Cook sister!

Waiter, there are cherries in my dumplings!

If you say the word "dumpling" to a room full of people, I can bet you that no two will think of the same dish.  It's just one of those dishes that can manifest itself in so many ways that no two people's old favourite family dumplings or local specialities will ever be the same.  Except for one small problem:  my family was never big on dumplings!  I think I remember one occasion where my mom made souskluitjies (traditional South African cinnamon dumplings), whcih I didn't much care for in my youth, and that aside I have no other warm fuzzy family dumpling recipes.  As I have got older, I have warmed to dumplings.  I make and adore my own souskluitjies.  I have discovered that dumplings are heavenly in stews or on fruit puddings; and that they are even better Chinese-style as dim sum.  But then for this month's WTSIM event, host Johanna threw me a curve ball.  Filled dumplings.  Yes, of course I could try my hand at dim sum, but I have been too madly busy at work getting ready for my holiday to want to engage in a fiddly dim sum session.  Plus there is nothing linking me or my culinary history in any way to dim sum!  And much as the idea of fruity dumplings appeal, surely they would be to heavy and stodgy in the middle of summer?  What to do, what to do...

As I was trawling the web for inspiration, I came across a recipe for Polish cherry dunplings.  Hmmm.  An idea began to take root.  You see, my father did rather a lot of family reasarch a decade or so ago, to try and find out who the first member of our family was who came to South Africa.  As it turns out, Jan Andries Horak had first set foot on Cape soil in 1745, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company.  There he married (four times!), fathered children and laid the foundations of my family in Africa.  From there, the records were relatively easy to trace and my father has a family tree showing each generation from my little nephews back to this founding father.  But what interested me more (and my father not at all) was where our family is from in Europe.  Although the surname is decidedly Czech, according to my dad's research, Jan was born in Altdam, Hanover - but I could find no modern references to a place called Altdam.  However, some digging on the net revealed that Altdam on the north coast of the Prussian empire and until, 1945 it was part of the German city of Stettin.  However, after the war when boundaries were re-drawn, the city ended up as being part of Poland and is now known as Szczecin.  The closest approximation of Altdam in modern terms is Dabie, a municipal neighbourhood of Szczecin. 

So... in a very roundabout way, I can make a case for a Polish connection to my family.  So when I saw a recipe for knedle wisniowe (cherry dumplings), I must have sensed a subconscious atavistic yearning for the cuisine of my forefathers (that's my story and I'm sticking to it!!).  And in any event, I have always adored cherries as their arrival means summer really has come :)

I got this recipe from Starchefs.com  and I have to say that I am not convinced of the fluid/solid ratio of the batter.  OK, that said, I may have screwed things up a little by a) being too lazy to take out my mixer and resorting to melting the butter to mix with the egg yolks and breadcrumbs; and b) using a coffee mug as a cup measure for milk because the measuring jug was in the fridge, full of something.  I suspect that these two little lapses of judgement meant that there was too much liquid.  By the time I got to the bit of the recipe where you "form tiny dumplings" with the dough, my dough was more like crazy glue and absolutely not interested in holding any sort of shape, unless you consider impersonating an amoeba a shape.  So there I was, adding more flour in desperation, knowing that this would probably throw out all the other ingredient ratios but dammit, I had to get something made for WTSIM, even if it had to be the Cherry Dumplings of Doom.  Or maybe I just don't make dumplings often enough to know what the right consistency is.  Either way, I'd already got to the stage of a recipe when you realise there's no going back - ingredients have already been sacrificed... 

Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is that if you follow the recipe below, expect the dough  to be sticky and tricky to handle - if anybody has suggestions as to how to improve this, I'd welcome them.  My solution was to swear a lot and coat my hands copiously in flour while juggling the sticky dough from hand to hand and trying to persuade it to wrap around a cherry.  It's all just non-stop glamour here at chez Cooksister.  Against this backdrop, I have to say that I fully expected them to be awful - I have no idea what they were meant to look like (mine just looked... erm... rough-textured and doughy) and had every expectation that my panic-adding of flour had not helped.  But despite the technical difficulties of getting them into the pot intact, they turned out to be delicious! Maybe a little stodgy, but with a lovely juicy cherry in the centre to lighten things up, and not too sweet.  Even notoriously dessert-shy Nick loved them.  Smacznego!

