tammylc

422 truffles. My goodness, that was a lot of truffles. I'm still finishing up the packaging today, and then I'll be eagerly getting them out of my house. For the Christmas collection, there was cranberry, gingerbread, egg nog and chestnut. Then I had a little bit of custom work to do, with Hazelnut, Patron XO Cafe and chipotle. Chestnut 12 oz chocolate 24 oz chestnut spread (sweetened chestnut puree, basically) 6 oz butter 1 tbsp brandy These turned out to be my favorite. Rich and decadent. Easy to make because I went with a commercial chestnut spread Cranberry 18 oz chocolate 12 oz cream 2 tbsp unsweetened cranberry concentrate This concentrate is really potent stuff. You can find it in health food stores. It's liquid, in a bottle - mine was in the juice aisle. Egg Nog 24 oz white chocolate 7 oz egg nog 1 vanilla bean 3/8 tsp nutmeg 2 tbsp rum These needed more rum, but I didn't realize that until too late, so you can't really taste it. Gingerbread 21 oz milk chocolate 8 oz cream 1/4 tsp black pepper 1/4 tsp allspice 1/4 tsp cloves 1/2 tsp ginger powder 2 tsp cinnamon 4 tsp molasses 1.5 tbsp ginger juice Black pepper was the magic ingredient to make these actually taste like what I was looking for. And the combination of powdered ginger and juice from fresh works really well. I ended up hiring a friend to come by and help for a few hours yesterday afternoon, and that was well worth the expense. And now I know that anything over 300 is probably too many.

Thinking some more about this aged gouda thing. I've got a bottle of Alvear Carlos VII amontillado downstairs - it's a totally dry wine made in the Sherry style with Pedros Ximenex grapes. Really interesting wine - the nose is butterscotch and caramel and idodine and soy, but it's not at all sweet, and it has a lingering hazelnut finish. There's definitely potential here to go with the gouda, but I'm just not sure how to incorporate it. I'll have to crack it open and check it out (it's fortified and oxidized, so lasts forever after it's opened, fortunately). Maybe a reduction? Hmmm...

The nice thing about Zingerman's is that they'll let me stand there and taste every cheese in the store if I need to, so I can do some experimenting on the fly... That is a gorgeous picture! Seems like the whole swiss family doesn't get much play in dessert. Or goudas, for that matter. Hmmm... Zingerman's has a really aged gouda right now - crystally and butterscotchy. Gouda with butterscotch - but how to incorporate the wine? Nice idea on one, but I'm not a deep-fryer. I'm thinking about 2, though...

Great job, Klary! You're going to be a hard act to follow, but I'll do my best!

Sharp cheddar pate choux with red wine sorbet?

Wow - what a great challenge! I've already got all kinds of ideas floating around, now I just need to figure out how to put them all together into something fabulous. Some very initial brainstorms: - port glazed walnuts - grapes coated in blue cheese and rolled in nuts - goat cheese - definitely something about goat cheese Please keep the ideas coming!

Thanks for the recommendation. My trip is over and done with, but maybe I'll make it back someday. And this thread will be out here for any other El Paso visitors.

I haven't tried these yet. But I was surprised to see that they list milk as in ingredient in even the darkest bars.

The restaurant in question seems to be notoriously overpriced, according to these CitySearch reviews: http://newyork.citysearch.com/review/7150725/986940. (I couldn't find a website for the restaurant). If they're charging $36 for 6 raviolis, $1050 for steak and truffles might make sense in that context.

Bryan - I'm looking for it and can't find it. Where's it at?

Yeah, she was AWFUL. One wonders if she'd had a few too many cocktails herself before the shooting started.

