Vegetables with Cheese Sauce

As promised in my previous post, here's the second recipe with fresh asparagus. If you ask me which one I liked most I'll answer that the two recipes are very good. This one has a stronger flavor sauce, which combined very well with the vegetables used, but the asparagus kind of disappeared in the middle of everything. It is perfectly possible to make this dish with other vegetables and keep your asparagus for other productions.

On the other hand the first recipe, Asparagus with Orange, presented more delicate flavors, and the sweet-acid flavour of the orange was a great match with the asparagus. So if what you want, like me, is to enjoy the full taste of asparagus, my vote goes to this first recipe.

Enough talk! Let me write down this recipe

Vegetables with Cheese Sauce

 2 cups fresh asparagus

1 cup zucchini, sliced

1 1 / 2 cups cauliflower bouquets

1 cup carrots cut into bat

Sauce

1 / 4 cup milk

1 / 4 cup cottage cheese

1 tsp lime juice

A pinch of mustard powder - I was really generous with the pinch, and even added one more. I assure you that made all the difference!

Remove the fiber from the stalks of asparagus. Be careful not to break their upper points. Cut the base of the stem (that white part which is harder, + / - 2cm). Tie the asparagus in a bundle and cook them in boiling salted water for 5 minutes. Put them in the pan with the tips up, almost out of water. Drain, refresh in cold water and arrange them on a dish where it will be served. Cook the remaining vegetables separately in salted water, but let them "al dente", or at least not too soft. Arrange them on serving platter.

Beat all the sauce ingredients in a blender until the mixture is smooth and serve over vegetables (I chose to mix everything by hand. I liked this more rustic appearance).

Bon Appetit!

Também em www.labgastro.blogspot.com

Daring Bakers' Challenge - July 2010 - Swiss Swirl Ice Cream Cake

Blog checking lines - The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

Mandatory -

•We had to make the Swiss rolls, a filling for them, two ice creams and a fudge sauce, from scratch.

•We had to set the dessert in a bowl/pan etc in the order given in the recipe-Swiss roll, first ice-cream, the fudge topping and, finally, the second ice cream.

Variations allowed -

•We could either follow the given recipes for all the components or change the flavour of the Swiss rolls, filling, ice creams and fudge topping.

•We could make it in whatever shape and size we wanted.

 

So, you can check the orinal recipes at The Daring Kitchen website.

 

Ok, I know the challenge is making a SWISS swirl ice crem cake but I decided to add a Brasilian point of view to it...

I made 2 SS cakes:

1º attemp: Romeo & Juliet cake. Humpf! Brasilian? R&J? Shakespeare? Isn't it English?

Yes, of course it is English, but if you ask any Brasilian guy what a R&J is, I bet the first answer will be this dessert _ a slice of cheese and a slice of guava marmelade.

In cheaper restaurants and bars it will be just that. In Fancy places you will find cheese cake with guava jam, guava mousse with melted cheese and so on. In ice cream factories there is a cheese ice cream with guava marmelade chips. So I made a roll filled with guava jam, cheese ice cream, Brasil nut fudge and guava ice cream.

BTW this roll is typical from Pernambuco, a Northeast state, and it's called Bolo de Rolo.

Cake

2 1/2 cupsoftened butter
2 3/4 cup sugar
8 eggs
4 cups wheat flour
Icing sugar
Grated Parmesan cheese

In a mixer, beat the butter and add sugar gradually. Join the 8 egg yolks and beat well until the mixture is whitening. Add flour gradually and continue beating. In another bowl, beat the egg whites  and gently add to previous cream.  Grease a 28cm x 42cm tray and sprinkle with flour. Pour a small portion of dough, spread with a spatula, forming a layer of less than 1cm. Bake inpre-heated oven  at high temperature. Bake for 4 min. or till the centre is springy to the touch. Spread a kitchen towel on the counter and sprinkle a little caster sugar over it. Turn the cake on to the towel. Spread over it a thin layer of filling and sprinkle with a bit of parmesan cheese. Roll the cake. Do it all over again til you have baked all the dough. But you will roll the other cakes one over the other. Sprinkle with icing sugar. 

Filling
700g guava marmelade
2 tablespoons water
Cut the guava marmelade into small pieces and cook with water until it melts and you get a creamy mixture.

Guava Marmelade Ice Cream

1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 can of milk
400g heavy cream
300g soft guava marmelade

Cut the guava marmelade into pieces and beat all ingredients in blender. Lead to the freezer until the edges begin to freeze. Bring it to the mixer and beat well. Place it again the freezer. Repeat the process until all the ice cream gets equally frozen.

