I couldn’t wait to make this New Year’s Eve Dinner. As much as I enjoy playing with sugar and chocolate, the prospect of working with meats and vegetables and all sorts of non-chocolate-oriented food was irresistible. It seemed like a vacation, notwithstanding all the standing and cooking… I hadn’t cooked even a semi-real meal in a long time.

I made dishes that I’d tucked into the back of my mind and had been wanting to make for a while… and luckily, since I have freakish knack for consistency, they all fit into each other to make for a nicely coherent menu — even the dessert, with its 4 components, just worked out that way.

I made a few things each day starting on Saturday, and by the time of the dinner party, everything but the risotto was practically ready and just needed to heated and plated. Such prep and organization reminded me of my restaurant stint in Napa, not to mention culinary school. The experience was like speaking a language that I learned a long time ago and was pleasantly surprised that I can still get by with — even if only in the most casual of settings. I cleared away everything from the counter that wasn’t needed for service, laid out my plates, and cleaned up after every course. There was barely any clean up at the end, and I mostly just checked in on food… until I ate it. It was the most stress-free dinner party I’ve ever had.

Spiced Quince Cake with Lemon Posset, Warm Walnut Sauce, Cranberry Sorbet, and Toasted Walnuts

Lemon Posset is my new culinary cause. It’s only lemon juice, sugar, and cream, but it sets up! Like a light-as-air lemon curd, or even a mousse! It’s so easy and brightly delicious, and it contains only ingredients whose flavor I thoroughly like! No eggs or cornstarch or powdered sugar to get in the way. I issue a warning to the next person who mentions lemon curd to me — for I shall sit them down and lecture on the wonders of lemon posset. So, yes, last year, I was amazed by Bacon Baklava, and this year, it’s all about the posset, which — bonus — is also just as much fun to say.

From what I can tell, the reaction between the acid in the lemon juice and the casein (protein) in the cream causes it to set. Like curd, some combination of lime, orange, or passion fruit can be used, too (and some possets are warm, alcoholic drinks… also worth a try; egg nog is related, I believe).

I used this recipe from Claire Cook’s new book, Indulge, which is especially useful as a go-to book for British desserts, though it is not exclusively anglo-oriented as she is currently the pastry chef at The French Laundry. Cook cooks boils the lemon juice and sugar together and adds boiled cream, but most recipes cook the sugar and cream together and add lemon juice at the end. I’m not sure what difference it makes, except for the amount of moisture lost through the boilings.

I have been taking spoonfuls of leftover lemon posset here and there (that is, whenever I can find an excuse to be in the kitchen), but like a mousse, some liquid separated out on the bottom by the second day. I guess magic can’t last forever.

As it happens, this dessert is partially a French Laundry Then-And-Now concoction — the Walnut Sauce is the Cream of Walnut Soup recipe from The French Laundry cookbook. Walnut-infused cream, poaching liquid, and a poached pear are blended together to make a sauce that’s stunning enough to be eaten alone as a soup. French Laundry at Home declares her love for it here, and the date on that post shows me that I’ve been meaning to make this since roughly last February. I think my juicy Bartlett pear may have been a bit too big, as the pear flavor was a little stronger than I wanted, but by putting it under the cake, the pear flavor nicely blended into the quince and still left the walnut flavor strong. Ah, the safety net of plated desserts combinations.

The Spiced Quince Cake is from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course. It called for a 10″ springform pan and the batter was very wet, but I used a 9″ and baked it a little longer and it was fine, if a bit spongy-looking. I poached the quinces on Saturday, left them in the syrup until Monday, when they were drained and baked in the cake; the star anise left the most noticeable impression on them. The batter for the cake was like that of a financier — (homemade) almond flour, a little flour, and egg whites with powdered sugar, spices, and browned butter. Rich flavor with a sugary crust and toothsome crumb, but a little heavy on the powdered sugar to me, esp in the aftertaste — but I am sensitive to that flavor.

The Cranberry Sorbet is based on the Chocolate Gourmand’s recipe from a high school friend. I decreased the alcohol by half, and not having limoncello and welcoming a combination of flavors, I substituted half Damiana and Tuaca. I also measured the sugar on my refractometer and it was off the chart, so I added water until it was about 27Brix. I love the smooth texture and rich cranberry flavor, bolstered by subtle spice and orange from the alcohol.

