Eden

A friend brought a HUGE chunk of morbier to my wine & cheese party on saturday, and I still have most of it leftover. Unfortunately, while I like morbier, my husband is a cheese weenie and there's a LOT more morbier here than I can finish off by myself in a timely fashion. (especially since I have leftovers of several other cheeses too) so I'm thinking if it's cooked into a dish where he doesn't smell the morbier, just tastes it as part of a dish there's a better chance of it going over well & not going to waste. Any suggestions?

Thursday (Bastille day): Assortment of cheeses and olives fresh greens & flowers with vinaigrette good bread boudin blanc* sauteed with apples onions & much butter home-made Peach sorbet fresh peaches macerated in sauternes bakery cream puffs, served with fresh cherries & drizzled with chocolate sauce *that was what I asked for, but the sausage shop gave me some unknown spicy sausage by mistake which I didn't realize (since I had helpers in the kitchen) till it was already in the pan & cooking. tasted OK but NOT the dish I was trying to make... Saturday - Bastille-day inspired wine & cheese party: Cheeses: Morbier, roquefort, pepper boursin, Pyrenees Mont cayal?, young & old goudas, home-made goat cheese , gorgonzola & home-made marmalade. Breads: baguettes, mini coissants, crackers, big coissants Olives: lucques, nicoise, picholines, picholines? with herbs de provence Brie tartlettes with an apricot chutney drizzled on top Fruits: wild berries, fresh cherries, casaba melon Desserts: One friend brought a chocolate tarte with orange cream topping another brought pain au chocolate & almond coissants from a local bakery, and a third made a "buche du Bastille" Theories differed as to whether it was a torch carried on the way to the bastille, or a piece of wood from the Barricades - the only thing certain is that it was as tasty as it was silly....

Actually there are people who will eat all of the above with silverware. I had one friend who not only ate her fried chicken with a knife & fork, she ate her jello that way too! She wasn't unadventurous food-wise, just silverware obsessed the idea of her scooping up a tidy handful of couscous is simply un-imaginable...

I make a sugar/currant puree and then fold that into whipped cream & serve curant fool. (works with red or black, just use more sugar with the black) likewise for currant ice-cream. edited to clarify that the stems seeds etc get strained out of the puree in a foodmill, and in the case of ice-cream, the puree is mixed with a creme anglaise base, not just whipped cream... Oh and my husband likes to make currant sorbets, which I love, but the black currant is just too intense for most people.

Now I know what to serve at my next Viking themed dinner

then here you go: thanks for the many suggestions everyone.

Wow, I just pulled up a map to get an idea of what a 5 mile radius would cut, and it's basically the entire city from Pioneer square up to about 175th or so. you're talking south of the king-dome, shoreline or the east-side. That's harsh. I'd understand 1-2 miles, but 5 seems extreme...

so if one wanted to make pear cider are there specific varieties it would be best to use?

Ditto north ballard/Crown hill. If you're feeling all girly girl Seattle has a desperate need for a place that does a good Afternoon Tea on par with the Queen Mary, but without the terrible service/management and uber-price. My top request would be for Russian/Eastern European food - that seems to be a big hole in the seattle spectrum.

one of our favorite, and easiest, ice-creams is just equal parts coco-loco (cream of coconut) and rice-dream (or milk if you don't dislike it/have dairy intolerant friends as we do) it's dreamy and the coco-loco provides all the sugars and stabilizers you need...

Or Kir Breton with a lovely dry French style apple cider! mmmmm.... ← ooh I haven't tried that, and I think we have apple cider in the house as well as pear - something else for tomorrow night's menu

also central market in Shorline & the Ballard market both have them. (which means that Greenwood market should too) FYI last time I was at CM they were up on top of the freezer section so only tall people could buy them

I can't recall the brand right now, but make sure you get an actual French brand of Cassis. We compared the good french stuff with the cheap domestic version, and it was like night & day. The real Cassis, was significantly darker, and had an intense taste of black currant. the domestic was just sweet and generically fruity. The good stuff costs about twice as much, but it's worth it... Oh and if you haven't tried it yet, bust out from the white wine & try a Kir Normande, made with pear cider

I just picked up a bunch of fresh garbazno beans at The Market this afternoon. Having only ever cooked with dried or canned garbanzos I don't know what-all I can do with them (besides munching on them straight from the pod like they were popcorn ) I was thinking of just dressing them with lemon, oil and salt, but would love to hear other suggestions. Thanks.

well it looks like that trend is hitting Seattle I think 3 different Moroccan restaurants have opened here in the last year or so, after a major dearth for the last 12+ years I've lived here. (and much whining about the lack on my part!) Now I just need time to go visit & compare them all... Disclosure: I must admit to ignorance of North-African cuisine beyond Moroccan, but what l do know I really like!

Here you go.