CHERRY DUMPLINGS (Knedle wisniowe) - makes 10-12 dumplings

Ingredients:

4 Tbsp bread crumbs
3 Tbsp butter (not melted!)
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup milk
1-1.5 cups flour (add until the dough is manageable)
Salt to taste (I used salted butter and omitted the salt)
250g Morello cherries (I used Summit)
4 Tbsp melted butter
4 Tbsp light brown sugar

METHOD:

Pit the cherries.

Combine bread crumbs, butter (softened but not melted), egg yolks and milk to form a paste. Mix in flour and salt, adding flour until the dough can be handled.

Shape into tiny dumplings, and insert 2 cherry halves into center of each. Drop 4 at a time into a deep pot of boiling water, and cook for about 5 minutes, or until they rise to the top.

Remove with a slotted spoon, drain and serve warm, topped with melted butter and sugar.

Restaurant Emile - hooray for cassoulet!

Can somebody please tell me how on earth I lived before the internet??  Apart from all the wondrousness of blogging (and that’s a lot of wondrousness, believe me!), it’s completely revolutionized the way I travel.  I am probably of the last generation that will remember total dependence on travel agents. You decided where you wanted to go and then they took over – suggesting hotels and itineraries and possibly even restaurants – and you meekly obeyed!  Never mind the person in question had probably never been there, or might not share your taste in hotels or food…  But now, it’s a whole new ballgame.  Nick and I decide on a destination and what follows is a frenzy of internet research – STATravel or Majortravel to find flights, and Tripadvisor to find a hotel, and then extra research to find a restaurant.  Now Nick is of the school of thought that I should leave the restaurant to chance – why can’t we wander the streets until we find something that takes our fancy?  Sometimes I leave it at that and occasionally it works out fine.   But there are also memories of walking around Venice until the restaurants were beginning to close because we simply could not find anything that looked nice or suited our budget! Suffice to say that, more often than not, I take the former route and plan meals down to the last crumb ;-)

When we decided to spend a night in Toulouse earlier this year, en route to Andorra for a ski trip which I was dreading like root canal work (much more on that later!), I knew we would be arriving late - so not much time to muck about finding a restaurant for dinner. And anyway, I was planning my last pre-ski dinner with the fervent intensity of a condemned man ordering his last meal...   I was going to the South-west of France, i.e. Global HQ of Cassoulet and Foie Gras, so I wanted to make sure I got a good example of the local speciality. What some internet research revealed is that there is a restaurant in Toulouse that is so well known for its cassoulet that it was commissioned to make the cassoulet for the launch dinner of the Airbus A380, Toulouse’s most famous non-edible export. So that was the end of any discussion: decision made!

Restaurant Emile has been around for a while - it opened in the 1940s as a working-class family restaurant called Emile but it subsequently did a bit of social climbing and was reincarnated as Chez Emile under new owner Francis Ferrier.  In 1999 Francis handed the reins to his nephew Luc Thibaud, the current owner.  The kitchen run by chef Christophe Fasan whose style is a contemporary take on traditional regional foods.  It is located on the rather pretty Place Saint George in a tall and narrow but unprepossessing building – I might not have looked twice had I not read up on it. Once inside, though, it's lovely.  There is a long room with exposed brick walls and tables in a sunny red and yellow colour scheme. There is also a room upstairs which is apparently more sought after, but having booked less than a week previously, I was quite happy with a table downstairs.  Having seated us, we were allowed a generous period to peruse the menu and take stock of our surroundings, and in the back of my head I started thinking oh dear, we’ll never get fed within our two hour window… but then you remember that you’re not in a chi-chi London restaurant and that they wouldn’t dream of kicking you out after two hours!  We perused the menu which is like a greatest hits parade of all the wonderful things a French bistro can produce, but what with this being Toulouse, I only had eyes for one thing:  cassoulet.  There was a tasting menu that was incredibly well-priced and Nick gallantly offered to join me if I wanted to try it, but there was no cassoulet on there.  So I decided uncharacteristically to avoid the tasting menu and go for cassoulet.  Although many French restaurants in Paris will offer cassoulet as part of their prix fixe menu, it usually comes at the expense of a hefty supplement, as does foie gras.  Or the prix fixe will include on and not the other.  But this, my friends, is the south-west and these are their signature dishes.  So just imagine my delight when one of their prix fixe menus was foie gras, cassoulet and a dessert of your choice!  No supplement!  No compromise!  Just my two favourite French foods! Could life get any better?  We placed our order and them threw ourselves on the Sommelier’s mercy when it came to choosing a wine - it was wonderful full-bodied red from Gaillac and a perfect match for the robust flavours of the cassoulet.

