Challenge #2: Soul Food

Dear Gumdrop,

Apologies for the delay in coming up with the next challenge, but I was wasting away in Kimchi-ville for the past week. Whilst I enjoyed the food in Korea a lot (I couldn’t bring myself to try the silk worm larvae on offer at every street corner though), savoring dak gal bee, bibimbap, bulgogi, manduk soup and endless glasses of soju, I was dismayed to discover that Koreans just don’t understand baked goods. Shop after shop offered the most divine looking confections in their windows, but once you tasted them, you discovered they were woefully lacking in soulful goodness. Like the knock-off designer bags on sale at the Migiloire market, they were all flash, no substance.

Case in point, IA, the Cuz and I wandered into this charming café in this absolutely chic design museum one afternoon – all reclaimed brick, concrete floors, Eames chairs and helvetica font. What could be more perfect on this chilly winter afternoon on the other side of the world than a vanilla cupcake and a green tea latte? What arrived was a travesty. Let me tell you, a cupcake is a mere muffin if bereft of fluffy, sweet, velvety icing. When Dunkin Donuts is the baking highlight of your trip, you know things are dire. Not to be too harsh on Seoul, where there are myriad warm and homey savory dishes to savour, but nothing satisfied the soul of this sweet tooth (I did have some of the prettiest lattes though).

So, in honour of my return, I challenge you to create the ultimate layer cake, piled high with the clouds of frosting. Any flavour you’d like, any occasion will suffice as long as it tastes as good as it looks!

Xo
Pickle

Cheese Cappuccino

Dear Pickle:

It took a while to choose a recipe for this sucker. I was gonna be crazy ambitious and use my ‘Larousse Gastronomique’ for, uh, the first time since I bought it like 8 years ago, but all the recipes in there are SO in shorthand ('first, make a beurre blah-blah from the master recipe, combining with two quantities of cooked sauce au capitaine, reserving anchovies and pushing the blah blah through a chinoise…' Eek!) Scared souffle-less, I looked instead to ‘The Silver Spoon’, that Italian cooking bible everyone told us we needed about 3 years ago and which I still haven’t used since I bought it (sensing a theme?)

I think maybe the best part of this recipe was realizing how simple it is to make a Bechamel sauce – just a classic, plain white sauce using flour as a thickener. This is the kind of recipe I always mean to commit to memory so I can impress my friends at weekends in the country. I don’t have either of those things, but when I do I’d like to be able to make Bechamel from memory. Did this earlier in the day, which made me feel organized and capable – until, after I’d put Pretzel and Peanut to bed, I realized I had to reheat this sauce to melt cheese into it and THEN cool it again. This meant that Mr. Salty and I did not eat dinner until 9:30. Which I guess is an appropriately French hour.

There were minor dramatics, one when I realized I’d purchased Gruyere instead of the Emmenthal called for in the recipe. (Does thinking all Swiss cheese is alike make me a racist in Switzerland?) The Gruyere is not an especially melty cheese and I only chopped it rather than grating it, which also added time. And a few lumps. The second freak-out was when the beaten whites didn’t get as shiny as I’m used to, I think because there was no sugar and I'm usually making meringue. But as we were hungry enough to eat our own arms, I was not deterred. Perhaps it was slightly under-whipped whites or the fact that I used my nana’s bean pot (which is a hell of a lot bigger than a 6 cup soufflé dish – a VERY small dish! Who knew?), I didn’t get the big, impressive soufflé lifty puffy thing I really wanted to see.



Nonetheless, it was quite tasty. Mr. Salty pronounced it like having cheese cappuccino for dinner, but not quite the taste sensation he'd been expecting – except then went back and ate much of it out of the pot and called it ‘more-ish’. I felt like I was eating very light scrambled eggs. However, as these scrambled eggs took a f*#& of a lot more work than the average scrambled egg, I might not rush to make this again. Perhaps I’ll save it for a luncheon in the country, when I’m dying to impress my friends. Or perhaps I’ll just make them a Bechamel and get loaded on champers.

P.S. As we were starving at 10:00 when dinner was done, we were most grateful for the delicious coconut cake you baked for us and ate two slices each. Then we were much more contented.

Clouds

Dear Gumdrop-

I must confess that while I love standing in the midst of the kitchen making a clatter and a mess, I do have several cooking related fears. There are just some recipes and techniques that I’m too intimidated to try like my irrational fear of cooking rice properly (yes, I know the answer is a rice cooker, but somehow that feels like cheating). So when you said our first foray into playing with tablespoons would be soufflés, I felt a little…deflated…like the soufflé I suddenly pictured in my head.

But I plucked up my courage and sought out some recipes thinking a lovely chocolate soufflé can’t be that difficult. I know how to whip up egg whites, after all. Since I’d be forcing the Indiscriminate Eater to consume the results, good or bad, I asked his opinion on the matter and was shocked when he asked for a savoury soufflé instead. Suddenly our date night dinner was Classic Cheese Soufflé. There seemed to be only one source for that: Julia Child. Seventies all the way, baby! Alas, I’m woefully bereft of Julia Child cookbooks at home, but I found a variation of her recipe on epicurious.com http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Classic-Cheese-Souffle-242119.

The unexpected thing I discovered about soufflés is that they’re really very simple and wonderfully delicious. I did have some hiccups along the way though. First, I was a klutz with the eggs and kept getting yolk in my whites. I think I went through half a dozen more eggs than I needed. Most tragic of all though was a 6 quart soufflé dish is a lot smaller than you think! As you’ll see from the picture, my dish was too big so I didn’t get the spectacular height I expected. It also took longer than the recipe said or maybe I just like the texture a bit firmer than old Julia did. It was a bit of a homely looking when it arrived at the table, but that's how you know it's homemade, right?

For all that, the IE was effusive in his praise, coming up with the best description possible: “it’s like having a cloud in your mouth”. The texture was so blissfully light and velvety and for someone who doesn’t really care for egg dishes, this is unexpectedly my new go-to for Sunday brunch.

I served the soufflé with baked oyster mushroom and arugla salad with a shallot and garlic vinaigrette and warm baguette. Tres delicieux!

Px

Challenge The First!

LE DEEP END

Dear Pickle:
When my baby brother was three, my mom famously took him for his first swimming lesson. A non-swimmer herself, she was anxious that her sweet little boy get a good, buoyant start. Imagine her surprise when they just threw tiny little KitKat into the pool and wouldn’t let her in to save her darling boy. Not that she could have anyway. She could only stand on the deck and have a conniption as he flailed about…

Before we get back to his fate, lemme tell you that I am sooooo excited about our blog! I've been trying to think of a first challenge that might be the culinary equivalent of tossing our baby butts right into the deep end (the, er, deep fryer?)

And so I challenge you to: A SOUFFLE. Sweet or savoury, your choice. But it must be a proper soufflé, the old school French kind that rises with egg whites – not one of those lame old freezer soufflés or whatevs.

Maybe I’m stuck in the Julia Child/Mary Tyler Moore/Carol Brady 1970s and soufflés are out of fashion. Or maybe, as I’m hoping, they’re a classic culinary test you’ll find exciting. I confess that I’ve never made one in my life and have been thinking about it for eons.

The main thing I know is that my brother is a passionate,lifelong swimmer and you have to pull him out of the water before his lips turn blue. I want the same thing for us and our bloggy kitchen. To have so much fun that they have to yank us from our kitchens, our lips still tasting of delicious creations.

xxx
Gumdrop