Author Archives: augustinealexandra

A Marks the Spot

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I’ll admit it – I was seduced by Martha Stewart. It all started out very innocently back in November. I had bought too much swiss chard and was on the hunt for a way to use up the hearty greens. I was doing my usual round of recipe searching – How to Cook Everything, Epicurious, Martha Stewart (usually in that order) and when I got to marthastewart.com, there it was… Where the Wild Wreaths Are. Now, you have to understand, it was early November.  Christmas was close enough to dream about all the projects I wanted to do to celebrate the season, and far enough away that I was still under the delusion that I could do them all – or any of them. I thought about the giant fir tree that had fallen on our property upstate during Sandy, with all those pine branches just lying there in a heap, and those fatal words popped into my head “I can make one myself!”. wreath_disasterNeedless to say, the wreath experiment was a disaster. I probably should not have let the bag of cut pine branches sit in the arid, New York apartment heat of my living room for three weeks. (On the upside, I did find a great new recipe for swiss chard: Barley and Lentil Soup with Swiss Chard.)

Feeling disheartened by the experience, and with Christmas looming, I dug through our box of Christmas ornaments and came up with a red amaryllis fabric flower and some holly leaves and berries that I had bought a couple of years ago to decorate a wreath. I dug around a little more to find the perfect finishing touch.

holiday_door

Now the question you might ask yourself when seeing this image – after “Is this the Prynnes’ residence?” –  is “Why does that paint color exist… in glossy?! And, why would anyone choose it for their front door?!” . I know. These are questions I ask myself every day as I’m climbing up the five flights of stairs to our home. The door color is actually the “accent color” of our building hall and stairwell. The main color that it’s “accenting” is closer to Yarn Harlot’s  Saddle Tan.  You can see now why I like to liven things up a bit for Christmas.

In fact, why should our door should be welcoming and cheerful only at Christmas? So off I went this week to my favorite fabric flower store on 28th Street, Pany Silk, and found a nice combination of flowers and leaves that I wired together to replace the holiday flowers and bring in the new year.

spring_door

I haven’t decided yet if it’s a little much for our apartment, it might be better on the front door of the cottage. But, I do like how it’s a nice relief to the dreaded “color” and strangely enough, the berries seem to work well with it. I’m inspired now to work with the ugly door, instead of ignoring it most of the year.  Maybe I’ll do different wreaths for each season. We do have masses of pine cones in our yard…

A Yule to Remember

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Eldred

Introducing Bûche de Noël 2012

Buche de Noel

I’m kind of old school when it comes to my yearly bûche de Noël, I follow Julia Child’s recipe from “The Way to Cook”. The recipe is a little fussy, but it’s worth it. The cake is an orange almond spongecake baked on a flat sheet so that you can roll it up, and it’s filled with and frosted with a chocolate frosting that involves mixing melted chocolate into an Italian meringue and then adding whipped cream. Not for the faint of heart. Her recipe also includes making a nut brittle and crushing it to include in the frosting, I leave that out along with the spun sugar she decorates the finished log with. I have a limit of carmelizing only once per recipe, hanging over a pan gently swirling the sugar water in deadly fear that it will crystalize is too nerve racking for me to do multiple times for one cake. Also, I usually end up making it at my parents’ house in Connecticut, which is challenging in itself.

I actually did the same thing this year that I do every year that I’ve been making the bûche de Noël, the difference this Christmas was almost purely aesthetic. I finally made the meringue mushrooms that traditionally decorate a yule log. Every year I plan on making them, but I either run out of time or interest. This year, after I made the Italian meringue – which turned out perfectly, I may have brought family members over to the Kitchenaid to admire it – I still had another hour that the oven was free and I was still feeling pretty energetic. So, I pulled out my pastry bag and went to work. Fortunately, when I was still at home I  had looked up the recipe for meringue mushrooms in my copy of Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts for tips on how to pipe out the meringue fungi. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right pastry tip, so I just used the bag without a tip, which worked well for mushrooms that are supposed to look like they’ve just been plucked from a woodland scene. I also sprinkled a little cocoa on them to give them a more woodsy look. Once they had baked, I then used a little frosting to stick the stems to the tops and spread it a bit on the bottom of the cap to replicate the gills. I then tucked the squat little guys around the sugar leaves I picked up at the last minute at N.Y. Cake and Baking Distributor on 22nd Street. Sprinkled a little powdered sugar over it, and… Voila!

