Duel Fuel or Why My Stove is Better than Yours

When my cooking goes wrong, I'm not apt to blame it on anything but myself. The truth is that the cook can be blamed for things going wrong most of the time and I admit that. There are, however, those times when you can blame burning, underbaking, uneven heat, overbaking, hot spots, excessive heat, and inadequate heat on your stove and oven. If you ask me (and most other people who cook), gas burners are better than electric and electric ovens are better than gas. This makes for a funny marriage of energy types.

A gas burner is super responsive. As soon as you turn that knob, the heat changes and you can see by how much. A gas oven, on the other hand, has periods of being on and periods of being off. It will heat up to 15 degrees above your target temperature and then cool down before igniting again to make up for lost heat. An electric stove will maintain the same temperature fairly consistently. Since sugar burns at 350 degrees, heating the gas oven to 365 in order to stay somewhere around the right temperature means that your angel food cake may come out looking less than angelic.

In the past, the cook would have to decide her priorities: Is baking more important or am I more concerned with cooking? Well now I can bake my cake and eat it too. Duel fuel stoves have come down in price dramatically, even being offered in everyday appliance lines like Kenmore. The fact that my house came with no appliances at all turned out to be a huge advantage. I could finally have the stove of my dreams! (or at least a version of the stove of my dreams).

Now that I've rubbed in how much better my stove is than yours, I need to be totally honest. I don't really pay too much attention to the fact that my stove is duel fuel. Instead I find myself much less annoyed by burning, underbaking, uneven heat, overbaking, etc.

I do confess to feeling the tiniest bit of gratitude every time I pull a perfectly cooked dish out of the oven, though!

Chocolate Love

In honor of Valentine's Day I feel the need to spread some love and a great recipe for chocolate truffles. About six years ago, when I was in college in my first apartment with a kitchen the size of a postage stamp, I saw the movie Chocolat. The movie was so beautiful and inspiring that I immediately went to the store, bought ingredients, went home and turned my kitchen into a truffle factory. I started in January and I didn't surface until well after Valentine's Day. Everyone I ran into recieved a truffle. "Good morning Professor! Have a truffle!" I carried them on me at all times.

I started with the basics and then progressed to the sublime. I never wanted truffles that were covered in hard chocolate. Mine were covered in nuts, cocoa, or sugar, the better to bite into the ganache. Cinnamon-Dried Cherry ended up being my favorite, inspired by the brownies that my college choir director treated us to a couple times a semester.

This winter I have a new invention in honor of Savory and Sweet. They are mint truffles made with real mint teabags so they have that fresh cool mint flavor rather than an artificial chewing gum flavor. To further bring out the sweetness of these chocolates, I decided to roll them in a mixture of granulated sugar and sea salt. Truly a beautiful savory-and-sweet marriage.

These are not hard to make and would be really fun with kids. Just choose the best chocolate you can. Find the Ghiradelli chocolate chips right alongside the others in the baking aisle. It is worth the extra 50 cents (it is also worth it for cookies, by the way!)

These are easy to make, allow you to get up to your elbows in chocolate and are guaranteed to make all your friends love you.

Happy Valentine's Day!



Chocolate Truffles
(Loosely based on a recipe from Bon Appetit Dec. 1999)


Cinnamon-Dried Cherry Truffles

Truffles
2/3 cup whipping cream
1 12-ounce package (about 2 cups) semisweet chocolate chips
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 Tablespoons dried tart cherries, finely chopped
1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Coating
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 Tablespoons cocoa powder

Bring cream to boil in heavy medium saucepan. Remove from heat. Add chocolate; whisk until melted and smooth. Whisk in vanilla. Pour into medium bowl. Add chopped cherries and 1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Cover; chill until firm, about 3 hours.

Line baking sheet with waxed paper. Drop mixture by rounded teaspoonfuls onto prepared baking sheet. Freeze until firm, about 45 minutes.

Mix 2 Tablespoons cinnamon and cocoa in a small bowl. Roll each truffle between your hands to make it roughly round. Roll around in the cinnamon-cocoa mixture to coat.


Mint Truffles

Truffles
2/3 cup whipping cream
3 peppermint tea bags, tags removed
1 12-ounce package (about 2 cups) semisweet chocolate chips

Coating
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon finely ground good quality sea salt


Bring cream and teabags to boil very slowly in heavy medium saucepan. Remove from heat. Remove tea bags and add chocolate; whisk until melted and smooth. Pour into medium bowl. Cover; chill until firm, about 3 hours.

Line baking sheet with waxed paper. Drop mixture by rounded teaspoonfuls onto prepared baking sheet. Freeze until firm, about 45 minutes.

Combine the sugar and salt in a small bowl. Roll each truffle between your hands to make it roughly round. Roll around in the sugar-salt mixture to coat.

The Potager in My Mind

Now that I have a real house with an actual yard, I am finally ready to have a proper kitchen garden. I have envied all those beautiful gardens around town, having what I'm positive is an underappreciation for the amount of work that goes into making them as amazing as they are. I'm about to find out exactly how much work that is.

For the mean time, though, I am gardening in my mind. I am imagining where I will put the parsnips, the tomatoes, the beans and the zucchini. I am looking critically at the sunlight in the yard at various times of the day, pretending that I have any ability at all to estimate where the sun will be at the same time of day in July. I am arranging for compost to be delivered from my parents' house (the best compost in the world, by the way). I even bought seeds. Now that is the part where commitment comes in! The style of gardening that I have in mind is the French kitchen garden or potager. The potager typically uses intensive gardening methods to get a huge yield out of a relatively small plot. Soil is cultivated to at least 18 inches to allow roots to reach down and plants to reach straight up. Another feature of the potager is that there is typically a mix of ornamental flowers with the vegetables. Strange bedfellows, perhaps, but no more strange than sweet and savory flavors in one dish. Why shouldn't the beautiful and the useful be combined? Maybe having the flowers in with the veggies will help show exactly how beautiful growing food can be.

Louis XIV even had a potager at Versailles, although I anticipate mine being of a slightly different scale!

I have grown herbs and tomatoes in pots for the past couple years, but I am eager to actually respond to what is in the garden with what I make in the kitchen. I anticipate a July full of tomatoes, a June of radishes and young greens, zucchini and beans throughout the season. September will be marked by parsnips, next January by the tomatoes I will can. My herb crusted chicken will be crusted with the herbs from my own garden: basil, parsley, chives, rosemary and more. My salads will sing with sweet peppers, nasturtium flowers and my very own lettuce.

I know that this will grow over time, though the years I will be able to both figuratively and metaphorically put down roots in my new home. Perennials finally seem worth it to me, and as they grow, I will too, learning to care for them and supply them with different companions over the years.