Dang it, late again!

My French Fridays with Dorie posts are rapidly devolving into "French some-days or other whenever I can get around to posting and Dorie probably won't be waiting around for me anyway" posts.  I will point out that I actually made this on Monday/Tuesday of last week.  Was it good?  Double-chocolate mousse cake did not make it past Tuesday at my house.  Yummmmmmm.

The "cake" is actually chocolate mousse, cooked in a springform pan in two stages.  First, the chocolate is melted in a double boiler, and then the coffee, sugar and egg yolks are added.  Here is the dense chocolate mixture after the last egg yolk is added:

Then the egg whites are whipped and folded in.  No pictures, sorry.

At this point you have dee-lish-us mousse, and actually I would have been fine stopping here.  (And eating it all straight out of the pan, thankyouverymuch.) But now you put about 1/3 into a springform ring placed on a cookie sheet:

This bakes into a soft "crust" that forms the basis for the next step.  You can either place the remainder of the mousse into the crust, unmold and enjoy; or place the remainder into the crust, bake, and enjoy; or place the remainder into the crust, bake, chill again, slice and enjoy.  I did the full monty for two reasons: first, it's Dorie's favorite; and second, I'd know if it would be worth the extra steps and time the next time I make this, because there WILL be a next time. 

If you look very closely you can see that there is a bottom "crust" that is more dense than the top part.  I served this with a little dollop of whipped cream.  It is dense and chocolatey, really delicious.  Four thumbs up from the kiddos plus big thumbs up from Bill.  One son said it tasted like a brownie, and he's kind of right.  But this is perfectly smooth, not grainy or gooey at all.  Next time I think I'll stop with the uncooked filling, well-chilled.  It is fluffy and light and so chocolatey.  (Yes, I know about eating raw eggs. I'll eat it all myself, if necessary.) This week was definitely a winner!

Monday--time to be grateful

We just finished five--count 'em, FIVE--snow and ice days here, which means that the kids have been out of school for ten straight days.  (They have today off for MLK day.) This week has been a high-wire act of schedule-juggling.  I suppose I have plenty to be thankful for:

21.  Grandparents who can watch the kids while I man the shop.
22.  And neighbors.
23.  Canned soup.
24.  My husband's four-wheel drive vehicle.  Somehow he never missed a single day of work.  Oh, wait.
25.  My friend Ann's excellent white blood cell count which enabled her to have chemo last week, after a three-week wait.
26.  Bayville Blue paint in my girls' room.  So pretty, and if I can find my son's camera I'll add a picture so you can actually see it.
27.  Peppermint sticks and the
28.  Ponies who love them.
29.  Giggly girls.  I know it won't last forever but it is music for now.
30.  Homemade chocolate chip cookies, with pecans from my uncle's trees.

May you have a wonderful and snow-free week!

Gnocchi Thank You!

Just because all the dishes are dirty doesn't mean the food's worth eating!

A little late this week with my French Fridays with Dorie post, in which I, along with a couple hundred other crazies, am cooking my way through Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan.  This week:  Gnocchi a la Parisienne.

Right up front:  Fail.  Big time.  But you know how it is--the good dishes are all alike.  The bad ones are each interesting in their own way.  And away we go...

Wow!  Need to use a filter on these pictures...my beater is white!

This is a two-part dish.  The "gnocchi" are really a pate a choux, the same dough used in the gougeres and cream puffs and eclairs.  Here is the glossy dough.  Can you hear it?  It's saying, "Make the pastry cream!  Ganache, too! We'll be ready!" Sadly, though, it was not to be.  The gnocchi are made by dropping little pieces of the dough in hot salted water for a few minutes, like pasta, and then scooping them out to dry.  I tasted one.  It was a little doughy, with a cooked exterior.  Then I had to taste several more, and even though they were oddly habit forming I can't say they were good.  Rather what a boiled flat cream puff ought to taste like.

