Audax Artifex was our January 2012 Daring Bakers’ host. Aud worked tirelessly to master light and fluffy scones (a/k/a biscuits) to help us create delicious and perfect batches in our own kitchens!

And Aud did inspire us!  Just check out his scones!!

Ever the detailed perfectionist (and I mean that in a very good way), Audax gave us guidance, detailed instructions and lots and lots of support.  I love that our first challenge of the year was so simple yet so open to creative interpretation (again, see Aud’s blog), and also so comforting.  Our biscuits (we’re in the US after all, and there is even a southerner living in this house) were the most basic, but man were they delicious.  Served with a hearty stew, they made an early-January meal that allowed us to forget, momentarily, how much we missed being outside by the grill.

I have to admit to something – as amazing at it looked, I didn’t actually use Audax’s recipe.  I used the one from Michael Ruhlman’s excellent book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.  You can see from the photo that the biscuits turned out wonderfully lifted and flaky.

You can also see by the less-lifted rounded sides why trimming the edges of biscuits is important for full lift – I wanted to get the most biscuit I could out of the dough, so I made squares and skipped cutting the edges.

I won’t be doing that in the future and I’m curious to see just how high these little guys will go next time!

I’m also curious to try Aud’s recipe – it’s much simpler and unlike Ruhlman’s which requires a bit of time and quite a bit of rolling (although it’s not complicated in the least), Aud’s biscuits were designed to be whipped together at a moment’s notice.  And if his instructions and photos weren’t enticing enough, I have all these examples by my daring compadres to spur me on!  These are definitely on the to-do list.

Thanks Audax for being such a wonderful host and for inspiring me to give biscuits a shot – they are as delightful as you are!

Cheers.

We love Zinfandel!

Which is true.  And this Zinfandel was good…but not amazing.  It came highly recommended, so perhaps the bar in my mind was a bit high, but it just fell a little short of what I was expecting.

It was very Zin…fruity, strong but still smooth and a bit spicy, body without being syrupy.  It was good at the start.  But my husband noticed that the finish was kind of hollow.  I think that’s what he said.  Perhaps “empty” was his exact term.  But you get the idea.  Something about the end of the taste of the wine just sort of fell…flat.

Would I buy it again?  Well, I’m gathering quite a few nice bottles to buy instead, so maybe not.  Would I turn it down if offered?  Heck no!  It’s very drinkable.  It just didn’t rock my world.

Until next week!

Cheers.

Box Wine Rating Recap:

Rendition Zinfandel

 ★★★☆☆ 

My husband had an interesting and excellent idea recently.  Knowing that people enjoy lists and recommendations, he suggested that I make a list of “must have” cookbooks for the blog, explaining why each book is on the list.

Genius!  And I’m planning on taking it one step further.  Each month this year I’m going to review one of the books in my collection that I think is a “must have,” and at the end of 2012, I’ll have a list of 12 cookbooks that are really stellar.  At least, that’s the hope.

The rules – yes, I’m going to make some rules.  Because I love them but also because I think that benchmarks are helpful in assessing things that other people have evaluated.  So here are the rules:

1. I own the book
2. I cook from it at least somewhat regularly (you’d be astounded by how many cookbooks I own and never cook from – or maybe you wouldn’t!)
3. I’ve made at least three things from them which have come off successfully without modification (I am still always amazed at how many recipes need to be altered)
4. The book is in print or is reasonably easy to find if it’s not (I’m not going to recommend you try to find some obscure title that costs $142 when a perfectly good $20 model will do)

Enough rules!

The first volume I’m going to talk about is The Way To Cook by Julia Child.  I talk about this book a lot and I think about it a lot.  You remember the first boy/girlfriend you had?  Not the one you were just super crushy on, but the first one you had that you loved.  The one that made you think “oh!  I totally get it, this ‘love’ thing!”  If there is a cookbook version of that, this one is it for me.

The Way To Cook is the first book I really cooked with.  Before I owned it, I dabbled in cooking, mostly reading Food and Wine, going gaga over the photos and then trying to recreate what was pictured.  I was having fun*, but I was more just kind of making things than I was cooking.  And I definitely wasn’t thinking about technique or about understanding how or why things worked.

Julia changed all that for me, which is the reason I’ll always love her, no matter how enticing and wonderful future authors and cookbooks may be.  This was the first book I owned that explained how to make things, with photos, clear writing and something called “Master Recipes.”  I discovered if I learned these recipes, I would get a handle on a technique that would in turn allow me to tackle other recipes that were similar and feel like I knew what I was doing. Julia’s teaching began to give me the confidence that is so key to learning anything.  This book was the beginning of the foundation I needed to stop parroting what I saw in pretty food magazines and start to actually cook.

I would recommend any of Julia’s books, without having read them.  The ones I have are that good.  As is her excellent PBS series, The French Chef.  The Way To Cook will always be my first-favorite, but I would be willing to gamble that virtually any of her titles would be excellent for any cook at any level.

For more of my waxing on about Julia, here is another post.

Until next month – Bon Appétit!

Cheers.

Twelve Months of Books Quick Recap:

The book: The Way to Cook by Julia Child
How long I’ve owned it: 20 years (approximate)
Three things I’ve made from it  that always turn out, without fail: Pie crust (Pâte Brisée Fine)-page 381*, Mayonnaise-page 363, Anchovy and Onion Tart (Pissaladière)-pg 393 (plus a million other things)

*Which is a must-have element in learning, I think.  The goofing around stage is very important!  Have fun!!
**This has been my go-to pie crust since I’ve owned this book. It’s only now, twenty some-odd years later that I’ve even considered giving other recipes a try. It’s that good.

Wine + pizza = excellence!

