This last weekend was Pate de Feuilles

It's like this:

You take 2 1/2 sticks of butter and you form a pad about 4 inches square and 1/4 inch thick.

You make a simple dough from flour, salt and water. You roll this out so that it is just a bit more than 8 inches long and 4 inches wide. You place the butter at one end of this, and fold dough over it, then pinch the edges to seal the butter in!

Now, you make a Samurai Sword from it. Repeated rolling it out thin and then folding it in on itself. Do this a number of times. Then roll it out until it is about 1/4 inch thick.

Now you cut out the pastries from the dough (Should I just call it butter?) and you bake them they should rise and be fluffy and flaky.

Hollandaise Sauce

The menu for last night was:

Poached Salmon
New Potatoes
Asparagus

All served with a Hollandaise Sauce.

We used Martha Stewart's recipe for Hollandaise - It was great.

Bruno and I seem to have great luck with saucees. The Merlot reduction for the Beef Tenderloin was incredible, and this was just as good.

You've got to be careful with Hollandaise, you've got to keep whisking it constantly, even when you leave it resting.

A double boiler is also essential. You can leave the sauce alone for a while, as you work on other things. Do this only if the water in the doulble boiler is warm, and you leave the sauce on top of the warm water.

Anyway, hats off to Bruno, we made a great meal last night.

Onion Soup

Tonight, Kathleen and I made Onion Soup.

It was great. You really have to cook the Onions for some time. But the payoff is huge. We used a good amount of white wine, which I think promoted the carmelization process.

It was alot of fun!

I’m in luck

I forgot to mention that I still have a job...

After a little programming…

Now, I've got my photogallery system (Photoshelf) reasonably integrated with the web log.

Thanks to folks (Ben and Mena) who write MovableType. The thing is great. and I am using the XML-RPC interface to pull off some really neat stuff. Its great what XML and a database can do, eh?

Anyway, things should get a bit more attractive around here.