How 'bout some ice cream with your chocolate sauce?

Chocolate sauce and ice cream was a favourite dessert growing up. After we finished eating, we often found ourselves looking at each other until someone said: Hmmm, I kinda feel like something sweet. Dad would grin, lick his lips and say in a rather mischevious way: chocolate sauce... Minutes later we were filling our bowls with ice cream and drowning it in dad's homemade sauce. When we sat down someone was guaranteed to look over into their neighbor's bowl and say: Oh! Did you want a little ice cream with your chocolate sauce? And we'd all laugh, because this was hilarious. Dad was always the worst. He'd go for seconds, put one small scoop of ice cream into his bowl and spoon four times as much sauce over the top. The man really loves his chocolate sauce.

So do I! I'd forgotten all about it until I was looking through a cookbook Katherine made me of family recipes. When I saw the recipe, I leaped out of my chair and immediately set to work. I'd been waiting for an opportunity like this or someone else to come along and eat the ice cream I had left over from a couple weekends ago. This sauce takes five minutes to make and tastes gloriously better than the I-don't-know-what-you're-made-of store bought sauce. Once you make this you'll never go back. You'll impress countless guests and suffer through them refusing to leave or banging down your door for more. It's a tough life...


Here's the recipe as Katherine wrote it out. I'll rewrite the directions below in case you have trouble reading them.

- In a saucepan heat 1/3 C water or coffee with 1/2 brown sugar* over moderate heat, whisking until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cocoa powder and salt and whisk until smooth. Add 2 tbs of butter cut into small pieces and vanilla. Whisk until butter is melted.

* I used 1/3 cup for a darker chocolate flavour.

- Keep any leftovers in the fridge and spread on baguettes in the morning for breakfast. Or just eat it with a spoon on the front porch in your barefeet wearing your favourite t-shirt and jeans. I dunno, it's spring!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The blog is 1 year-old today. And I made Tarte Tatin to celebrate. My mom is also visiting, which marks the beginning of the new era: Mom comes to visit. She's already stocked my cupboards, bought me a jade plant, a new little table and a lovely print of two bears holding their arms out to each other with a caption that reads "Donne-moi ta bouche". I like Mom coming to visit.

Writing this blog has been one of the greatest things I've ever done. We've even acquired some faithful readers! I've so enjoyed sharing my culinary adventures with Kelsey and all of you. I know I've only been eating soup lately, but things are changing - spring is almost here!

I first heard about Tarte Tatin from Rock, a man I work with. He was always saying how easy it was and how delicious and how he was going to come to work early one day and make it for us all. He hasn't yet, but since I now know how to make it, I can eat it every day if I want to. And it's so easy! Most recipes I've seen call for store-bought puff pastry; however, in the International Best Recipe by Cooks Illustrated you make your own. And. It. Is. Phenomenal.

Darling Alix came for lunch. I made salmon and quinoa. Mom made a salad. We ate Tarte Tatin.


Tarte Tatin

As adapted from Cooks Illustrated

For the crust:

Cooks Illustrated makes their dough in a food processor. I lack this kitchen tool, so I used a nifty hand pastry blender and the "smear" method (see below).

"Sugar makes pastry dough sticky, crumbly, and generally difficult to handle, and it also tends to fuse the spacers - the little bits of butter that make pastry flaky - leaving the baked crust crunchy, cookie-like, and a little hard." The solution? Confectioners sugar which "simply disappears" in the dough.

1 1/3 C white pastry flour
1/4 C confectioners sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick chilled unsalted butter
1 large egg, chilled and beaten

- Whisk flour, sugar and salt together to eliminate any lumps
- Cut in the butter with a pastry blender until the butter is in pea-sized lumps
- Slowly add the beaten egg, stiring and lifting the dough with a fork until big clumps form
- Dump the dough out onto a well-floured counter or cutting board and gather it into a rough ball. It will be loose and dry at this time.
- Take the heel of your hand and starting at the edge of the ball furthest from you, smear the dough onto the counter, all the while working back towards your body. This helps to combine the butter and the dough together (thank you Julia Child!) Now you can shape it into a disk, wrap it in Seran wrap and chill it while you prepare the apples. (You might need to use a bench scraper to get the dough off the counter).