First to arrive was our amuse bouche - a little blob of tomato concasse topped with brandade of crab and drizzled with a pesto dressing, which was perfectly delightful with sweet red tomatoes pairing well with the saltiness of the brandade.  Delicious.  Nick started with a salad of marinated anchovies, tomatoes and boiled eggs which he pronounced to be delicious. And for me came... the foie gras.  I am a sucker for this stuff and I fear that in my lifetime it may end up being banned pretty much everywhere outside of France.  As somebody who has never smoked, done drugs or indulged in anything particularly risque in any aspect of her life it is a source of wonder to me that I now have one controversial habit - a foie gras habit!  At a bbq with  friends a few weeks ago I mentioned having had foie gras at a restaurant and was immediately verbally attacked by one of the guests - how could I?! Never mind that the chicken kebab he was eating helps to sustain an industry that far outweighs the evil of foie gras in terms of the extent of suffering.  But moving rapidly along.  The foie was served mi cuit (half cooked - the fresh foie is cooked very slowly and at a low temperature in a terrine to develop a complex texture and flavour) in a generous slab with a slice of toasted pain de Campagne.  And it was g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s, with the firm yet melting texture and delicate flavour that I love so much.  This was seriously high quality stuff and one of the nicest examples I have had - my only minor quibble was that I like something sweet to go with my foie, but this particular plate was devoid of sweetness.

Now, I have had a couple of cassoulets in my time.  It is a dish that endlessly fascinates me - how such essentially humble ingredients can be elevated to something so truly sublime and rib-stickingly good.  Because it really is basically pork & beans!  But oh, what delights await.  The name comes from the cassole or earthenware dish in which it is cooked (also the root of the word casserole, incidentally) and the dish is regarded as one of the aristocracy of French regional cuisine.  There are a number of stories about how it was invented, with the most popular being that it came about during the Hundred Years War at Castelnaudary, when beseiged villagers made a hearty dish of what they could find within the walls (manily pork and beans!), ate well and thus revived, stormed out and defeated the English beseigers.  Whether or not beans had been introduced to the country at this stage of history is neither here nor there ;-)  In any event, it is probably France's best-known dish and probably deserves a post all to itself.  So how was my example?  Oh.  My.  The word unctuous is the only one that springs immediately to mind.  The surface had gone that wonderful sticky consistency of something that's spent a long slow time in an oven, and once you got a spoonful out, you could see that the slow cooking had released all the gelatinous goodness in the pork rinds and formed a deliciously sticky base for the beans.  As you can see from the picture on the right, there was plenty of porky goodness studded throughout, including Toulouse sausages, and then there was the chunk of confit de canard in the middle.  I thought I'd died and gone to cassoulet heaven.  Both Nick and I manfully soldiered on through a pretty gigantic portion, but in the end it defeated us both (but only by a small margin!).  Although I am no expert, I have had a couple of cassoulets and this one was definitely the daddy.

Astonishingly, after all that, I still felt I could face dessert.  Well, it would be churlish to turn down a Grand Marinier souffle, now wouldn't it??  So what arrived was this perfect example on the left, absolutely soaring skyward in eggy wobbliness.  Wow.  And it was indeed light as a feather (and therefore obviously calorie free...!).  If I had any complaint, it would be that they had rather a light touch with the Grand Marinier bottle.  If a dish contains alcohol as a central ingredient, I am quite keen to be able to taste traces of it, and it was just not in evidence here.  But that aside, it was wonderful, washed down with a glass of French dessert wine (sadly not recorded).  I also noticed all around us that there were beautifully plated and interesting desserts - things in egg shells with french toast (kind of Heston Blumenthal-esque in its play on breakfast v dinner), so I suspect there is a lot more fun to be had with this menu outside of the traditional meal we had. 

