The Cake!

And here is the cake in its full glory. First a closeup on the "experimental" placing of a square on top of a circle (two circles = three layers total), and my "hipster messy hair" approach to spreading the buttercream.

Then a cross-section:



Here you can see the layers - white cake brushed with lavender syrup, layered with lemon-chocolate ganache and lemon curd, and topped with lemon buttercream and lavender meringues. The lavender flavour didn't come through that well, but the cake is pretty tasty - even now, a week and a half later.

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 7: Failure!!!

It had to happen sometime. And actually, as failures go, this was fairly unsuccessful, in that it wasn't all that bad. For one thing, I made the failed noodles the same day that I pulled a 16-hour kitchen marathon, so that I was too tired to care whether they tasted good or not, I was just happy to stop making food. And for another reason, they didn't qualify as a kitchen disaster. Disasters, like my attempts to make dosas and injera, have to make a horrible mess that takes hours to clean up, or at least ruins some piece of kitchen equipment. Or at a minimum, they have to use up ingredients too costly to replace. All that happened here was, I made the noodles, and they didn't taste good. Moving on!

The noodle in question was the Hand-Rolled Rice Noodle, and I actually really enjoyed making them. I kneaded together the dough of rice flour, salt and water, before starting the cake layers for my mother's fancy birthday cake. The blob of dough sat resting while I worked my pastry wiles, then I did the shaping and cooking all in the time that the egg whites and sugar syrup for the buttercream were being combined and cooled in the stand mixer. So, another quick and easy recipe.

They were fun to shape, too. With slightly oiled hands, I pinched off pieces of dough, rolled them between my hands into a ball, and then into a tapered cylinder, fat at the centre in the space between my palms and thinner, pointed at the edges. This technique also felt pleasantly intuitive, except that despite repeatedly re-oiling my hands, the dough kept unpleasantly sticking, and didn't seem to be of the right texture. Sure enough, when it came to the boil, I just couldn't cook them to a pleasant texture. It's possible I missed the crucial window, but I think they segued gracelessly from undercooked to overcooked and mushy, with nothing of the spring and bite you'd expect from a rice noodle.

I had made a quick salsa to go with them, Market Stall Fresh Tomato Salsa also from Beyond the Great Wall, which was flavoured with sesame oil and chives and was really delicious. So I mixed my mushy sad little blobs of noodle with the salsa in a bowl and tried to eat them. The flavour wasn't bad, but I had this unpleasant insecurity about whether or not I was eating raw rice somehow, so I eventually gave up. After sampling syrup, curd, ganache, cake batter, buttercream, and meringues all day, it's not like there was much room left for real food anyway.

I have two theories about the failure. One is that right from the get-go I knew the dough was too wet. The instructions explain that it will be stiff and hard to work and mine wasn't - maybe I put too much water in, and if I'd kneaded in more flour as I thought of doing initially, it might all have been ok. The other problem is that I was using schmancy organic brown rice flour from the US rather than standard white rice flour. The former was probably long or medium grain instead of a stickier shorter grain Asian rice, so maybe it was just not great for the recipe. I've now acquired some plain rice flour and I'll be sure to try again...

Cake experiment

I can't believe how much I cooked last Saturday. The most complicated thing was inventing a new cake for my mother's birthday. It's shown here in an intermediate stage on Saturday night, about 14 hours after I started cooking that morning.

So far, it's a basic white cake from Joy of Cooking, brushed with a lavender syrup I made from the herbs in our garden. The cake layers are brushed with lemon-chocolate ganache and lemon curd, about to be popped into the fridge to let them set a bit before receiving their final coating of lemon buttercream.

The innovation (besides putting a square cake layer on top of two round ones, a decorating choice that was more original than successful but ah well) was mostly in the lavender syrup, since otherwise I just modified existing recipes (replacing orange with lemon). Unfortunately the lavender flavour didn't come through enough. Even though I felt like I'd saturated the cake layers thoroughly, there was room for more moisture there and that would have helped - plus it's too early and cold for there to be lavender blossoms so I just had to use the leaves which yielded a less intense flavour. What I really needed to do was make a lavender buttercream, but after all those hours in the kitchen (and with 3lbs of butter at stake) I wasn't prepared to do it without a recipe...next time.

