Canard à l'orange and why not Julia Child's

It's been 2 months since my last post. Yes I've been lazy. Lazy to experiment in the kitchen, lazy to dress up my food, lazy to take photos, and even lazier to update the blog.

Not sure when my next post will be, but here's a French duck stew recipe that I thought I'll share, since it's so yummy and easy to make.

Les Classiques de Camille is still my favourite French cookbook because it's really one that caters for the lazy home cook. After watching Julie and Julia, I had the impulse to buy Julia Child's cookbook. Thankfully, I was deterred by 1) price; 2) imperial rather than metric measurements; 3) lack of pictures. Now I found a new reason why I would not buy it.

It began with my quest to improve my Boeuf Bourguignon, which on previous attempts, yielded rather dry meat.  Since the movie made the dish even more famous, I googled for Julia Child's recipe. So many steps! And an article I found on the New York Times rightly explained:

"Ms. Child’s recipe is not the boeuf bourguignon that most French cooks would make. Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is actually a translation of French restaurant technique to American home kitchens. Ms. Child learned at a professional culinary school, not from home cooks. Her stew’s painstaking multistep method — cooking all the vegetables separately, straining the sauce, etc. — has chefly fingerprints all over it"

And so I stuck to my Camille's much easier version, cook the dish one day in advance, reheat it the next day and made some improvements. In fact, the beef stew tasted the best on the third day. Still room for improvements but I'm afterall not a chef.

Enough of cow talk. Last weekend, I decided to cook duck the French way. Again referring to Camille's cookbook, she has all but 3 recipes involving duck. So I chose the classical Orange Duck stew. Not too incidentally, Julia Child has her own version and once again, I found her multistep method too complicated.

Here's Camille's easy, uncomplicated though not so quick (it's a stew afterall) version, which I've translated and adjusted to a 2 servings portion.

Canard à l'Orange
Serves 2

2 big duck drumsticks
half tablespoon butter
half a carrot (or use one if you like, always good to have more veges)
half onion (as above)
about 100ml white wine
2 oranges
about half cup of chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

Sliced onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole, brown duck in butter on all sides with onion and carrot. Add salt and pepper.

When the meat is well-coloured, moisten with white wine. After about 10 minutes, add the stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of half an orange (without the bitter white pith) and blanch with boiling water for 1 minute. Squeeze the juice from one orange and cut the other orange into thin slices.

After the duck has simmered for 1 hour, pour the juice, zest and orange slices into the pan and stir gently.

Cook everything for another 15 minutes in high fire to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

Serve with smashed celeriac (this recipe from Jamie Oliver's website is yummy).

Note: For bigger serving (say 6 persons), use:
1 whole duck (2.5kg)
Double the quantity of the rest of ingredients except use 3 oranges (1 for zest and juice, 2 for slices)

Absolutely Homemade Tarte Tatin

Finally, more success in making tarte tatin. Our pilgrimage back home to learn the art of French home cooking has not been in vain!!!

A few thoughts why I love home cooked food so much:
1. They do not always look dressed up like in restaurants, but they certainly look and smell yummy.
2. The pleasure starts even before the meal is served at the table -- especially the anticipation as the aromatic smells of whatever that's cooking on the stovetop or baking in the oven fills the kitchen and dining area.
3. They give you a warm fuzzy feeling, as they are cooked with love and joy.
4. They are usually (though not always) healthier.

Back to our lesson on tarte tatin. Being lazy, I did not take note of the recipe as the dessert was being made. In fact, I don't think Rémi's maman referred to any recipe at all, as this is probably as easy as frying an egg to her. As she was peeling and slicing the apples (that came from her garden), she was passing some to a greedy me, and baby Pablo. At the same time, she was also making a blueberry tart (as we couldn't agree on which to have for dessert since they are both nice, she decided to make both), so it wasn't a structured tarte tatin lesson per se.

Despite a lack of a precise recipe (which I never follow anyway), I managed to take down some notes and came up with some guidelines/tips/steps that contributed to our last night's tarte tatin success.

Steps to making tarte tatin

Dough:
Pate Brisee (salty tart dough)
You can also use premade filo pastry bought from the supermarket

To make the apple filling
5-6 apples (or enough to pack up tightly the base of the tart tin), peeled and sliced into thick pieces.
Butter (according to your fat conscious. I used about 25g or less but feel free to use more)
Sugar (50g + another 50g or less to sprinkle over the base of the tart tin)

Put apples, butter and sugar into a frying pan and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, until the sugar has caramelised and the apples are cooked (do not overcook the apples though). Add a little water if necessary.

Grease the tart tin with more butter. Sprinkle the other half of the sugar over the base of the tart tin. Pour the caramelised apples into the tin. Pack tightly.