The service was attentive all night, although never intrusive.  It was also deliciously unhurried which is something I've come to value tremendously since comign to London.  And the price, considering the excellent food we'd had, was a ridiculour €35 per head.  Try getting that food and those portion sizes in London at that price.  Sadly, I do not have the bill and cannot tell you what the total came to, but it was in the region of €100 for two.  The verdict:  what a great find for hearty traditional food as well as more innovative dishes in a relaxed and classy setting - for utterly reasonable prices.

Restaurant Emile
13 Place St Georges
31000 TOULOUSE
France
Tel. +33 5 61 21 05 56
http://www.restaurant-emile.com

Roasted butternut, feta and pinenut salad

Despite the fact that we have had nothing but dark clouds and rainstorms around here lately, rumour has it that summer has in fact arrived in the British Isles.  I can tell it by the way the poppies have exploded in my garden (to the delight of visiting bumblebees!) and I can tell it by the sauna-like underground trains, but I sure can't tell by the amount of sunshine we are getting!! While you are reading this, I will be in South Africa to celebrate my dad's 85th birthday and according to the weather forecasts, mid-winter South Africa is expected to be warmer and sunnier than mid-summer London - go figure.

But even though there's no sun, we are still having pretty hot, sultry nights and what I most often crave when I get home after work is a salad.  Now I must confess - I adore salads.  Leafy salads, potato salads, crunchy salads, vegetable salads, meaty salads - bring 'em on.  But what I love more than anything is a salad that I did not make myself.  Classic Caesar, salmon Caesar, cajun chicken, crab & avo, waldorf, Nicoise... I love them all.  But the problem arises when we are eating at home.  You see, the trouble with living with my hollow-legged and permanently ravenous husband is that for him, a salad does not count as a meal.  It's merely a bit of crunch to accompany The Main Event, which means that I have to make a whole meal and then a salad and often after work the idea of this final labour-intensive step makes me lose the will to live.  So we probably don't have salads at home as often as I'd like, and when we do it's usually a plain tossed salad. 

But trawling the web the other day, I came across Salad 'Stravaganza, a fab one-off event hosted by Lisa and Kelly, and I decided that this was the perfect excuse to make a salad that I'd been picturing in my head for quite some time now (I'm sad that way...).  I have often spoken of my love for butternut squash, and I have been known to trek all the way out to Wood Green to get the tins of Turkish feta that I love.  And I have combined these two ingredients before, in a quiche.  But how about a salad?  And so from this little acorn of an idea grew a mighty oak:  my roasted butternut, feta and pine nut salad!  I have to say, this one's a keeper - the sweet squash, the salty feta and the crunch provided by the leaves and nuts is a sublime combination.  I served mine with a wholegrain mustard vinaigrette, but substituted the brine from a bottle of peppadews instead of vinegar - this added a lovely spicy-sweet tang to the dressing.

I used half and half of round (or butterhead) lettuce and cos, mainly because that's what I had available, but I rather liked the crunch of the gem and the comparative softness of the round.  You could also use baby spinach leaves.  I used the neck of the butternut as there's less seeding that needs to be done and it's easier to cut into neat cubes of about 1/2 an inch.  With enough crusty bread, this would make a nice light lunch.

ROASTED BUTTERNUT, FETA AND PINE NUT SALAD (serves 2-3)

Ingredients

Round (butter) and cos lettuce
Half a butternut, peeled, seeded and cubed
olive oil for roasting
1tsp dried rosemary
1/4 cup of pine nuts
100-200g of feta depending how much you love it!

For the dressing:
1/4 cup of olive oil
3 Tbsp raspberry vinegar or peppadew brine
1 tsp wholegrain mustard
1 tsp honey
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 200C.  Prepare the butternut as cubes and place in an oven-proof dish, toss in olive oil until coated, sprinkly with rosemary and roast until soft and turning brown at the edges.  Drain on kitchen paper and allow to cool.

Toast the pine nuts in a non-stick pan, watching them carefully and stirring lots as they burn very easily.  Remove when starting to brown and smelling wonderful!

Wash and dry the lettuce.  Tear the leaves and place in a salad bowl.  Stir in the cooled butternut and crumbled feta cheese and sprinkle with pine nuts. 