Brunch date: Birthday feast à deux

Last Saturday was Maman's birthday and as it's also her wedding anniversary, we decided to have a special brunch together rather than dinner. I wanted to make it a multicourse feast nonetheless.

The first course consisted of scrambled eggs with fresh cheese, tomatoes, and mint, served with sauteed rainbow swiss chard, and a dollop of the tomato-ginger chutney leftover from the dumpling experiment.

But the real treat was the pain viennois, which I had started at quarter to eight that morning and which baked to a golden sheen just in time for us to eat at 11:30. We had it with fresh rhubarb compote, and a foretaste of the cake to come later that weekend: lemon-chocolate ganache. The bread, while pretty and tasty, was not all I hoped it would be - I think I'll have to go all the way and make brioche next time. But the accompaniments were fabulous - the compote very tart, a soft rich pink that melted into the rich bread. And the ganache was probably the best one I have ever made, so exquisitely bitter with lemon zest that you nearly forgot it was sweet until the chocolate melted on your tongue like honey.

It was a cold grey day, but the table was brightened with vast dark red peonies, and we sat with our coffees dipping baguette points into the little pots and chatting the morning away. Happy birthday Maman!

Pseudo-Russian soirée

We may have been drinking champagne, not vodka, and it may not have been beluga, but we enjoyed our blinis and caviar just as riotously as we could.

Macarons

I still haven't fulfilled my plan to make my own, but these beautiful macarons (from Meinhardt's) deserved a photo of their own, in all their crisp, glossy loveliness. Part of the celebration of my middle sister's graduation from King's College in Nova Scotia, BA (Hons).

Stages of another levain experiment

First ferment: Here the reserved dough from the previous week's baking has just been taken out of the fridge, to come to room temperature and be combined with water and some more flour (refreshed), and left to reactivate overnight.

Second ferment: The morning after. My little buckwheat poolish (batter of flour, water, and leavening agent left to sit at least 12 hours, in order to develop the flavour and texture of the once and future bread) is ready to be turned into dough.

After only a few hours, the dough has risen to fill the bowl and push insistently at the plastic wrap covering. If anything, it's a bit overrisen here - when I pull back the wrap, the dough collapses into long strings of gluten pictured a few days ago on the blog.

Baking a flatbread. This small piece of dough was rolled out, brushed with olive oil and left to rise a short time, before being bedecked with fresh rosemary and queso fresco and popped into the brick oven. I would have been better off crumbling the queso as it didn't melt like I expected it to (the oven temperature was pretty uneven for this baking).

On the plus side, I didn't burn any loaves! Close up of the post-baking texture.

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 6: Dumplings!!!

These were amazing. Fun, easy, they came together without a hitch, and most importantly they were delicious. Avanti!

I wanted to make something different, but to begin with they were the same - same as last week that is, since I decided to use the Kazakh noodle dough that I had made the stretched noodles of the previous week. Once the batch was made and resting, I turned to the question of fillings.

The recipe I was working from, Savoury Boiled Dumplings (jiao zi), from Beyond the Great Wall, gave two fillings, both with pork in them. I decided to make two different fillings as well, but vegetarian of course (actually, I put some fish sauce in them, so not really veggie, but oh well). A rummage through the vegetable drawers ended up in a densely flavoured stirfry of onion, garlic, carrot and shiitake. I reserved a bit of this and used it as a flavour base for my second filling, otherwise composed of yu choy and tofu. I made these up as I went along based on memories of my Viet cooking mentor's dumplings, and happily they turned out well, except that in my slapdash cooking ways I didn't bother to press the water out of the tofu before I combined the ingredients. It worked out ok as I was able to just take from the drier bits at the top when assembling, but straining it would have been better as too much liquid in the fillings makes the dumpling wrapper fall apart.

