Quiche Lorraine

The first time I made pastry was for mince pies. It was the first Christmas we were spending with Ollie’s family and I wanted to do a good job. And that was how I learned that anal tendencies and really flaky pastry kind of go together. You know how chefs come in two camps? There’s the pinch-of-this relaxed Mediterranean kind, and the uber-precise wiry kind. Well, the second group is the one knocking out superlative pastry.

Back then, the steps I followed to ensure good pastry included: keeping the butter in the freezer for an hour or so before starting, using a metal bowl and putting it intermittently back into the fridge to ensure the mix was staying as cold as possible, using two knives to cut the butter into the pastry and never, ever touching it by hand until the very last minute when the dough has to be brought together manually. I added the ice-cold water drop by drop, just to the point at which the dough would barely hold together and no more. Yep, I did say anal. And that pastry was both a complete bugger to work with and beautifully light and flaky. Nowadays I’m less uptight with my pies and tarts but those principles have stayed with me. I still keep my ingredients cold and work fast. I use a pastry cutter – one of the few unitaskers I think is genuinely necessary in the kitchen – to keep my warm hands out of the dough as much as possible. I’m happy to work with a slightly wetter dough these days as it means that rolling out the dough is actually possible and that I will, therefore, make pastry. And that means pecan pie, lemon tart, beef stewed in ale and topped with a pastry lid, and the ultimate pastry vehicle: quiche.

My quiche-making has recently been hampered by the fact that both Tartine and Craftsman and Wolves make fabulous examples of the genre, and both are within a 5 minute walk of our apartment. I know, poor me. I made quiche this week with a family dinner in mind. Let’s just say that standing in front of the oven at 6.30pm, cussing at the extra minutes the thing was taking to bake, was not my finest moment. Don’t make my mistake. Make your quiche in advance, with the leisure of time. It’s ideal about an hour out of the oven, still warm but far from hot, but it’s also great cold from the fridge or at room temperature, or wrapped up in foil for a one handed lunch at a desk or on a hike (preferably the latter). Please don’t get het up about how butter- and cream-laden the whole thing is. It’s rich and unctuous so you have a moderate slice with a pile of salad on the side and a small glass of wine if you so please.

Quiche Lorraine
Adapted from Jamie Magazine

For the pastry:
500g all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
130g unsalted butter
2 egg yolks
iced water

For the filling:
1 tbsp butter
140g bacon, diced
140g ham, diced
140g gruyère cheese, grated
250ml crème fraîche
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 egg yolks
250ml milk
A pinch of ground nutmeg

You want to start making the pastry well in advance of assembling the quiche – about 2 hours before you want to bake it.
Place the flour and salt in a food processor and pulse to combine. Cut the butter into cubes and add to the food processor. Pulse to chop the butter into the flour but don’t overcombine – you want to keep pea-sized chunks of butter in the dough if possible.
Add the two egg yolks to the processor and again pulse to blend them into the dough. You will now add ice-cold water gradually, just until the dough begins to come together. Begin with about 4 tablespoons, pulse. Add a little more water and pulse again if necessary, until the dough begins to hold together in large clumps.
Remove to a large bowl or lightly floured surface and bring the dough together into a bowl – you may need to sprinkle a touch more water into the dough at this point. Wrap the dough well in plastic wrap and leave in the fridge for at least an hour.

Remove the dough from the fridge and roll out on a lightly floured surface to about 5mm thick. Lay the pastry over a round 32cm/12inch deep tart tin and carefully press into the base and sides. Trim any excess with a sharp knife, line the case with 4 layers of clingfilm or with a layer of parchment paper, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. To blind bake the pastry, fill with pastry weights (or dried rice or beans) and bake for 15 minutes. Lift out the weights using the clingfilm or parchment and bake the pastry for 5 more minutes, or until the base is dry. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large pan over a medium heat and cook the bacon until softened. Drain on kitchen paper and allow to cool, then combine in a bowl with the ham and gruyère cheese and spread evenly over the cooled pastry case.
Preheat the oven to 190C/375F. Whisk the crème fraîche, eggs, egg yolks, milk and nutmeg together in a bowl and season generously. Carefully pour the mixture into the pastry case.

Bake the quiche in the oven for 40–45 minutes or until the filling has set and the top is beginning to turn golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin before serving.

Summer Chicken Salad with Peaches and Blackberries

Hello strangers. It’s been a curious few weeks. My moods have been climbing up and down faster than the San Francisco summer thermometer. For the first time in months, my focus had to slip from the all-consuming minutiae of raising an infant to bigger picture stuff. Going back to work, searching for a nanny, piles of house-related admin. I found myself in the reality check of a slick downtown lawyer’s office, cycle helmet in hand, some kind of baby-food smear on my top, like a cliché of a mom in a movie. The edges were sharper than my woolly existence of maternity leave. It’s all fine – I quite like sharp edges – but I haven’t had much brain space for writing, or even cooking.

