Hey Devon,

Last year around this time I half put together this recipe for chouxettes... then time went by and it was past blueberry season, and I decided to hold off. This recipe is meant for this time of year, when you can get fresh, inexpensive blueberries. It’s pretty festive too, if you are into 4th of July themed foods.

My great grandmother made this recipe, in fact it is written in her very old copy of the Joy Of Cooking. She lived to be 101, and made this well into her 90s. Coincidentally her sister passed away this week at 101 also. Now my mom mainly carries on the tradition of blueberry buckle, I’d say we have it at least 4 times a summer. She makes it for parties, out of town visitors... birthday breakfasts (with a more traditional birthday cake later on).

For me, blueberry buckle tastes like summer, and must be eaten on a napkin, while standing up, in the kitchen of the beach house, trying to avoid crumbs going all over (its inevitable, and probably shouldn’t be eaten that way). The thing is, you have to eat standing up so that when you are done you can cut another oddly-shaped piece to disguise how much of the cake you are taking. It is typically gone within a couple hours, though in our defense there are a lot of people there, waiting to pounce on it.

You can double the recipe and make it in a 9”x13”, as pictured here.

Blueberry Buckle

Mix thoroughly:

¾ Cup Sugar
¼ Cup Soft Butter
1 Egg

Stir in:

½ C Milk

Sift together and stir in:

2 Cup Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
½ tsp Salt

Carefully blend in

2 Cups (well drained) Blueberries
(can sub in frozen in off season, just defrost and drain, though they will bleed more into the batter)

To make crumb topping, mash together with a fork until course crumbs are formed:

½ Cup Sugar
⅓ Cup Flour
½ tsp Cinnamon (I’d double that)
¼ Cup Soft Butter

Spread batter into a buttered and floured 9” square pan. Sprinkle with topping.

Bake at 375 Degrees for 40-45 minutes (I think around an hour if you double it). Cake is done when it feels solid and no batter sticks to a tooth pick, crumbs and blueberry mush are to be expected.

That’s Bea’s handwriting (my great-grandmother and middle-namesake).

Hope to see you soon,

Amanda

Chocolate and Sea Salt Tostadas

Dear Devon,

Short post today. I am leaving in a few hours for a weekend adventure to Valencia with a carload of friends. Packing is still on the “to do” list, as is lunch, both eating and making. But I wanted to tempt you with something to think over or possibly try this weekend.

My last half dozen posts have featured one ingredient: chocolate. I don’t confess to be a full-blown chocolate fiend (not yet that is), but I do have a completely new appreciation for it. The Spaniards love their chocolate dark, bitter, and pure. Here, chocolate is made from only three ingredients: cacao, sugar, and vanilla. No chemicals, no additives, no extra flavorings, just three ingredients, and it definitely shows in both the flavor and its shiny surface. The chocolate is richer, smoother, not overly sweetened and without that gross waxy texture that I’ve known all my life.

For the past few months, I have regularly stopped in at some of the best chocolate shops in the city. I am slowly befriending the staff and gleaning ideas for desserts and savories. Some of these shops have been in business for over 100 years, using the same techniques, recipes, and even grinder, delighting generations of Barcelonans. I can’t brag to have tried the entire stable of truffles or bonbons at any one place. Let’s just say, I have a completely new respect for chocolate and Hershey’s ranks below crayola.

My inspiration for this recipe is a bit hazy. I’ve seen variations of this flavor combination on menus, chocolate bars, and even in the NY Times. All I know is that it’s delicious, especially when you use the finest chocolate, bright sea salt and pungent olive oil. Since there are only four ingredients (bread counts too), you really need to invest in the best products. Set aside the table salt and crayons for another dish, real fleur de sel and good chocolate will make all the difference.

Chocolate and Sea Salt Tostadas
(makes 12)

1 baguette, sliced
large chunk of good dark chocolate (71% is best)
1 generous pinch of sea salt
3 tbsp olive oil

Arrange sliced baguette on a cutting board. Grate chocolate over the slices. A vegetable peeler works well, cutting the chocolate into long swirling strips. Sprinkle with a good pinch of sea salt and olive oil.