Cover the apples with the rolled up/flattened tart dough, with the edges tucked into.

Baked in preheated oven of 190 degrees for about 20-25 minutes, or until the dough is golden brown.

Invert and voilah! You have a nicely delicious apple upside down tart!

Our next plan is to replicate this success, and make a tarte tatin dish with blood! This is not a joke. Boudin noir aux pommes is another French classic dish of black pudding (blood sausage) with apples. And at a restaurant in Lyon during our trip, we had a wonderful boudin noir cooked in tarte tatin. What a delightful combination. Now we only have to find out how.

Mustard Chicken, cooked the Rabbit way

We saw a little hedgehog outside our house about two weeks ago. Looked like a baby and it was so cute Rémi couldn't resist putting it in his hands and touching it. Of course, that made the little creature even more scared and curled up.

It's the first time I've come up close and seen a hedgehog alive in Wellington. There's plenty of them here but they are nocturnal. So I've only seen dead ones on the road from inside the car, and will almost immediately turn my head in the other direction. Like the possums, hedgehogs are considered a pest that threaten native plants and birds, so their being smashed by vehicles are not sympathised by environmentalists.

Well, this is not a recipe post of possum pies or hedgehog tarts. I'm going on to talk about rabbit. They are cute, so cute that I refused to eat them as a kid when my grandmother made a nutritious stew out of rabbit meat. So I've never eaten rabbit meat in my life even though I've also never kept rabbits as pets.

But now I am told that rabbits are pests too. They destroy meadows in Europe, and here in New Zealand, they are like possums and hedgehogs. Ok, guilt factor removed, we're already planning to ask Rémi's mom to cook a rabbit dish when we go back to France. It's traditional French dish.

I am also told that rabbit meat taste like chicken. So before I get to try real rabbit meat, I found this recipe on Camille's classic French cooking cookbook: Lapin à la moutarde, meaning Rabbit cooked with mustard. So we decided to try it out, substituting rabbit with chicken.

It's so easy to make, yet so delicious that I think I will do this again and again. Enjoy.

Mustard Chicken (Poulet à la Moutarde)
serves two

2 pieces of chicken (choose your own cut or portion size. we're small eater, so we had a drumstick each. I think thigh or even chicken breast works well, if not better. or use rabbit meat like in original recipe)
2 pieces of bacon
2 sage leaves (I may experiment with other herbs next time)
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
About 60ml of liquid cream

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

Remove chicken skin. Spread mustard over the chicken. Wrap the bacon around the chicken, with the sage leaves in between. Put in a roasting tin and add about 1 tablespoon of water before putting into the hot oven.

Bake for about 35 minutes.

When the chicken is cooked, take out and transfer the chicken to serving plates. Quickly put the cream into the hot roasting tin and mix with all the juices/fats in the tin to make a creamy sauce. Pour over the chicken.

There's no need to add salt or pepper.

Serve with salad and boiled potatoes.

Cooking crayfish/lobster the French way

One of the memorable scenes I still remember from the movie Julie and Julia was when Julie plucked up her courage to attempt her last recipe challenge from Julia Child's cookbook: to kill a live lobster and cook it.

I'm afraid I don't have the determination of Julie. First, I am not as diligent as her in keeping my food blog up-to-date (Yes, I'm feeling guilty about my long hiatus in trying new recipes and posting them here). Secondly, the act of killing something alive for my dinner plate is still too much for me.

Nevertheless, for our annual fancy Christmas meal in 2009, we still decided to try something new. Rare oysters is a French Christmas tradition that I decided we must stick to, since I love them more than Rémi. And our favourite deli supermarket was taking pre-orders for crayfish for Christmas, which we couldn't resist. I wasn't planning to kill the crayfish myself, but we ordered a live one anyway, as I was sure Rémi will take care of it. Not sure if it was a right move, but we kept the crayfish covered in newspaper in the fridge, hoping to sedate it. And it survived the cold and was still moving when we were ready to cook it the next day.

We don't have Julia Child's cookbook to guide us along, just some advice from Camille and Youtube tutorials. From Camille: for the more adventurous cook, use a sharp knife to slit the live crayfish from head to tail, that will give it a very quick death. After watching more video tutorials, Rémi decided he will opt for the coward option: throw the crayfish into boiling water, cover and cook for 3 minutes.

All the time, the cowardly me was hiding outside the kitchen :) and enjoying the finished result after.

Here's the recipe from Camille for the adventurous cook. We had replaced lobster with crayfish.

Crayfish Grilled with Tarragon Butter
Serves 2

1 crayfish
1 tablespoon of butter, softened
2 branches of tarragon
salt and pepper

Put the crayfish into boiling water for 3-4 minutes. So hopefully it didn't suffer for too long. The flesh will still be partially raw after 3-4 minutes.

