Pistachio Nougat & Lemon-Buttermilk Sorbet

I made nougat/turron last year and recently found a recipe using pistachio. The light green color caught my eye and since I love both turron and pistachio I just have to make it. It is very chewy and bad for the teeth but so delicious, so who cares?:D

Pistachio Nougat/Turron
2 cups sugar
1½ cups light corn syrup
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup water
2 egg whites
½ teaspoon pistachio flavor oil
green food coloring
4 tablespoons butter
1½ cups toasted pistachio

• Prepare an 8 x 8 inch pan by covering it with non-stick aluminum foil or potato starch wafer both at the bottom and on top.
• Combine the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and water in a large saucepan over medium high heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved and continue to cook until mixture reaches hard-ball stage, 250°F.
• While mixture is cooking, place egg whites in large bowl of stand mixer and whisk until they hold stiff peaks. When sugar syrup has reached 250 degrees, remove from heat and slowly pour one quarter of the mixture into the stiff egg whites, with the mixer running constantly. Continue beating until the egg whites hold its shape.
• Return the saucepan with the remaining syrup to the stove and continue to cook over medium high heat until the mixture reaches 300 degrees, or hard-crack stage.With the mixer running, pour the remaining sugar syrup slowly into the egg mixture and continue beating until mixture is thick and stiff.
• Add the flavoring and a few drops of food coloring gel or paste to tint the nougat a delicate green. Add the softened butter and beat until the candy is very thick and satiny. Add the nuts last and stir until combined.
• Spoon the nougat into the prepared pan and press it smooth and evenly. Allow to set to room temperature and cut into small squares to serve.

I also made Lemon-Buttermilk Sorbet (from David Lebovitz's THE PERFECT SCOOP) before the buttermilk from the butter I made spoils. It is so light, yummy, and very refreshing, the tangy lemon and tangy buttermilk are perfect for each other. This flavor is excellent with ginger thins.

Lemon-Buttermilk Sorbet
1/3 cup water
2/3 cup sugar
1 lemon
2 cups buttermilk
¼ cup lemon juice

• In a medium stainless steel sauce pan, mix the sugar and water. Grate the zest of the lemon directly into the saucepan. Heat, stirring frequently, until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and let stand until the syrup reaches room temperature, then chill thoroughly in the refrigerator. Whisk the buttermilk into the syrup, then whisk in the lemon juice. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.

According to David Lebovitz, you can make ice cream without an ice cream maker. He suggests you freeze the mixture and stir with a mixer every 30 minutes until the ice cream is smooth. You can read his tips in making the perfect scoop of ice cream with or without ice cream maker here.

lemon buttermilk sorbet and ginger thins sandwich

Maryland/Virginia Blue & Alaska King Crabs

crab cakes and relleno


blue crabs in coconut milk and hot red pepper sauce

Two of my favorite Filipino bloggers recently featured crabs in their posts. It was sheer torture reading their posts, my only consolation is at that at least I know what they taste like ;D. I have eaten A LOT of the sweet curacha with coconut sauce and of course steamed alimango (mud crab). What we have here is the Maryland/Virginia blue crab which is a cousin, I think, of our alimasag, also called blue crab in the Philippines. My mother rarely bought blue crabs, she said they are not as meaty and tasty as the mud crabs. I myself don't buy crabs in their shells because only my daughter and I have the patience to eat them. I buy the canned lump crab meat from Indonesia, Thailand, or the Philippines and make crab cakes to eat with rice and as crab sandwich, or plain with vinegar and chile dipping sauce.

I bought a few blue crabs and prepared some with coconut and chile sauce, crab cakes and crab relleno. I also bought a few Alaska king crab legs which I have not tried before because they look freakingly ugly with their ipis (cockroach)-like spiky legs, they scare me. I steamed them and ate them with garlic infused butter and lemon juice. I did not like them at all, maybe because they were previoulsy frozen and did not taste fresh. Eh, nothing can equal alimango and curacha, period!:D

