Stay with me here... Potato... Ice Cream... trust me okay?

Hello everyone!
Look!!! It’s me again! And without a 3 month break!
How exciting....

Any-hoo, on the 12th of October I went to a product launch by infoods for their incusin line of purees with the effervescent Chuck Hughes.

There was quite a bit of awesome food presented and served. Being a big giant gestational pod, I couldn’t sample the salmon tartare and the parsley vodka shooter. But the blinis with caramelized onions were fantastic. There were potato croquettes on a stick which I didn’t photograph. A cauliflower cappucino, and a scallop atop a puree with carrot butter. There were also 2 sweet offerings, that I didn’t exactly catch what they consisted of except that they were CHOCK FULL of awesome.

See the pictures below, and make sure you bring a napkin to mop up the drool.

There was also sort of a blog challenge to create something with the insnax / incuisin line and then blog about it. It’s technically a contest, but since there’s no chance of me winning, I’ll just call it a blog challenge.

I decided to turn one of the purees into an ice cream. Since I don’t have an ice cream maker, and am wholly inexperienced at ice cream making, I expected it to fail spectacularly. It wasn’t too bad though. I think it would have been better if I could find a way to extract some of the water from the potato puree but even in this format it was very tasty. AND it did taste of the potato puree, so it’s not like it was just a textural thing.

I scoured the internet for how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker and it does take a bit of diligence.

Here goes....
What you'll need
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 tsp unsalted butter
3/4 cup incuisin butter and cream potato puree
tiny pinch of salt
1 1/2 tbsp sugar (or more if you want)

A shallow pan that can go in the freezer
A freezer
about 2h to wait

Pour the milk into a saucepan and bring slowly up to boiling point but DO NOT LET IT BOIL. Add the butter and mix it up

In a bowl, beat together the egg yolks and sugar until thick. Pour the milk into the mixture of egg yolks and sugar whilst stirring. Pour the mixture back into the pan and heat gently, stirring until the custard thickens - DO NOT BRING TO THE BOIL BECAUSE CURDLED CUSTARD BLOWS. When it's nice and thick and about halfway to pudding texture, add the frozen potato puree.

The potato will cool the custard and the custard will thaw the potato puree. If necessary turn the heat on again just low though. When the custard/potato mix is cold stir in the cream and salt.
Your next step is to pour everything into a baking dish made of something that can handle being frozen and throw it in the freezer. From here on I defer to Mr. David Lebovitz because that's where I found the technique.  After 45 minutes have passed, go back and stir it up really well.

Then go back every half hour or 20 minutes and mix it up again. And there you have it.  Eat it.
The only problem was that after it reached the perfect consistency, it kept freezing, rock hard. I think it's because of the water content  in the potato. I didn't want to cook the potato down into oblivion so I'm kind of at a loss how to fix it.  But I'm sure SOMEONE out there will have a suggestion.
AND if you get it at its perfect moment of frozen-ness, it's really quite fabulously tasty and indulgent.

Well thanks to infoods and Miss Mayssam Samaha For inviting me to that lovely evening, and my apologies to Chuck for accidentally tripping him with my bag.... (that was embarrassing)
If anyone has any suggestions on how to combat the over-freezing let me know because it was definitely something I would want to make again.
Merci and thanks for washing your feet in the fountain of Candace.... (ew, that was a little weird) anyways, thanks for reading. Come back soon

Xoxox
-Candace

Hazelnut Pasta -- WOW so time consuming

Holy hell! I can't believe it's been a month and a half since I last posted. A lot has happened in the last 6 weeks. We went on our honeymoon! We went to El Salvador, and I REALLY reccomend it to people. It is beautiful and the people are so nice and there's so much to do. Volcanoes to climb, forests, beaches and a vibrant culture. It was amazing. We even got to watch gold medal olympic hockey due to the kindness of the resort staff, a vacationer with a laptop, and a spotty WiFi feed. Check out the story over at the husband's blog Cowhide & Rubber.


