You may remember from my posts about the quince and almond cake and the quince jelly that I have a friend with a house in the country and a generous disposition.

On a Sunday night a couple of weeks ago, she was driving back to Paris after spending a weekend there, and she announced she had more quinces and also some walnuts for me. The bag is quite heavy, she said, did I want her to drop them off? That would be perfect, I replied, and we agreed to meet in a spot that wouldn’t take her too far out of her way, and where she could double-park for a minute without incurring the wrath of other drivers.

Still, we had to be quick: she pulled the bag she had prepared for me out of the passenger’s seat and plopped it on the sidewalk. It’s heavy, she repeated, is it going to be okay? I lifted the bag. Oof, it was heavy — a large canvas bag filled with about twelve kilos of in-shell walnuts and maybe six of quinces — but it didn’t feel impossible to carry. You know, I do yoga, and I beat my egg whites by hand, that sort of thing. I assured her I would be fine and thanked her before she drove away.

Crunchy on the rims and tender in the middle, these cookies are altogether satisfying on a dark fall afternoon, when it feels like the sky has dropped several floors.

And now it was just me and the bulging bag, a few blocks — uphill blocks, naturally — from my apartment. It was quite late, the bag was heavier with every step, the handles coarser on my bare palms, and as I stopped and started, shifting the weight onto one leg or the other, I also had more of an audience that I would have preferred. (Have you noticed how much harder hard things seem when someone is watching mirthfully?)

But I made it home with both arms still plugged into their shoulder sockets, and now I get to doubly enjoy this incredible profusion of fresh walnuts.

I have given some to neighbors and visiting friends, and we’ve been working our way through the rest of them with dedication — eating them straight, on their own or with fruit and cheese, in grated carrot salads, sprinkled on Hokkaido squash soups, slipped into pizzas and gratins, whizzed to make dips and spreads, added to granola… Walnuts are said to be the ultimate brain food, and if that is the case, I fully expect to be on a Nobel prize shortlist sometime soon.

I’m not sure if the selection jury will think this is relevant, but I have become pretty good at shelling walnuts in a speedy fashion, and my technique is a simple but efficient self-taylorization of the process: I start by cracking all the walnuts (crack crack crack), then I pry all the shells open to extract the nugget of walnut meat (pry pry pry), and finally I split the walnut halves delicately to remove the bark-like partition in the middle (split split split).

In addition to the uses listed above, I have also been baking with them, as for these wholesome cookies, chunky with walnuts and dates.

The recipe is based on one for chocolate and orange cookies published by Nolwenn in the very good L’Atelier Bio cookbook, and written up praisingly by Clea some months ago.

I’ve taken Nolwenn’s basic recipe, which happens to be dairy-free and gluten-free, and played with it: I’ve replaced the chocolate chips and candied orange rind with walnuts and diced date paste, I’ve added soaked flax seeds as a binding agent, substituted rolled spelt for the rolled quinoa (which means they’re no longer gluten-free), added some roasted grain “coffee” as a spice to amp up the flavor of the walnuts and dates, and sprinkled salt flakes on each cookie, which provides delicious salty jolts when you eat them.

These cookies bake into a wonderful texture, crunchy on the rims, tender in the middle, and altogether satisfying on a dark fall afternoon, when it feels like the sky has dropped several floors.

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There’s nothing like an edible host(ess) gift, and I have found that bringing a loaf of freshly home-baked bread makes you a very popular guest indeed.

What I like to do then is schedule my weekly bread baking on the day that we’re expected at a friend’s house, and make bâtards, those plump, elongated loaves: I’ll bake three at a time, save two for our own consumption, and bring the third one — the one with the best looks, I am shallow that way — along to dinner with us.

In my next life, if I come back as a super organized and freakishly foresighted person, I’ll keep a stash of pretty tea towels in which to swaddle the loaf, and the whole thing will be my gift. Until then, I will continue to just wrap it in one of my more presentable torchons, and say “oh, great, thanks!” when the host or hostess returns it to me.

In my next life, if I come back as a super organized and freakishly foresighted person, I’ll keep a stash of pretty tea towels in which to swaddle the loaf, and the whole thing can be my gift.

Of course I let them decide whether they want to serve that bread with dinner, but my secret preference is that they save it for their own breakfast the next day. (I also tell them that it freezes well.)

The recipe I’ve most often used for bread gifts lately is this one, which produces appetizing and wonderfully flavorful loaves freckled throughout with a generous helping of grains and seeds.

It is based on a recipe by Steve B., whose blog Bread Cetera is a valuable resource for those of us who wish to expand our bread-baking horizon and develop a better understanding of the craft.

I follow the basic formula Steve offers for the dough*, which has you soak the seeds and grains overnight before using, and then apply the method I use to make sourdough baguettes: I mix the dough on the eve of the bake, let it ferment in the fridge overnight, then simply shape and bake the loaves the next day.

Join the conversation!

Do you ever bring bread as a host(ess) gift? If so, what kind?

* With slight modifications: I don’t add the small amount of commercial yeast, I adjusted the quantities of starter to list only what’s used in the dough, and two-thirded all the amounts. I invite you to read Steve’s post and the ensuing discussion.

