It was Rohini's birthday on Wednesday; to celebrate, we cooked dinner for a few of our friends. Dinner consisted of a summery carrot-tomato soup, a vegetable and goat cheese quiche, and lettuce salad. Dessert was chocolate layer cake with raspberries in the filling.
The recipe for the carrot soup is from The Vegetarian Bistro by Marlena Spieler (A very cook- and confidence- inspiring book). We sautéed sliced carrots (flavourful, from the farmer's market) and an onion (a large sweet Vidalia, also sliced) in a little butter with a few cumin seeds, then added sliced garlic and some white wine (questionable Chardonnay), cooked off some of the wine, added diced tomatoes (juicy and flavorful, also from the farmer's market), vegetable stock (from a carton), water, salt, pepper and thyme (from our herb garden), and cooked until the carrots were tender. Light, fragrant, and so appetizing! We will make this soup again soon.
The recipe for the quiche came from eating similar quiches during our recent trip to France, and resolving to replicate them at home. We filled a partially baked pie shell with pieces of broiled and skinned (sweet) red peppers, sautéed (sweet, slender 'Japanese') eggplant, sautéed zucchini, dollops of goat cheese, slivered basil, and some eggs beaten with sour cream and salt, and baked the filled pie until the filling was cooked and the goat cheese was lightly browned. The vegetables were fresh from the farmer's market that morning, and all tender and flavorful. Broiling the peppers heightened their flavor and sweetness. The olive oily sautéed eggplants were irresistibly snack-on-able. Fine, the zucchini was nice too. There was only just enough egg - sour cream to bind the vegetables together, so the pie crust was brown and crisp.
The salad was red leaf lettuce dressed with good olive oil, champagne vinegar, walnut mustard (Fallot), and a spoonful of homemade mayonnaise.
The cake was beautiful! We carefully followed the recipe for the "Tribute Cake" in Bittersweet by Alice Medrich. Two layers of devil's food cake, each brushed with crème de framboise, sandwiched together with a whipped chocolate (Valrhona Caraïbe) ganache filling and fresh raspberries (from the farmers' market), then glazed with the same chocolate. We tend to find involved layer cakes to be more fun to construct than to eat, and this was no exception, but we did enjoy eating it very much. (So did the guests, and at the end even the serving platter had been scraped clean.) We thought this recipe was a very good showcase for the Caraïbe chocolate, though of course it's hard to beat just eating it neat!
Cumin Scented Carrot and Tomato Soup (adapted a bit from Vegetarian Bistro)
Serves 8 as an appetizer
10 medium-small (or equivalent) carrots, thinly sliced (use good carrots, I probably sliced 1.5-2mm thick)
1 large sweet onion, chopped
2Tbsp butter
1/2Tbsp sugar
1/2tsp cumin seeds
10-12 medium cloves garlic, in thin slices
1/2 bottle (375ml) dry white wine
5 medium tomatoes, diced (use good tomatoes)
2C vegetable stock
3C water
3 or so sprigs of thyme
Salt and pepper to taste
Sauté the carrots and onion in the butter with the sugar and cumin seeds until the vegetables are softened a bit, probably 8-10 minutes. Probably use at least a 4-qt pot for this.
Add the garlic and wine. Cook at medium high heat until the liquid is reduced by about half.
Add in the tomatoes, vegetable stock, water, and thyme. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer until the carrots are tender. Serve hot. (If not serving immediately, stop simmering just before the carrots are tender, remove from heat, and cool. Reheat before serving. This way the carrots will finish cooking while the soup is cooling, and won't get overcooked and mushy.)
Quiche with Goat Cheese, Red Peppers, Eggplant, and Zucchini
Serves 6
1 Really Good Pie Crust (see below)
Red peppers, halved and de-seeded
"Oriental eggplants," diced
Zucchini, diced
Kosher salt
Goat cheese, in dollops
2 eggs
1/3C sour cream
1/4tsp or more salt
A small handful fresh basil
Black pepper
Turn the oven to "Broil" and preheat. Coat the red peppers in (not too much!) olive oil, and place them skinside-up on a foiled baking tray. Broil for 15 minutes or so, checking frequently, until skin is blackened in several spots and the pieces look a little shriveled. Remove from the oven, cool, remove the skin, and then chop into bite-size pieces.