For the apples:

1 stick unsalted butter
3/4 C granulated sugar
5-6 Granny Smith apples, peeled, quartered and cored.

- Preheat the oven to 375 F and place the rack in the upper third.
- Peel, core and quarter your apples
- Melt the stick of butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet (or any other oven proof skillet you have)
- When it's melted, sprinkle the sugar over top, stir it around and start to lay your apples on their cut side in a ring around the pan. They should fit tightly together. Fill the middle with more apples also lain on their cut side.
- Over high heat, cook the apples for 10-12 minutes. Then using a fork, turn the apples onto their other cut side. They will have cooked down some, making them easy to turn and creating a bit more space in the pan.
- Cook the turned apples for 5 more minutes.
- While you're waiting for the apples to cook, roll out the pastry.
- When the apples are ready, lay the dough on top of the bubbling caramelized apples, folding any excess dough onto itself to form a small crust.
- Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the dough is nice and brown.
- Let it cool for 30 minutes on a rack.
- Place a plate big enough to cover the skillet and holding the plate and skillet firmly, flip the tart onto the plate. The apples should not stick, but if they do, just reposition any loose ones back on the tart.

THE TOPPING!

We had ice cream, but Cooks Illustrated recommends 1 C heavy cream beaten with 1/2 sour cream until light and fluffy. Yes please!

Thanks for reading people. And thanks Kelsey. What pure delicious joy this is to share this space with you.

- jude

Triple Coconut Cream Pie

Tommy Douglas has changed my life. He's changed my sister's life and my parents' lives too. Our knowing he exists, like many culinary related things, is thanks to the Maki family. Without them, I'm not sure my family's legacy of good eats would be so strong. I forget the context, but one wintry evening, John (Kelsey's Dad) pulled out Tommy D's cookbook, The Seattle Kitchen, and gave it to us as a present. Since, we've made countless recipes from the book and bought his other one called Tom's Big Dinners. I can only recall one semi-failure when my Dad made baked trout with apple rings; the trout wasn't very good, so dinner wasn't very good, and Dad was kinda sad. But it really wasn't his fault, plus, success and deliciousness wouldn't be so good if they happened all the time.

Katherine and I have this phenomenal on-going dream where we move to Seattle, live in a tiny over-priced apartment near Pike Street Market looking out onto the harbour. We'd work in one of Tommy D's six restaurants, side by side, getting yelled at by the chef, furiously peeling potatoes, washing dishes with suds up to our ears, and stagger home very late at night, only to get up in the morning, groggily drink copious amounts of thick black Seattle coffee, get some exercise and do it all over again. It'd be amazing and probably very sweaty, dirty and frustrating. At least we'd have each other. Because you see, the other on-going dream is to open a restaurant, and we're going to need some training at some point about what this whole thing is about. We'll get there.

One of the first desserts I remember my sister making many years ago when she was probably 13 or 14, is the Triple Coconut Cream Pie. Her comments next to the recipe in the cookbook read: a bit rich... She wasn't exaggerating. A best-seller twelve years in a row at the restaurant (as of when the cookbook was written in 2001), there's coconut in the crust, in the pastry cream and on the top; not a pie for the weak-minded. After eating Katherine's pie, I rolled out of my chair onto the floor holding my stomach, groaning first of course with pleasure and then from the serious dairy overload. But I survived to tell the tale and ate it again last winter when the Makis and the Murphys went to Lola for an epic feast. (More stomach holding and groaning insued. Oh my phenomenal tendency to over eat!) Then finally, I rubbed my hands together, pulled up my socks, dressed to impress and made the pie. Ros and Ben were coming for dinner, and I wanted to impress. He didn't let me down; Tommy D never fails to impress. And despite the fact that pastry crust mystifies me every time, it turned out quite delicious, producing terrific comments from Ben's side of the table: pas real! oh, this is pas real!


