there yet.  I don't eat cherries alone.  I don't eat them during the day.  I haven't missed work because I've been eating cherries (possibly because I don't have a job). 

No, I feel that the way to stop eating California cherries is to quickly use up all the ones you have in the fridge in one fell swoop.  The real danger is in eating them fresh, one by one, sucking the pits and then seeing how far you can spit them.  In a baked treat, they're nice, but not nearly as tempting and addictive as the raw product.  And so, for anyone else who may be struggling with this same problem, I offer a glimmer of hope:  the Joy of Cooking's Cherry Clafouti recipe.  It uses up a pound of sweet cherries, and tastes like a cross between a custard and a cake.  I like it because you don't need to serve anything alongside.  It doesn't need ice cream or whipping cream or custard sauce.  It's perfect alone and really easy to make.

Here is how I made The Joy of Cooking's Cherry Clafouti:

Pit a pound of cherries.  Or leave them whole if you are a traditionalist.  I can't serve a pitty dessert in the Yellow House because if we're having dessert, it's most like Sunday and if it's Sunday, we mostly likely just finished a bottle of wine and if we just finished a bottle of wine, I am not in the right state to vigilantly prevent myself and the children from choking on a pit. 

Put the cherries in your favourite pie plate.  Now, toss 4 eggs and 3/4 cup of sugar into a mixer and beat for 2 minutes.  Add a cup of milk, a tablespoon of rum, 2 teaspoons of vanilla and mix.  Finally, add 3/4 cup of flour and a pinch of salt.  Bake at 375 for ten minutes then 350 for 35.  The smell is heavenly. I like to eat this while it's still fairly warm. 

This is a dessert that is just crying out for a nice wine pairing.  Unfortunately, I haven't tried any, so can't make a suggestion.  I should probably be loyal for once and suggest a nice BC ice wine, or just because the name is a perfect match, Cherry Point Vineyards' Cowichan Blackberry Port.  But the first thing that comes to mind is a sweet muscat.  I'm open to suggestions for the next time I make this...when the local cherry season starts, of course.

Other great ways to rid your fridge of those sweet red sirens:

Sher's Cherry and Almond Coffee Cake

Sher's Cherry muffins with crumb topping

(Sher has her own producing cherry tree, so she eats them without guilt.  My cherry tree is almost completely dead and the one limb that still grows fruit hangs over into the neighbour's yard.  Worse luck.)

Weird but in a good way: Béa's sweet savoury tartine

Sam's cherry-almond pavlova

The ulterior epicure's cherry tart

Remembrance of Crêpes Past (and Present)

My earliest memory of crêpes is not a good one.  My mother put some in my lunchbox in kindergarten and my fellow five-year-olds were curious. 

"What ARE those things?" one asked.

"Crêpes!" I proudly replied as I tucked into my special treat. 

She looked at me, incredulous.  Then her incredulity turned to rage. 

"They are NOT!"

She ran off to find the teacher, shouting  "Teacher! Teacher, Rebeca's lying!  She said she has grapes for lunch but those aren't grapes!"

Then, of course, the whole class had to take a peek at my lunch and see just what it was I was trying to pull off as grapes.  They were disgusted, not only by my lying, but at what they saw as a pitiful excuse for pancakes and "anyway, pancakes aren't lunch food", didn't I know that? 

I finished my lunch sadly and very self-consciously.  And so began a long tradition of me having to eat things in my lunch that everyone else in the class pronounced a) disgusting, b) weird, c) too healthy, d) certainly not lunch food or e) all of the above. 

Years later, I got completely addicted to the crêpes available at one particular crêpe stand in the Quartier Latin (Anna, there's your gratuitous French for the day!) in Paris during a brief visit there.  They would make them to order, and put any number of fillings in them.  My favourite was a very sharp cheese, maybe a comté;?  It got so that when my travelling companions and I were deciding where to eat, they wouldn't even ask me anymore.

ONE OF THEM:  Okay, where should we go for lunch, guys?

MOI:  Well, I think that...

ONE OF THEM: Sorry, I should rephrase.  Where, ASIDE FROM THAT BLOODY CRÊPE STAND, should we go for lunch, guys?

When I returned to Paris five years later, I couldn't find the same crêpe stand, and all the ones I could find were now stuffing their crêpes; to within an inch of their flimsy little lives, serving them more like giant wraps than the teeny little flat just-slightly-filled crêpes that I had loved.  I tried one stuffed with all manner of meats and cheeses, and it was okay, but not the same. 

My next bunch of crêpey memories are much more pleasant, for this was Tobias' choice of a seduction breakfast when I would stay the night at his place during our courtship.  Actually, I guess seduction isn't quite right, since by the morning, I was pretty much a sure thing.  It was just a simple romantic gesture.  Although, simple isn't quite right either.  With him, crêpe-making was quite a production.  Always a double batch of the Joy of Cooking sweet recipe, and at least three different kinds of fillings, elaborately laid out on the breakfast table, and whipped cream, lots of whipped cream. 

Those were the days. 

As for making crêpes myself, well, I never really saw the need, even though I do enjoy it. Tobias was always much better at it than I was.  But recently, having acquired a silicon spatula that can handle high heat, and having gotten my cast iron pans to a point of seasonedness that makes cooking things on them foolproof, I think my crêpe skills can now rival my spouse's (though I do tend to get impatient and undercook them).

The first few are always a little too thick, and I never wait long enough for the pan to heat up, so they take longer than they ought to to cook.  Tobias calls crêpe-making a selfless act, because the cook doesn't get to eat until the rest of the family has had their fill, but once I get a groove, and the pan is hot enough, they are a joy to make. My cast iron omelette pan has such a perfectly nonstick surface that the crêpes slide easily over it, and if the flip doesn't go perfectly, it is easy to flatten the crêpe out again. 

Which is not to say that the best part of the morning isn't when I finally finish up the batter and get to tuck into my own share of the spoils.

I was inspired to make crêpes this morning by Lisa's post about Mollie Katzen's Cherry-Ricotta Crêpes, but somehow I remembered the recipe wrong, and thought the ricotta went in the filling, not in the batter.  So, by the time I fired up the computer and checked Lisa's blog, I already had my batter resting in the fridge.  Maybe next Saturday I'll try the ricotta version.

Still, if I hadn't read Lisa's post, I wouldn't have bought California cherries, and I'm glad that I did: they were delicious, if a little tart.  It's a long wait until cherries come into season here in the Great White North.  The topping, I'm pleased to say, was all Canadian. 

It goes without saying that everyone in the family was crazy about this breakfast.