Rooibos Poached Pear Tart

This post is also available in: French

Hope everyone in hurricane Sandy's path is staying safe, warm, and dry.
Now to pears - what a perfect fall fruit. I mostly love their mild, grainy taste and versatility. They are great in sweets, but also work as a special addition in savouries. Right now I've got a pear tart going in the oven, but here is another one made earlier this week. 

Poaching is a cool way to prepare pears, it makes them sweeter and melt-on-your-tongue soft. Poach them in wine, spiced water, or tea, which is what I did here. Rooibos is a South African tea that I'm very fond of, it's caffeine-free and has a nice, warming taste.

And of course autumn is the time to eat all the cinnamon you can handle. I spiced the poaching tea with cinnamon and ginger and let it reduce to later use as a syrup.
Enjoy and stay cozy.

Pear Tart
Crust
1 lemon- zest and juice
1 pear - cored and roughly chopped
1" piece of ginger root - peeled and roughly chopped
1 tablespoon maple syrup
2 tablespoons chia seeds
3 tablespoons melted cacao butter
1/2 cup coconut sugar - powdered
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups oat flour
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

In a high-speed blender, combine the lemon zest and juice, pear, ginger, maple syrup, and chia seeds, set aside. In a bowl, mix cacao butter with sugar and vanilla, then add the pear mixture to combine. In a separate bowl, combine oat and coconut flours with salt, then mix the wet mixture in to make a dough. Press it into an 8" diameter tart pan or square pan. Dehydrate at 115F for 6-8 hours, remove from the pan and dehydrate more until dry.

Spicy Rooibos Poached Pears
4 ripe, firm pears - peeled, cored, and halved
2 lemons - juice and zest
3 1/2 cups purified water
1/3 cup red Rooibos tea
1 cup coconut sugar
3 tablespoons maple syrup
3-inch piece ginger - peeled and chopped
1 cinnamon stick

Put everything in a large saucepan, bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Take pears out, strain the liquid, leaving the ginger pieces and cinnamon stick in. Reduce the poaching liquid for about 30 minutes, until syrupy.

Filling
3/4 cup cashews - soaked for 4 hours
1 2/3 cup nut milk
1/2 cup agave syrup or other liquid sweetener of your choice
3/4 cup coconut oil
0.7oz/19g Irish moss - rinsed thoroughly and soaked in hot water for at least 10 minutes
1 tablespoon coconut sugar
3 cardamom pods - seeds crushed in a mortar and pestle
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons poaching syrup

In a high speed blender, combine cashews with 2/3 cup of nut milk, 1/4 cup agave, and half of the coconut oil until smooth. Set aside, don't wash your blender. Blend 1 cup of nut milk with the Irish moss, coconut sugar, spices, poaching syrup, and the remaining half of coconut oil. Pour into a large bowl, fold in the cashew mixture, and mix well to incorporate. Fill the crust, let cool in the refrigerator to set. Top with 4 pear halves. Use the rest as a pudding topped with the remaining pears, sprinkled with the poaching syrup and toasted hazelnuts if you wish.

Black Sesame and Ginger Ice Cream

This post is also available in: French

Before it gets too cold, here are two ice cream ideas that are a little more hearty to set the mood for fall.

I've been wanting to try black sesame ice cream for a while now. At first, I was mostly intrigued by its deep asphalt grey colour, which is so uncharacteristic to ice cream or any dessert for that matter. Deviant ice cream. But then I thought about the flavour and realized that it would taste of halva and honey, and there was no stopping me then.

I also made some ginger ice cream to go with the grey batch. Ginger is another one of those warming, earthy flavours, which combines wonderfully with the sesame. I found the pairing of the two to be very comforting, almost soothing to have after a long day or to end a peaceful dinner.

Ginger Ice Cream
2 cans full fat coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum or 1 tablespoon arrowroot powder
1/2 cup agave syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-inch peeled knob of ginger plus 1/4 cup grated ginger

In a bowl, mix together 1/4 cup of coconut milk with xanthan gum or arrowroot powder to form a thick slurry, set aside. Heat the rest of the milk, agave syrup, vanilla and the knob of ginger in a medium sized pan. Bring to a near boil, mix to dissolve the agave. Cover and leave to infuse until cool. Remove the knob of ginger and heat again. Add the slurry and whisk until smooth. Remove from heat and add grated ginger. Let cool completely at room temperature and refrigerate overnight. Put into an ice cream maker for 25 minutes or however long your brand of ice cream machine suggests.