Since the fillings were so easy I also had time to make a tomato-ginger chutney whilst the dough reposed - a Tibetan recipe from the same cookbook. It was tart, gingery, intense, and redoubled my enthusiasm for expanding my sauce repertoire. Mmm.

It was time to shape! After putting on a pot of water to come to the boil, I divided the dough in 8 pieces, and then each piece in 8 again, for 64 dumplings. It was so quick and pleasant putting them together that I could easily imagine a marathon dumpling-making session, especially sitting with a couple of friends chatting and drinking tea. If the idea appeals, just let me know...

There was no need for a rolling pin - I tried patting and stretching the dough and both worked. It stretches easily, but much more so in one direction, as cutting it severs the gluten strands that give it elasticity. So patting it out allows you to shape the piece more regularly, but stretching is faster. The results were about the same in the end - a piece more rectangular than round, but easy enough to fold into a half-moon shape, with dappled pinched edges.

The dumpling wrappers were much thicker than the commercial ones I'd used before, but they were actually easier to work with - they sealed better, didn't stick to the surface as long as I kept it floured and worked swiftly. Even my liquidy filling problems were solved by patting in a bit of extra flour to persuade the dough that it didn't want to give into structural anarchy. It wasn't long until I had shapely little rows lined up for the boiling.

I had been a bit apprehensive about the cooking, since I know dumplings are prone to falling apart, and the recipe called for boiling, not steaming. But I prefer to follow directions at least the first time through, so I tossed the first 8 into the salted rolling waters and hoped for the best. And - perfection! None of them collapsed, and though the cooking times, dumpling sizes, and dough thickness, were all slightly uneven, each dumpling had chewy bite without being either hard or soggy. They were seriously good. My only cooking complaint is that I hadn't fully precooked the yu choy, and I think it would have been better that way - the fillings were heated through, but they're not cooked for long enough to work any chemistry on the innards.

I decided to only cook half, freezing the other 32 (my nefarious plans for them include dumpling noodle soup, something I love but can never find vegetarian versions of in restaurants). Soon they were in two bowls, divided by filling type, and I was calling my mother up for a taste test.

I had put out three dipping sauces to accompany them - the tomato-ginger chutney, and then two simple traditional accompaniments. One was just soy sauce and sesame oil; the other was just fish sauce with sliced thai bird chiles. We dipped and sampled all six combinations, and then just kept eating. The verdict was unanimous - the shiitake-carrot filling was the tastiest, having much stronger flavour, but the tofu-yu choy went better with the intense taste of the chutney. The chutney was probably the overall winner, as everyone who passed through the kitchen that day found excuses to help themselves to spoonfuls of it on its own. I think my favourite pairing was the fish sauce-chile one, though. It's funny to remember my initial reservations about fermented fish condiments as contrasted to my love for them now. They add so much more than a salty flavour, especially when paired with chile.

I was amazed by the texture of the dumpling wrapper. Even though it had just been boiled for a minute, it was much more like a steamed bread, very light. In the photo if you look closely you can see little air bubbles in the dough, especially at the pleated top. Thickness didn't at all equate to heaviness.

These were so much fun to make, and not that much work, especially if you had a leftover sauce or stirfry you could recycle as a filling. Most importantly they were also a lot of fun to eat. They were out on the table with their sauces and before I knew it they were all gone. I found an interesting recipe for tapioca dough dumplings, so that might be my next dumpling foray. Miam!

Textures: Inside a flatbread

And some of the baked result of the levain...

(baked in the brick oven, quite successfully)

Textures: A second week in levain

Look at the strands of gluten in this buckwheat dough! Week 2 of my levain experiment, which sadly only made it to week 3 before I forgot to reserve some dough to keep it going. Never fear, I've already started a second batch...

Brunch date: Fiddlehead Frittata

I love brunch. I love going out for brunch (preferably on weekdays; ah for my beloved Plateau lifestyle); and I love making it at home. For years and years I have kept going on about how I want to have regular brunch parties, since the food is so tasty and it's such a cosy relaxed meal to share with people. But in practice, life is busy and it never gets around to happening.