Take out the crayfish and cut into two pieces lengthwise, from head to tail. Put into a baking tin, the flesh side up.

Spread soft butter all over and sprinkle salt and pepper. Grill for 5 minutes and spread butter on the crayfish once or twice during the grilling.

When the edge of the flesh has turned golden in colour, take out and transfer to serving plate. Pour the melted butter from the baking tin over the crayfish and sprinkle tarragon over. (Actually, we had chopped half our tarragon and mixed into the soft butter before grilling)

Note from Camille: it's best to kill the crayfish alive by slitting it into two, and skipping the boiling part. But this requires courage.

And yes, the lobster and crayfish can be used interchangeably.

And yes too, the end result was real yummy.

Second try at Kouign Amann

It's our second attempt and we're not getting better at it yet. But still a good try nonetheless.

Kouign Amann is a Brittany buttery caramelised cake. Think croissant laced with lots of sugar.

The hardest part of the cooking process is actually to look at the cake swimming in the pan of melted butter in the oven. We stared hard at it and asked ourselves if eating it is the right thing to do. The solution: follow the recipe and allow the cake to rest for 5 minutes after it's taken out from the oven. This gives the butter enough time to be soaked into the cake so that you see no evil.

And as if the butter and sugar is not enough to clog our arteries, we had a second dessert of crème brulée the same night.

For our second attempt at kougin amann, we still couldn't decide on what recipe to follow. So we used a combination of recipe proportion and instructions from:
1. Camille's cookbook;
2. David Lebowitz's blog which has a good pictorial breakdown of instruction,
3. Youtube by Atelia Chefs (he may be speaking French, but the clip is useful for seeing how you actually fold the dough into many layers)

Mixed Berry Crumble

Another berrily good dessert made by Rémi.

He found the recipe from the internet, and we found a new secret to a fabulous crumble: by replacing half the flour used in crumble with ground almond. It gives the crumble a new nutty, almony flavour and texture that is even harder to resist.

I don't have the exact recipe he used but try the ground almond. And unlike the apple crumble, it is best to refrigerate and chill the berry crumble before serving.

And just as I'm proud of his fantastic crumble, I'm equally proud of the new ice-cream scoop I just bought.

Simple berry delights

I love summer in Wellington. The weather still sucks, but at least there's more sunny days and it is marginally less cold.

The best part of summer is the berry season. Because of the crappy weather, we have been missing out on buying lots and lots of berries at the Sunday market. But we are still enjoying lots of berries from the supermarket.

They make perfect quick dessert. Like here, we have blackberries and strawberries in our natural plain yoghurt. Topped with vanilla sugar and some bit of cream.

Mix and match quiche

I'm feeling bad about not updating my blog for a long while. Since finding a part time job, I'm finding less time to experiment new dishes in the kitchen. What I'm getting good at though is cooking very quickly, and for multiple meals, as I pack my lunchbox most days.

For instance, I like to cook extra for dinner, so that I have some leftover for next day's lunch. It could also mean preparing for next day's lunchbox (like a tabbouleh salad) while cooking tonight's dinner. Or even better, on days when I have French till late, I would pack my lunchbox while preparing dinner during breakfast time. This is usually a slowcook dish, like chopping up vegetables to make ratatouille or a Chinese pork ribs soup.

Lunchbox tomorrow: Zucchini and Prawns Quiche with onions.
Making quiche to me is becoming more like cooking Chinese fried rice or noodles, there's a lot of improvisation. I would throw in whatever ingredients I can find in the fridge into the egg mixture.

So using the Quiche Lorraine recipe's proportion of eggs to cream, I vary the ingredients that goes into it.

Here's some mix and match combination which is definitely not exhaustive. Feel free to be inspired at cafes and supermarkets too.

- zucchini and prawns
- tomatoes and black olives
- spinach and bacon
- bacon and feta cheese
- salmon and leek
- onions and chicken
- mushrooms and ham

Parisian designer style Quiche Lorraine

I didn't make this up. This recipe was inspired by a Parisian designer friend. Tall, slender, pretty and fashionable, she exudes the type of style that we imagine all fashionable Parisian ladies to be. And she proves that fashionable big city Frenchwomen are just as good cooks as moms and grannies. You can also rightly imagine her to cook in super sleek modern kitchen.

We had the pleasure to taste her Quiche Lorraine, to which she added a strong goat cheese. I normally find goat cheese too strong for my liking, but the quiche just brings out the taste of the cheese perfectly.

So I was determined to replicate her Quiche Lorraine. Using Camille's traditional Quiche Lorraine recipe (cheese is not an ingredient of original quiche Lorraine recipes), I experimented with goat feta and sheep feta on separate occasions and liked both very much.

Quiche Lorraine with goat cheese
Serves four

1 portion of pâte brisée tart dough
approx 200g bacon
3 eggs
200ml crème fraiche
goat feta (or be daring to experiment with different types of goat cheese)
salt and pepper

Prepare the tart dough and leave in fridge for half and hour.

Preheat oven at 180ºC. Roll out tart thinly and line on a prepared tin (either floured or greased). Using a fork, poke holes all over the base.

Cut the bacon into small slices and sprinkle all over the uncooked tart base. Put into oven and bake for 10 minutes. I like Camille's way of crisping the bacon without using an additional frying pan.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the cream together. Add salt and pepper. Pour into the precooked tart.

Here's why I left out specifying the quantity of the cheese earlier. Cut the feta into small cubes, just enough to spread all over the tart.

Bake the quiche in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Serve hot.

Oeufs Au Lait, Creme Brulee's not-so-famous cousin

Good friend PY was wondering why I haven't been updating my blog as often. I'm still cooking on a near daily basis and enjoying plenty of good desserts every other day. But not every dish is worth documenting, I supposed. And then I have been busy writing other much more boring stuff.

Thought I'll introduce this perhaps lesser known French dessert. We all know crème brûlée. We all love crème brûlée. And we all like to order crème brûlée at our favourite French restaurant. I would imagine, as its lesser known cousin (or even twin brother), Oeufs Au Lait must feel extremely neglected.

Actually, crème brûlée has at least 2 not-so-famous cousins (or twin brothers, whichever you see it). The other being crème Catalane (Catalane is the region in Southwest France that borders Spain) and bears an even closer resemblance to crème brûlée. And it is widely served in restaurants in this region. It is as sinful as crème brûlée in terms of the number of egg yolks used, and has a more citrus taste than traditional vanilla flavoured crème brûlée. The difference lies in the cooking method. There is no baking in crème Catalane.

And don't ask me which of the creamy/eggy desserts is the most original or has been invented first. I'm sure the French haven't agreed on the answer yet.

As for Oeufs Au Lait, its name tells us what it is: eggs with milk. It tastes like a sweetened version of the Japanese steamed egg Chawamushi. And it may have less sugarly sins than crème brûlée.

So now we know French dessert is not all about crème brûlée even though it stills rank highly in my list of favourites.

And predictably, I like to refer to Camille's cookbook of French classic dishes to try out all these classic French desserts. Hmm...looking through the dessert pictures in this French cookbook, I suspect that besides crème Catalane and oeufs au lait, two other desserts -- blanc-manger au lait d'amandes and oeufs à la neige -- may also be possible distant cousins of our favourite crème brûlée.

Oeufs Au Lait
Makes two small ramekins (we did it on a day when we have only 1 egg left, feel free to increase the quantity proportionately)

130ml milk
1 egg
a few drops of vanilla essence
15g sugar (perhaps 1 teaspoon?)

Preheat oven at 150 degrees Celcius.

Add vanilla essence into the milk and boil. You may like to use vanilla beans instead. If using that, let the vanilla beans infuse for 5 minutes before removing the vanilla pod.

Whisk the egg(s) with sugar. Gradually add the hot milk while stirring. Pass the creamy egg mixture through a sieve into small ramekins.

Place the ramekins in a mould or tin and fill up with water to form a water bath. Bake in oven for about 30 minutes.

Serve cool. You may also make a caramelised sugar syrup and pour a thin layer to the oeufs au lait before serving.

Crumble of Pears and Dates

Hmmm....my food presentation skills are not doing justice to this tasty and easy to make crumble. Now it looks like some gluey fruits that has been messed around on a kid's plate.

Looks aside, it is a pretty light dessert after a heavy dinner, as the crumble pastry is just a sprinkle on the pear rather than a thick crust

The recipe is adapted from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. And it's so easy to adapt the portion size that I'm regurgitating the recipe based on memory.

Crumble of Pears and Dates
Serves two

2 pears (1 pear per person)
A few dried dates (Persian dates, not Chinese red dates, can be replaced with figs)
Some honey (about 1 tablespoon)
Roughly 1 spoon of butter (after adding my reduced quantity of butter, I regretted it as omitting the butter would make healthier dessert)

For the crumble:
30g flour (or 1 heap tablespoon)
15g cold butter
20g brown sugar (or about 1 tablespoon)
Sprinkle almond flakes or walnut pieces

Preheat oven at 200 degree Celcius.

Peel pear and quarter it. Put in a small pan with butter over low heat. Add honey. Cook for about 3-5 minutes.

Cut the dates into cubes. Mix into the pear mixture. Put everything into a baking tin.

Prepare the crumble by rubbing butter into the flour until all butter are evenly mixed into the flour. Add sugar and mix well.

Sprinkle the crumble over the pears. Sprinkle nuts over the crumble. Bake for about 20 minutes until the crumble is golden brown.