The little gnocchi are coated with the second part of the dish, the bechamel.  Bechamel is one of the classic four mother sauces and is made by making a paste of flour and butter, cooking it, and then adding hot milk.  Then I added nutmeg, salt and pepper.  It was very, very thick, more like a paste or goo than an actual sauce.  I don't think that was right but I figured I'd take a chance.

Run away, little gnocchi!  The Bechamel is coming!

Here is a picture of the gnocchi being attacked covered by the blob of bechamel.  This dish was not looking good.  I forged ahead.  At this point about 3/4 of the pots that I own were dirty, so why not?  (This is one of the recipes that makes it obvious that Dorie has someone else cleaning her dishes.)  So there was a topping of cheese, grated Emmentaler and Parmesan in my case.  And a further dotting of butter. 

Just out of the oven,  lovely!  Dorie called it kind of a French version of mac-and-cheese, comfort food.  But I found it heavy, too rich and a sad waste of choux paste.  As for the kids, J loved it, but he loves almost everything.  D was lukewarm on it, while for M and P one bite was plenty.  And Bill, he just said, "That was the most complicated macaroni and cheese I've ever seen." 

No gnocchi in our future.  But that's what this FFwD is all about, stepping outside my comfort zone.  I think very little of this was due to the my cooking; it just wasn't the kind of food we like.  What do we like?  How about this mac and cheese recipe, for starters.  Oh, and it all goes down better with a Winter Mojito.  Cheers!

Monday Morning Gratitude

A great time to stop before the week gets underway.  Actually today we have a little enforced leisure because of...

11.  Snow!  And ice, of course.  You can't have snow in the South without some ice on the side. 
12.  Pets whom we love and who love us. 
13.  A wonderful sermon which gave me a week's worth of thinking in the first five minutes.
14.  Handknit hats.
15.  Snuggling on the couch with the kids to watch a movie.
16.  The paperwhites which bloomed.  This is the first time I've successfully forced bulbs in the in winter.
17.  Brownie mix. 
18.  Photos.  We are so documented now.  Have you ever stopped to think how amazing it is that we have gazillions of images of last week, last year, ten years ago?  Imagine what it was like 150 years ago, when you only had your memory.
19.  Watching my children grow and nurture friendships.
20.  Emergency workers who are out working to make sure we are safe, even though the roads are really bad today.  (I got the road report from my husband who is at the office right now.)

Time for the second cup.  One child has still not emerged from his room.  I'd say that is taking full advantage of a lazy day!

Revisiting "Open to Buy"

I don't "shop blog" much.  Oh, the stories I could tell--maybe someday.  But a little while back I blogged about a way of managing my buying, called "Open to Buy."  I wanted to offer a little insight into how it is working out.

Wow...a budget!  It was tough to get used to having to pick and choose what to purchase.  There are tons of nice items to choose from, many would actually sell and more that would be nice to have in the shop.  But OtB forced me to prioritize--what do I have to keep on hand to keep people coming back?  What can I push to the next month?  Have I exhausted the demand for that item?  Hard questions sometimes.

We made it through the fall and Christmas rush very well, though.  I over-spent, by just a little, a couple of months, but according to the OtB system you need to do that as you head into your busier months.  Then you pull way back as you head into your down season, so that your inventory leads your sales more closely.  I am thrilled to say that we have come into the new year in a much healthier cash position than we had six months ago! 

Right now I'm assessing where we go in the waning months of winter and into our down season, late spring and summer.  I have time to add some fun things for winter yet, but I'm also keeping an eye to what I need to pick up for spring.  Unlike last year, I've given myself a framework to make decisions from.  It really limits the shop in some ways, but it ensures that we'll be around for busy seasons yet to come. 

One additional good point is that even when I've taken some riskier positions in inventory, I've been able to manage that risk by knowing how the position compares to the overall sales of the shop.  I've taken more calculated risks this year.  That includes holding sales--I've known how a sale is going to affect my inventory levels and thus my following month's purchasing.  Very interesting. 

Enough shop talk...time to gather the kids and head to church.  And if you ever want to visit a really cute yarn shop in Peachtree City, Georgia, you can google just that and come and see us!

