I’d like to thank everyone for all of the wonderfully kind comments I received to my last post about how I’ve been experiencing a bit of a lull in the kitchen department recently.

Trust bloggers to always cheer you up!

As a way out of the doldrums, I’ve decided to keep things simple and to just go with what I want.

And at this time of year, I want berries!

An abundance of blueberries and strawberries at my weekly trip to the farmer’s market had me really inspired for the first time in a long time. I came home and as luck would have it, I had a loaf of brioche left from a recent trip to Rahier. Immediately, I remembered this recipe, which I’d bookmared in the May 2008 issue of Food & Wine.

This was so easy to make and so incredibly delicious. It restored a little bit more of my faith.

As you know, this is Magazine Mondays, which means I’m happy to share links from other bloggers who have tackled their magazine pile. Here’s the list of brave souls:

Allie of Zucchero Dolce made a Coffee Cheesecake with Nutella Swirl on a Brownie Base. Swoon!

Margaret of Tea and Scones was a busy bee as she made Watermelon Sorbet and Swedish Meatballs with Buttered Noodles from Martha Stewart Living. Wow! Last week she made Basic Yellow Butter Cupcakes also from Martha Stewart Living.

Tamy of 3 Sides of Crazy made Shredded Vegetable Chicken Egg Rolls with Blackberry Pineapple Dipping Sauce and Spicy Gingersnaps!

Janie of Panini Girl made Blueberry Corn Muffins from Country Living to celebrate summer.

Sharon of fiberdoodles is participating in her first Magazine Mondays with a Georgia Peach Barbecued Chicken recipe!

Thanks to everyone for sharing their magazine recipe adventures!

Have a great week, everyone!

Ciao!

My Magazine Mondays submission is the luscious Berry-Brioche Bread Pudding from the May 2008 issue of Food & Wine.

Lately, as I rush out of the house in the morning grabbing at the fruit basket before I go, my reaction tends to be the same, “Apples, again!”

Now I love apples. But by this time of year we’ve been on a steady diet of apples as primary fruit since … oh … about September.

What I want are peaches. Juicy, fuzzy Ontario peaches.

And I want those few precious strawberries from the handful of plants in our garden.

I also want cherries, straight from Niagara.

But all I got is apples.

So I made me some Apple Pie Bars and pretended I was eating them in the middle of a blackberry patch on a sunny afternoon.

Have a good week!

Ciao!

Note: For this edition of Magazine Mondays, I finally tried the recipe for Apple Pie Bars from Food & Wine’s March 2008 issue. If you have to eat apples, you might as well dress them up!

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been challenged! The gauntlet has been thrown down by none other than the brilliant photographer and fantastic cook Meeta of What’s For Lunch Honey?.

Not only did Meeta organize an event with sixty plus participants, she took the time out of her schedule to send me a postcard. And a postcard of her own making no less! Meeta sent me this lovely picture of blueberries and red currants and on the back she challenged me to create something using those two ingredients.

The only question … would Cream Puff choose to accept the challenge?

I’ve already made a few pies with blueberries and red currants so that was out of the question. Almost immediately, I thought of some sort of fruit sauce that I could pour over a slice of pound cake or maybe a bowl of vanilla ice cream. I did some searching on Epicurious for ideas and found a recipe for Summer’s Best Blueberry Sauce that put me on the road to my end result:  Blueberry and Red Currant Sauce.

The photo in the recipe for Summer’s Best Blueberry Sauce was ingrained in my mind so I decided to try my sauce over some freshly made waffles smothered in butter. Glorious!

Meeta, I hope I have fulfilled the challenge to your liking.

This post will self-destruct in five seconds …

Ciao!

Blueberry and Red Currant Sauce

Inspired by this recipe from www.epicurious.com.

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 3 cups water
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 2 cups blueberries
• 1 cup red currants
• a small piece of lemon rind

1. Combine the sugar, cornstarch, water and lemon juice in a heavy-bottomed pot. Bring to a boil, stirring often to ensure that the sugar dissolves and that there are no lumps.
2. Once the sugar has dissolved (3 to 5 minutes), add the blueberries, currants and lemon rind.
3. Bring the mixture to a boil again, stirring often.
4. Once it’s boiling, reduce the heat to low and simmer slowly until the mixture has reduced by at least one-third. You can reduce it further if you want a really thick sauce.
5. Taste the sauce and adjust according to your own tastes (more sugar or lemon juice if you want it).
6. Turn off the heat. Strain the sauce through a sieve to remove the skins and any seeds. Let it cool and then pour into an airtight container and refrigerate.
7. The sauce can be served directly from the refrigerator (you may have to shake the container a bit to mix it up) or you can reheat it. It will keep for a week or so.
8. Enjoy.