Mix all the dressing ingredients together in a bottle and shake well.  Pour over salad before serving.

Here are some more delicious salads that feature on Cooksister:

• Brocolli and toasted seed salad
• Broad bean, green bean & mozzarella salad
• Carpaccio of zucchini
• Cured ham and roast fig salad
• Grilled salmon Caesar salad
• Marinated mushrooms
• Pomegranate, fennel, pear and rocket salad
• Salade Nicoise a la Cooksister

Baby pak choi and peppadew stir-fry

I am one of those rare women who does not go all gooey at the mention of the word chocolate.  It's not that I dislike it, it's just that I'm more of a savoury girl and I simply can't see how chocolate is going to make it all better.  But don't let that make you think I have annoyingly health tastes, like Nick who considers a tomato sprinkled with black pepper a valid mid-afternoon snack...  Oh no - my tastes run more to things like cheese or mayonnaise or crisps. Or preferably all three of these together in some form ;-) So, frankly, it always comes as a surprise to me when I find myself really liking something that's actually good for me.

One of the things that I have pretty much always been fond of is the wonderful brassica family.  I am led to believe that the genus brassica contains a larger percentage of important agricultural and horticultural crops than any other genus, so it comes as no surprise to find that it encompasses things like kohlrabi, swedes, turnips, cabbage, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and seeds such as oilseed rape (canola) and mustard seeds.  It turns out that the members of this happy genus are exceptionally high in  vitamin C, soluble fibre and a raft of nutrients with potent anti-cancer properties (diindolylmethane, sulforaphane and selenium).  And, of course, it goes without saying that they are low in fat. Even as a kid, I liked them all - even brussels sprouts!  What a lot of dinner-time conflict that must have spared my family...

One of the brassicas that I was not really familiar with until later in life is pak choi/bok choy. Now left to myown devices I would probably have translated this as Chinese cabbage (brassica rapa), but apparently this family is just a morass of potential pitfalls when it comes to nomenclature.  As I understand it, there are (broadly speaking) two main varieties of brassica rapa, one of which forms a compact head (the Pekinensis group), and one which does not form a head as much as a rosette-like cluster of leaves with white stems and dark green leaf blades (the Chinensis group).  It is to the latter group that pak choi belongs.  Each baby pak choi is about 6 inches long and a very pleasing tulip shape, from its firm, pale and bulbous base to its nipped-in waist and fanned-out dark freen leaves.  Taste-wise, they are crisp and quite mild - far less strident than, say, savoy cabbage.And each one is packed full of all the goodness that is the legacy of the brassicas. 

I often have pak choi in restaurants, served with garlic in an oyster sauce, but when I make them at home, I usually stir-fry them with onions and soy sauce.  However, this week I tried something a little different:  I added some sliced peppadews to the pan.  I have written extensively elsewhere about peppadews, so I won't repeat that now.  Suffice to say that these sweetly spicy piquante peppers will not only add zing to your stir-fries but their bright colour is also irresistible.  And (here's the best part) as members of the capsicum family, they are also superfoods, packed with capsaicinoids which have anti-inflammatory properties and are good for your heart. 

I'm submitting this recipe to this month's edition of Heart of the Matter, hosted by fellow-UK foodie Joanna as it's packed with good-for-your-heart ingredients, big on taste and low on fat. Eat well.  Be well.

:-)

BABY PAK CHOI WITH PEPPADEWS (serves 2)

Ingredients:

4-6 heads of baby pak choi, depending on size
1 medium onion, cut into thin wedges
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
4 peppadew piquante peppers, drained and sliced
1 Tbsp Extra virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp brine from the peppadews
sesame seeds (optional)

Method:

Rinse the baby pak choi and halve lengthways (or quarter if large).  Rinse again to get rid of stray dirt trapped between the leaves and pat dry.

Heat the oil in a non-stick pan and add the onions and garlic.  Cook over medium high heat, stirring constantly until the onions begin to brown.  Add the pak choi, cut side down if possible, and allow to brown a little as well.

Add the soy sauce, brine and peppadews and continue to stir-fry until pak choi is as soft or as crispy as you like it - for me, this is usually only about 3-4 minutes.

