Home cooking for family and friends
Weekly posts from Bread’N Butter Kids. Those posts can contain a range of information on a chosen ingredient technique or relate to a piece of actuality.
Madeleines are very versatile biscuits. First, they taste great. Then they are kind of cute. The other advantage is that they take no time to make and that you generally will ave the ingredients at home!
Madeleines can be served on their own for the afternoon snack, or with coffee or tea. I love them, and I am not the only one (tested for you!). They are also perfect for children who come back again and again for a spare one!
The recipe can be found HERE.
And the soup of the day is: the turnip soup!
Yes, from chocolate mousses (last week) to soups, what a change! We can’t eat chocolate all the time as we all know.
What do you think of this little menu: a soup, a small pasta dish and a chocolate mousse. Sounds like a balanced menu to me! Anyway, winter here marks an increase in the amount of soups I prepare. Soups are mega healthy and easy, so no excuse, get the big pot out!
I bought turnips. What? Yes, turnips! For the French followers who may hesitate on the translation, I am speaking of “navets”). I have ever been a fan. What is the story here? Not being a fan, I never buy turnip, except extremely rarely while preparing a large dish of couscous (the whole dish from northern Africa, not just the semolina part). The rarity is that I don’t do couscous very often, good merguez are hard to find and when I do a couscous, I don’t necessarily add turnips. Makes me feel like making a couscous soon. 🙂 I had always had that repulsion to turnip and wanted to give it a second chance. So I decided on a soup. I looked into the fridge, perfect I had some carrots and some fennel.
The above (half of the fennel shown) serve 3 people.
It is very easy getting carried away by adding a lot of vegetables or adding a few items of each sort, but here I should advise against it:
Include some salt to your cooking pot. The photo below is from a different mixed vegetables soup (kale, carrots, potatoes, celeriac branches). Why?
In the choice of vegetables, you can go for a unique vegetables or a mix. When doing a single vegetable soup:
The mix vegetable soup is either a choice or a practicality:
Now, to the question do you need a litre of stock to make a soup, the answer is NO (exception of the onion soup). This is particularly true for the mix vegetable soup, you are basically creating a stock! For the single vegetable soups like cauliflower and pumpkin, if you want to use a good stock, by all means use it. Just watch out for added salts and flavours.
The soups below are blended except if advised otherwise. Single vegetables soups that we make at home are:
Mix veges:
You did read properly “Chocolate Mousses” with a “s” at the end. Yeah!!!
This means we get to speak about a few versions of this hero dish. There is no single recipe for chocolate mousse, the recipe to use depends on the application: is it to be served on its own? or is it to use as a layer in a cake?
I have also ventured into the word of raw and vegan people by trying the raw chocolate mousse in which avocados are used to create the body of the mousse. I even tried the water chocolate mousse from Heston Blumenthal, which was a lot of fun!
Use: dessert in individual portions or in a large bowl to share.
Ingredients: good dark chocolate and eggs ONLY (no sugar, no cream).
Accessibility: super easy to make and always a winner. Needs to be done in advance
I love this one, for me it is “the chocolate mousse”. Mum used to make a large bowl of it for the family and guests.
Use: in proper cooking, it is used as part of a layered cake but you will find it as a stand alone recipe if you google chocolate mousse in Australia (and probably most anglophone countries). When I am served such a mousse in a cafe or restaurant, it is for me a massive let down (and I won’t eat it, not a fan) and generally says much of the restaurant. However, in a layered cake, where it is associated with some more complex flavours, these mousse has its place.
Ingredients: cream whipped and mixed with chocolate powder, cocoa and sugar or at best cooking chocolate.
Accessibility: super easy. Should be done earlier.
I happen to make recently (not for the first time) a mousse which we really like. It is quite strong and is often served with some fruity notes and a crunchy element. This mousse is decadent! It is yummy and you must stop yourself to avoid cleaning off the bowl!
Use: As an element of a dessert. Likened to little chocolate pots desserts. The texture is silky and shiny!
Ingredients: chocolate, eggwhite, water, sugar, thickened cream
Accessibility: super easy. Needs to be done in advance.
Recipe HERE.
Use: dessert or in a raw chocolate tart. Loved by vegan, raw food adepts.
Ingredients: cacao, avocado, liquid sugar/sweetener
Accessibility: super easy. Can be eaten straight away.
I tried the avocado chocolate mousse in order to know what it is all about. I purchased some raw cacao and was lucky enough to do my grocery when there was a special on avocados!
The concept is very simple: put the avocado flesh in the food processor with some raw cocoa and some liquid sweetener and whizz! You can add a little drop of water to reach the desired consistency.
I tried three versions of it:
The recipe is HERE. I pushed it and made some raw tarts (see photo).