And there was even savory food, too… after the jump…

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Heirloom Cherry Tomato Tart: Peeled Organic Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes, Organic Opal Basil, Parmigiano-Reggiano Chips, and Organic Ricotta on Toasted Plum-Streaked Brioche.

I haven’t had many tomatoes yet this season, and I think that plums are to blame. I’m tired of eating skins for now.

So, at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market on Wednesday, I bought a punnet of colorful heirloom cherry tomatoes more out of duty than craving. It wasn’t until I got home that I remembered the glistening rainbow of peeled cherry tomatoes in The French Laundry cookbook, so I gave it a shot.

The result: peeled cherry tomatoes are my newest form of tomato perfection. These luscious orbs melt away with the freshest tomato flavor and optimum tomato texture. It’s almost like spherified tomato sauce, akin to an El Bulli trick.

I usually shy away from dealing with the peeling-by-blanching method b/c it takes a lot of time-heat-dishes-water-ice (I’m talking about you, peaches), but since cherry tomatoes are so small, the blanching step is a snap. Not even an ice bath is needed.

You just bring enough lightly salted water to cover the tomatoes to a boil in a saucepan, gently add a few (rinsed, stemmed) cherry tomatoes at time, and after about 5 seconds, remove them with a slotted spoon onto a cutting board; if you notice that certain colors of tomatoes are splitting during poaching (like my yellow ones did), take them out even sooner b/c they probably have thinner skins. With a thin serrated knife, make the smallest possible incision into the skin near the stem end (purely for cosmetic reasons). Gently unwrap the tomato from its skin with your fingers. They will keep for several hours at room temp. I’m guessing that you could also just microwave some water to boiling and work with that.

It takes a little time, but each tomato is its own challenge to peel without nicking or squashing. You appreciate the colorful beauty of each one close up, and feel protective of their sensitive selves, and snack on them.

This tart was inspired by the Salad of Petite Summer Tomatoes with Vine-Ripe Sorbet in The French Laundry Cookbook that featured the peeled tomatoes. I just made it bigger, more casual, and based on what I had on hand. Once the tomatoes are peeled, it’s practically a matter of assembly; and things stick nicely onto their moist surface. Incidentally, for lunches this summer, I’ve gotten into the habit of baking or toasting some sort of bread-y base (puff pastry, pizza dough, bread, etc), and loading it up with toppings once out of the oven. There’s more control, temperature contrast, and crunch that way, and the ind’l flavors keep more integrity (yes, sometimes desirable, sometimes not).

I spread ricotta on the toasted brioche b/c I love it with tomatoes and it’s a good moisture barrier btw the bread and tomatoes.

Instead of making their garlic tuile with a flour-based batter, I grated some parmigiano-reggiano cheese, formed it onto rounds on a silpat, baked them in a 350F oven until bubbly, broke them up, and scattered them over the tomatoes.

I added chopped opal basil b/c it’s pretty and I’d bought some at the market, too.

I used “plum-streaked brioche” b/c I had the leftover plum brioche tart that I froze as the base, but I couldn’t slice away every last fragment of the plums. Luckily, plums and tomatoes go very nicely with each other. There’s something kinetic there, esp w/ the slight sugar factor. Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course has a recipe for Sautee of Tomato and Plums if you want to try a dessert with the combination.

I didn’t make the TFL tomato sorbet, but I bet it’s fantastic the way it would melt over the tomatoes as a sauce and also as a textural counterpoint as a silky sorbet.

I enthusiastically bought a lot more heirloom cherry tomatoes this morning at the Saturday Santa Monica market (which is smaller than the Wednesday one, but is predominantly organic), and now I have the happy challenge of making a lot of dishes with them. Tonight, I think that the peeled cherry tomatoes will be great with pasta. I’ll probably bake the ricotta with eggs, flour, and parmigiano-reggiano cheese so that I can chop it into cubes to toss in; or maybe it’ll be turned into gnocchi. And add basil… and onions… and olives… and whatever else I can find…

There’s something very sad about going to supermarkets whose shelves are groaning under the weight of multiple choices for almost every single possible thing you can buy, and thinking: “Is this all they have?”

Chad and I planned on having burgers last night, and when I went to the supermarket at 5pm, I was amazed that every single package of hamburger buns listed a boatload of ingredients that I didn’t want in my hamburger buns — including high-fructose corn syrup. True, there were buns in the bulk bakery section, but those had no ingredient lists and given my defeat in the bread aisle, I figured that my chances of approving of the ingredients wouldn’t be high.

