Days of Soup and Tea

I've been sick all week.  ALL WEEK.  All week I've been working from home, sipping soup and drinking tea.  I've drank so much Peppermint Amour tea that I never want to see the stuff again.  I actually eventually sullied my My Lian Dieter Braun tea cup with that crappy Immunizer Tea from David's Tea.  You know, the one that's supposed to be a citrusy, minty, zingy tea, but is actually closer to the pot-pourri I got as a free sample from Crabtree&Evelyn once in the 90s (it made my undies smell of nothing, incidentally).

All week, I had variations on red lentil soup.  I made my own rice and red lentil soup one day, and then I made wheat and red lentil soup from a package another.  I made enough to last me a few days.  Now I never want to see red lentil soup again.

My wireless mouse liked warming itself against my lentil soup.

On the upside, I finally made that croissant pudding.  Actually, I instructed Spousal Unit to make it as I was indisposed, lying on the sofa under a pile of used Kleenexes, the toddler gleefully making a mess around me.  

Spousal Unit did a crappy job of it.  He thought that the pudding was done when it was still molten.  It wasn't.  The pudding has to rise and look like a soufflé for it to be done.  So I put it back in the oven and waited, all the while sniffling and feeling like someone had taken a cheese grater to my throat.  It eventually rose and I went to bed.  The next day, I tasted some and found that Spousal Unit put in so much booze that I was able to taste it in my stuffy state. 

I had some with coffee (which I had in my cutesy cup because I couldn't be bothered to get a proper espresso cup). I spilled the coffee, though.  I assume it was because of the booze.

"Now look what you've done!"

The Ulterior Motives Behind My Croissants Purchase

I bought croissants for the first time in a while.  I was on my way home from the grocery store when I decided that I'd stop by the local pastry shop.  The pastries they make are OK, but their croissants are pretty damned tasty.

I used to not be able to get croissants on a Saturday.  They used to make a few in the morning and then let them run out.  Presumably this was because morons were running the place.  The front-of-house was staffed by a bunch of disinterested and dopey-looking private school girls and I assume the back-of-house was staffed by similarly disinterested people.  

But things changed recently.  Now there  are these eager young'uns at the counter who are somewhat above HS age.  They may confuse chocolate croissants with almond croissants, but at least they don't have a chit-chat about what Taylor wore yesterday to the mall while you stand there waiting for them to acknowledge your existence.  

Most importantly, I was able to secure four croissants, two chocolate croissants and two cheese danishes on a Saturday.  I also bought a caramel donut, which was a "new feature".  It was an impulse buy.  They had samples and a zillion of them on the counter, calling to me.  

Anyways.  I had the donut and half a chocolate croissant with espresso, made with my home Bialetti.  That was a fucking tasty donut!  The dough was soft, but not mushy and because it wasn't super-sweet, it countered the oozy sweet caramel insides.  It took a lot of willpower not to go back and buy a dozen of them.

Now, you might wonder how two adults and a small toddler can eat through all that flaky pastry.  Well, the answer is that I deliberately bought too many croissants so that they'll go stale and I can make Nigella's croissant pudding.   OK, I make a variation on it that doesn't involve cooking sugar (instead I just add maple syrup, because maple syrup is awesome and I live in Canada and I can get it all the time). But I'm looking forward to that in a day or two, once the croissants are nice'n'stale.  

À la recherche du pain perdu

In French, French toast is called "pain perdu" because it's made with old, stale bread (pain=bread, perdu=lost).  Spousal Unit and I are big fans of making French toast out of the stale bread hanging around the house.  Today we made French toast with some week-old sourdough bread.   

We use three eggs.  Many people will tell you to use fewer, but we find that three eggs for half a loaf works.  We also add maple syrup in the batter because a bad cook told me to do that once.

The bad cook in question was the original cook at the vegetarian place I used to frequent when I was in grad school.  She made these gawd-awful wraps and chickpea mushes that gave vegetarian food a bad name.  The only thing she made well was French toast.  One day I asked her the secret of her French toast and she said "maple syrup".  She put maple syrup in the batter.  That made the bread caramelize and gave it a woodsy-sweet taste.

She eventually left -- or was fired, I don't know.  She was replaced by this fantastic cook who turned the place around and totally made it happening.  He got rid of the wraps and added black bean burritos and hemp burgers and blueberry upside-down cake and brownies and then this local celebrity started hanging out there because he was in love with the waitress, but then she left to be a nanny somewhere and he stopped coming and then I graduated and the place was sold and it's probably totally different now.

Anyways.

Because of that first gawd-awful cook, I started adding maple syrup to my French toast batter and never looked back -- except for that time when I made Nigella Lawson's doughnut French toast, but that was because her boobs told me to.