Tarte Tatin

Inspired by the Great British Bake Off I decided to do some baking. I attempted to make tarte tatin, which I have never made before, but which I have enjoyed eating on numerous occasions. I started off by looking up recipes on the internet and came across a very recent one by Claire Ptak, of Violet Bakery in Hackney.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/28/apple-tarte-tatin-recipe-puff-pastry-claire-ptak-baking-the-seasons

The Violet Bakery is beautiful and irritating in equal measure. It's the kind of place that serves its cakes on the same 1970s china your parents got as a wedding present (which your parents will love to loudly comment on if you ever take them there, which you shouldn't). The service is glacial and the staff are dressed in that inimitable Hackney style Ugly-on-Purpose. They mix their cakes with a 1950s Hobart they probably found in a skip. I adore their cakes, but I don't honestly feel cool enough to be in there in the first place.

I love Claire Ptak's recipes, not only do they generally work, but her books are beautiful (she is a food stylist - although if ever there was a #firstworldproblem it is that) and she explains how to be a good baker outside of just following a recipe. In one of her recipe books she relates a moment during her time as a stagiaire at Chez Panisse in California (one day I will totally do a stage there too...) when the great Alice Waters told her off for her poor mise en place. In other words, if you don't get your shit weighed out and organised before starting to bake, and tidy as you go, you're going to get into trouble. I generally cook in a hurricane of confusion, so it's a piece of advice I have tried to take on board.

Sooo, tarte tatin. As explained in the overly pedantic Guardian comments section below the recipe, tarte tatin it does not need prefacing with 'apple'. A tarte tatin is always made with apple and only if made with other fruits do they need specifying in the title of the dish. Especially if you're making a banana one, like Sarah Jane did on the Bake Off. I will want to know it's a Banana Tarte Tatin so I can avoid eating it and then arrange to have you killed. 

First let's deal with the pastry. Claire's (we're on first name terms now right?) recipe kindly only specifies '500g puff pastry'. Which I think implies I can either make it or buy it. So I sent Eddie to the shop. Sadly he came back empty handed, apparently it's still a capital offence in France to buy ready-made pastry. (OK, I'm only joking, you can buy it, but I bet you believed me for a second there. Mind you, you still can't buy fresh chicken stock). 

So I made some rough puff BY HAND. I froze some cubes of butter and instead of using a standing mixer (which I don't have here) I used the washed hands of a small boy. Then I rolled out the whole buttery mess, folded it and turned it, resting in the freezer for 20 minutes in between. Five times. 

No rolling pin. So I turned to the next obvious cylindrical object

Mise en place still rubbish

I made a caramel with butter and sugar, which immediately hardened into rock hard toffee once it had cooled, but I hoped it would liquefy once in the oven. I peeled and cored my apples and popped them on top, but the wrong way up as I forgot the whole thing would would eventually be turned out upside down. 

The finished product can't be said to have been an unmitigated success, as my dutifully made puff pastry did not laminate (i.e. get layers) and instead turned into a sort of buttery crisp. That said, it was pretty tasty so not a total disaster. 

Buttery

Fruit the wrong way up

I learn from various online forums that a failure to laminate is either down to the butter being too warm when it goes in the oven so it just immediately melts (but my pastry had been in the fridge), or it's down to the oven not being hot enough. I don't know the oven in the house in France so I think this is likely. Pastry has never been my strong suit, I'm also totally crap at making shortcrust, so maybe it's something I should practice....

We ate the tarte while watching 'Mr. Right', a hit-man-rom-com in the vein of Grosse Point Blank - one of Eddie's favorite films. It was a pleasant surprise to find a new and watchable film on netflix and it proved to be the perfect antidote to our jaded state of overfed exhaustion. With the amiable screen presences of the consistently excellent Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick on fine form, the humour was amusing, the romance touching and the action well choreographed. The script had a touch of Shane Black but with a female co-lead instead of his more typical bromances. 

And for all of you who have found this post criminally boring, here's a photo of Charlie with a stewed carrot stuffed into each cheek.

'I want to make you an offer you can't refuse'

 

Ski-lifts and stock-tiffs

Well, what a lovely few days (with the odd exception, but more of that later) we have been having in Serre Chevalier since we arrived last Friday. We won't bore you with a blow-by-blow account but here are some of the interesting things that have happened (obviously, we're like, in the middle of the mountains, so we're not talking about a book launch, or a preview table at the latest pop up, or a cheese and wine party. God we miss London. Anyway where were we?)