So why is it that almost all honey cake recipes have coffee or cola or tea in them? what does this add? Sometime a while back I was looking for a plain honey cake recipe (like FWED's recipe which Wendy linked to above) and couldn't find anything sans coffee...

Well they hold together much better, the fist round realy just wanted to crumble when you touched them, and on this round, Bill accidentally turned the box on it's side when we got to the park and only one of them broke. Flavor wise I think the first batch was a little sweeter, and spicier tasting, which could be the honey variety (round one used Huckleberry honey, round two a mix of huckleberry and Fireweed) or the cooking process. It shouldn't be the honey quantity since I beleive round two had a slightly higher honey ratio. I cut the oil quantity in round two, because while round One didn't taste oily, it was a little greasy to handle, and I think the oil is part of what made it hard for them to hold together. I also mixed the oil into the crumbs on round two with a food processor rather than a fork to make sure the smaller amount of oil got distributed well. I'm probably going to make round Three this afternoon just to confirm that the soft crack works, and that letting the oiled crumbs sit makes no real difference (Plus, I have a meeting to attend where they like to get treats...) I ran into my husbands Boss a few weeks ago & got asked when I was gong to send in some more yummy historical food - please! When I make too much of something I often send the extras in to work with Bill, apparently I hadn't been cooking enough recently

Locusts - round two: I'm afraid I was trying to do this around other activites, so it did not have the focused attention it deserved... I started per a suggestion by trying to reduce the honey in a double boiler. After an hour it had barely reached 160F and no reduction seemed to be happening, so I switched to a heavy enamel pot directly over the flame. Within 3 minutes I'd cooked the honey to 250F (hard crack). This was a bit higher than intended, and when left to cool, it hardened past stir-ability so I had to reheat it to mix it into the bread crumbs. next time I will only take it to soft crack, and I think it will stir in without trouble. As with the first time it was a little difficult to form the balls, (the oil makes them not want to stick) but I smooshed hard & got them into little balls mostly, and once I let them set for an hour or so the honey stiffened back up & held them together beautifully. I'm afraid none of the close-up shots came out well, but here's the tray of sweets about to be taken on a picnic. Also no shot when plated because well, they descended like locusts again, especially those who had tried them the first time! I'll post the recipe to recipe gullet later this evening, I'm off to help a friend make Pork Egyrdouce for 150...

well since I am mid-recipe with the "locusts" Why don't I just continue to post the process on this recipe for a start? Thank you for the helpful answers. And yes, I'd love to know what the musk smelled like!

I noticed that in my own menu. Maybe it's because with summer all the lovely mediterannean type produce (peppers, tomatoes etc) is available, and that's what's on people's minds? From reading previous threads on this topic I gather there are no particular foods traditionally associated with Bastille Day to anchor a menu around so I just asked myself "what do I feel like cooking that's from my French repertoire?" Most of my favorite dishes from my visits to Paris are a little heavier and don't seem right with warm weather. Of course that could be because I never visit Europe in the summer

Out of curiosity, since I need to thicken some honey for my Al-Andalus recipe, how thick was the honey at this stage compared to how it came out of the jar? How long did it take to get there, did you use a double boiler, or heat it directly over the flame. Thanks for any clues. I haven't cooked honey down previously & it makes me nervous that I'm going to boil-over/burn the honey & have a gigantic mess on my hands... I was just having this discussion locally, with theories ranging from reduced honey, to whipped honey, to crystalized honey. One person mentioned that other early middle-eastern recipes call for cooking down honey - I'm waiting for her to track down sources... So have you found a source for a culinary safe musk? I have come across many recipes which call for this ingredient, and get frustrated that I am not making them as accurately as I could... This would make sense given that we have various different focuses represented here, although I also like the idea of busting out & playing with 18th century food for a change (I think we should go up through victorian/edwardian, the food then is still pretty different from what we eat today...)

another trick is to make the caramel in advance. I find it thickens up a good bit if you let is sit even 24hours before using.

a good portion of the Al-Andalus recipes end this way, maybe the other recipes are more dependable? According to Heiatt & Butler in 'Curye on Inglysch' (excellent source by the way) paynemayn is "best quality white bread". Variants on the term include: payndemayn, pain de mayn, pain main etc.

We've invited over a handful of friends for a French themed dinner. (we may not BE french, but we sure appreciate the bits of food & culture they send our way!) The menu will include an array of french cheese, wine & olives of course. I may even bust out & buy a loaf of Poulaine bread (one of the local stores has it FedExed in from Paris ) A lamb and olive roast from Nimes The celery root and apple puree from Wolfert's "cooking of Southern France" probably a red pepper and tomato salad or maybe a green salad with roasted chevre? (more cheese can't be wrong!) and either a fresh fruit tart, Mont-blanc or Prunes in armagnac for dessert plus whatever ice-cream/sorbet Bill feels like making that week. Still a bit up in the air...