Berry and Mascarpone Brulée--Not Only For Singles

Berries season has started. Before local berries fill up local stores, right now they are peaking in Mexico. I buy different berries almost everyday and if we cannot eat them all in the most tasty way (i.e., fresh), I experiment with different berry desserts. They are my favorite fruits so the list of desserts I make based on berries is almost endless and is still growing.

A friend asked me recently for simpler recipes for busy "singles" who are not very comfortable in the kitchen but sometimes would like to impress someone. I think this dessert would fall in such a category. Anyone can make it and I suppose anyone would love to eat it. And again it is just two ingredient dish, and the whole preparing takes literally three minutes. It can be done with raspberries or blackberries together, as I did it, but either one alone will work as well.

Since there is not much to talk about, here is the recipe.

Berries an Mascarpone Brulée
(Serves six)

Ingredients:
One 8 oz box mascarpone cheese,
two 6 oz boxes raspberries,
two 6 oz boxes blackberries,
6 teaspoons brown sugar(a regular white sugar would work too, but I prefer brown sugar's "nutty" flavor),

Preparation:
1. Preheat a broiler or a grill until it is very hot.
2. Divide fruits between 6 separate shallow ramekins or place them on one large oven proof dish.
3. Top each portion with a tablespoon of mascarpone (or scatter it over the big dish) and sprinkle brown sugar on top.

4. Place under the hot grill and broil until the cheese melts, sugar burns slightly, and fruits release juice--it will take about 3 minutes, but be careful as it may easily burn.
5. Decorate with fresh mint leaves and serve warm.

Arugula and Lentil Salad--from London's Borough

I happened to be in London during the week of the royal wedding. "Happened" is the right word, as my visit was almost incidental. I was accompanying my mom on her trip back to Poland, and spent a few days in London on my homebound leg.

I was very lucky with the weather--70 F all the time and clear skies. I did wardrobe shopping at my favorite COS, watched Brits getting excited by the approaching royal wedding, and discovered a few places I had no chance to see before. One of them I heard a lot about was Borough. It is well known among foodies mostly because of its food market.

I got there on a sunny morning when vendors just started to open their stands. They were in a rush to take their produce from the boxes. I must say their fruits and vegetables were amazingly fresh looking. The merchants were slightly annoyed with tourists like me, obsessively taking pictures of what they had to sell rather than buying it. And what this market--not a big place at all--can offer is pretty impressive. You can prepare an excellent gourmet dinner party from the stuff you can get there, starting with sophisticated salads, through fantastic fish and meats, very fresh vegetables, and finishing with the best Swiss cheese and French wines.

This place must be impressive by any standards; many Italian and Spanish tourists were admiring the freshness and the variety of products sold and, like me, were taking pictures, perhaps for their own food blogs .

Borough market is quite a trip if you were to go there just to do your regular food shopping. And even an attractive neighbourhood may not be enough of an excuse to go there and shop for food, as I am not sure that walking through Miro exhibition at Tate Modern with a pound of fresh halibut or digging into a Shakespeare bookstore with an aromatic Comté would be an appealing idea. So I wonder who the everyday clients of the market are.

Around noon, when I was about to leave the market I notice a very long line at one of the stands. All that was sold there was one type of salad, that the lady selling it was assembling for the patiently waiting clients. It was lunch time so partly out of curiosity and partly out of a genuine appetite I also bought one such box, sat at the river bank, and ate its content. It was simple but tasty.

Arugula and Lentil Salad

Ingredients:
4 cups of arugula,
2 cups of lentils (cooked or from a can),
2 carrots, shredded,
6 oz mozzarella,
1 cup(about 6-8 oz) grape tomatoes,
a few slices of prosciutto,
3 tbsp olive oil,
juice from half lemon,
2 garlic cloves,minced
salt and pepper.

Preparation:
1. Arrange arugula on a plate in a nest leaving an hole in the middle.
2. Mix carrot, garlic, and lentils and put them inside the arugula nest.
3. Throw on top tomatoes and mozzarella cut into small cubes.
4. Mix olive oil with lemon juice, salt and pepper, and drizzle over the salad.
5. Put on top prosciutto cut into slices .