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I haven’t made much jam lately. I was very excited about the process when I was just learning about it some years ago, but I soon realized it was hardly a thrifty pursuit in my case: because I live in the city, I have no need to preserve a hypothetical glut from a garden or orchard, and the price of fresh organic fruit is such that I only buy what we’ll consume in season.

I have occasionally helped my mother prepare batches of jam while on vacation at my parent’s mountain house in the summer, when it is possible to strike good deals on crates of berries or apricots at the greenmarket. Aside from that, my jam-making ambitions have been placed on the back burner.

But then I received a big gift of quinces a few weeks ago, and in addition to the poaching and the cake baking, I was inspired to make quince jelly, one of the most classic uses of the pectin-rich fruit.

In a few months, when the jelly has had time to age a bit, we’ll pop a jar open and spread some on our morning slices of pain au levain, with or without a thin insulation layer of semi-salted butter.

I turned to jam guru Christine Ferber for guidance, and followed the recipe that’s in her comprehensive book Mes Confitures.

Making quince jelly is a two-step endeavor: first, you cook chunks of whole quinces (good news! no need to peel or core them!) in water until soft. You then filter the juice they’ve produced and, after giving it a good night’s rest, you boil it with sugar and lemon juice (the acidity makes it possible for the pectin to gel*) until the jelly is concentrated enough to set.

The amount of sugar you add in the second step depends on the volume of quince juice you get out of the first, and the different recipes I’ve looked at instruct you to add anywhere between 600 grams and 1 kilogram (3 to 5 cups) sugar for each liter (or quart) of juice.

Contrary to what one might intuitively think, this has no effect on how sweet the resulting jelly is: jelly sets on the condition that it’s been brought to a target temperature of 103-105°C (or 217-221°F; at sea level), at which point the sugar concentration is 65%**. If you’ve added less sugar in the first place, your jelly will simply take more time to reach that concentration, because there will be more liquids to boil off, and you’ll end up with a lesser quantity of jelly.

Some like to flavor quince jelly with vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, or other warm spices, and I have no ideological objection to it, but I consulted with Maxence and we agreed we’d rather just enjoy the pure taste of quinces on our toast.

Because this is, naturally, the primary use we intend for the ruby lightbulbs of jelly my efforts yielded: in a few months, when it’s had time to age a bit, we’ll pop a jar open and spread some on our morning slices of pain au levain, with or without a thin insulation layer of semi-salted butter. I’m sure it will fare well on the tender flesh of a split yogurt scone, too, and I look forward to brushing the top of my apple tarts with it for shine, as is traditional.

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* As Harold McGee explains on page 297 of his On Food and Cooking, the addition of lemon juice “increases the acidity, wich neutralizes the electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel.” (Don’t you love to imagine those pectin chains acting all aloof and superior?)

** “When we dissolve sugar or salt in water, the boiling point of the solution becomes higher than the boiling point of pure water. This increase in the boiling point depends predictably on the amount of material dissolved: the more dissolved molecules in the water, the higher the boiling point. So the boiling point of a solution is an indicator of the concentration of the dissolved material.” Ibid., pp. 680-681.

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It’s been a bit of a mushroom fest around here lately: Maxence and I went foraging in the forest of Rambouillet earlier this month, and we came back with six and a half kilos of mushrooms between us (that’s fourteen pounds).

Naturally, we didn’t venture out willy nilly into the forest (I’ve read enough children’s tales and seen enough video projects not to do that). We went with a pro, a friend who’s a seasoned mushroom picker, who knows her Cantharellus cibarius from her Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, and who was able to guide us to the most prolific spots and help us look for and identify the various specimens.

It was the kind of golden fall day that begs for a bundled-up picnic by a pond with ducks quacking about and, as luck would have it, that’s exactly what we got — a welcome break halfway through an intense day of scanning the forest floors for the cap of a mushroom, or the tell-tale lifted leaves under which a cep might lurk.

Maxence turned out to be really good at this game (read: better than me) and our baskets were soon heavy with lepiotas, an exceptional manna of millers, a few wood hedgehogs, the odd wood blewit, and miscellaneous boletus, including an unhoped for amount of Boletus edulis, the prized cep (a.k.a. porcino) whose meaty flesh knows no equal in the mushroom realm.

Once home, exhausted like we hadn’t been in a long time, we got to work sorting, cleaning, and prepping our bounty so the bulk of it could be cooked while fresh, which took the better part of two hours. Our reward: a young cep carpaccio and cep spaghetti for dinner, and a freezer stocked with tubs of ready-to-gobble mushrooms and mushroom broth for future meals.

And a week later, on a Friday night, I used the remainder of our ceps to make cep and walnut pizzas, the memory of which still move me as I type this.

I prepared a sourdough-leavened dough with my starter, and made the whole thing vegan by using some of the cashew “cheese” I’d made that week, in place of mozzarella. A drizzle of the fabulous olive oil they use at Delancey (thanks, M&B!) and a sprinkle of pepper and torn basil later, we feasted on delicious fall pizzas that did plenty justice to the fruits, um, spores of our foraging.

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