French Friday with Mushrooms

I'm back with my next recipe from Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan.  This week it was Paris Mushroom Soup.

This is how my girls sliced the 1-1/2 pounds of mushrooms that go into the soup.  The egg slicer makes quick work of the mushrooms with no risk of little fingers getting sliced.

Once the soup has simmered a while, making the whole house smell warm and yummy, you can either use an immersion blender or place the soup into blender.  This was the inaugural job for my new RED immersion blender.  While it was chunkier than it would have been had I used the blender, it was super fast and only made one dish dirty.

This is the finished soup.  The book doesn't have a photo (that I saw) and I think I know why.  It isn't very appetizing looking!  But the taste:  wonderful!  Musky and warm, perfect for an overcast and cold winter evening.  All the kids tasted it and enjoyed it.  J had two full bowls and M had one.

We served this with a small green salad, and the leftovers of roast chicken from the night before.  Delicious.  I'll make it again!

First Monday Gratitude

I have a friend whose blog I follow, and she's been posting things she's grateful for each week. It is a good exercise and, since I'm completely unoriginal, I am going to copy her. But of course I'll aim lower...for now just ten things I'm grateful for each week. Seems pretty pitiful considering my abundant life but you have to start somewhere.

1. The town I live in--our neighborhood had a couple of break-ins over the holidays, but I must have gotten ten emails that were passed around as soon as it happened, and the crooks were caught before Christmas. People like to complain but that is pretty quick!
2. My cool keyboard that I'm typing on right now, that goes with my iPad. Not sure how blogging from the iPad will be but I'm game for a couple of posts. There's an app for Blogger that I'm not using...maybe next time.
3. New rooms for all my kids. The boys and the girls each shared a room until three days ago. The girls had wanted to split up, but that required new carpet, blah blah blah, but then finally they were ready to make the move. Then out of nowhere the boys wanted to split up, too! I'm reeling from the change, and upstairs looks like a tornado hit, but I'm looking forward to seeing how their individual personalities are revealed in their own spaces.
4. The very delicious coffee my husband makes for me each and every morning with the French Press.
5. A final day off before school and the real-life whirlwind begin again. Time for that last little bit of coffee and then cleaning up.
6. The cool pancake squirter that lets me make very good happy-face pancakes in the morning. I'm afraid that a picture will have to come later. J is also thankful for that.
7. A cat who somehow always ends up on my bed, snuggled by my feet, in the morning.
8. Children who are bookworms.
9. Exact change.
10. A new page on the calendar and a fresh start! We are excited to see what 2011 brings.

Have a wonderful day. I will try to make this more link-y as I go along, especially to link to the other blogs!

First French Friday on the Last Day of the Year

I got an awesome Christmas gift (no, not the iPad):  Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan.  As I was looking at the book, trying to decide which yummy recipe to make first, I decided to check out Dorie's website.  Turns out there's a "cook-along" of sorts going on, one recipe a week, "French Fridays with Dorie."  Sounds good.  So now every Friday I'll share my version of our week's dish.  Unless I don't.

This week I actually made two things and they were both great.  First up were the Gougeres, a cheese pastry.  That's not a good description.  It's "choux paste" which is the pastry part of eclairs or cream puffs, but with grated cheese added to the dough before you bake it.  The dough has lots of eggs in it so it puffs up beautifully in the oven.  Unfilled, they are these puffs of chewy cheesy bread.  Here's the dough in my mixer:

And then here the gougeres while I was switching the pans in the oven:

Finally, lunch.  Frankly, I love Dorie because most of her recipes seem to start with "These are really great with Champagne," but I had mine with tomato soup.  Also pretty tasty:

Now, finally, the recipe of the week, "Spiced Butter-Glazed Carrots."  I suppose these would also be good with Champagne, but we just had them with our dinner of pork tenderloin, rice, and sliced fruit.  These are cooked with sliced fresh ginger, onion, garlic, cardamom and butter.  A little more trouble than steamed carrots, but a whole lot more flavor.  The kids really loved them, and so did the grownups.  Thanks, Dorie!