Nice and still easy Creme Brulee

It's been almost one year since I last attempted Crème Brûlée. Now I'm back with an improved version, even though I still use the same recipe. This is because I now have 2 not-so-secret weapons: real vanilla beans and blow torch. And each time I do it, I am reminded again of the simple steps in making this favourite French dessert.

We had bought vanilla pods with the remaining of our Tongan dollars at the airport when we were holidaying in the country. Despite my love for all things vanilla, I'm clueless as to how the real thing looks like and thankfully, youtube comes to my rescue to show me how to even open it!

As for the blow torch, we were actually shopping for electric toothbrush at Moore Wilson. Being rather put off by the hefty price tag of fancy electric toothbrushes, our attention were instead attracted by the colourful blow torch on display right next to the oral hygiene devices. Well, I guess anyone with a sweet tooth needs to work harder on keeping their pearly whites clean.

Anyway, to keep the long story short, we were happy to sacrifice our dental health in the name of holy good creme brulee.

Below is the recipe from Camille's French classic cookbook, slightly amended from my last post.

Crème Brûlée
makes 6 cups

1 whole egg
4 egg yolks
80g castor sugar
half vanilla pod or a few drops of vanilla essence
400ml liquid cream
brown sugar

If you're using vanilla beans, slit the pod lengthwise into two and scour the beans out from half the pod with the back of your knife. Check youtube if you're unsure. Add half the pod and the vanilla beans to the 400ml cream and heat over medium-low fire to infuse the vanilla flavour until the cream is just about to boil.

In case you're short of say 100ml cream (which we are always short of, as cream do not seem to come in 400ml packaging), top it up with milk. (Maybe that's my secret to making a lighter version of creme brulee...hmmm)

Set aside for 15 minutes. Preheat oven at 130 degree Celcius.

After that, pour over a sieve to remove the vanilla pod. Don't throw the vanilla pod away, dry it and keep it in a jar of sugar to make vanilla sugar.

Whisk the egg, egg yolks, castor sugar (if you're using vanilla essence, add it during this stage) together (just a manual balloon hand whisk will do), then add the cream in slowly until well blended.

Pour mixture over a sieve (to remove bubbles) into individual ramekins (coffee cups may work well). This quantity makes 6 cups.

Cook in preheated oven of 130C. The cups have to be placed in a tray of water to moderate actual heat going through and prevent the eggs from become omelettes.

Cooking time is about 40-45 minutes, but be sure the cream has gelled in the cups. What we do is shake our oven a little bit (or tilt the cups), and you'll also see the custard surface a little puffed up, indicating that the inside is cooked.

You also wouldn't want to overcook the custard. We cooked our perfect crème brûlée in 45 minutes in our fan-baked oven, but every oven is different, so some careful observation is necessary here. If still unsure, you may consider sacrificing one cup by piercing through the surface to check if it's cooked inside.

Put in fridge for 1 hour before serving. To serve, sprinkle generously brown sugar on top and grill in a very hot oven (say 200-250C for 5 minutes, watch carefully to avoid burning the top) for the surface to caramelise before serving, or better still, get a blow torch.

Camille has another suggestion which we have tried with half the batch of creme brulee with good results: leave the creme brulee to cool in the oven door open, and cool overnight. Then repeat the last step above.

Also, if you like to experiment with different flavours, just replace the vanilla beans with say lemon zest, coffee liqueur, almond essence....

Improvised blueberry charlotte

I have a little of all the key ingredients leftover from previous dessert experiments. They are not enough to make another cake or tart, but too precious to waste. So a blueberry charlotte is created out of no recipe. Which is the beauty of charlotte, since no cooking is involved. You just mix and match what you can find in your pantry or fridge and voilah! A satisfactory conclusion to a great dinner.

My improvised blueberry charlotte
Serves two

A handful of blueberries
2 tablespoon good quality berry jam (I used mixed berry jam)
100ml fresh cream
Sponge biscuits
1 spoon icing sugar (castor sugar will do too)
a few drops of vanilla essence

Remembering that these are mostly leftover ingredients, the quantity is not really precise and that important. Just use what you can find.

Mix the blueberries with jam over low fire for a few quick minutes, so that the jam softens and you kind of get a thick coulis. Leave to cool.

Whipped the cream with sugar and vanilla essence until it becomes creamy. To get perfect whipped cream, keep your mixing bowl and beater sticks in the freezer for 15 minutes before you start to whip it. And the cream is ready when it leaves a trail. Overwhipping it makes the cream becomes butter and buttermilk (which means it is not really wasted, just make it into butter for your breakfast).

Arrange the sponge biscuits together in the way you like in a dessert glass or bowl. Crush some small pieces to line the bottom of the glass. Spoon the whipped cream, followed by a spoon of the berry mixture. Put a few small pieces of biscuits, followed by another spoon of whipped cream. Topped with berry mixture.

