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Red Wine – Poached Pears Served with Mascarpone Orange Blossom Cream

Poached pears are simply amazing! If simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication, this dessert might be the quintessence of this idea. Ripe pears, brown sugar, wine. Maybe a vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick and a star anise. This simple ingredients, combined together, create a mouth-watering, exquisite and stunning dessert.

Poached pears are so versatile. They can be paired with a cheese platter and nuts, creating the perfect way to end any sophisticated menu. They can be served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and they make a refreshing dessert ideal on a hot summer evening. I chose this time to serve them in a wine and brown sugar reduction and I paired them with a flavorful orange blossom mascarpone cream. Regarding poached pears, the possibilities are endless! Continue reading Red Wine – Poached Pears Served with Mascarpone Orange Blossom Cream

Cabbage and Cured Duck Breast Salad

Cabbage and smoked duck salad is such an interesting salad. Everything about it is interesting, the bold flavors, the sweet and the earthy scents, the warm colors and wild textures. Crunchy cabbage ribbons dressed with olive oil and apple cider vinegar, juicy blood-oranges, toasted hazelnuts, flavorful candied apricot strips and salty and gamey duck breast; this simple yet sophisticated salad has about five or six ingredients, but they work so well together, creating a veritable taste and texture symphony.

Why I love cabbage and smoked duck breast salad:

it’s exquisite, it has a verisimilar complexity, it’s sweet, salty, sour and bitter, somehow each one in the right amount
it’s lovely during the cold months
its hearty and satisfying
it’s ready in less than 15 minutes and it takes even less to devour it
it looks so appealing and sophisticated, even though it is so effortless

Continue reading Cabbage and Cured Duck Breast Salad

Hot Chocolate

I love chocolate. I love it in every state of aggregation, in every color or flavor combination. And I love it even more when outside is freezing and the chocolate waits for me patiently in a huge cup, garnished with tangy cocoa powder and silky marshmallows.

I love hot chocolate because:

it’s sweet and slightly bitter, with subtle notes of vanilla and coffee
it’s quite dense and creamy, silky and decadent
it warms both my body and my soul
it’s ready in less than 10 minutes
reminds me of my childhood

Continue reading Hot Chocolate

Scotch Quail Eggs

Scotch eggs are nothing else but boiled eggs wrapped in sausage, coated in bread crumbs. Whenever I’m making scotch eggs, I like to use quail eggs because the final product is small and appetizing, but you can also use chicken or duck eggs. They can be served either hot or cold. Served hot, they make a delicious and hearty main dish and served cold, they make some eye-catching and mouth-watering appetizers.

I love my scotch eggs soft boiled with a crispy crust and an oozing, velvety and buttery yolk, but this is of course a matter of preference. If you like your eggs soft boiled, it is extremely easy to get that oozing yolk in this recipe too. The secret is that the boiling time should not be longer than two minutes and a half. A two-minute boiling interval makes the quail egg very difficult to peel and a three-minute boil starts to solidify the yolk, so a two and a half minute interval seems to be golden. Continue reading Scotch Quail Eggs

Quail Egg Butter Curry

Quail eggs boiled to perfection, served in a velvety and decadent butter and beetroot sauce, scented with ginger and Garam Masala. It does sound appealing, doesn’t it! The fact is I’m seldom dazzled by a combination of flavors, not because I’m a person hard to impress, but because I try really hard to content my emotions, at least culinary-wise. But this flavor profile mesmerizes me, it fascinates me to the point I drag myself to the kitchen at 1 am, in my pijamas, just to enjoy that taste again.

The starting point of this recipe is in fact Murgh Makhani, a delicious Indian butter chicken curry. About three years ago I substituted chicken with quail eggs and the recipe made so much sense, that I’ve made it only with quail eggs ever since. I often make this recipe with ghee, the Indian clarified butter, a very nutritious ingredient, but since I make my own ghee and I happened to run out ot it, I decided to use regular butter. And yes, that gorgeous chick in the picture is one of my quail-pets. On this note, how cool is the fact that my pets also provide breakfast? Continue reading Quail Egg Butter Curry

Cream of Pumpkin Soup

Cream of pumpkin soup is one of my favorite soups. I know I say the same thing about almost every soup I try and I’m also aware of the fact that I might have a problem. I wouldn’t call it a problem, though. I would rather call it an affinity for everything that’s nutritious, delicious and hydrating.
Pumpkin-wise, this year has been extremely productive and rewarding. I harvested some huge pumpkins from my own veggie garden. And when I say huge, I mean huge-huge, that’s-the-biggest-vegetable-I’ve-ever-seen kind of huge. If last year I had two semi-decent looking pumpkins (who am I kidding, they were a cross between a melon and a tennis ball, to be more accurate), this year I had about a dozen giant ones. And they were so incredibly tasty! Sometimes I looked at them and I felt it would be a shame to cook them, and then I remembered their perfect flavor and their addictive sweetness. And that was the nudge I needed to get things going! Continue reading Cream of Pumpkin Soup