So, I've decided to take action by inaugurating the Stealth Brunch Party. For the last three weeks, I've made something fancy and/or exciting for brunch on Saturday mornings. It started with Mother's Day, continued when fiddleheads (my preferred augur of spring!) showed up at Granville Island market (albeit for a hairraising $10/lb), and then Maman's birthday was a further excuse. Sure enough, whether we all sat down together or people just helped themselves as they passed through the kitchen, everyone in the house eventually partook. I figure if I'm consistent enough, my brunch parties will become a reality.

So now you know - if you're in Vancouver of a Saturday, drop on by. Otherwise you can feast visually, as I plan to post photos on the blog. The idea is that the tradition marks some intersection of the practical (using up leftovers, in the way that cooked salmon from the previous night's dinner wound up in this dish) and the creative (not just brunch but original brunch is what we strive for!). We'll see how it goes, but so far, it goes tastily.

For May 24th, no te veo

No te veo. Bien sé
que estás aquí, detrás
de una frágil pared
de ladrillos y cal, bien al alcance
de mi voz, si llamara.
Pero no llamaré.
Te llamaré mañana,
cuando, al no verte ya
me imagine que sigues
aquí cerca, a mi lado,
y que basta hoy la voz
que ayer no quise dar.
Mañana... cuando estés
allá detrás de una
frágil pared de vientos,
de cielos y de años.

poema de Pedro Salinas

Breadmaking update: Brick ovens, kabocha, and very unscientific levain!

It might be the fact that I have absolutely no breadmaking agenda these days, but for whatever reason I have been baking pretty much nonstop. So much that I forgot to write down whatever I did to produce the rather awesome experimental espresso-spelt bread, though hopefully I'll be able to more or less reproduce it. Yesterday I actually had a reason to bake though - we were firing up the brick oven again, and wanted to have some loaves to show for it.

I stirred together a regular spelt poolish the night before, and planned to put the leftover roasted squash from that morning's waffles to use in it in some way. It was only Sunday morning that I remember the little lump of dough languishing in the fridge hoping to become my first attempt at the levain method someday. So I decided to go for two separate doughs, figuring that the levain might be a total failure, but even if it succeeded, the 14 people attending that night's dinner would probably be able to keep up with the eating.

Of course, I only thought about the levain when I got home from yoga at about 12:30. After a quick perusal of our cookbooks and some online sources, it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to be able even to approach orthodox levain methods since at the very latest I should have started to reactivate it the night before. Instead, I just decided to take what I vaguely remembered having read about levain some years before, and just run with it. What could happen?

It wouldn't have been your purist's levain in the best of timings. Levain is a wild-yeast method akin to sourdough. The classic French countryside technique, it involves keeping back some of the preceding week's batch of dough to start the next. Originally it would of course have been kept at room temperature, there not being any other temperature. All that fermentation gives you plenty to work with, keeps the wild yeasts alive in your kitchen. What appeals to me about levain over sourdough is that you don't have to keep refreshing the starter in a way that has always seemed rather wasteful to me (I should state upfront that I have never made proper sourdough yet, though I will get around to it eventually). Instead, you just take your preserved lump of dough, now incredibly stringy with gluten and very wet from all the reactions that have gone on during its resting time, and combine it fully into the new dough. Then before baking, you keep back a new piece, child of the current batch, for use next week.

That much I remember from my prior reading. Anyhow, now I was faced with a cold, stringy little lump of dough, which itself had been started with yeast, albeit slow-started with only a 1/4 teaspoon and left to itself to develop into a fully-raised dough. Nothing purist here, but in for a penny. I decided to help myself out a little, and make this dough in the same bowl I'd had the poolish for the squash dough in, so that the levain could get a little boost from the recent yeast activity still clinging to the sides of the unwashed bowl. I poured in a little water, and started to break up the levain in it with my fingers.

I had to start giggling for a bit, as it seemed like rather than levain, I was ending up with something else I had read about but never made - seitan (wheat gluten, the stuff Asian fake meat is often made of). You make it by developing strands of gluten and gradually washing the starch out of it till you're just left with pure strands of gluten. And that's what I had - stretchy strings of gluten that wouldn't dissolve but kept recoalescing in the water under my fingers. At least they were resilient!