Cheese Ice Cream
500ml milk
150ml heavy cream
5 egg yolks
100g of  a white cheese

Bring the milk, the cream and the cheese to simmer. In another bowl, combine egg yolks and sugar. Add a little of the warm milk mixture to yolks and mix well. Pour the egg yolks into the remaining milk mixture and return to low heat, stirring, until thickened, without boiling. Place in the freezer and repeat the process of the guava ice cream.

Brazil Nut Topping

3 tablespoons Brazil nuts  butter - still using the remains of the other challenge.

3 tablespoons heavy cream
5 teespoons sugar
Mix well and cook until thickened.

Assembly

Cut the Swiss rolls into 20 equal slices ( approximately 2 cm each ).Cover the bottom and sides of the bowl in which you are going to set the dessert with cling film/plastic wrap. Arrange two slices at the bottom of the pan, with their seam sides facing each other. Arrange the Swiss roll slices up the bowl, with the seam sides facing away from the bottom, to cover the sides of the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and freeze till the slices are firm (at least 30 minutes). Soften the Guava ice cream. Take the bowl out of the freezer, remove the cling film cover and add the ice cream on top of the cake slices. Spread it out to cover the bottom and sides of the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and freeze till firm ( at least 1 hour) Add the fudge sauce over the ice cream, cover and freeze till firm ( at least an hour). Soften the cheese ice cream and spread it over the fudge sauce. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze for at least 4-5 hours till completely set. Remove the plastic cover, and place the serving plate on top of the bowl. Turn it upside down and remove the bowl and the plastic lining. If the bowl does not come away easily, wipe the outsides of the bowl with a kitchen towel dampened with hot water. The bowl will come away easily. Keep the cake out of the freezer for at least 10 minutes before slicing, depending on how hot your region is. Slice with a sharp knife, dipped in hot water.

2º attempt: Do you know Caipirinha? This is a typical Brasilian drink made with cachaça (sugar cane brandy), lime and sugar. So...Lime roll with lime curd filling, cachaça ice cream, Basil caramel and rapadura( block of raw brown sugar) ice cream.

Ok, ok I know Caipirinha is NOT made with brown sugar, but what else could I do?
Basil? Nowadays,you can also find Caipinhinha with basil, Strawberry or passion fruit caipirinhas. Or you can use vodca insted of cachaça. It would be a Caipirissima.

Lime cake

6 eggs
225g sugar
45g wheat flour

Zests of 1 lime

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Beat eggs until doubled in volume. Add sugar gradually and beat until the mixture is white. Add the flour and the zest and lime juice, mixing gently. Pour the dough into 2 greased and floured baking pantrays and place into a preheated to 200 ° C oven. Bake until the centre is springy to the touch , but without letting it brown. Remove from oven and unmold the cake onto a sheet of baking paper sprinkled with sugar. Wrap the cake and let cool. Then unroll and cover with a thin layer of filling and roll it again. This recipe yields two rolls.

Filling

1 can condensed milk

Juice of 1 lime

Mix well and spread on the cakes.

Cachaça Ice Cream

400g caster sugar
500g water
1 tablespoon lime zests
150ml of cachaça

Boil water and sugar for 5 min. When cooled, add the lime zests, cover and let rest for one or two hours. add the rum, stir and place in the freezer. Repet the process of the two other  ice creams.

Brown Sugar Block Ice Cream

6 egg yolks

1l milk

500g brown sugar block- I got a very good creamy brown sugar block, then used it here.

500g of heavy cream

Mince the brown sugar block and beat in blender with 500ml of milk. Heat the remaining milk. Beat egg yolks slightly and add a bit of warm milk. Mix well and add the remaining milk. Keep on low heat, stirring constantly, and not boiling until it thickens. Combine the two mixtures and freeze. From there, do the same as as the other ice creams.

Basil Caramel
1/2 cup water

1/2 cup sugar

1 bunch basil, chopped

Pour all the ingridients in a pan and take it to a medium heat and let simmer until it begins to thicken.

Assembly
Similar to the Romeo & Juliet swirl ice cream cake.

Conclusions 

1st - The version of Romeo and Juliet was great. The cake is laborious, but worth the effort. The ice creams were great. But the cherry of the cake was the nut topping. It matched wonderfully.

