Daring Bakers September Challenge: Vols-Au-Vents

The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

I was distinctly underwhelmed when I saw this month's challenge. While I love puff pastry, the idea of making it myself never appealled to me as I felt confident that my time would be better spent on fillings etc than on the actually pastry making process. Also, while I'm always up for some retro cooking, vols-au-vents just seemed a step too far into seventies dinner party territory for my liking.

We were pointed to a fantastic video online which includes the recipe and technique if you're interested and if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million as I have no idea how I would have managed without it: http://video.pbs.org/video/1174110297/search/Pastry
FYI I halved the quantities and still had a huge amount of pastry at the end.

You initially pop the flour and water in the food processer and blitz until you have a ball of pastry - i found I needed considerably more water than the recipe prescribed. Then you refrigerate the pastry for 5 mins before you start rolling with the butter. I won't go into details on how to roll and fold the pastry as its all the video. As I started rolling out I thought the butter was just too hard and looked like it was going to break though so I found just pounding with my rolling pin to soften things up worked well at the start. At this point I was expecting a complete disaster but with two "turns" completed I decided to go for two more before I refrigerated the pastry again. They went ok but I could see the butter breaking up a little. After an hour in the fridge I completed the final two turns with no difficulty and popped it back in the fridge for another few hours and went off to walk the dog around Queens Park with the Monkey and Mr Jen. We stopped off for pizza at Queens Park Pizza - definitely the best in the area although I still miss Love Supreme from Paddington - if only they delivered here...... It was the Monkey's first pizza and I thought she would love it being a cheese and bread fan just like me. Unfortunately she didn't seem to like it - all she ate was the olives from the salad and the pizza - very strange.

After I'd put the Monkey to bed I constructed my vols-au-vents. I decided to only make two and save the rest of the pastry for my favourite puff dish (Nigel Slater's Onion and Cheese Tart: http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/533882). A halfway check while they were baking proved tricky as so much butter comes out that they were slipping all over the baking tray so they got a bit squashed and didn't rise any more after that but looked ok as they came out of the oven (should've taken a photo then). While they were cooling they slumped a bit but I was glad it was over and hungry for dessert!

As we're still trying to be vaguely healthy in an attempt to look half decent in our swimmers when we hit the beaches of New Caledonia next week, I decided to fill our vols-au-vents with yoghurt and blueberries. The combination turned out to be a good one as the slight sourness of the yoghurt and the berries countered the rich butteryness (how do you spell that? did I just invent a word?) of the pastry. The pastry was amazing - so different from the frozen stuff and definitely worth the calories!

Overall the process of making the pastry was a bit of an effort but it tasted at least twenty times better than anything I've ever bought and considering you can make a big batch and freeze it, I'm surprised to say that I would make it again. I don't think I'd bother with vols-au-vents though as there are far more delicious uses for puff pastry in my opinion.

Rambutan

Firstly, to clarify, I'm talking about Rambutan the restaurant not the fruit, although the fruit did feature in a few of the dishes. Our house guests generously decided to take Mr Jen and I out for dinner and asked a chef friend of ours (known as "Chef") what his meal of the year so far had been and he immediately picked a fish dish at Rambutan. We were able to book a 7.30pm table for that night which was refreshing as I hate the "two sitting" times that lots of restaurants seem to use these days. 7pm is too early as the Monkey only goes down at that time and while we can get the babysitter to do it, its much easier if we know she's settled before we leave. 9pm is just too late for me as you never end up eating before 9.30pm and I'm starving by that point. Anyway, as we knew nothing about the restaurant we asked what style the food was and they told us it was "thai with a southern feel" which sounded interesting....


