Easter 2012 Outtakes

I actually made most of the dishes I made for Easter during the preceding week to test them. Does anyone else do this? I have a phobia of feeding people bad food. An honest to God phobia. I get the shakes and hyperventilate and feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. Does anybody else do that?
As I get older, no doubt, all this panic will be replaced with serenity and grace. Good old Grace. Anyway, these are the dishes that didn't quite make the cut.

Roasted Beetroot with Almond and Horseradish Sauce - from Moro East. Unpleasantly sweet and suspiciously dense. The boyfriend likes the sauce but I found it gritty and astringent

Hot Cross Buns - from Louis P de Guoy's Bread Tray. I don't remember why I bought this book but it's not particularly useful, all the recipes are written for an American kitchen and many include archaic ingredients. I would give an example but I've already given the book to a charity shop to ruin some other sucker's life. I must have done something wrong because the bun dough was too runny to shape and had to be poured into makeshift tinfoil cases. The taste was exactly as a bun should be, but they were a little too heavy and well just look at them!

Courgette Strudel - from Vegiterranean. This book has never been very good to me, but I think the reason I keep it around is that it tells a great story and I'm a creepy peeper who likes to pry in other people's personal lives. I ended up making this strudel twice, once as written and once filled with leftover fruity chicken stuffing. The first time I forgot to add the egg to the dough but the result was nice enough (a little too slippery to eat while hot but delicious when cold), the second time I made the dough as instructed and it turned into stone in the oven. In the end it was nice enough but not outstanding in any way.

Sweet Lemon and Olive Cookies - from New Portuguese Table. These were easy to make, unusual and delicious. I usually hate making desserts from American cookbooks because they're always too sweet for me but these cookies are thin, crisp and combine saltiness and sweetness. The olives are a good balance to the tartness of the lemon. The only reason these didn't make it to the Easter table was because I thought they might be a little controversial for my stepmother. I was right - she'd bought a frozen Black Forest Gateaux. More for me.

Last note, check out this olive oil I got from a Portuguese deli near my office, it's so green and mild. On the boyfriend's insistence we have always bought Spanish olive oil, but this was a steal at £15 for a whole case, so I'm switching allegiances. O fim!

Easter 2012

So let me preface this by saying, too self consciously, that Russian Easter falls later than English Easter so this post is not horribly out of date.
This weekend was spent slaving away in the kitchen to prepare a feast for my brother, dad, his wife and her cousin and wife. Unlike the laughable idea of only giving up chocolate for Lent, the Russian great fast is an exclusion of all animal products. For weeks my family has been lurking around, peering at supermarket shelves with hungry eyes and subsisting on sad little stews and toast with nothing on it, so I wanted to make their return to a balanced diet as decadent as possible.
Or rather as decadent as possible within their every day dietary constraints. My stepmother doesn't eat pork and her cousin's wife is allergic to garlic and onions.
Cooking without onions and garlic is very difficult. Here is what I ended up making:

Borodinsky bread - I've been making this using this recipe for a while and it's never let me down. A delicious malty, rye with coriander. Very difficult to find here, and when you do it's always always stale. My jar of rye starter is about 6 months old now, definitely thinking of writing it into my will.

Olive bread - from Veggiestan. Old friend, so delicious. Should really explore this book further.

French Style bread - from Cookwise. Horrible. I should have listened to Jennifer Reese when she warns (despite her book being called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) that you will never approximate the standards of a professional bakery and should always buy baguettes. But I had to try and fly too close to the sun! You start with fiddling about with the dough for a nice cozy 7 hours. Coaxing it to rise, adding strange things like ice, vitamin C tablets and lentil flour. It dutifully rises, then there about a page of instructions on how to shape it which I tried very hard to follow, but couldn't (I don't blame Cookwise entirely for this, I can barely tie my own shoelaces). And the baking is really the anticlimax of the whole operation. The crust is almost impenetrably hard, the crumb is an off putting opaque hue and it's extraordinarily bland. As a vehicle for canapes it's ok, but I'm convinced that baguette baking is probably not for me.

Seared Beef with Roast Tomato Salsa - from Marie Claire Food and Drink. This is definitely my favorite party food book. All of the recipes are just on the right side of elaborate and on the whole the food I have made from this book so far has been superb. Incidentally I also made the simple architchoke spread canape from the book, topped with black pudding, and then realized that the marinade for the chokes had garlic in it and black pudding contains onion. It was horrible to realise that I was potentially going to make someone sick though my own ignorance. And not to trivialize it, but I'll take a nut allergy over onions and garlic any day. On the side is bean puree with smoked mackerel.

Aspic - this is a family recipe, you take some veal bones and boil them with aromatics for a couple of hours, then strain, pick off the meat and cover it with the liquid which should set into a thick meaty jelly overnight. You have to use veal because it contains a lot more natural gelatine than say ox tail, but if you can't find any just use a could of sheets of gelatine in the stock. I almost ran into trouble with this as well, after a few hours of cooking the stock still tasted a little thin and watery so I reached for a stock cube and only thought to read the ingredients at the last minute. Seriously onions are in everything!

Olivier salad - Every Russian person makes this, it's a heavy, rich, mayonnaise based salad that is also incidentally served in Spanish restaurants under the name of 'Russian Salad'. You boil some potatoes, carrots and eggs, dice and mix with diced gherkins, tinned peas and cubes or mortadella and cover with mayonnaise. So bad and yet so good. Some people also add apples, but I'm not friends with any of those.