Result: the fruity flavours of the cocoa, or maybe the avocado are really the novelty for me. If you don’t use enough cocoa, the avocado taste comes through which is not great. All together, it has a very earthy smell and flavour which is not for everybody. As for the tarts, the texture is very crumbly (just nuts, oil and sweetener), which is no surprise as there are no binder. Both the avo mousse and tarts were not a success in our household.
I had to try it. I saw it on television and just the idea of it grasped my curiosity.
Use: dessert. Experimental, for fun!
Ingredients: Chocolate and water.
Accessibility: needs elbow oil. Serve immediately! (it hardens quickly)
The method is easy, you bring to the boil the water and pour it over your chocolate previously chopped in small pieces. Now start whisking and don’t stop! The whisking will integrate air bubbles while the temperature decreases. Eventually it reaches a crystallisation point. That point is reached all of a sudden. You get some warning as you see and feel the mix thicken, just then, it sets, if you go to far (like I did the first time) you get like a dirt texture which can actually be great for some specific desserts set up.
Tips:
Recipe and video HERE. Feel free to reduce the proportions, I used half of that.
Again a french classic, yoghurt cakes are called gateaux au yahourt in the french cuisine! The reason yogurt cakes are so well loved is these crusty edges and top and the moist inside with that yoghurt taste cake that we recognise closed eyes.
In France, the recipe is based on the volume of a little pot of yoghurt (about 1/2 cup), so it is fun to measure the other ingredients with that container. Elsewhere in the word, yoghurt may not be sold so much in individual portions by default and also the use of measuring cups is not a novelty!
Anyway, for you here, I have added two recipes to this blog and provided the quantities in grams as well.
The cake is generally baked in a round tin, but feel free to use muffin trays like I did.
If you use it for afternoon tea, the cake is great on its own. If you want to serve it for dessert, poach some fruits and serve it with the reduced poaching syrup!
Brussel sprouts are in season in Australia and right now the volume of production is quite big. You can not really miss them in stores or on markets. So read on and maybe you will add them to your next grocery list.
Let me ask you, do you know anything about the production of Brussel Sprouts?
Many of the people I know do not like Brussel Sprouts, maybe because of terrible tin version used in school canteens when they grew up or just because the taste can be quite strong. I will give you a few ways with Brussels Sprouts which work quite well!
Just in passing….check the nutritious qualities of Brussel sprouts: high in vitamins A, B1, B7, very high in vitamins B9), you will find plenty information by googling around. Surprising it has not yet been marketed as a superfood!
Brussel sprouts as their name suggests are associated with Brussel (Bruxelles) in Belgium, where they originate from. The Brussel sprout belongs to the cabbage family and as such its structure is quite similar to it big brother the large green cabbage.
In Europe, the areas of productions of Brussel sprouts are primarily the UK, Belgium, Holland and northern France. Australia has a few small areas of production.
Brussel Sprouts grow along the stem of the plant in a helicoid distribution (it turns around the stem). The stem can be quite high and reach over a metre height, this means quite a lot of sprouts per plant!
The photos below are courtesy of my brother who farms them in Northern France.
The production is labour intensive throughout the crop development. At the start, seedlings are grown in nurseries, then have to be transplanted to full fields. During growth, interventions are rather mechanical. At the time of harvest, each plant is handled manually. Each stem is cut by the harvester then inserted manually into a part of the harvester which cuts off each Brussel sprout from the stem. The sprouts are collected by a conveyor belt, sorted (manually) in the upper section of the harvester. They can then start their journey to the consumer.
There are quite a few ways to use Brussel Sprouts, from raw whole in lunch boxes to cooked a number of way.
Brussel sprouts taste better when associated with other ingredients, they are especially good at absorbing the good flavours of fats such as butter and bacon but also some sharp flavours like balsamic vinegar.
A common use in Australia is the use in Asian dishes such as stir fry dishes or curry. For those, it is nice when there is still a bit of crunch to the Brussel sprouts. I would advice the bigger sprouts be cut in half.
The most common way cooked by my mother when I grew up, was steamed and then slowly, but really slowly, reduced with a nut of butter and some bacon dices (lardons) for quite a while, you want the bacon to be crisp and the sprouts slightly coloured. The sprouts become very soft and melty and quite tasty. I tried with my children, our au-pair and my husband, it was a success. Unfortunately, I forgot about the photo! As a result, the one below photo is from another blogger.
Another way, which was a random find while looking at ways to use ricotta in savoury dishes is in a mushroom and Brussel sprouts lasagna. The sprouts are thinly sliced, then reduced in oil (but I should try in butter), seasoned with salt and pepper. A dash of balsamic vinegar is added to the pan towards the end of the cooking. I could have eaten the lot straight out of the pan!