After awhile it seemed I'd done all I could do, so I started stirring all purpose flour into the bowl, and made a little sponge that I left to activate for a bit, just to see whether anything was really going to happen at all in the midst of all this unorthodoxy.

While it was resting I made the dough for the squash bread. I mashed roasted kabocha squash into some yogourt, then stirred in the poolish and a bit more water, then some rye flour. All things considered, I would have liked to have given that sponge a few hours to get acquainted with itself, but instead I just gave it a few minutes and then stirred in all purpose flour until it was ready to be kneaded. After being dubious at first, I have become a total convert to Richard Bertinet's kneading method, described in detail in his book DOUGH: Simple Contemporary Bread. It's got great recipes and the design is lovely, but the best part is this method totally unlike any other I've seen described. The crucial parts are, don't flour the work surface, and rather than pressing and folding the dough over itself, you pull it away and toss it forward, so that you are always stretching the dough and encouraging its growth. There are moments where the dough seems impossibly sticky, but it has always come together for me in the end. I am sure I have been saved from many otherwise unforgivable bread mistakes by the way this knead builds cohesion and resilience in the dough.

Back to the levain, and to Bertinet's kneading again. The bubbles in the sponge showed that SOMETHING was working, and the kneading transformed my little brown blob into something that was clearly leavened bread dough. The gluten strands were short with a tendency to break at first, and the dough was definitely a bit stiffer than what I usually produce, but by the end of the kneading it was a creditable effort. Just a couple of hours to rise, and my lunchbreak.

By this time the fire was roaring, and the dough was ready for shaping. My squash dough became three loaves and 8 pizzette, the levain one loaf, 7 pizzette, and one little lump of dough back in the fridge to wait for next week's levain experiment. A la le Fromentier, beloved Montreal bakery, the squash dough was adorned with black sesame seeds, and one of the loaves got studded with pumpkin seeds. The levain stayed plain, and all the loaves were hidden under double layers of kitchen towel to rise.

Maman had requested pizzette to go along with the olives and other antipasti when everyone arrived, and overall I prefer pizza bianca so that's what we had. I plucked a handful of nearly everything in the herb garden (rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, oregano - I left out the lavender; and some basil), chopped them and stirred them into olive oil, then rubbed the tops of the rolled out rounds of flatbread that had already risen for 30 minutes. I had intended to serve them with feta, but it had gone off, so it was just veggies. Some I made with cherry tomato halves, others with the rest of the roasted kabocha, and some with both.

We've lit the brick oven a few times, and I have made dough for it before but not actually presided over the baking. It was slightly stressful but also really fun, spinning the disks of dough about right next to the burning logs so as to brown them evenly, learning the best in-the-absence-of-a-peel technique, and leaping madly on the errant tomato halves that tried to bake solo. A few more sessions and I think I'll have it down.

I was a bit less successful with the loaves - I only managed to bake one in there around the roast pork, huge trays of roasted vegetables, whole kabocha squashes (for an amazing goat cheese, arugula and mint warm salad) and the tray of baked pears for dessert (served with the now-legendary homemade honey-thyme ice cream). That one loaf ended up with a carbonised exterior that I had to peel off. The bread inside was quite delicious though - moist, airy, well-structured, a lovely tan colour shot through with bright orange from the squash. We passed it around picking off pieces and the whole thing vanished before supper was properly begun. I baked the other three in the conventional oven, by which time they were a little overrisen and not at their best. The crust is more hard than crisp, but the dough structure in the levain is fantastic - well aerated and spongy. The taste is subtle but good - I'll have to see if later experiments can yield a more sourdoughy flavour. The squash bread is softer and a little sweeter and cries out to be made into a grilled sandwich.

All in all a good day's breadmaking - and with 14 of our extended family sitting down together outside in the obliging evening sunshine, with the wild gymnastic displays by my boy-cousins, my nieces' kindness in sharing their dinner with my recycled My Little Ponies and the poor, pork-smeared stuffed emu; with reading some books in the glider before dessert, and fighting my toddler niece for control of our shared dessert spoon (and saving the emu from chocolatey smears to match the pork ones) - a perfect Sunday evening.

