Bakeram Yoga

I am ready for summer!  As I write this it is cold and rainy outside, but we have actually had several nice balmy days lately.  Add to the balmy days a mostly re-done patio and the outside just beckons to be enjoyed.  Alex and I re-did the patio over Christmas and have been steadily finishing it up since then (my family has a tradition of starting large projects over the holidays).  The one big thing the patio is currently missing is a built in grill with prep counter space.  However, over the holidays our sewer line to the city went and so we got to replace that instead of paying the contractors to build our grill.  Oh the joys of the being homeowners!  But, I think it might have actually worked out ok because I didn’t really know what we wanted as far as grilling goes.  So, my dear readers, this summer is going to be dedicated to me researching and doing lots of grilling to figure out exactly what we want (and hopefully by the fall we will have saved up some more money for a new grill).  My skills with the grill are severely lacking and from my brief research foray yesterday there seem to be lots of options for a new grill along with tons of “must have” accessories.  Our current grill is the very basic Weber with absolutely no frills to it at all.  It is a charcoal grill and we use a chimney to get the charcoal going.  I intend to grill as much as possible without buying anything extra for it (since it will be hopefully up on Craigslist in the fall).

So my first project was beer can chicken.  I had heard of it in passing and the reviews were fantastic and it seemed like something that required no serious grilling ability or accessories, just a chicken and a beer can.  So first rule of grilling: it seems to take about 45 minutes to get the charcoal going.  So start it about an hour before you need it (just to allow for it being windy and hard to light).  The chimney is pretty self-explanatory.  You put newspaper bunched up in the bottom (but not too tight: the fire needs air!) and then fill up the top with charcoal.

Use a lighter to light the paper and let it go for a bit.  Check on it every 15 minutes or so to make sure the fire is still going and to check on the coals.  The charcoal is ready to use when it is light gray on top.

While your charcoal is getting going, you can work on prepping the chicken.  Take the chicken out of its wrapper and wash it thoroughly with cold water.  Then dry it off with paper towels or an old dish towel (I keep my old dish towels around for this specific purpose.  The towel does much better than paper and it is one less paper towel in the trash.)  Rub olive oil all over the chicken and then rub it down with this mixture of spices which I varied from here:

Then take a can (I used an empty soda can) and fill it half way with your liquid of choice.  You can use beer, wine, soda even.  I used white wine because I had an open bottle in the fridge and no cans of beer.  Insert the can into the cavity of chicken (basically up it’s butt, I know, I know, insert crass joke here).  Place the chicken and can on a small cookie sheet and it is ready for the grill.

Hopefully now your coals are nice and gray-colored and ready to go.  Take them and pour them out on each side of the grill leaving  the middle section open.  The chicken cooks by indirect heat so you don’t wan the coals directly underneath the chicken.  The place the chicken on its cookie sheet in the middle of the grill.  Place the lid on and open the air flow.  Set the timer for 45 minutes (my chicken was about 3 pounds).  Then check it to see what temperature it is by placing the meat thermometer into the thickest part of the breast.  My research varied as to whether it needed to be at 160 degrees or 180 degrees.  I aimed for somewhere in the middle.  The other clue that the chicken is done is that the juices that run out when you stick in the thermometer will be clear.  It turned out quite well especially since the chicken had been in the freezer for several months!

I know, I know, this is a bit of an odd post to follow right on the heels of my post about weight dilemmas.  However, I very strongly feel that part of eating well is eating closer to nature and closer to the ground.  I have this notion that if I could simply just eat real food (with the sugar in moderation) then my weight would adjust itself accordingly and I would be ok.  However, I haven’t ever successfully been able to accomplish this.  Which leads me to homemade butter.  When we were in France, the butter was fantastic.  The flavor just popped in your mouth.  Then spread on a fresh baguette made it just fabulous!  Since coming back, I have tried in vain to find something that approximates the same taste to no avail.  So I decided that I would try to make it myself.

