Free-Form Peach Mousse

This "recipe" is easy-peasy. You are basically going to make sweetened whipped cream with a bit of liquor and then stir in some peach purée and eat it.

If you want, you can chill it a bit before eating, but this mousse won't really hold up for days. Think more like you make it right before dinner and then eat it right after, or if you are making a single serving for yourself, just chill your ramekin or cup or whatever you are going to eat it out of before you start preparing your dessert. No chilling of the finished product is necessary, especially if you are working with cold ingredients. If you've got a jar of peach purée that you, say, made right after buying peaches at the farmers market, then this takes no time at all. If you don't have one, you should probably go to the farmers market, buy some ripe peaches, and make one. Heck, make more than one and freeze the extra.

This recipe makes one reasonably-sized serving. If you want to go big, as I have lately, multiply everything times 1.5. If you are not single or have a date or a dinner party or a family, multiply times the number of people and maybe add a serving (or more) because some people want big helpings or seconds or what-have-you.

This is based on my recollection of a recipe from what claimed to be a French monastic cookbook based on the principal of seasonal eating. This recipe was pretty much the only thing I made from the book and liked, but as the cookbook cost less than $5 in the basement of the Harvard Book Store, I never felt bad about that. However, in one of my recent moves, I apparently didn't feel like I needed to keep the book either, so when I went to find the recipe a few weeks ago, I realized I must've gotten rid of the cookbook it was in. Oops!

However, as I was sure I remembered the basic ingredients, I decided to tinker till I got something I was happy with. This is it.

I know lots of fruit mousses call for gelatin. This one doesn't—not only because the original didn't, but also because I'm a vegetarian—albeit not the strictest one—but despite my occasional marshmallow, I generally don't eat gelatin because it isn't vegetarian. Besides, this is delicious without it and holds up fine so long as you eat it within a few hours of making it. Why add ingredients you don't need, after all?

Lastly, I encourage you to get crazy and use different sorts of fruit purée. I think a number of stone fruits would work. However, whatever you use should be about the consistency of peach purée and shouldn't have seeds in it. I guess you could strain out the seeds if necessary, or if the texture doesn't bother you, do what makes you happy. Also, you are likely going to have to adjust the sugar based on the sweetness of the fruit you use, so keep that in mind.

(for a single serving)

¼ cup cream

2 tsp confectioners sugar

1 tsp brandy (option, but why wouldn't you?)

3-5 tsp of peach purée (to taste)

1) Add the cream to a mixing bowl. It would be awesome if the bowl were metal and chilled, but it's not necessary. Using a mixer of whatever sort you've got, start mixing the cream on low as you add the sugar bit by bit and the brandy.

2) Once you've added the sugar and brandy, turn the mixer up to high speed until you've got whipped cream. You'll recognize it because the cream will hold its shape. Don't over mix, or you'll end up with sweetened alcoholic butter, and I'm not really sure what that's useful for. (Perhaps you could make a cake with it.)

3) Once you've got whipped cream, gently fold in the peach purée and spoon into ramekins or tea cups or whatever you plan to serve the mouse from and cover it and put it in the fridge till you are ready to eat it.

Baking Saturday for a Week of Good Eats

I’ve just started a new job—well, two new jobs, actually.  Both are teaching, and for the next ten weeks, it’s going to be all teaching all the time—well, much of the time.  It’s a bit overwhelming to go from no job to two jobs, but as hard as it is, I can recognize the blessing in it as well.

As a result of all this new work—and anyone who knows a teacher knows there’s so much more work than the time spent in the classroom—I’ve been worried about feeding myself.  When you come home mentally—and sometimes physically—exhausted, the last thing you want to do is cook yourself a meal, which is why last week, I made a noodle dish that would be lunch for a few days, went the The Family Store for some easy lunch and dinner food (Hummus, anyone?), and ordered out.  I can see that making food in quantities that will provide leftovers and going to The Family Store are going to become fixtures in my life, but I want to avoid too much eating outside of the house.

These last few months of being broke have shown me how much cash eating out can eat up.  While I do love eating out when the food is amazing, what tends to happen when you are exhausted is that your standards become lower.  As a result, you end up spending too much money on food that is neither all that tasty nor all that healthy.  Not having the money to do that over the past few months has opened my eyes to what a waste it is on every level.  Though it is more work and though it takes time, cooking at home is a cheaper, healthier, and more delicious option.

To that end, I spent yesterday baking.  I meant to do it last week, but last week was my first with two jobs, and I was too overwhelmed.  Now, anyone who knows me knows how much I loved sweet baked goods.  I sort of cannot live without them, which is why it is lucky that I’m such a good baker.  For my weekly sweets, I made my new go-to, Apple Custardy Squares, as well as banana muffins for a healthy-ish AM snack. 