Anyways, I tried to blog about pupusas (national dish of El Salvador), and I tried to write about my disdain for those who refuse to eat out of their comfort zones, but it didn't work out. And then I decided to make hazelnut pasta. Spurred on by finding that Bob's Red Mill offered a hazelnut flour, I scoured the western end of the island of Montreal and didn't find any. I did manage to find finely ground hazelnuts, not quite at the level of 'flour' but I thought it would be fine enough.... oh it worked... but it took SUCH a long time. As it turns out they weren't ground fine enough. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The pasta recipe was as follows:


1 cup semolina
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 cup finely ground hazelnuts, or hazelnut flour
1 tbsp oil (preferrably a nut oil like walnut or hazelnut)
1/4 tsp salt
3 eggs (whisked together)


Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl and add the eggs and oil. Remove your rings and dig your hands in! Mix together the ingredients until it becomes a flexible cohesive dough. If it is too dry add a little bit of water at a time until you acheive a ductile consistency. Roll the dough into a ball and cover with a tea towel or plastic wrap. Refigerate for at least half an hour.


Once it has rested, remove from the refigerator and chop the dough into manageable pieces (below) and cover the pieces with plastic wrap to prevent it from drying out.





After meticulously passing the dough through the pasta maker and collecting the scrappy shreds, putting it back together and passing it through again, this ragged strip is what I got. As I passed it through the increasingly tighter settings of the pasta maker, the pieces of nuts that were too large for the opening ripped through the dough. IT TOOK FOREVER. After I picked out the nut pieces that were too large it went fairly smoothly. But up until that point, it was utterly tedious.

Eventually I was able to get decent pasta out of it. Sure there's little holes in it, but over all, it looks okay. At this point I was really regretting not finding that hazelnut flour...

For the sauce I combined 2 shallots, about 1/2 a container of mushrooms (sliced), About 4 slices of bacon, chopped finely, 1 1/2 tbsp butter, 1/2 cup of white wine, and 1 tbsp chopped fresh sage.

Frying up the bacon and shallots in the fat of the bacon as it renders out, I added the mushrooms and continued to sauté until the mushrooms had browned slightly. I deglazed w/ the white wine and then added the butter to melt, finally tossing in the sage. I left it to cook for another minute or two and then tossed it with the freshly cooked pasta.

The final touch was a handful of shredded Comté cheese. It was a nice touch, adding some salt and a subtle nutty taste that complements the nuts in the pasta. All in all it worked out. It was super tasty and a real learning experience, but I threw out a lot of dough because I didn't have until 1 am to be making pasta. I will search for the elusive hazelnut flour and report back with new pasta and new photos.

A slow reentry into the blogging world, but I have another one planned very soon. The next one will focus on the upcoming event benefitting Wine to Water. We've partnered with Barefoot wines to bring you the first event of its kind in Canada. We're changing the format of the event to be a pairing event. If anyone is interested in being a food sponsor for pairings with Pinot Grigio or Zinfandel contact me and I will jump up and down repeatedly shrieking with glee.

And if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make the hazelnut pasta a little more efficient, please leave a comment. My hand is now asleep so I will leave you with that. Thanks again for taking the time to read this! xoxoxoox

-C.

Sore Bays

I’ve been thinking a lot about sorbets, sorbets and non-traditional ingredients. In this post, I’ve done three. 2 were a success, one was a sad, perfumey mess. Rosewater is a harsh mistress my friends; tread lightly along that path. So January is sorbet month at the SnookRoussel Ranch. I’ve really enjoyed playing with it because you can experiment to your heart’s content. And if there’s a misstep, it doesn’t feel like such a big deal. My first stumbling block I was faced with was my lack of ice cream maker. You would think that you could just stick it in the freezer and presto, frozen right? Well, yes, it’s frozen, but you could also kill a man with it. The goal is something softer that you can then turn into an edible treat. The solution? Vodka. 2 tsps of vodka in a pan of sorbet prevents it freezing to a diamond-like consistency. It stays a little soft and you can easily shave it with a spoon. I WOULD like to know if there was an alternative to vodka, or spirits of any kind. While MY veins run with pure wine, I can understand if someone wouldn’t want to feed their child a spiked sorbet, even if it is only 2 tsp for the whole thing. Does anyone know of anything else one could use in the absence of an ice cream maker?

Well anyways, the three flavours of sorbet that I made were:
1) Grapefruit Basil
2) Pear Vanilla Rosemary
3) Blooming Tea and Rosewater (fail)

The beginning of all sweet sorbets should be a simple syrup. The recipe for that is simple, as the name suggests. Combine a 1:1 ratio of water to granulated sugar, and heat until the sugar is completely dissolved and the syrup is clear. Let it cool.

For the grapefruit basil sorbet, I used 2 cups of simple syrup, 2 cups of fresh squeezed pink grapefruit juice, and some nice wide strips of grapefruit zest. I heated it until it was boiling just a little bit and then shut off the heat and threw a handful of basil leaves in there to steep. About a 1/4 of a cup, maybe a bit less.



It then gets strained and poured into a shallow pan. This is the point where you add the 2 tsp of vodka. This is also the point where you make yourself a drink, you know, since the bottle is out already.

Wait overnight or many hours and you can shave it with a spoon into a bowl very easily, due to the vodka. Serve as a light dessert :)

Sorbet #2 Pear Rosemary Vanilla. I started out with the same 2 cups simple syrup. Then cooked 3 VERY RIPE pears and their juices in the simple syrup until they were mashably soft, the time really depends on how ripe your pears were to start out with. In retrospect, I would have added about 1 cup of pear nectar / juice because I found it too light on pear flavour. Then turn the heat down to low and add about 1 tsp dried rosemary (or more if you want) and the seeds of 1/2 a vanilla bean, or vanilla extract.

The next part gets a little messy, and I suppose you can use the same method for any flavour that has real fruit pieces in it. Our mesh strainer was being used so I used cheese cloth (available at supermarkets). After draining the liquid out into a shallow pan, I put the pear pulp into a little cheese cloth sack and twisted it tighter and tighter to extract the liquid from the pulp. I suspect that pushing the pears through a mesh strainer with the back of a spoon would have been easier, but then I wouldn't have been able to share this slightly gross photo with you.


Again, it all goes into a shallow pan with 2 tsp of vodka. And have another drink at this point.
It won't work unless you do...

And overnight, PRESTO! Sorbet.
I love the little black seeds that you get from using the real vanilla bean.

Ugh, and Sorbet #3
Do I have to? ehhh okay. I thought this would be a great idea, it would be flowery and comforting. But it turned out to be a mouthful of bitter perfume. Blooming tea (don't know what flavour) and rosewater sorbet. It started with the same 2 cups simple syrup, 2 balls of blooming tea steeped in 1 1/2 cups of water, 1 tbsp of rosewater... why am I writing this? It was terrible, no one wants the recipe... well after I realized it was terrible and all hell broke loose and I started adding vanilla extract and lemon juice, but nothing could save it. However it started out with a very pretty picture of the blooming tea. Incidentally, this was quite a difficult picture to take... when you have the perfect sunbeam on the floor and 2 cats.

Don't be fooled by my prompting, this was AFTER they had already had their way with the tea and I had to chase it across the floor three times. Oh and make sure you listen to it with the audio, apparently the music from the TV ties it all together... especially at the end heh heh heh (flush)




At this point I still thought that the sorbet would be a success, it was so pretty and then I forgot about the tea. This is where the bitter comes in. The other failing was WAY too much rosewater, as I may have mentioned before.


And then to add insult to injury, I thought that adding gin as the antifreeze alcohol would go well with the combination. Yeah, it didn't.


So I put it in the freezer anyways, and it was actually really pretty with lovely ice shapes. But by this point I knew it would not actually TASTE good.



Here is a picture of the scraping. I thought it might be helpful for the other more succesful sorbet attempts if I showed the scraping. It works very quickly and with not a lot of elbow grease.

And the final product. Kyle says that it's not that bad, as a garnish or in small quantities it is okay. But I think it's horrid and so I photoshopped the background in this picture to be all dark so that it looks a little sinister.

So the moral of the story is, sorbets are easy and fast to prepare (even though they take a while to freeze) but just be careful with the intensity of your flavours. You need to 'over flavour' a little bit to counteract the effects of the cold, but don't go overboard. If it's offensive before you freeze it, it will be offensive after you freeze it. And if anyone knows of an anti-freeze solution that doesn't involve alcohol, please let me know. Oh! And share your sorbets if you make any, I'd be interested to hear what people have tried or made.

On the Wine to Water Montreal Event newsfront, we have a wine sponsor!!!! Barefoot Wines will be sponsoring half the wine for the event!!! It's alive and well and we're well on our way to making it happen, so stay tuned for more developments.

Another reason to stay tuned is that Caty Marzi of Snack & I will be having another blog challenge at the end of the month, AND we have recruited Tina Brooks of Brooks Pepperfire Foods as our 3rd challenge member. VERY exciting! It is the Mango Challenge. Thanks again
xoxox
-Candace

Ground Cherry Jam and Other Stories

Well this post was supposed to be about my adventures in Jamland (a principality of the Indepentant Republic of Confiture) but I had such an interesting day today that I had include that too. Firstly, I visited the Salon des Vins et Fromages and sampled some GREAT local wines and cheeses. Notably a selection of 4 goat cheeses and 2 goat sausages from La Chevriere de Monnoir. I bought a bottle of wine from Carone Wines, Bin33 it was called.



