Lemon Curd Puffs

It's lemon season and my bandmate's wife treated me to a delicious spoonful of her lemon curd the other night at practice. Luscious, so sweet and tart! She sent Al to our next gig with a bag of lemons for me, so I made these:


Lemon Curd Choux/Puffs

Lemon Curd
3 large lemons
1 1/4 cup sugar or to taste
1/4 lb unsalted butter
5 large eggs
pinch of salt

Zest the lemons finely, mince if needed, and mix with sugar and a pinch of salt. Cream butter and sugar/lemon mix together, then add eggs one at a time. Juice lemons and add the juice into the mix. Heat gently over low heat in 2 qt saucepan, stirring continuously until custard thickens. Pour into container to cool. If using just for this recipe, can pour into shallow bowl and cover with plastic wrap (press into surface once not ridiculously hot) to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate once cool enough.

While lemon curd is cooling, make the choux

Puffs (this is Julia Child's recipe)
1 1/2 c water
9 tb butter
2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 c flour
5-6 large eggs

Preheat oven to 425
Place water butter and sugar in saucepan and heat to boiling. Once butter is melted and water is bubbling, turn off heat and add flour all at once. Stir with wooden spoon until all incorporated and pate comes away from the sides of the pan. If needed, you can turn the heat back to low to get it to that state (I've never had to). Mix in eggs, one at a time, making sure each is fully incorporated before adding the next. Batter should be thick and able to stand on its own, but glossy. If too thick and not glossy enough add the 6th egg in parts until glossy enough.

Form into 1 inch dollops on a lightly buttered baking sheet or two (this makes quite a bit, two baking sheets if you space them properly though I can fit almost all of it on one very big baking sheet when they're placed pretty close). I use two spoons. You might be able to use a pastry bag, though the batter/dough is pretty thick.

Bake at 425 about 20 minutes, then turn down to 350 and bake 10 minutes more or until golden. Leave oven door open when you turn off the heat and leave them in a little longer to dry out.

If you're me and you started this escapade sometime after 11pm, you then tidy up the kitchen a bit, refrigerate the lemon curd and go to bed. If you started earlier, you can proceed whenever the puffs aren't too hot and the lemon curd is set.

Fill puffs with lemon curd, either with pastry bag or by slicing a slit and spooning a bit in, then top with drizzled melted chocolate. Serve soon or they'll get soggy. You can store the puffs unfilled in an airtight container at room temperature for a day or two without filling, or longer in the freezer, but they should be eaten soon after filling which shouldn't be a problem.

Another view:

New Year

Ended 2011 with a foggy hike on Mount St Helena.Charlie, Gabe and I had planned to go climbing, but we picked the one moist day of this dry winter so ended up hiking instead.
It was a beautiful damp day, enticing for photographs. I forgot to bring my camera, so Charlie and I shared his and some of these photos are his.

It's been so dry this winter that the hills are still pretty brown, but this area was nice and lush.
The reds of the manzanita looked particularly burnished in the damp air.
And the fog and moss gave the forest an ethereal quality.Lichen-covered branches contrasted beautifully with the fallen brown leaves,
and it coated standing trunks as well, making for a fuzzy forest.We veered off the path to find a nice deep dry hole with interesting little nooks.
And we checked out one of the climbing spots, the Bubble.
We stopped at a newish restaurant in Winters on the way home. Preserve Public House is a great place to eat and drink, and Charlie loves their pulled pork sandwich so much, he had it two days in a row while he was housesitting in Winters so he could introduce me to it. We headed home on a full stomach, then Charlie and I snuck over to Froggy's for Carol's surprise birthday party. Carol's friends filled the bar. It was a tiki-themed party, so I'd made a set of 19 cat and dog tiki mugs which were used as centerpieces. Here are a few of my favorites:

New Year's Eve was spent preparing a handmade ravioli feast. I was too busy stressing over being late to take photos, but luckily Sarah thought to snap a picture, so here's some I stole from her. Happily, we had lots of hands to make the ravioli, and everyone was fine with dinner being a process. And even more fortunately, our Italian friend Tommaso showed up in the nick of time to show us how it's actually done.
Dinner was delicious. It was so good that Charlie and I had to take a nap afterwards and never made it to the New Year's Eve party. Oh well.
Charlie made up for it with a January birthday party that broke records. He had the brilliant idea of hiring a taco truck and inviting all his friends. We're not sure exactly how many people came, but someone counted 99 folks at one point, and the taco truck fed at least 75 before running out of food. Charlie helped serve a few plates. (Photo courtesy of Julia Luckenbill.)There was a pinata too. The kids all took a swing, then Charlie finished it off.
Happy birthday Charlie!

food

I like food. And I like that Charlie likes food. This is a meal he made near the end of September.
And yes, that is Charlie's homemade sourdough topped by his mother's jam.