If you like the sponge biscuits to be soft like cake, make a quick syrup out of jam and dip each biscuits briefly in the syrup before using them.

Leave in the fridge for about 4 hours before serving.

Improved Blueberry Tart

Certain French food can be extraordinarily seasonal. Or it seems to be the case for Rémi's family. And blueberry tart is made mainly during the blueberry season. While you can probably get frozen blueberries from the supermarket out of season, the pleasure is partially derived from picking wild blueberries in the countryside. And since the season is particularly short, the window for enjoying blueberry tart is particularly short.

Anyway, this is his third attempt at making blueberry tart with frozen blueberries. And it just get nicer and nicer.

The recipe is still the same as the last one we did. The main difference this time:

1. The dough is not pre-cooked;
2. After flattening the dough on the tart mould, sprinkle ground almonds over the base of the tart, followed by sugar;
3. Then you spread generously the blueberries, filling up the tart, and sprinkle more sugar;
4. Bake for 30 minutes or more, until the blueberries just start to wrinkle.

Super Sinful Kouign Amann

There are some foods where just by eating one serving will fulfill your monthly quota of calories intake. Duck confit is one of them. Kouign Amann is the dessert equivalent of duck confit, except that instead of the letting the duck drumstick swim in duck fat, you drown the cake dough in a sea of butter and sugar. Don't be deceived by the harmless looking crust of the picture I took.

Kouign-amann (pronounced ku-nya-marn) is a celtic specialty from Brittany. The name comes from the Breton words for cake ("kouign") and butter ("amann"). It's quite like bread (think croissant), made by folding bread dough several times so that you achieve a multilayer cake/bread. Like croissant, it is oily, as you have to spread 10 times more butter on it than on kaya toast (assuming you use 1 tablespoon butter for kaya toast). It is more sinful than croissant, in the sense that after pouring 10 big tablespoons of butter, you dump yet another 10 big tablespoons of sugar onto it.

The result is a bread-like crusty cake that has a deceptively light but oily layered texture, with crispy sugar that caramelise in between the layers.

Thankfully, we shared our sin with M (who decided to work doubly hard at the gym for the week after the dessert).

Rémi did everything, I just provided eye power. No recipe sharing here since I have no idea how he did it, except that he took the recipe proportions from Camille's cookbook, and followed the steps from the following video clip.

Apricot Clafoutis

Nothing new, but here's a variation of Clafoutis that I did last week.

I did the same thing twice, first with just half an apricot. There was too much crust and not enough fruits, so I tried by putting more than one apricot, all diced up, into each muffin round.

Making individual servings of clafoutis is useful for bringing them out on, say a picnic, no messiness with cutting the cake up.

I wish spring and summer to come soon. Right now, everyday fruits is always apples, pears, kiwis and oranges. I'm already looking forward to cherries, peaches, apricots and all kinds of berries.

What we've been up to + Pear and chocolate Cake

The spread of desserts here partly explain the absence from blogging. I've been cooking, eating, then more cooking and eating. Above picture courtesy of M, whom we had the pleasure of attending the party celebrating his engagement with LC.

Our contributions include the peachy Charlotte, the tangy Lemon Tart, and Camille's Fondant au Chocolat.

And here's a useful tip, for those who wants to make heart shaped cake like me, but couldn't find a heart shaped tin after visiting some 6 stores in the city.



Besides Camille's fondant, Rémi has also started the first experiment to find the right way to make a volcanic like French melted chocolate cake. Meaning when you use your dessertspoon to break the little warm cake, the chocolate just oozes out like hot lava.

The idea is to bake the chocolate cake for a short time in a hot oven, so that the inside doesn't cook completely and hence it's still moist. We hope to try a few variations of recipes Rémi found on French websites. By the way, the white patches on the cake is my lame attempt at dusting icing sugar on the cake, they are not the results of a mouldy cake.



And finally, the ugliest looking cake of this whole lot, because me and Rémi are too busy with savouring it while it's still piping hot from the oven and only bother to take photo after the second day.

The recipe comes from Christelle Le Ru. First time we made it for the Chinese New Year reunion dinner, it was sooooo good that despite having a 101% full stomach, I went on for a second and possibly third slice. Second time, we couldn't repeat the success but not too bad still. Third time, yum yum. So I've decided to post the recipe, for my bro who have tried the first yummy attempt. The precious highly recommended recipe book was from them afterall.

Pear and Chocolate Cake
Serves 5? I've halved the proportion and the cake last us 3 desserts for 2.

2 eggs
100g sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
85g melted butter
135g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 sweet pears
100g dark chocolate
sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease a loaf tin.

Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla essenee together. Add the melted butter and mix until everything is well combined. Fold the flour and baking powder into the cake mixture.

Peel and cut the pears into slices or cubes. Break the chocolate into small pieces. Stir the pears and chocolate pieces into the cake mixture. Do not worry if you find that there seems to be more pear than cake. The juiciness of the pears gives a moist sweet texture to the cake.

Pour into the tin and scattered sliced almonds over the top. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. The cake is especially nice when it's warm, with the chocolate partially melted inside.

Breast of Duck with Cepes Mushrooms

One more French duck recipe from Camille, but it is not duck confit. We have considered trying to make our own duck confit, but after checking on youtube, we saw, horrors of all horrors, that you need almost one pot of fat to cook that already very fatty duck meat. Oh no, no way we're going to make cassoulet.

A friend once asked, after enjoying a hearty meal of fatty cassoulet in France, how do French ladies stay slim on a rich French diet.

I'm afraid I have no perfect answer since I'm not French, never lived in France, don't survive on a purely French diet and have not read the book French Women Don't Get fat.

I think it's because French value the quality of their food more than quantity. They eat for pleasure, preferring to enjoy their food slowly rather than gobbling them just to fill their stomach. And portion control. But that's still too generalising.

Rémi thinks that typical French eat a lot of boiled vegetables at home. As well as yoghurt for breakfast, and as desserts. French gourmet cuisine like duck confit and foi gras are for tourists who dine in restaurants while French people tend to eat home-cooked food everyday. The 3-hour lunch and 4-hour dinner marathon feasts we're being fed by the parents whenever we go back to France are not normal everyday fare, but more homecoming reunion treats.

Other reasons I found when googling this topic include: French women are slender but thinks they are fat (while British women are fat but believe they are slim); intense pressure from French men to stay slim (AGREE!!!); stay clear of fast food (eat REAL food); maintain active lifestyle (even the French great grandmother may be doing more sports than me)...

Breast of Duck with Cèpes Mushrooms (Magrets de Canard aux Cèpes)
Serves two

2 nice fillets of duck breast
2 or more handfuls cépes mushrooms (they are very flavoursome. use porcini if you can't find cépes. or mix forest mushrooms. as they are more expensive, I mixed with fresh button mushrooms)
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 teaspoon chopped parsley
olive oil
salt and pepper

Clean the cèpes. Heat some olive oil and cook the mushrooms for a few minutes until they start rejecting water. Drain and set aside.

Put half of the chopped garlic and parsley under the skin of the duck breast.

On a frying pan, using medium heat, cook the duck breast, skin side first. As the duck is very fatty, you do not have to add oil to the frying pan. Rather, the duck fat will ooze out. Cook for about 7 minutes, discard the extra oil, turn the fillet and cook for 5 minutes. Now, duck breast cooked this way is like steak, so adjust the cooking time if you like the meat more rare, or more cooked.

When the duck is done, remove and cover.

Heat olive oil, throw in the mushrooms, add garlic, parsley, salt and pepper and brown for a few minutes.

Slice the duck breast fillet and serve with the mushrooms.

As a side, try roasting potatoes with duck fat.

Orange Duck and Orange Cake

At 18 degrees Celsius, I was told that my rented apartment's internal temperature before switching on heater is warm. It is afterall the standard temperature recommended by the World Health Organisation. The average indoor temperature of a Kiwi home in winter is 16 degrees Celsius. And according to my classmate in French class, she can even blow fog out of her breath in her lounge, if the curtains over the huge floor-to-ceiling windows are not drawn in time.

Despite being a developed country, it is universally acknowledged that Kiwi homes' insulation and heating are third world standards. I read that the country has the worst winter mortality rates in the developed world, and high pneumonia, asthma or whatever rates due to damp cold houses.

If you think that these cold hard truths will make them wake up and improve their home insulation, you're wrong. The standard Kiwi response is to ask complaining foreigners to "toughen up" or otherwise "go home". They sure are a tough species, when I see children wearing shorts and walking barefooted outside, while I am huddled up with scarf, gloves, 3-4 layers of warm clothes and a thick jacket.

Being of tropical breed, I definitely desire to have warmer house. Especially after staying one week in my brother's warm apartment in Sweden when it's minus five outside. So warm that you can walk around barefooted, wear tees and shorts indoor. Well, in my Kiwi home, I wear a jumper even in summer.

So cooking stews and baking will become a favourite winter pastime of mine to warm the house further. Just don't show me the electricity bill.

And yes, I finally found duck meat being sold in a gourmet supermarket. So I was determined to make a French duck dish. My original plan was to cook duck confit, but after discovering the horrendous amount of fats used (basically, you need enough fat to cover your meat), I opted to cook the more modestly oiled "Carnard à l'orange". Dessert came in the form of "Gateau à l'orange", an orange caked soaked in orange juice.