Just in case anyone else gets to El Paso, here's the text of my reviews of the two places I ate - Geske's Fire Grill and H&H Car Wash. Pictures are on my blog. -- Eating El Paso Last week my travels took me to the city of El Paso. I had a couple days of great meetings, and my contact there, José, was an excellent tour guide who was totally willing to indulge my foodblogging idiosyncrasies. After a very long day of meetings on Wednesday, we wanted to go out to dinner. I showed him the list of restaurants that I'd assembled from my pre-trip research, and he picked out GeoGeskes. We actually ended up at Geskes Fire Grill, which is the sister restaurant to GeoGeskes and was much closer to where we were. Despite the five TVs surrounding the bar, this would be a good restaurant to go to with a date, as there are a lot booths that really encourage sitting next to the person you're with. In fact, it was a little difficult in one of those booths to find a seating configuration that worked for a business meeting sort of dinner. But we managed. My initial impression of the menu was fairly "eh." Burgers and other sandwiches, some not very exciting sounding entrees (although if I was a lobster fan I definitely would have been enticed by "The 'L' Pasta - Linguine, lobster, lemon, leeks.") I was also still recovering from the giant burrito I'd grabbed in the airport for lunch, so I think food just wasn't very appealing, and the idea of ordering an entree was overwhelming. So instead I ordered the sashimi appetizer and a house salad. José ordered a bacon cheeseburger with margarita fries. As you can see in the pic, what they call sashimi isn't - it's a seared but still very rare piece of nice tuna. This happens to be just how I like my tuna, and the menu did state that it was seared, so I knew what I was getting myself into. It was drizzled with a sweet tamari glaze and sprinkled with sesame seeds and was all in all a delightful appetizer. The house salad was similarly well executed. Despite being an awfully busy salad - blue cheese, cashew bits, parmesan crackers, dried cranberries - it actually worked really well. It was perfectly dressed - a nice light coating of balsalmic vinaigrette on every leaf and not at all soggy. José raved at length about his burger, but I didn't taste it so can't comment. I can, however, give huge raves to the margarita fries. This huge mound of shoestring fries with citrus salt would have fed at least two more people, and they were perfectly hot and crispy with a salty-sweet-sour tang. Excellent. Service was not so good as the food, and at times it was actually overbearing. And my mojito was perhaps a little watery. Still, the food was much better than I expected from the menu, and I suspect those margarita french fries could be downright addictive. Geske's Fire Grill 1506 Lee Treviño, Suite C El Paso, TX 915-593-3473 When I told José that I wanted to go to H&H Car Wash for lunch the next day, he was a little croggled. "No, really," I told him, "it's supposed to have really great food!" Later, as we walked past the people handwashing and detailing cars and into this divey little lunch counter, he made sure to remind me that he was doing this for me. This was the first place I'd come across when I was searching for places to eat in El Paso. It seemed to be pretty high up on the lists of all the food cognoscenti. I knew I'd want to try some good Mexican food while I was in El Paso, so I decided to go for it. Lunch in a car wash - that would be a first! As you'd expect, it's not much to look at. 3 tables and a bunch of stools at the counter. A stove covered in pots of this and that, which get moved out of the way to make room for other things. Menu posted on the wall. We opted to try the chile rellenos and huevos rancheros. Both were good, although the chile rellenos were my favorite. José said they were almost as good as his mom's - high praise, indeed. He especially praised the beans, and when I asked him why, he told me that Mexican food is meant to be simple, and should taste like itself. Beans, cooked simply, mashed, and topped with just a little bit of cheese are the perfect example. A pitcher full of potent salsa verdé added an extra kick to anything that needed it, and by the time we finished lunch, my face was bright red. A basket of fresh flour and corn tortillas on the side was the perfect accompaniment, and provided me with a fabulous revelation. Trying to tame the burn in my mouth, I finished up my lunch with a plain corn tortilla. It was amazing. I've had corn tortillas before, but they've been nothing to write home about. This one - just a locally made commercial one, not even handmade - tasted like pure, fresh sweet corn. A lovely finish to a lovely lunch. H & H Car Wash and Coffee Shop 701 East Yandell Drive El Paso, TX 79902 915-533-1144

Experiments with chestnut ganache are underway. Although I was skeptical going in, I tried the recipe posted below. Half my chestnuts were moldy (grrr). I don't have a ricer, so I tried to use a food mill, but that didn't work. So I ended up trying to mix it all up in my food processor, and - understandably - didn't get the nice smooth puree I was looking for. That might have been okay, but there's no cream or other liquid in the recipe so the sugar stays crunchy, and well - yuck. I just wasn't pleased. Given the molding issue, I decided to abandon the idea of cooking my own chestnuts from scratch - it's too disheartening to go to all that work of scoring and peeling only to have them not be useable. So I found a sweetened chestnut spread and am working with that as the base instead. I did a test batch last night with 2 oz chestnut spread, 1 oz melted chocolate, and 1/4 tsp brandy. Pretty good, but I'm going to try another batch today that incorporates some butter.

