Not Exactly French "Biscuits"

Beese-kwee? No, these are plain old American cookies, but they did come out of my tiny "Paris" kitchen. A helpful trick when space is limited is spreading a project over a couple of days, mixing one evening and baking the next.

I made a double recipe of basic refrigerator cookie dough and played variations on it from there, with prepared, rolls of dough kept cool overnight on the enclosed front porch, along with a bowl of oatmeal-cherry dough. (Organic Michigan dried cherries in place of raisins make any recipe calling for raisins more special.)

Inherent dangers of a small kitchen cannot, however, be denied. Moving in and out with trays of cookies, it's easy to bump the oven control knob. How could one tray have burned -- and so quickly? Oh, too much heat.

The overdone cookies were not good enough to take to Northport, but not too burned to eat at home. A few deformed pinwheels didn't make it into the decorated tin going to the bookstore, either, and here they are (below) on our dining table next to a falling-apart paperback book -- another little orphan staying home with me -- not rejected but special, i.e., slated for home consumption.

Last but not least: presentation! A big, old, beautifully decorated cookie tin from Germany held all the cookies I made and would have held more. They'll keep well in the tin, also. I wouldn't have minded a tin from France, but the German one found me and worked out fine.

American Holiday Tradition (with a Twist at the End)

Wall at end of my Paris kitchen

Is there anything that sings of holidays more cheerfully and invitingly than food, especially the aroma of spices? Thanksgiving ushers in pumpkin pie season. And since it is a day largely given over to kitchen and dining room, it gave me an opportunity to get around, finally, to documenting something for this poor, neglected blog. 

My friend Laura, who was first my Thanksgiving guest (in 1970 in Traverse City; she roasted a duck in Lansing for our holiday the following year) was bringing cranberries, squash, and Brussel sprouts, so my responsibilities were limited to snacks, bird, stuffing, and dessert, and the consequent absence of stress presented me with another opportunity, that of making my pumpkin pie entirely from scratch. Beginning with a nice little organic pie pumpkin from Oryana (not, please, a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin from Halloween! and if you ever tried that in your younger days, you know the disaster that ensues), a whole pumpkin rather than canned, makes for a longer process but yields benefits, too, first being the seeds.

Scoop out the seeds from the cooked pumpkin, clean them, dry them in a low oven, toss with olive oil and curry powder, and give them another turn in the oven. Check and stir, as necessary. (I set the temperature at 200 but can’t give you a precise time.) You will not believe how yummy they are: packaged dry snacking pumpkin seeds from the convenience store are not even from the same taste planet.

I should have noted earlier that you probably want to roast your whole pumpkin the night before, at a somewhat higher temperature than you’ll use in the morning for the seeds. Prick it with a knife in several places and slide it in at 300 or slightly higher (not over 350). It can cool overnight, and you can get up early to remove the “meat” and steam it until tender enough to mash. Or do that the night before, also, depending on your schedule.

Making piecrust from scratch does not require an advanced degree. It takes time and can be messy, but you need no fancy ingredients, and making your own crust delivers a delicious sense of accomplishment. Just remember to (1) keep your ingredients cold and (2) handle the dough as little as possible. When my mother was a bride, she refrigerated her flour and shortening ahead of time. You don’t need to go that far, but a couple of ice cubes in the water won’t hurt the process.

Don’t have a pastry cutter? I have never had one, and I’ve gotten so good with the two-knives method over the years that I wouldn’t take a pastry cutter now as a gift. Remember, don’t overwork the dough, and keep your warm hands off it! You want a flaky crust. Body heat melts the shortening before the pie gets to the oven, and that ruins pastry.

A rolling pin does not produce a perfect circle of pie dough. An approximation is all that’s necessary. If you need to piece the edge together here and there, a finger dipped in that ice water will aid in smoothing the repair(s).

Patch at edge of crust

One kitchen tool worth the trouble of finding space for, in the tiniest of Paris kitchens, is a second coffee grinder. It’s perfect for grinding whole cloves and such, and since you won’t be using it on a daily basis, it can be tucked away in the back of a cupboard. 

When you do need it, you’ll be glad it’s there.

