Paris, crêpes, and Mary

The family and I went to Paris to start out our summer vacation this year.  It was really fun to see Paris through the kids' eyes and to have an excuse to be a tourist.  The kids loved the Louvre and Eiffel Tower and even wanted to climb up the Arc de Triomph. They were unimpressed with the beauty of the avenues and prefered to sleep in taxis rather than admire the view.  They did not want to sit in a cafe all day (what?!) but loved the food markets, fresh crusty baguettes and eating Vietnamese pho noodles for the first time.  And as all good tourists do, we had several crêpes for snacks in between seeing sites. 

Which led us to understand that we really needed a râteau en bois to take home.  Yes, that's right.  A 

wooden crêpe batter spreader thingy. The ultimate Paris souvenir. You heard it here first folks!

Mary and I cooking together.

So, today we tried making crêpe with our rateau.  The recipe I use now is from my friend Mary, so I always think of her whenever I make crêpes.  Mary was an amazing cook and the last time I saw her, we made a huge pile of crêpes together for a party.  We made the crêpes in advance during the day.  To serve, we just reheated them in the oven, wrapped in foil.  We had a big bowl of whipped cream, another huge bowl of berries, and some chocolate sauce. Guests filled their own crêpe and we had a long line of very happy customers.  I am so privileged that my last memory of Mary was such a happy one, full of laughter and good food.  I think Mary would have approved of the râteau.  She probably would have been better at using it than me!

To be honest, it wasn't that much easier to use the râteau than to just swirl the batter in the pan. It takes a light touch on the rateau not to tear the delicate batter and it took a few tries before we managed to make a good looking crêpe.  The main thing that is better with the râteau is that you don't have to be in such a hurry, like you do when you swirl the batter.  In fact, you need to wait a few seconds after you have poured in the batter before you spread it with the râteau. So the process is a bit calmer.  Whether you decide to swirl or use a râteau, the crêpes will taste good all the same!

You can put almost anything on your crêpes.  My personal favorite is the simplest, just a sprinkle of sugar and lemon onto the hot crepe.

Mary's Crêpe Recipe

Makes  about 10 crêpes:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tbsp sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup milk

1/3 cup water

3 eggs

3 tbsps butter, melted

1.       Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor and process briefly.

2.       With the motor running, add the milk, water, and eggs,  through the feed tube.  Process until smooth.  Alternatively, you can beat the batter with a whisk by hand.

3. Pour the batter into a bowl and then add the melted butter slowly, whisking all the time.

3.       Heat a heavy 7-inch nonstick skillet (mine is a 9-inch) until quite hot.  Pour in 3 tbsps (I use a 1/4 cup) of the batter, then quickly tilt the pan so the batter spreads evenly, forming a crepe.  

4.  If using a râteau, pour in the batter in the center of the pan.  Wait a few seconds and then gently use the rateau to swirl the batter around to the edges of the pan.

5. Cook until lightly brown, 30 to 45 seconds; then turn and cook another 15 seconds.

6.       Repeat, using up all the batter.  As you finish the crêpe, stack them between sheets of waxed paper to prevent them from sticking or serve them at once, hot from the pan.  If making crêpes for later, wrap the stacked crêpes in plastic wrap.  They will keep in the refrigerator for 2 days.  To re-heat, simply wrap them in foil and heat them in the oven. 

Swedish Oatmeal Cookies (Havrekakor)

This is a family favorite and a quintessential Swedish cookie.  They have become a specialty of my son Oscar who made his first pocket money by baking a few batches, packing them into little bags and selling them around the neighborhood on his bicycle.

They are simple to make and irresistible, being neither too rich nor too sweet.  Unlike American oatmeal cookies, these are light and crunchy.  A batch of these cookies are easily eaten in a day, okay, in an hour, by my family!

About 40 small cookies

250 grams butter

3 dl sugar

1 egg

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 ½ dl oatmeal

2 dl raisins

5 dl flour

Heat the oven to 200 C or 400F .  
Cream the butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until it is light and fluffy.  Add the eggs and the baking powder and continue to mix a further two minutes.  Add in the flour and sugar bit by bit until it is just combined.  Finally, add the raisins and oatmeal and combine with a wooden spoon. 

