Hazelnut Biscotti

This Sunday at the Fairmount Farmers Market, you'll find pastured meats and eggs from Fair Valley Farm and Fog Hollow Farm and fresh produce from Camas Swale Farm including:
berries (serve with biscotti, recipe below)
greens
radishes (make some smashed radishes in chili oil)
salad 
snap peas (try some springtime spaghetti carbonara)

The first of the spring strawberries are such a treat, that I prefer to savor them plain rather than hiding them in pillows of sweet toppings. A refined hazelnut biscotti makes the perfect accompaniment to naturally sweet berries. My daughter made biscotti for my husband's birthday and we've been nibbling them with fresh strawberries all week.

Hazelnut Biscotti

adapted from Patricia Wells Tratoria

2 cups (265 g) unbleached all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
3 large eggs
2/3 cup (135 g) vanilla sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup (125 g) hazelnuts, toasted and cooled

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a large mixing bowl.

3. In a small bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture, slowly add the liquids, and mix well with you hands or a dough whisk. If necessary, add additional flour to form a firm and workable dough. Add the hazelnuts and work them evenly into the dough.

4. Divide the dough into 2 equal pieces. Flour your hands and carefully roll each piece into and oval cylinder about 2 inches wide and 12 inches long. Carefully transfer each cylinder to the parchment-lined baking sheet. 

5. Place the baking sheet in the middle of the oven and bake until the dough is slightly risen and an even golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Remove and transfer the cylinders to a cooling rack for 10 minutes.

6. Transfer each cylinder to a cutting board and slice the biscotti on a sharp diagonal (45-degree angle) at 1/2 inch intervals. Stand the biscotti upright on the baking sheet about 1/2 inch apart. Return the baking sheet to the center of the oven and bake until the biscotti are a deep golden brown, about 15 minutes more. Remove from the oven and transfer the biscotti to a rack to cool thoroughly. The cookies should be dry and crisp. Once cooled they can be store in an airtight container for up to 1 month.

HLTs

This Sunday at at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken, lamb, and pork cuts from Fair Valley Farm and handcrafted vegan hazelnut cheese from Avellana Creamery. Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
lots of tomatoes, including cherries and flats of roams (try roasted tomato fish soup)
sweet and hot peppers of all kinds  peppers and tomatillos (delicious pan seared in salsa)
Shiro plums and Gravenstein apples from SLO farm (make apple-topped teff pancakes) 
NW peaches and blackberries
fennel and eggplants (make fennel and sardine pasta)
baby beets and new potatoes
carrots and kohlrabi  (try this kohlrabi salad with lemon and capers)
crookneck squash, summer squash, and cucumbers
radicchio, chard, kale, and lettuce, including bagged mix (try corn and chard pudding)
garlic and fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) and home-grown lemon grass

Preserves, Beans, and Grains
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, and Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

This past few months, I've been experimenting with bread making, culminating with a trip last month to the Bread Lab, where my co-instructors and I got to see the multitude of different wheat strains being bred by wheat geneticist Steven Jones,

a lab full of amazing devices for studying the physical properties of bread dough, like this bubble blowing machine,

and we were tutored by baker Jonathan McDowell, 

producing the most delicious loaves of bread I've ever tasted.

Back home, my next attempt at high hydration, naturally fermented, whole wheat dough was pretty much a disaster, and I had to resort to a loaf pan to bake it, but it was still delicious. This sour, complex whole grain bread I've been baking goes nicely with the smooth, mild creaminess of Avellana Creamery's vegan hazelnut cheese. Continuing in the spirit of experimentation, for my latest loaf I invented a new version of the BLT, which is a true classic but infinitely malleable. The HLT consists of whole wheat bread spread with hazelnut cheese, dotted with sweet cherry tomatoes, and topped with a tender leaf of lettuce.