If you like (and if, unlike me, you have some in your cupboard!), sprinkle some sesame seeds over the vegetables before serving.  Mine paired well with honey, ginger & soy roasted salmon steaks.

For another delicious brassica recipe, check out my broccoli and toasted sunflower seed salad!

Pissaladiere - a piece of France

What is it about Mediterranean cuisine that just makes me swoon?  It could be the colours - all vivid red tomatoes, shiny yellow peppers and verdant green basil leaves.  Or it could be the fact that one mouthful can transport you back to a happy holiday spent in the sun in some gorgeous Mediterranean village.  Or it could just be that it's so damn delicious. Whatever the reason, I came back from a holiday in the South of France a couple of years ago, absolutely brimming with the joy of fish soups with rouille and croutons, mild Provencal olive oils, fat pink prawns cooked on the barbecue... and pissaladiere. 

And after a day or two in the cold grey that is London in November, I promptly forgot about it again. 

That is, until a friend served it to me at a lazy weekend lunch and as fast as you can say Cote d'Azur, it was back on my "to make" list.  I guess you could call it southern France's version of the Italian pizza - some sort of pastry with a delicious savoury topping.  But in fact, there isn't a great deal of similarity whn you get down to it.  For a start, with a pizza, the topping and the crust are in contact for a matter of a few scant minutes before arriving at your table, fresh from their shotgun wedding.  They don't know each other, they have no real shared past and they certainly have not made a lifelong connection (try tilting a pizza into the vertical position and you'll soon find out what I mean!).  But with pissaladiere, things are abit different.  They date, they talk, they meet the family and only arrive at your table as they are celebrating their anniversary (well, if you celebrate anniversaries after an hour or so!).  The flavours have time to meld, the juices make inroads into the pastry and it is an altogether more subtle creature.  Oh - and there's no cheese.  And some puritans insist on no tomato either, but this was one of the two ways in which I strayed from the traditional recipe.  More on this later. 

Traditionally, pissaladiere is street food sold in the markets of Nice all day long, so there's nothing frou-frou or fussy about it - it's all about robust flavours and textures and that's why I love it.  So where does the vaguely rude-sounding name come from?  Although most recipes these days call for anchovy fillets, traditionally the pastry base was spread with pissala, a paste made from marinated anchovies, sardines and herbs - hence the name.  Traditionally the base is made with a dough rather like pizza dough but I have also seen recipes with a shortcrust pastry base, and I used a non-traditional ready-made roll of puff pastry.  The original recipe also calls for a topping of only olives without the addition of tomatoes, but I had seen a few recipes including tomatoes and I had a couple of soggy tomatoes lurking in the crisper drawer the first time I made pissaladiere, so voila - in they went.

The end result is fabulous - a crispy base, sweet onions on top and then the kick of olives and anchovies to top it all off. In the cooking process the anchovy fillets kind of snuggle up to the onions and melt into them, so their salty tang infuses the whole pie.  Ummmm-mmmm.  I have served this warm as a starter a couple of times, but I suspect it would also taste great cold at a picnic.  Could it be I've found my dish for the Henley food blogger picnic this year??

PISSALADIERE (serves 4)

Ingredients

About half a pack of ready-made puff pastry (enough to line a 20cm fluted pie dish)
4-5 medium onions, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1/4 cup of olive oil
2-3 large ripe tomatoes, peeled and diced
90g anchovy fillets, drained
3/4 cup pitted black olives
1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
1/4 tsp salt
pepper to taste

Method

Preheat the oven to 220C. Roll out the puff pastry according to the instructions on the packet until it is large enough to line your pie dish.  Line the pie dish with pastry and prick the base with a fork to prevent it from rising.  Line the pastry shell with baking paper and fill with baking beans.  Bake for 10-15 minutes, then remove from the oven and remove the paper and beans (be careful - they will be HOT!). 

In the meantime, heat the oil in a large frying pan and add the onions and garlic.  The trick is to cook them long & slow so that they soften and sweeten but do not brown.  Be patient and stir lots - it takes about 30 minutes!  After the first 15 minutes, add the tomato so that the flavours can meld.  Add the thyme at the end of the cooking process and season with pepper and salt if desired (but rememebr that the olives and anchovies will add a lot of salt to the final dish).

