Eat Like You Live Here

Fall always makes me crave brown butter…..I’m always looking for interesting ways to employ brown butter in my cooking. Here’s a dessert option for brown butter. This is a basic brioche recipe where brown butter has been substituted for the regular unsalted butter, baked in a hot dog mold and toasted on the outside. Loaded with spice, pistachio and coffee ice creams and topped with toffee bits. After tasting this last night, i think I’ll just load it with coffee ice cream instead of the assortment of ice creams. Coffee and brown butter just seem like a perfect match. Enjoy the photos!

Just pics tonight. Not sure there is much to say here. Country ham is folded into our tot mix and served with red eye mayo. Boom.

This is one of those plates of food that you take a bite of and just think ‘all is right with the world’. The sticky bun is usually a treat reserved for mornings with a huge cup of black coffee. I couldn’t see why we  couldn’t take this sweet treat and adapt it for use on our dessert menu.

I started with a sweet brioche dough rolled out into a rectangle.

Then I take the prunes that have soaked in armagnac and puree them until they make a smooth paste. This paste is then spread on the dough and topped with sugar, cinnamon and fresh grated nutmeg.

The next step is to carefully roll up the dough and refrigerate.Following a brief time in the fridge, the dough is pulled out and placed in a muffin tin that has been layered with sugars and vanilla which will form the caramel as the sticky bun bakes. Once in the muffin tins(which we use so the buns retain their shape as they cook) are loaded up, the buns proof for about three hours before they hit the oven.

After about 35 minutes in the oven, the finished product is turned out on to a cooling sheet and ready to be topped with pistachio ice cream

Here’s the finished product:

This is a really fun dish in addition to being intensely flavorful. You’ll also notice that it really is just the sticky bun, ice cream and a spot of caramel sauce on the bottom of the plate, which I think is really important. Plates of food don’t need to hide behind gimmicks and 86 garnishes to be soulful, flavorful,interesting and to transport you. They just don’t. Most times, it is the simplest items, perfectly executed which hit home the hardest.

I love apple dumplings…..always have, always will. One favorite food memory I have is watching my dad pour heavy cream over his warm apple dumpling and then taking a spoon and diving in!

It is apple season in south central PA and The Carriage House Market is overflowing with apples of all shapes and sizes. Obviously, my thoughts turned to how we can put an apple dumpling on our menu. One improvement I wanted to make on the traditional apple dumpling was the dumpling dough which is traditionally a straight pie dough wrapped around a whole cored apple and while the original is great, I wanted something with a little more pop; a little more buttery flake. I remembered a pastry I had at Pierre Herme in Paris called a kougin-amann and thought it would be a great wrapper for an apple dumpling. As a matter of R&D, I also sampled Dominique Ansel’s ‘DKA’(his version of kougin-amann) while on a recent trip to NYC.(I know, it’s a tough life….)

So, I started with that flaky dough, added a drizzle of caramel to the base of the pastry and inserted a peeled and cored apple which had been tossed in sugar, cinnamon, clove, all spice, and nutmeg. Pulled the corners closed and painted the top of the pastry with egg wash and dusted with the same spiced sugar mix that the apple were tossed in.

As for finishing the dish, I decided to take a page from my dad’s book and serve the dumpling with warm cream. However, I thought it would be nice to add some depth to the cream, so I’ve taken oats and toasted them then pureed the oats and a touch of salt in cream and strained the cream until smooth. It makes a very interesting, fully flavored sidekick to a buttery, flakey apple dumpling.

Enjoy the pics!

Every winter, my dad and I comb through seed catalogs and decide what we are going to grow in our Culinary Garden that summer. Sometimes, the results are obvious; tomatoes. Sometimes, I get a response like ‘what are you going to do with THOSE?’ Ground cherries got me that response this year.

One of my favorite things to do with ground cherries is to make a pie or tart. So…..that’s what we have done. In another example of transition cooking, we are currently featuring a ground cherry and chestnut crumble tart with sour cream ice cream. This tart is beautiful in its simplicity  and provides not only a bit of sweetness at the end of a tasting menu, but also a bit of acidity. If you’ve never tried ground cherries, do yourself a favor and give them a shot. You won’t be sorry!

The calendar says there are four seasons. As chefs and cooks, we know there are many more. Some of my favorite cooking and some of the most interesting combinations of ingredients come in transition. We are in one of those transitions right now. Pumpkins are being roasted and processed, but corn and tomatoes are still coming out of gardens. This overlap of seasons provides us with some amazing chances at creativity. The last gasp of summer’s fruits and the first breath of what autumn has to offer.

The composition below is a perfect example of transition(as most of our food will be for the coming weeks). It is a salad of sweet corn, pear, chanterelle mushroom and black truffle. All dressed with smoky bacon fat.

As you are shopping at your local farmers markets in the coming weeks, take a look at the ingredients that are popping up and do some transitional cooking for yourself!

Beef heart. Honestly one of my favorite pieces of the animal to cook. There isn’t a whole lot of sex involved in  beef tenderloin, but heart, tongue, marrow? That’s 24/7 sex appeal.

We are very lucky to be able to use Sheppard Mansion Farms highland beef. Raising an animal and taking it to slaughter presents a glorious amount of options when the meat arrives back on the property. The most obvious is that we have ALL the parts to work with and like I said, there’s a lot of sex appeal in heart, tongue and marrow.

First things first; if you’re not going to try heart because you’re squeamish about eating a heart or a tongue, take a break from reading this post and go grow yourself a pair. Would I really serve something that wasn’t delicious? You gotta trust me.

On to the dish: This dish is currently residing as a cold first course on our tasting menu. It is comprised of grilled and chilled beef heart, asparagus, Caputo Brothers mozzarella, tots and a grilled spring onion vinaigrette…a twist of cracked pepper and some peppery edible flowers and chives finish off the dish.

For the heart: We marinate it overnight in a mix of sherry vinegar, olive oil, rosemary, garlic and shallot. Once marinated, we quickly grill the outside of the heart, while keeping the inside raw. It is then removed from the grill and sliced very thin for plating. Seriously, it may be the most flavorful piece of beef you’ve ever eaten…….It’s a really great salad….meat, crispy potato, some asparagus and the best mozzarella I’ve ever tasted from Caputo Brothers. You gotta try this dish……you gotta have heart.