We arrived hungry so immediately ordered our starters and picked some pre-dinner cocktails - there is a cocktail bar downstairs which would be nice for a drink if you arrived early. With advice from the friendly waiter, we ordered betel leaves with tea smoked trout, a chicken dish described by our waiter as a thai san choy bow and some salt and pepper squid. I think they took note of our hunger and the food arrived really quickly. The betel leaves were nice but the other dishes were far better - the chicken was fresh and zingy with coriander and chilli and the salt and pepper squid was perfectly cooked and had a real peppery hit. I wasn't so keen on the lemon dipping sauce with the squid so after my first dip I just left it plain but my dining companions stuck with it and said it grew on them.


We relied on our waiter to help with the mains as we couldn't remember which dish Chef had recommended, there were two fish dishes - a hot, sweet and sour whole crispy fish or a salty fish with crispy pork, lemongrass, thai herbs and hot sweet fish sauce. I can never resist a pork addition to a dish and the waiter recommended it so we went for the salty fish (pictured above). We also ordered a king prawn yellow curry, a dry red curry with pork belly and the crispy duck with sweet rambutan, eschallot, garlic and tamarind sauce. The prawn curry arrived first which was right up my street and I had to use all my willpower not to pile my plate high with rice and covered it with the sauce. I held back and just had a small delicious portion. I was glad of my restraint when the other mains arrived. The salty fish was more of a salad with crunchy pork and a great constrast to the other dishes. The pork belly was also excellent and my dining companions all voted it as their favourite immediately. Then the duck arrived. Now to put this in context, I never order duck in restaurants anymore as its so often a disappointment. I also don't like fruit with meat so the rambutan sauce didn't appeal either. I tried it first and can say without a doubt that this was the best duck I have ever tasted. The meat/fat/crispy skin ratio was perfect and the sweet but sour sauce was an ideal accompaniment.

We were too full for dessert but decided that we could fit in two portions of the ice cream/sorbet selection between the four of us. The ice creams and sorbets are all made in the restaurant and each platter consisted of: sesame ice cream with tamarind syrup, passionfruit ice cream with red chilli syrup and a rambutan and kaffir lime sorbet. I love sesame ice cream but I couldn't pick a favourite out of the free as they were all so good .


While the food was amazing, the great service with personality really made the meal. We found out later that night that Chef's favourite dish was actually the hot, sweet and sour whole crispy fish - what a fantastic excuse to go back again! But why didn’t he tell us about this place sooner??


Rambutan
96 Oxford Street
Darlinghurst
NSW 2010
02 9360 7772

02 9360 7772

Cookbook Addiction - Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook Review

Today is a very special day in my house as a parcel arrived containing the new Nigel Slater cookbook - Tender: v1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch. I can't comment on this book yet as I am saving it for a quiet moment when I have the house to myself and I can spend some serious alone time with Nigel. To say that I love him would be an understatement. I have all bar one of his cookbooks (I'm missing the 30 Minute Cook - Christmas present alert for Mr Jen!!). As I begin to fill the third bookshelf with cookbooks I thought I should do a quick count and found I was up to 67. I then remembered the 3 sitting by my bed for nighttime reading so I have hit the big 7-0 - I'm so glad that Nigel saw it in with me! Anyway, I thought it might be worth reviewing a few on my blog. As I baked some cookies for my always hungry pregnant friend the other day, I thought I'd start with the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.

The Hummingbird Bakery itself is in London and was opened by Tarek Malouf (the book's author) to bring some American style cakes -in particular cupcakes - to the UK. I was drawn to the book as I'm becoming a keen baker and slightly lacking in baking books (Christmas present alert No.2) and have been relying on my "How to be a Domestic Goddess" by Nigella Lawson for most of my baking needs. The Hummingbird book comes with an endorsement from Gwyneth Paltrow on the front which seemed a little strange as no matter how many trips around Spain she takes for TV, I'll never believe that skinny Gwyneth is a real cake lover. The book contains 16 cupcake recipes plus other recipes for cakes, pies, brownies, muffins and cookies including American classics like Key Lime Pie and Pumpkin Pie. Overall there is a good mix and some interesting ideas that I'm looking forward to trying, especially the Green Tea cupcakes and the peanut butter cookies.

