Summer Holidays are over!

I can't believe that the school started already.  Somehow, it starts early August in East Tennessee.  So I feel like it should be cooler, but it's still August, so it is still hot.  Summer is not over yet.

We had a busy first half of summer vacation.  We went to Florida, we attended Wedding, my daughter went to drama summer camp, and we went to Florida again. 

But last half of summer vacation was very slow.  We didn't have any plan, and the construction was going on, we practically stayed home everyday, not doing anything much.

It was not really fun for my daughter nor for me.  

So we are so glad to have school started.  And the construction is done, so we can now paint the newly renovated bathrooms and bedrooms.  Suddenly we are very busy!

Here are the sweets that I made during summer.  I was so fortunate to have good berries and peaches in June and July.  Almost all the sweets were made with local fruits.

Today marks one year from the day we came to TN form North East.  I feel like I didn't do anything this past year.  We had the cycle of having renovation going on, which means I get stressed out having workmen in the house all the time, then it's done and they are gone for a while but we can't relax, because we have to paint, then the next renovation starts.... we did that 3 times in the past year.  Our painting part is not done yet.  But after that, it's done for now.  I am glad.

I hope 2nd year of our new life in Appalachia will be nicer.  We couldn't go out much because either we wanted to do something at home while the workers are not around, or we had to paint.  I'd love to visit lots of places and check out some events.  I want to start working if it's possible.  I don't know if there are many chances like in North East for me to make dance costumes, but I would like to do something with my skill.

There are a lot of hopes for the future.

Tarts

I had never baked tart until this January.   I like tart all right, but I always preferred cakes with cream.  But I remembered that I enjoyed tarts from this nice little shop called Aux Delices in Connecticut.  However, I can't get anything like that here in my town.  Only solution is to learn how to bake it.

So I started.  I remember that some kind of filling they used was so good.  Now I know that was almond creme.  It was not too difficult make.  After I got comfortable making dough, I started to experimenting.

I like custard in tart, so I made very simple custard and fruits tartlets for afternoon snack.

It is so much fun to arrange the fruits.  Especially caramelized apple.  I like make it look like a flower.

I just love cooked fruits.  Of course fresh fruits are great, too, but I do like them cooked also.

Now when I make filling for tart, I do substitute almond with other nuts.  I like Walnuts.  It gives more down to earth feeling to the tart.  I especially like pecans.  If they are coupled with brown sugar, it becomes very "county" tasting to me.  I love making peach pecan tart.  To me it tastes Southern.  It probably doesn't to real southern people, but the all the ingredients are from this region, an taste so simple and kind so I feel that way.

Making small tartlets is fun too.  They look so cute.  I always make a few for taste testing when I make big tart.

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I've been wanted to make something pretty.  Not food.  With my sewing.  But I couldn't find what to make for long time.  Doing renovation all the time brings chaos to the house and my brain.   I always had clients to tell me what they want, so without them, I felt lost.  But I think something brewing in me.  I found a scrap book that I made 20 years ago to get ideas.  I love the feeling of thinking about making something pretty.

Tiny Raspberries and Long Blackberries

I started seeing berries at the farmers market.  I remember we had very big blackberries last year when we came here for closing of our house.  They made my daughter who never had liked blackberries completely change her opinion on blackberries.  So we've been looking forward to having them again.  I also found tiny raspberries.  They are half of normal raspberries in a grocery store.  They are very sweet and I can't pass them since they are so cute looking!

So I made Raspberry Custard Tart for July 4th.  

We came back from Florida 4 p.m. and I was baking the tart right away....

It was such a short trip.  We left on Friday night and drove back on Monday.  But it was really fun taking our dog to beach.  Although he is afraid of water.  I hope he will get use to it but there are no beaches where we live....  We need to look for a lake, I guess.

Besides the berries, South Carolina peaches are in season.  So I baked Peach and Blackberry Tart one day.  Instead of almond cream, I made walnut cream.  I love changing out the nuts to make cream.  My favorite is pecan cream with brown sugar.  It tastes very country-like to me.

I was happy that I used up my berries very tastefully, but I saw them again at the market yesterday.  I couldn't walk away from them....  So they were thrown into mini Lemon Cake.

I guess my baking with berries will continue for a while until they stop selling them at the farmers market.

