French Fridays with Dorie - Potato Chip Tortilla

A simple and fun recipe this week, we got to make Potato Chip Tortilla for French Fridays with Dorie. Just as the name clearly states, we had to use potato chips, the very kind that comes out of a bag! I don't know about you, but that to me was thrilling not because of the processed chips but because of the unexpected element and creativity of whoever first thought up the recipe. 

All we had to do was open up a bag of chips, crush them with our fingers (yummy!) and stir them into an egg mixture before frying it into a tortilla. Or rather, a loaded omelette tortilla. I bought myself a bag of crinkle-cut potato chips flavored with Sweet Thai Chilli... seriously delicious on its own but even better in this tortilla. Yes, trust me.

Dorie suggested several herbs such as basil, parsley or cilantro be included in the egg mixture, but I only had fresh purple basil, oregano and spring onions from my garden so I simply used those. And a mild red chilli pepper that I deseeded completely was also added to offer a burst of color to the tortilla. This makes a quick and easy appetizer and is a definite feature in our upcoming dinner parties. The other great thing about this recipe is that you can use more than one type of flavored potato chips (salt and vinegar, mesquite BBQ, hot and spicy, sour cream and chives, etc) which allows you to set up several tortilla stations in your buffet according to the different flavors. Or even have a mix of them in one big serving platter. The boring hostess you certainly will not be!

Our cooking group does not publish any of Dorie's recipes but if you're keen on joining our weekly cook-along, you can get yourself a copy of Around My French Table here. For other versions of this potato chip tortilla, please check out the group's attempts here.

I'll have something beautiful, something festive for you on Monday so watch out for that. You'll want to make it even if you don't celebrate Christmas. Well I did, and gave these away to friends! :)

In the meantime, I wish everyone a brilliant weekend!

Muffin Monday - Basil Lime Olive Oil Muffins

I'm back on the Muffin Monday wagon this week, and what a delicious and healthy recipe we were given to try out. Our host,  An of Baker Street provided one of Giada De Laurentiis's recipes to make Olive Oil Muffins. As much as I think butter rules when it comes to baking in general, olive and coconut oils do come in as equal seconds.

Savory Tomato and Beetroot Cobbler with Turmeric Curry Leaf Biscuit Topping

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Our party host Penny of Jeroxie blog had us all 'cobblered' this month and believe me when I say this... it is a rare occasion that I will post something savory up on this blog, least of all a cobbler. When you hear the word 'cobbler', images of the freshest seasonal fruits dotted all over or buried underneath something sweet tend to flash across the mind. Correction, make that my mind.

French Fridays with Dorie - Café Salle Pleyel Hamburger

Oh dear, you can tell we like our meat well done around here. Very well done :-). In fact, a beautiful, juicy burger lies somewhere underneath that charred-looking patty you see in the photo above. In this week's French Fridays with Dorie, we were supposed to replicate that famous hamburger served at the Café Salle Pleyel in Paris. Although, after I cooked mine, I doubt if the Café Salle Pleyel would want anything to do with it! 

Dragonfruit-Basil Mascarpone Ice Cream and Mochi Ice Cream

Have you noticed how there've been way too many recipes using dragonfruit on this blog lately? It's not that I can't help myself, but I really can't! Red-fleshed dragonfruit is seasonal, just like strawberries, and rhubarb and God knows what else. It lasts a mere few months and then I have to wait nearly a whole year to do this again. A whole year of resisting using artificial pink food coloring. Yes, my name is Maya and I'm a PINK addict. Do you think I need to join a support group as a form of therapy? :-)

French Fridays With Dorie - Mozarella,Tomato and Dragonfruit Salad

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.

~ Oscar Wilde

I was so looking forward to this week's French Fridays with Dorie's recipe. That was, until I went looking for the ingredients and realised there was absolutely no fresh strawberries on the shelves anywhere. It was a repeat of the roasted rhubarb episode of last week... the MIA ingredient this time being strawberries due to it being out-of-season over here :-(.

No matter, I got the tomatoes, I got the mozarella and I even managed to get the fresh basil. All that was left was a suitable substitute for strawberries. Now if you were lucky enough to procure strawberries where you're at, then I was equally lucky to be able to get my hands on dragonfruit, of the red-fleshed variety, at that. As an aside, dragonfruit is also sold widely in France mainly due to the influence of the large Asian communities (especially Vietnamese) residing in its cities. So I guess my version of Dorie's summer salad is not totally out of the context of her cookbook, Around My French Table (well, not when you consider that Cola and Jam Spare Ribs have made it in there too!).