These are best eaten right away. Serve as an afternoon snack or a light dessert.

Our M. Wells Diner Dinner

Dear Michelle, 

You must come back IMMEDIATELY. I have had one of the top ten meals of my life. 

I have many things to tell you about: Thomas Keller’s split pea soup, my time at home, naan cooked on the grill, rose infused vinegar, but this trumps all of them. Jeff heard about this place a while ago, a little diner car restaurant called M. Wells in Queens run by two transplants from Montreal, and decided to take me there for our first anniversary. 

I was fairly excited, having read good things about escargot, bone marrow, calves brains, you know, the things I tend to get curious about. We took the G train up into Long Island City, and walked a short way to the diner.  

The sun was setting, the night was mild and pleasant, and my hunger suddenly piqued to the point where I start getting a little weird. We entered the unassuming little diner car to an enclave of clatter and chatter, full of happy faces and promising smells. We wanted to try several things, and our waiter recommended five to six small dishes, so we hemmed and hawed and finally chose those that most intrigued us. 

The escargot with bone marrow was one of the dishes I’d read about and had really wanted to try, and immediately when it arrived I popped a piping hot snail covered in fat, parsley and bread crumbs in my mouth. I was lucky I didn’t burn myself! After that first hot but satisfying bite, I tried the cold dish that Jeff had wanted to order, Porchetta Sierra, while the escargot cooled a bit. 

I had not been all that excited about this dish; it was described as thinly sliced pork with a mackerel mayo and fried caper berries. Roast pork isn’t my favorite, but I was interested enough by the idea of it with fish mayonnaise. This ended up being my favorite dish, so elegant in its simplicity. The very juicy, thinly sliced roast pork had plenty of melty, not chewy, fatty bits. It was laid out in a circle on a plate, and the inner part of that circle was spread with a greyish mayo, and sprinkled all over were fried capers. 

This mayonnaise was the perfect amount of salty and umami for the pork, and the fried capers added a pop of much needed color and crunch. I don’t even like capers, which usually taste like mildew to me, but fried they are delicious! Jeff didn’t like it as much because mayonnaise weirds him out, but he did like his first ever taste of escargot, which was delicious, perfectly cooked. I was disappointed, and this was my only disappointment, that the marrow was liquid. I don’t know if this was by design or not, but I’d have liked spreadable marrow for the crunchy little toasts on the side instead of molten marrow that needed to be soaked up from the plate. 

Next out was caesar salad, Grouper cordon blue, and smoked chicken legs with fries. I don’t remember in what order we ate, but I am sure the level of gluttony we reached might have been just short of a deadly sin. The salad, Jeff’s idea as a light addition to the meal, was just that. It was a beautiful pile of green with a few golden croutons, all covered with a generous feathery fluff of fine, long bits of grated cheese. The dressing was made with smoked herring instead of anchovies, a nice touch. 

The Grouper cordon blue was good, although I was starting to recognize the physical limits of my stomach at this point. The fish was fried, with a crispy thin crust (I’m guessing cornmeal), combined with mortadella, pickled ramps (YUM), and a sour cream dressing on a thin toasted sourdough roll. That sauce was so good that even after I was uncomfortably stuffed, I was eating the leftover roll with the dressing soaked in. 

The most impressive dish of the night was the smoked chicken legs with fries. You see that description, and you think of a plate of drumsticks on fries, maybe with some sort of sauce, right? I did. What we got was a giant platter with a WHOLE CHICKEN LEG, thigh to claws, on top of biscuits and thin crunchy fries, all dripping with the best barbeque sauce ever. I say bbq sauce, but it was more like a cross between that and gravy (and it would have made an excellent poutine), thick and glossy and sweet and smoky and spicy. When I try to replicate this, I will make a white roux, then add chicken stock, tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, cayenne, paprika, and brown sugar. We each ate enough of the leg to taste it, as it was the most likely to be good reheated. That will be our dinner tonight, and the bones will go in with a ham hock and bacon to some baked beans I’ll make later in the week. You can bet I’ll try to make them taste like that sauce. 

