So…. I admit it.  We made this for the fourth of July.   It’s now October – so not exactly prime peach or raspberry season.  But I’m working through a back log of recipes so thought I’d share this beautiful and simple galette.  And who am I kidding?  It’s always a good time for raspberries in this house.

I suspect you could make this galette with a number of wonderful fruits – beautiful fall pears or plums perhaps?  I might just have to try that this weekend… I promise I’ll post it before February.

Raspberry & Peach Galette (makes 2)

Dough:

• 3 tbsp sour cream
• 1/3 cup ice water
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup cornmeal
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 7 Tbsp unsalted butter; cold and cut into 7 pieces

My birthday was last week and for the coming year I’m committing to a “birthday resolution” of sorts.  Basically, I’m promising myself to spend one hour a day creating something/making something with my hands.  Obviously, this can include the food creations Steve and I have written about before.  But beyond that, this commitment also includes all the various other art/craft hobbies I enjoy – painting, sketching, block printing, silk screening, graphic design, paper arts…  the list goes on.  I have a lot of hobbies, what can I say?  One hour may not seem like very much, but since I have a day job, I’m starting small – with a goal I might actually have a chance of reaching.   And maybe, if I get my act together, there may be more than just food on this blog in the near future.

But for now back to the food.  For my birthday this year, I made chocolate salt caramel mini cupcakes.  These have made an appearance on the blog before, but this time I decided to use a different caramel filling.  The original version was tasty I just didn’t like to have to keep chewing the carmel long after the cupcake was gone.  So I substituted a softer caramel which mostly soaks into the cupcake leaving it moist in the middle.  This combination was a major success with everyone who tried them.  Soft caramel filling from now on!

Chocolate Salt Caramel Cupcakes

(adapted from Martha Stewart Cupcakes and Baked Explorations)

Original post for baking the cupcakes, making the frosting and assembly can be found here: Chocolate Salt Caramel Cupcakes.  Substitute the caramel in that recipe with this new softer version below.  I doubled this recipe for a single batch of cupcakes, but ended up with plenty of extra (the horror!) so a single batch might be enough.

• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp light corn syrup
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 tsp fleur de sel
• 1/4 cup sour cream

In a medium saucepan, combine sugar, corn syrup and water. Stir together gently to avoid splashing the sides of the pan. Cook over high heat without stirring until the mixture is dark amber (or reaches 350 degrees), around 6 to 8 minutes. Watch closely as it can burn quickly. Remove from heat and slowly add the cream while stirring (careful – it will bubble) and then stir in the fleur de sel. Whisk in the sour cream and set aside. Cool before filling the cupcakes.

Some time in the near future, we’ll hopefully have a blog post or two on some recreations from that night at Comerç 24, like chocolate with olive oil and sea salt or their “pizza” with anchovies, arugula and wild strawberries.  For today, our inspiration comes from another of Abellan’s restaurants, the more traditional, more casual and less expensive Tapas 24.

Tapas 24, off of Passeig de Gracia.

After an amazing meal at Tapas 24, Dana and I had a big choice to make.  Do we have the chocolate with olive oil, which we knew was amazing from our dinner at Comerç, or strawberries with balsamic vinegar.  Being the indecisive folk that we are, we made the obvious choice.  Order both.  The obvious choice was also the correct choice.  Both were insanely good and insanely simple.

This morning, we got back from a whirlwind trip back north to Portland.  In our fridge was four pounds of strawberries, among other berries, we bought almost a week ago.  Pressed with a need to use a good amount of the strawberries before they went bad, Dana thought of our dessert at Tapas 24.  Since the dessert was pretty self explanatory, we figured we had all the ingredients (strawberries, sugar and balsamic vinegar), so it was just a matter of getting the proportions correct.  After finding something in one of our cookbooks, we got started.

Strawberries and sugar..good

Strawberries w/ sugar & balsamic…better

We didn’t have anything to eat these with, but they would have been great on ice cream, or a light cake.

Balsamic Strawberries

(inspired by Tapas24 and Bon appetit desserts)

• 3 cups of strawberries, hulled and quartered
• 1/2 cup sugar (a little more if the strawberries are tart)
• 1/4 cup good balsamic vinegar

Pretty simple here – put all ingredients in a bowl and mix gently.  Let the strawberries stand at least a half hour, mixing periodically.  Best within a few hours, as the strawberries continue to break down and take on the vinegar flavor.

Our May hostess, Denise, of There’s a Newf in My Soup!, challenged The Daring Cooks to make Gumbo! She provided us with all the recipes we’d need, from creole spices, homemade stock, and Louisiana white rice, to Drew’s Chicken & Smoked Sausage Gumbo and Seafood Gumbo from My New Orleans: The Cookbook, by John Besh.

For the gumbo, we decide to go with a land animal variations.  Both of us love most seafood, but for some reason we rarely cook it at home.  And by rarely, I mean once or twice  a year (aside from Daring Cooks challenges).  It’s probably because we’re pretty bad at planning meals, so buying fish at the market would probably result in us throwing it out a couple of days later.