My first stop was Whole Foods, where I had been told that I could find the sea salt from the Island of Re which is off the northern coast of France.  This salt is particularly good for some reason that I don’t know.  I found the sea salt and also picked up some Strauss Family Creamery heavy whipping cream. They have the best dairy products that I can currently find in a store.  I am still working on finding an actual dairy to get some raw cream from for butter.  The French butter is made from the raw cream and I think there is something there, but more on that later.  Then I started googling for butter recipes.  I had an idea of how to make it, but just wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.  I found this recipe on Cooking for Engineers.  It is amazingly detailed and complete with pictures of what things will look like.  It made very tasty butter and I used their approximations for the salt to add.  My only addition is to make sure that when you are removing the buttermilk, that you pour the butter through a strainer.  It helps put the butter into a ball so that you can knead it in the cold water next.  The recipe was fairly simple to make, just throw the cream into my favorite kitchen aid mixer turn it on, put the splash guard on and let it rip.  I checked on every 5 minutes or so, but spent most of the time cleaning up the kitchen instead of working on the butter.  It was really surprisingly easy.  It was all finished in about 20 minutes and then you can spread the butter on bread and ohmygoodness it was fantastic!

Morale of this story – go out an make yourself some butter!!

And then don’t keep it in the fridge – it spreads better and has a better taste when it is room temperature!

I have always struggled with my weight.  I love to eat and there is such an emotional tie for me to food.  I also yearn to be one of those French women who only eat a couple of bites of everything and seem to be effortlessly thin.  I remember when I was about 10 and I weighed 106 pounds and I was a bit chubby so I decided that I needed to get back down to 100.  Needless to say, I grew before I could lose the weight.  In my adult life (well at least since I stopped growing), I have gone back and forth with my weight.  I lost 20 pounds in high school and got down to my thinnest at 150 and then went to college and promptly started the upward climb.  Then there was law school and campaigns and taking the bar and just general unhappiness which topped me out at 5′ 11″ and 190.  According to the doctor’s charts, I should be somewhere between 143-174 for my height.  So it was time to do something.  So I joined weight watchers and got back down to 158.  Then there was my honeymoon, a move cross country and taking the bar again and again.  This has taken me back up to about 173, which is right on the line of acceptable from a health standpoint.

My vice is mainly sugar and I work to try to figure out how to manage it.  My younger sister, Peggy, and I are constantly trying to figure out what will help to keep us on a moderation track.  We have tried all sorts of things and generally it seems that avoiding it is the only full proof way to do it.  However, this isn’t sustainable either because at my birthday I want a piece of cake and at other times there is such a connection between something that someone has made for you that you don’t want to not be able to have some of it.  But once I start eating it, it is very hard to stop myself. Then there is the barrage of other junky bad for you things that you encounter in everyday life and have to attempt to avoid which is really hard.  I get worn down or am tired or hungry and then I eat it.

This gets further complicated at the moment because Alex and I would like to have a baby.  Foremost, I don’t want the baby to have the same sugar addiction that I do.  This means that I really need to somehow reach a happy ground with the sugar sometime soon.  Secondly, I would like to think that I can eat more healthy and cut out the chemically things that I eat and just generally be healthy about my food choices.  The problem is when I get to work and there are nacho cheese Doritos staring me in the face or yummy chocolate from See’s and I am almost drawn to them, or when I have just finished dinner and I want a bit of something sweet.  Or a million other times when it seems somewhat appropriate or yummy to have something that I know isn’t good for me.  It is so enticing and so far I have no lasting good solution to this.  Peggy is starting her residency and really worried about gaining weight and eating too much because she is tired and stressed.  So I think we are going to implement the start of another no sugar stretch and see how it goes this time.  It is always easier to do it together because then we are accountable to someone else.