If you are French or have lived in France, the answer would be yes. For others, you probably have not eaten any Palets Bretons.
I could not resist this recipe. I am not being patriotic just now (no! 🙂 ), this is just that I LOVE those little biscuits and you can’t find them in Australia.
They are very easy to make. The only limitation is that they cannot be placed to cook on a flat sheet as they need support. Turned out that I had a silicone mould for mini-muffin (which I never use normally) just perfect for it!
You can keep them in a cookie box for a couple weeks easily (please not in the fridge, just in an airtight container or cookie box). They are perfect with a cup of tea, with desserts like yogurt or fruit compotes and can even be used for lunch boxes snack.
There are only few ingredients, same as in most cookies: flour, butter (of course, we are speaking Brittany), eggs, sugar and baking powder.
Now I am sure you feel like making them!
Makes the quantity you can see on the above photo.
In a first time, you need to make the dough:
The second part is the cutting and cooking:
How to call a dessert which is no exactly what you intend to do? Lets call this one a chestnut raspberry tiramisu.
I had all these chestnuts I wanted to use. The kids and I got excited and after having eaten a whole bad of them somehow, the second bag was going untouched for a while. This is a classic situation in a family, isn’t it? So I used most of them to make a chestnut puree. I had in mind to do a beautiful chestnut raspberry layered cake. I also had this great pot of mascarpone in the fridge and had been going through the cookbook “80 Authentic Italian Sweet Treats, Cakes and Desserts” by Laura Zavan.
Now, a very important factor, it is very cold in my kitchen at the moment (for those who don’t know, we have been going through renovations). It would have felt like around 5°C when I prepared the dessert wrapped in many layers.
I didn’t know if it would have set overnight but after a few hours, it had not moved and I was running out of time. I placed the dessert in the freezer where it set just on time.
In the end, it was quite good. Next time, if there is one, I would add a little gelatine to the mascarpone.
I had also prepared a backup dessert, a chocolate cake with roasted strawberries. As a result, we had plenty to chose from and a fair amount of left overs. Did you know, some desserts freeze really well? You can have a nice finish to your meal in no time!
My kitchen is being taken over by my children! It started with a menu written by Ambrine a few weeks ago, then a tentative to make a chocolate dip Nutella like which saw the stock of chocolate seriously reduced (I wasn’t home), a tentative to make caramel in the micro-wave (with chocolate, I wasn’t home either), a double serie of strawberry & white chocolate cookies, because the first ones were eaten sooooo quickly. This weekend, we were treated by a full breakfast with coddled eggs. And now a massive bunch of chocolate hazelnut friands for a school assignment.
The latest item was not to be so significant until a few kids at school came together with the idea to bring in their goods to the class. The assignment reads “Masterchef: your masterchef challenge…Bake some cookies for your family. Use photos or a drawing to show how you shared them equally.” It seems like the brief has been adapted to fit the fun of sharing!
So lets share today the strawberry and white chocolate cookies. Children love them (tested for you on a few different families). Personally, I really like them warm, when not completely cooled yet, simply because I am not a big fan of white chocolate. Small warning, it is also quite sweet. What I really like is that the recipe shared the fats between cream cheese and butter, it brings in a really nice taste which works perfectly with strawberries and white chocolate.
Recipe from the blog omgchocolatedesserts adapted for units and technical preferences (more practical, less washing up too!).
Yes, we do, we all love them! They are the crepes!
First, a little note on vocabulary. We will agree here that crepes and pancakes are two very different things. The first will refer to the very thin hot cake, originally from Brittany in western France. The second is the English thick version of the flat hot cake, generally served for breakfast.
A quick look on various website will give you the history of crepes. The word crêpe is French for pancake and is derived from the Latin crispus meaning “curled”. 
Crêpes originated in Brittany (fr. Breton), in the northwest region of France, which lies between the English Channel to the north and the Bay of Biscay to the south. Crêpes were originally called galettes, meaning flat cakes.
Around the 12th century buckwheat was introduced in Brittany from the east. Buckwheat thrived on the desolate and rocky Breton moors and is called “sarrasin” or “blé noir” (black whea
t) due to the dark specs that are often found in it. Buckwheat is one of the plants of the polygonaceae family, which also includes rhubarb and sorrel. It is high in fiber and is an excellent plant source of easily digestive protein and contains all eight essential amino acids. Another benefit is that it is gluten free.
White flour crêpes appeared only at the turn of the 20th century when white wheat flour which formerly had been as expensive as sugar, honey or meat, became affordable. White flour crêpes are as thin as buckwheat crêpes but softer as a result of the eggs, milk, and butter used to make them.
The above is from Monique’s Crepes.
In France, crepes are generally made out of wheat flour. In the southern part of Normandie and in Bretagne (Britany), buckweat is also used to make crepes, there are then called “galettes” and generally served with a savoury fill. Note that buckwheat is gluten free.
