Issues of Domesticity

I’ve been spending the last 4 weeks on purely domestic preoccupations. Moving in to a new house can be a lengthy affair, especially for one predisposed to excessive do-it-yourself-ism and a bizarre sense of financial stringency. A week was spent making the place sanitary, a week after that making the place habitable, and another one making the place ours.

5708 Darlington is beautiful now, and it is pretty much ours. We’re probably just one step away from home ownership. That step being mortgage. Which most likely won’t be happening in the nearest future, unless one of us starts selling work at Sotheby’s or engages in some other sort of institutional artistic commercialism.

For now we’ll be hunting down promotional food samples give-outs, fraternity recruitment barbecues, free lunch talks about resume writing, pancake mornings on the grassy patch courtesy of student clubs, sorority cookie handouts and complimentary condoms from the health center on Friday mornings.

But occasionally we have pie.

Raspberry Frangipane Tart with Irish Cream Ganache.

(Recipe follows at the end of the post.)

For now things like pies and home-cooked dinners still stand as normal functioning activities of daily life. We’ll try our best, but school will rightfully prevent us from domestic frivolities and luxuries like these. As much as I enjoy making a quintuple quantity of Pate Brisee for bulk pie construction, it really takes up too much of my cognitive load to keep in my the establishment of the fridge at any point in time. I really cannot afford the brain real estate to be able to keep in mind what arrangements of ingredients are present in the kitchen for a particular pie configuration. So for now I’m trying my best to make 10-serving things, so that when the ink hits the paper and all I can think about is color and composition, I’ll have gluttonous portions of Ma-Bo Tofu, Potato and Spinach Gratin, French Onion Soup and Bircher Muesli in the fridge and freezer in happy little single-serve Tupperwares.

Remove 1000 upholstery tacks before proceeding.

I found a chair in the garage. Its quite an undertaking, both in terms of time and tools. But mostly just lots of sandpaper. It reminds me a lot of back when I was 9 and we had a bunch of old teak furniture from the 40′s that my grandmother had, and my father decided to refinish of all them with lustrous Danish oil. My brother and I went through lots of sandpaper in the staircase landing outside the front door of our apartment, sanding the aged, peeling, dark varnish off of those solid examples of stellar joinery. Conceptually we all turn into our parents at a certain point in time.

Check out the detailing on the tacks!

I was hoping to finish this in a few days, and then fashion a butt-contoured seat out of the 2×4 pine stash under our patio. But obviously the sanding took much longer than I was expecting, even after purchases of power sanding attachments and quality Dremel time. The chair is now sitting in a corner of my room waiting for a free weekend, where I decide that refurbishing antique furniture is higher up the priority list than churning out art and doing the endless piles of readings for Social Psych and Art History.

 

 

Raspberry Frangipane Tart with Irish Cream Ganache

(Hashed together, heavily modified, embellished, abridged and re-adapted  from Bon Appetit’s Magazine’s Master Pie Crust, July 2011, and a Pear and Hazelnut Frangipane Tart on Epicurious.com)

Use a pretty deep pie dish for this. I was just trying to use up my mushy raspberries that were on the verge of moldy, but I guess it should work with frozen or really good fresh raspberries too. Salted almonds are important to put that nice salty tang that cuts through the sugary overload that usually happens inevitably in pies and tarts.

Pate Brisee

(makes 5 crusts, yes thats a lot of crust, but stash it away in the freezer and you can make almost-instant pie 4 more times in the future!) 

All ingredients should be as stone cold as possible. Put the butter and flour in the freezer if you have to.

6.5 cups flour

4 sticks (500g) unsalted butter

2 tsp sea salt

2 tsp sugar 

1 egg

2 tsp vinegar or lemon juice

cold water

Chuck flour, butter, salt and sugar in a food processor and blitz till it everything looks like split peas. Incorporate the egg and vinegar and pulse till the dough starts to come together. Remove to a flat surface and knead the clumps together using as little cold water and handling as possible. Freeze, refrigerate, roll, do whatever you want with it.

Frangipane Filling

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1/4 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1/2 cup almonds, ground fine

1 tsp salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon Amaretto

1.5 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder (sifted in with the flour)

2 tablespoons milk

In a small bowl cream together the butter, salt, sugar and beat in the egg, milk, the almonds, the vanilla extract, the Amaretto, and the flour+baking powder. Batter should be like a brownie batter sort of consistency.

Irish Cream Ganache

2 tbs Irish Cream

160g Good 72% chocolate

1/2 cup (125 ml) milk

1 tbs cream cheese

1 tbs icing sugar

1/4 tsp sea salt

Heat milk in saucepan till pretty warm (but not boiling). Whisk in salt, sugar, chocolate and cream cheese till smooth. Mix in Irish Cream.

Assembly!

2 Half Pint Punnets of Raspberries

2 tbsp Raspberry Preserve

1/8 cup of roasted salted almonds, crushed roughly

Roll out one portion of Pate Brisee into a pie dish. Top with Frangipane filling. Scatter raspberries in as random manner as possible. Bake in 375F oven for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and spread 2 tbsp raspberry preserve while tart is still warm. Let cool for 10 minutes and pour ganache over. Sprinkle crushed almonds and chill for at least 2 hours in fridge before serving.

 

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