When the onion mix is very soft, remove from heat and spread into your pre-baked pie crust.  Cut each anchovy fillet in half lengthways and use the strips to create a lattice pattern on top of the onions.  Decorate each diamond of the lattice pattern with a black olive.  Grind more pepper over the tart if desired, reduce the oven temperature to 190C and bake for about 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Serve with a fresh green salad, a dry rose wine and a lovely sunny afternoon.

Waiter, there's something in my... dumpling!

No, really, waiter - there is something in my dumpling!  But it's not my fault - Johanna made me do it!

Yes folks, your favourite monthly foodblogging event, WTSIM, is back and this time the hosting is in the capable hands of The Passionate Cook.  Now you may think we just leap out of bed in the morning and decide on the theme for the month, but let me assure you there is a lot of discussion and agonising that goes on behind the scenes.  Is the theme too complicated?  Too simple?  Too summery?  Too wintery?  Too boring?  Too terrifying??  Nothing about food blogging events is ever straightforward ;-)  And this month Johanna even managed to surprise her co-hosts. 

When I think of dumplings, my mind wanders naturally over to souskluitjies, a wonderful South African dessert of sweet cinnamon dumplings in syrup. But Johanna doesn't have just any old piece of steamed/boiled dough in mind - she is after filled dumplings!  Panic!  But after a few deep breaths I started to think about the possibilities... Dinky dim sum!  Perfect pierogi!  Sumptuous summer fruit dumplings! Woo hoo!

So your only problem now is to decide what to make from this smorgasbord of choice.  And while you're thinking, head on over to Johanna's blog to see how to participate - and I'll see you all at the roundup shortly after 30 June.

USA day 6 - Fall colours and Monte Cristo sandwiches

[This post is part of my very leisurely report on our trip to the USA last year in October.]

Waking up on our first morning in Connecticut and looking out of the window, the view could not possibly have been more different to New York.  Where there had been a busy road and grimy brick buildings, we were now being treated to the best fall colour I had ever seen. Where there had been dirty pavements, there were now manicured lawns.  It was heavenly.  Our host Larry sadly had to head off on a business trip, but he had kindly given us the run of the house for as long as we wanted, so we decided to take it relatively easy and just explore the surrounding area.

First stop was to grab a bite for breakfast, and in this regard we had been given very specific instructions by Larry:  do not be seduced by the siren call of the picturesque village coffee shops.  Go directly to the Coffee an' Donut Shop and get your breakfast there.  He had seemed so serious and adamant about it that we decided to take his advice and do just that.  The shop is a small and unprepossessing place in a small shoppping centre a little bit away from the town centre.  There were a few tables inside but they were pretty full so we got our coffee and donuts to go.  There wasn't a huge selection but all the usuals were there - iced, chocolate, cinnamon and a few others I can't recall.  Grabbed a couple of coffees and donuts and headed off to find a picturesque spot to enjoy breakfast.  We ended up near the Saugatuck Rowing Club - and let me assure you it is the plushest rowing club I have ever laid eyes on (with the possible exception of Leander).  It is a huge building right on the Saugatuck river and we found a bench nearby with a great view across the tranquil water reflecting the autumn colours on the opposite bank.  So... how was the doughnut?  Un-bloody-believable.  Absolutely the best doughnut that I have eaten in about 20 years - which was the last time my mom made home-made doughnuts.  You can keep your over-sweetened, over-priced Krispy-Kreme or your mass-produced Dunkin' Donuts.  This is The Real Deal - crispy on the outside and featherlight on the inside, with a thick crust of cinnamon sugar.  I was in doughnut Nirvana.  It's a good thing this store is nowhere near I live because my weight would just balloon! 