Triple Coconut Cream Pie

As adapted from Tommy Douglas' Seattle Kitchen

I am not going to give you the 411 on Pastry Making. Despite all my reading about the mysterious, necessary procedures, I still don't really know what I'm doing. I have already given one recipe here for Max's mother's recipe, and it's really terrific, almost fool-proof, but since, my dad has modified it and I've lost track of which recipe I'm making. So I followed Tommy D's directions exactly, and well, the crust was fine. I knew it could have been more tender, but I have horrifically high expectations and we can't have everything.

This is definitely a time consuming recipe, so save it for those moments when everything else has gone totally wrong and you need some serious respite from this crazy demanding world, or when some super-excellent friends are going to grace you with their presence and you want to impress the hell out of them, ie., Ros and Ben. Thank you guys for being so incredibly wonderful! So here you go Ros, you can make pastry too, promise.

Coconut Pie Shell

You pre-bake the shell before filling it with the pastry cream.

1 C plus 2 TBS all-purpose flour
1/2 C unsweetened, shredded coconut
1/2 C (1 stick) cold, unsalted butter
2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp kosher salt, or sea salt
1/3 C ice water, or more as needed

- Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl.
- Using a pastry blender, cut in the butter until pea-sized.
- Add the ice water gradually, flicking the dough with a fork so you don't over mix. This dough is on the drier side, so don't add too much water, but you still need to add enough just until it looks like it'll barely hold together (I needed about a TBS more). All this caused me great doubt, and much worrying, but with faith I persevered. Gather the dough into a ball (it will be crumbly), place it onto some Seran Wrap and form it into a disk. Completely cover it and refrigerate for at least an hour. It can be made the night before.

- When you're ready to bake the pie, get out a 9-inch pie dish.
- Roll out the dough on a floured surface, turning the dough clockwise after ever roll so you form an even round disk, until it's about 1/8 inch thick. (If it seems like it's not going to work, just exercise some serious patience and be gentle.)
- Transfer the dough by rolling it around the rolling pin and laying it very gently into the pie dish. Help the dough to reach the bottom by lifting it up at the edges and pressing it into the dish with your fingers. Try not to stretch it.
- Trim the outside edges so you have about an inch hanging over. Tuck the excess dough under itself and crimp the edges.
- Freeze the shell again for one hour. This is supposed to help prevent shrinkage in the oven. I think it helped, but who knows.
- After an hour, preheat the oven to 400 F.
- Place a sheet of aluminum foil inside the shell. Fill it with dried beans and bake the shell for 20-25 minutes.
- Take the pie shell out of the oven, remove the beans and cook for 10 minutes more, or until the bottom begins to brown.
- Let it cool before adding the filling.


The Coconut Pastry Cream

This will need a couple of hours to cool down.

2 C milk
2 C unsweetened coconut
1 vanilla bean, split in half lengthwise
2 large eggs
1/2 C plus 2 TBS sugar
3 TBS all-purpose flour
1/4 (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softned

- Combine the milk and coconut in a medium saucepan.
- Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds from it. Add the seeds and the whole pod to the pot.
- Bring to an ALMOST boil on med-high. STIR FREQUENTLY. Otherwise, your milk is going to burn. Another way to do this is in a double boiler.
- Meanwhile, in another bowl, mix together the eggs, sugar and flour. When the milk is hot enough, add about 1/3 C to the egg mixture to warm them up. You don't want the eggs to curdle when you add them to the milk and coconut mixture.
- Add the warmed egg to the milk and whisk until the pastry cream starts to thicken. It should be hot enough so that when you stop stirring, it will kinda blurp and bubble. But it's very important to stir, otherwise it'll burn. This'll take about 5-7 minutes.
- When it's very thick, take it off the heat, remove the vanilla bean and stir in the butter. Place the pastry cream into a bowl over another bowl of cold water to cool it down. I made it the night before, so I just left it on the counter and stirred it around a couple of times before putting it into the fridge.