Anyway, back to the gumbo.  We invited a couple of friends over to be our guinea pigs for this challenge.  When they asked what they could bring, I joked that they should come over with the precooked Trader Joe’s chicken they had been planning to eat that evening.  Although it was a joke, it was almost needed.

After Dana got home from work, which was an ordeal since she had to drive to Orange County that day.  It was the first time she had driven the car we bought in August.  Well, second time driving  The weekend prior she practiced, just to get a little used to the car.  To speed things up, we divvied up the tasks.  Dana chopped the veggies, I made the roux.  Unfortunately we didn’t keep the duck fat from the duck confit, so I had to opt for canola oil.  The instructions said to add the flour to the hot oil, which I did.  I must have either had the stove on too high or didn’t add/whisk the flour fast enough because it didn’t take 15 minutes to turn a dark brown, like the instructions said.  It took one.  And 30 seconds after that, dark brown had turned to black and our apartment started to fill with a wee bit of smoke.  Not too much, but you could definitely smell it.

After 15 minutes or so of scooping out the burnt flour, which luckily had become fairly solid/clumpy so it was easy to remove and wiping down the Le Creuset, we were back in business for try number 2.  At this point, I was hoping they took my joke seriously and would bring their TJ’s chicken.  Well, try number 2 was a bit more successful.  To be safe, I lowered the temp, dumped all of the flour in at once and whisked away like a madman for 15 minutes.

The rest of the cooking was pretty uneventful, aside from one thing.  See, I’m not very good at reading directions.  By the time I read through the whole thing, I’ve forgotten the first 10 steps.  I have the same problem listening.  It causes issues from time to time, especially when one of those things I forget is a person’s name.  This happens a lot.  In this case, the step I forgot was that we were supposed to used an 8 quart pot.  Since getting our Le Creuset for our wedding, I want to use it whenever possible  This meal was no different.  I didn’t even think about the volume issue (ours is 6.75 quarts) until Dana mentioned it as the chicken and veggies were cooking.  I looked at it.  I looked at the 3 quarts of chicken stock.  Back at the pot.  Back at the chicken stock.  Once more to the pot.  “Nah, I think we’ll be good.”  I proclaimed.   I figured there was a lot of empty space between the chicken, etc.  After pouring in the first quart of the stock, I quickly realized there was a lot more in the pot than I realized.  After two quarts, our pot was full.  Apparently in addition to my issues paying attention, I have pretty bad spatial sense as well.  We cut the okra by about a third to make sure it didn’t turn into gumbo paste.  And to my credit, when our friends arrived, they said it had a great sausage to liquid ratio.   Can I claim I just wanted to make a meatier gumbo?

Overall, despite our roux and chicken stock issues, the gumbo was a success.  Everyone loved it, which is good because it made waaaay more than 4 servings.  I’m going to be eating it for days.  The one thing I’d change is I’d either brown the chicken in a separate pan or brown it before the roux and remove it until later.  The chicken never really browned, and ended up looking like boiled chicken.  Not them most appetizing thing.  That’s just a minor complaint though.  The chicken was moist and tasted great. Just looked a little sad and wrinkly.

Thanks for the great challenge.  I’ll be eating gumbo for the next week!  As always, you can find the recipe at The Daring Kitchen

The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

And now for the DC blog checking line.

Renata of Testado, Provado & Aprovado! was our Daring Cooks’ April 2011 hostess. Renata challenged us to think “outside the plate” and create our own edible containers! Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 17th to May 16th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

I wish we spent more time on figuring out another edible container, but in the end, I think they came out pretty nicely.  Plus, I got to snack on a couple failed bacon cups.

mmm….bacon

What makes bacon better you ask?  Maple mousse and a strawberry, that’s what.

We’re a little late with the challenge this month.  Post is coming soon.

Kathlyn of Bake Like a Ninja was our Daring Cooks’ March 2011 hostess. Kathlyn challenges us to make two classic Peruvian dishes: Ceviche de Pescado from “Peruvian Cooking – Basic Recipes” by Annik Franco Barreau. And Papas Rellenas adapted from a home recipe by Kathlyn’s Spanish teacher, Mayra.

For our challenge we chose to make the ceviche.  The recipe called for a firm white fish, but we decided to make a little change and use tuna.  Last week we were up in Seattle (for our wedding) and ate at Japonessa.  The sushi chef there made us a special tuna and citrus dish that was insanely good.  I took this challenge as a chance to maybe mimic his creation.

Other than substituting the tuna, I pretty much stayed true to the recipe.  Actually that isn’t true.  I realized after eating the ceviche that I forgot that oh so important “salt and pepper to taste” step.  Since I was already late, I was a little scattered making it and forgot the seasoning.  To rectify this brutal mistake we drizzled soy sauce over ours.  Oh, and because the limes I bought were about as moist as the Sahara, I threw in the juice of one blood orange as well (apparently it’s blood orange season down here in San Diego).