At any rate, I get to eat pretty well normally, but we recently had an even more amazing food weekend. Charlie was house/dogsitting for these lovely folks:

Charlie got permission for me to come hang out with the dogs too, and it was a treat especially since there was a piano and bookcases on bookcases of cookbooks and food books.

The first night, I brought ingredients for thai coconut chicken soup and endive/pear/blue cheese salad. They were so delicious, we forgot to photograph them. We started the next morning off with Swedish pancakes, bacon and a frittata made with locally grown peppers and some local eggs.We discovered a pasta machine, so in the evening we combined more peppers and some Cloverleaf tomatoes with ground bison and our homemade pasta.
Since breakfast was so good the first morning, Charlie surprised me the second morning by making more Swedish pancakes on his own as well as eggs and bacon. He learned from my mistake in halving the recipe and made the full recipe this time so we not only had larger pancakes, we had leftovers.Frankie had already had her breakfast, but she thought ours looked better.
That night we made Chinese style noodles. These were similar to Italian noodles with the addition of more water/less egg and dusting the dough with cornstarch to smooth it as it's pressed through the machine.
We did a cold noodle recipe with a soy sauce/black vinegar/scallion/sesame oil sauce. Very tasty and I was too hungry to take pictures, but I made chinese noodles again a couple days later as a stir fry this time.
After enjoying their pasta machine so much, I had to have one of my own. Coincidentally the one I purchased off of ebay turned out to be located in Winters where we'd been housesitting and I knew the folks selling it. Small world...

Chinese noodle recipe (adapted from The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Tropp)
3 cups flour
1 large egg or 2 medium eggs
3/4 cup water
1-1.5 tsp salt

Mix flour and salt and form it into a mound (I do this in a bowl to make cleaning easier). Make a dent in the middle for the egg. Crack egg(s) into indentation and beat, then add water and mix. Gradually incorporate flour into wet ingredients. Once it comes together as a dough, start to knead, adding more flour as necessary to keep hands from sticking (or more water if too dry). Knead until elastic and smooth then form into a dough ball, lightly oil the outside and let rest, covered for 20 minutes to 3 hours. The rest lets the gluten relax and really helps.

Divide dough into six parts. With each piece of dough, roughly flatten with hands and dust with cornstarch before running it through the thickest setting on the pasta machine. Fold in thirds, dust, run through thickest setting with folds to the sides, repeat 2-3 times. Continue dusting with cornstarch as needed and running through the machine at decreasing thicknesses until the thickness you want. Plenty of cornstarch helps...you shouldn't really need it to keep the dough from sticking in the machine, but it helps smooth the texture and produce a silkier noodle. I used the second to last setting "6" on my pasta machine. Let the thin sheets sit for a while on a towel to dry out a bit (15-30 minutes?) before cutting.

I cut the noodles with the thin cutters, taking each bundle after they went through and stretching them out a bit further. Long noodles are lovely, but for sanity in cooking, it helps to cut them to about 15 inches or so. Dust cut noodles with cornstarch to prevent clumping. Let sit before cooking. Noodles can sit outside the fridge for an hour or two before cooking, just fluff them occasionally, or can be stored in the fridge for a day (again fluff occasionally). They can also be dried completely or frozen. Cook in boiling water briefly...if made thin, they will only need around 10 seconds after the water comes back to a boil. Noodles should be tender but still have a slight bite. Stop the cooking by rinsing in cold water. If not immediately saucing, mix noodles with a little oil to prevent sticking.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

The day after Lambtown, I hitched a ride with my friend Sarah and her dog Punky to San Francisco for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. We succeeded in leaving nice and early and spent the whole day relaxing and enjoying good music and company. The musical highlight for me was Edgar Meyer, Bela Fleck and Zakir Hussein.

Sarah and I both erred on the side of bringing extra food so we enjoyed a feast of bread and cheese and tomatoes/basil/olive oil/garlic and vegetarian steamed buns and wine.

Punky made friends easily and attracted the attention of Chris and Sierra who joined us with their dog Fonz (short for Fonzarelli). Since Punk's full name is Punky Brewster, it was only fitting they should find each other.


Chris and Punky enjoyed meeting each other.

As always, the festival was pretty crowded.
At the Dvotchka show, people were hanging out in the trees to get a good view while other just hung out under them.
This dog was having a pretty relaxed time.

I was a bit surprised how relatively easy it was to find people--the magic of cell phones. Spencer found us first.

Then we met up with Michelle and Tom.

And finally I found Abby for the Emmylou Harris set.

We were relatively close but we still had to do some maneuvering to see over the tall folks in front of us since everyone was standing.Fun day of music followed up by dinner at a pho shop. Good times.

