The vanishing Vanilla Biscuits

These biscuits, or Little Vanilla Crescents, are from Recipes from a Provençal Kitchen, a book I received as a gift some 15 years ago. The author claims that they are so good that one has to eat them all straight away, and that is indeed the case! This is the recipe of the vanishing Vanilla Biscuits! You will want to do two doses, one for the guests, another one for you!

You need:
- 210g butter
- 210 g flour
- 100g ground almonds
- 50g sugar
and some sugar and vanilla sugar for the topping.

Mix together all the ingredients with your fingers until a dough forms. Let the dough rest in the fridge for some 15 to 30 minutes. Then take small (about 25 grams) amounts of the dough and roll between the palms of your hands so as to form sticks about 6 cm long. Bend them slightly to form crescents, set on a baking tray covered with a baking sheet, and bake in about 200 degrees C for some 15 minutes. Be careful not to let them gain any colour - they should remain pale. When the crescents are still warm, roll them in a mixture of sugar and vanilla sugar and place on a serving plate. This is the tricky part - the biscuits crumble easily when they are warm, but the sugar won’t stick to them if you let them cool too much.

Enjoy the biscuits, they won't last long!

A colorful vegetarian risotto, to brighten your winter evening

The colorful Baked Tomato Risotto with Green Pesto.

Vegetables yield very colorful dishes that play very well with those white china that you just bought. Here’s a dish that will make your dinner a super colorful experience.

This extremely tasty vegetarian risotto can be served “tel quel” or to accompany just about any grilled meat or fish. It takes some time to prepare this risotto due to inclusion of oven-baked tomatoes but it is definitely worth the wait - besides, it is super easy to prepare. You will separately prepare the risotto, the tomatoes, and the pesto. Finally we will combine the three when serving.

For four hungry people, you’ll need:

...for the risotto:
4 dl (1.6 US cups) risotto rice
1 medium-sized onion
white wine / chicken broth / vegetable stock
water (all in all, you’ll need about 9 dl or 3.8 US cups of liquids)
olive oil, salt, black pepper to taste

...for the oven-baked tomatoes:
about eight medium-sized tomatoes
salt, black pepper and olive oil
1 tsp sugar
rosemary/thyme if available

...for the pesto:
one bunch of basil, chopped
pine kernels, smashed
one medium-sized garlic clove, mashed
1 dl (0.4 US cups) grated Parmesan / Grana Padano cheese
salt and black pepper to taste
olive oil

Keep some basil leaves and Parmesan cheese aside to use when serving.

First, prepare the tomatoes. Cut them in slices, place on an oven pan covered with a baking sheet, and season generously with olive oil, salt, pepper, sugar, and rosemary/thyme. Bake in 175 degrees Celsius (350 F) during about one hour, or until the tomatoes are well-baked, even a bit dry (be careful not to burn them, though!).

Then, prepare the pesto: mix all the ingredients (except for the oil), and then add olive oil enough to make the mixture is easy to mix with a spoon.

Lastly, sauté the onion in a large frying pan with some olive oil, until golden. Then stir in the rice, and the stock/the wine. Let boil for a couple of minutes. Finally add the water, salt, and pepper, letting the rice cook until it is al dente. Make sure that your risotto is not too dry!

Serving: pour some risotto on each plate and top with a couple of tomato slices and a spoonful of pesto. Decorate with basil leaves and freshly grated Parmesan.

Enjoy with a glass of red!

Crunchy Pecan Cookies

Having recently read Michael Pollans’s In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, I just couldn’t buy any industrial cookies at the supermarket today. Instead, I decided to bake some myself. All the cookie recipes I’ve tried so far involve quite a lot of time and/or effort, but now I wanted to find something easy. Google search “easy cookies” didn’t result in anything I would have found worth trying, but the first result in gourmet.com search looked like I just hit the jackpot! I didn’t have potato starch, though, like the original recipe required and I found the amount of sugar excessive, so the recipe is a bit modified. But the result was just as good as the recipe predicted: these soft yet crunchy, super tasty cookies are truly addictive. So here it goes:

3 egg whites
2,5 dl pecan nuts
1,25 dl sugar
25 grams all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp salt

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Beat the egg whites. Pulse 1 dl pecans, sugar, flour, cinnamon and salt in a food processor. Chop coarsely the remaining pecans. Then mix all the ingredients together. Place 1 tablespoons of dough on a baking sheet covered oven pan (not very close one to another!) and cook in 200 degrees (C) about 12 minutes or until they get some colour; then take out and let cool completely before removing to a serving plate. It pays off to test just how well cooked you like your cookies the best: if cooked less, they remain soft yet crunchy, if cooked a little bit more they might gain in taste, but in my opinion lose in texture. If you are a true cinnamon-lover, you can obviously add more cinnamon than suggested. I wanted my cookies to have just a hint of cinnamon so that it wouldn’t override the taste of pecans.