And thanks to my sweet husband who knows that I just loved eating in France and is helping me hold onto the illusion for a little while longer...

Back to Wonkiness

There are a couple of issues in the news I like to follow, and one of them is the idea of a credit-driven bubble. The best and most painful example is our current housing bubble, but I personally believe there is a higher-education bubble, too. More on that when it isn't Christmas Eve.

The Dallas Fed just published an analysis of recovery from the current housing bubble. In the very first paragraph there is this:

9.1 million homes were built between 2002 and 2006, a period when 5.6 million U.S. households were formed.

If that doesn't jump out and shake you then nothing will. This report goes on to discuss how there can't be a "soft landing" from the housing bubble. There isn't enough money in the world to muffle the bursting bubble.

Capitalism is awesome, because it allows for the most rational and highest uses of resources to create wealth. It is also, unfortunately, subject to painful corrections, but those are the times when resources are getting re-allocated so that there can be a recovery. Like ripping off a band-aid, it hurts like crazy when you do it, but it is over faster and the recovery can begin in earnest. Programs to mitigate the pain, while comforting in the short run, are really just a waste of time and money. Kindness can kill us all.

The best thing we did in Paris

What a title!  But it's true.  Ian, this is for you!

In preparing for our trip, I researched things to do with kids in Paris.  One interesting thing that popped up was to meet a photographer and have great pictures made.  Now, we haven't had pictures made of our family in about five and a half years.  My children are sadly undocumented.  We have of course had the church directory pictures made, but somehow those cameras have the Lutheran lens on them, giving us the too-much-coffee-and-Jello-Salad pallor.  They don't count.

My rental agency provided the name of a photographer who turned out to be booked while we were in Paris, but she gladly suggested Ian Holmes, a British photographer living in Paris.  I contacted Ian and he was available on our first afternoon in Paris.  This was perfect, so we arranged to meet on Monday.

You have probably seen so many family portraits where the family has reasonably matching clothes, everyone's hair is trimmed and neat, the kids look like they actually like each other and Mom looks relaxed.  If you have one of those, my hat's off to you.  I can't.  I've tried, but I somehow grow three heads, start screaming at everyone, forget items of clothing, discover two children's clothes don't fit, lose a shoe, and then forget how to put on my own makeup.  Not pleasant.  But this time would be different. (Don't laugh, Ian.)  The magic of Paris would put a gloss on all of it and we'd have one set of perfect family photographs.

Well.  Monday morning we did the first thing on the kids' to-do list:  we climbed the Eiffel Tower to the second level, 669 steps.  (I'll post pictures of that next.)  It was windy and quite cool, really a typical November day in Paris.  We had fun, looking all around the Tower, and then walked back down for a yummy lunch in a neighborhood bistro.  Our waiter was fun and our food warm and tasty.  All of a sudden I realized we had 45 minutes to meet Ian at Palais Royal, about five metro stops and a train-change away.  Yikes, time to get moving.

I got moving, but getting the others going was like pushing string.  "Mom, do I have to wear this?"  "It itches!"  "I'm cold."  "Are you sure we have to do this?" "I don't want to brush my hair."  "This doesn't fit."  He was right, there.  The new shirts I'd bought didn't fit!  Zut alors.  But if the boys didn't wear their new shirts with dress pants, they'd be in jeans, and I didn't want jeans in the pictures.  Then my husband asked if we'd be inside for pictures.  Um, no.  "But then won't we be really cold?"  Zut encore.  The kids' coats still had the ski tags from last year, and D's pink coat was starting to show the Metro grime after just one day.  And I realized that no matter what I did with my hair, or the girls', the wind would just promptly undo it.  Surrender.  "Guys, just wear what you want, but WE HAVE TO GO NOW."

We got off the Palais Royal Metro stop at 2:50 or so, late for our 2:30 appointment with Ian.  He had very helpfully emailed me a photo of the place to meet him:

The problem was that when we got off the Metro stop we couldn't find it!  I decided that if we stood there long enough looking lost that somehow a cheerful looking Englishman carrying photography equipment would speak to us.  I was right!  After two or three minutes of looking clueless Ian tracked us down and we got to work.  I was so frazzled, and convinced right from the beginning that the pictures wouldn't work out.  After all, look at my motley crew.