No noodles this week

Too busy baking bread.

I'll try to make up the noodles by doing two in one week sometime soon. Technically, I did cook the dried Kazakh noodles last week, but that just sounds like an excuse. I may double up by making dumplings and noodles in the same week, just to mix it up a bit.

Bread post to follow!

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 5: Hand-stretched Kazakh Noodles

The Kazakh noodles, from a recipe in Beyond the Great Wall, were a departure. While the preceding four types were shaped in different ways, they were all quickly cut or torn into small rounds or squares or spheres. These long noodles had each to be stretched by hand into skinny strips, which made them a bit more time-consuming. In the end though, they were still easy and fun - and delicious.

The dough was similar to the other Asian noodles I've made so far - eggs, flour, salt and water mixed into a stiff dough and briefly kneaded. Rather than letting the dough rest in a ball before shaping, though, you divide it in four and pat each quarter out into a rectangle, and then cut it crosswise into strips (the dough scraper is very efficient for this) before covering it and letting it rest. Here's where I made my slight mistake - I rolled the quarters out instead of patting them, since the dough was quite stiff and resistant to being flattened. Although I'd read the directions through already, if I'd really pictured the process I wouldn't have done this, since it's not important how big the strips are, and I think it contributed to the problem I had of the dough drying up and thus not stretching as evenly. If you're going to let the dough sit a bit longer or you are doing all the shaping yourself, as I was, I recommend really covering it up well, with a couple of cloths (at least one of them dampened), as the dough's not as fun to work with when it starts drying out.

After the rest period, the fun begins. You just pick up each strip, and using one hand stable and pulling against it with the other, kind of like drafting for spinning, you stretch and flatten your little strip into a veritable noodle, long, thin, glorious-looking. This step was very exciting for me. As long as the dough wasn't dried out, its egg-rich strength made for a beautiful even stretch, and elegant noodles up to 40cm long. Unable to come up with an equally elegant drying rack arrangment, I just draped them over cooling racks and a couple of floured cookie sheets for their resting time. This worked fine, but someday when I'm making a big batch I think I'll clean the clothes-drying rack and use that - I love the image of long rows of noodles swaying gently in the breeze!

In a rash of enthusiasm, I turned last Saturday into a cooking frenzy, and along with these noodles I made rice and beans and vegetables, and fresh tortillas, for supper; dairy-free chocolate banana cake for our lactose intolerant friend; and some bread and pita just because. So I only ended up cooking up a small portion of the noodles for myself while they were fresh, before we dispersed to our various yoga classes and then came back to eat the Mexican food, drink wine, and watch Buffy.

Having the fondest memories of the exquisite hand-stretched northern Chinese noodles you can get at the Richmond Public Market foodcourt (pictured on the blog sometime in 2008), with their tomato-egg sauce, I made a quick but loving tribute to the more elaborate dish. Just stirfried some cherry tomatoes with lots of ginger and green onion, scrambled an egg into it, cracked some pepper over top, all in the time it took to boil my nice long noodles. Mmmm...the noodles were delicate and soft but not soggy, long enough to be comfortably slurpable, both easy to swallow yet still with that nice fresh-noodle bite to them. And tomato-ginger-green onion must be one of the great all-time flavour combinations...

The recipe also allowed for drying the noodles for a few days before cooking them, so that's what I did with the rest of them. If you see a pinkish tinge to the noodles in the photo, it's because I used swiss chard cooking water in the dough. It disappeared when they were cooked again but showed up well in the dried format - if it affected the flavour at all, it was too subtle for my palate to notice. After leaving them in an artistically random pile on the counter for a few days, I boiled them up and tossed them with another quick stirfry, this time with shallots and garlic and yu choy alongside the tomatoes and ginger and spring onion, but no egg (I don't know why I didn't put tofu in - next time). The texture wasn't quite as stellar for the dried version, but that was probably just me getting the cooking time wrong. Still delicious - especially because I had them for breakfast.

