A summer feast and a gluten-free cookie

The other night, Jacques and I invited our friend Bethany over for a meal celebrating summer. It was really fantastic. Jacques chose all of the recipes from the great cookbook I bought him last Christmas – Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan. This book is a keeper. Everything we’ve made from it so far is really wonderful.

We went to the farmers’ market in the morning to collect our ingredients for the meal – eggs, bacon, green beans, tomatoes, rhubarb, and a delicious rhubarb wine. This time of year at the market is magical – the stands are overflowing with an abundance of beautiful vegetables and fruit. I particularly can’t resist buying a ton of fruit. This week we brought home peaches, cherries and little golden plums that we are enjoying. So far I’ve turned some of them into smoothies and popsicles.

We cooked four courses. The appetizer was a chickpea flour flatbread from Nice called Socca, and the main course was a deconstructed BLT salad with hard-boiled eggs. We did a cheese course of cheesy creme brulee with green beans, and dessert (which I forgot to photograph) was a salted buttery shortbread with roasted rhubarb.

Thinking back on this meal, I wish I could eat everything all over again. It was sublime. I think our favourite was the salad, which was outstanding. Arugula, crispy bacon, homemade croutons, juicy cherry tomatoes, topped with hard-boiled eggs, those topped with dollops of homemade mayonnaise. The blend of flavours and textures all came together into bitefuls of fresh summer flavour. Making your own mayonnaise makes all the difference. It is so, so good, and so easy.

The cheesy creme brulee is ingenious, salty and delicious, and also very easy to make. And I was stunned by how amazing the roasted rhubarb was. It breaks down into s silky tangle of tangy but sweet fruit. I think I’ll be roasting rhubarb lots more from now on.

The cookies is called a salted butter break-up, and it’s basically a large shortbread cookie that you bake in one piece and then take to the table for people to break off their own hunks. It has French grey salt in it, which gives a wonderful granular crunch of salt along with the sweetness. It easily converted to gluten-free, which was wonderful. You can see my recipe below.

None of the food on this menu screams “French” to me, except maybe the creme brulee. That’s the great thing about this cookbook. The recipes are incredibly diverse and mostly uncomplicated, including a delicious Vietnamese chicken soup and a fantastically rich cauliflower bacon gratin. And Dorie Greenspan is an exacting recipe writer, giving you precise instructions, telling you what you can make in advance, and including lots of variations on each recipe. There are so many more we’d like to try.

Lucie hung out with us on the balcony in her bouncy chair and on her activity mat, enjoying the fresh air. So far she is proving to be very amenable to most of our plans, and she is a great sleeper. Now that there is a baby in our lives, I’m sure we’ll be spending even more time at home cooking, and inviting friends over to share the meal.

Gluten-free Salted Butter Break-Ups
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table

Dorie tells us this recipe is traditional in the Poitou region of France, where butter is prized. If you can’t find sel gris (grey salt), which is slightly moist, grey salt, you can use another coarse salt. We bought a bag of sel gris at the Italian Centre, and it was delicious in these cookies.

127 g/4.5 oz tapioca starch
42 g/1.5 oz sweet rice flour
42 g/1.5 oz sorghum flour
3/4 – 1 tsp. sel gris
127 g/4.5 oz cold unsalted butter, cut into 18 pieces
3 to 5 tablespoons cold water
1 egg yolk, for the glaze

Mix together the starch and the flours and the salt in a medium bowl. Add the butter, and cut it into the flours using a pastry cutter. The mixture should end up looking like coarse meal, with some pea-sized chunks of butter and some smaller flakes. Add the water one tablespoon at a time and mix together with a wooden spoon. After a few tablespoons, start mixing with your hands so you can feel when the dough starts to come together. It should be fairly sticky and malleable, and almost form a ball.

Scrape the dough onto a work surface, form it into a square, and pat it down. Wrap the dough in a large square of plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for at least one hour. Dorie tells us the dough can be refrigerated for three days or frozen for two months.