As a forerunner to this, a friend has recommended a juice cleanse (the juice is so tasty!) and allowed me to borrow her juicer so I think I am going to embark on it first.  The juicing is connected to yoga and meditation and just generally exploring your relationship with food.  The juice follows your chakras.  So for instance you start with the root chakra which is red so the juices that you drink that day are red.  It also combines the juicing with a broth too.  It sounds interesting and fun so we will see how it goes.  This journey is an ongoing one and perhaps sometime I will come to a point of peace about it all.

This trip started about a year ago when my sister Peggy decided that she wanted to rent a flat in Paris for a month.  Then a couple of months after that Julie and Julia came out,  I read Julia Child’s My Life in Paris and I started cooking Julia’s recipes.  So needless to say I have become a bit infatuated with French food.  The flavors are just so subtle, not at all like the bold spicy flavors that I am used to in TexMex.  So I went to Paris with the idea that I would eat my way through the town and try and taste just about everything.

We arrived on a Sunday evening after a very long plane ride.  Our landlord left us a list of good restaurants around the neighborhood and we went out to a bistro nearby.  We were really concerned that we wouldn’t be able to still get food as it was about 10 p.m.  Little did we know that no one in Paris seems to eat before 8 p.m., preferably 9 p.m. so eating at 10 p.m. wasn’t really considered late at all.  Alex and I both got salads and a glass of wine for me and a beer for him.  The salads were remarkable in that the ingredients were quite fresh for the middle of the city in a local bar basically.  We were both surprised at just how good the food was.

We went back to our flat and attempted to sleep.  I was very excited as the thing I really wanted to do was to have pane chocolate warm from the nearest bakery. Julia describes a wonderful experience in her book of getting up early and having a warm croissant and a cup of coffee that really spoke to me.  I got up the next morning and went for a run.  I didn’t bring any money with me and I literally must have passed at least 8 boulangeries on the run with the smell of fresh bread and croissants wafting out the door.  Needless to say, as soon as I got back, I showered and Alex and I got out the door.  Our first stop was the patisserie across the street from us.  The pane chocolate was quite tasty and I was quite satisfied, so up the street we went in search of a cafe crema (coffee and steamed milk) to wash down the pane chocolate.  We spent a good chunk of the rest of the day wandering around our neighborhood trying pane chocolate and pane chocolate aus almond (with almonds) at the the different patisseries around us.  It was just delightful.

*Interesting side note about patisseries and boulangeries in France: The French government regulates what the different types of bakeries can call themselves and sell.  A boulangerie just means that the person who is the baker is certified to make bread and has been tested on the different recipes that make up the different types of French bread.  A patisserie means that the baker is certified in how to make the specific French pastries and will make certain ones.  An “artisan” shop means that the baker is required to make and sell specific types of bread and pastries that have been deemed “French” by the government and that they don’t wish to die out.  The French are not much on innovation, but they are very concerned that their older recipes will be lost and that bakers will not know how to make them.  This was a similar attitude with the different types of cheese.  It was all quite fascinating!

There is always something growing in our backyard.  Right now it is oranges.  We have a lovely mature tree in our backyard.  It looked a bit sad when we moved in, but it is amazing what a bit of water and compost can do!  We have oranges in spades.  I have been making fresh squeezed orange juice as fast as the oranges fall off the tree.  However, as soon as the oranges get ripe, there is an inevitable task to be done: marmalade.  There isn’t too much that you can do to preserve oranges.  You eat them, drink the juice and make marmalade.  This weekend, Alex picked a bunch of the oranges that were ripe and the timer was on to make the marmalade.  My recipe is variation on my Great-Grandmother Chadwell’s recipe.  The trick to yummy marmalade seems to be in using grapefruit.  This year I also replaced the normal lemons with a California favorite: meyer lemons.  There is just something about these lemons.  They are a bit sweet and have a lovely juxtaposition of sour and sweet flavor which leads to much tastiness!

Alex took the morning off to help me get started and I canned all day long.  In total I made four recipes which amounted to 19 pints and 5 quarts of marmalade which should keep us in marmalade until next year.  In case you are up for a day (or a couple of hours) of canning, here is my recipe.

