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Calamansi-soaked Lady Fingers Brûlée

Sunday, January 10, 2021



This is a layered dessert bottom-to-top a cross-section with cinnamon-macadamia granola, broiled plantains and sweet white bread soaked in coconut-ginger pudding milk. The idea of making it was fun, not to mention the process — the goal was commitment to the ingredients and assembling them to the perfect temperature and texture hierarchy. The tiny calamansis were a delight to juice through a sieve more than many times to generate enough volume, and taming the acid, I added cookie sugar (reputedly the calamansi is the tartiest of all citrus fruits, for sure at the opposite taste spectrum to the mild Meyer lemons). Toasting the granola and the bread with a dollop of butter will definitely deepen the flavor of the brûlée, absent a kitchen torch, thus the caramelization proof of this powerhouse sweet is inside the bowl. You might wonder why plantains in the mix? Well, I was starving for a “big breakfast,” and the banana-substance will do the job (think of an açaí bowl turning it into baked pudding gone further elevating it to a delicately delectable leche flan— that was kind of what I was experimenting/curious for this beautiful Sunday morning). 

It’s an Ode to Hunger.            

PS. Books, books, books, I’ll have those too. Their dynamic is to necessitate and nourish the mind-body, to eat is to think. I was at the off-the-beaten-path bookstore in Puunene yesterday weaving through the classics in search of Kipling. But instead, irresistibly, found these keepers: The Little Prince, St. Teresa of Avila, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Bridgge and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I taught The Little Prince to my poetry club years ago and on break time would make French toast with the kids (our donated classroom inside a church in Jeonju was equipped with a kitchen, hence cooking was also part of my repertoire as teacher, and my students learned through osmosis my passion for food). I reread the children’s classic yesterday, and “I” was more than filled to the brim. How about… let me stop there and leave you with these lines from the book... I think they will more than tell you what’s on my plate…  

I ask [you] to forgive me for dedicating this 
[post] to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: 
this grown-up is the best friend I have in the 
world. I have another excuse: this grown-up
can understand everything, even books for children.
I have a third excuse: he lives in [a valley]
where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be
comforted. I didn’t know how to reach him, 
where to find him… It’s so mysterious, the land
of tears. [But] one sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. 
I’d walk very slowly to a water fountain […] 
The stars are beautiful because of a flower 
you don’t see… What makes the desert beautiful
is that it hides a well somewhere…What I’m looking
at is only a shell. What’s most important is invisible…

— Antione De Saint-Exupéry  






















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