Not only does it look great and festive, but it’s also a really tasty combination of flavors, the orange almond cake complements the chocolate really well.

Me and my buche de noel

Have a wonderful new year!!

Bread for two… plus dessert

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Eldred

I’ve had a couple of disastrous experiences baking with yeast – cinnamon rolls that could have been handy hockey puck replacements and a loaf of bread that, used strategically, could have been a very efficient and dangerous projectile weapon.  I’ve become a bit intimidated by the idea of working with yeast, but I love a good loaf of bread. So, a few years ago, in search of decent bread in Inwood, Mark and I bought a Zogirushi bread machine. With the limited counter and storage space in our apartment, the smaller one pound mini bread maker appealed to us. It’s the perfect size for two people – or one gluttonous person.

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Now, if you’re looking for one of those wonderful crusty, earthy, chewy loaves of bread, book a flight to France. The bread machine is not going to deliver and I’m guessing that purists regard it on the same level of food sacrilege as biscuits in a tube and store-bought pie crust. But, if you want a good, standard loaf that is great for sandwiches and toast and a good fallback for general use – and love the smell of baking bread – the Zogirushi is great.

bread After exhausting the recipes in the booklet that came with the machine, I bought The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook. There are 300 recipes in this book, everything from your standard white bread to “Roquefort Cheese Bread with Walnuts” to hot dog rolls. I experimented with a few recipes, buying some of the harder to find ingredients online at King Arthur Flour and for awhile our apartment was a mini bread factory. Then the novelty wore off and the Inwood farmer’s market expanded to year round, so good bread became more readily available. Our little Zogi just sat tucked away, unused for a couple of years.

Recently I had the brilliant idea of bringing Zogi up to our cottage for the same reason that we bought it in the first place. Although our farmer’s market in Barryville offers us great bread in the warmer months, in the winter we have to drive at least 45 minutes to find a decent loaf. So Zogi is now back in action, and Saturday  was its re-inauguration.  It was a cold, rainy, foggy day and there’s nothing like the smell of baking bread to make you feel warm and cozy. I threw in the ingredients for my favorite brioche recipe and 3 hours and 40 minutes later I wrenched out a small loaf from the small pan – the blade on the bottom of the pan makes it a little bit of a struggle to get the loaf out of the pan, but it’s worth the work.

bread.gone

It was devoured with butter and a very tasty wine jelly from Eminence Road Winery  that we had picked up at our local farmer’s market before it closed for the season. It’s made from Gewurztraminer  – try saying that fives times fast…actually, just try saying it.

Our mini brioche was the perfect accompaniment to our dinner and there was even some left over for toast the next morning. A toasted slice of homemade bread with butter and jam and a cup of tea on a Sunday morning. Bliss.

Now, the brioche recipe required two egg yolks.

Hmmm…. what to do with the remaining egg whites?….

meringues

Knitting Heartache or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gauge

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Eldred

After a Thanksgiving full of food, family and friends, Mark and I retreated up to our little blue cottage on Friday afternoon to digest.  Saturday morning we woke up to a gray sky and snowflakes half-heartedly swirling about the yard.  We ventured out into the cold to pick up our mail at our little post office and get some groceries and then headed home where we settled in for the day. After some careful consideration of our Netflix options, I made a cup of mint tea, picked up my knitting and we pressed play on “The Return of the Pink Panther”.

For the past four weeks I’ve been knitting happily away on a new cardigan for myself,  “Yellow Wall Cardigan”. I replaced the recommended yarn with a very nice tweedy yarn, Rustic Tweed by Queensland Collection, and I was loving the result, although I occasionally wondered if the stitches were tight enough. Now, it’s drummed into all knitters from the second they pick up their first size 10 needles and ball of acrylic yarn that before they start a project, CHECK YOUR GAUGE! Because every knitter has her/his own specific tension on how they hold their yarn, the number of stitches per inch that each knitter achieves with the same size needle and the same yarn can vary greatly. And, if you use a different yarn from the one recommended in the pattern, it’s doubly important to do a proper swatch.  For example, if you are knitting a sweater with a, let’s just say, 37″ width at the chest and the pattern requires, let’s just say, 24 stitches per inch, and you are knitting 22 stitches per inch, it would change the width of the sweater to 40″. That’s right, three inches, a full size larger – you see where I’m going with this?