These noodles were awesome. I can't wait to make them again.

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 4: Lhasa Egg Noodle Shells

After the gnocchi interlude, it was back to Tibet and the third in the small-Tibetan-wheat-noodles category from Beyond the Great Wall. The last of these similar recipes is also handshaped, and has an egg in the dough like the Earlobe Noodles, but no oil. I made the dough, let it rest, then cut it in pieces, rolled it into logs, and divided those into smaller pieces, just like shaping the gnocchi last week. From here, you take each little piece and use your thumb to flatten it against your palm, so that you end up with a pretty little shell, thicker at the edges and quite thin in the middle (actually I thought these ones looked a lot like earlobes).

I don't know whether I made these larger than I was supposed to, but they seemed to take awhile to cook. Tasting the half-cooked ones made me a bit worried as they seemed bland and tough, so I decided to pan fry them to give them a bit more flavour. Butter, the rest of the caramelised onions, and more fresh herbs, plus a bit of crisping from the heat, and they turned out to be pretty yummy after all.

It was family Sunday dinner again, this time with my uncle, aunt, and two boy-cousins, as well as the home group of Mom, Grandma, and both my sisters. We had a huge meal that came together casually with everyone making a few things - the best kind. My uncle, the chef, had brought an enormous halibut, and after making its giant eye wobble at people for a bit, he oven-roasted it with lemon, and served it with an artichoke-tomato sauce. We ate it over a mix of brown rices and wild rice, and with the noodles of course. There was a soup to start, a beautiful deep red puree of roasted tomato and peppers, rich with ginger flavour. Then there were salads, a roasted beet, orange, and fresh fennel salad, and a crisp green one with tomatoes and avocado. For dessert, baked apples with vanilla ice cream; and for apres-dessert - three generations of women having an Abba dance party in the kitchen while doing the dishes.

These noodles were nice, but I was expecting them to have a bit more flavour, I think. The egg definitely gives them resilience in the mouth, but it's amazing how different they were from the first recipe, the Earlobe noodles. The addition of just a few drops of oil created a totally different texture and flavour. I liked all these noodles, and I would definitely make them all again, but everyone's clear favourite was the Earlobes.

The day after the dinner, I had the noodles for lunch, with leftover halibut and artichoke-tomato sauce. Homemade noodles. Mmm.

I'm looking forward to being a bit more ambitious in the following weeks. I want to experiment more with different kinds of gnocchi, and I think it's time to try rice noodles for the first time. I'd also like to try noodle sheets and rolled-out-and-cut long noodles sometime soon. I don't know what it'll be next week, but this project is only just beginning.

The Telltale Handprint

My mother, modelling the latest in lululemon's spring Cakeathlon collection, especially designed for frenetic marathon wedding cake sessions. Notice the appropriate colour scheme.

We always tease my mom that she's not really cooking unless she's wearing floury handprints on her bum. It turns out that cornstarch is a much better medium for self-expression - we couldn't even get it to smudge, much less come off!

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 3: Potato Gnocchi

I finally decided to leave Tibet and leap on over to Italy. I love gnocchi, and even though I've seen it done and know it's not that hard, I had never made them myself. So for week 3, it was clearly gnocchi time. I went with the Basic Potato Gnocchi from the recent English translation of the Italian classic Il cucchiaio d'argento, The Silver Spoon.

I peeled Yukon Gold potatoes and steamed them, then mashed them and mixed in an egg, some salt, and some flour. The only tricky part was the first few minutes of kneading - I don't have the asbestos fingers of a chef, and it's important to start working while they're still hot from cooking so the ingredients blend well and the potatoes don't dry out. Otherwise it was fun, that kitchen alchemy that turns vegetables into a smooth firm dough in a matter of minutes.