NOTE: Before you refrigerate the pastry cream, place some Seran Wrap directly onto the surface. This will prevent a film from forming.

- When the pie shell and the pastry cream have cooled, scrape the pastry cream into the shell, smoothing it out to make an even layer.
- Garnish with whip cream, large-flaked toasted coconut and white chocolate curls. (Recipe for whip cream follows.)

Sweetned Whipped Cream

1 1/2 C whipping cream (35 %)
1 tsp vanilla
1 TBS sugar

- Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks, add the vanilla and the sugar and beat a few more times.

* I always whip cream by hand, and as long as you use a metal bowl and big light strokes, it should take about 5 minutes. However, if you try stirring it, or just swishing the whisk around, it will take forever. So, use a lifting motion and hop to it.

- Put the whipped cream on top of the pastry cream and sprinkle on the large flakes of toasted coconut (you can find this at the grocery store, or if not, at the health food store) and white chocolate curls*.

* These curls can easily be made from a block of white chocolate using a vegetable peeler. I couldn't find a block of chocolate easily, so I bought some curls...I know, next time I'll make them myself.

The pie will keep at least four days in the fridge. I had to send some home with Ros and Ben because I didn't want to eat more than half a pie all by myself. Even though I made it on Wednesday, it was still delicious Saturday night after a meal of chickpea curry, broccoli and sweet potatoes. But I'd say four days is the max amount of time you'd want to keep it.


- murph

Why the West Coast Rules and Why Skimping on Butter is Silly and even Foolish (Part 3)

Blackberry crisp is my favourite dessert. Whether it be after a meal out on the deck with vanilla ice cream in the summer, for breakfast with yogurt in the winter, scooped out of a tiny round Tupperwear container after lunch sitting outside between classes in the fall, or out of the pan when I come home from school, errands, work etc., a berry crisp is a beautiful thing.

However, what crisp is varies for many people. I've tried a couple of different recipes over these past few months, but each time I find myself licking my spoon going hmmmm.....not quite what I expected! What is amiss?


The recipes I've followed or looked at mostly called for more flour than oats, or equal part oats and equal parts flour. I am of the camp that uses more oats than flour. However, the main problem I've been having is that I've been skimping on the butter! What a crime! My crisps were coming out of the oven with these loose floury toppings. Sure, they were good....but we're striving for GREAT over here in Chef Murphy Land. Plus, since crisp is all about the topping (good berries help too, but a mass of boiling berries is jam and if we wanted to eat jars of jam we would), it's very important to find a way to make a topping that suits your fancy best.

When I made a blackberry crisp from 3 different types of local-as-you-can-get blackberries (marion, inch and another kind I forget the name of) down in Oregon I, with confidence, loosely followed a recipe that we often use for crisp; but when I peeked in the oven, to my dismay I saw a sea of floating dry oats: clearly a lack of butter. I knew it! I always do that! I skimp on the butter thinking I'm saving us all, and no no no! Dry oats are terrible no matter how you take them. So I whisked the crisp out of the oven mid-bake (knowing that no harm would come to it) and added dollops of butter all over the top of my little baking beauty. And it was worth it. The end result was a crunchy but not too thick topping loaded with oats, brown sugar and cinnamon, covering gently bubbling sugary blackberries.