Black Sesame Ice Cream
Black Sesame Paste
1/2 cup black sesame seeds
1/2 cup raw honey

Toast black sesame seeds in a dry frying pan over medium heat, shaking the pan often. Remove from heat immediately as you start smelling the toasted seeds. Grind the seeds in a coffee grinder or mortar and pestle. Mix honey with the seeds.

2 cans full fat coconut milk
2 tablespoons arrowroot powder or 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/2 cup coconut sugar
pinch of salt
4 tablespoons black sesame paste

In a bowl, mix together 1/4 cup coconut milk and arrowroot powder, making a slurry. In a medium sized pan, combine the rest of the milk, sugar and salt and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, stir in the arrowroot/xanthan slurry and simmer for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Mix in the black sesame seed paste thoroughly. Let cool completely at room temperature and refrigerate overnight. Put into an ice cream maker for 25 minutes or however long your brand of ice cream machine suggests.

To make raw ice cream, use this recipe for vanilla ice cream and add about the same amount of grated ginger or sesame paste. You may want to reduce the amount of agave for the black sesame ice-cream or use 1/2 cup of coconut sugar instead.

Beet Mille-Feuille from the La Tartine Gourmande Cookbook

This post is also available in: French

La Tartine Gourmande is a cookbook I've been spending a lot of time with ever since it came out in the spring. I've admired Béatrice Peltre's blog for quite a while now, and it was the very thing that, almost three years ago, made me want to try my hand at writing about food. Béa's vision is unmistakably hers, and her love for the ingredients and dishes that she prepares shows through in every photo and recipe. Out of all cookbooks on my shelf (editor's note, the shelf is overloaded), this one has been the one I've read and reread most often and got an incredible amount of ideas from. Béa's attention to detail and French approach to cooking is something I relate to very much. It's no secret that us Russians are historically very drawn to anything French, like most of the world, really.

Out of the recipes I've tried from the cookbook, this beet mille-feuille was a favourite. It's a pretty simple appetizer, which happens to be very tasty and impressive in appearance, a great idea for having friends over.

One thing I did here is make my own ricotta cheese, used to do it all the time when living in Russia. It is a surprisingly easy process that requires only two ingredients - milk and lemon juice. And the result is worlds away from the store-bought kind, so much richer and creamier. Since the original recipe calls for both goat and ricotta cheeses, I used raw goat's milk from a local farm to make this ricotta.
Check out the book for more serious inspiration.

Beet Mille-Feuille
I slightly changed Béa's recipe by adding radishes, basil oil, apple cider vinegar, and lemon zest to my homemade goat milk ricotta, eliminating goat cheese.

(makes 4)
1 1/2 cups freshly made goat milk ricotta cheese (good recipe here) or 1 cup ricotta cheese mixed with 1/2 cup soft goat cheese
3 radishes - chopped
3 tablespoons chopped chives
2 tablespoons basil oil (1/2 cup olive oil blended together with 1 cup basil leaves)
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
zest of 1 lemon
salt and freshly ground black pepper  - to taste
3 red small to medium cooked beets - peeled
3 yellow small to medium cooked beets - peeled
handful of fresh greens or microgreens to serve
fresh basil for garnish (optional)
small handful of hazelnuts (optionally toasted)

In a bowl, mix cheese, radishes, chives, oil, vinegar, lemon zest, salt and pepper. Cut about 4 horizontal slices in each beet (you will have left over slices). You can use a ring mold about 2 3/4-inch wide by 2 1/4-inch tall to cut each slice with and then assemble the mille-feuille inside the ring mold. Or you can build the mille-feuille by simply placing a neat layer of cheese mixture on top of a beet slice, alternating colours. Use 4 beet slices per each mille-feuille, secure with a toothpick if needed. Refrigerate for a couple of hours before trimming. Use a very sharp knife to trim the mille-feuille to a square shape. Remove the toothpicks if using, optionally drizzle with olive oil and serve with microgreens or fresh greens and hazelnuts if you like. Garnish with basil leaves on top.