Uzska - with a filling of beef and mushroom

Roast Chicken with Fruit and Nut Stuffing - from Rotis. Boning out a leg joint is exactly the kind of laborious, stressful precision work I like. Stuffed with chicken breast, mushrooms, dates, apricots and hazlenuts and rolled in parma ham. This is then roasted on a bed of peppers. Very flavourful, I omitted the onion from the stuffing with no adverse effect

Marrow with caramelized butter and yoghurt with cumin sauce - from Moro East. Sam and Sam Clark promise than anyone who doesn't like marrow will be converted with this reciepe, and they're right! May it's because butter makes everything more delicious, maybe it's the tangy punchy sauce, but this is incredibly good. Still, marrow hatred runs deep and my brother refused to even try it

Pannetone - Gino D'Acampo's recipe from Cook Vegetarian Christmas magazine 2011. I used far too big a tin for this so instead of rising into a puffy bun this spread out and looked and felt like a dense fruitcake. We were all far too full to try it so I actually have no idea how it turned out. All I can say is that it used up the egg yolks left over from the meringues and smelled really nice.

Pashka - from Elena Molokhovets' Gift to Young Housewives. The Russian Mrs Beeton. Pashka means Easter in Russian and it's basically a dome of dairy. You combine ricotta with sour cream butter and sugar (I also threw in some raisins), then weigh down in a muslin lined colander overnight and you get an extraordinarily creamy, and again, tangy, dessert that will hold it's shape on a plate. In olden times they were weighed down in special molds with the cross and XB (which stands for Christ has risen) carved on the inside, so that when you unmold it it's already decorated. After weeks of depriving yourself of dairy this would probably give you all the calcium you missed out on in one go.

Madeleines and Mini Nutty Meringues - from Coffee Time Treats by Jose Marechal. This is a cute little book, I don't usually buy books with less than 100 recipes but this one can stay. Madeleines are very quick and easy to make, these ones are flavoured with orange and lemon zest. And the meringues are surprisingly easy too. The book calls for walnuts but I used pistachios and freeze dried strawberry powder.
Victor and Oksana, the stepmother's cousin and his wife, live in Chamonix and rather hilariously meringues happen to be his favorite snacks but it's impossible to make them at their altitude, so he has to do without. They just disintegrate into puddles on the baking sheet. Beans won't cook either, apparently. Anyway I had not such problems and they came out just fine (here's a recipe for high altitude meringues, cornstarch is apparently the answer)

Mendiants - From Rachel Allen Entertaining at Home. It's the only thing in her book that I wanted to make and even then I didn't want to use her recipe. She instructs you to place a bowl over boiling water,add the chocolate then remove the bowl to allow the residual heat to melt the chocolate. You are then to drip a little of the melted chocolate onto a sheet of parchment paper and stud with whatever you have handy. It's simple, but not technical enough for me. I want to be told that heating chocolate to over 45C will separate the fats and the resulting chocolate will not snap but crumble. I would lie to be informed that you need to cool the chocolate before dripping, as it will not spread evenly into a nice disk if it's too hot. And it would be nice if she suggested sprinkling it with something home made like long strips of candied peel, or crystallized ginger (which is what I did), I also used freeze dried strawberry powder and pistachios.

Miley Cyrus cocktail - I love this drink, it's like a modern day Shirley Temple. Equal parts of tonic water and apple juice with raspberries, fresh or frozen. My dad can't really drink too much but the tonic in this makes it taste like enough of a cocktail without making him self conscious.

Saffron Kulich

Well it's Easter time! And naturally, since I'm Russian, I am making the traditional Orthodox Kulich, which is a kind of cake, I suppose.
To be honest I don't have much of a choice, the recipe is from this publication I picked up at the airport the last time I was in Moscow, ominously titled "Calendar of the Orthodox Housewife: Lenten and Modest Meals for Every Day In Accordance With The Holy Church", it's set out almost like a calendar with one or two recipes for every day. This is not only seasonal and observant of the mandates of Orthodoxy, but also eliminates any indecision and allows you to plan your meals... a year in advance.
Did I mention that my step-grandmother is staying with us for a couple of weeks? Well needless to say everyone is totally psyched with the whole Easter thing so this ended up being a team effort. Here's a story in pictures... and words.
Here's the business, raisins to be soaked in rum (yum) overnight, and this is also my first ever time working with yeast.
The prep work extended into the living room.
The messiest the kitchen has ever been.
This is the one where I almost fell of the chair I was standing on to take the picture. I started helping after that.
The recipe calls for 10 egg yolks, so while the dough was rising for an hour I decided to make meringues.
Mine on the right, my brother's on the left. Mine are obviously better.

Result: OK, so since the prep work took such a long time, and the dough had to be left to rise twice, by the time it was ready for the oven, it was way past midnight. Everyone went to bed, I put in an episode of Gossip Girl, and waited the recommended 40 minutes 'without opening the oven door, or the kulich won't rise'. So what result do you think I got? It was burned, of course!
Burned and hard as a rock on the outside (but cooked really well on the inside, obviously). Here's what it's supposed to look like, by the way
And here's what ours looked like.
Was it entirely my fault? Maybe. Did the whole 'too many chefs in the kitchen' thing have an effect? Possibly. Did I finally rectify the situation but totally buying a delicious substitute from an Italian Deli the next day? Sure, why not.