It’s not that I’m fanatical about ultra-righteous ingredients. I just want to eat as decently as I can, and I draw the line at certain things. So, I came home and prepared hamburger buns myself, using the Variation 1 for White Bread in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. You can make loaves, rolls, or hamburger or hot dog buns with the dough.

Incidentally, I can see why the market’s buns were so laden with ingredients. The recipe in the book called for bread flour, salt, powdered milk, sugar, instant dry yeast, egg, butter, and water. If you don’t use real egg, butter, or sugar in your industrial buns, you have to do some fancy footwork to approximate their effects with whatever presumably cheaper, long-lasting things you want to use. Heck, I was surprised that the recipe in the book called for powdered milk, but in the intro, he says you could use almost any kind of milk instead.

I used AP flour instead of bread flour b/c I wanted to encourage the lightness that the lower percentage of protein would give; plus, I don’t want to have to buy and store bread flour. I also used slightly less butter and sugar than he recommended, b/c I don’t need the extra fat or calories, and knew I wouldn’t miss them. For them to proof, I put them in the warmest place in my apartment, which was near Chad’s computers. I also placed them near each other for their final proof so that they would kiss, and would have soft spots on the sides; that’s my favorite part of hamburger buns. As you can see in the pic above, they browned a little unevenly b/c of this, but it didn’t make a difference when we ate them. I also doubted how soft the crust would be before I baked them, so I scored them (with a none-too-sharp knife, as it happened) just to ensure at least a streak of softness; it turned out to be unnecessary. I also sprinkled them with a little salt before they went into the oven, so that a whisper of salt would grace our upper lip as we bit into them.

We were able to eat around 9pm, and I don’t want to be immodest, but the buns were pretty fantastic. They shared many of the textural qualities of store-bought buns, but the flavor was so fresh and clean; I realized that they lacked that peculiar aftertaste of regular buns. It totally changed the home burger experience. I abide by the rule that buns should be as soft as the meat, and these fit perfectly into that ideal. They had a nice spongy crumb…

So, a hamburger bun is categorized as an enriched bread (as opposed to lean), b/c of the added dairy and sugar, which have a tenderizing effect. It makes them softer and lighter — squishier– with a soft caramelized crust. I much prefer to buy breads made from lean doughs (such as baguettes) from bakeries b/c they have special ovens that will give it the proper hard crust, but enriched breads (such as brioche and challah) are quite nice to bake at home. They don’t require much of a crust, and are baked at a much lower temperature. The dough is more forgiving to work with, too, because of all the fat, which coats the gluten.

Breads made without preservatives do tend to dry out quickly, so whenever I make or buy such bread, I cut them into 1-2 sized portions and freeze them as soon as I’m done eating them for the day. I wrap them first in plastic wrap, and then in aluminum foil. When I want one asap, I unwrap them completely, rest it on the alum foil, put them in the oven, and set it to about 375F. By the time the temperature is ready, the bread usually is, too. If I plan ahead better, I just put them on the counter — still wrapped so that condensation doesn’t form on the bread itself — until it’s thawed; and it doesn’t take all that long.

I came home from the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market today with two kinds of amazingly juicy and flavorful peaches (Spring Crest and an unspecified yellow, 2# each), a bulb of fennel, a bag of three red onions, pickling cucumbers, and a little paper bag with about eight morel mushrooms. I’ve been coveting the morels for a while, but have been deterred by, oh, the extravagance — $12/half #. Turns out that mine were about $3, and the kind mushroom man even threw in a few extra.

For the peaches, all were dipped in boiling water for a minute before being plunged in an ice bath, cut with an x, and slipped out of their skins. They were both clingstone (as opposed to freestone), so I did my best to extricate as much flesh as possible with my knife. The Spring Crest peaches were mixed with half their weight in sugar and the juice of a lemon; they’ll be boiled into peach preserves tomorrow. For a peach crisp, the other half were mixed with just a couple teaspoons of flour in my beloved Emile Henry pie dish to thicken up the juices (recipe, such as it is in its simple genius, from Chez Panisse Desserts; no added sugar necessary if you’ve got sweet fruit), and baked with a crisp topping — flour, dark brown sugar, oats (ALL crisps need oats, as far as I’m concerned, and no nuts), salt, butter (I have the luxury of having some Echire in my fridge that I’m just dying to get rid of before it goes bad; I’m happy with Challenge butter, too), and cinnamon; I also added a bit of cardamom, black pepper, and dried thyme for intrigue. Baked it until it bubbly, and let it cool down a little. I knew once my serving spoon effortlessly glided through it that it would be just what I wanted.

