Of pie

In this house we are hooked on a new show: Pushing daisies. It is pretty, fun, cute and it makes me want to eat pie all the time! So the other day I made pie. Not the dessert kind this time, more like a mushroom and bacon quiche with thyme.

Take 150 grams of butter

mix with 300 grams flour

add 3 Tbs cold water

And you have a pie crust!

I stopped taking pictures at this point, so I leave the rest to your imagination. All I can say is that it was good. And that I have some pie dough left, just enough for one or two portion sized pies. I just have to figure out what to fill them with!

Large portions of the weekend have been spent in front of the sewing machine, and I will be back later today with a ReStyle Sunday. In the meantime, you can check out a bathroom turned into this amazing studio space. If I won 200 million I would get a sewing room, thats for sure!

Thistle and weeds, part 2

Look what I found!

A real artichoke! I watched Julie and Julia again this Monday, and of course I was inspired. Earlier that day I went to Asia mat for a couple of things, and behold, a whole box of these beautiful thistles were sitting on a shelf and they were calling out my name. "I will buy one", I thought to myself, "and if I dont have time to cook it, at least I will have something pretty to look at." So I purchased my very first artichoke. 

After looking at it for a couple of days I decided it was time to take the next step. Consulting Andreas Viestads article on how to cook and eat an artichoke I simply cut the stem of it and boiled it for 25 minutes or so. In the meantime I made Hollandaise sauce, just like Julie... It wasnt even hard! The only mistake I made was to use salted butter and add salt (again!), mainly because I used two different recipes, so really I set myself up for failure here. I really dont know what Hollandaise is supposed to taste like, but I think it was pretty close. 

Then the eating: Peeling one leaf off at the time, dipping them in the sauce and sucking the ends of them is fun finger food, but after a while I got impatient to find out what the heart of it looked like, and sped up the eating process. Suddenly a flower appeared out of nowhere, and I screamed with excitement! My roommates werent that into it, but let me have my moment. I found the heart and enjoyed it all!

It really is a flower!

Eating an artichoke will certainly not fill you up, even when accompanied by a sauce that is basically butter. So make sure you make a main course, not just a starter, next time you prepare one of these darlings. 

Quiche aux Poireaux et Champignons

4.15 PM
It is raining so hard it looks like it is snowing, so I guess fall has come to town.  Luckily I am inside, working on my very first Julia Child recipe: Leek and mushroom quiche. Actually, it is a combination of two quiches: leek quiche and mushroom quiche - obviously.

Leeks are cut, mushrooms are cut, pate brisee (tart dough) is in the oven. Now to the challenging part, the actual cooking.

A while later...
The mushrooms are crowded! Julia said to never crowd the mushroom. How will this end?
I don´t have any port either. Oh well, at least I got the real butter.

11.15 PM
The dinner guests have left and the dishes are done, and here is the rest of the story:
The leeks were simmering (on their way to "very tender") as I started on the crust. I knew it was going to be a tough one, but I followed the recipe strictly, hoping that would help. I actually filled my pie form quite nicely, covered it with foil and poured some black beans in there for weight while pre-cooking.

Nine minutes later, the alarm calls "Piiiee is reeeaadyy" and I get it out of the oven. Out comes the beans, except a couple of little suckers that are still stuck in the shell. Since this thing is toasting I get the brilliant idea of tipping it over to get those beans out. The problem is that the whole crust falls out! This is a disaster, or a Julie-moment, as Lyndee called it. I just stand there, looking at my upside-down crust on the cutting board, thinking: this had to happen, something had to go wrong... Lyndee comes in to try to help me flip the thing back into its form without deconstructing it entirely. "If only we could flip this cutting board/drawer" she says. "But we can!" I exclaim, and we do. Only a few crumbs are lost, and there are some minor tears and cracks, but hey, that was a pretty good rescue expedition.

From there on everything went smoothly. I finished cooking the not-so-crowded-afterall mushrooms, made the cream and egg mix and stirred in the vegetables. The pie shell could hardly contain all the liquid, so I asked it very kindly to not rise too much. In the oven it went, and now I could just wait. 26 more minutes and I could take out a golden, puffy, mouth watering quiche.

It was a pretty good dinner. A bit too salty, which was entirely my fault, since I used salted butter and didn´t cut anything on the added salt. So much for reading the recipe thoroughly.

The company was happy too, and Lyndee made a great apple and raspberry crisp for dessert, so we were ready to roll into bed by the end of the night. My first (adapted) Julia Child recipe is completed, and I feel good about it. I have no idea how Julie managed to do this for a whole year though. A simple pie took me 2,5 hours, then what about killing lobsters or cracking bones to get to the marrow? I am certainly not taking on that challenge, at least for now.

To read Julie´s experience with this pie, click here.
To get the recipe I used, click here

As for the other simple goals: 
At least I am up by 7am in the morning, and journaling is quite fun.

And yesterday I went on a sail boat with the YWAM Skien leadership team. I even got to steer the ship for a while, which was more than I expected waking up that morning.

Wearing: 

My favourite 2$ thrift store sweat pants

Grey hoodie from lost and found

Blue scarf from the 2nd hand store in Skien

Sunglasses from H&M

Life jacket (safety first)

Hat from Noa Noa (it is striped, but that´s hard to see, so I have to tell you, 

because I was going for a Steve Zissou reference here, 

and you wouldn´t have guessed if I didn´t tell you)

Ship o´hoy!

A servantless existence

Today´s brunch: Banana pancakes with mom´s homemade strawberry jam and lots of coffee. Mmmm... Weekends are great for long mornings with a good breakfast/brunch/lunch. 

The other day I saw "Julie and Julia" (and now I read the blog from 2002, perhaps I should pick up the book instead, as it´s loading incredibly slow. It is probably hidden so deep down in the internet archives it can´t understand why anyone would try to bring it out in broad daylight again) and now I would like to cook way through a cook book too! I have been thinking of this for some time now, and combined with 4 simple goals by Elsie Flannigan from A Beautiful Mess, I decided to set some goals for a more rich and happy life, as she puts it.  

1. Cook something new every week. I have so many cook books with recipes just waiting to be tried and enjoyed.  I have two of Andreas Viestad´s books I want to use for this challenge: "Where Flavor Was Born: Recipes and Culinary Travels Along the Indian Ocean Spice Route" and "How to boil water". The last one is focusing on how to use different ingredients, and has chapters on how to prepare meat, make sauces, bake vegetables etc. The first one is a book dedicated to spices, which I love, so the combination of these two should give a good end result. So for the rest of 2010 I will either try a new technique or an entirely new dish every week. 


2. Get up early every morning. Very simple goal, but oh so hard... Me and my roommate even have a jar for "late fees". I don´t want to break the bank on this one, and making it public like this will probably be even more helpful for my discipline. 


3. Journal every day. Profound or ordinary, creative or practical: I will write something down and perhaps glue a picture next to it. 


4. Make a passport holder. A cute passport holder, mind you. And it would be great if I finish it before my next trip:
Destination: Bremen, Germany 
What: Staff trip with YWAM Skien 
Departure: August 30


The guidelines tell me to blog about the endeavor and reward myself when I reach my goals. This means potentially multiple rewards every day! Well, accomplishing these things will be a reward in itself, and I am excited to start!