Only kidding.  Ian took that picture.  Ian is amazing.  He put the kids at ease right away, taking us to an art installation very close to the Louvre and letting them run around.  Bill is always photogenic, but it took me a good bit longer to relax.  I'm not a natural in front of the camera anyway.  Here are some pictures around the Louvre:

As you can see, the pictures are truly wonderful.  Then we took a long walk through the Louvre courtyard, stopping for a moment:

before moving on to the Tuileries:

In between, he raced with the kids, caught M and Bill doing a runway-model walk, and let Bill and me have a nice calm (romantic!) stroll through the Tuileries gardens.

Then it was down to the quai by the Seine for some more photographs:

We walked across the Seine on a charming pedestrian bridge.  The locks you see on the bridge are left by lovers, who write their names on the lock and throw the key in the Seine.  How romantic!  One of the many little things Ian shared with us that afternoon.

We ended the afternoon in a St. Germain cafe, a wonderful 100-year-old place where we all warmed up with chocolat chaud.  Ian traded stories about his dog Sherlock with the kids while they asked him all about life as a photographer and snowboarder.  What a wonderful, warm memory, and we have the pictures to show for it, too.

Somehow at the end of the day it didn't matter that we didn't match, that we looked like we'd just gotten caught on film while we were out enjoying Paris as a family.  And in fact, that was kind of how the afternoon unfolded.  Natural, but in the very best light.  All of our pictures are just so much better than I would have ever hoped.  Thank you, Ian, for some amazing photos and even better memories.

What we saw, Part 2: Roman Holiday

Since my kids and husband love all things Rome, we decided to spend part of our vacation in the Provence region.  France has an amazing variety of Roman ruins and, since we didn't want to spend our whole vacation in Paris this was an easy choice.  The hard part was deciding how to limit ourselves.  On the map these little towns look close together and it is very tempting to say, "Oh, we'll go here, and then hop over here and then end the day in this little town."  Somehow it takes twice as long to get everywhere as you think!

Wisely, we centered our Provencal time around Nimes because of the huge amount of Roman "stuff" there.  It turns out that was good because Nimes was all we had time for!  I said in our last post that we got a late start leaving Lyon.  Poor M--he hadn't been feeling good but shortly after we left Lyon we had to stop.  He was sick!  M gets the trooper award for the whole trip because, in spite of a stomach bug that hit him hard this first day and then came and went for the rest of the week, he hung in there and still had a great time.

Our first *planned* stop was just a quick meal, where J had his first crocque monsieur:

Then off to Pont du Gard, which we hit in the late afternoon:

This was our first Roman ruin of the trip, an amazing aquaduct that still stands proudly over the river Gard.  (I had been here on previous trips but DH had never seen it.)  The PdG was an aquaduct built to provide water to a nearby town.  There are so many cool things about it: 

It's huge! 

No mortar!  Each block cut to fit.

Three hundred year old grafitti left by stonemason apprentices!

It is even hard to defend.  Engineering advances like this couldn't be made if your soldiers were always worried about sabotage and you had to constantly worry about enemies poisoning the water.  This is an indication of the relative peace and prosperity of the area during the time of Roman rule.  If people are so worried about the next attack, or even their next meal, useful buildings like this don't get built.

Then we sped off to Nimes, about 20 miles away.  Note to self:  Do not follow Mapquest directions in France. 

After some lucky driving and about 90 more minutes in the car (!) we made it to our hotel, the already-described-and-delightful Hotel des Tuileries.  We dropped our bags and M (poor baby, still sick but just wanting to sleep) and headed across the street to La Palette Gourmande and quite possibly our best meal of the trip.  I wish I had taken pictures...Veronique was delightful and we are STILL talking about the scalloped potatoes!  All five of us had the three-course Beaujolais Nouveau meal (no beaujolais for the kids!) and I was so happy that we all had real French food, like salade saucisson (mixed green salad with a sausage baked into bread), those scalloped potatoes and lots of sliced baguettes!