I pulled some noyaux ice cream that I had out of the freezer to accompany it, because cold ice cream melting into a warm crisp is one of my favorite things in the world. I made it when I had apricot pits to spare from an apricot preserves project. Noyaux are the almond-like kernels found in the middle of stone fruits’ pits. They look like this…

They impart a slightly bitter almond flavor, much like Amaretto liqueur, which is, in fact, made mainly with noyaux (not almonds). It may seem like a tedious endeavor to get them out, but it’s fun if you’re in the mood. The key is cushioning, because it involves wielding a hammer. Fold a plush dish towel under a cutting board, and fold some paper towels into layers. Scatter a few apricot pits (or peach or cherry) amongst the paper towels on the cutting board, and tap-TAP with a hammer until each cracks open and extricate the nuggets inside. I infused 20 of them in 2 cups cream, 1 cup milk, and 1/3 cup sugar for about half an hour and added a pinch of salt and touch of vodka before chilling and spinning it into ice cream (I’m often leaving the yolks out of my ice cream now for a cleaner flavor; it’s also nice that it’s easier this way). I still have about 25 noyaux leftover from that; they’re in my freezer, but I’m not sure if that will preserve them.

To make candied fennel, the fennel bulb was sliced, poached until tender in water, salt, and lemon juice, and then poached in a weak simple syrup until translucent; method from The French Laundry Cookbook. I’ll have it with the crisp or ice cream/sorbet or yogurt or something over the next month. I was inspired to make this by Carol’s recent post.

The pickling cucumbers will turn into refrigerator pickles in the next couple days, and the red onions will also be pickled.

And now… morel pizza talk. I was craving pizza last night, but in a moment of lucidity, $15 for a delivered pizza seemed a little outrageous. I had instant dry yeast, flour, salt, and water, so there was no excuse for me not to make it myself. I used a drop-dead easy recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. You just mix the ingredients together (I subbed 10% of the flour with whole wheat flour; and he suggests chilling the flour before mixing), divide the dough into pieces, shape them into balls, and chill (or put in oiled bags in your freezer and defrost a day in advance of baking). Then, you take out however much you want over a three day period, and put it on the counter 2 hrs before you want to eat (so that it can fully proof). Fire up your oven as high as it will go, shape the dough using your best impression of a pizzeria worker, and bake for about 8 minutes. Since the chill in the fridge slows the growth of the yeast, the flavor is deeper/smoother and the texture creamier than a shorter, more laborious method.

I admit, though, that sometimes drop-dead easy isn’t enough for me. I kind of messed it up… before saving it. The recipe calls for 20 oz flour and much less water, but in a fog of carefree ease, I added 20 oz of water, too. I discovered that after the dough was supposed to be done mixing. Sure, it had looked suspiciously wet, but I’ve seen many wet doughs pull themselves together eventually. This one was still wet… and pretty tough with gluten when I pulled an ear to check it. So, I did some quick math, and added the appropriate amounts of flour, salt, and yeast to fix it. I mixed it in a stand mixer to integrate it, but I was concerned that that the gluten already formed was getting too strong, so I kneaded it by hand to even it. It’s pretty hard to over-knead a batch of dough by hand, so I hope that I closed the gap some between the high and low gluten levels.

When I came home with my morels this morning, I was determined to have morel pizza for lunch, but I wasn’t sure how the morels would like being baked in a scorching oven. Reinhart talks about how the mastery of pizza involves mastering the moment when the crust and the topping are done at the same time, without sogginess or burning. Since I don’t really like mushrooms and tomatoes together, my pizza was only going to be cheese and vegetable, so I decided not to tempt fate trying to conjure up perfect topping-crust timing wizardry. I would simply heat the crust and the topping separately.

I followed Suzanne Goin’s advice to soak the morels gently in warm water to clean, because they did look a touch dirty, and dried them as best I could. Then I adapted a recipe from the Mustard’s cookbook for Morel Mushroom and Goat Cheese Toasts, subbing what I had on hand — red onions for shallots, feta for goat cheese, dried thyme for fresh, and pizza crust for toast. The morels were sauteed with red onions, thyme, black pepper, oil, butter, and cognac, eyeballing all of the amounts.