The duck recipe was adjusted from Camille's French classic cookbook. Cake recipe was recited by Rémi's mother from her memory.

Duck of Orange (Canard à l'orange)
Serves 6 (Serves 2)
Note: Original recipe used one whole duck, whereas I used only 2 drumsticks, enough for 2 persons. Quantity quoted in brackets are my very rough guestimations.

1 big duck about 2.5kg (2 duck drumsticks)
20g butter (1 spoonful, you decide how less sinful you want your dish to be)
1 carrot (1 small, more veg is always healthy)
1 onion (1 too, since onions has so many health benefits)
200ml white wine (about 80ml, I just poured randomly actually)
3 oranges (1 orange)
1 glass of chicken stock (less than half a glass)
salt and pepper

Slice onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole or pan, heat butter, add onion and carrot. Brown the duck on all sides. Add salt and pepper.

When the duck is well coloured on all sides, moisten with white wine. Cook for about 10 minutes and pour over the chicken stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of one orange (or half) coarsely. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling water (a step that I skipped conveniently). Squeeze the juice off the orange (or half) and cut the other 2 oranges (or the other half) into thin slices.

After one hour of simmering, pour orange juice, zest and slices into the casserole. Stir gently. Remove cover and turn up the heat to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

My resulting duck drumstick was fat and juicy, and the orange slices so soft it's almost like marmalade.

Serve with rosemary roasted potato cubes, or salad.

Orange Cake (Gateau à l'orange)

The recipe was given from memory, so not very precise. I will try making it again another way for improvements.

4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
120g plain flour + 1 teaspoon baking powder
120g sugar
60g butter, melted
4 oranges, extract zest from 2 oranges, and juice from all 4

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius. Prepare a cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper (I was too lazy to do that, and almost couldn't unmould my cake)

Beat egg yolks and sugar together. Add flour and melted butter and zests.

Beat egg whites until it becomes stiff and firm (make sure the eggs are at room temperature before beating). I find that after adding the flour, the mixture becomes rather dry. So a tip from Nigella, the celebrity chef who likes to fling her hair is to take a big spoon of the egg white meringue mixture, stir strongly into the flour batter to smoothen the texture. Then fold the rest of the stiff egg whites gently.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.

Pour orange juice onto the cake, let it soak through. You may like to unmould the cake first.

Serve cold.

Crumble of Lemon Curd

The first dish that Rémi tried to impress me with was homemade lemon curd. Or rather, a 2-week old lemon curd on bread. Errr...well, I can say that I wasn't too impressed. Moreover, it was a tad too sour for me.

Well, if he had known or seen this Lemon Curd Crumble recipe, he would have scored more points then.

The recipe came from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. I had decided to made it as I had some leftover crumbles from making an apple crumble.

Sometimes, one dish lead to another. From the first apple crumble late last week, we went on to have a second one, and now the lemon curd crumble. But because of a mistake I made when mixing cream and eggs together, I was left with an extra portion of cream and eggs mixture. So I made a quiche out of that earlier today. This will leave me with extra tart dough, so the apple crumble misjudgment is going to end with a pear tart tonight.

Lemon Curd Crumble (Crumble de Citron)
Serves 4 (I've divided the quantity, wanting to make just 2 cups, but still having enough lemon curd for 4 small ramekins)

100ml lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
70g sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
2 eggs
100ml liquid cream
1 branch of lemon verbena (it's something new to me, I tried replacing this with mint leaves)
Butter for greasing the ramekins

Crumble
60g flour
35g butter
40g sugar

According to the recipe, you may replace cream with whole milk yoghurt or white cheese. But I stuck to the cream.

Beat the cold cream with a hand beater until it becomes creamy (do not overbeat until it becomes chantilly cream). Mix the eggs in.

Boil the lemon juice with sugar for 2-3 minutes until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add the verbena leaves. Cover and let the leaves infuse for a while. I had used 6 small mint leaves, but probably didn't use enough to make much of an impression. Anyway, discard the leaves and let the lemon syrup cool down.

Mix the lemon syrup with cornflour. Add the cream and egg mixture to it. Cook the mixture over low heat (or bain marie), stirring non-stop until it thickens. It took quite a while for the mixture to thicken (until it almost become like lemon curd), but do not be tempted to increase the heat, as you will end up with scramble eggs.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease 4 ramekins and pour the lemon curd mixture into it.

Prepare the crumble. Using your fingertips, rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles crumbles. Add sugar and mix well.

Bake the lemon mixture for 15 minutes, or more, until you see the surface browning and solidifying. Sprinkle the crumbles very gently on the surface and return to over for another 15-20 minutes, until the crumbles are golden brown.

Serve cold or just warm.