The woman manning the tourist office amused us a lot. In answer to every question she gave one of *those* French shrugs and suggested Katie call them herself. Maybe it's because Katie's French is so bloody brilliant the woman thought we just didn't need any help. Then Katie walked outside to ask Ed something and when she returned one minute later the grille had been slammed shut for the interminable lunch break.

We've been on a number of ski lifts before they shut down for the season. This has mostly involved staring at much more adventurous people (mountain bikers, white water rafters, quad bikers etc), drinking coffee out of the thermos and then going back down again. The chair lift in Villeneuve was most exciting, as Charlie, being quite small, could easily have slipped 30 feet to the ground if we hadn't been hanging onto him. 

Just one small push...

 There's just no way that would get past health and safety in the UK.

Safely back at the bottom of the mountain we found an icy cold lake but managed to pluck up the courage to take a dip thanks to the sweltering 30 degree heat. Charlie was less keen and opted instead for chilling on a rock at the water's edge.

Too cool for pool

That night we had a lovely selection of salads

Flagelot and bacon, green beans in salt and beurre, olives with anchovies, potato with Roquefort, tomato and warmed goat cheese with balsamic glaze

and then somewhat ill-advisedly sank three bottles of rosé. Sunday was a write off. However, we did manage to drag our sorry arses to Briançon and found an attractive old town and fort, then grabbed the cable car up the mountain as that was about as much effort as we felt able to expend. 

yeah, whatever, it's not as exciting as the Piccadilly Line

A reviving cuppatea at 2500 feet

Woke up feeling much fresher on Monday and went out for an aimless drive that resulted in the discovery of a beautiful meadow covered in flowers and haybales. Charlie invented a new sport 'hay-baling' whereby he leaps from one haybale to another aided by a long suffering parent

"again, again" it's probably a better fitness routine than gym membership

and then we picnicked beside one of them 

Thermos propped up against the bale, our new best friend

and watched my shoes become colonised by crickets (which are present in biblical proportions, we really should find some recipe that makes use of them but that might be more suited to the Laos leg of our trip). We've somewhat fallen into the trap of eating baguettes for our picnics, so we tried to be a little more inventive with this one: tomato and goat's cheese salad with olives, tins of mackerel - one à la moutarde, the other à la sauce tomate, mini saucisson sec (which are SO nice), artichoke hearts and more tea. We didn't get round to eating our tin of peaches, and anyway it was all getting a bit too Enid Blyton. 

Then Ed dug out a kite from the car 

"this bores me"

and we spent an exhilarating hour flying them in the brisk wind, followed by a walk along a fast flowing river and a quick paddle - which resulted in numb feet after a few seconds as the water must be coming off the glacier. Rounded off by a traditional roast chicken dinner.

A whole chicken, you see, can supply the essence of 3 to 4 decent meals and when on a pretty tight daily budget such a thing is a godsend. However unbeknownst to us it was also the source of the biggest row since one-way-street-gate. Ed spent several hours stripping the carcas, boiled up a rich, deep stock and left it overnight to develop. The following morning after draining it into an appropriate receptacle in the sink (in case of over-spill) he went to dispose of the carcass and noticed the bin bag was leaking, and so took it to the outdoor bin. He returned upstairs to find that although Katie had helpfully mopped up the offending slick, unfortunately she had failed to notice the aforementioned rich brown stock in the dish in the sink, and mistaking it for dishwater she wrung out the bin-juice soaked rag into it just as Ed returned from outside.

Well there followed a rather eccentric performance (a classic mantrum) featuring jumping up and down on the spot, swearing, and tears as Ed practically pulled his own hair out. Now there really is nothing more pathetic than crying over spilt stock, we get that, but it was one of those mornings when everything just seemed stacked against poor old Ed and that stock had taken a long time to prepare and was going to be bloody tasty. To calm himself down Ed stomped off alone on a five hour trek up the side of a mountain, as he stopped for the occasional cup of coffee from the thermos sitting in one shady rock lined clearing after another his mood began to lift. Although it's probably one of those things he'll feel bitter about until his dying day. 

3 hours uphill walking, still grumpy