From there we set a course to kind of meander up the coast a little and then drive inland to New Haven, home of Yale University.  We didn't have a particular aim in mind - after the meticulously planned calendar of sightseeing in NYC, it was nice just to be able to drift alng and look at the countryside and the autumn colours for a bit. First stop was a Connecticut beach just north of Westport - as you can see from my outfit, it wasn't exactly beach weather!!  From there we followed the coast, marvelling at the increasingly vibrant colours of the trees.  Nick's a great one for following the byways rather than the highways, which is how we found ourselves on a far smaller road an hour or two later pulling up at a brightly decorated farm stall.  It looked like veritable cornucopia of autumnal produce, from the glorious multi-coloured ears of corn, to the multicoloured varieties of squash in every size tumbling out of their basket, to the stacked crates of apples.  After the sugar and fat overload of breakfast, I was in the mood for something a little healthier, so I grabbed a couple of apples, selected for nothing other than their sheer crimson prettiness.  As I was paying I asked the stall owner what they were and he said Macouns, which I'd never heard of.  Little wonder, because a) they are only available for 2-3 months of the year and b) they are much sought after in New England, so I don't imagine many of them are exported to the UK.  These perfectly round medium-sized apples are gloriously red with a thin skin and sweet crunchy flesh with no hint of flouriness.  They look and taste exactly like I remember apples tasting from my childhood - I think I'm in love!

From there, we headed along the coast to New Haven - now there's a town with a split personality if ever I saw one!!  As you approach it on the I-95, it looks like a typical industrial town - none too gorgeous.  But then you follow the signs onto the Yale University campus... and suddenly you could be in England, with beautiful stone buildings and church spires.  It comes as no surprise to find that the charter for Yale (as a college) was signed in 1701, so there is a great deal of history here.  Apart from the architecture, the university posseses an impressive collection of art for visitors to admire and had we not been all sightseed-out we could have spent a few happy hours there.  But our recent NYC sightseeing blitz combined with the lack of parking and the fact that we wanted to try and find some Connecticut vineyards, with the result that we left after only about half an hour of driving and walking around campus.

We turned up the I-91 and then took the backroads heading northeast.  We really tried to find some of the vineyards - in particular I remember getting out of the car at a small grocery store to ask where Digrazia Vineyards might be and tried valiantly to follow the directions given... but alas:  no vineyard!  So by the time we struck the I-84 we were a little ill-tempered and hungry!  Good thing, then, that we spotted the Blue Colony Diner.  To be honest, you'd have to be seriously oblivious not to spot it and be instantly drawn to it - it looks like something off a movie set, all 1950's nostalgia and Art Deco-inspired styling.  We hadn't yet done a proper roadside diner on our US travels so the decision to go in was easy and instantaneous. The interior was exactly what you'd expect a diner to look like - booths along the back wall with blue vinyl-covered seats, country & western music playing softly on the stereo and a waitress wearing an apron and calling you "darlin'".  The pastries in the display fridge by the entrance were gargantuan, as if they had wandered into Area 51 and emerged as super-pastries, somehow boosted by alian powers! 

But we were after delights of a more savoury kind, so we checked out the extensive menu.  It covers all bases - from diner favourites like burgers, corned beef sandwiches, club sandwiches or mac 'n cheese to blue-plate specials (daily changing full meals at low prices), to (bizarrely) Greek specialities.  I soon settled on something that I hadn't heard of until Elizabeth mentioned it to me ages ago during the course of the EoMEoTE:  a Monte Cristo sandwich.  Do you like French toast?  Do you like grilled cheese sandwiches?  Together?? In that case, just go out and get yourself a Monte Cristo sandwich! It's basically slices of turkey, ham and Swiss cheese sandwiched between thick slices of French toast - and if you're lucky like me, there may be some maple syrup on the side (also coleslaw in the background and a fantastic fresh pickle in the foreground...).  You can just taste the calories and with each bite you can see little happy cellulite cells dancing a jig on your upper thighs.  But damn, it is delicious.  (In case you are wondering about the odd name, the sandwich first appeared in the US in about the 1940s and is thought to be an adaptation of the classic French croque monsieur - Monte Cristo is also thought to be a corruption of the name.)  I must say that I fell in love with the conforting softness and great sweet/savoury combination of the sandwich:  Nick's burger was good, but my sandwich was transcendental.  I realise that we experienced the tiniest fraction of what was on offer at the Blue Colony, but based on what we had, this place is a haven of excellent and unpretentious diner cuisine. 

After squeezing back out through the door and rolling through the parking lot to our car, we set off again down Route 7 and back to Westport.  The area is really lovely area to drive through - all these valleys ablaze with fall colours and houses hidden amongst the trees, making you wonder what it might be like to chuck it all in and come and live in the wilds of Connecticut.  By the time we got back to Westport, we weren't in the mood for dinner out, so we decided to cook dinner at