When you’re ready to bake, centre a rack in the oven and preheat it to 350. Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

Remove the dough from the fridge, and, if it’s very hard, bash it a few times with your rolling pin to soften it. Put the dough between sheets of plastic wrap or waxed paper and roll it out to about a 1/4 inch thickness, about 5 by 11 inches. It doesn’t have to be an exact rectangle. Transfer the dough to the baking sheet.

Beat the egg yolk with a few drops of cold water and, using a pastry brush, paint the top of the dough with the egg glaze. Dorie’s recipe asks you to then score the dough in a crosshatch pattern. I tried this, but it doesn’t seem to stay scored in the oven with the GF dough, and doesn’t look great when it comes out, so I wouldn’t bother.

Bake the cookie for 30 to 40 minutes. In our oven, 35 minutes was perfect. It should be golden and firm to the touch, but have a little spring when pressed in the centre. Transfer the baking sheet to a rack and allow the cookie to cool to room temperature.

Serve whole and allow your guests to break pieces off. It will be messy but fun!

Introducing Lucie!

Here is our daughter Lucie when she was one day old. Hard to believe that day, May 27, is more than two months ago. Having a baby sure does change a lot of things. Including blogging frequency!

Here is Lucie again last week, when she was 9 weeks old. Jacques and I think she is pretty awesome.

More food posts to come. I really miss writing here and I’m hoping to do it more soon. Once life got a little bit back to normal Lucie and I started doing some traveling around Alberta with Jacques, who is touring in a play this summer. I want to write a bit about some of the food I ate, and about a magnificent meal we made the other night. Here’s to summer!

Watermelon Ginger Popsicles

The weather in Edmonton has been absolutely lovely. It really couldn’t have been more perfect for the three weeks of my mini waiting-for-baby vacation. We’re still not sure how long this vacation will last. The baby is due tomorrow, but who knows when it will actually decide to show up? We’re hoping sooner rather than later. We’re so excited to meet it!

I’ve been spending lots of time outdoors, walking to and from various errands and sitting on the balcony soaking up the sun. I was telling J the other day that it’s amazing how much Edmonton transforms itself at this time of year. All of sudden green is everywhere you look – vibrant, pulsating green. We live right near the river valley, and it becomes a haven of greenery, the complete opposite of the brown and white we see most of the year. I love all the flowers covering the tree branches right now – to me, it’s one of the most beautiful sights in this climate. The air is so fragrant. It’s wonderful.

I’ve also been spending a lot of my free time in the kitchen, and with the warm weather, thoughts turned to summer treats like homemade popsicles. They are so easy to make, and there are so many delicious combinations. I’m inspired by a brilliant cookbook I have about Mexican popsicles, called paletas, written by Fany Gerson. She runs a paleta business in New York City. The book is beautiful and filled with recipes for all kinds of various popsicles, shaved ices, and aguas frescas. My first batch was grapefruit popsicles, which were fantastic. A blend of fresh grapefruit juice and simple syrup, they had a perfect tartness.

These watermelon popsicles were an inspiration from J. I bought a big watermelon on sale at the grocery store earlier this week and was planning to turn some of it into popsicles, using the recipe in Fany’s book. I also made ginger syrup this week, and J suggested combining the two. They turned out great. So refreshing from the watermelon, and the ginger adds a really nice little kick. J said the ginger came through as an aroma for him. I made my ginger syrup really strong and spicy, but feel free to play it down if you like. Know, however, that if you make it too weak you might not taste ginger in the popsicles at all.

You could also easily make these with a plain simple syrup, as the original recipe suggests. If you’re a fan of popsicles and other frozen treats I highly recommend this book. Most recipes look very easy and take advantage of summer’s bounty. There are a few Mexican ingredients that might be hard to find, but that could be a fun challenge too (depending on where you live).

Watermelon Ginger Popsicles

1/2 cup ginger syrup (recipe follows)
1.5 pounds peeled and diced watermelon (about 4 cups)
1 Tablespoon lime juice

Put the watermelon in a blender (I actually used an immersion blender) and blend until smooth. Add the syrup and lime juice and mix again until blended.

Pour into your popsicle molds and freeze until solid.