We’ve been making pizza together since we’ve lived together.  I’ve waxed a little poetically about that before, but goofiness be damned, after 7 years homemade pizza is something that really means “home” to me.  Maybe it’s because it’s so simple, maybe (very likely) it’s because my husband almost always makes it or maybe it’s because it’s something we learned to make together, I pretty much can’t get enough of the stuff.

My husband just had a birthday and his mom sent him a wonderful cookbook:

I’ll admit that pizza on the grill has stumped us these many years.  Each of us has made it successfully once (and each was delicious).  But mostly, our grilled pizza has wound up being at least somewhat of a mess, so we were both excited to get a book that promised to help us master this puzzle.  It’s still winter here (which in LA, doesn’t mean “cold” so much as “dark”) and when he suggested we do something from the book, I was a little surprised – who wants to be outside in the “cold-for-LA” dark cooking pizza on the grill?  About mid-way, reason kicked in and we ditched the idea of doing the pizza outside and opted for the oven.  It was spectacular.

My husband chose a sausage and shitake mushroom combo from the book, which was glorious.  We use Trader Joe’s tomato sauce which he amps up with balsamic vinegar and some secret spices, but a simple homemade tomato sauce would be amazing here as well.  The combination was a knockout.  The book has a couple of different recipes for dough and the one we made was both a nice change from the dough we usually make and also has the promising quality of being a little drier and stiffer, which I think will hold up to the grill once the days get a little longer and we try it out there.

Wait – isn’t this a Wine Wednesday post?  What’s up with all this pizza blah blah blah?

Well, the book also has another fantastic feature – beverage pairings!  This recipe came with a suggestion for an Oregon Pinot Noir.  We don’t carry such stuff at work, so I settled on the Sebastopol Hills Pinot from the Sonoma Coast and am I glad I did!  This bottle is a bit pricier than we usually fly ($9.99 at Trader Joe’s), but it’s well worth the spend.  Smooth without being flat, body without being syrupy or cloy (is that a word?), a bit of sweetness, extremely balanced with a bit of pepper (the husband noted that, I’m still too palette-dead to be picking up spices in wine).  It was a fine wine that I would take with pride to any dinner party.*

Overall, dinner was a hit.  The pizza was fabulous and the wine was wonderful.  Like great old friends, they stand on their own and they are even more fun together!

Until next week!

Cheers.

Box Wine Rating Recap:

Sebastopol Pinot Noir

 ★★★★☆ 

Paired with Mushroom Pizza (page 27 in Pizza On The Grill by Elizabeth Karmel and Bob Blumer)

 ★★★★½ 

*Once we get our house done, it will make a very fine hostess gift if you’re over – how’s that for a subtle hint?

Hola!

Actually, “Bon jour” is more in order here.  Today we’re talking about our experiment in pairing a couple more French wines with Hunter’s Stew.

To recap, we’ve been going through the fun and informative Wine Food & Friends to deepen our knowledge of wines and also how wines pair with food.  Already there have been a few surprises – Riesling is actually quite delicious (and not overly sweet) and French wines tend to be very dry, earthy and flat (as opposed to superior, which I would have expected based on my experience with French foods).

I’m afraid this particular pairing of a Chateuneuf du Pape with Hunter’s Stew doesn’t do much for my opinion of French wine, except, perhaps, seal the deal on the fact that I don’t really like them.  But I’m always open to changing my mind…

But first, let’s talk about the food.  What the heck is Hunter’s Stew?

This is essentially a faster version of a glorious French dish known as Cassoulet.  The classic is on the labor-intensive side*, requiring two or three days to make and a at least a few ingredients that you’re not necessarily going to find at the supermarket down the street.  That said, I highly recommend making it at least once (and if you do, I recommend Anthony Bourdain’s recipe, mostly because I’ve made it and know that it’s delicious).  This stuff is amazing.  Truly.  It’s amazing.  I had no idea that beans could taste so wonderful.

The Hunter’s Stew from our wine pairing book was good, and certainly considering the much easier preparation, worth sampling.  I did think, though, that the recipe was far too big, even for the number of people it was supposed to serve.  I cut it down by half and we had this stuff on hand for days.  It was good, but anything you have to eat for four days straight gets a bit tiring.

The recipe called for a Côtes du Rhône, and we substituted this dry red, which worked well for cooking:

Not highly drinkable (to our taste) but a fine wine for its intended purpose.

What was, unfortunately, disappointing was the Chateauneuf.  I was pretty excited to try this one, partially because of its renown and also because it’s a great seller at work.  I know popularity doesn’t always equal quality, but oftentimes, there is a reason a lot of people enjoy something.  Not so much so in the case of this wine.

It did do better when paired with the stew.  Our first sips sans dinner were, much like the other French wines we’ve tasted so far, very dry, very earthy and kind of flat.  Drinking it with the Hunter’s Stew helped immensely.  But, as my husband pointed out, even though the stew improved the wine, do you really want to buy a bottle of wine that requires a particular dinner to make it palatable?

My answer is “no” – I don’t.  So I’m giving this one a pass.  As with all things food-related, it’s very much a matter of taste.  And each week we go on with this little experiment leads me closer to the conclusion that I’m a California lass at heart and just don’t really care for French wines.

Next week we’ll stop beating up on the French and find something that is more recommendable.  In general, I like to keep things positive – I think it’s more helpful.  Or at least, it’s a lot more fun!

Until next week!

Cheers.

Box Wine Rating Recap:

Chateauneuf du Pape

 ★½☆☆☆ 

Paired with Hunter’s Stew (page 122 in “Wine, Food & Friends” by Karen MacNeil)

 ★★☆☆☆ 

*Bourdain would disagree, but I think anything that needs this much planning is a bit labor-intensive in my book.  It’s not hard or complicated, it just takes a lot of time.