Unfortunately I lost 11 of my 30 coupon tickets so we left a little early. THEN we headed to the old port for oysters at Mechant Boeuf. It was my first time eating oysters, and frankly I was terrified! Although I didn't like the little sauces they gave me (Red wine vinegar and shallot sauce was fruity and a little cloying. Tarragon and Pernod was okay but nothing stellar) but with a little lemon juice and tabasco, they were decent.
Sure, sure, a little boogery, but not horrific like I have been told. And the flavour was really good, I will definitely re-try. I'm impressed with myself! Perhaps though, 13 oysters was a little much for a maiden voyage.

Okay on with the Jams and Jellies! I saw Aimée Bourque of Under the High Chair's Jam Swap and decided I wanted to participate, but I'm not a sweets person so I needed practice. I don't think this post really qualifies for the Jam swap, since it is a bit wobbly, but it was a great inspiration. I started with sparkling wine jelly, but not only did it not set well but I think I added too much sugar. I decided to add more pectin to help with the gelling, but I used the crystals and... well you can see what happened to it. Idiot that I am, I saw it in the fridge and thought the crystals were bubbles. I was all impressed that the sparkling wine kept the bubbles. Yeah, no....

Okay! Try #2 I will use fruit, and I will use liquid pectin (I'll save the Jam sans added-pectin for a more experienced effort. I.e. some other time). A few weeks ago it was ground cherry mania here in Quebec. I bought 3 containers and set about hulling them. Here below are ground cherries.

And these are the hulled specimens, 17 hours later. Okay not 17 but it took about 1/2 an hour to hull the little buggers.
I ended up with about 3 cups.

And 1/2 cup of sugar
(2 x 1/4 cup. I know, I know, the picture is of a 1/4 cup... geez!).

It really was enough, I can't imagine throwing 2 cups of sugar in there. We're making JAM here people, not candy!

The ground cherries went into the pot with 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water, plus 2 tbsp lime juice.

And then it goes KERRAAZY with the boiling! Once they get soft and start swelling and/or bursting, go at them with a potato masher. I then added a pouch of liquid pectin and boiled for about 5 minutes.

Here is the final product. It is still a little loose, but FAR more successful than the wine jelly. Without adding anything really there's almost a creamy vanilla flavour to it.

I think Kyle seems to think that it is too precious to slap on some bread and munch on, but I have pursuaded him...

Cheers my dears! Please comment, and bring your friends :)

Thanks!

xoxoxo

-Candace

The world’s saltiest short ribs

Oh what a disaster. First off, I have to tell you, I cried. The goal was to try out a ‘cure’ what I estimated would be equal to a dry brine, but it would let me get more spices in contact with the meat. More like more salt in contact with the meat. On the up side, the grilled asparagus and Vidalia onion risotto was highly successful. I ruined, I mean ‘cured’ the short ribs in kosher salt, celery salt, coriander, black pepper, and crushed juniper berries for 24h. Rinsed them, and threw them in the smoker for 2 hours over hickory chips with a water bath of cola and allspice berries. We keep experimenting with different water baths, but I have yet to taste a difference.
The ribs came out beautifully, to the eye. But they were tough and almost inedibly salty. I think we may have made beef bacon…
What is the lesson here? Kyle says that it is not to cure them so long. I don’t disagree, but maybe dry brines are something I leave for another day. I also think that maybe my salt was too fine. I should have used a coarser salt so that it wouldn’t have broken down so easily


Fresh from the cure, it looked so promising. Rinsed and air dried...



The asparagus and onions seasoned, oiled, and ready for the grill



Nothing but the finest generic cola for us.



We floated allspice berries in cola as our water bath... don't know if it did anything



There they go, into the smoker. Hi Kyle!



After the arborio rice gets sautéed in olive oil for a bit, I add the broth about half a cup at a time (home made turkey broth made from a turkey we did in the smoker *drool*)



Stirring until the liquid is absorbed and then add some more broth. Everything is steaming up!
Until all the little rice ladies have softened.
But not mush, Al Dente as they say.



It appears that the veggies are finished with their purgatory on the grill.
Into the risotto they go!


Look how lovely they looked coming out of the smoker. Looks can be so deceiving.



And the final plating, again, prettier than it tasted. Apologies go out to the cow that this came from and to Kyle for having to eat this.
We are not salt deficient this week.


Any thoughts? Suggestions?