Marmalade

Instead of normal pectin in this recipe I use Pomona’s Universal Pectin.  You can find it at Whole Foods or any natural grocery store.  It allows the jam to gel with about a third of the sugar that one would normally use.

First things first! Make calcium water:

½ t. of calcuim powder (from the Pomona’s Universal Pectin)

½ c. of water

Mix well together in a clear glass jar and put it in the refrigerator.  This solution will keep a couple of months.  If you see any discoloration: don’t use it.

This recipe will make about 7 pints of jam depending on the size of your fruit.  So take 7 pint jars, screw caps, lids and a funnel and put them into a large pot of water. The water should cover the tops of the jars.  Then cover the jars and boil the water.  Once the water begins to boil, turn it down until you are ready to use the jars.

15 medium sized oranges
4 large grapefruit
4 meyer lemons
¼ t. baking soda
1c water
1 package of Pomona’s Universal Pectin
4 c. sugar

*Note on ingredients: Our orange tree produces oranges that have a lot of pith in them.  In this recipe there is an increase in the amount of oranges to account for this.  You are aiming to have about 12 cups of liquefied fruit so you can adjust the recipe accordingly. Additionally regular lemons can also be used, Meyer lemons are just better.
Use a microplane to zest 3 grapefruit, 5 oranges, and 2 lemons. If you don’t have a microplane then you want to use something that makes the rind similarly small. When you zest just take off the rind not the pith(white part). You can add more or less zest as you like it. Then slice off the rest of the rind and the pith from all the fruit. It isn’t crucial that you get all of the pith off, just most of it. Then cut up the fruit and take out the pits. Then take the cut up fruit and put it in a blender or food processor to turn it into a fruit soup of sorts.

Take the zested rind and put it in a saucepan with the baking soda and water. Heat to boiling and then simmer for 10 minutes. Then add in the processed fruit.  Also add 6 teaspoons of the calcium water.  Then let the mixture boil.  While the fruit is heating up take the sugar and the pectin (it is tan and in the larger pouch) and mix the two together.  Once the fruit has boiled add in the sugar and pectin and stir vigorously until the sugar has dissolved into the fruit.

Once the fruit is boiling, it is time to can.  Take one jar out of the boiling water and set it near the boiling fruit.  Then place the funnel on top and pour enough of the fruit in until you have about and inch left in the jar (the bottom of the screw part of the jar is a good estimation of this).  Then place the lid on top and take your fingers and push it down to ensure that it is secure.  Then take the screw top and place it over the lid and tighten as much as possible.  Two old washcloths are good to use to protect your hands from the hot jars.  Now listen to your jars pop as they tell you they are sealed.

It is officially day 10 of no sugar.  So far, I have survived and I haven’t given in.  Both of these are good things.  However, I have noticed a couple of things that are worth nothing about myself.

1) Drinking makes the cravings really bad.  Last Friday night, Alex and I decided to get a bottle of cheap wine at Trader Joes and some baked cheese puffs and have happy hour at home.  Both were acceptable to the new diet, but felt just enough like cheating to be fun for a Friday night.  Bad decision.  Half a bottle of wine later, my desire to walk to 7-Eleven and raid whatever sweets they had was really intense.  Not fun nor good.  Lesson learned: must keep the drinking down. Upside: one glass of champagne for dinner tonight seemed to be just fine.

2) Chips should also be on the list.  I couldn’t stop eating those cheese puffs until they were all gone.  Ergo, they go on the addictive list and should not be eaten.

3) I am actually not addicted to rich foods even if they are not healthy for me.  Tonight I made a lovely Julia Child meal because I hadn’t really cooked in awhile and I wanted to create.  I made chicken breasts with a yummy port cream sauce, creamed spinach and a wild rice pilaf.  It was lovely.  It did have just over a half a cup of butter in it and 2 cups of half and half in it so it wasn’t particularly healthy, but I found half way through the chicken that I just wasn’t hungry anymore and I could easily just stop which was a pleasant discovery.

