All The Pieces Coming Together

After our disastrous macaron attempt last week, the elderchild and I tried again yesterday. It was almost disastrous again but we persevered and got pretty decent looking raspberry macarons!

Here's what worked, and what didn't:
1. The oven, new, is convection, and it seems that it should be set to 275˚F. 300˚F was too hot and they didn't develop their little feet.

2. The parchment, King Arthur brand, was perfect.

3. The egg whites were the near-catastrophe. I had egg whites in a carton which I'd used for a cake. After we tried to make meringue out of them for the macarons I recalled that they don't work well for that purpose (maybe there is a preservative or pasteurization issue? I don't remember). Anyway, we separated some eggs and made a better meringue which we used for the macarons. Not wanting to waste the other egg whites, later I beat the meringue for probably 20 minutes and made forgotten cookies. Which are not bad, after all that!

Forgotten cookies.

4. For the ganache, since I didn't have raspberry purée, I used raspberry syrup I had in my canning inventory. I added together the volumes of the purée and invert sugar and just used that total amount of raspberry syrup, and it worked perfectly.

I am now out of almond flour and don't anticipate buying any more in the near future as my freezers are both overflowing with food.

Tastes Like We Remember

When the kids were little, they went to a daycare which had its food provided by the daycare provider's husband's restaurant. One of the most popular items was chicken-orzo soup, aka Avgolemono. The kids both loved it, as did the adults. From time to time we would go back to his restaurant and buy it by the quart. But it's been a long time since we've been able to do that, and he doesn't have it on the menu every day. I decided to try my hand at making it.

I found this recipe on line and made a few tweaks based upon what I had in the house. Instead of four quarts of chicken stock I used two quarts of my "Ducken" stock and two quarts of water. I used about 3/4 cup lemon juice. Other than that, I followed the recipe to the letter. One thing I would change for the future would be to try using four eggs instead of three. It just wasn't thick enough. Otherwise, it tasted just like we remembered. The children were pleased.

The other project for today was more bread. Now that everyone is home and eating lunches here every day I need to make bread much more often. In my quest to get softer sandwich bread from my starter, I tried something new with this batch. I replaced some of the water with 1 cup of milk. I'm pleased to say that the bread is super soft and springy, and I will definitely use that trick again!

Redeeming Myself

After the macaron debacle I purchased better parchment paper. It's amazing how much variation there is for something that most of us who bake would think is a standardized product. The paper arrived the other day, just in time for me to make a birthday cake for my husband.

Note the bread, which I made yesterday, for our cheese fondues. 

In the fabulous cookbook, Marbled, Swirled, and Layered, is a recipe for a pistachio chocolate cake with a brown sugar buttercream. I decided to try my hand at making it. It most definitely required high quality parchment paper to make the thin chocolate cake required for rolling with the filling. Essentially, it is a jelly roll, on its side. It's been a while since I've done anything this complicated, that is for sure!

And yet, despite all the swearing, somehow I managed to make it look almost as good as the photo. Even if I was a little heavy-handed with the buttercream.

Happy Birthday! 

Serious Disappointment

Ever since the new oven arrived and I discovered it had a convection function (I'd forgotten) I had been planning to make macarons and try it out. My theory was that my barely functional gas oven couldn't maintain a stable temperature and that convection was required so the heat would be drier. Today the elderchild and I made a small batch of macarons. Everything was going fine. Until it wasn't.

Note: every single cookie cracked. All are stuck to the parchment.

My best guess is that the parchment I bought was just... crap. There is no other way to describe it. I had cheap parchment before, and then I bought a batch from Amazon that was great and worked perfectly. So when it was time to buy more, I went through my order history and ordered the exact same product. That was somehow completely different when it arrived. I'd had heard this complaint about Amazon recently, that other vendors were reselling products on Amazon that were not the correct product and not of the same quality. This is why, in the past I had not purchased toilet paper and other sundries through Amazon; mainly because the reviews for various products indicated that they were also subject to the same bait-and-switch.

Anyway, you can imagine our disappointment. We can't even pry all these broken macarons off the paper without the paper coming with the cookie. It's ridiculous. Every single cookie was ruined. Every. Single. One.

Setting aside all the work involved, almond flour is not cheap.

I have ordered King Arthur Brand parchment. And if it arrives being anything other than King Arthur Brand parchment, I will send it back. 

North American Soup?

The other day, this recipe for Sopa de Lima showed up in my inbox. It sounded very tasty and I wanted to make it. I'd had some wild game and turkey bones in my freezer for a while that needed to go if I was going to have more room for other meats and vegetables. After all, if we're going to be socially isolated for a while, I need to have provisions. Obviously I don't have chachalacas, but I do have one full chukar breast and one full Canada goose breast. So I set to work early this morning.

First, I used the turkey bones to make stock, and set aside 1 quart and the meat from the bones for the soup. The rest of the stock is being chilled so I can remove the fat before canning it. Maybe tomorrow....

Next, I put the goose and chukar breasts in a pot with the stock and the rest of the soup base ingredients and cooked them until I was sure the goose was cooked through. I will point out that goose isn't exactly a white meat, but in the end it worked out okay, if a little darker than the photos. I did have to pick out a little bit of birdshot out of the goose while I was shredding it.

Finally, I put all the soup ingredients together, skipping the habañero but using a poblano pepper. With the cilantro and tortilla chips, it was popular all around. Even the youngerchild had a full bowl, minus the goose which was "too gamey."

Why North American? Well, Mexican recipe, American turkey, and Canadian Goose, of course!

Unintentional But Funny

Yesterday we went for a long hike through Dogtown, the abandoned colonial town in Gloucester, MA. It was good to get out, particularly in this time of social isolation. One of the odd findings in Dogtown are the Babson Boulders, a series of inspirational admonishments carved into the glacial erratics which are scattered all over the area. We found all but the last five which would have involved crossing active railroad tracks, something we felt it would be prudent not to do. Babson probably would have approved of our prudence.

Along the way we found huge patches of wintergreen, some with no berries at all and some with TONS of berries. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) We picked a lot. The elderchild asked if we could make them into muffins. Easily done!






This morning I used this recipe but without the chocolate chips and made a dozen chocolate-wintergreen muffins. Which look a lot like those pictures of the coronavirus. I promise, it was not intentional. But it seems apropos anyway.

So Much Has Happened

New oven!

Yeah, sorry about that. It's been quite the month and a half. It started with a trip to Malaysia for our friends' wedding in the latter half of January. And then we got back, work picked up, family members were sick, there were trips out to see colleges and said family and then the flu hit, I fell off a horse, and now we're all stuck at home waiting to see what will happen with the state of the world. I am the only one who doesn't get to work/study from home so this is going to be interesting.

Both children will now be doing some sort of remote classes after their respective spring breaks end. We were supposed to be going to Scotland today to visit more colleges, obviously that isn't happening. All the concerts and lectures we had tickets for are postponed indefinitely or canceled. It makes sense but it's frustrating all the same.

You know what I can do? Bake! Especially now, that I have a NEW OVEN. Right before we went to Malaysia the oven died its final death. Which meant my sister was staying with the youngerchild without an oven, but they managed. I got a new oven delivered the day after we got back and haven't even really had much time to play with it except for making bread. That will change this week, as I had already taken the week off (for the aforementioned nonexistent trip to Scotland) so plan to start trying to bake some things. Starting with today - Pi Day!

Using the filling from eat the love's Strawberry Rhubarb Galette, I made a Pi, with the help of the elderchild. The oven worked swimmingly. We can't wait for dessert!