My dear little hand-held Cuisinart mixer, I must admit, did not take all the lumps and strings out of the cooked pumpkin, and I had to resort to a blender. The blender, however, worked perfectly.

Tantalizing aroma of curried pumpkin seeds and fresh-ground cloves fills the house. It’s Thanksgiving! And there’s more mashed cooked pumpkin in the freezer for a soup sometime in the near future. I’m already looking forward to coconut milk, fresh garlic, fresh ginger and turmeric for that kitchen project.

One little pumpkin goes a long way, in a Paris kitchen or elsewhere. I highly recommend it.

A View Into the Kitchen, a Breakfast Casserole, and a Company Dessert

The kitchen in our old farmhouse is very small. In the photograph above, you are looking through the doorway (there's no room for a door) into the kitchen. Three or four steps, depending on the length of your stride, would take you from the sill to the back wall, and from side to side, there's no need to take steps -- just turn from sink to stove. Because it is so small, I call it my Paris kitchen, and I've written on my main blog, Books in Northport, about how I started calling it that.

There's no dishwasher in my (Up North Michigan) Paris kitchen and no window to look through during my dishwashing meditations. When I'm outdoors, I'm outdoors. When I'm washing dishes, I'm washing dishes. Or looking up at pictures of different breeds of chickens and dreaming of having live ones outdoors....

Despite the modest size of the kitchen, I finally treated myself to new appliances in 2015. Our brand-new refrigerator has a separate door for the freezer! The brand-new stove has a working oven! My new kitchen appliances are larger and more modern than the ones Julia Child had in Paris, and I'm no Julia Child, so they are all I need for the rest of my life.

The package on the counter above -- can you see it? -- is organic bacon from "the meat lady" at our summer farmers market. Below is the same bacon sizzling in a pan, and beneath that is the breakfast casserole I put together on Sunday morning for my visiting mother and sisters. 

Sadly, I completely forgot to photograph the casserole when it came out of the oven. Sorry!

David often asks me, when I bring dinner to the table, "Did you take a picture of that?" and I wave away the suggestion. During my family's recent visit, however, following a recipe from Jayne Robinson's The Cake Chronicles, I thought photographing my attempt at different stages might not be a bad idea -- and, in fact, I had done so last year, when making another recipe from the book, and when I became convinced that I needed an electric mixer: my fresh tomato cake last year, batter beaten by hand, while delicious, was just not as light as a cake should be. 

For this year's family reunion dessert, I decided to make what Jayne Robinson calls a Michigan sour cherry pudding cake. My mother and sisters and I agreed that we would call it a Michigan sour cherry custard cake, as the milk and cream and eggs deliver a texture and flavor more like custard than either pudding or cake. French Regional Cooking, by Jean Ferniot, another book I consulted, gives the alternate English/American name as cherry flan. The cherries I used were organic Balatons, and I pitted them hastily before freezing, racing the fruit flies, which explains the appearance of the dessert, both in process and in finished form.

Tart cherries distributed over half the batter in pie pan

Remaining batter poured gently over

Finished dessert, out of the oven

My cookbook of French regional recipes calls this by its traditional French name, clafoutis. It's a specialty of the Massif Central region of France, where I fell in love with the old province of Auvergne, though this recipe comes from the Limousin. Both Jayne's recipe and the French cookbook recipe call for 1/4 cup of heavy cream, but then Jayne uses 3/4 cup of milk and three eggs, while the French leave out the milk entirely and use eight (8) eggs.

French cookbook shows clafoutis made with unpitted cherries

But I did it Jayne's way, and that was a sufficient number of eggs for us. It also let me use whole milk from Shetler's Dairy. The great thing -- a bonus -- about needing heavy cream for the batter was having the remainder to whip for dessert topping. As for the hard stuff, French Regional Cooking called for kirsch, The Cake Chronicles for cognac, but I used Redbreast, because it's what I had on hand, left from a sister visit in August.

The cherries were pitted a few weeks back on my front porch, and my family and I enjoyed our dessert this past weekend on the front porch, but the dessert itself came out of my own little Paris kitchen. It tasted even better than it looked.