Blue Cheese Mille-feuille with Glazed Red Onion and Fig and Cress Salad
from Vegetarian: It’s not all beans and tofu, Murdoch Books, 2011.
My first recipe from this new book. It comes from a series 'My Kitchen'. Oddly, it only has two sections to it: Snacks, soups and starters, and Mains. There are no sweets but, as these are essentially vegetarian anyway, they can be found in any cookbook. A quick browse through shows that the recipes are garnered from a wide variety of cooking cultures. Each double page spread has a strip down the side containing information of various sorts. For example, one page has an explanation of ‘jicama’. Useful, but it would have been better if accompanied by an illustration to show what this vegetable looks like. For many people, it’s known as yam bean.
My first exercise into cooking from this book was with the mille-fueille. Probably the hardest thing about the recipe is working out how to pronounce the French word, which apparently means ‘one thousand leaves’.
I was fascinated to find that I had to cook the puff pastry layers weighted down between two trays to keep them from rising too much.
While they were baking it was simply a matter of glazing the onions and mixing the soft cheese filling.
With the layers baked and the cheesy filling mixed it was simply of matter of putting all the pieces together. I obviously didn't put enough weight on the tray when cooking the bottom two layers.
The simple salad was made from some favourite ingredients: figs and water cress. The dressing was a type of mayonnaise with mustard and red wine vinegar. Tasty.
Apart from some heated discussion on pronunciation of the name, the next most difficult item was trying to eat the meal without scattering the elements around the plate. But it was all worth the effort. The meal looked reasonably appealing and the creamy cheese filling, glazed onion and salad all went together really well.
Taste: ✔✔✔✔
Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔
No comments:
Post a Comment