Since I was last here, I had Ollie at home for 3 long, staycation weeks of paternity leave. I thought those weeks would see me in the kitchen a lot, and writing even more. It didn’t really happen that way; in fact, I cooked much less than I do on a normal daily basis. Partly as a consequence of the above, but also because we enjoyed lunching out as a threesome most days, and I was granted the luxury of being cooked for on many evenings. I also imagined that we’d use the three weeks to get super healthy. Ollie and I are brilliant at getting each other obsessed by random cleanses, or health kicks. We’re also pretty good at making each other cocktails, and, well, we went down the latter route this time. But I have been craving salad a lot, perhaps as a corrective, and especially those dotted with the drool-worthy stone fruits we’re wolfing down at the moment (none less than Henry, whose enthusiasm should strike fear into the stony hearts of peaches everywhere).

Salads are pretty low on fuss as far as dinners go: no hours of oven, reasonably few timing problems, accepting of stops and starts. These are all the qualities that drew me to Jeanne Kelley’s cookbook Salad for Dinner. You may well wonder why you would need recipes for salads, let alone an entire cookbook on the subject. I felt the same – isn’t the whole charm of the salad its accommodating nature, the fact you can toss this and that into a bowl and come up with a meal? This book proves that wrong on two scores. First: there are some really quite inventive dishes here, things you might not have thought to make into a form you would later characterize as a “salad”. That’s partly what really makes them dinner worthy and the book so much fun to read. Second: the dressings make all the difference. A drizzle of this oil, and dash of that herb: the dressings complement their ingredients just so, to heights that my regular oil-vinegar-seasoning combos don’t quite reach. The notion of salad isn’t typically, instinctively comforting but it got me back in the kitchen and, as always, the kitchen is where I find my ground again. Dinner by dinner.

Summer Chicken Salad with Peaches and Blackberries
Adapted from Salad for Dinner by Jeanne Kelley

For the marinade/chicken:
2 tbsp. white wine vinegar
2 tbsp. hazelnut oil, or extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp. honey
1 tsp fresh thyme
1/2 tsp salt
1lb/500g boneless chicken breasts, ideally with skin (about 2 large or 3 small breasts)

For the salad:
2 tbsp. white wine vinegar
1 tbsp. honey
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. minced shallot
12 cups mixed greens (see note below)
2 peaches, pitted and sliced
1 cup/1 punnet fresh blackberries
1/2 cup chopped toasted hazelnuts (I didn’t toast mine as I was rushing. Nobody died)
2 oz/50g blue cheese, crumbled

* I have thought about how to quantify 12 cups of salad for a non-US market and have decided that all you need to know is that you need enough salad greens for 4 people to make this recipe. Use your eye/judgment.

Start by marinading the chicken. Combine 2 tbsp. vinegar, 2 tbsp. oil, 1 tbsp. honey, the chopped thyme and 1/2 tsp salt in a small bowl or dish and stir to blend. Add the chicken breasts and coat in the marinade. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours and up to overnight.

When you are ready to start the salad, preheat a stovetop grill pan or cast iron sauté pan to medium heat. Grill the chicken until browned and cooked through – this was about 6 minutes per side for my chicken breasts. Transfer to a cutting board to rest while you prepare the rest of the salad.

In a large bowl, combine 2 tbsp. vinegar, 1 tbsp. honey and 1/2 tsp salt. Slowly whisk in the 1/4 cup/60ml oil until well combined. Stir in the shallot. Add the greens, peaches, and blackberries to the dressing in the bowl and toss to combine. Divide among 4 plates.

Thinly slice the chicken and arrange atop the salad plates. Sprinkle the salads with the hazelnuts and cheese and serve.

Superfood Salmon

Motherhood is about raising and celebrating the child you have, not the child you thought you would have. It’s about understanding that he is exactly the person he is supposed to be. And that, if you’re lucky, he might just be the teacher who turns you into the person you are supposed to be.
Joan Ryan

I stumbled upon this quote when desperately researching why it is that babies who have slept really well for the last couple of months suddenly hit the four month mark and turn into night terrors. Most of the activity in the Cakesnail household this week has taken place between the hours of 1 and 5am in the shape of crying, bouncing, rocking, crying, feeding, bouncing, crying. You get it. I think (hope) the worst is over, but it’s been big stuff for our little guy: his brain is gearing up for a mega developmental leap that should happen in another couple of weeks. It’s a pretty cool one – he’s going to start rolling, and building towards crawling (eek), and probably making those baba-mama-tata-papa sounds that we will leap to records as first “words”. But at the moment he’s a tad confused, and spooked, and needy. Doesn’t anyone whose head circumference is going to grow three centimeters in a mere month deserve to feel a bit discombobulated?

