The book itself is kind of a pain in the ass. It seems as though it was translated perhaps from French to German and then into English. Not that the steps matter here. The end result is that the instructions can be incredibly difficult to make sense of. That and all of the measurements are metric . . . ahh, the metric system.
Metric measurements may make a ton of sense (oh no i didn't) in the fields of science, industry and commerce but I feel like, in the kitchen at least, our english system is far superior (if you're not a scientist.) It's just intuitive and comfortable. It uses regular household items and asks you to divide by two. Even the Swiss have to revert to folk terms like "teaspoon" and "tablespoon." What the hell does 40 ml look like? How does that relate to my day to day? It's just sterile and scientific. It make's cooking feel like a chemistry experiment.
I'm exaggerating the problem a bit. My measuring cups all have the metric equivalents stamped on them as does my food scale. The only real problem is in the possible differences between an american tablespoon/teaspoon and the spoons that Betti Bossi is using. But she'd be happy to sell me a set of her spoons if I need them.
Now that I've explained all of my excuses for failing miserably at these recipes here's how they went down:
1. Baked Cheese Puffs
These are your basic dinner rolls - like a Swiss biscuit - except with 3/4 pound of cheese folded in and a little cayenne and nutmeg. I used a little too much cayenne. The recipe called for two pinches. I think my pinches were just a little too big. I also made the mistake of just dumping the eggs into the mix rather than beating them in slowly. It took me forever to get the dough to thicken up. They cooked OK, a little dense maybe, but they were a pain to handle when trying to get them onto the cookie sheet. Oh, and the recipe also called for Jura cheese. I used an aged gruyere which worked just as well.
2. Fish Soup
For a landlocked country there are a lot of fish recipes in this book. I never cared much for fish but I thought I'd give it a go with a few modifications. The soup was butter, leeks, onions, garlic, tomatoes, carrots, celery, white wine, water, parsley, lemon juice, a bay leaf and salt & pepper. You cook the fish in all of that for a few minutes then you pour off the liquid, bring it to a boil, then add more butter, flour and what the book calls "double cream". In Britain that's a cream that's 48% fat so I've just been using heavy whipping cream instead.
For the 'fish' I went up to Huong Vuong at 11th & Washington (you may know it as the 'Vietnamese supermarket'). They have a freezer aisle and one of the doors there's a random label that says "health foods". You'll find lots of frozen oddities in there. For this occasion I grabbed the 'veggie fish ham'. It's this slab of tuna shaped seitan wrapped in nori.
This went off problem free - except to say that it's incredibly thick and rich and I could barely finish one serving. It was great, I just pushed the leftovers on my brothers.
OK, there are more recipes to come but for now, the sun is shining and the thermometer says 51. That doesn't happen very often in January so I'm going to get my ass outside and enjoy it.
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