Overall the dish was alright.  Even though I tasted the ceviche pretty quickly after tossing it in the lime juice, the citrus had already overtaken the flavor of the tuna.  By the time Dana got a taste (after work) it was REALLY citrusy.

Since I had all of those blood oranges around, I decided to dice a few up and throw it in the ceviche.  It was similar to Japonessa, but still not quite the same.  It did add a nice touch of red to the dish.

Thanks again to Kathlyn for the challenge.  When I get a chance I’ll try out the papas rellenas recipe too!  As always, you can find the recipe on the Daring Kitchen site.

Here is a teaser pic.  A full post w/ pictures will be up over the weekend.

A couple of months ago we were eating at a Cafe Chloe, a French restaurant here in San Diego. I ordered the duck confit, not exactly knowing what “confit” was (I’m guessing our cell signal was bad because this is normally when I’d do some quick cell phone wikipedia-ing). I did know I love duck, I figured I had a good chance of liking the dish. Well, “liking” would bean understatement. It is still one of the best dishes I’ve had since moving down here. Still, as good as it was, I really wasn’t sure what made it a “confit”. Well, apparently the curiosity I had at the restaurant didn’t carry over to when I got home because 2 months later, when I read what this challenge, was the first time I found out what a confit really is. Either that or my horrible memory was to blame.

This month’s challenge was to make a cassoulet, a French stew, with duck confit. When I read that the cassoulet was an Anthony Bourdain recipe, it got me really excited. I’ve never made or eaten anything of his, but just basing off his culinary history and the fact that I love his show, I figured it’d be good.

On to my attempt at the challenge. The first task to tackle was to get all of right ingredients. Most of the ingredients were easy to come by. Onion, check. Garlic, got it. Pork sausage, easy enough to get. Duck legs, shouldn’t be a big deal. Duck fat, hmmm, not sure about that one. Pork rind, you mean the fried chip looking things? Pork belly, okay….time to find a butcher. After doing some Yelping, I found what appeared to be one of the better butchers in town. It was pretty close, about 10 minutes away, so I figured I’d run by after work. This is where the big lesson for this month’s challenge. Don’t send Steve to the butcher, even with a list, unless he has actually read the recipe (not just glanced through it).

So, I went through my list with the butcher. As expected, getting sausage was easy enough. As was the duck fat. That’s where the easy ended. They only had whole, frozen ducks. The closest thing to pork rind was pork side, which looked like uncured, uncut bacon, but with skin. The pork belly was where my lesson comes in. The butcher said he didn’t have any belly, and after scouring his inventory he came back with pork back fat, which literally looked like a slab of fat. In my head, this was what belly was going to look like, or at least similar to. If I had read the recipe more carefully, I would have remembered that the substitutes for the belly were actual cuts of meat, key word being meat (not fat). Next time, I’ll actually know what I’m looking for at the butcher, not just what it’s called.

My butcher shop mishaps were mostly non issues in the end. We got duck at Whole Foods (why does Whole Foods have this, but not an actual butcher shop?), used the back fat as a substitute for the rind (the skin on the pork side was not nearly enough) and used the pork side as our belly substitute (so I swapped my rind substitute for my belly substitute).

Once we figured out we could go ahead and use all of the eat we got at the butcher, the actual dish wasn’t too difficult. After soaking the beans, the first step we had to do was prepare the duck confit. For those who, like me, were ignorant to what a confit is, confit is a way of preparing and preserving food by immersing it in a substance for flavor and preservation. To make fruit confit, you immerse it in sugar until it reaches it’s core (essentially candied fruit). For meat, you immerse it in it’s own rendered fat. Sounds gross. Looks gross. Tastes amazing! And that’s all that matters.

mmm duck fat

After taking the confit out of the oven and cooling it, it was time to move onto the stew.  Nothing too eventful here.  The sausage browned really nicely and everything else started coming together.

Dana cutting our non pork belly

The last step was to bake the cassoulet in a deep casserole dish.  Hmm… We have deep, small dishes and shallow, large dishes, but no deep and large ones.  We settled on making “individual” cassoulets using various sized casserole dishes.  Individual is probably the wrong word because, although there was only one piece of duck in each dish, each was enough to feed at least 2 people.  Needless to say, we had a ton of leftovers!

Wouldn’t this look nicer in a large Le Crouset? If only this challenge was in a few months

Finished cassoulet.  Natural light, you’re the best.

Yuki approves

As always, you can find the complete recipe on the Daring Kitchen site, HERE.  Thanks again to Jenni and Lisa for the great challenge.

I had actually forgotten about this month’s challenge until Tuesday of this week.  So I decided to add crostata to the list of things I’d be making for Thanksgiving this year.  Probably not the smartest idea of had, I’ll admit.  But all turned out okay – all dishes were finished and the crostata turned out great.  We decided to make the jam version since we happened to have received a large jar of homemade jam just a few days before.  Good jam = good crostata apparently!  We served it with a maple whipped cream (1 cup cream + 2 Tbsp maple syrup) as part of the dessert spread.

Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday!  As always, the recipe can be found on Daring Kitchen.