After a good night's sleep we were ready to explore Nimes, an ancient city that long ago outgrew the bounds of its original walls.  First was the Arena, the best-preserved Roman coliseum in the world and still in use today!  We took the audio tour which was excellent.  As you can see all the kids paid close attention:

The top of the Arena gives some lovely views of the city, which has a real Provencal vibe with its wide tree-lined boulevards.  It was a damp, cold, windy day, but you can see the clouds threatening here, too:

We strolled down this street, stopping occasionally to confirm our status as tourists:

And then we arrived at the Maison Caree, a very well-preserved Roman building.  The amazing thing here is that all four walls are intact.  Below you can see two of the walls.

I'll note that Nimes is small enough that we never even considered getting our car and driving anywhere.  We walked everywhere.

After lunch the threatening skies followed through, and opened up.  Our very smart hotel had umbrellas, though, and so we set off to see the Tour Magne, about a 15-minute walk.  This is another structure that had no purpose but just to be built and look cool, one more thing that only a peaceful and prosperous society builds.  (I'm pointing this out because it is such a contrast to the extreme squalor and poverty of the Middle Ages.)  It rained and rained and rained, but we walked and walked and walked, and the kids laughed it off for the most part. 

The Tour Magne is on a hill over the Fontaine Gardens.  Here are some of the stairs up to the Tower--can you see the waterfall?!

So we went up those steps and many, many more to the top of the hill to find, um, the Tower.  This is what we saw:

But we couldn't figure out how to get in.  So we looked around, said "great" and started back downhill.  That's when we saw much more than we'd bargained for.  The gardens were built in the 17th century, around a series of canals that held water to supply the booming silk fabric business that was Nimes at the time.  I was standing here, thinking, "Wow, for once they didn't do something symmetrical, what's up with that?" when I saw a plaque that describes the Atheneum this garden was built around.  The Atheneum is this curved section to the right.

It's not a Roman bath but something they used more ceremonially, and they are extremely rare.  So, cool!  It also meant that I stood there and looked around and saw the best ruin of the afternoon, the Temple of Diana.  This was a really tumble-down building, but wide open and we could walk all around it to the extent that we wanted to get wet.  DH and P got really wet.  Creeping around this old building in the pouring rain is something we talk about a lot.

Up early the next morning to do a crazy drive:  Nimes to Paris via Chambord.  DH and I had never seen the heart of France, and we both thought it would be fun to at least see it at 60 miles per hour.  Turns out it was good to give M a down day, as he continued to recover and eat very carefully. 

One thing that is very cool about driving across France is how quickly the landscape changes.  What we saw:  deserts, hills, snow-covered alps, deep evergreen forests, plains with rich black dirt waiting to be tilled, volcanoes (extinct, I hope!), sheep, cows, farms farms farms, rivers, leafless forests (it IS November!), little half-timbered villages, and finally, this:

Chambord, one of the great Loire valley chateaux.  Built by Francis I, this was his hunting lodge.  It also contains a famous double-helix staircase designed by Leonardo da Vinci.  It took six years to build!  The double-helix enables two people to ascend and descend without seeing each other.  The entire chateau is stone inside and out, and on a damp November day it was COLD.  The chateau was interesting, but there wasn't really much to the tour other than a bunch of empty rooms.  We would loved to have felt a more human touch, to understand how such a huge place would run, where they prepared meals, where they ate, even where the horses lived!  We made a quick stop here, only about 1 1/2 hours, and then headed north to Paris.

Driving into Paris on a Sunday evening is a slow affair, and another note to self:  Don't print out the Mapquest directions in miles when the car and road signs are in kilometres.  Also, apparently lots of Parisiens leave the city for the weekend, only to pile back in when the weekend is over.  The roads were very, very crowded.

Finally, our first glimpse of this most Parisian of sights:

More soon!  A bientot!