La Gourmande

Citrus fruits washed and waiting to be made into yogurt cakes

Ready for the Vanilla Grapefruit Cake

In a country that takes food very seriously (is it really a coincidence that the word for "chef" and "boss" are one in the same?), it’s very difficult not to be inspired by the quality of food and ingredients available here. I’ve always liked cooking and been interested in food, but I feel like that interest has really blossomed here in the land where food is classified as one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites. If you haven’t been able to tell from my previous posts, I’ve also fallen in with a group of amazing cooks who like to cook and share that experience with others as much as I do.

Mixing the plain yogurt with blood orange juice

So, I thought I’d share with you some of my most recent culinary ventures…

Batter ready for the pan

Last Monday I hosted the Mangesters chez moi. My, like every other assistant I know, bank account being entirely depleted from my February/March vacation, I opted for a cheap and simple meal, and managed to cook for 10 people for less than 20 euros. To start we had a salad with thinly sliced strawberries and disks of goat cheese, and a vinaigrette. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this already, but the French have this incredibly correct notion that salad dressing doesn’t need anything besides oil, vinegar, a dollop of spicy mustard and salt and pepper. It comes out a little different every time, but is always really delicious.

Juicing for the Blood Orange Olive Oil cake

For the main dish we had a version of Pasta e Fagioli soup that I adopted from Chow.com I added a little too much pasta, so, if you attempt this dish, always add less than you think, it really soaks up the liquid. And don't forget to add plenty of cheese!

Friday night I went to a Belgian friend’s house where he made us all traditional Belgian waffles in his family’s waffle press. I’ve never seen batter so thick – and they were more like dense cakes that needed jam or some other moist spread, than the fluffy supple ones we’re used to getting at diners at home. 

Sugar blended with grapefruit zest, plain yogurt and eggs

Sunday, after a late night out AND losing an hour because we just changed the clocks forward, I started my day by going to a 2pm brunch at some friends’. Though the extent of my contribution to the meal was stopping for fresh baguettes on the way over, I thought I was worth describing here as it was such a typical Epic French Sunday lunch. We had a salad of mache and roquette with avocado, onion and tomato with the aforementioned vinaigrette. 2 kinds of quiches: mushroom, onion, zucchini and cheese, and tomato, tuna and Dijon mustard. Both really yummy, except that they bought the wrong dough for one of the quiches – a vanilla infused one used for desserts. I guess that’s the risk you run when you do your grocery shopping after a long night out, but it turned out ok. Bread and butter of course. Followed by 2 gorgeous cheeses from the Sunday morning market at St. Aubin, one comte and one vieux comte aged 60 months. Finally, strawberries, chocolate and coffee.

Finished products

What I didn’t contribute to brunch I made up later that day as later that afternoon I cruised my bike over to my friend Lauren’s house (chef from Brooklyn) where we baked all afternoon and into the evening. We’ve both been wanting to try out this traditionally French recipe for yogurt cake for a while now, so we scrounged up what ingredients we had and started brainstorming. With a motley collection of citrus fruits we came up with: a blood orange olive oil cake (adapted from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite food blogs), a vanilla grapefruit yogurt cake, and a lemon yogurt cake.

I stayed until dinner time, and Lauren put together a really nice vegetarian dinner of mache salad, steamed white asparagus, and a tomato, onion, mushroom parsely rice.

Tomorrow we’re bringing our cakes to the Mangesters, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Bisous.

Linz

White asparagus have a much more woody,
fibrous texture than the green variety

Peeling white asparagus - proved to be slightly futile

Recipe for our Blood Orange Olive Oil Cake

Ingredients:

2 blood oranges (We only had one, so if you have more, use ‘em!)

1 cup of sugar

½ cup of plain yogurt

2/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil

1 ¾ cups of flour

1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a medium sized loaf pan.

Zest the 2 blood oranges and using your hands, rub the zest together with the sugar until evenly distributed.

Add the juice of 1 orange to the plain yogurt and mix until smooth. I did not do this (again for lack of oranges), but you can supreme the other orange, taking the flesh away from the skin and pith and cut the segments out of their connective membranes, and stir in the segments later.

Whisk the eggs and olive oil into the yogurt-juice mixture.

In another bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt) and gently stir the mixture into the wet ingredients. This is where you can also fold in the orange segments.

Bake cake for about 50-55 minutes. Let it cool on a rack for 5 minutes before taking it out of the mold to cool at room temperature. Serve plain or with whipped cream or crème fraiche.