Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue

I hope you noticed that the title of this post is Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue, not Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with Meringue. You have noticed, haven’t you?

Well, basically, although I had no plans to serve the Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with meringue, it was a good way of using up the three egg whites with which we were left with after having prepared the brûlée.

But let me begin at the beginning. As I’ve written in the earlier blog post today, we had Pomegranate Ginger Saffron Braised Lamb Neck, accompanied by roast winter vegetables and mashed potatoes for dinner yesterday. Remains the question of dessert. For as far as I can remember, I have always only had one favourite dish: crème brûlée. Or to be more truthful: my all-time favourite dish was dessert, and my favourite variant of it was crème brûlée. Astonishing only that I waited until now to wish for a blow torch to make my own brûlées for my birthday. Lucky for me, my wish was gratified and Buzz’ lovely sisters gave me my Hotery Professional Chef’s Torch.

Shortly afterwards, Buzz cooked for me, and we decided to make our own first crème brûlée (together, that is – you wouldn’t expect me to leave something so interesting to him alone?). The crème went fairly well, although it took a lot longer to set, and was covered by a top layer of cream that was slightly thicker than the rest. Still, it was enough to convert Buzz to an equal crème-brûlée-addict as I am, and this, then, quickly settled the question of dessert as well.

Normal crème brûlee has been on our menu only three weeks ago, so we decided to go out and explore brûlée-land, making a start with Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée. Again, all went fairly well – until we discovered that even after 40 minutes of au bain marie, the cream wasn’t set. There wasn’t much we could do, as we really needed the oven for the roast vegetables, so we shoved them into the fridge and hoped that the cold would do the rest.

Of course it didn’t. The cream was still too liquid, and it was too late to do anything about it anyway. In the end, we had some mandarins for dessert; I baked the meringues over night and we devoured them even before breakfast, and we’ve given the crème brûlée a new bath this morning and are now waiting for them to cool down.

Has anything like this happened to anybody else? Any other brûlée-experiences?

2009 – A Pomegranate Odyssey

It’s weekend, and time for a Sunday, ehm, Saturday roast. At the same time, it is (for the time being) my last weekend with Buzz, as I will be leaving to return to my studies on Sunday night. Clearly, we were up to something special.

Now, before I start this perhaps I must tell a little more about myself. These past few years, I have been living in the Netherlands. A couple of months ago, I decided to do an MA, and my eye fell on a programme that was only offered in London. I applied, was accepted (albeit only two weeks before term started – but that’s another story) and moved to London, where trying to get settled nearly cost me more effort than my studies themselves. One of the great things I encountered there, however, was a fruit stall near to university buildings were even the most exotic fruit was sold for a sixpence. And among those were pomegranates.

I became really exited when saw those pomegranates. I had only eaten pomegranates once earlier, while I was learning Italian in Siena and went for a weekend trip around Venice, Vicenza and Padova with a Japanese classmate. While looking for one church or another, all of a sudden we stood in front of a tree laden with ripe pomegranates. I was shy about picking up somebody else’s fruit, and, even worse, picking up fruit from the dirty street, but she had no qualms, and convinced me to try it too, and from that moment on I was sold.

You can imagine that in the following weeks I lived on more or less a pomegranate diet, eating up to eight pomegranates a week. I was surprised to discover upon my return home in December that fruit stalls here also carried them, masses of them. How could I ever not have seen them!?

Anyway, now that I knew that they were there, and that I was in cooking spirits again (I hate cooking for myself, which I am more or less forced to do in London – not because I live there alone but also because my kitchen is tiny, minimally equipped as I will be leaving after a year again, and not visitor-friendly), I knew that I wanted to cook something with pomegranates. And as my rekindled love for pomegranates has sent me searching the internet for anything related to pomegranates, I had already stumbled accross Habeas Brûlée’s great recipes for Pomegranate Ginger Saffron Braised Lamb Neck. Buzz was sold for the huge piece of meat (although probably any meat would have done), I fell for the pomegranates, so that was settled quickly.

More difficult proved to be our search to find the required pomegranate molasses. I had already inquired, unsuccessfully, in some shops in our neighbourhood. As I needed to return some books to the library, I figured I could pass by some ethnic food shops in the city centre. I called some in advance, to do some prescreening work, but when this resulted in a busy-signal-rate of approximately 50%, I decided to just hit the streets, and to my surprise, right in the first shop I found two bottles saying ‘Pomegranate’ on them. But which one should I take? Both contained a dark, thick kind of syrup; but one said ‘Pomegranate Juice’, the other ‘Pomegranate salad dressing’, neither was what I was looking for. I asked the shop assistant for help, who then explained to me that both were the same. Well, yes, they were of the same brand, but they had different names and different ingredients. In the end I bought the smaller bottle, came home, tasted the syrup – and was surprised at how sour the liquid was.

This couldn’t be what we should be looking for, but it was too far to return to that one shop again, and we were afraid to spoil our lamb with something too sour, so we kept looking. One shop I had phoned told me that they didn’t have molasses, only juice and syrup. When we checked them, the shop keeper explained that the syrup was sour and that it would probably be the same what we had already bought. Apparently, the sour syrup was predominant in Turkish shops, while we were looking for the Persian variant. It took us a while to check every single ethnic food shop we passed until, about an hour or so later, we finally found one that sold pomegranate molasses and could assure us that the molasses were not sour. It was no great surprise, then, that the shopkeeper was from Persia.

As accompaniment, we made some potato mash and roasted some winter vegetables, largely following the recipe of this week’s Escalivada, only using celery root and a small pumpkin, substituting the thyme for some dried rosemary, and adding a spoonful of honey. Delicious!

We, ehm, nearly would have had some dessert as well, but I’ll write about that in a new post.