Raspberry Tart: The Process

Grated Butter for Crust

Pureed Raspberries and Sugar ready to boil

Chocolate Tart dough made by grating frozen butter and hand kneading. Kept in the fridge for a half an hour or so, and ready to bake.

The baked shell, sides cleaned up with a pizza cutter, filled with the raspberry filling that has been spiked with gelatin!

Making ganache...

Ganache made....

Once the gelee is cooled, pour the ganache on top.

Currently setting in the fridge is a raspberry gelee/chocolate ganache tart: a spin-off of my much coveted Red Currant tart by Palachinka. The only condition: I'm using a removable-bottomed cheesecake pan instead of a traditional tart tin, but so far this has proved to only be a minor disability. The final result will reveal itself tomorrow...

-R

Ode to a beet

Beet porn!


Simple sautee with beets, zucchini, green onions, and beet greens.

Wee beets! From Gloucester charming road-stand

Contrary to some kid complex, that same one that abhors spinach and other leafy healthy things, beets are the best thing ever. Contrary to popular belief, bears do NOT beat beets.

1. They are a beautiful magenta, joyfully staining your hands and everything else they touch
2. They are sweet and earthy and perfect in texture
3. They have greens good as chard

Some wonderful ways to prepare beets:

I definitely would cook them, either boil or wrap in aluminum foil and bake around 400 for 25 minutes, or until soft (for both methods). Then, peel off the skin and make a nice warm beet salad with goat cheese, nuts, and grapefruit or chill and make a lovely cold salad, or sautee with more fresh vegetables, the greens, and vinegar, or just be impatient and make your hands and face purple with delight!

The moral: go buy some beets and be well!

Some incentive:

"Remember all those legendary Russian centenarians? Beets, frequently consumed either pickled or in borscht, the traditional Russian soup, may be one reason behind their long and healthy lives. These colorful root vegetables contain powerful nutrient compounds that help protect against heart disease, birth defects and certain cancers, especially colon cancer."

Read more about how awesome they are.

S.

One Week Home

I am always really really excited to go home. For many reasons. First of all, I love the house I grew up in, especially in the summer time. There is a hammock and a frog pond and flowers and vegetables and a big front yard. And there's the kitchen. We have a really nice kitchen that my dad basically re-did himself. I won't pretend that a big reason why I'm excited to go home is not so I can use that kitchen.

Here is my list of to-makes while I'm home. I'm putting it down so hopefully I will hold myself to them, although I don't think it will be that difficult to motivate me to craft goodies with the nice equipment and money allotment my parents can provide.


1. Red Currant and Chocolate Tart
2. Soft Pretzels
3. Bulgogi
4. Fish Tacos
5. Grilled Pizza

And hopefully I can get my hands on my parents' nice camera :)

-R

Pickles.

Aye comrades, it is true, that our cameras suck mostly but still we make things! Well now that it's August...there STILL no excuse for not canning. There's a lot of quite delicious fruits and veggies.

Take cucumbers for example. They taste good...when pickled! It's quite easy: boil water, white vinegar, and salt. Pour into jars with dill weed, garlic, peppercorns, and cucumbers. Process with enough boiling time so you don't get botulism later. DONE. Come October or November you can whip these babies out of hiding.

S.

More Inspiration

I think it's always good to keep looking out for what the pros are doing. In this case, the food-blogger pros may be just like us, but with better cameras. All it takes to successfully food blog is the promise that you'll actually MAKE something and the hope that whatever you make can be photographed properly. Now I won't speak for Suzanne officially, but I think she'd agree that our photographic capabilities and resources are minimal. Because of this, I must vicariously live through some other's photographic renderings of food experimentation. And I think all of you who view PERPETUAL HUNGER! deserve a little eye candy every once in awhile, at least until we get all fancy cameras n' stuff.

Here are the corresponding websites to the pictures:

Rainbow Sponge Cake

Heirloom Tomato Tart

Zucchini and Goat Cheese Pizza

Adorable Cupcakes

-R

Chocolate "Sherbet"

(No, not mine. But it looked a lot like that, really!!!!)

Dairy's been kicking my ass lately, so I thought I'd do a little experimentation based quite loosely on David Lebovitz' Chocolate Sherbet recipe. Sherbet, as opposed to Sorbet, contains milk. In this case, Soy Milk.

So I took 2 Cups of Soy Milk, 3/4 Cup of Cocoa Powder, one chopped banana, a bunch of tablespoons of thick apple butter, and a healthy couple of twirls around the pot of honey into a sauce pan. I brought it all to a boil and whisked it together. Somehow it came together nicely, and after boiling, I pureed it in my blender and set it to cool. Is it possible that this dessert could be good for you AND actually work?

Somehow, it cooled into a just slightly sweet chocolate pudding?!?!? How this happened, I do not know. It is in the freezer now, and all we can do is wait and see....

UPDATE: SUCCESS. Using Mr. Lebovitz's making-ice-cream-without-a-maker tutorial, I successfully crafted a perfectly smooth decadent fudgy non-dairy (low-fat if you dig that too!)dessert! (Sorry for lack of photographs). I think the apple butter/banana additions assisted this achievement. How the custard came out so thick and pudding like will forever befuddle me, but it worked.

-R

One Stop Dinner: Murray's Cheese

Title not entirely true... we bought produce elsewhere.

And although you'd think that since Murray's (http://www.murrayscheese.com/) is quite famed/tourist destination, the prices would be off the wall, the opposite is true.

FRESH Pasta: Enough for three people or two really fucking hungry people. $3.00.

Fresh Ricotta: A very generous container full of the best ricotta I've had. $3.00.

A Chunk of Prosucitto: That's right. A Chunk. No, not slices. $3.50.

All grand quality.

Grab a zucchini and a lemon or two from the market and you're pretty set to go assuming you have olive oil and garlic. Cook the pasta for about 8 minutes in salted water. Meanwhile, heat up some oil and cook pretty shaved zucchini slices and garlic. Throw in the chunks of proscuitto that you've rendered from the big chunk at the end. Take this all off the heat, throw it in a bowl and squeeze in some lemon juice. When the pasta's ready add it to the bowl and toss. Spoon in globs of fresh ricotta.

This is nice because the shaved zucchini twirls up in your fork with the pasta :) I still have leftover ricotta and prosciutto, too, and had leftover pasta this morning.

Eat.

-R