Technorati tags:  blueberries, red currants, waffles

On any given day, you will find a large basket of fruit on my kitchen table. This is for two reasons. First of all, it encourages my family to eat more fruit. And secondly, it’s pretty to look at. A perfectly ripened mango, an elegant pear, a juicy orange … all of them begging to be eaten. There’s just one problem. In their midst, you will always find an apple or two approaching a brown, shrivelled end.

Now don’t get me wrong, we like apples. Come the Fall we’re the first to load up on the bounty that Ontario’s apple harvest provides. It’s just that by the time Spring rolls around … well … the apples start to get a bit boring. Already I find myself daydreaming about strawberries, wild blueberries and the most fragrant peaches from Niagara-on-the-Lake. But the daydream inevitably comes to an end as I take a bite out of another apple. So many apples. Months of apples.

So you’ll understand why, last Saturday, I just knew I had to do something. A family of McIntosh apples was withering away in that aforementioned fruit basket. There was no way they’d make it to see another week of lunches. I needed a solution; something new and different that would help me solve the apple surplus.

That’s when I remembered a little trip that I’d taken to Ina Garten-land a few weeks ago. I had been flipping through a copy of her book Barefoot Contessa Parties! looking for a coffee cake recipe, but had instead come across a recipe for apple crostata. Essentially, it’s a recipe for a free-form apple tart.

The pastry consisted of flour, sugar salt and a lot o’ butter. It came together in a snap as I got to use the food processor. I usually make pastry dough by hand, but I wanted to follow Garten’s recipe as closely as possible. After refrigerating the dough for an hour, it was a dream to work with. I had no problems rolling it out and within minutes I was ready for the filling.

Preparing the filling consisted of peeling the apples and cutting them into chunks. I added grated orange zest and piled it all on to the dough in a glorious mass, being sure to leave a good 1-1/2 inch border all around so that I could fold the dough over the apples. A quick topping of flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon and more butter was the final touch.

While Garten’s recipe doesn’t call for an egg wash, I made one anyway. I brushed the border with the egg wash to ensure that as I folded the pastry over the apples, it would stay in place. I then brushed the egg over the dough so that it would take on a lovely golden colour.

Twenty-five minutes letter I had the most beautiful tart. Some vanilla ice cream and a lovely cup of coffee and all of a sudden we were a family of apple lovers all over again.

Ciao!

Apple Crostata

Adapted from Barefoot Contessa Parties! by Ina Garten.

For the pastry (this recipe will yield enough pastry for 2 tarts)

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 pound (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, diced
• 1/2 cup ice water

1. Put all of the dry ingredients in the bowl of a food processor, fitted with the dough attachment. Pulse 2 or 3 times to combine.
2. Add the butter all at once and pulse 12 to 15 times, until the butter is the size of peas.
3. Add a 1/4 cup of the ice water all at once and pulse the dough until it begins to come together around the blade. If the dough doesn’t come together, add a tablespoon of ice water at a time until the dough comes together.
4. Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead it a few times until you form a smooth ball. Divide the ball into two pieces and flatten each piece into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap. If you’re making one tart, place one disk in the refrigerator for an hour and freeze the other disk. Otherwise, if you’re making two tarts, refrigerate both disks of dough for an hour.

For the filling:

• 4 or 5 McIntosh apples
• grated zest of a small orange
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 4 tablespoons (1/2 a stick) cold unsalted butter, diced
• 1 egg, beaten with a tablespoon of water

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
3. Peel the apples and quarter them. Cut each quarter into three pieces. Toss the apples with the orange zest and set aside.
4. On a well-floured surface, roll your disk of dough into an 11-inch circle. (If the dough is too hard from being refrigerated, let it sit for a few minutes.) Once you’ve rolled out the dough, fold it into quarters or roll it around a rolling pin and transfer the circle to the prepared baking sheet.
5. Pile the apple mixture on the dough, being sure to leave a 1-1/2 to 2-inch border all the way around.
6. Combine the flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse a few times to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture is crumbly. Pour the topping into a bowl and, with your fingers, work the butter until the topping starts to hold together. Sprinkle the topping on the apples.
7. Brush egg wash over the border of dough. Carefully begin folding the border up and over the apples. The dough should partially cover the apples all the way around.
8. Once you’ve folded the dough up and over, brush the egg wash over the dough.
9. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. The apples will be tender.
10. Enjoy!