Pull-Apart Tomato Bread with Feta, Garlic and Herb Filling

Our Brunei Armed Forces turns 50 years old today. It is older than our independent country, which is only 27. Yes, we are a young country... I was born when we were not yet completely autonomous and free. To celebrate the military's Golden Anniversary as well as honor the selfless men and women who have served to protect and maintain peace for this country, I'm going to bake something special today.

Pull-apart bread...I've been seeing a lot of them around lately - being written about, baked and I presume, eaten. What's going on? Is there a secret that bakers are revelling in which I'm totally clueless about? Those breads that I've seen via my computer screen sure do look good. My blogger friends, Nancy (Spicie Foodie), Gina (SPCookieQueen) and Lora (Cake Duchess) have all recently made their own versions of pull-apart bread. And then there were also several others' take on it that I dare to imagine this style of bread becoming the newest rage in baking. Step aside, macaron. Go on..scoot over, cake-pop. Your time is up. Pull-apart bread's here and it's going to rip our world! Pun intended, of course.

FFWD - Bistrot Paul Bert Pepper Steak

As mouthwatering as it eventually turned out, this week's recipe had me slightly worried from the word go. We are not big meat eaters in this house and whenever I've cooked it, things like steak magically come out rubbery or burnt. My official food-tasters like their meat well-done, so to me that means "over-done", which isn't really the same thing, is it? Anyway, to cut a long story short, I don't really know how to cook the perfect steak, so more often than not we try not to eat it at home.

Then French Fridays with Dorie throws out this recipe and I am forced to face my....what is it....fear? Weakness? Idiocy? And because I cook meat the way I do, I tried to stick to Dorie's method of cooking the filet mignon as close as possible in the hope that maybe this time, it will turn out fine. By a stroke of luck, I still had my substantial stash of Sarawak peppercorns in the pantry, waiting for their earthy heat to be released.

My stash of Sarawak pepper, and what happened when I

tried to bash them in a plastic bag (ie. holes happened!)

I had bought bags of the stuff while on vacation in Sarawak last year (we are neighboring countries), and though I use it fairly often in my cooking, I still had too much left. This pepper steak recipe was perfect, and the coarsely cracked pepper requirement meant that I got to bash them to my heart's content. Of course, I tried to be cocky about it all and placed the peppercorns in a ziplock bag, poised for bashing. Wrongest move! The plastic bag ended up full of holes due to the sharp bits of cracked pepper... Mental note: next time, stick to the mortar and pestle or the kitchen-towel-wrapping method as suggested in the book.

Young papaya shoestring frites with crispy basil

I followed Dorie's steak-cooking method to a 'T', but did opt to change things up with the accompanying sauce and fries. Using Cognac or any other liquor was out of the question (and not because I'm a member of AA), so I boiled the sauce down with juice pressed out of a very ripe pear instead. Close enough. Then instead of adding the full measure of heavy cream, I halved that and added another half of coconut cream. That gave a lovely sweetness and a tropical touch to the sauce.

Now the frites. Do you remember when I mentioned the low-carb diet going on in this house? (Hint: it isn't me). That forced me to think about alternatives to potatoes. Later on, I went to the market and found these green, young papayas that were on the verge of being ripe but not quite there. Instantly, papaya frites seemed like a really good idea. The young fruit's firm texture is similar to potatoes except that it's not starchy which would probably make it less crisp when fried. I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

A mandoline helped slice the papaya very thinly as I wanted to make shoestring-style fries. You have to really watch the heat on this one as papaya caramelises very quickly. While the strips remained fairly soft in the middle, the edges were wonderfully crispy. I also threw in a handful of aromatic Thai basil leaves into the hot oil at the very end and lifted these out with the papaya. If you've never fried papaya this way before, then you should, the frites tasted hea-ven-ly...

Before and after cooking: Not much difference, is there?

The steak was cooked on the rare side - just for me. While I wasn't used to the pinkish hue of the meat inside, it proved as tender as the thumb I bashed during the peppercorn massacre above. Simply juicy and lovely!

That's it from me this week, I think. It's been a rather busy week, no, month full of blogger's events and challenges (why do I do this to myself?). I'm going to take a blogging break this weekend starting this afternoon, taking in the Wedding-of-the-Century shenanigans going on across many oceans from here. I will, of course, make time during the commercial breaks to check out the other FFWD members' variations of this dish!

Happy weekend to all!