Daring Cooks’ Challange: En Croute

With the end of the school year quickly approaching, a few birthdays occurring, a minor holiday, and a sudden and unexpected agreement to make a wedding cake (Dude, I’m going to make a wedding cake!) it’s been a busy few weeks around here, and despite my best intentions, I’ve fallen off of the Daring anything wagon. Oh, I meant to do the Daring Bakers’ last challenge, making Savarin.  I had all of the ingredients and even got a hold of a special pan to help me get the job done, but I just didn’t get there.

Then there’s this month’s Daring Cooks’ challenge: Monkey Queen of Don’t Make Me Call My Flying Monkeys, was our May 2013 Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to dive into the world of en Croute. And I was so ready.  I had visions of Beef Wellington and Cheesy chicken wrapped in puffy pastry, but more than anything I really wanted to try Brie en Croute.  I love brie, and I hadn’t really eaten any in forever and ever and ever.  And there was this method of making puff pastry that I was simply dying to try.  And like the Savarin challenge, I had everything ready…and I just couldn’t get there. 

The next thing I knew, if was May 14 and I still had a wheel of Brie and some apples in my ‘fridge, no desire to fiddle with flour and butter to make puffy, puffed pastry, and a really strong feeling of guilt for once again saying I’d do something that I just couldn’t work up the necessary intestinal fortitude (ha!) to do.  I simply couldn’t get to gettin’. 

Eventually, I gave up the idea about making my own pastry and the husband very kindly ran out and got some from the freezer section of the local grocery store, and I made my Brie on Croute on the 15th– only a day late!  Yet, here I sit on the 18th just now typing the post.  I think it’s because I found myself a little disappointed with my final results, and it was my fault.  Why did I ever think cinnamon and brie would be a wise combination, again?  Ah, well.  Learn from my mistakes!

Brie en Croute

Ingredients:

1 golden delicious apple

2 tbsp. sugar

1 tbsp. flour

1/4 tsp. cinnamon

1 tbsp. chopped pecans

1/2 tbsp. butter

1 (8 oz.) round of brie

1 sheet puff pastry, thawed

1 egg

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Peel and dice the apple into 1 x 1 inch pieces.  Combine the apples and sugar in a bowl and let them sit for a few minutes.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in a skillet over medium-low heat.  Add the apples with sugar and the pecans to the butter.

Cook for a few minutes until the apples are tender, but not mushy.

Now, I should have stopped there.  They didn’t really need to thicken for the brie en croute, and the spiciness of the cinnamon did not meld well with the mellow earthiness of the brie.  I’d suggest skipping this step if you choose to make this.

Add the flour and cinnamon to the apples,

and stir until everything is thick.

Roll out the puff pastry (you may wish to lightly oil the counter first– I didn’t and mine stuck), and mound the apple mixture in the center of the pastry.  I marked the size of the brie before I did mine.

Set the brie on top of the apple mixture.  You don’t need to cut the rind off.  It’s edible and tastes a lot better than it looks.  If you do choose to remove some of it, I’d suggest only removing the part that will touch the filling.  The rind helps keep the melted cheese contained.

Wrap the pastry up around the brie and cut off the excess.

Flip the wrapped brie over carefully, and place it on a greased cookie sheet seam side down.

Decorate it, if you want.  I should have skipped the decoration, or at least considered what it would look like once puffy.  Also, and I didn’t photograph this part, brush the pastry with a lightly beaten egg.

Bake the brie en croute for approximately 20 minutes.  Remove it from the oven and let it rest for at least 40 minutes or so.  Yeah, I should have considered what this would look like after it was baked.  Sorry about that.

Serve it with the crackers of you choice.  I love Triscuits.  I hadn’t had a Triscuit for seven years before three days ago.  So addictively good.  This is why they probably will not grace my pantry for another seven years.  I know my weaknesses.

Oooey, gooey, melty brie.  Yum. 

In the spirit of full disclosure, though, I must admit that I pulled the pastry off of the brie and scraped off the cinnamon apples.   We ate them separately because they were delicious; it’s just that they only tasted good independent of each other.  Lesson learned: keep the cinnamon away from the brie.

Yield: more than enough for us

 

 

Superwoman and the Rain of Popcorn

In honor of Mother’s Day and National Short Story Month, inspired by Elaine Farris Hughes’, Writing from the Inner Self, suggested title for a story or vignette, and brought to you by a desire to flex some severely underused creative writing muscles….

