Fall hit us in full force over here today. It started raining last night and has been dreary since. It’s getting colder. The mosquitos are out and they are terrible – here’s to hoping the cold tonight kills them off. My body is one giant mosquito bite.
On the menu for this week:
- Pastry: It’s cake week! We are making the “filling” and decorations until Friday, when we will assemble three cakes. We made macarons as part of the decorations today, so I’ll have that recipe for you tomorrow.
- Cooking:
- Yesterday we made butternut squash soup surprise (recipe below)
- Today, tomato water risotto
- Green risotto
- Octopus pie (gross.. and we had to cut up a whole octopus today. It was disgusting, the tentacles would stick to your fingers when you were cleaning it. I’m not eating this one)
- Paella with “rice-like squid”
- Cheese Souffle
On to the recipe. I am going to make this one at home all the time.
- Cut up some butternut squash into big chunks. You can cut as much as you want, depending on how much you are going to make.
- Cut up some onion (same as above). For each slice of butternut squash (a slice being the size between two ridges), use about half a small white onion.
- Put the onion and the squash in a saucepan with butter and olive oil (because.. we are in France. You can’t have enough fats) and start cooking on the stove. And add some salt, too, while you’re at it.
- When the onions are translucent, add enough water (or broth) to cover the squash.
- Once the butternut squash can be mushed (very technical term) with a spoon, take it off the stove. Put it in the blender and add cream and water until it’s the consistency you want to eat it at. Then pour it through a sieve to get all the chunks out.
- Set the soup aside. Now it’s time for the surprise! We are making a mushroom royal.
- Cut up a small shallot and about 5 mushrooms (this will be enough to serve 2) into really small pieces.
- Put shallot and mushrooms in a saucepan with butter and oil. Don’t cook them so long that you brown them.
- When they are done, put them into a bowl and add 100g of water, 30g whole egg, and 10g egg yolk. Mix with an immersion blender for 2 seconds. Then split into two medium-sized ramekins (which… I will need to purchase when I get back – add it to the list!). Cover with plastic wrap
- Put the ramekins in the oven with a separate bowl of water. Bake for 15 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius.
- Once the mushroom royal is done, it should be pretty solid. Pour your soup over the royal and season. Reserve some soup if you want to make it look pretty (below).
You could stop here or, you could make it look really pretty by doing the following:
- Take a mushroom (we used a cep) and brown it in some butter. Then, wrap it in a fig leaf and bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 4 minutes.
- Put the cep in the middle of your soup bowl.
- With your reserved soup, add some vegetable broth and a pinch of soy lecithin and mix. Put your immersion blender half in the soup and half in the air (you will have to tip your saucepan to do this) and turn it on. It will create a foam. Use the foam to decorate the top of your soup bowl. Fun fact: you can use this technique to make foam with any liquid!
- You can also clean out and boil a small pumpkin and fill it with soup! (Collective Awe from the girls in my class on this)
Now it’s time to eat! It’s pretty much the perfect fall meal.
Our chefs are such great teachers and talented chefs, but they speak English as their second language (as I’ve said before – much better than I will ever be able to speak French). They each say some things in the cutest ways, also known as “chefisms”. Our cooking chef, Chef Samuel, often says “that would be not beautiful”. So if you chose to forego the last three steps, he would say about your ramekin of soup “that is not beautiful”. He was the head chef at some pretty fancy restaurants, so he is very skilled with making his food beautiful. Me – not so much. Some of the gals that I hang out with here think this phrase is so cute that we have started using it in our everyday life. Me wearing my stinky running clothes in public? That would be not beautiful.
More Croissants, Please! 