Here's the text of my blog post about Robert is Here. You can go there if you want to see the pictures. I first read about this farm stand in Issue 70 of The Art of Eating. When I found out I was going to be in Homestead, FL for work, I had this vague inkling of having heard of that area before. Eventually I discovered the Fruit and Spice Park, which had been featured in the same article as Robert is Here, and slowly but surely I started to remember why all of this seemed so familiar. Once I put all the pieces together, it was an easy decision to scrap my plans to hit South Beach and check out art-deco hotels, and instead take myself on a culinary tour of this south Florida farming community. Robert is Here is certainly a strange name for a farm stand. Here's the story, according to the Art of Eating article: Okay, today this story would end up in child neglect charges, but this was 1961. Robert sold all the cucumbers, and a business was born. He started taking donations of extra produce from neighboring farmers, although when they found out how much money he was making, he had to start paying them. During the school year, he'd set up his stand with a can labeled "honor system" during the day, and get dropped off by the school bus to work the afternoon shift. By the time he was age 8, things were too busy during the day to leave the stand alone, so Robert hired his first employee. Robert is Here continues to be a family affair. When Robert was helping me pick out fruit for my Taste of the Tropics party, he pointed out all of his kids to me, working at various tasks around the stand. It's a friendly, family kind of place, just like you'd expect. Robert himself was a great host, cutting a perfectly ripe passionfruit in half for us to share, and helping me select guavas and papayas that would be perfectly ripe in exactly 2 days time (and they were). I didn't try one of his famous Key Lime milkshakes - something I sorely regretted when my dinner plans got pushed back a couple of hours. In addition to fruits and vegetables, both ordinary and exotic, the stand also features a huge variety of sauces, jams, jellies and honeys, most of which are available on their website. They also ship citrus, and perhaps other fruit as well. Robert is Here 19200 SW 344th St (aka Palm Dr) Homestead, FL 305-246-1592

Yes, "BO" was one of the descriptors that people used in describing the aroma. As I said in my blog post, it was a pleasantly musky aroma when the fruit was whole, but once it was cut into it was much much stronger. Very interesting.

It certainly seemed quite ripe, although I'm not sure I'd call it "mushy." So perhaps it would have been better with another day or two to ripen. If I had a guava tree in my back yard I'd spend all my time sniffing it! It smelled so good!

You must be using a very different recipe. I've found the 248 in that particular recipe to be the absolute minimum - usually I cook them to 250 to get the texture I'm looking for.

My report of the fruit tasting is up on my blog, complete with pictures. Thanks again for all your help!

Thanks for the tips, David. My ganache isn't breaking - it comes together into what appears to be a beautiful glossy emulsion. But the finished centers have a decidedly grainy texture.

I switched from using Michel Cluizel pastilles to E. Guittard discs. Because the discs seem to big for the method of pouring cream over the chocolate to work, I've been melting my chocolate and then combining it with the hot cream. Ever since I've made this change, my ganache has been grainy. Any guesses on whether it's the method or the chocolate that's causing the problem? I'm thinking of trying the pour over method, but using a food processor to do the emulsification, since it seems like that might work even with the nickel size E. Guittard discs. Or maybe I just need to start buying bars and chopping chocolate. Does using invert sugar or corn syrup or butter in a ganache help make it less grainy? (I usually do a very simply ganache of just chocolate and cream.) Thanks for any advice!

My blog post about the Fruit and Spice Park is up now. There's a link from there with more pictures and commentary in a Picasa web album.

Yeah - isn't he cute? I found gingerbread sprinkles at the store and thought they'd make the perfect identifying mark. Only problem is - they don't taste very good. That's why just one tiny one instead of an actual sprinkle.

Gorgeous as usual, Vanessa! I've had a crazy baking/candymaking weekend. My 2-year old was home sick from daycare on Friday and I was looking for things to do with him. He asked if we could make the pie pumpkin that's been sitting on our counter since before Halloween into pumpkin pie, so we did that. We've been fun playing with cookie cutters and playdough, so I decided we should make some cookies too. I made up the sugar cookie dough while he was napping, and then he helped me roll out and cut the cookies. Friday night/Saturday day I made a loaf of no-knead bread. But this is the confectionary thread, so what I really should be talking about are the truffles. I've already got orders for 20 dozen truffles for my holiday sale (with 5 more days for orders to be placed) so I needed to start testing my recipes. Good thing I did - all of the recipes need work - gingerbread needs more ginger, egg nog needs more vanilla and nutmeg, cranberry needs a different source of cranberry flavor, and chestnut needs a new approach entirely. But this gave me a chance to decorate them and take a picture so I can make a little flavor decoder insert for the packages. Here they are: Clockwise from top left: chestnut, cranberry, egg nog, gingerbread. They look better than they taste right now, but I have good ideas for the next iteration.

I pulled off some dough from this batch to use in my next one. Do I need to do anything special to it before I use it? And how do I incorporate it in a fresh batch?

Because Robert is Here didn't have any for sale. However, I did end up pulling a can of Mangosteen in heavy syrup out of my cupboard. That ought to count for something. (It was fine, but nothing to write home about. But just as canned peaches or pears are mere shadows of their fresh selves, I expect fresh mangosteen would be another thing entirely.)