Southern Cooking and Sweets Cooked in March

I am interested in lots of kind of food.  When people ask me what I usually cook, it is very hard to answer.  I do cook Japanese naturally, but now that I'm living in TN, it's not easy to accomplish.  I also cook other Asian dishes....  Chinese, Korean Thai, Vietnamese.  But usually, I cook with more common ingredients so Italian and French influenced dishes appear a lot on the table.  

When I lived in Connecticut, my friends and I sometimes pick a town to visit in NY based on what kind of restaurants and stores available there.  We visited Bronx for Italian food, Brighton Beach for Russian, Astoria for Greek, etc...  When I have a chance to eat something that is from different culture, I am so happy to try it.

Nevertheless, I never liked Southern food that much even though my husband J is from Appalachia.  I guess the richness of frying food is not too appealing to me....  I know J wanted me to learn to cook good Southern food, but I didn't really take it seriously.

But one day, I baked biscuits.  J says that it's not supposed to be sweet like the ones in North.  I got the recipe that is not sweet and tried it.  It came out pretty tasty.  Even my daughter who never liked biscuits like it a lot.  

I baked cornbread other time since J wants to cut down gluten intake, I thought I'd give a try to bake cornbread with only corn meal.  

He also said that cornbread shouldn't be sweet like the ones in North.  So he liked my cornbread that didn't have any sugar in it.  It was fun baking in a pre-heated cast iron pan!

Somehow, now I am more open to cook southern food.  I am not a big fan of frying food, but I can certainly try to make some recipes less rich to suit my taste.  I think visiting Asheville was good for me in the regard.  I don't get to eat southern food in my town because it's not a tourists place so there is not much of Southern restaurants.  But place like Asheville has interesting Southern food.  More modernized, more healthy, more trendy....  Looking at them made me interested in it.  

Grits is one of the thing I picked up there.  It's practically Polenta...  I can put different kind of cheese in it.  I love it with fried green tomatoes!  It's not a heavy combination especially if I cook tomatoes in a little bi of olive oil.

There are lots to learn ....  But it at least started.  It's too bad I don't have hard core Southern relatives around me to teach. 

It's already April.  It was so warm yesterday.  But it went back several step today and I was wearing my coat this morning.  I hope to put it away soon.

So in March, I made these sweets.  I hope to try something new in April...

Smoked Salmon and Avocado Pasta

We are renovating 2nd floor right now.    I have to tell you the house J bought for us is very old.  It's built in mid 40's which is not a surprise at where we live.  But the couple who lived here were old and weren't taking care of this house well besides whatever the renovations they did was very unprofessionally done.  So by the time this house was on sale, the couple was long gone, the house was unattended for years on top of the original messed up conditions.  It is true because of it, we had a such a bargain.  I didn't look at this house until the day of the closing.  I was busy in North East.  So it was such a shock to see the state this house was in....  but we took out the carpeting from entire house, cleaned up, had the kitchen remodeled, painted the wood paneling walls.  It's slowly coming together.  The one thing (which is most important factor to me to pick a house) that I love this place is its size and layout.  It's not huge, but adequate for 3 of us.  It has funny little place or hallway to play around.  So even though it is far from my dream house yet, I'm happily waiting it to be the one someday.

So the entire 2nd floor is demolished to have new electric, air conditioning system and walls installed.  Which is great!  Yet when the lunch time comes, I feel too self conscious about cooking something has strong aroma such as frying garlic.  They are working hard and cooking some nice smelling food and not serving them seems to me not nice.  

But I do get hungry.  And I don't want to eat PB & J every day....besides the fact that we don't keep bread in the house since J is trying to avoid gluten as much as possible and our daughter doesn't care for a sandwich.

So the cold salad pasta is actually great lunch for me to whip up.  All I have to do is to boil the pasta.  It doesn't create aroma of cooking.  I just have to cut ingredients and mix.  

*Smoked Salmon and Avocado Pasta*

For 2 servings

1 avocado

2 oz. smoked salmon 

10 cherry tomatoes

1/4 red onion

2 table spoon capers

2 tea spoon Dijon mustard

2 tea spoon extra virgin olive oil

Freshly squeezed juice form 1 lemon

2 tea spoon white wine vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

Your favorite pasta 1/2 lb.