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and measure out heaping teaspoons of dough, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie to allow them to spread.  Bake in the oven for about 8 minutes until golden.

Yotam Ottolenghi's Amazing Hummus

If you have not taken a look at Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook, I highly reccomend that you do. Ottolenghi is a Israeli chef who has several restaurants in London.  His gorgeous cookbook is full of beautiful vibrant salads, vegetables and other amazing dishes that I want to eat every day.  I have been making his hummus and it is by far the best hummus that I have ever tasted. It is silky smooth, light and fluffy, with a gorgeous balance of chickpea flavor and tahini, tempered by a bit of lemon juice and garlic.

I like to eat it on the day that I make it warm, topped with fried bits of lamb. The leftover hummus is great the next day, cold smeared onto bread or slices of cucumber, carrot and celery.

There are two tricks that make this hummus great.  The first is that the chickpeas are cooked with a bit of baking soda.  The baking soda allows the chickpeas to cook a bit faster, but more importantly breaks down the outside shell of the chickpea.   The second trick is slightly overcook the chickpeas until they mush easily between your two fingers. Doing this results in a super smooth, silky and almost fluffy texture.  Trust me, when I say that you have never had hummus this good!

This recipe is for a purist hummus with just garlic, tahini and lemon juice as a flavoring.  You can jazz it up by adding some cumin or adding more tahini to taste.

Ottolenghi's Hummus, as interpreted by me

250 grams dried chickpeas
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 to 1 cup tahini
4 tablespoons lemon juice (about a half of a large juicy lemon)
4 garlic cloves, peeled
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons ice cold water

The night before you want to make the hummus, put the dried chickpeas in a bowl and cover with plenty of water and let the beans soak over night.

The next day, drain the chickpeas. Put a large pot on the stove on high heat.  Pour in the drained chickpeas and the baking soda.  Stir for about 3 minutes.  You will see that skins of the chickpeas start to disintegrate a bit and a film will form on the bottom of the pot.  Pour in 1.5 liters water and bring to a boil. Skim off the foam periodically. Cook the chickpeas for 20 to 30 minutes until they are very tender and can be mushed easily between two fingers.  Drain the peas.

Pour the chickpeas into a food processor and process until the peas are smooth.  Add in the tahini, salt, lemon juice, and the garlic (pressed through a garlic press).  Process until combined.  Taste teh hummus and adjust the salt and tahini to your liking. With the motor on, add the cold water, one tablespoon at a time.

Serve warm or cold with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of zatar spice, which adds a lemony bite as well as a gorgeous red color.  Some toasted pine nuts also taste wonderful on top.

I like to serve it as dinner with bits of lamb on top to smear over pita or a flat bread:

500 grams boneless lamb chop
1 teaspoon cumin
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon peppar
chopped parsley
a sprinkle of zatar
olive oil for frying

Cut the lamb into small bite size pieces.  Sprinkle with the salt, cumin, peppar and lemon juice.

Put a frying pan on the stove, preferably cast iron, onto the hottest heat.  Add a generous dollop of olive oil.  Fry the lamb, in two or three batches, until it is nicely browned, a few minutes on each side.

To serve, smear a generous amount of hummus on a platter.  Heap the lamb in the center, sprinkle with parsley, a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and dust it with the zatar.

Serve with sliced cucumber and flat bread.

Quintessential Mac and Cheese

Gustaf and I decided to walk the perimeter of Sodermalm a couple of weeks ago, stopping at the Hornstull Marknad for sustenance along the way.  This market is a great place to try out the latest food trucks, including some of my favorites including burritos at The Good Gringo, sliders at Flippin Burgers, and crepes at Bon Coin. On this occassion, there was a lovely couple with a table set up serving macaroni and cheese.  It was such an unlikely thing to find at a Swedish market, we had to try it.  And it was wonderful.  Really wonderful.  Cheesy and creamy but not too rich.  It had a bread crumb topping and to top it all off, they drizzled it with some truffle oil and put some grated truffled cheese on top.  It made us very happy.  So happy, that I was a bit annoyed. OK, really annoyed. Up to this point, I had felt that I made a pretty good mac and cheese.  But this mac and cheese blew mine away.  Clearly I had to up my game.