For some reason, many knitters are notoriously bad gauge swatchers, most of us are so excited to start a project that we either do a half-assed swatch or just plunge in with the courage of our convictions, however misguided they are. So, four weeks ago I decided to go with a half-assed swatch  – which I haven’t steamed or blocked, also recommended – and I plunged in. Along the way, a little voice in my head suggested that I should double check my gauge, which I decide to completely ignore because, I think to myself, “I did a swatch, it’s totally fine!”. It’s not until this gray, cold Saturday with Inspector Clouseau wrestling with an industrial vacuum in the background , that I decide to double check the gauge on my knitting.

I’ll save you the strain on your eyes and tell you: the gauge on my sweater is 22  stitches per inch.

I think it would be physically painful for me to tell you exactly how far along on the sweater I was when I made this discovery.

All I can say is that I had started my third skein of yarn.

Citron – not a small french car

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Manhattan

…and plum pudding is not a pudding. Ever since I bought the 2006 Cook’s Illustrated Holiday Baking issue, I’ve had my eye on the recipe for “Old Fashioned Plum Pudding”. I’m a sucker for traditional European recipes, I’ve been making a Buche de Noel for the past 8 or so Christmas’ and the idea of making a grand entrance at dinner with a dessert ablaze is too tempting. Unfortunately, you have to be a little more organized to make a traditional plum pudding, it’s ideal to make it at least a month ahead, and I’ve never gotten myself pulled together enough to plan that far in advance. But, 2012 is finally the year of the blazing plum pudding. First hurdle:  candied citron.

As it turns out, citron is not just any citrus fruit peel that you have hanging around. After I put oranges on my shopping list, I thought I should actually look up citron and see if it is something specific. It is. It’s a citrus fruit found in more exotic climes than my neighborhood Fine Fare Supermarket. So, on a day when my mom was visiting from Connecticut,  I picked her up at Grand Central and we both made our way down to Curry Hill to the famous Kalustyan’s. Mom was looking for candied fruit for a Russian dessert recipe that my father’s mother gave her and I was on a candied citron mission. We didn’t have to look far, right inside the door were two bins of candied citron – diced and in rather intimidating large halves.  As it turns out, the citron fruit is mostly a very thick white rind with very little actual juice. I opted for the diced citron, and scooped a small amount of the very sticky stuff into a baggie.

Note the pale green color, nothing like the unnatural green citron bits found in your standard doorstop fruitcakes.

Mom found her candied fruit, and then we poked around the amazing selection of spices, jams, beans, etc that Kalustyan’s offers. I left Kalustyan’s feeling victorious and contemplating my next plum pudding hurdle: the large steamer pot.

Fortunately, my neighborhood Fine Fare Supermarket is just the place to find a steamer pot large enough to steam tamales and plum puddings.

From Upstate Manhattan to Upstate New York

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Three years ago my husband – then boyfriend – and I bought a small blue cottage in Sullivan County, New York. This had been a dream of mine for years, and when Mark and I met, it became a joint dream. Our Manhattan home is a one bedroom fifth floor walk-up in the northern reaches of Manhattan. It overlooks Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters. Our neighborhood and the view is rather bucolic for Manhattan, if you ignore the periodic car alarms, blaring music from passing cars, and the occasional late night drunken fight on our corner.

View from my apartment window of the local wildlife

But it’s city life and we are a quick zip down to midtown and downtown on the A train. I love living in New York, but I also longed for a country getaway where I could grow a garden, read on a hammock and have dinner in a screened-in porch to the hum of cicadas and crickets. When we found our little blue cottage we found our perfect country retreat, with a screened-in porch, space for a garden and surrounded by trees.

The view from my hammock sans wildlife – they are in their hideout plotting the next raid on the garden.

In August of 2010, Mark and I got married in the backyard of our little blue cottage. Now we divide our time between the whirl of our city life and the slow pace of our country home. Whether I’m looking out my window at pigeons nesting in my downstairs neighbor’s window boxes or at an owl resting in on the branches of a tree, I’ve always got projects that I’m working on inspired by both of my homes and surroundings.