Judy's Blackberry Crisp

What's a good crisp? Well, I love a crisp that isn't too sweet and definitely not juicy or runny. Fruit differs in its sweetness, so taste the fruit you're going to use before you sweeten it; in other words, sweeten to taste. I just dump some sugar on, mix it around and see if the fruit is well covered. If it is, I stop dumping. Then, very important, I do the same with instant tapioca. Some people like to use flour to thicken their crisps, but I find that it gives the fruit a gluey colour. If you're using very ripe berries, you'll need more tapioca. I go by the main principle which is to use enough tapioca to cover the fruit, but not thickly, just well dispersed. Then, very important, let this mixture sit for 15 minutes or so while you make the topping. Following these two guidelines have often produced an excellently thick and succulent fruit filling, especially in the old days of living under the apprentice of dad and mum. Now for the topping: I love a crunchy topping laden with oats, a bit of flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and ENOUGH butter. To this you can add lemon/orange zest, nuts, other spices, or whatever your creativity spurs upon you.

The proportions below will be rather rough....but they should be precise enough to give you satisfying results until you find a way that you like best. Maybe you like your fruit sweeter? Maybe you like more flour? Maybe you want nuts in your topping? Maybe you even prefer cobblers....but that's another subject for another day.

- OVEN: 350 degrees F

- Dump enough berries into a 9 X 13 baking dish to cover the bottom and fill the dish half way (probably around 4-6 C)
- Add at least 3/4 C sugar (or less, or more)
- Add at least 2 TBS of instant tapioca (add this, have a look, maybe add a bit more especially if the fruit is super juicy).
- Let this sit for a while (15 min).

- Add at least 2 C of oats into a bowl
- Add 3/4 C flour
- Add 3/4 C brown sugar (maybe more? I'll let you use your better judgement).
- Add 1 TBS cinnamon
- Add at least 1/2 stick of butter - cut in with a pastry blender or your trusty fingers (or use more! No seriously, if after adding this stick of butter you see that there aren't enough little tiny balls to match the ratio of oats, flour and sugar, add another couple TBS - nothing bad will happen, I promise. If all else fails, add some mid-bake).
- Sprinkle this topping over the fruit.
- Bake until bubbling IN THE CENTER at 350 for about.....40-45 minutes.
- Let sit for at least 15 minutes before you eat it so your ice cream doesn't turn the whole thing to a creamy berry soup, unless of course you like this kinda thing, which would be fine, of course.

Also, seeing as life is all about the learning process, if anyone has anything to say about crisp toppings, or a comment on my very LOOSE recipe that I more or less invented from memory, I would be more than delighted to read your words.

Happy Crisping and Stay Tuned For Next Time.

Tried and True Brownies

My fella has taught me two important lessons on brownies:
1) They should always be undercooked
2) They are best with more chocolate than socially acceptable.

Thus, after muddling around with various recipes, box mixes, and chocolate bars, we have arrived at an absolutely stunning result. Be warned - these are not for the faint of heart. They will keep you up at night.

Ingredients:
12 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
pinch salt
2 eggs
1 crushed, dark chocolate bar (flavors are good, and go fair trade people)


Method:
Melt the butter over the stove. Remove from stove and stir in all cocoa powder until smooth. Add brown and white sugar, stir until smooth. Add flour, mixing in with as few strokes as possible (the more you stir the tougher your brownies will be). Finally, incorporate each egg thoroughly and separately. Batter should be shiny and sticky. If you think it is too dense you can add a little bit of hot water. Stir in the chocolate bar pieces.

Line a glass 9x9 pan with tin foil, and grease as you see fit. Pour in brownie mixture and shake pan back and forth to flatten. Place in a preheated 325 degree oven. Cook until a fork inserted into the center comes out with a bit of brownie goo still attached (not covered in brownie goo, but there should still be some clinging to the fork). Cool on counter. Slice, enjoy.

We absolutely splurge on these if we add the chocolate bar - but they are just as decadent without. The real question is whether one can afford the two eggs and butter (especially when these disappear so quick!) But hey, in tough times, sometimes you just gotta treat yourself.