Tartly

Another favorite souvenir of mine from this trip was a cookbook I bought from the Scottish National Trust. I try to bring back some sort of the food or a cookbook to learn about the food since my mother and I often see a lot of interesting food, but seldom try it. Mother is violently allergic to fish so we are always leery of restaurants, especially when staying on an ISLAND known for it's SEAFOOD! We grocery graze and carry a bag buffet every day unless, of course, we find an Uppercrust!

This cookbook had a recipe for rhubarb tarts and called for puff pastry, rhubarb, and sugar. That's it. And it sounded scrummy and simple. I was home with my parents this week and spent an afternoon making 2 pounds of puff pastry dough for this recipe. The rhubarb part is nothing more than chopped rhubarb coated in sugar and allowed to sweat for at least 30 minutes but no more than 2 hours. I picked nice and red slender stalks and split them lengthwise and into half inch pieces. I really coated them with sugar because I was skeptical that they wouldn't be tart or bitter.

While I had my rhubarb sweating, I got out my puff pastry and cut off a slab, rolled it out to 1/8" thick and used an empty cottage cheese container to cut out rounds. I lined the oven with Mom's long since broken baking stone (but I still use it as an oven liner when I bake bread and pastries) so I'd have a hot and stony surface to bake the pastry on. I assembled the tarts on a sheet of parchment which I transferred to the stone with a cookie sheet. While I was waiting for the oven to get good and hot (425 degrees), I used a bowl to score each round and press a border into the dough. I docked the centers with a fork and then piled the rhubarb on top, trying to stay within the borders.

Now if you have never worked with puff pastry, you have never lived. I use the recipe published May of 2002 in Martha Stewart Living Magazine and have had nothing but exemplary results each time. This recipe uses a full pound of butter and makes 2 pounds of dough that can be frozen up to 3 months. The dough starts as a very light simple pastry with flour, cake flour, 1/2 stick of butter, and ice water. It is almost a light biscuit dough. You chill this dough while you shape your butter. 3 1/2 sticks of butter are beaten between parchment paper until it is malleable and shaped into a 6 x 6" square. Beating it with a pin softens it without warming it. You then remove the dough from the fridge and roll it into a 9" disc. Center the butter package on this disc and mark the straight edges around the butter package with a knife. Remove the butter package and use a rolling pin to roll the edges past the knife markings into a clover shape. Recenter the butter package onto the dough and fold the clover leaves up as you would an envelope. Now carefully and slowly use your rolling pin to press and shape the dough into a 20 x 10" rectangle, keeping the edges as square as possible. Fold the dough up as you would a business letter and wrap in the butter pounding parchment. Chill for 30-60 minutes. Remove the dough from the fridge and again slowly press and shape the dough into a 20 x 10" rectangle and again fold up. Chill as before. Repeat this until you have folded the dough a total of 6 times. You can then use it or freeze it and use it as you do. You can have it longer than 3 months, but after then it will start to oxidize and turn a kind of gray color. It tastes just as wonderful, but it isn't as pretty!

If you do the math, you will find that there are over 1,450 layers of butter and dough! And there is no leavening agent in it: no yeast, no baking powder, no baking soda, no cream of tartar, etc. The steam from the butter as it escapes during baking is what causes the layers to rise and separate into the flaky loveliness that is puff pastry. This is why it is so important that you always put it into a HOT oven so that the rising gets a jump.

Once you have a 2 pound block of this in your freezer, you're set for a while. You just cut a chunk off when you want to make something. You can roll it out and slice it into strips and bake as an appetizer or make cheese straws by doing this after folding in a layer of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. You can make tart shells or flaky crackers or shape, cut, and coat it in sugar and bake until the sugar caramelizes and serve them as a cookie, etc. And for all you dough-heads out there, it is good just to eat it too!

No offense to the good people over at Pepperidge Farms, but I have tried the frozen puff pastry I saw in the store and had finished results that sure looked pretty but they weren't nearly as buttery or flavorful. And the dough wasn't nearly as tasty to just eat either, so I'm afraid I recommend making your own from scratch.