I shaved some parmesan cheese onto the shaped dough, baked it for about 8 minutes at 500F, crumbled on some feta, topped it with the morel mixture, and garnished with parsley. It was pretty amazing. And yes, the only thing better than morels on pizza is morels with cognac. The crust was nicely webbed, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside — and didn’t seem damaged. Not bad for a roughly $4 pizza, hastily photographed so that I could eat.

This was all done by 2:00pm, which is great, because I have a new candy bar to (hopefully) finish up…

I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since I made Thomas Keller’s 2-inch quiche (recipe and article here). When I think back to making it that day in culinary school last April and how the concept of making a quiche was so utterly new and weird to me… I’m really amazed by how far I’ve come since then. I get it now… and can play around with it.

Last time, I agonized over getting the process and ingredients just right — Point Reyes Blue Cheese (instead of Roquefort) and leeks — but this time, the whole idea to make the quiche came about while I was driving home from the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market so the whole process was much more improv-style.

I decided to use the red chard and dandelion greens that I’d purchased to make a sort of faux quiche florentine. To be honest, my biggest problem with quiches is that there can be so much rich, monotonous custard, but I also didn’t want it to be too dense w/ greens. So when I got home, I raided my fridge to see what else I could use to fill in my quiche and discovered a leftover 3/4 of an onion, some feta, some thyme, and some slices of bacon in my freezer.

I then looked in the Bouchon cookbook and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison for ideas for how to go about preparing the ingredients.

Except for the custard base and crust, I didn’t really measure anything. I just estimated and adjusted based on the amount of ingredients I had and how they were acting.

Dandelion Greens: 1 bunch, stems removed.  Boiled in water for 8 minutes, drained, boiled in change of water for 8 mins. Squeezed very dry. Next time I’ll probably just wilt them in butter; they shrunk so much when boiled and I don’t mind a bit of bitterness.

Red Chard: 1 bunch, stems removed.  Wilted in melted butter, salt, and pepper. Squeezed very dry. Their red color was sorted of wasted in this; I didn’t really want a pink quiche, though, so I’m happy they didn’t bleed into the custard. Btw, these took forever to clean. No matter how many times I changed the water in the sink that I was cleaning them in, little bugs kept turning up. It probably took at least 5 changes of water until I was satisfied that they were clean.

Onion: 3/4 of an onion. Based on the Onion Confit recipe in the Bouchon cookbook. You basically cook slices of onion in a pan very slowly - with water, butter, and a bouquet garni (I just used some sprigs of thyme). They’re soft, but don’t fall apart, and have a natural onion-y sweetness. It’s supposed to take about 2 hours, so I started this first, and let it go while I did other things. I stopped it when it seemed soft and cooked and sweet… I don’t really know how long it took.

Bacon: Baked lardons until fat rendered. Sauteed briefly with onions before assembling quiche. I just used 1.75 slices for the whole thing. I love bacon, but I don’t like when it dominates.

Also, I saw that the quiches in the cookbook are assembled by laying half of the vegetables on the bottom of the crust, pouring over half of the custard base, laying the other half of the vegetables on top and then pouring over the rmg custard base. So, instead of mixing all of the filling ingredients together, I made a lorraine-like layer topped by a florentine-like layer…

So, not only is it a 2-inch quiche — it’s a 2-in-1 quiche!

And technically, this is probably a little more than 2 inches. Since I don’t have the specified 9×2″ ring mold, I used the outside of a 9″ spring form pan, that was about 2.5 inches tall. Even though the crust originally was originally folded over the top, it slipped down during parbaking. That was fine.

And as I wrote before, this quiche is something of a long, slow project. It’s not hard and it’s certainly flexible and even forgiving, but it just needs time, esp b/c it’s so big. The crust — from mixing ingredients to resting to rolling out to shaping in pan to chilling again to baking to cooling — takes a while; several hours, at least. The prep for the inside fillings can be as quick or slow as you want, at least, and the custard is a snap to make (although it does need a 15 min rest at one point). But then it takes about 1.75 hrs to bake (mine took 2 hr 10 mins; probably b/c of all the stuff in it), and a long time to cool. In the book, it’s recommend that you chill it and serve it the next day, reheating it slice by slice. You’re best bet is probably to make it over the course of a weekend day, and then eat it over the course of the week.

Oh, and how did it taste? Awesome. It was just as breathtakingly silky as last time, and the fillings were good alone and together.

I wanted to serve it with a mustard greens/fennel/celery/scallion/feta/thyme salad last night, but the quiche didn’t make it in time, so instead, I went with glazed multi-colored carrots from the farmer’s market for today.