Sauté the eggplants and zucchini in small batches in oilve oil. Sprinkle with a bit of kosher salt at some point.
Mix the eggs and sour cream and salt in a bowl with a fork. Lay the peppers, eggplants, and zucchini down and put goat cheese dollops on top of them, followed by shredded basil. Then spoon the liquid on top. Bake until the tops of the goat cheese dollops are golden and the filling looks fairly solid. Preferably serve cooled.
Really Good Pie Crust (I [Rob] don't know where this recipe comes from, but it's basically classic.)
The most important thing in this recipe is keeping everything cold. Earlier this week I tried to make this crust in our 90˚F kitchen and it was an awful experience, although somehow the crust managed to come out all right. This time around I did it in the air-conditioned living room and it was much more cooperative. If you have really warm hands you may want to wear gloves, although then you'll miss out on the fun of getting butter and flour all over your hands.
I usually move the butter from the fridge to the freezer 10 or so minutes before starting, and also put a measuring cup of water in there.
1.25C flour
1/4tsp salt
1 stick (8 Tbsp) butter, very cold
2-3Tbsp water, ice cold
Mix the flour and salt thoroughly in a large mixing bowl. (Might as well do this with your hands, since they're about to get stuff all over them.) Remove the butter from the freezer and quickly chop it into pieces about 1/2Tbsp apiece. Dump them all in to the flour, unstick them if they're stuck together, and toss them around with your hands to get them all covered in flour, just to minimize contact between your warm hands and the butter. Now mash everything around with your hands, squeezing the butter into smaller floury pieces. (You could use a pastry cutter for this, but what's the fun in that?) Keep doing this, fairly quickly so as not to give the butter time to melt, until most of the butter is pieces no larger than a pea. Now use your fingers to individually divide the larger pieces of butter until they're about pea-sized too. What's left should be mostly a kind of granular flour-butter mixture, with a bunch of lumps. Now you're ready to add the water.
Take the water out of the freezer. Start out with adding about 1 or 1.5 tablespoons of water. Mix around with your hands to incorporate the water. Try to do this quickly, because this is the point where heat from your hands will very quickly transfer through the water to the butter. So you want to incorporate with as little touching as possible. Probably the grains of the mixture will increase in size, but they won't all try to stick together yet. Add a little more water and do this again. Repeat until you can shape it into a ball without having pieces trying to fall off. Wrap the ball in cling wrap and refrigerate for at least half an hour, preferably at least an hour.
After it has chilled enough, roll it out as follows. Place it on a lightly floured counter or board that won't slip. (Again, this should happen in a cool place.) Using a floured rolling pin, roll by pushing from the center of the dough away from you. Rotate the dough 45-90˚ after every (yes, every) stroke. At some points you may have to (lightly!) flour under the dough or reflour the rolling pin. The dough probably won't stay perfectly round, but (though some people would disagree with this) you can always cut and paste bits of dough later. The final thickness should be a little thinner than a pencil. To get the dough onto a pie plate, I usually roll it onto the rolling pin, then roll it out onto the pie plate, with varying degrees of success. Patch the crust with hanging-over bits so there aren't any holes.
At this point, if you want to use the crust for a pie, you can just fill it and stick it in the oven. For this quiche, we want to parbake the crust though. Put the crust in the freezer and give it at least 15 minutes there.
Preheat the oven to 425˚F. Remove the crust from the freezer and put in some pie weights. I use a bunch of rice for this, in two layers of aluminum foil. (That way the top layer of aluminum foil doesn't get butter all over it, and you can just keep the rice in it for future use. I've probably used the same rice for 20 pie crusts now.) Put the crust in the oven for 12 minutes. Take it out, remove the pie weights and aluminum foil, and put back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes. It should start to look crispy, but should not start to brown.
(If you want the crust for a pie or tart with cold filling, you should keep baking until the crust is golden brown, maybe another 10-15 minutes, or longer. Don't forget to let it cool completely before adding cold filling!)
Now the crust is ready for you to put in the filling and bake the rest of the way!
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