I baked the assembled tarts for about 15 minutes at 425 degrees and the edges puffed right up and contained the rhubarb and the rhubarb got quite juicy. I was just petrified it wouldn't have had enough time to really bake and soften and all I could think of was Celery Pie. This photo really doesn't do them justice! I sprinkled them with a little powdered sugar and whipped some cream with a little powdered sugar. I was very pleased with them. There were a couple tart places, but I think next time I will quite finely dice the rhubarb and let it sweat for at least an hour so it's good and soft when baked. I much prefer a mushy textured rhubarb pie and I like a consistent sweet/tart throughout. This is definitely an early summer recipe too because you need the slender and pretty red stalks. You wouldn't want to make this in August with green and woody rhubarb--that can be disquised in pies with orange juice and red food coloring! What a charming way to showcase rhubarb from the garden!

i like yarn

This is a picture of my feet and albino legs as I'm doing the biggest CRUNCH of my life! I finished this pair of socks while we were staying at our guesthouse in Lerwick, Shetland. I wanted to somehow take a picture so you could clearly see I was somewhere foreign. I thought of my feet hanging off some stone walls or on a grand monument or some such thing. Unfortunately I forgot all about it until we had retired to our room for the evening after walking all day. At that point, I was not willing to ambulate further than to the bathroom and back. We did have some lovely chimneys across the street though, and I tried to capture them behind my feet. I'm sure the drivers and pedestrians were wondering what that pair of legs was doing hanging out the window opposite the chiropodists'! These were knit with Trekking yarn on size US 2 dpn's with a cuff of 64 stitches. I have 2 more skeins of this in different colorways and I'm thus far pleased with this yarn. These will make good Christmas socks.

Here I am recovering after my Jamieson & Smith Wool Brokers experience! This was our first target upon arriving in Lerwick. We saw it from the walk with our suitcases from the ferry to our guest house. It was high up on a treacherous bluff with a convoluting and Lord of the Rings-esque stone staircase, but the store sign was clearly and brightly labeled. We dumped our bags, got a map and headed clear back out in search of it. Inside I bought the yarn for the Luckenbooth sweater and a lace shawl! I'm going to have to become quite disciplined in my knitting before I take on either of these projects! I also got some drop spindles including an Ashford, Shetland roving, and an Ashford Niddy Noddy.

Well, I'm back...

I haven't been around for a while! I just returned home from the long awaited trip back to the UK with my mother. We traveled around in northern England in York and Thirsk. For any of you Iowa Public Television nerds out there, Yorkshire is where the filmed "The Full Monty", "The Last of the Summer Wine", and "All Creatures Great and Small", otherwise known as James Herriot country. We then traveled by train up to Aberdeen, Scotland and took an overnight ferry to The Shetland Islands and stayed in a guest house in Lerwick. There we visited the Jamieson and Smith Wool Brokers and I got glorious yarn for a fairisle sweater that I am so excited about. I don't care if it takes me 20 years to knit it, but I shall attempt it. I also got yarn for a Shetland lace shawl pattern, another knitting Mount Everest! I bought two new drop spindles for myself, as well as one for Melissa and Summer along with 100 grams of real shetland wool roving! (If they catch the spinning bug, we will find them out of wool to spin, out of cotton balls because they tried to spin them, and in fact pulling the hair out of their brushes and trying to spin it! It truly happens!) I got 5 different shades of Shetland roving for myself for spinning. I don't know what I'm going to do with it or in fact what I have enough for. It is unspun and I'd have to kind of have a project in mind and spin for that guage. Hmmmm. I also got myself an Ashford niddy noddy. We also visited the fabulous Shetland Museum which was free of admission and absolutely excellent. While in the Shetland Islands, we were closer to Norway than we were Scotland so it never really got dark there, and if the islands didn't have stone walls, you'd swear you were in southwest Norway. It was just wonderful. We then flew to Edinburgh and toured the castle, Holyrood Palace, shopped along the Royal Mile and Princes Street, visited two period restored houses, and visited The Tartan Weaving Mills. We flew home with our luggage just under the weight restriction weight, but our carry on luggage was quite heavy, hmmmm, go figure. We ended up having to spend an extra night in a hotel because a flight was canceled on the last leg of our trip home, but it all worked out in the end. We had a great time but I am glad to be home.



We visited some beautiful buildings and churches and cathedrals. Saw the Stone of Destiny in Edinburgh. It is hard to believe that all the crowned heads had been crowned above that stone, starting back with William the Conqueror, isn't it? Somebody like that? And to marvel at how those beautiful windows were made how many hundreds of years ago with the tools and technology that they had and they have survived!

Saw a WWII era kitchen and pantry in the James Herriot house, and a Georgian kitchen in Edinburgh. I have a weakness for those kinds of displays! We walked along on top of medieval city walls along the perimeter of the old city. Learned all about Richard III and the mystery of the Princes in the tower.

And we goofed around and laughed a lot and took stupid pictures of us being stupid. You should see us at Christmas!