4) Sugar/sweets are everywhere.  I never really realized it until I wasn’t eating sugar, but it is all over the place.  I run into probably 10 times a day easily.  This means there are 10 times a day when I have to repeat to myself that I am not depriving myself of this, but instead this is a decision that I made voluntarily and I intend to stick to it. Society should take note of this and contemplate doing something about it. No freaking wonder our country is overweight!

I also have this constant conversation going on in my head about whether I will be able to try small amounts once the initial month is up or not.  However, I keep trying to remind myself that I need to get through this month first, then I will see what happens next.

I love sugar.  I always have.  It was always the thing that I turned to when I was sad and depressed and also when I was happy and celebrating something.  I have many wonderful memories of baking with my family while I was growing up.  One of my favorite things to de-stress is to go into the kitchen and bake or cook something, no matter what it is.

However, I have found recently that once I start eating sweets I can’t stop.  It is almost impossible for me to stop before the last of it is gone.  The interesting thing is that I don’t crash from the sugar so I don’t really have a check point where I know I have gone too far.  The more I look at it lately, the more it feels like an addiction.  I realize it sounds a bit silly.  I mean I am talking about sugar, not some illicit drug.  I am not overweight and am a healthy person.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize how much it controls my life.  It is always my go to in a stressful situation to make it better.  I don’t drink, I sugar binge.

So I have decided that I am going to try to take sugar out of my life for the present time.  I want to really see how I am without it.  Can I break the addiction and not crave it so much anymore?  Alex and my two younger sisters have also decided to join me in this quest.  They are intent on cutting it out for a month and then somehow trying to slowly add some back in to bring moderation to how much sugar we consume.  I am not sure that I am going to be able to do that.  However, we will see, one day at a time.

The ground rules, as discussed by my sisters and I, are that we aren’t to eat anything that is composed of more than one-third sugar (mainly refined sugar), but this also includes no guzzling of maple syrup, honey or agave (we are hardcore!).  However, there is a concession for not more than 2 tablespoons of my homemade low sugar jam with peanut butter and toast.  We are allowed one yogurt a day and I am allowed a small amount of agave in my chai.  The overarching idea is that we don’t want to allow ourselves anything that could be binged on to satisfy sugar cravings.  We are also trying to eat healthily so that fat doesn’t replace sugar.  We are not currently trying to lose weight, just get used to the no sugar.  We may try that later as we all seem to have this 15 pounds that it would be pleasant to have gone.

We started on January 2 and so I am at day 3.  It has been a bit trying so far.  My first day there were Sprinkles cupcakes at work to celebrate a co-workers birthday and one of my managers was insistent that I have one.  I didn’t, but it was really difficult as Sprinkles are so yummy!  On day two, we borrowed a lawn mower from our very nice next door neighbor who works at a good bakery.  He gave us a box full of pastries including a whole bunt cake.  Alex about lost it at that point.  There was even a pain au chocolate which is Alex’s favorite.  The pastries went into the trunk where they stayed until Alex had the wonderful idea to give them to the guys at our bike shop when we dropped off his bike to get it fixed.  Today has been decent so far, so almost three days down!

Butternut squash is hard to deal with.  I have vivid memories of the last time I tried to peel and dice one up.  My hands were bruised and broken by the time I was done.  However, it is fall and the wind is blowing outside and I am feeling cozy inside.  My husband and I have been eating seasonal produce with the garden cycles this year.  So it was time for winter squashes and root veggies and things that are very different from all the tomatoes and salads we have been eating all summer long.  My mother-in-law has a lovely recipe for butternut squash soup.  So I decide that to celebrate all this fallness, I am going to make the soup.