Serve alone or with fresh bread.

And some pictures from Borough:

Napoleons--Simply Delicious

For all the tales I heard linking this delicious pastry to Napoleon Bonaparte, the name is all they seem to have in common. He may have had a good chance to try them, but I doubt there is any historic document saying, for example, that they were his favorites. Some link the name of this pastry to Napoli, the city where it allegedly came from, while in Poland, the name is said to come from the name of the pastry shop located at the Napoleon Square in Warsaw, which was famous for its delicious napoleons. Anyways, I think everyone, at least in Europe, tried napoleons (in France known as mille feuilles), as they were first described already in 1651.

I remember them from my childhood in Poland. Those days, in most places napoleons were pretty bad. They were made with pale and hard pastry and filled with a very starchy cream. But there was one small family bakery in my hometown, which sold napoleons that could put you in a state of nirvana. Their delicate crunchy pastry leaves mixed in my mouth with a smooth vanilla cream and powdered sugar stuck to my lips and, almost always, nose. They were messy to eat, particularly straight from the tissue in which they were wrapped, with their delicate cream often running down on my clothes, but they were hard to resist, so I often spent my whole weekly allowance on them.

Many years have passed since those good days, but I still think that one of the best napoleons I ate were coming from that small pastry shop, which does not exist anymore. Since nothing I could buy matches that taste I started to make them at home. They have always been a huge success and so far no one who tried them refused to have another one.

They are easy to make, especially when you can get a good ready-made puff pastry. This shortcut would save you a lot of time without hurting the taste. The whole difference lies in a good, home-made, vanilla-infused cream that you fill the pastry with. For this, I use my very old recipe for a version of crème pâtissière that I use often, also to make profiteroles and some other desserts. Last time I made napoleons I served them with kiwi and passion fruit. Their zestiness complemented wonderfully the sweetness of the cream.

Napoleons

Ingredients:
2 sheets of puff pastry (I always use Pepperidge Farm,

For the cream:
2 cups milk,
3 large egg yolks,
1/2 cup sugar,
half a stick vanilla pod,
1/4 cup corn starch,
1 tbsp white all purpose flour,
4 tbsp soft butter.

Pastry preparation:
1. Defrost pastry, lay it out on a working surface and, using sharp knife, cut into equal squares. I cut it first into three long pieces and then each of them into nine squares. From one sheet of pastry I get 18 small pieces, but you can make them bigger, and make 12 pieces from one sheet.
2. Preheat oven to 370 F.
3. Place squares on a buttered cookie sheet and bake for about 20 minutes, or until light gold and puffy. Cool them down completely.

Cream Preparation:
1. Place egg yolks in a heat proof bowl, add sugar and, using an electric mixer or a hand whisker, stir for about 2 minutes, until the mixture becomes pale and sugar dissolves a little bit.

2. Add flour and corn starch and stir again--at that point the mixture will become pretty thick.
3. In a medium pot heat milk with the vanilla pod cut alongside in half. Bring it to the boiling point, take out from the heat and remove the vanilla pod from the milk.
3. Add a little bit of hot milk (about 1/2 cup) to the flour and egg yolk mixture, and blend it in using a whisker. When the mixture becomes thinner follow with the rest of milk.
4. Transfer the mixture into the pot where milk was boiled and stirring it constantly over the medium heat, bring it to boil (to make custard). When first bubbles appear on the custard take it out from the heat and cool down.

5. When custard cools down to room temperature, using an electric mixer, add one by one all four spoons of butter, waiting until they blend in one after another.
6. Using a sharp knife, cut the puff pastry pieces horizontally. Fill each bottom part with a spoon of cream and cover with the top part.

7. Place on the serving plate and dust generously with powdered sugar.
8. Serve alone or decorated with kiwis, passion fruits, or raspberries. I usually assemble them just before serving--this way the pastry stays crunchy. If you fill the whole batch with cream and store at refrigerator, after several hours puff pastry will become soft.