Makes about ten 2.5 oz-popsicles (the mold in the first picture above is a smaller one – I used two different-sized molds. )

To make the ginger syrup:

2 cups chopped ginger (from a few large hunks fresh ginger root)
4.5 cups water
1.5 cups sugar

These amounts will make about 2 cups very strong, spicy, not very sweet ginger syrup. If you don’t want it so spicy, use less ginger or more sugar. It’s great to have on hand to add to water or mixed drinks, but you only need 1/2 cup for the popsicles.

The ginger should be chopped into small pieces. Put it into a pot with the sugar and water and bring to a boil so the sugar dissolves. Simmer for about 30 minutes so the ginger flavour infuses the water. The longer you let it simmer, the stronger it gets. Let cool, strain the ginger and pour the syrup into a jar or bottle.

Gluten-free Eats at “Truck Stop”

The words “truck stop” bring to mind the Irving gas station in Aulac, New Brunswick. It’s a traditional stopping-place on the drive between Halifax, NS, and PEI, a drive my family made many times during my childhood and one I later made many times on my own.

I believe the gas station/restaurant combo in Aulac is officially called a “big stop”, but there were always many long-haul semi-trailers parked there when you pulled in, drawn by the enormous and super-high Irving sign beckoning you off the highway just past the NB border.

We rarely ate in the restaurant in Aulac, usually pulling in just to gas up, go for a pee break, and grab some road trip snacks. But as soon as you walk in the door to the convenience store and restaurant, you’re greeted by a tall glass case filled with mile-high cakes and pies, topped with clouds of puffy meringue or frosted with drifts of white curlicues. Strangely, even when we did eat at the diner, I don’t remember ever tasting one of those concoctions.

The truck stop I attended yesterday was of an entirely different nature. It involved food trucks rather than semi-trailers. These truck stops are organized by two local foodies, Sharon Yeo and Mack Male, the team behind last summer’s super-popular What the Truck?! festivals. This season they’ve expanded and teamed up with the Old Strathcona Business Association here in Edmonton to offer smaller, weekly food truck events throughout the month of May. The larger festivals will return this summer.

I think Sharon and Mack have done an awesome job capitalizing on the burgeoning food truck scene here in Edmonton, making more people aware of these trucks, and giving the truck owners a chance to meet and serve new customers.

I was especially excited about the event when I saw the menu posted online. It’s not always easy to find gluten-free options at food trucks (there are usually lots of sandwiches), but Molly’s Eats was offering an almost entirely GF menu. Checking back to the May 3 event, Molly’s had some delicious-sounding GF items then too. Go Molly! My friend Kathryn, who also eats GF, and I were pumped to try the food.

The truck stops are held at Wilbert McIntyre Park, right next to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market just off Whyte Ave. It’s a great location, with plenty of room for people to line up and benches to sit and eat. Though it was a chilly evening on Thursday, there was a pretty good turnout, and when the sun shone it wasn’t too cold. I’m sure the event would attract even more people in really nice weather.

Kathryn and I both ordered the spicy tomato seafood soup ($6.50 for a small), and I also tried the hush puppies ($5) while she went for the fries duo ($5). At the last minute I decided to splurge on a chocolate sandwich cookie ($4). They looked divine.

After a 10-minute wait, our food came out and we went to sit on a bench to eat. The soup was delicious, with just the right amount of spice and several tiny shrimp. I expected more visible clams and crab, but I think they were chopped up quite finely. The hush puppies had a great texture, crunchy without being greasy, though they were a little bland in spite of the green onions, bacon and cheese. They came with a tiny cup of pesto, which helped amp up the flavour of the balls of dough. Kathryn’s fries were good, though some were soggy instead of crispy.

My favourite item was the sandwich cookie. Just the right amount of chocolatey sweetness, with a perfectly firm, chewy texture. The filling was a white chocolate ganache, but I thought I tasted mint, which I love. I haven’t yet been able to make a GF cookie like this and I really wish I could.

By the time we finished eating my hands were freezing and despite the sun, it was pretty cold. So we retreated to a cafe for tea for the rest of the evening.

It was a great outing, more of the kind I’ve been enjoying with all my free time lately. If this baby hasn’t popped out by next Thursday I may go to the truck stop again! Check out the schedule here – there is some change in which trucks are there from week to week.