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“Superwoman and the Rain of Popcorn”

by ML Spell

Esmeralda Trevain hung the phone up with her left hand and swiped a paper towel across a pool of puddled chocolate milk on the dining room table with her right all while narrowly avoiding a treacherously sharp, red knock-off Lego brick that was threatening to make a permanent indentation in her heel.  And so it went day in and day out: phone calls and spills, toy explosions and dirt bombs.  This was the life for which she’d signed up even though she hadn’t realized it at the time.  And most days, most days she didn’t really mind it all that much.

The dishes went in and out of the dishwasher. The laundry went in and out of the clothes hampers.  The dog went in and out of the back door.  And sometimes, sometimes Esmeralda went in and out of her mind.  Oh, it wasn’t like you’d think.  No, it wasn’t that at all.  I see you sitting there tsk tsking to yourself, “Poor thing.  Horrible thing.  Evil thing to appear on the evening news like that.”  But it wasn’t like that at all.

Esmeralda was a day-dreamer.  That’s what she’d do—in and out of her mind all day, and at night sometimes, too.  The morning walk with her daughter became a stroll around the Seine.  An afternoon splashing in the pool became a relaxing swim on the Lido deck of a ship cruising through the Caribbean.  Even a casual supper at the family dinner table turned into an exotic dining experience in the Orient.  In and out of her mind, she traveled day by day.

And it never hurt a soul.  Not one single person.  No one knew she spent a few hours a week contemplating trips she’d never take, wondering about icy river voyages past the great Alaskan wilderness or hikes on the rocky coasts past the iconic lighthouses of Maine.  No.  To everyone else in her everyday life, she was a superwoman.  She was a superwoman who could whip up a Thanksgiving feast without blinking an eye. She was a superwoman who could tell you exactly what day and time your yearly physical was without ever consulting a calendar.  She was a superwoman who could hear a three-year-old silently planning to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting family dog from two rooms and a staircase away.

And like that, her trek across hot coals in a far-away island of undetermined name which was in reality the overturned fake Legos in a dining room that was in desperate need of a good mopping, she stopped and turned as the three-year-old called out, “Mommy!  Watch this!”  And there Esmeralda Trevain stood, transfixed watching the orange bowl fly toward the ceiling, popcorn pouring down over their heads: superwoman in a rain of popcorn.  And she didn’t mind. Not one little bit.

National Short Story Month

How is it that I always knew that April was National Poetry Month, but I missed May’s honor as National Short Story Month?  Oh, I love poetry.  I do.  In fact, I love it so much that my students always commented about how happy I was on the first day of our poetry units.  What’s not to love about alliteration, onomatopoeia, metonymy, and polysyndeton? Okay, so maybe not spelling the terms, but I love the rest of it– the depth, the musical qualities presented by the rhythm and rhyme and punctuation (or lack thereof) working together or even against each other, and  the power of the words.

Stopping and noting everything that lives on our bookshelves– the shelves that line our downstairs library (read office-like area that dreams of being a grand library), and upstairs bedrooms– you’d see a lot of novels crossing so many genres between the four of us that it’s make your head spin (Crichton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Jordan, Kafka, King, Pratchett, Preston & Child, Riordan, Rowling, Stockett, Weber– you get the idea) and you’d find many, many, many books of poetry (Dickinson, Eliot, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Whitman, not to mention anthology after anthology of renaissance and romantic poets, war and modern poets).

There are also plays, art books, tomes on architecture and history (ancient and modern), physics and engineering, photography, and a few cookbooks here and there (really– just a few when compared to everything else).  What you won’t find, though, are compilations of short stories.  I own maybe five of them.  Maybe.

The thing is, the mere fact that there’s not a proliferation of short stories on those shelves makes what is there are all the more important to me.  What those stories say about me, I’m sure I don’t really want to know.  They are the ones, though, the ones that I’ve chosen to collect, to keep, and to occasionally reread.  When I sat down to write some fiction this past month for the first time in fifteen years, it wasn’t Dumas or Golding or Hurston whispering in my ear, it was Flannery O’Connor and Roald Dahl, William Faulkner and John Updike.

So, what was my point?  Oh, yes.  May is National Short Story Month, so read one or two or three, or write one… or two or three.

Some of my favorites (many of which are not for the faint of heart, all of which are classics) in no particular order:

• A & P—John Updike
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find—Flannery O’Conner
• The Story of an Hour—Kate Chopin
• The Scarlet Ibis— James Hurst
• The Lottery—Shirley Jackson
• A Rose for Emily—William Faulkner
• Lamb to the Slaughter—Roald Dahl

Okay, even I have to admit to being a little creeped out by the short stories I like.  Eesh.  Perhaps they’re balanced by all of the Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, Far Side, and Bloom County comic compilations we own.  But come to think of it, maybe not.