However, with the vivid memories of last time still in my head, I decide that I am not dicing up the squash nor the apples.  I will peel them both, but then the cuisinart is going to deal with the rest.  First mistake.  It seemed all well and good – it was still a pain to deal with, but I got everything sliced up.  So I started the cooking: I sauteed the leeks and the butter (the smell of butter cooking is just sooo yummy!).  Then I realized that the pot I was cooking them in was not distributing the heat correctly so the leeks started burning.  I started freaking out a bit.  However, I dive into the leeks with a pair of tongs and start fishing out the burned pieces of leek and add some more butter in.  That should fix things right?  Well it did for the moment.

Then I toss in all the sliced up butternut squash and the apples.  I am supposed to cook both until they are “caramelized” and then add in the chicken broth.  Caramelizing has always been a bit of a mystery me and I have never quite understood the difference between it and just cooking something until it is a bit soft.  At this point I realize that I might have a bit of a problem.  The butternut squash and apples that the cuisinart sliced up is way more than the required measurements of the recipe.  I had thought this wasn’t an issue, but I now realize that I have way too much food matter in the pot and a comparatively small surface to cook it all.  At about this moment, Alex walks into the kitchen.  He looks at my pot and me being slightly disheveled and says,

“Maybe this is a bit much for right now, why don’t we eat something else for dinner and I will put this away for the moment.”

I reply, “No, of course not – I am being stubborn, I am going to finish this soup and feed you some of it for dinner.”  Then I promptly begin to vigorously attempt to stir the contents of the pot, which is kinda hard.  I stir for a bit longer and Alex and I go back and forth as to whether I should be doing this or not.  Finally he wins, I realize that I am exhausted from a particularly hard workout that morning and I haven’t really eaten enough during the day so I am starving.  He directs me to Sophie’s bed and instructs me to lay down with her and he will get us some dinner.  Then he makes us some lovely boca burgers.

The good news is that today I approach the big pot in the fridge with a new take on it.  I have decided that the squash and apples are going back into the cuisinart and I will use the blade to pulse them into smaller pieces.  This worked quite well and I have soup cooling on the stove for tonight’s dinner with some pumpkin ravioli and a light pumpkin cream sauce.

Here’s the recipe if you decide you want to chop things!

Butternut Squash and Apple Soup

2 T. unsalted butter

1 ½ c. sliced leek, white and pale green parts only

1 T minced garlic

6 c. peeled and roughly diced butternut squash

3 cups peeled and roughly diced apples

6 ½ c. chicken stock

Sea salt, preferably gray salt

1 c. chopped spiced candied walnuts

Met the butter in a large pot over moderate heat and cook until it turns nut brown.  Add the leeks and sauté until slightly softened, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and sauté briefly to release its fragrance.  Add the squash and the apples, raise the heat to high, and cook stirring, until the vegetables begin to caramelize, about 5 minutes.    Add the chicken stock, bring to a simmer and cover partially.  Adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until the squash and apples are tender, about 40 minutes.  Transfer in batches to a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.  Return to the pot, reheat to serving temperature, and season with salt.  Garnish the soup with the walnuts when serving.

On my cooking journey my next stop is raw foods.  I am fascinated by raw food diets.  I am not entirely sure how one can possibly feel full eating only mostly fruits and veggies, not to mention how you manage to get all of the necessary nutrients.  A friend of mine lent me a book called The Raw Truth: The Art of Preparing Living Foods by Jeremy A. Safron.  She further enticed me with stories of lovely desserts without sugar or butter.  My sweet tooth couldn’t wait to see!  So this week I decided that I would “cook” a raw foods meal.  I made Apples with Ginger Chutney, Gazpacho and for dessert: Bliss Balls.

