Yesterday night we have celebrated my little sister 12th birthday. I already had in mind what i wanted to make : a kind of mezze with a dip or two, polpette (meatballs) and blinis with caviar and creme fraiche and for la piece de resistance, i thought a piece montee would be quite impressive.
For the mezze i made :
blinis with caviar - i love my recipe for blinis; they’re soft, dense and light at the same time. Just one tip, i always add 2 tbsp of creme fraiche in the batter (for approx. 25 mini blinis).
aubergine, yogurt and mint dip - i used a recipe from the great Nigella’s Feast. It’s really good. I’ll definitely make this again. The pinenuts really adds something
polpette (meat balls) - the recipe is from Feast -again- “aromatic lamb meatballs”, but as i don’t like lamb i used beef and the result was great. I think this are good with some bitter leaves like cresson alienois.

The piece montee
Actually i had never made choux buns before but i thought it would be easy - just follow the recipe. I had three recipes : one from Feast, another from my chocolate desserts from Pierre Herme and the last from a french pastry book of mine. These three recipes were identic so i used Pierre Herme’s. But for my first attempt, i didn’t read the recipe till its end: i added the flour off the heat and ended up with a liquid batter; so i put my pan back on the heat while stirring. I got a nice smooth batter. The choux buns were right, but as i thought they weren’t i just throw away the excess batter and whipped up another - this time following closely the recipe. But the result was awful; if my buns rose high in the oven they took less than 1 minutes to fall once out of the oven. I was dissapointed. But my dad told me tu ne devrais pas rester sur un echec (you must keep going and try to do another batch); and so i did. I made another batch of buns. OK, my choux buns aren’t that high, but they’re good. I’ll try again when i’ll be a little more relaxed.
For the toffee sauce i prefered to make a soft caramel rather than an hard one. I think the toffee-ish side of the caramel brings lusciousness to this already luscious pudding.
Just one more thing : the filling is a simple vanilla creme patissiere.

Chanterelles are one of those autumn goods you never have enough of. They’re golden and ebony delicate mushrooms with a great perfume.

Last tuesday, my dad went in the arrière pays and picked a lot of mushrooms : sanguins and chanterelles.
The sanguins are very good pickled and then stored, covered with oil, in a airtight jar for at least 3 weeks. Concerning the chanterelles, you can either freeze them or as my dad, dry them. I admit it takes a long time to sundry them, but frankly you’ve got nothing to do bar puting all the beautiful mushrooms on a double layer of brown paper.

Sun-dried chanterelles
Place the chanterelles (no need to brush them as when they’ll dry, the earth will fall off them) on a double layer of brown paper.
And place all that in the sun every morning : they’ll dry in 2-3 days.

If you haven’t got time or sun : turn on your oven to the lowest temperature and dry the chanterelles -placed in a baking tray- for a night. The next morning your chanterelles will be nicely dried and concentrated in flavour and you kitchen will smell like a mountain cottage.

[looking for the lost butternut squash]

Eric Roux is a cook who have a great chronique on a mid-day show on Canal+. I love his chroniques are they’re the most delicious and interesting food programmes on French tv : to tell the truth the first thing i do when i’m back home for lunch around 1pm is to turn on the television and watch him speak about tomatoes, grapes… while cooking for myself.
Last wednesday he talked about pumpkins. I was all excited because he showed differents kind of them and i was sure he was going to mention the famous butternut squash : the most divine pumpkin for me. Then he mentionned it, needless to say i was in heaven : “afterall it was possible to find buttermut squash in France, hourray!”. I already knew Eric had a blog, but never dropped by.
So i went on his great blog and post him a comment on how much i loved his show and how much i was happy to know i could find butternut squash in france. He very kindly answered me by email that he was sure i could find what i wanted (i’m not going to repeat “butternut squash” all over this post) in Toulouse food maket.
Lucky me : i didn’t have class on friday.

So this morning i woke up at 7am, took the bus down to the city center and went to all the food market i could find; but nowhere was my dear butternut squash. Desperate and hopeless i finely bought 4 lovely pomegranates and tentatively went to the last food market, asked the man if he had courge musquée (french name), but as he didn’t seem to know what they was i said butternut and then he showed me 3 butternut squashes waiting for me to buy them… Guess what i did. Buy the 3 of them. And if i have too much, i’ll just freeze them (clever girl, hey). I found the butternut squashes in a stand located inside the Place des Carmes market. I’ll write recipes for butternut squash next week when i’ll be in my home

Oops, i didn’t tell you everything; Eric Roux asked me if i could give hime a recipe using butternut for him to put on his blog. But i won’t give him only one recipe but 3… that will be :
-butternut bruschetta from BBC’s Ready Steady Cook
-either a very rich pumpkin risotto from Tom Norrington Davies or a beef and butternut squash curry from Paul Rankin
-butternut cheesecake from Feast