Note:  This tart serves 6, although I could have very easily eaten one on my own. Instead of McIntosh apples, you can also use Macoun or Empire.

Technorati tags:  apples, crostata, tarts

I must admit that I’ve cheated slightly when it comes to the third round of the Weekend Cookbook Challenge hosted by Alicat of Something So Clever. You’re supposed to pick a new recipe from a book that’s been languishing in a corner of your home somewhere. Technically, this book has been languishing on The Overburdened Bookshelf. But I actually rescued it about a month ago from my cookbook jungle and flipped to a recipe that I’d wanted to try for a long time.

Which cookbook, you ask? The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten.

What recipe, you ask? Orange Yogurt.

Why haven’t I used this cookbook more often, you ask? Because every time I look at it I am reminded of Ina Garten’s kitchen and I am forced to suppress pangs of overwhelming jealousy.

What made me finally change my mind, you ask? A renewed interest in yogurt.

Lately, I’ve been reading an awful lot about the health benefits of yogurt. Apparently the "friendly" bacteria that live in yogurt, which is a form of fermented milk, are very good at protecting our intestinal tracts. It’s also an excellent source of important nutrients like calcium.

Oh yes … and it tastes good. I have always loved the slight tartness of yogurt. It’s versatility is also impressive. You can eat yogurt at any time of the day. You can use it in both savoury cooking and in baking. You can add a variety of foods to yogurt including fruit and nuts. It’s fairly inexpensive, and you can even make yogurt at home.

I’m not sure if it’s because my bones have been thirsting for more calcium lately, or maybe it’s because my tastes have changed, but I’ve really been craving yogurt of late. And every once in awhile my mind would flutter back to an episode of The Barefoot Contessa that I saw where She-of-the-Kitchen-That-I-Envy prepared a recipe for Orange Yogurt.

It was very simple. A container of plain low-fat yogurt was placed in a sieve lined with cheesecloth and allowed to drain overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, the thickened yogurt was mixed with the zest of an orange, freshly squeezed orange juice, nuts, raisins, honey and vanilla extract. How hard is that?

Not having any cheesecloth handy, I used paper towels, which worked just fine. While I’ve tried this recipe with many different types of yogurt, the one I use most often is a brand called Liberty, which is made in Quebec. I like to use the organic plain yogurt that contains 2.5 per cent milk fat. Granted that may not qualify as "low-fat", but we all have our little indulgences!

I am always surprised at how much liquid drains from the yogurt. This time around I decided to measure the liquid. I was surprised to see that 2/3 of a cup had drained from a container of 750 grams of yogurt. And just as soon as I finish marvelling at how much liquid drained from the yogurt, I begin salivating at the sight of the thick and creamy deliciousness that is left behind.

I add the zest and juice of an orange and about a 1/4 cup of honey. I also like to add nuts … lots of them. My current favourites are walnuts and slivered almonds. I omit the raisins, but do sometimes add chopped dried fruit. I’ve tried apricots and figs, but this time around I used dried prunes, which were delicious. While I have added vanilla extract in the past, coconut fiend that I am, I’ve been using a few drops of coconut extract recently. To further indulge my coconut tooth, I will add a bit of dried (or fresh) flaked coconut if I have some on hand. I love the contrast in flavours between the coconut and the orange. I give everything a good stir and for the next few days, I have the most delightful breakfast you can imagine. What a perfect way to start a weekend morning.

"Orange" you lovely? You bet you are!

Ciao!

Orange and Coconut Yogurt

Adapted from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten.

• 1 container of plain yogurt (750 grams;whichever brand you like; whatever level of fat content you like)
• zest and juice of one orange
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/2 cup walnuts, roughly chopped
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds
• 1/4 cup prunes, roughly chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon coconut extract
• 1/4 cup flaked coconut (I use dried but if you can find fresh … be my guest!)

1. Line a sieve with cheesecloth or paper towels. Spoon the yogurt into the sieve and place in a large pot in the refrigerator to drain overnight.
2. Remove the yogurt from the sieve and place in a large bowl. Add the orange zest, orange juice and honey and mix well.
3. Add the nuts and prunes, mix well.
4. Finish by adding the coconut extract and flaked coconut. Mix well and cover and refrigerate for an hour before serving.
5. Enjoy!