So it turns out that raw foodists get a good portion of their nutrition from sprouts.  When plants sprout, they release a good amount of nutrients so that they can grow into a plant.  These nutrients aren’t available when it just in a seed form.  So by eating sprouted plants you get those lovely just released vitamins and minerals.  I had my first experience with sprouting because the bliss balls called for a cup of sprouted oat groats. Oat groats are the seed form of oats which surprising Whole Foods carried.  According to the book you are supposed to soak the groats for 6 hours and then in two days they will sprout.  In the meantime you need to keep them nice and wet.  So I soaked and I waited and I admit, my groats didn’t sprout.  I am not exactly sure why, but I think groats on are on the harder scale of sproutable things so I think I will go back and try something easy next time like alfalfa.  None the less, I mixed them into the bliss balls, which consisted of soaked dates (makes them easier to blend), peanut butter, cocoa powder (so I was supposed to use carob powder to be true to raw foods, but I don’t like carob powder), raisins and some spices.  They were tasty and I am looking forward to snacking on the leftovers today.

“Cooking” for raw foodists involves more of using the food processor a lot and a juicer if you have one, which I don’t.  They gazpacho is entirely just cut up veggies and fresh herbs.  I got to try out a new herb that I haven’t used before: tarragon.  It was a bit spicy smelling and added a lovely flavor to the gazpacho.  The ginger chutney involved more soaked dates, their soaking water and grated ginger.  Then you cut up apples to dip into it.  Super tasty!  I also have to admit a bias for anything involving ginger.  It is the best.

By the end of the meal, I was pleasantly full, which surprised me.  Although I admit that we also opened a bottle of champagne too because it just seemed like the perfect thing to go with the food; so nice and light and airy.  I doubt that champagne is raw food approved.  I have the leftovers in the fridge which I am going to eat for lunch.  My husband loved it all too – he really enjoyed the gazpacho especially.  I think the raw foods meal was a success and I will definitely try out some more recipes.

As you can tell from this site, I love to bake and cook.  So when Alex found a preview for Julie and Julia he was determined that I should see it the weekend it came out.  He even checked out Julia Child’s My Life in France for me to read as background.  I read the book at a feverish pace and finished it just hours before we went to see the movie.  The book is just fantastic.  My favorite part is the begining where she describes how she feel in love with French food.  The descriptions are just so full of love and wonder.  It resonated with me and inspired me to want to cook more and try and take my cooking up a notch.  I am job searching at the moment and so I even had a few days where I decided that I might go to culinary degree.  This quickly ended by realizing that it cost $50,000 for a year and half and I really have no desire to work in the craziness of a professional kitchen.  So instead I decided that I am going to cook something very hard sounding at least once a week as way to teach myself to be a better cook and save $50,000.  Then, because I have this lovely blog, I will write about it.

So back to the library we went for a Julia cookbook.  I got Julia’s Breakfasts, Lunches, and Suppers.  Flipping through the pages, I found the recipes for a “VIP Lunch” which included the recipe for the choulibiac, a watercress salad and pear sherbet.  Not having an ice cream maker, I decided that I would just make the choulibiac and the watercress salad: mainly because it just looked ridiculous and hard and I wanted something just like that.  Choulibiac is a french fish pastry.  It requires 5 different recipes before you can actually assemble the pastry and bake it.  It also has 5 pages of instructions, including a discussion on the use of white peppercorns (mature and used on fish and white sauces) versus black peppercorns (immature and used in heavier sauces and meat).

Yesterday at about 3:30 p.m. I began the first step: making a giant crepe.  Now crepes and I have never really gotten along because they are picky and delicate and I detest non-stick pans which are practically required to make them.  So I was a wee bit nervous.  I read the instructions and the ingredients.  They looked simple enough until I got to the part about leveling the oven.  You see, this crepe will be the size of a cookie sheet and about 1/8 and inch thick.  Therefore, Julia admonishes not to use a pan that is not absolutely level and to make sure that our oven is level.  I checked my pan and it looked level (although not non-stick) and hoped for the best with the oven.  I mixed up the crepe batter and buttered and floured my pan.  Then in it went to oven for several minutes and then under the broiler for several more.  During this process I was supposed to make sure the crepe didn’t “stiffen.”  What this meant was beyond me.  However, as I pulled the crepe out from the broiler and tried to gently pull it out of the pan, I abruptly realized: I let it stiffen and since it was stiff, there was no way I was getting it off the pan without breaking it.  Doh!  Fail on the crepe.  So I ripped it out with some frustration, tried it (tasty!) and threw it in the garbage and cleaned out the pan for try #2.  I mixed up another set of batter and waited and watched it in the oven very carefully.  I pulled it out and it started to come away from the sides.  I could get all of it off except for one side which was thinner and crispy.  No good.  It seemed either my pan or oven was not level.   However, I managed to save a good chunk of the crepe, decide it was good enough and move on to the next step.