blue crabs

scary looking Alaska king crab legs

Speaking of crabs, I had a strange but funny encounter with them. Many many years ago I used to work as a domestic flight attendant and being one of the newbies I was stationed at Cebu. We fly to the Mindanao region, stay overnight in Zamboanga City once every 2 weeks, where I had those curachas. We also go to Cotabato City where I ate the biggest and tastiest mud crabs. I had a regular passenger whose family had crab and catfish farms in Cotabato City. One night after I got off the plane and was ready to board the company van to take us home, the driver informed me I had a tall can filled with live catfish in water and a dozen crabs tied together with palm fronds that the aforementioned passenger left for me as a gift. How he knew it was my off day the next day I never found out. It was very late, the housemaid was already in bed, and I did not know what to do with the fish and crabs. My friends and I left them on the kitchen table and went to bed. Early next morning the maid was laughing and making all sorts of racket, woke us up to tell us some of the crabs had "escaped". Two lazy or perhaps clueless crabs were still on the kitchen table, some were halfway through the living room floor and some were crawling through the weird perfectly round holes on the living room concrete walls. The holes were decorative or part of the design, which is the oddest thing. When we rented the house we were just concerned with the bedrooms and baths, we didn't care about the living room and kitchen because we were never there. We ate at hotels and restaurants, we never had a meal in that house, we never cooked. So we didn't mind those holes, they were not big enough even for a child to get through and we also never thought of criminal elements at the time. So we caught maybe 4 of the crabs trying to crawl out of the holes and 4 on the floor, unlucky bastards. I never got to eat either the crabs or the catfish (I didn't eat catfish then) because my friends and I already had planned to go out that day, then went to work the next day. The maid and the 3 pilots who shared the house with us told me they were fantastic!

Crab Cakes
1 pound lump crab meat
1 cup finely diced potato, optional
4 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 medium onion, finely minced
2 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
¼ cup parsley, finely minced
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
2 eggs, beaten
olive or grapeseed oil

• In a small skillet, fry the potatoes until light brown, set aside. In another skillet, heat 1 T oil and saute the garlic and onion for 3 minutes. Add the tomatoes and cook for 2 minutes. Add the cooked potatoes, salt and parsley and stir for 1 minute. In a bowl, mix the crab and potato mixture, add the eggs, mixing gently. Form into patties or fill crab shells. Heat oil in a large skillet and fry crab cakes or crab rellenos 2 minutes on each side or until golden brown.

Ensaimada

I have always wanted to make the Hizon style ensaimada which resembles the original Spanish ensaimada, i.e. flat and whitish inside, not the fluffy yellow almost cake-like Goldilocks ensaimada. The Hizon ensaimada I remember was golden brown and flattened further with a hot iron or maybe spatula to caramelize the sugar topping. It was delicious, bready, sweet and perfect with hot chocolate.

In one of my Spanish cookbooks the recipe for ensaimada is leavened with baking powder and has lard, not butter. It is shaped into one gigantic coil and left to rise for 7 hours before baking. I will try that recipe next time I make ensaimadas.

Today I used a Spanish recipe I found online. I was able to make two 7-inch ensaimadas using half of the dough and the other half I made into a coffee cake loaf filled with Nutella and hazelnuts.

Update: Goldilocks-style and Spanish Majorcan recipes here

topped with butter, sugar, and grated young gouda

Nutella and hazelnuts coffee cake loaf

Here is the ensaimada recipe that uses baking powder and lard:
5 cups flour
¾ cup sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup warm water
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup lard

• Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, eggs and water. Knead to form a smooth dough. Roll dough and spread the lard. Roll and fold several times until the lard is absorbed. Halve the dough (or use one dough recipe but it will be HUGE) and roll each dough as thin as possible. Roll the dough from one side like a poster. Coil the rolled dough loosely on 2 large baking sheets, cover with damp towel or plastic wrap and leave to rise for 5 - 7 hours. Bake in a preheated 300°F oven until golden brown. Dust with powdered sugar before slicing.

Who's Cool

I watched yet another Tadanobu Asano movie (Café Lumière) and I just realized how cool this guy is. He can stand there not saying or doing anything yet I am drawn to him, no matter how small the role or screen time. I have seen maybe a dozen of his movies and I liked him in all of them. Having seen hundreds of movies, I made a list of movie celebrities that I think are so cool, along with one or two of their best movies, IMHO.

The coolest guys in cinema


Humphrey Bogart - The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Sabrina











Tadanobu Asano - Gojoe, Last Life In The Universe











Steve McQueen - Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair











Jonathan Rhys Meyers - Gormenghast, Velvet Goldmine











Alain Delon - Le Samourai, L'eclisse











My All-time Favorite Movie Performers

• Jimmy Stewart
• Humphrey Bogart
• Cary Grant
• Steve McQueen
  
• Katharine Hepburn
• Audrey Hepburn
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Adrien Brody
• Johnny Depp
  
• Brad Pitt
  
• Ben Stiller
• Maggie Gyllenhaal
• Toshiro Mifune
• Tadanobu Asano
  
• Takeshi Kitano (Beat Takeshi)
  
• Jet Li
• Jackie Chan
• Takeshi Kaneshiro
  
• Tony Leung
  
• Maggie Cheung
• Vincent Cassel
• Jean Reno
• Alain Delon
  
• Audrey Tautou
• Colin Firth
• Jonathan Rhys Meyers
• Christian Bale
  
• Gary Oldman
• David Bowie
• Rachel Weisz