Roasted Pumpkin and Corn Salad

For me, autumn basically translates itself by pumpkin. Pumpkin soups and creams, pumpkin salads and stakes, pumpkin cakes, pies and smoothies. This humble and extremely versatile vegetable has won my heart through time, due to its lovely flavor, texture and sweetness. Undoubtedly, my favorite variety of pumpkin is Musquee de Provence, a French variety that I’ve been growing in my own veggie garden for years. This beautiful giant has a gorgeous burnt orange skin with teal patches and a deep-orange flesh. The flesh is delicious and flavorful and if it’s finely sliced, it can be served even raw. Continue reading Roasted Pumpkin and Corn Salad

Sweet Chili Jam

Sweet and sour chili jam is an amazing thing! It’s a vegan sauce, made from only four budget-friendly ingredients (chili, apple cider vinegar, brown sugar and garlic). This sauce has the capacity to elevate each and every single dish you can think of, it goes divine with veggies, dairy and meat products, pasta, rice, omelets, burgers or sandwiches. I love chili sauce so much that I’d be even tempted to pair it with tarts and cakes, the only thing that discourages me a tiny bit is the garlic in its composition.

Chili sauce has such a lovely vibrant color. It’s so creamy and dense. It is hot and spicy, fragrant and so flavorful. It is also extremely easy to make at it lasts in the refrigerator up to 2 months. Theoretically. Practically, the jar will be empty in 2 or 3 weeks. I really hope you’ll give it a try! Continue reading Sweet Chili Jam

Mocha Cake (Coffee Cake with Whipped Ganache Cream)

Today VespressoCooking turns 1. I can’t believe it! I have no idea how time flew by but it did, and I’m so glad I had the courage to launch myself, head first, in this project. It was such a wild year, I shifted my career, I discovered my infinite passion for photography, I’ve created a poultry microfarm, I graduated from culinary school and became a chef. I hope I don’t sound cheesy but I feel the need to thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for every visit, for every line that you’ve read and for every recipe that you’ve saved!

Whenever there’s an anniversary, there has to be a cake, and this particular cake is nothing but extraordinary. It is a chocolate and coffee cake, a mocha delight, if you will. It is a well known fact that coffee and chocolate are a match made in heaven but this cake somehow surprises me with every slice. The sponge is the perfect balance between dense and airy and the whipped ganache is simply divine.

The sponge is in fact „torta al Caffé”, an Italian coffee cake. This particular sponge is very popular in northern Italy, and it’s served for colazione, breakfast that is. I felt in love with its texture and its taste at first bite and I wished I could make it in my own kitchen. Persuasive as I am, I convinced the pastry chef (which happens to be a close friend) to give me the recipe and since then I’ve been been baking it at least twice a month.

There’s not much to say about the ganache. Ganache is a cake filling made with chocolate melted in warm whipping cream. The proportion of those two ingredients give the ganache its texture. I use the following scheme: Continue reading Mocha Cake (Coffee Cake with Whipped Ganache Cream)

Braised Rooster Legs with Wine and Sage Sauce

In a farm, the rooster has an extremely active life, from fertilizing the eggs, to mentaining the social order and chasing me like a crazy person whenever he’s in the mood for some action defending the chicken family from any potential predator and this active lifestyle must be sustained by a powerful muscular system. After the rooster meat is cooked, this muscular system (which is essential for the fulfilling daily attributions) often turns into a chewy, rubbery, uncomfortable, almost painful mess. To tenderize the meat and to make it juicy I pulled off some two simple and efficient tricks:

Aging the meat. I learnt this trick from my grandmother. She used to wrap the rooster in parchment paper and refrigerate it for 2 – 4 days. And let me say, this trick really works. It is very important to wrap the meat in parchment paper, and not cling film, because the paper allows the meat to breathe.
Slow-cooking the meat. I take the aged meat from the refrigerator about an hour before cooking and I let it get to room temperature. I pad dry it and I sear it, I deglaze the pan with wine, I cover the meat halfway with chicken broth and I slowcook it, covered, for about 1 hour, making sure I drizzle some juices from the pan every 15 minutes.

These two basic tricks allow me to get a tender and juicy steak each time. The taste is incredible, earthy, somehow buttery, with subtle notes of wine and sage. To conclude, if I didn’t manage to bust the “rooster is too rubbery” myth, at least I hope I made you curious! Continue reading Braised Rooster Legs with Wine and Sage Sauce