Stopped by the farmer’s market yesterday and went into a frenzy of ingredient purchasing:
- rose geranium leaves
- lemon verbena
- lemon basil
- lemongrass
- Thai basil
- fennel
- Dancy tangerine marmalade
- Meyer lemons
- Yuzu (a Japanese citrus with an intriguing scent)
I probably won’t use all of those, but I want to have enough on hand to work with the inspiration of the moment. And herbs are cheap at about $1.50/bundle.
A word on the marmalade. I don’t normally buy ingredients for my chocolates, preferring to make everything myself, but June Taylor marmalades are something else. They’re better than anything I can make, which is rare, so I’m buying theirs. They don’t have the bitterness that most marmalades (including my home-cooked ones) do, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. They have a marmalade-making class in January, and I may take it just to figure out how they do it. I suspect they either blanch the orange peel or remove the white part – may try that with the yuzu.
I haven’t quite figured out the sequences of events yet for next week. Some friends are coming over on Friday and/or Saturday to help me pack and ship the truffles, so that’s obviously the final day. The truffles/molded chocolates have to be finished at most a day in advance of packing and shipping (to keep them fresh – since they have no preservatives, they are pretty perishable). So that’s Thursday and Friday. But what to do on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday? I’m thinking more fudge, experiments in jellies, and some taste tests with ganaches.
Unfortunately, like an idiot, I didn’t buy enough Ivoire (Valrhona’s white chocolate) to make chocolates with. I only bought 1 kg, which was mostly consumed in making the lavender-lemon-white chocolate fudge. So now I have 400g left, which isn’t enough to dip truffles. But I can make two batches of ganaches to fill truffles with, so I will probably do coffee and one other (as-yet undetermined) flavor.
