Friday, June 5, 2009

Hallelujah! Midterm Secret Ingredients Answer My Prayers

In my last post I wrote "...fingers are crossed that one of the ingredients we get is the stone fruit that's in season." Well guess what, I got cherries! A bagful of glistening ruby beauties with an abundance of juicy flavor that begged to be tucked into the spelt flour galette crust recipe I'd memorized in preparation.

My surprise challenge was to use the following:
Cherries, sweet potatoes, kale (ingredients)
Battonet, braise, cast iron skillet (method/equipment)

We spent time up front brainstorming. I sketched out a menu of two different galetes: one savory and one sweet, as well as fries (those would tick off my sweet potatoes, battonet knife cut and use of the cast iron skillet). From there, we had 90 minutes in the kitchen, along with our sous chefs, to make everything. I'm forever in debt to Shannon for pulling off the perfect galette pastry. Though I wrote out the specs, it was her implementation. As she worked on making the dough and rolling the mini pies out, I created fillings, and hacked up the darn potatoes, then fried and spiced them.

My final menu:
--Sweet galette, cherries macerated in cinnamon, almond extract, a sprinkling of sea salt, succanat (alternative sweetener) and arrowroot (to thicken). Garnished with pistachios.
--Savory galette, "mini pizzas" with tomato sauce, braised leeks and kale with garlic and oregano. Garnished with cheese topping and oregano.
--Marscapone and goat cheese combined as topping for both. This was a nice way to "bridge" the concept together.
--Sweet potato fries with garlic chili salt.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but should have photos thanks to my classmate Lara to post later.

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