Crepes recipes may vary between regions. In the northern and eastern part of France, beer is often included in the batter, it does a great job at lightening the dough and makes very thin and delicious crepes. Also, quite often, the dough does not have any sugar.
If you are making crepes (at home that is), you will need a crepe pan. I have tried in other pans, I can tell you, it is not easy because of the high edges and because your pan must strictly be not sticky and not scratched.
Note that large non-stick (tefal or other) fry-pans are perfect to make galettes as you need them larger and the buckwheat galette is ticker making it easier to handle.
Galettes or savoury crepes are generally filled on demand. The filling is placed on the galette when the galette is turned over while cooking, the filling ingredients are added and the four “corners” of the crepes pulled an folded towards the middle to contain the filling (you end up with a square shape). The basic filling is a full egg, ham and cheese, but there are many variations. Combinations of the following ingredients make a great galette:
You can also use blue cheese (I personally love it in savoury gallettes), green asparagus, smoke salmon, salmon, tomatoes,…the list is endless!
Sweet crepes are delicious when they remain simple! The most simple fillings are:
One crepe recipe which became quite famous is “Crepes Suzettes”, this requires a little more work.
Many of you would have seen crepes filled and then folded in two and then further folded to form a triangle. This is not the case everywhere. In my family, we rolled them, much more fun especially when you are a kid!
The recipe of the galette can be found HERE. This is my adopted recipe.
For the crepes, the recipe is quite different. The recipe below calls for a resting time of 2 hours, if you don’t have that time in front of you, it will also work, the crepes will be thicker. If you have no beer or prefer not to use beer, use water and milk. Crepes are very forgiving in terms of ratios. Careful not using only milk or your crepes will be brittle. If you increase the quantity of eggs, your crepes will be quite thick and filling.
This will easily serve 4 people for dessert. Left overs can be covered and placed in the fridge.
Now 3 MAJOR tips:
Take a guess before looking further down the page, you may be surprised! I was glad to discover this was not all sweet treats!
This is the chocolate and apple tower. Without my help, I was not allowed to watch.
I had to eat it (of course), it was a bit to sweet, definitely a treat. And by the way I did not get to choose the element of the menu!
Keep your cooking stocks please!! Seriously, you would be loosing so much yummyness. Their best use? A risotto for sure!
What stock? For example when you cook mussels, you will end up with a broth, won’t you? Filter it and freeze it. If you cook a casserole, you may end up with some quite tasty sauce. Put it in the fridge, the next day remove the fat that has accumulated and is hard on the top part of the stock and freeze until you need it. If you are more adventurous and cook ham hocks, you MUST keep the stock, trust me this will be amazing (I tried!).
There are plenty types of risottos, the basic tasks are the same: fry a bit your rice, add condiment, garlic, a glass of wine, then your stock and cook slowly. Some chefs would tell you that risottos must be mixed regularly, other will say not to touch it, I think this comes from regional variations. Some risottos will come with tons of cheese (yum), some other have no cheese. There are so many options!
How easy: VERY EASY!
For a basic recipe try this Jamie Oliver basic risotto .
When I started making risottos,
I started with a cherry tomatoes and mozarella risotto from Marcus Wareing.
Vegetarian people as much as non-vegetarian, this is a must do, so good! I made it so many times since, varying things along.
Now, what prompted me to write this post was one made this week using a mussel broth (moules marinieres) and placing a whole fish in it. It took no time. Here you go!
Why not a small pannacotta to finish of a weekday dinner? Why not, indeed.
Pannacottas are rather quick to do, easy (plenty browny points here!!!), you can (have to actually) make them in advance, put them in the fridge an forget about them until serving time.
Why a pannacotta this week? Well, cooking in the evening is becoming a little less amusing as my kitchen has no doors now and the weather has got much much colder suddenly (cold, really cold!). So mid day cooking in lieu of a coffee during a work break (obviously while working at home) is a solution some days.
We (my 7 y.o and myself to be exact) have been following Masterchef (browse through this link, there are a few interesting ideas an recipes). One night was a special Nigella Lawson challenge and include the preparation of a coffee pannacotta. I did not understand why everyone was having a fit to ensure it was perfectly silky, mine always seem to end up that way. The one I really love is a chai tea pannacotta. CLICK CLICK for the recipe. Apparently (according to Masterchef) the test is having a sexy wobble! I remembered that just in time, check the video below. AhAh! I would have preferred serving it with a rhubarb compote (which was ready) but the children insisted to have it with chocolate sauce as in Masterchef.
Another mid-day cooking dish was a pork belly roast. I cook it on top of sliced apple and garlic heads, it is great dish, just have to prepare a few greens and dinner’s ready!