When our waiter came by to ask about dessert (sigh), I told him this was the best meal I’d had all year, that it was exemplary. He returned with a bottle of maple syrup liquor (delicious!), and did a shot with us. It was a truly memorable evening, and we MUST go back when you return!

Frozen Chocolate Truffles

Dear Devon,

In an effort to get a bit more language practice, I registered for a cooking class at my local civic center. Unfortunately, there are no molecular gastronomy courses, but at 50 Euros a semester, I was hardly going to register a complaint. I put my money down for a chocolate themed dessert class. I had hoped that I’d learn to make liquor-filled bonbons but the class was more focused on baked goods than confections. In practice and theory, I knew how to make most of the recipes. In hindsight, it was for the better. My language skills are steadily improving but my comprehension greatly depended on my prior baking experience.

The partial meltdowns of my anxious teacher could fill an entire volume. In many ways, the course was particularly cruel to her. The kitchen is hardly equipped for teaching let alone actually baking. There was the constant threat of equipment malfunction (fridge or microwave), lack of basic materials like bowls, whisks or scale, and then there was the portly student from whose mouth issued a constant and unrelenting stream of advice, stories, loosely-linked words, and general nonsense. In six weeks, I know more details about her life than yours.

Given these setbacks, the class altered my perceptions of what is actually possible in the kitchen. The obvious lack of materials and occasional mistake didn’t stop us from making some really fantastic desserts. Sure, it had the distinct look of homemade and yes, at times, there was the failed, trash bound cake or cookies. She proved to me that it was possible to make and not just purchase macaroons. Truffles are delightfully easy to make and can even serve as the base for an amazingly decadent, dark chocolate cake.


I have been mulling over the recipes and the class for a few weeks, trying to decide where or if to begin experimenting. I admit, when looking over the packet of recipes, I am largely uninspired but then again, it usually isn’t the recipe that inspires me to start cooking, it’s the market.

There’s a wonderful stand at La Boqueria that specializes in foods of the forest. In the fall, the stand overflows with morels, truffles, wild mushrooms, and strange looking roots. Summer’s bounty includes zucchini blossoms, white asparagus, and wild strawberries. These berries are wonderful. They are about the size of my fingernail but intensely sweet and amazingly fragrant. One tiny berry is tastier than an entire giant American strawberry. I eat them like candy. Encasing them in chocolate truffle seemed the next logical step.


Frozen Chocolate Truffles
(makes 36)

100 grams of butter
50 grams of sugar (confectioner’s is best, but granulated will do)
100 grams of chocolate (70 % cacao)
1 egg yolk
1 tsp hazelnut oil (optional)
1 tsp espresso
24 frozen wild strawberries
¼ cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup coconut (optional)

Wash and gently dry wild strawberries. Place berries without touching one another on a small tray and freeze. Leave overnight.

Gently melt butter over a pot of simmering water. Remove melted butter from the heat and whisk in sugar and egg yolk. In a separate bowl, melt the chocolate with hazelnut oil and water. Add the butter mixture to the melted chocolate and thoroughly mix. Cool in the fridge until firm to the touch, roughly 2 hours.

When the chocolate mixture is set and the berries have frozen, begin forming the truffles. Using two spoons, scoop a bit of the ganache into each spoon. Center one frozen berry in one of the two spoons and cover the berry with the ganache from the second spoon. Work the spoons around each other, to form a small ball. It is similar to forming quenelles.

In a small bowl, sift in cocoa powder. Roll the freshly formed truffle in cocoa powder. I had some extra truffles so I rolled them in coconut. Set the finished truffle on a platter and continue with the remaining berries. Freeze the entire tray of truffles until set, roughly 2 hours.

Store in the freezer in a plastic container.

Note: Be sure to work quickly. The truffle mix will begin to soften if left out too long and will make forming the truffles difficult. If this happens, pop the bowl back into the fridge for a bit until the mixture hardens again.