On our walk, Gustaf and I discussed the qualities that made this mac and cheese wonderful. We decided that the following items were key:
1) The pasta needed to be cooked slightly past al dente.  Not mushy but yielding.
2) For crunch, buttery toasted bread crumbs for a topping
3) The cheese sauce needed to be silky and rich tasting but still mild with a good mouth feel. How would we achieve this?  I have always used a good quality aged cheddar for my sauce.  But in fact, cheddar is not a great melting cheese.  It has a grainy quality that keeps the sauce from being silky.  Finally, we decided that if we used a combination of aged cheddar, parmesan, and plain trashy American cheese, we might hit the right flavor and mouth feel.

Here is how we did it:

Serves 4 to 6 persons

Bread crumb topping:
3 to 4 slices white bread
25 grams butter
1/4 teaspoon dried herbs (like rosemary or thyme) or 1/2 teaspoon finely minced fresh herb
a pinch of salt

Cheese Sauce:
50 grams butter
5 tablespoons flour
3/4 liters milk
250 grams grated cheddar
100 grams grated parmesan
5 slices American cheese
1/2 teaspoon dijon mustard
salt and peppar to taste

500 grams pasta
Truffle oil, for an optional garnish

Make the toasted crumbs:
Prepare the crumbs by putting the bread in a food processor and blitzing until you have fine crumbs.  Mix the bread crumbs and herbs and salt together.  You can toast the crumbs in the oven or in a pan on the stove.
For on the stove:  Put the butter in the pan, with the heat turned up high.  When the butter is melted, add the breadcrumb mixture and toss until the crumbs are coated with butter.  Stir the bread crumbs in the pan until they are lightly browned and toasted.
In the oven:  Melt the butter in the microwave or in a small pan on the stove and toss the butter, breadcrumbs, salt, and herbs together until all the crumbs are coated in butter.  Pour the mixture onto a baking sheet and put in the oven at the highest heat or with the broiler/grill on.  Cook, stiring occasionally, until the crumbs are a golden brown, making sure you keep a close eye so that they don't work.
Set the crumbs aside to cool.

Cook the pasta:
Put a big pot of water to boil.  When the water comes to a boil, add a generous amount of salt and the pasta.  Bring the water back to a boil and cook it for the time as directed on the pasta box.  Taste the pasta and cook it one to two minutes longer, so that it is slightly past the al dente stage.  Drain, the pasta, reserving a cup of the pasta water, in case you want to thin the pasta sauce.

Making the cheese sauce:
While the pasta is cooking, you can make the sauce.  First grate all the cheeses and set aside.

With a pot on medium heat, melt the butter.  Add the flour to the butter and stir until combined.  Continue stirring for a few minutes. Add the milk and stir quickly with a whisk to get out the lumps. As you add the milk, the sauce will thicken quickly.  Just keep stirring. Don't worry if the sauce seems a bit grainy.  As you continue to stir, the sauce will become smoother.  Continue stirring until the milk comes to a boil and thickens.  I alternate between a whisk to keep the sauce smooth and a spoon to scrape the bottom of the pan.

Once the sauce starts to boil, turn down the heat to low and add the cheeses, a pinch of salt and mustard.  Whisk until the cheeses are melted.  Taste and adjust the salt and add a bit of pepper.

Pour the cheese sauce over the pasta and mix until all the pasta is coated.  If the sauce seems to thick for your taste, then it with a bit of the preserved pasta water.

To serve, scoop out some of the mac and cheese into a bowl. Sprinkle with truffle oil, if desired.  Sprinkle on a generous portion of buttered crumbs.  Eat while hot.