These changes bit hard to start out. It feels cruel – just as you find a rhythm with your days, and get a glorious 8 hour chunk of sleep from your little one, not only is that snatched away, but it comes with much more middle-of-the-night distress than the pure eating fest of the newborn nights. It’s all too easy to put your parenting decisions under the spotlight: should I have let him sleep “on the go” so much; does he need a stricter daytime schedule; does he need to cry for longer to learn his way out of some of this? The whole experience is quite the teacher: I certainly will never judge anyone else’s parenting decisions having been through this. Learning not to judge your own: well, that’s a much harder lesson.

I don’t write much about my yoga practice on Cakesnail – it’s something I prefer to experience more than to intellectualize, which writing invariably leads me to do. But this week I can’t stop thinking about just how much yoga there is in this journey of parenthood. It’s about dropping attachments to and expectations of an image of what our nights should look like at this point. It’s about acceptance, trust, and faith that everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. And it’s about kindness – to a confused, growing little boy, to Ollie, and, hardest of all, to myself. So while my asana practice might look quite different to the days Before Henry – a chaotic mom-and-baby class here, or a mad dash to and from a weekly practice there – it’s fine. I’m chanting and breathing all night long, and that gym ball does wonders for the core in any case.

Being up all night requires careful nourishment: a quick bowl of pasta and tomato sauce doesn’t really cut it. I’ve been eating a lot of meat as a result – some days it’s a sheer physical drive for a burger or steak. But I’m trying to get more fish into this diet, especially before bed, as it’s a digestable protein that keeps you full and aids sleep without a heaviness in the gut. I generally avoid cooking fish, just because I’m not really that good at it. Terrified of the modern culinary sin of overcooking, I usually end up serving fillet of sushi, which then has to go back in the oven or on the stove probably in chunks, while the rest of the meal goes cold and limp. This is why, if I invite you for dinner, I will not be serving fish. Of course this vicious circle is ridiculous: more tethering to fear, and expectations, and perfectionism. It’s only fish!

Speaking of perfectionism, I took this recipe from Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP newsletter on superfoods this month, with recipes from Dr Frank Lipman. You would think that the realities of these past weeks would make any mama infuriated by Gwynny’s curated depiction of idealized motherhood, and I totally get it if you find her ridiculous. But love or loathe, she does have impeccable food taste, and this salmon recipe hits all the right notes, whether you’re trying to get through the night, or just through the hump of late January resolution fatigue. The fish marinades in soy, balsamic, lime and honey, leaving a subtle note when grilled that pairs perfectly with brown rice and greens quickly wok-fried with garlic. Eat up, let go, and enjoy whatever ride you find yourself on right now. You’ll be off it before you know*.

*since I wrote this, nights are almost back to normal! Whatever ‘normal’ means these days…

Soy-Balsamic Salmon with Brown Rice and Kale
Adapted from Dr Frank Lipman for GOOP

Serves 2

2 salmon fillets, around 1/3-1/2 lb each, preferably wild or whatever salmon is sustainably fished where you are
1/4 cup light soy sauce (I used tamari)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
juice of half a lime
1 tbsp honey
3 tbsp olive oil
black pepper

Brown rice to serve, cooked however you prefer (I do 1 part rice to 2 parts water in a rice cooker)

1 bunch kale
4 cloves garlic
canola or vegetable oil

Combine the soy, balsamic and lime juice in a small bowl. Whisk in the honey until well combined, and then slowly drizzle in the olive oil while continuing to whisk. Stir in a few turns of fresh black pepper.

Place the salmon fillets in a sealable container or shallow dish, and pour the marinade over the fish. Cover and refrigerate for 4-12 hours, turning the fish and basting 3-4 times during this time.

Before you cook the fish, cook your rice and prepare the kale by removing the hard stems and cutting or ripping into pieces. Finely chop the garlic and set to one side.

Line a baking sheet or tray with parchment paper or foil. Remove the salmon from the marinade and place on the sheet, skin-side up. Preheat your broiler (UK = grill) and place the salmon underneath, not too close to the heat, around the second shelf to the top. This is where it gets fun! The original recipe said to broil/grill for 2-3 minutes each side. Mine needed more like 6 minutes each side, but keep an eye on your fish and use your instincts. Just take note of how long it took, even if you end up getting it wrong, so you can tweak the next time.

Once the fish is on the second side, heat about 2 tbsp canola or vegetable oil in a wok or appropriate skillet, and add the garlic. Fry, moving around the pan quickly, for about 1 minute, then add the kale and continue cooking and stirring for about 1-2 more minutes.

Serve the rice and kale alongside the fish.