Cooking for sharing
One of the reason I like cooking is to place the dish in the middle of the table for everyone to share. Of course when you go to a restaurant, you get the dish you selected from the menu. At home, at friends, I love when the dish is put on the table. This may sound obvious to some of you if you haven’t been in countries where plates are plated in the kitchen and brough to the guests.
Our family lives on a small island in the northern part of Sydney. As our children and their friends from next door were all day coming back and forth between the two house, we decided to have a common dinner. Each family brought their dish and, …wahoo, what a feast we had: soup, salmon, flat bread, curry, dal and chocolate cake for dessert!
The soup of the day
The soup of the day was a vegetable soup, a French classic: the potato leek soup. Here you go: one big potato (or 2 small), 1 small leek, 2 carrots, rock salt and water just covering the vegetables. Simmer until cooked then blend.
You can use other vegetables and add a little complexity, this is a base recipe.
The soup can be served on its own or with a teaspoon of creme fraiche. Add an egg or a little fried Haloumi and here is a meal!
Baked Salmon with capers, red onion and chestnuts
I have already posted about that simple method of preparing fish. I enjoy it because it is simple, full of flavours, looks good and results in a very light dish. You will find the recipe HERE.
And for breakfast we had fresh croissants
And for breakfast we had fresh croissants, so did two other families nearby. I hadn’t made croissants for a long long time. It had something to do with not being satisfied of how the flakiness had been. The idea of baking viennoiseries had been in my mind for a few weeks, I had a good ides what I had to improve. I had been making sure to have the right butter available at home just in case I felt like taking the dive. Somehow, my youngest daughter asked for some Saturday morning. Here was the excuse I needed.
When making croissants, it is difficult to make a small quantity because you need a minimum volume of dough for the lamination process (the process that makes those flaky buttery layers). I used a recipe based on dry yeast, this at least was not to be left to good luck. I had been quite unlucky with fresh yeast recently, and anyway, I did not have any.
From 500 g of flour, I got 15 pieces, mostly croissants , a few pains au chocolat and a few torsades (think braids) I made using long strips cut from the sides of the dough when first rolled. I am quite pleased with the result.
The recipe needs a fair documenting with photos which I do not yet have, it is not on my blog for now.