2nd - The cachaça ice cream as soon as you take it fromthe freezer, begins to melt. Imagine then how difficult it was to work with it. As I spread it over the cake layer, it began to soften. Then when I took it again from the freezer to top with the basil caramel, which was still warm,  it melted again. Finally, before covering with brown sugar block ice cream ... You get the picture. So when the whole thing was ready and I'd cut the first slice, I noticed that the layer of cachaça was very thin. As sponge cake is, well, a sponge, the cake becamevery moist. The flavours were all mixed. Like in Caipirinha. But the idea was that one could taste each individual flavour. But it was a success anyway.

3rd - I thought that I should have reversed the layers of ice cream in this Caipirinha swirl. But then again, cachaça ice cream would melt down and make the whole  thing wouldcollapse.

4th - I've made the guava ice cream in the Matilde's ice cream maker. The machine didn't work well with the other ice creams. I had to make them as described in the recipes.

5th - The best ice cream, in terms of taste, were the cachaça and the guava ones.

Well, that's it. I can only thank Sunita for an excellent challenge; Mario, for helping with ideas and Matilde, for help with ideas, with all the work and the loan of the ice cream maker. Without challenge proponents there would be no challenge at all, and me, without my friends, would be alone to face it all.

You can see the original recipes on the site The Daring Kitchen.

Também em http://www.labgastro.blogspot.com/

A Great Idea...

These days I was surfing the net when I found in The Chef in my Head a really interesting recipe. Fig filled with blue cheese. Blue cheese is any cheese with that blue-greenish mould inside, like gorgonzola, for example.

Soon I remembered I had some fig at home. Unfortunately, there was no blue cheese. But there were some Camembert left from my little girl’s birthday party.

Some more research on the fridge and I discovered one more leftover, some Shitake mushroom that were saved from turning into roast-beef sauce for lunch.

There! A good idea for an appetizer before dinner: figs and mushrooms filled with Camembert cheese in the oven. Lavoisier once said, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed, or, as common sense, everything is copied…

Fresh figs, washed, peeled and cut in half

Shitake or Paris mushrooms, without the stem

200g Camembert cheese

2 Tbs of butter

Fresh rosemary to taste

Olive oil

Oil a tray with a thin layer of olive oil. Also oil the fig and mushrooms halves and place them in the tray. Squash the Camembert cheese with a fork, mixing it with the butter. Add the rosemary leaves. I suggest not putting too much rosemary, so you don’t “kill” the cheese. Fill the figs and the mushrooms with this mixture and take it to the oven 150°C, just so the cheese starts to melt. Serve it right ahead and Bon Appetite!

Também em http://www.labgastro.blogspot.com/

Rice Leftover

Well, I don't know if I could say it's a real leftover. Actually I cooked some extra rice at lunch, keeping an eye on diner. Anyway, this is a good idea for rice leftovers, so...

This recipe is very easy and quick to be done. Perfect for those days when you are tired and don't want to spent hours cooking diner (just like today!).

4 cups cooked rice

2 beaten eggs

1/2 cup milk

1Tbspoon Oregano

200g muzzarella cheese

200g ham

Shredded Parmesan cheese

Mix together the eggs, the milk, oregano and rice. In a buttered baking dish, spread half this mixture. Then place the muzzarella cheese slices and the ham slices. Cover with the other half of the rice mixture. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese and bake at the oven, preheated at 220ºC for 20 minutes.

I think I could add 1 or 2 more eggs to the recipe. And definetely I can figure out some variations, like chicken leftover instead of ham. Or pehaps some shrimps, or other types of cheese or whatever you have in your fridge. let's try this out!

Daring Bakers' Challenge - June 2010

Blog-checking lines: The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard

Mandatory items: The recipe is comprised of three parts, four if you include the crème anglaise. You must make the chocolate pavlovas, the mascarpone mousse and the mascarpone cream using the recipes provided.

Variations allowed:

•You can use orange juice for the Grand Marnier in the mousse if you don’t use alcohol

•You can omit the sambuca from the mascarpone cream.

•You may substitute any crème anglaise recipe you might already have in your arsenal.

Preparation time: The recipe can be made in one day although there are several steps involved.

•While the pavlovas are baking, the crème anglaise should be made which will take about 15 minutes.

•While it is cooling, the chocolate mascarpone mousse can be made which will take about 15 minutes.

•There will be a bit of a wait time for the mascarpone cream because of the cooling time for the Crème Anglaise.