< 1 > Start boiling water for cooking the pasta.

< 2 >  Chop avocado, salmon, and tomatoes to bite size.

< 3 > Slice the onion into thin strips or mince.

< 4 > Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl.

< 5 > When the pasta is cooked, mix with everything in the bowl and serve.

Both avocado and salmon contains lots of fat, so I hold off the amount of olive oil in this dish.

This actually will be really nice on a hot summer day.  But It is getting pretty nice here in east TN.  I hear birds singing in the morning.  The are very colorful.  I can't wait till spring....

February has passed....  I can't believe it's already March!  Here is the review of the sweets I made in the last month.

There are lots of chocolate sweets because of Valentine's day.  I actually lost a week worth of data because the construction upstairs cuts off the electricity suddenly.  So there should have been more sweets...  However the sweets that I made during the time were actually not really successful.  Especially the tartlets that I baked with raspberry tinted very pale pink pear compote. It somehow resembled too much like a mini chicken breast.  It really did.  Those were called chicken breast tarts by J and our daughter.  It could have been perfect for halloween with some red sauce drizzled over it though.

So I got 10 Meyer Lemons

I went to a market and found Meyer Lemons were on sale.....10 for 2 dollars.  I just couldn't pass the deal so I picked 10 of them not knowing how I am going to use them.

I had left over tart dough at home so I decided to use the recipe that I use for Key Lime Pie filling for the lemons.  It worked great!  I felt like I need some fruits for decoration, so I used blueberries.  

I must tell you that I always preferred cakes to tarts.  I felt like tarts are too much like cookies.  I liked the softness of cakes and cream on it.  But recently, I DO love tarts.  I realized how versatile they are.  You could use any fruits on it, cooked or raw to really enjoy the season.  As for the cream, I can make custard cream, pastry cream, almond cream, or citrus cream like this depends on what I have and feel like it.  I feel like the tarts suit everyday life more.  I still like cakes though!

*Meyer Lemon Filling For 9 inch shell*

1/2 cup freshly squeezed Meyer lemon juice 

1 cup sweetened condensed milk

4 large egg yolks

< 1 > Mix the all the ingredients and bake at 325 F in the shell of your choice for 15 to 20 min.

*Note* 

I made 3 4-inch tartlets so reduced the ingredients to half.  A store bought graham cracker pie shell works great for this recipe, too.  You can substitute lemon or lime for the same recipe, but that case, you might want to serve with whipped cream since it will be quite tart.

They were quite delightful.  But I didn't describe what kind of tartlets they are, my husband J was pretty surprised with the tartness.  I'd been making tartlets with custard cream a lot recently so he thought these were the same things.  They look quite similar.

But as he realized that it was Meyer lemon cream, he enjoyed it a lot.  My daughter who loves anything sour was very happy too.  I made coconut whipped cream with whipped cream and coconut milk to serve with the tartlets as desserts.  That was nice combination.

OK, tart filling didn't use too many lemons...  instead it created egg whites left over.  I would usually use them for Financiers but my challenging spirit was rising in the afternoon.  Therefore, I decided to dare try making Macarons.

There are some sweets I consider that I'm not experienced enough to bake.  The macarons were one of them.  But I do have egg whites, and I do have lots of nice lemons to make lemon cream for it.  I just had to do it.  

Well, the result is....  I made the dough too runny so except for few really small ones, they didn't turn out to be a perfect circles.  The texture and taste, J liked it a lot.  My daughter didn't like it.  I, myself.... confused.  

I've only had macarons once in Tokyo a year ago.  They were from a brunch of reputable French pastry shop and tasted great.  But details are far away in my memory.  I guess I need eat them again in order to know what I am after.  Yet in this small town by the Appalachian mountains, it's impossible to find one.  I must put macarons on the list of the things that I must eat in Japan when I visit my family next month.

Yes, the macarons didn't consume the lemon too much either.  So I made lemon cake in Bundt mold to take to Sunday dinner at my father in law's house.  

I also made Greek lemon potatoes at his house to go with Lamb chops.  Now 3 Meyer lemons are sitting in the bowl waiting to be squeezed.  What I am going to use them for today?

Pear Tart

I love almond cream.  Cutting and opening the poached pears like a fan was fun, too!  I do same thing to eggplants when I cook Tempura.