Shaping the gnocchi was fun too. The dough was dense and responsive, and working quickly with a dough scraper always makes me feel like a pro. I stretched it out into logs, cut them into small pieces, then scored each with a fork before transferring it to a floured kitchen towel. As I shaped, I boiled the gnocchi in batches. They only take a few minutes to cook and it was easy to fall into a rhythm. Making massive quantities of gnocchi would be quite doable, I think, as long as you weren't dancing around too many other people on the journey from shaping surface to stovetop!

Even though we were only four for dinner, rather than the usual Sunday horde, Maman made a delicious and elaborate seafood dinner. The gnocchi fell in quite well among all the other tastes. I made a simple preparation, since mostly I just wanted to taste the noodles themselves - caramelised red onion, and lots of fresh sage, thyme, and rosemary from the garden, sauteed in a little butter.

They were AMAZING. I assumed it would take a couple of tries to get a good texture, and maybe this was just beginner's luck - but they were really, really good. The recipe warns that while too much flour makes them hard, too much potato makes them fall apart during cooking, and I'm sure it's a fine line that varies depending on your potato type, air temperature and humidity, age of flour, etc, etc. My theory right now, though, is that a good strategy is to not work too too much flour into the potatoes initially, but to flour the logs generously as you roll them out and cut them. This gives you a tender inside but a firm outer layer that keeps the gnocchi from falling apart in the water. It worked this time anyway - but I'll have to test the theory many more times before relying on it.

I only prepped half the gnocchi for supper, making the rest a few days later. By then the texture was not quite as perfect, but still enjoyable. This time I sauteed swiss chard, more caramelised onion, tomato, olives, herbs, and feta for a thicker sauce, different but also tasty.

My sister's response after tasting the gnocchi was, "How do you make potatoes DO that?!" Well, now you know. And now that I know, I suspect I'll be making potatoes do this a lot.

Khachapuri

Lest it be thought that I'm neglecting to bake in the midst of all this noodlery, let it be said that I've made bread three times since I've been back (and also two layer cakes!). This is one of my favourite recipes from Alford and Duguid's Flatbreads and Flavours (their first cookbook).

I had an intense craving for them right after I woke up one morning, and because they're not yeasted, making them for breakfast was entirely plausible. You just stir together some cheese and an egg to make a filling, then knead flour mixed with yogourt as the liquid, to make a moist stretchy dough. I always put too little flour in the dough and end up with sticky, unmanageable messes - yet they always taste fantastic anyway.

Khachapuri are a Georgian cheese bread that come in many styles - but I love this one, with just a hint of cheese, a crisp exterior and soft inside. And the smell, so rich and complex from the yogourt. This time it drew my mom down from upstairs and we snacked on the first batch just as it came out of the oven, hardly waiting for it to cool. We have an ongoing debate about whether they taste better fresh from the oven, or toasted the next day, when the outside gets really crisp and the inside seems softer than ever. Since they disappear almost instantly, it doesn't take long to be ready to make another batch...

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 2: Amdo Noodle Squares

Since week 1 went so well, I decided to stick to Tibet for the next week and make Amdo Noodle Squares, also from Alford and Duguid's Beyond the Great Wall. The recipe is fairly similar to the last, but with a plainer dough - just flour, salt, and water. Instead of rolling the dough into logs after letting it rest, and pinching off the pieces impressionistically, you roll it out flat and cut it into squares.

The dough was fairly easy to work with, and as you don't have to roll it out that thin, it went quickly, especially with the devoted assistance of my niece, who lovingly patted each little square and gently placed it on the floured towel to await its turn in the pot. Ever since she could sit, she has always wanted to be lifted up onto the counter to help whenever the flour starts flying (she's 4 now). We boiled them briefly in a large pot and that was that - quick and easy despite all the commotion going on in the kitchen.

Embarrassing to relate, but with everything else going on, I almost forgot to make the noodles this week - I was just saved by a friend asking how the project was going. So I ended up making them to go with Sunday night family dinner. We ate the Tibetan noodles in a big pot of minestrone that I had made the night before.

The verdict? The noodles with their minimalist ingredients weren't as tasty or as intriguingly textured as the first week's batch, but they stood up nicely in the soup, and they paired excellently well with grated parmigiano. Tasty, if not stunning.