FrogPrincesse
-
Posts
4,754 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by FrogPrincesse
-
-
No such thing as too much lemon in my opinion, but could you link the recipe?-
1
-
-
It looks like a typical marmalade, just cooked longer so it caramelizes.
-
@Fernwood No they aren’t delicate. They easily keep for a few weeks in the fridge, so transporting them shouldn’t be a problem.
-
1 hour ago, dtremit said:
You can get the skinny type with a nice ergonomic handle:
https://www.microplane.com/premium-classic-series-zester-grater-turq
This is the only kind I've ever had, but I've been pleased with it.
That's the one I have. Love it!
-
4 hours ago, TicTac said:
VERY interesting. So are you suggesting a wide/squat pot produces a better end result? More evaporation?
My marmalade did not set - I probably did not use enough sugar (I hate the stuff TBH!) so it was a bit syrupy. But it was good. Also put a vanilla pod in one or two jars, worked our quite nicely! Esp so over vanilla ice cream.
Using the right pot will get you there faster and without overcooking the fruit. With a tall and narrow pot filled pretty full, it was easily taking 2 hours to reach the gelling point. With a large and wide pot, about 30-45 minutes.
The bag in the right in the picture has the seeds (and membranes) which provide additional pectin (in addition to the fruit itself) and help the marmalade set.
-
1
-
-
Thanks for the additional details, @Kerala. That looks really good indeed! And thanks for reminding me about your foodblog, I will make sure to (re)read it!
-
3
-
-
2 minutes ago, TicTac said:
Looks good. My grandfather taught me to make marmalade with Seville oranges many moons ago. I made a batch a couple years back and I think we are down to our last jar...
Assuming the 1.5kg of 'water' is actually sugar?!
Otherwise, it seems more like Seville Soup 😛
Correct (and fixed)! 1.5 kg of sugar, as I am not a big fan of Seville soup...
You are lucky to have learned from your grandfather! There is no tradition of making marmalade in my (French) family, so I learned through trial and error and with the tips from other eGulleters. For me the biggest improvement was to use the right pot! When I used a tall/narrow pot in my first attempts, getting the marmalade to set would take forever (several hours). Now it's a much faster process, thankfully.
-
3
-
1
-
-
Beautiful and mouth-watering food, everyone!
Thanks for sharing your family tradition, @Kerala (and the gorgeous landscape). It sounds like you had a real feast and the ballotine looks very fancy - what did you use for the farce/stuffing?
We celebrated on Christmas day and it was just the four of us. We started with some snacks: iberico bellota salami (first time trying this and I highly recommend it), cured duck prosciutto, and little florettes of tête de moine cheese. Also a few medjool dates stuffed with Gruyère (my daughter’s contribution).
I was in the mood for something rustic to start the meal, and decided to go with a Corrèze garlic soup from Paula Wolfert's Cooking of Southwest France. It is made from slow-cooking garlic and onions in duck fat and stock (I used goose for both). The soup is thickened at the end with egg (sort of a French version of egg-drop soup), and livened up with a touch of red wine vinegar. It is served with a slice of rustic bread (bought at my local bakery Wildwood Flour) brushed with a touch of goose fat & sprinkled with ground pepper.
I followed with a simple endive, Fuyu persimmon and nut salad (recipe from Zuni, I used walnuts instead of pecans). It was good, although a bit plain to be honest. The recipe calls for cutting the endive into thin spears, but this goes against the French custom of never cutting salad greens in your plate (it is considered impolite, and for example you are supposed to gently fold large leaves of lettuce rather than cutting them), so I just sliced them into less pretty but more manageable bite-sized pieces. 😄 The persimmons were very good; it's been a fantastic year for persimmons in California.
Following the simple salad was a roast goose prepared in the Alsatian style, following Anne Willan's recipe from Country Cooking of France. I first cooked goose for the holidays a few years ago, and now my husband requests it every year. The goose is stuffed with green apples (that I realized post-meal I had forgotten to serve...) and basted with brown beer (Mammoth nut brown in this case). I served it with potatoes (cooked in the pressure cooker and then roasted underneath the goose in the goose fat) and red cabbage braised in brown beer & vinegar with caraway seeds (recipe from Tom Colicchio in Think Like a Chef). The red cabbage provided some acidity to cut the rich flavor of the goose (the green apples serve the same purpose - that is, if you don't forget to serve them 😁).
The goose is first browned in the oven at high temperature, then the skin is pricked and the bird cooked upside down at lower temperature to release the fat, then cooked some more breast side up. Finally, it is massaged with butter and crisped at high temperature for a short time before resting and carving. Goose is quite rich in fat of course, and it sort of self-bastes with the fat slowly releasing and permeating the meat, so the legs in the end taste essentially like confit (very similar to duck confit, just larger) and are the best part in my opinion. My meat thermometer was, it turned out, defective so the breasts ended up a bit overdone but still very edible. I have since then treated myself to a new Thermapen!
For dessert, I decided to try a local, family-owned French pastry shop for a traditional bûche de Noël. It was pretty good I thought, and the decorations were cute. More importantly, my daughter absolutely loved it! 😊
-
4
-
3
-
2
-
-
Has anyone been making marmalade lately?
Here is my annual batch of marmalade. I used a dozen Seville oranges (951 g, they were on the smaller size this year), mandarin juice (1/2 glass), 2.4 L of water, and 1.5 kg of sugar. I follow the recipe from David Lebovitz in Ready for Dessert with minor modifications - I scrape the skin to remove all the membranes that I place in the seed bag (I find that if I leave the membranes in, the marmalade isn't as clear). I used 2 tablespoons of aged rhum agricole as the booze component.