Hazelnut Cloud Cookies

With all the anticipation and preparations for the holidays, it's hard not to feel a little bit disappointed with the actual event, as my daughter did when the promised Christmas snowfall in Boston yielded only enough for this miniature snowman peeking quizzically around the porch pillar of my childhood home. We all have our hopes for the holidays and each celebration will only be an approximation of those expectations. My son had covered his bases with his list for Santa Claus: "a magic wand and some money", but got neither, while I suspect that my daughter's fervent wish was simply to be able to believe in Santa Claus for one more year, a tall order when Santa had to navigate between Eugene and Boston and between antithetical German and American Christmas traditions.  

Ensconced here in the artifacts of my childhood, I couldn't help pine for the incomparable flavors of the homemade German Christmas cookies we used to receive each year from my grandmother's home in Franconia, half of them crushed into an etherial mixture of sweet, nutty, buttery crumbs that I used to scoop and gobble by the handful. In a post-holiday attempt to perk up my daughter and recreate some of those flavors, I tried this recipe for powdery nut cookies, similar to her favorite pecan cloud cookies from the Eugene City Bakery.

The cookies are made from a simple butter dough sweetened with powdered sugar and packed with ground nuts (back in Eugene, I would use our supply of hazelnuts from Thistledown Farm). This batch served as an accompaniment to a tea party with toy china my son unearthed from my old bedroom. As we nibbled our dainty nut clouds, real snow clouds gathered in the afternoon sky and by bedtime enough snow had accumulated to ensure that real-sized snowmen will be built tomorrow. 

Hazelnut Cloud Cookies

adapted from Epicurious via Smitten Kitchen

makes about 4 dozen cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter at room temperature, cut into cubes

1/2 cup powdered sugar for the dough and about 1 1/2 cups for coating

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup hazelnuts (or use pecans or walnuts or a combination of nuts)

2 cups all purpose flour

1/8 tsp cinnamon (optional)

1. In a dry skillet or a toaster oven, lightly toast the nuts until fragrant. If using hazelnuts, roll them in a dishtowel to remove most of their skin. Combine the nuts and the flour in a food processor and blend into a fine powder (including the flour will prevent the nuts from turning into nut butter). Remove the nut flour to a bowl.

2. Put the butter in the food processor and process until well-creamed. Add the 1/2 cup powdered sugar and vanilla extract and process to incorporate. Now add the nut flour and process into a stiff dough. Transfer the dough back into the nut flour bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and chill for at least 30 minutes.

3. Prior to baking the cookies, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cover two baking pans with parchment paper or silicone mats. Scoop out large teaspoons of dough, roll them into 1 inch balls in your palms, and place them on the baking sheets in about three rows and four columns. Place in the oven. Chill the remaining half of the dough while the first batch of cookies bake. After 10 minutes, rotate the baking sheets 180 degrees and from top to bottom oven rack. Remove the cookies after about 18 minutes, when their bottoms are golden brown and their tops are pale golden.

4. Let the cookies cool on the rack for about five minutes. Fill a shallow bowl with 3/4 cup powdered sugar, and mix in cinnamon, if using. Roll each cookie in the powdered sugar and transfer to a serving plate. If you like, sift the remaining powdered sugar over the cookies to give them a final dusting. Bake the second batch of cookies as above (or you can store the dough to bake later). These cookies store well at room temperature in an airtight container for several days.

Birthday Dumplings with a Figgy Surprise

All of a sudden it seems that everyone is abuzz about aebleskiver. My first reaction was "What?". But when I was treated to some of these Danish pancake spheres prepared with expert aplomb by a friend in Salt Lake City, I understood the appeal. I'm a big fan of pancakes all all shapes and sizes, and these balls of buttery, eggy fluffiness are mouthwatering when served hot from the pan. So I asked for an aebleskiver pan for my birthday (or rather I snatched one up in the hardware store when we were out buying gardening supplies and shoved it into my husband's hand before dashing off to prevent my three year old from toppling over a large display of assorted nails).