Lambtown

Some weekends there are just too many fun things to do. Recently Full Belly Farm hosted Hoesdown, a harvest celebration, on the same weekend as Dixon had Lambtown, a celebration of the sheep industry (and Calpaca joined in with an alpaca show) and San Francisco had Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a big free music festival in Golden Gate Park.

I spent Saturday at Lambtown. I'd meant to just go for a short time, dash in, say hi to my friends in the sheep to shawl competition, say hi to Bruce and Joan and their alpacas and restock my mohair supply. But Lambtown has gotten big. Dixon is a small town of about 18000, close to Davis, and Lambtown used to be this little event where they shut down a few blocks in the center of town and had a lamb cook off on the street with some vendors and a few people demonstrating spinning and weaving in a not very large room. Now it's at the fairgrounds and there is a giant warehouse full of people selling fiber arts related things and supplies, there's a long walkway lined with vendors, everything from people selling wool and knitting needles, to sunglasses and bonsai. There was a lot to see.

I was wondering how to find Ah...Sweet Alpacas when I ran into Bruce walking Phantom around to garner interest in the alpacas which were tucked away in a corner of the fairgrounds. I got to show Bruce and Joan the finished yarn that I'd started at their farm. Meanwhile, my old sheep-to-shawl team of the Silverado Guild made a beautiful lacy shawl out of wool and alpaca to win the competition and after the excitement was over, I was able to visit with some folks I hadn't seen for a while. I ran into three ladies from Anne's Web, the spinning guild in Salinas that was one of my favorite things about being in that area. We had a good fibery talk while we waited and waited and waited for the wool show to finish their judging so we could buy fleeces.

My goal had been to buy a kid mohair fleece and knitting needles for the rose-grey alpaca shawl and nothing more. There were so many tempting things, so setting myself a goal was really wise. But the farm where I'd been hoping to buy mohair brought fleeces for the show, but didn't have a booth and I was about to give up when my friend Vera found some gorgeously silky kid mohair from Janet Heppler's Nebo Rock Ranch. It was a small fleece, so I bought it. Then the wool show sale opened and I ended up buying the first place mohair fleece from Eureka Mohair, the farm I'd been looking for (and I think it's the ranch that produced the first mohair I ever bought, a batt of natural red yearling). That kid must be enjoying life, lots of dirt and vegetable matter, but the curl and shine are amazing.

Here's a photo of some Eureka Mohair Farm kid mohair in a new bag I sewed to store the picked locks:

National Alpaca Farm Days

National Alpaca Farm Days this year was September 24th and 25th. I did a spinning demonstration at a nearby alpaca farm two years ago but missed last year, so I was excited that they asked me back this year. Spinning alpaca among the alpacas for 6 hours, what could be better?

Charlie joined me and we spent Sunday out at Ah...Sweet Alpacas, an alpaca farm between Vacaville and Winters. As always, the alpacas were cute.

Joan and Bruce were very welcoming and there were two girls who've been helping out with the alpacas and were eager to share their knowledge with visitors. Here's a photo of Charlie talking with Joan over the fiber boy pen. Now is a great time to get alpacas. These sweet fellows are for sale for $500 for two (you need at least two!) and less if you get more.

Amazingly (for september), it started to sprinkle on the way over, and it was overcast and sprinkling for much of the day. Fewer people came Sunday than Saturday, but we had a steady trickle of visitors. Luckily there was still time to visit with the alpacas. This is Cayenne, the matriarch of the girls.

Here is Sabrina. Bruce says she's the sweetest! Here's Rosie posing for the camera:
Joan gave me Rosie's seconds to spin. One of the great things about alpacas is their range of natural colors, 16 distinct shades. Rosie has a beautiful variegated rose-grey fleece (sheared last spring).
And here's the yarn I'm spinning.A photographer for Fairfield's paper, the Daily Republic, took a photo of me spinning, wearing one of my felted shawls...this one is silk and alpaca, naturally.
Alpaca is one of my favorite fibers to spin because it can be wonderfully soft and you can often spin it raw without further preparation after shearing. Unlike sheep wool, alpaca doesn't have lanolin, so as long as you don't mind the dust, you can spin it without washing it. (You can spin raw sheep wool, but depending on the amount of lanolin and how warm it is, it can be much more difficult to draft than washed wool, and the lanolin gets all over your hands and wheel). I started out demonstrating how to spin from the "cloud"--just fluffing up a bunch of alpaca and spinning. I also showed how to comb the alpaca using my mini combs, then spin from roving. Got a lot of spinning done, got in a few plugs for the Craft Center ("learn to spin at the CC!") and even got one lady excited about raising silkworms. Good day.

The sun finally came out towards the end of the day. And I saw firsthand why some of the alpaca I spin is so darn dusty.