The marmalade gelled pretty quickly and the set is quite firm. It tastes very bright and a bit acidic but will mellow as it ages.
The yield was 8 jars (6 x 8 oz jars and 2 x 13 oz "Bonne Maman" jars).
-
6
-
1
-
1
-
-
I have both types and prefer the skinny one- it’s easier to navigate around a round surface like a lemon or an orange. The paddle-shaped one is good for cheese.
-
1
-
-
I realized am a bit behind in posting meals. This one is from December 30 - someone was in the mood for scallops and I found super fresh specimens at Catalina Offshore, my local seafood shop. I prepared them scampi-style and they tasted amazing, very sweet.
December 29, I was in the mood for a cheese soufflé and made this one from Jacques Pepin using Swiss gruyere. The recipe is "easy" and doesn't require to separate eggs. It was delicious (especially the crusty bits on the sides and bottom), but quite rich!. I ate it with a green salad (plenty of vinegar) on the side.
-
8
-
2
-
1
-
-
This "aged sheep's milk cheese" from Spain is pretty good (I wonder if it has a name). It's marinated in olive oil. The texture is a bit like a Manchego. The flavor is quite mild, a bit nutty.
-
6
-
-
3 hours ago, gulfporter said:
A fellow diner at a restaurant in Tucson in October overheard me order a non-alcoholic beer. He mentioned to me that there is a Guinness non-alcoholic beer. I should have asked if it was available in Tucson. I looked at Safeway and Fry's, but no luck.
Have any of you seen it where you are? I started Seco Enero (dry January) and will be in Tucson in a few weeks. If you've tasted it, what did you think of it?
Try Total Wine. They have it according to Wine Searcher.
-
1
-
-
Continuing with the lobster theme.
Local spiny lobsters…
cooked on the grill with olive oil and lemon. Delicious.
-
9
-
5
-
-
Salmon in papillote with ginger and garlic using @Andrea Nguyen's recipe from Vietnamese Food Any Day (this book deserves its own thread btw). I followed the recipe as is except I didn't have any oyster sauce so I used all soy with a touch of fish sauce, and I substituted (blanched) broccolini for bok choy. This was easy and delicious.
-
13
-
4
-
-
Easy dinner with ingredients from Trader Joe's. The tikka masala sauce is pretty good, and the garlic naans are decent (from the freezer section). For the meat, I used boneless skinless chicken thighs. Not pictured - I added some non-TJ's chutneys on the side (mango and plum), and yoghurt/raita.
-
5
-
1
-
-
Traditional quiche lorraine (creme fraiche, eggs, bacon, salt & pepper, nutmeg - no cheese).
-
12
-
1
-
2
-
-
Chocolate crack cookies for a cookie exchange. Lots of them.
Before baking
After
-
7
-
1
-
-
Mouthwatering spread, @Duvel!
For my daughter - filet mignon and fingerling potatoes. The steak was cooked sous vide and finished on the grill. The potatoes were cooked in a pressure cooker and sautéed with olive oil and herbes de Provence.
-
14
-
2
-
-
From last night, salmon pinwheels with spinach and feta, haricots verts. All items are from Trader Joe’s; the green beans are frozen and the salmon is fresh / vacuumed-sealed with the herb and feta filling. Ten minutes in the oven under the broiler, and dinner was ready! I added some olive oil and lemon juice before serving. It was very tasty and super easy.
-
20
-
1
-
-
6 minutes ago, liuzhou said:
I love traditional Port Salud, but it's rare even in France. Nearly all is now industrially made and nothing like the original. The monks who originally made it sold the trademark in the 1950s.
You can read the history on the Spruce Eats but take anything it says with a bucket of salt. They claim that it
That would be amazing given that the Loire Valley isn't in Brittany, at all. It is east of Brittany.
Brittany? 😆 They got the river and the region wrong. It’s in the Mayenne valley (in the Loire region), not the Loire valley.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-du-Salut_Abbey
-
-
Duck breast with a honey, mandarin & garlic glaze, served with a simple lettuce & persimmon salad. The duck was from a local butcher shop (Sepulveda Meats & Provisions), and it was really delicious!
-
15
-
3
-
-
Making Marmalade: Tips & Techniques
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
@TicTac I am glad you were able to find Seville oranges! As Katie said, use the juice in the marmalade. They tend to not have a lot, but that depends on the variety and freshness. I also use the juice of a sweet orange (following David Lebovitz's recipe). It's there for flavor, and so is the liquor component (scotch is traditional, rum also works quite well), if you choose to include it. The beauty of making marmalade is that you can make it exactly to your liking!
Cheesecloth is absolutely fine, actually that's what I used in my first batches. It can shed at the edges, so you just have to keep an eye on that (make a tight bundle and you will be fine). Also, if it is the fabric type, it is not reusable and you will need another piece for the next batch. Because I make marmalade regularly, I upgraded to a cheese / nut bag - I just wash it at the end and it is good to go for another round of marmalade or jam.
As to what goes into the bag, unlike Katie, I include seeds and pith as they are both great sources of pectin. Initially I was worried that including the pith would make the marmalade less clear, but that is not the case at all.
A mix of white and dark brown sugar works very well. I have done it in the past either intentionally (for another boost of flavor, caramel notes) or unintentionally because I realized at the last minute that I didn't have enough white sugar on hand. Again, another opportunity to create the flavor profile you like the best.