The Apple Custardy Squares are some Dorrie-Greenspan goodness, and I have made mine the past few times with 2 tbsp. of dark rum and a great mix of apples—Fuji, Mutsu’s Mother, Honeycrisp, and whatever other sweet and juicy apples they have at the farmers market.  When it comes to apples, I’m pretty exclusively a farmers-market girl.  Now, of course, all the apples are apples that have been in storage since last fall, but they have been great so far.  My biggest apple discoveries of late have been the Mutsu’s Mother—a sweet, juicy, almost pear-like apple—and Braeburn—which seems to me the Platonic ideal of apple, a position previously held by the Honeycrisp.  Braeburn has this apply scent that is pretty much what you imagine if some asks you to think of the scent of apples.  It is rocking my world right now.

As for the banana muffins, I followed my own recipe, one I developed after years of using my mom’s shortening-based recipe.  I got tired of the blandness of shortening, but when I used all butter, I found it too overwhelming, so I came up with this happy medium.  However, I am pretty annoyed with myself at the moment.  I’d meant to try browning the ¼ cup of butter I use in the recipe, but I forgot to.  I decided to try this after making Dorrie Greenspan’s Brown-Butter-and-Vanilla-Bean Weekend Cake.  In the batter, the smell and taste of the brown butter was divine, but I’m not totally sure how much of a difference in made in the taste of the finished product.  Still, I meant to give it a try in my master muffin recipe, but in the exhaustion of last night, I totally spaced it.  Oh well!  I guess it just means I’ll have to make muffins again in a week or two.  C’est dommage!  Actually, I plan to try a few ways: first, I’ll just substitute brown butter for the melted butter in the recipe, and if that tastes good, I’ll try again using ½ cup brown butter to replace all the fat.  I’ll let you know how it goes when I do.

Baking Chez Moi is très magnifique!

I know I haven’t posted anything in forever, which is a shame because I’ve been meaning to. I have a kick-ass lentil soup recipe that I’ve been meaning to write down. (The secret is red wine vinegar and French lentils.) Plus, there is my almost-entirely-from-scratch enchilada recipe. (I make everything except the tortillas, though I do have a tortilla press, so maybe one day.) I should actually write those out because I wing them every time.  

However, today, I am all about the Apple Custardy Squares from Baking Chez Moi. If you like apples, these are near perfect food. The recipe can be found here. (Thank you, Boston Globe and Dorrie Greenspan!)

How perfect is this food? Well, I didn’t get a picture because it didn’t cross my mind because it smelled so good I had to cut and eat it immediately, or after the obligatory fifteen-minute waiting period. Since I’ve basically eaten the whole thing myself, it is good that it only makes a small pan, and it’s great that it only requires ingredients you probably have around the house anyway.

The Apple Custardy Squares are the second recipe I’ve tried from Baking Chez Moi, and I just have to say how excited I am about this cookbook. It was one of my two Christmas gifts from my boyfriend, and sadly, it arrived during a period of immense tummy trouble for me. That’s why I tried it out for the first time only two weekends ago.

I did look at it as soon as I opened it, of course, and the recipes had me salivating and planning what to cook. What’s more, I immediately fell in love with the tone of the writing. It feels like Dorrie Greenspan is in your kitchen chatting you up and offering stories and advice. Every recipe comes with helpful info regarding serving and storing, but the most useful feature might be the Bonne Idée, or good idea. Not every recipe has a Bonne Idèe, but when the recipe does, it lives up to the name. The Bonne Idèe typically offers substitutions or additions to the recipe that might be good to try. For the Apple Custardy Squares, for example, she suggests adding some alcohol or almond extract. (I opted for two tablespoons of dark rum, which I had around because it was an optional ingredient in the first recipe I made, the Brown-Butter-and-Vanilla-Bean Weekend Cake. This is a lady who doesn’t mind a little liquor in her baked goods, yet another reason to love her.) She also suggests using pears or a combination of pears of apples or going tropical and using mangoes in the place of apples.

And this pretty much exemplifies what is so fantastic about this cookbook: there’s no dogma here. Greenspan encourages her readers to have fun, experiment, and make the recipes fit their tastes. I love that because it is how I approach cooking and because I think the dogma keeps a lot of people out of the kitchen. When you are scared of doing it wrong, you are less likely to try. Greenspan’s breezy tone and her many Bonnes Idèes make cooking seem less like a rigorous discipline and more like a fun and enjoyable way to feed yourself, your friends, and your family. Of course, yes, there is and can be some rigorous discipline in cooking; some recipes require it if you want them to turn out properly.  However, my idea of perfect in the kitchen is something the cook is happy with and enjoys eating.  Beyond that, I’m not sure there is a right and wrong so much as a good and even better.