Last week, Cooks' Emporium posted a photo recipe for marscapone-stuffed strawberries. (If you like them on Facebook, all sorts of fun recipes will pop up in your feed.) While I'm not usually one for strawberries (I know, I know), I VOWED TO MAKE THEM. I picked up a little tub of marscapone, and happily, there were strawberries at the Main Street market. I also picked up a neato decorating bulb from Cooks' Emporium, since I didn't yet own any frosting implements.
Since photo recipes on Facebook don't always reliably link, I looked for a comparable recipe and found this one from The Italian Dish.
My parents gave me a microplane grater for Christmas, and it is MAGICAL. I mostly use it for zesting citrus, but it makes for some good chocolate dust. Since chocolate melts at body temperature, pretty much, it's essential to refridgerate your chocolate bar before grating it. Otherwise, it melts rapidly as you grate it, and you'll get chocolate smudges everywhere.
And hey, I finally have strawberries to set on my strawberry plate! FINALLY.
The recipe called for 28 strawberries exactly, as if all strawberries are uniform. Ha!
I am almost empty on my Bourbon Barrel vanilla extract, after a year! I've been rationing it for a while. I guess when I run out, I have to go back to Louisville? TRAGIC.
Fiddling around with my new frosting bulb was fun! I used the star-shaped piping thing, which ended up looking lovely on the strawberries. If I do this again, though, I think I'll hollow the strawberries out a bit, rather than cross-cut them as the recipe suggested.
And then I dusted them with chocolate! I had a bit of a heavy hand here, but is anyone going to complain?
A successful dessert experiment! Hopefully I will manage to not devour these all before work tomorrow morning.
In healthier-ish experiments, I made TWO salads with the butter lettuce (LOCALLY GROWN) and pea shoots! My go-to salad is typically one with goat cheese, sunflower seeds, and a lime vinaigrette. I feel like this is a riff off a salad special from The Black Sparrow, but I'm not certain. In any case, when I Googled for a dressing recipe, I also came across one for an orange salad, so I decided to make both.
Pistachio Orange Salad
Riffing off this recipe from Saveur. I happily had pistachios in the pantry (which isn't always the case, as they're pretty expensive), and in the fridge there were a few blood oranges rattling around. (I know citrus fruits should be kept on the counter, but I think I stuck those in there before I went out of town a couple of weeks ago. Eh, it works.) One neato trick I picked up in a cooking class: if you're juicing from the fruit, roll it around a few times before slicing it in half! That Saveur link also has a handy video that shows how to slice an orange up all fancy.
While I didn't have creme fraiche (because come on, people, who ever has that on hand), I DID have a tub of Greek Gods Honey Orange Yogurt. And PROTIP: in most recipes, you can pretty easily swap creme fraiche for sour cream for Greek yogurt, as they have similar consistencies and lend the same sour/fresh flavor.
I omitted the chives, since I didn't have any, and added in pea shoots and pine nuts. And then I remembered the pistachios! Whoops. Two kinds of nuts it is!
Butter lettuce is pretty delicate, so don't put dressing on until right before serving. Actually, I wouldn't even make the salad more than an hour or so ahead of time. Butter lettuce is, like, a third as hearty as, say, a crisp romaine. (This is all dependent, of course, on your tolerance for vaguely soggy salad. I don't mind it sometimes.)
Pea shoots, perhaps unsurprisingly, taste like peas. They're a nice contrast with the butter lettuce--the leaves have a similar, tender feel to them, and the stems are twiny and delightful.
Also notice: 1) I am pretty hilariously bad at doing the fancy segment slicing, and 2) blood oranges turn everything pink. I promise your dressing will look much less unnatural if you opt for regular oranges. (If you're following the recipe, I will also note I added a bit of lemon pepper to the dressing, but no salt.)
Still tasty, though.
Goat Cheese Salad with Lime Viniagarette
I used this recipe from The Yummy Life for the dressing, though I used avocado oil instead of grapeseed. Since it was such a small amount, I used the dressing shaker again, but if it was a bit more, the immersion blender would probably be a safer bet.
Salad Ingredients
Butter lettuce
Pea shoots
One small log of chevre (soft goat cheese)
Sunflower seeds (about 1/2 cup, which is a LOT, but I love them)
Salad dressing
Salad spinners are especially handy for delicate lettuces--after only a day, the butter lettuce was already a bit limp, and any excess water would make the salad unbearably soggy.
And the final dressing! Notice the lumpiness of the cheese--since chevre is pretty soft, it's difficult to slice neatly. I just pinched off pieces with my fingers. And this photo of pouring dressing over the salad is as close to an action shot as I take take, left-handed, with my smartphone.
For real though, that salad dressing shaker is a pretty sound investment. It is SO EASY to make your own dressing. When I'm being less fancy, I usually just dash some olive oil, lemon juice, and pepper together and VOILA. Yum. But if you're going to be fancy, it's handy to have an arsenal of weird ingredients in your pantry.
It's taken me a couple of years to build up this collection. I'm subscribed to Try the World and Hamptons Lane, which encourage fun experimentation. When I travel, I look for local souvenirs, and I get a lot of fun food-themed gifts from folks, as well. It takes up a lot of space, but hey! There are worse hobbies to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment