morels & cream

work has been very quiet for the last week or so, and it turns me into a ball of anxious energy, just waiting to escape my desk; i've even started doing some baking at work, having found that as long as i share the final product, no one seems to mind me bustling around the kitchen. monday night i hurried home from work with a project in mind: making butter.

the times posted a diy handbook recently that really got me thinking about all the from-scratch projects i've been wanting to try but putting off. now that there's no wedding planning to distract me, i plan on tackling a lot of these.

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morel mushroom sweet cream butter

1 fresh morel mushroom
1/2 t butter (for sauteing morel)
2 cups heavy whipping cream
truffle salt, to taste

i had a friend in high school whose family gathered morels from secret locations, and i've always been fascinated with this gorgeous little mushroom. (rumor has it they grow wild in some nyc parks. . . july through september, audrey leary becomes the fungus fighter, morel hunter extraordinaire!) i picked one up at dean and deluca on my lunch break, determined to make the most of it. to wash morels, you have to do something that goes against every mushroom-washing instinct i've got - dunk it in a bowl of water and shake and shake it until sediment comes out. the honeycomb like cap just traps dirt and it's the only way to get it good and clean. once you're satisfied it's de-dirtied, immediately chop it up and throw it in a saucepan with your tiny pat of butter, sauteing on low heat until it's soft and dark brown.





so! prepare a pitcher of ice water, then put your cream in a mixer or food processor and whip it until it gets very stiff peaks. and then keep whipping. it'll start looking kinda curdled. KEEP WHIPPING. it'll start to separate. GOOD! keep whipping! until it's pretty stiff and buttery and there's lots of buttermilk separated out.



strain out and save the buttermilk (i used it later for biscuits.) now rinse the butter in a sieve with that ice water until the water runs totally clear. it's important you use ice water so the butter doesn't melt down the drain. rinsing it will keep it from going bad quickly.




now, take that butter and put it in a blender (or use your immersion blender, like i did.) add salt and your morels and pulse; add salt until you're satisfied with its saltiness, and the butter is speckled and doesn't have anymore big mushroom chunks. ta-da! delicious mushroom butter.




i made this butter the same night as the egg cup custards, and decided to make a really simple pasta with some noodles sam and i picked up on our honeymoon, in curaçao.





fun with food!

all i did for this pasta was boil the noodles (duh) steam and then char some baby artichokes in chicken stock, and make a chiffonade of basil leaves, and toss it all together with salt, pepper, and the morel butter.








voila! this pasta managed to be both light and rich; the morels come through beautifully on the noodles, and the basil helps keep it fresh and not too heavy.

enjoy! my apologies for the overload of food pics. . . i'm having a love affair with my camera these days and i'm bad at editing myself.

xo audrey

$20 pigeon dinner

hello and happy tuesday! i feel like i've been walking the wrong way up an escalator lately - i have a list of things to do that doesn't seem to shrink no matter how much i do towards it. one of those things permanently on the to-do list is write a blog post, damn it! so email-answering and caterer-searching be damned, i'm doing this thing.




through the viewfinder


gratuitous fiance shot

i spent ten days in maine with sam about a week ago and it was glorrrrrious. a couple days in portland, where we stumbled upon a bookstore devoted entirely to food and cookbooks (i picked up a great book on canning that i'll try to share from as the weather cools down), ate more than our share of amazing food, and hiked down to the ocean and back through these gorgeous woods that were absolutely overrun with mushrooms of every kind. at the risk of sounding like a weirdo, mushrooms are so graceful and gorgeous. sam snagged a book on foraging at aforementioned bookstore, so i'm pretty sure we've got ourselves a new hobby.



















we then spent a week in a small town about 30 minutes outside the city, in a cabin that belongs to a friend's family. i'm so used to cooking whenever i go stay with anyone - i love cooking for people (obviously) and most people are happy to sit back and let someone else take care of the meals for a while - so i was surprised and delighted to find out that the patriarch of the family has worked in kitchens all his life and absolutely loves to cook. we ate like kings. family style dinners every night that were so different from what i usually cook - something about me gravitates towards complicated food. i rarely just choose a meat and prepare it simply; i grew up mostly vegetarian, so i never really learned how to cook meat properly, and even after i started cooking meat i just kind of shied away from the things i hadn't eaten growing up. so things like pork shoulder and braised short ribs were relatively new experiences to me, and i couldn't get enough.

so, when sam and i were grocery shopping the other day (i think between the two of us we probably go to some form of grocery store, be it fairway or bodega, about 17 times a week) and he spotted a fancy fowl section, we decided to try something new and buy a squab. it was $18.35 for about a pound. a little outrageous, but we had both *heard* of squab, and we were pretty sure it was kind of fancy and delicious, so we decided to just go for it. (this story may make me sound kind of stupid. i did go to culinary school, but i'm a pastry chef! we learned nothing about meat of any kind. not a thing.) we brought it home and i busted out a few cookbooks looking for recipes; nothing sounded quite right, so we hit the internet and i found a good, simple roasted squab recipe. and on the way learned what squab is, exactly: pigeon. we paid $20 a pound to eat the awful birds i scuffle past on the street on a daily basis. but you know what? that is one tasty sky rat. very rich, fatty tasting meat, kind of like duck; i highly recommend it. here's what i did with mine.



you need:

a squab
some shiitake mushrooms (maybe 7-8 decent sized ones), sliced
a few T butter
some garlic
some rosemary (or whatever herbs you want to use)
about 1/3 cup of red wine (i used a malbec, but any not-too-sweet, full wine will work [ithink])
salt & pepper
aaand i served mine over some multigrained rice.




turn your oven up to 450 and let it get there.

get a small, oven safe pan - big enough for the squab but not much bigger. put some butter on it - a couple tablespoons, chopped up a little - and then some herbs and salt and pepper, and i covered mine in minced garlic. get your rice cooking while you're heating up the oven, slice your mushrooms, drink some wine. so once the oven is preheated, put the bird in there and let it be for about 7 minutes. open the oven and spoon the butter and juices back over the bird and rotate it. cook another 7 minutes and do the same thing. you can flip the bird itself over at this point too. i cooked mine for about 20 minutes - you know it's done when you pierce the skin and the meat feels firm but flakes up. it will keep a deep red color - it's supposed to be kept somewhat rare. at this point you should have your mushrooms heating up in a saute pan with a bit of butter; take the squab out of its pan and let it rest on a cutting board, then deglaze the pan with the red wine and pour the whole juicy lot into the saute pan with the mushrooms. cook until it's reduced nicely; split the squab down the middle; put it on the rice; spoon/pour the mushrooms over it. enjoy with the rest of the wine. cheers!




so i may have overcompensated for my absence with way too many photos. if so, i apologize.

more food soon.

xo audrey