At this point, I notice the sweat dripping down my neck and realize just how hot it has gotten in my kitchen.  I found out later that it had reached 94 that afternoon, which was quite hot in my un-air-conditioned house!  Nevertheless, I was going to persevere.  I chopped up the shallots and seasoned the fish and put it in the fridge.  Then I started to work on the pate a choux, which is a pastry paste.  This seemed to go well and I finished, put it and the pan it was in a bowl of warm water and moved on to the fish mousse.  The mousse seemed to go well.  In fact it looked so much like white chocolate mousse that I had a hard time convincing myself that it was really mostly cut up raw fish and that I should not taste it.  Then it was on to the mushroom duxelles.  They are very finely chopped (thank goodness for the Cuisinart!) mushrooms and more shallots.  The interesting thing about them is that after I put them through the Cuisinart, Julia instructed that you should wring the water out of them by putting them in a cloth dish towel and squeezing to get the water out.  I was very dubious of this because the mushrooms looked pretty dry to me.  Sure enough though, I put them in the dish towel, squeezed and water came out.  Then when I open the towel there was a very compact sphere of mushrooms in it.  Then the mushrooms went into some butter to saute until they “begin to separate from each other.” Did I mention this woman might love cream and butter more than I do?

Finally I was ready for the final assembly.  I looked at the clock and realized that it was already 5:45 p.m.  I couldn’t believe the time had passed so quickly; I had been completely absorbed in the recipe.  There were detailed photos in the book and I began to assemble per the instructions.  I even managed to use my damaged crepe in a way that no one could tell the difference.  As I finished off putting the last of the choux on top, I realized two things: I had forgotten to put in the second layer of mushrooms and my choux was way too runny.  Julia’s looked like frosting and mine was not holding its shape and falling all over the place.  I began to panic a bit.  Had I missed something else?  Was it going to turn out ok?  I reminded myself that there was little I could do at this point and that I might as well put it in the oven and hope for the best.  So into the oven it went and I started on the sauce.

The sauce required that I make a fish broth first.  I had procured “fish trimmings” from the fish person at Whole Foods and was now staring at a fish head and skeleton in my sauce pan.  This was a wee bit gross.  So I piled in the required veggies and then a cup of water and a cup of vermouth.  Have you ever used a cup of vermouth in anything?  I quite enjoy my dirty martinis, but never before I had used quite this much vermouth.  It was oddly satisfying.  Once the broth had simmered, out came the junk and in went the cream and a bit of choux (this stuff is very multi-purpose!).  As it thickened, I tasted it to see what spices it might need.  I was a bit suspicious, but the sauce was just delicious!  The flavor was very subtle and with the taste of fish without being fishy.  The sauce also seemed to have the cream almost layered over the broth as a secondary taste.  I was quite impressed.

At this point Alex walked in.  It was close to 7 p.m. and I realized that I was about to fall over.  I recruited him to help me finish up the salad while the choulibiac finished cooking.  Once I “began to smell a delicious odor of pastry, fish and mushrooms” I knew it was done.  I pulled it out and plated two pieces with the sauce and Alex delivered the salad to the table. We tasted it and it was unlike anything I have ever tasted before.  It was quite delicate and flaky.  Alex pronounced it a masterpiece and we commenced the eating of it.  I went to bed exhausted, but very satisfied that I had succeeded in some real ridiculous many-stepped cooking.

Here are some pictures.