I decided to test some staple recipes first - the vanilla cupcakes, the brownies and an oat and raisin cookies. I found the cupcakes a bit on the sweet side, like many of the recipes in the book, they are very heavy on sugar. I would recommend Nigella's fairy cake recipe instead which gives a far more buttery result which I prefer. http://www.nigella.com/recipe/recipe_detail.aspx?rid=13670. I found the same problem with the brownies - far too sweet. Again, Nigella's recipe which is higher in butter and eggs and lower in sugar is much more to my taste.

I have baked the Oat and Raisin Cookies (pictured above) three times now. The first time I followed the recipe to the word and found them far too sweet with not enough oats and far too many raisins. I've adapted the recipe a couple of times (doubling the oats and reducing the raisins and sugar quantities) and when I made them for my pregnant friend I used spelt flour as she can't eat wheat. I also make them into thicker cookies than prescribed in the original recipe as I feel that the egg content makes them kind of "cakey" anyway. Given that everything I've tried so far has been too sweet for me, I don't think this has been my most succcessful purchase but as I always tend to adapt recipes to suit my taste I'm sure I'll end up trying a good few more of the recipes so I'll report back....

Oat and Raisin Spelt Cookies (adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf)

Ingredients - makes about 20 cookies

270g Butter at room temperatire

200g Dark Brown Sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp Vanilla extract

350g Spelt Flour (you can just use plain wheat flour instead)

1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

1 tsp Salt

1 tsp Cinnamon

200g Rolled Oats

150g Raisins

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees.

1: Mix the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy (I used my electric hand blender - it would take longer by hand)

2: Add the eggs one at a time and then the vanilla

3: Mix the flour, salt, bicarb, cinnamon and oats in a separate bowl and then add to the butter mixture and stir in the raisins

4: Arrange the cookie dough in equal amounts on baking trays that have been lined with greaseproof paper

5: Bake for 12-15 minutes until golden brown and firm. Turn onto a wire rack to cool

Bringing in some order....

After throwing away a scary amount of food from my fridge on my return from holiday I have decided to become more organised and start planning meals.

I’ve always taken a bit of a slapdash approach to supermarket shopping with only a meal or two in mind and so I usually end up making several repeat trips during the week plus a night or two of “Ready Steady Cook” style invention to try to use up the random food items that caught my eye whilst shopping. No matter how inventive I am, I always end up with veggies that have to be thrown away which I hate.

After a diet consisting mainly of cake and cups of tea for the last fortnight, Mr Jen and I are determined to get healthy and have the added incentive of our nutritionist friend coming to stay which should inspire us to stick to the plan.

In terms of main meals I generally try to rotate on a Meat-Fish-Vegetarian cycle so we end up with at least two of each every week. I also aim for things that I can cook most of when the Monkey is on her lunchtime nap with only last minute preparation before dinner. Plus Mr Jen usually takes his lunch into work so leftover-friendly meals are also good.

A whole week in advance seems quite daunting so I first broke it down to type/cuisine – so 7 main meals can include: Curry, Pasta/Italian, Mexican, Asian, Slow cooked stew, 2 Main course salads (as its going to be warm on the weekend!)

Now to add the actual dishes:
Curry – Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry with Brown Rice and Green Salad
Pasta/Italian – Broccoli Pesto with Pasta
Mexican – Chicken Fajitas with Corn Tortillas
Asian – Green Thai Fish Curry (yes I snuck an extra curry in!) with Brown Basmati
Slow cooked – Morroccan Spiced Lamb Shoulder with Red Lentils
Salad – Grilled Trout with Guacamole and mixed salad
Salad 2 – Beef Thai Salad

Realistically we’re going to end up eating out and/or getting takeaway at some point so the seven meals can work for some weekend lunches too. For the spicier meals, I just take out a monkey-sized portion before I add the chilli element. All I need to do now is to write the shopping list. Will I manage to stick to it.....