Back home, I seasoned the pan, and then watched some Youtube videos on making aebleskiver. My first reaction was "You've got to be kidding!" The implement used is a skewer! Somehow you are supposed to take a pool of liquid batter, poke at it with a thin stick, and magically produce a spherical popover. 

I prepared the batter, which is fluffy from whipped egg whites and tangy from buttermilk. For the first batch I tried, I put in dollops of jam. 

After a few moments of cooking, you are supposed to coax the nascent aebleskivers sideways,

and then poke and prod them around until they become spherical. It turns out that there are many ways to produce non-spherical aebleskiver, such as flat discs or basket-shaped structures with cavernous gaping holes. Luckily, they all taste good. 

Emboldened by this first attempt, and with remaining batter, I was inspired to create a dessert aebleskiver of a stuffed dumpling stuffed with a stuffed fig. A dumpling turdunken. To soften the figs, I simmered them in a little red wine.

Meanwhile, I toasted some hazelnuts in a dry skillet, and chilled some chocolate chips. Then I pulsed these in a food processor to make a coarse meal.

To stuff the figs, I made a slit down the side, pressed down the flesh and spooned in the chocolate and hazelnut mixture. Then I prepared some aebleskiver. It turned out that having a solid base in the middle made the turning process much easier and produced aebleskiver whose volume more closely approximated the cube of their radius times pi. They were also delicious.

As a last minute inspiration, I mixed up the reduced fig-flavored wine with a little creme fraiche, which made a lovely accompaniment for the fig filled aebelskiver. As a pleasant post birthday surprise, this recipe was picked as an editors' choice on the food52 website.

Aebleskiver filled with chocolate and hazelnut stuffed figs

• 14 dried figs, such as black mission
• 1/2 cup fruity red wine, such as a Zinfandel
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg yoke
• 1 egg white
• 1 tablespoon melted butter for the batter, plus more for the pan
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 cup hazelnuts
• 1/8 cup bittersweet chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup creme fraiche
• powdered sugar

1. 1. Snip the stems from the figs and, in a small sauce pan, simmer them in the red red wine, turning occasionally, for about ten minutes, until much of the wine reduces and is absorbed by the figs. Remove from the heat and leave the softened figs in the wine until ready to use.
2. 2. Prepare the fig stuffing. Chill the chocolate chips in the freezer so that they won't melt when chopped. Lightly toast the hazelnuts in a dry skillet, then allow to cool. Chop the chocolate chips and hazel nuts in a small electric chopper or food processor until they form a coarse meal.
3. 3. Stuff the softened figs by cutting a slit down the length, then using your fingers to press in the fig flesh to make a cavity, and filling this with a small spoonful of the minced hazelnut and chocolate mixture. Set aside. Reserve the remaining fig-flavored red wine for creme fraiche topping.
4. Prepare the batter by combining the dry ingredients in one bowl and whisking together the buttermilk, egg yoke and melted butter in another bowl. Beat the egg white until stiff. Combine the dry ingredients into the wet. The batter should be runny like a thickish pancake batter. Add a little more buttermilk if necessary to achieve the right consistency. Then fold in the egg white.
5. Heat an aebleskiver pan and butter well. Fill each of the cavities to about 1/2 the height with batter. Then place a stuffed fig into each well and top with a little more batter to cover the fig and fill the well. Cook for about a minute. With a skewer tip the dumpling to one side so that the cooked half dome is perpendicular to the pan and cook for another minute. Now catch each dumpling on the corner between the first half dome and the second half dome and rotate this to the top, so that the least cooked face of the dumpling points downwards. Keep rotating the dumplings for a few more minutes until they are golden brown on all sides and cooked through.
6. Prepare a topping to serve with the dumplings by mixing in a few tablespoons of the reduced figgy red wine with creme fraiche to taste. Serve the dumplings warm with a dollop of the flavored creme fraiche, and if you like, a sprinkle of powdered sugar.