•If you make the Crème Anglaise the day before, the dessert should take about 2 hours including cooking time for the pavlovas.

Recipe 1: Chocolate Meringue (for the chocolate Pavlova)

3 large egg whites

½ cup plus 1 tbsp (110 g) white granulated sugar

¼ cup (30 g) confectioner’s (icing) sugar

1/3 cup (30 g) cocoa powder

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 200º F (95º C) degrees. Line two baking sheets with silpat or parchment and set aside.

Put the egg whites in a bowl and whip until soft peaks form. Increase speed to high and gradually add granulated sugar about 1 tbsp at a time until stiff peaks form. (The whites should be firm but moist.)

Sift the confectioner’s sugar and cocoa powder over the egg whites and fold the dry ingredients into the white. (This looks like it will not happen. Fold gently and it will eventually come together.)

Fill a pastry bag with the meringue. Pipe the meringue into whatever shapes you desire. Alternatively, you could just free form your shapes and level them a bit with the back of a spoon. (Class made rounds, hearts, diamonds and an attempt at a clover was made!)

Bake for 2-3 hours until the meringues become dry and crisp. Cool and store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

Recipe 2: Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse (for the top of the Pavlova base)

1 ½ cups (355 ml) heavy cream (cream with a milk fat content of between 36 and 40 percent)

Grated zest of 1 average sized lemon

9 ounces (255 g) 72% chocolate, chopped

1 2/3 cups (390 ml) mascarpone (I made this a few months ago - you can see it here)

pinch of nutmeg

2 tbsp (30 ml) Grand Marnier (I used orange juice)

Put ½ cup (120 ml) of the heavy cream and the lemon zest in a saucepan over medium high heat. Once warm, add the chocolate and whisk until melted and smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and let sit at room temperature until cool.

Place the mascarpone, the remaining cup of cream and nutmeg in a bowl. Whip on low for a minute until the mascarpone is loose. Add the Grand Marnier and whip on medium speed until it holds soft peaks. (DO NOT OVERBEAT AS THE MASCARPONE WILL BREAK.)

Mix about ¼ of the mascarpone mixture into the chocolate to lighten. Fold in the remaining mascarpone until well incorporated. Fill a pastry bag with the mousse. Again, you could just free form mousse on top of the pavlova.

Recipe 3: Crème Anglaise (a component of the Mascarpone Cream below):

1 cup (235 ml) whole milk

1 cup (235 ml) heavy cream

1 vanilla bean, split or 1 tsp pure vanilla extract

6 large egg yolks

6 tbsp (75 g) sugar

In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until the mixture turns pale yellow.

Combine the milk, cream and vanilla in a saucepan over medium high heat, bringing the mixture to a boil. Take off the heat.

Pour about ½ cup of the hot liquid into the yolk mixture, whisking constantly to keep from making scrambled eggs. Pour the yolk mixture into the pan with the remaining cream mixture and put the heat back on medium. Stir constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens enough to lightly coat the back of a wooden spoon. DO NOT OVERCOOK.

Remove the mixture from the heat and strain it through a fine mesh sieve into a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until the mixture is thoroughly chilled, about 2 hours or overnight.

Recipe 4: Mascarpone Cream (for drizzling):

1 recipe crème anglaise

½ cup (120 ml) mascarpone

2 tbsp (30 ml) Sambucca (optional) - I used a ristretto espresso coffee

½ cup (120 ml) heavy cream

Prepare the crème anglaise. Slowly whisk in the mascarpone and the Sambucca and let the mixture cool. Put the cream in a bowl and beat with electric mixer until very soft peaks are formed. Fold the cream into the mascarpone mixture.

Assembly:

Pipe the mousse onto the pavlovas and drizzle with the mascarpone cream over the top. Dust with confectioner’s sugar and fresh fruit if desired.

Additional Information:

Wikipedia’s definition of Pavlova

The history of Pavlova

Videos:

Great video on Youtube – How to Make Pavlova

Another video that uses whipped cream instead of the Mascarpone cream - Pavlova

Epicurious – Australia Pavlova

Some great photos on Flickr:

La Tartine Gourmand – Red and Orange Pavlova

VROG in Bristol – Birthday Pavlova

Marco Veringa – Pavlova 6 (the fruit on this one is stunning)

Katiequinndavies – Double Chocolate & Raspberry Pavlova

My Food Obsession – Chocolate Banana Rolled Pavlova (something different!)

Also here: http://www.labgastro.blogspot.com/