The Autumn Solstice, A visit to the Zoo and some Verrines

Today is the autumn solstice, which means a couple of things for me:
1) Since my precious little Baby Saffron was born on the 21st of March and thus the spring solstice, she turned 6 months old today. Where does the time go?
2) I really have to put up some of the "summer" posts I still have in my drafts since they're not really relevant anymore. It's time to start making heavier fare to pat the tummy and the spirit against the cooler weather.
So, you get to see our visit to the zoo (though you wouldn't have known it was summer with the weather we had at the zoo that day) and these mango and passion fruit verrines which come from the leftover ingredients of the mango macarons.

To be perfectly honest, I hate the zoo. I just hate to see these poor animals in captivity. But we didn't go to the zoo for our own pleasure since A. hates the zoo even more than I do, we went because Baby Saffron is simply enthralled with animals right now and does the funniest acrobatics just to try and reach the dogs with her fingertips, so we thought she'd enjoy seeing all these other strange and wonderful-looking animals.
Unfortunately, the day was gray and drab, and while she loves seeing the dogs at close quarters, most of the animals were too far away in their pens to generate much more than mild interest on her part. Plus, there were so many people it was often difficult to get in a position where she could see something in the throng, which prompts me to say that the most obnoxious animals at the zoo were clearly the humans. She was fascinated by the hyenas, but I'm pretty sure that was because they looked like dogs to her.

We spent some time looking at the flamingos and I caught one of them in a ballerina stretch above, so effortlessly graceful. The ocelots were staring at the passage from their lair to their outer pen and we figured it was probably close to meal time. While it is necessary I suppose, particularly given some peoples' foolishness, I did hate taking pictures of the ocelots and the tigers through thick sheets of glass. 
The verrines are composed of a layer of the filling I made for the macarons, a layer of honey mango puree, a layer of whipped cream, and a topping of fresh passion fruit. They were actually even more refreshing than I expected them to be.

While I do hate the zoo, I have to admit that generally speaking, most of the enclosures were much better and larger than at any other zoo I've seen. I still think it's a shame to "cage" the animals in this way and put them in environments that are nothing like their natural ones -I mean, it's London, so all those poor animals that are used to tropical weather must be freezing, I know I am- but as my sister pointed out, in some cases it may be better to be in a pen than staring down the end of a poacher's gun barrel. And it enables us and other parents like us to take their wee ones to see some beautiful animals without taking them on a trek across the globe.

For more filling (which I made up as I was going along so feel free to try your own version) than you can possibly put in mango macarons and thus end up making Mango-Passion Fruit verrines:

- 1/2 Honey Mango
- 2 egg whites
- 50g granulated sugar
- ~50g double cream
- ~100g fromage frais
- ~40g fresh passion fruit
- Puree the honey mango but you do not need all of it for the filling as it is very watery.
- Put the egg whites with the sugar in a bowl over simmering water (double-boiler) and heat to 100C whipping constantly. Take off the heat and continue whipping until cool (I use my stand mixer bowl for this). You should have a stiff glossy meringue (Swiss).
 - In a separate bowl, whip the cream to soft peaks. Add the fromage frais and whip until smooth. Fold in the Swiss meringue. Fold in the passion fruit (save the seeds with a little juice for the top layer of the verrine) and some of the mango puree so that the mixture is not too thin and will stiffen in the fridge.
- Then you simply put some of that mixture on the bottom of your glass.
- Top with a layer of the leftover mango puree.
- Top with a layer of whipped cream (preferably freshly whipped cream and not stuff from the can so that you can sweeten it as you wish and not as the manufacturer wishes).
- Top that with the reserved passion fruit seeds and juice. Cover and refrigerate so that it is cool and refreshing when you wish to enjoy it.

Thinking about New Zealand

One of the places I've been that I love best on earth is New Zealand. I was just looking at pictures I took there and this is one of my favorite ones.

What I like most about this picture is that I took it with a Canon Elph circa 2003 -the Powershot S400 to be precise- which I briefly mentioned here. It was a very cold and brisk day on the southermost tip of the South island and the boat in the background just happened to be crossing as I was taking the picture. I miss how clean the air is there, the color of the water, the completely different landscapes for every hour driven. I'll post other pictures from there whenever I feel nostalgic for it, so better brace yourselves.

Waiting for my macro lens...

Oh the things I could do when it gets here...

It's done so have some Chocolate Fleur de Sel Macs

If you've been here before this is a totally new look since the very beginning of this blog. I mean I know at the beginning of the year I said I was going to do all this stuff and then life got in the way, so I changed the header a little bit and changed the widths and everything and that was that for a little while. But since I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to change the blog entirely and make it less about food and a little more about other things like photography and whatever strikes my fancy, it's been bugging me to change it up completely. So this is what I came up with messing around with the code, making some headers with one of my old scanned photographs, and generally tweaking here and there. I hope you like it. If you don't, that's too bad, unless of course it means you want to offer me your coding and graphic design skills for free to make it more the way you'd like it to be.

This is also the inaugural post of every post isn't going to be about food anymore, as I said before, sometimes it's just going to be one picture or just a thought or whatever strikes my fancy, or not. Your guess is as good as mine although I'd like to say I think it will be easier for me to post more frequently that way, which will be nice for both me and you. And just for the pleasure of contradicting myself, particularly the part about how this isn't going to be only about food anymore, have some chocolate macarons on me, half of them have fleur de sel on the shells, the other half are plain. They were made from Aran of Cannelle et Vanille's recipe and they are for the previously mentioned Mac-athon organized by Jamie of Life's a Feast. They're not beautiful like Aran's but they sure do taste good. The filling is a chocolate mousse sort of concoction conjured up from the same batch of Swiss meringue and fromage frais mixture that went into the filling for the mango macs. And with that I leave you my friends.

Just in case you're visiting...