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.

Recent adventures

Despite my utter inability to keep up with blogging, interesting things have been happening the past few months. August 1st, two historic houses were moved across downtown Davis to a new site to be made into new co-ops.
The Solar Community Housing Association runs several co-ops and has been working on establishing a new one. Two houses across the street from Davis' Central Park were donated and there was a big turnout to watch them be moved. It was a huge cooperative project, with tree trimmers, PG&E, the railroad and the city all having folks there to facilitate the 7 block journey through the heart of downtown Davis. Mark Chang brought his piano car and played "Our house, in the middle of the street, our house..." as part of a procession of bikes following the house.
The houses will be retrofitted for LEED certification and will rely on a large number of volunteers. Anyone in the area is welcome to come help out, no experience necessary. A bunch of my friends and I helped out at their big September work day. See their website for more details.

Also in August, I finally made it to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. There was so much more than I expected, everything from tiny frogs:

to little brown birds:to catfish:I really liked the giant catfish.The living roof was beautiful, especially at dusk:

The next adventure was camping at Arroyo Seco. We hiked in and set up camp, then went for a swim before settling down for the night. The next day we decided to do a nice little day hike out to Tassajara Hot Springs. It didn't look far on the map. There were beautiful flowers along the trail.

and manzanita

and butterflies

and cool creeksWe went along the Horse Pasture Trail from Marble Peak Trail then took the Tassajara Cutoff Trail. There was evidence of the recent fires.and there were beautiful views

but Horse Pasture and Tassajara Cutoff trails were so overgrown that it was slow going slogging through them. It took us so much longer that we didn't have time to soak at Tassajara before turning around and taking the Tony Trail back. Tony Trail went up up up before going down and was washed out in places on top of having plenty of overgrowth. The burrs loved Aaron's socks.
Since I hadn't checked trail reports before going on this trip, I was completely unprepared in shorts and between brush and burrs and ivy and what not, my legs were in rough shape by the end.

We were very happy to make it out of Ventana Wilderness.
In September we went to the Monterey County Fair:and I was excited to see the Monterey Wool Auction
I was good and didn't bid on anything since I met Sue Reuser and picked up the three cormo/cormo x fleeces I'd bought from her in June. Her fleeces are pricey but well worth it...so gorgeous. Her fleeces took a bunch of top honors in the wool show and if I didn't have my lovelies filling the trunk, I would have been tempted to bid on more.

Doxie:hogget 910:hogget 925:

I also had some time to saw seashells by the sea shore (to inlay the treadles of my spinning wheel):while Aaron had his African drumming practice:

Culinary adventures included a mild fixation on pluots after reading Chip Brantley's book "The Perfect Fruit"

and a new obsession with making risotto:
Shrimp and fresh veggie risotto

Heat up 1/4 cup olive oil in a stock pot.
Add 2/3 c minced onion and 4-5 large cloves minced garlic and cook until aromatic.
Add ~1 cup chopped sundried tomatoes, ~1-2 tb finely chopped rosemary and 1tb finely chopped sage and cook for a few minutes.
Add 1 cup risotto rice and mix with oils, herbs, etc.
Add preheated chicken/veggie stock +/- water in 1/2 cup aliquots, stirring and waiting for liquid to be absorbed completely before adding more. Continue adding liquid until rice is done, still slightly firm in the center.
Add in fresh peas and corn. Cook for a just little bit, then remove from heat and add in 1 cup grated parmesan cheese. Stir to combine. Salt and pepper to taste. Add pre-cooked shrimp and stir until warmed through, then serve. Top with a squirt of lemon juice if desired.