Note:  This recipe will yield approximately 3 cups of yogurt.

Is there a fruit in the world imbued with more significance than the apple? Whether it’s Eve offering a shiny red one to Adam or your mom telling you to eat one a day, apples are more than just a simple fruit.

While Piemonte is well-known for its production of rice and wine, did you know that it is also a major producer of apples? In fact, Italy is one of the top five apple-producing nations in the world. Apples are grown in Piemonte, as well as Emilia Romagna, the Veneto, Campagna and Trentino Alto Adige.

In Piemonte, apples are grown in areas such as Cavour, Bibiana and Pinerolo. Approximately 70 per cent of the apples grown in Piemonte are of the Golden Delicious type. Another 15 per cent are of the Red Delicious cultivar. The remaining 15 per cent is comprised of a variety of apples including Gala.

The Piemontesi also turn out varieties that are designated as "Ancient Piemonte Apples". This designation has been trademarked by the Paniere of the Provincia di Torino, which recognizes the production of local products that are tied to the region’s history. There are eight antique varieties of apple that claim this designation and they have names like Buras, Calvilla bianca, Grigia di Torriana and Magnana.

As our Olympic meal slowly winds down, I decided that an apple dish would be a fitting way to begin our farewell to this region of Italy. While researching the cuisine of Piemonte, I came across a cookbook called A Passion for Piedmont by Matt Kramer. While I generally do not buy cookbooks sight unseen, I did so with this one. Call it cook’s intuition,but I just felt that this would be a treasure of Piemontesi recipes … I’m glad to say that I was right.

One of the recipes that instantly caught my eye was the Apple and Bread Crumb Cake. This is exactly the type of sweet that I would expect to see on a Piemontese table. A simple cake, it shines because of the quality of the individual ingredients, in this case, the juiciest apples and the crumbs of a rustic loaf of country bread.

The subtitle of Kramer’s book is:  Italy’s Most Glorious Regional Table. My "travels" across Piemonte during these Olympics have shown me that this title is most fitting!

Ciao!

Apple and Bread Crumb Cake

Adapted from A Passion for Piedmont by Matt Kramer.

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter
• 3 pounds, Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced (the original recipe indicates that you can also use McIntosh)
• 2-1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs (I used a typical Italian country bread. I sliced off the crust and processed the interior of the bread in the food processor to make the fresh bread crumbs.)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 6 tablespoons apricot jam
• juice of 1 lemon

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter a loaf pan (8 x 4-inches). Line the bottom of the pan with waxed paper or parchment paper. Butter the paper and set the pan aside.
2. In a large skillet, melt a 1/4 of the butter. Add the apples and cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the apples have softened. This should take between 15 and 20 minutes. Once the apples are cooked transfer them to a bowl.
3. In the same skillet, melt the remaining 1/2 cup of butter. Add the bread crumbs, the sugar and the cinnamon. Combine and cook over medium heat until the bread crumbs have absorbed the butter and turned golden. This should take 5 to 10 minutes.
4. Once this is done you are now ready to begin assembling the cake.
5. Sprinkle 1/3 of the bread crumbs in the bottom of the loaf pan and pat them down firmly with a spoon.
6. Spread 1/2 of the apricot jam over this layer as smoothly as possible.
7. Place half the apples over the jam, smoothing the apples out and pressing them down firmly. Sprinkle half of the lemon juice over the apples.
8. Repeat with 1/3 of the bread crumbs. Spread the remaining apricot jam over the bread crumb layer and top with the remaining apples. Press down firmly to ensure that the entire loaf pan is filled and that there are no air pockets. Sprinkle the remaining lemon juice over the apples.
9. Top with the final 1/3 of the bread crumbs. Press them down as evenly as possible.
10. Bake the cake for 45 to 50 minutes, or until it is nicely golden and bubbling at the sides.
11. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool completely. I advise keeping it in the loaf pan for at least eight hours before inverting it onto a plate. I left my cake in the pan for about 12 hours.
12. When you’re ready to remove the cake, run a thin knife all around the sides of the pan. Carefully invert the cake onto a dish. Peel the parchment paper off.
13. Serve the cake with ice cream or whipped cream.
14. Enjoy!

Note:  This cake serves 6 to 8 people. My research into apple production in Piemonte led me to www.italianfood.about.com and www.piemonte.magazine.it. You can visit those sites for more information.