Puff pastry, you are my mistress

Is this different from phyllo dough? I think it must be. Do you make it or buy it? I would put a creamy blue cheese with a tiny bit of fig spread in some; chopped nuts with butter/cinnamon/sugar; toasted pine nuts with spinach and grated swiss cheese; almond paste.

Yeah, it is a little bit different. From my experience with phyllo, you need to add a bunch of butter to make it taste like something more than flaky flakes. And when you add butter, it's delish. But with this, which I bought frozen -- I'll admit it! -- the butter is already in there. It appears to be full of it, in fact. It came in a square and I cut it into 16ths to make the little appetizers.

Mine looked pretty much exactly like this:
http://mccutcheon.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/puff-pastry.jpg

From googling I see that some people cook salmon in puff pastry. That sounds pretty tasty.

http://www.marions-kochbuch.com/food-pic/salmon-in-puff-pastry.jpg

crap

pwned by marions-kochbuch.de

Okay, those look fabulous and you are so otm re: phyllo. I keep reading about puff paste, which is what you would make cream puffs and eclairs from. I think it's different yet again, since it can be squeezed from a tube.

It's really good cut into little squares with a dollop of bitter marmalade on the top of each one. Also, you can roll it out big and spread it with caremelised onions and that is totally nummy (and also easier than your guests will suspect).

Ooooooooooooooooh onions. That sounds good. I want to eat everything wrapped in this stuff every day but I think it's a recipe for obesity.

Jaq, is that squeezable stuff choux paste?

Yep Laurel that is the stuff - I still haven't tried making it/doing anything with it myself.

Trader Joe's had this (puff pastry)! I bought 2 packages!

On the menu for tonight:

sweet onion/goat cheese/mushroom puff pastry gallette
on
sauteed dandelion greens

i'll take a picture if it's pretty

mmm sounds delicious!

i made a martha stewart napoleon recipe last year which called for puff pastry. it was extremely difficult to get it to cook in the proper shape though. i'm much more a phyllo fan for napoleons.

Ok, so the puff pastry gallette thingies tasted great, looked great, everything delish.
See? (the little pastries were the world's tiniest chocolate croissants and little blobs of puff pastry with crushed up toffee bits in them)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2224/2260619828_78f3a774ee.jpg

But the greens? I have no idea what I did to deserve greens that tasted that awful. I sauteed them in some oil and added a little bit of chicken stock for flavor, added salt, pepper, some garlic and they turned out extremely bitter and totally inedible. I threw them away and ate fresh (raw) spinach instead. I'm going to have to find out what went wrong there.

ps i abandoned the mushrooms because i thought onion + cheese sounded like a winning-enough combo on its own.

There's something about blanching bitter greens (in vinegar water? just plain water? salted water? I don't remember) that is supposed to help tone down the bitterness. On bigger dandelion greens, I've cut out the center ribs, thinking that would help but sometimes they are just bitter.

Do you think it mattered that they had been sitting in my fridge for about a week before I ate them? If I had cut out the center ribs there would not have been much left to cook. Honestly, I had never eaten them before so I wasn't sure if they were supposed to taste like that or what. I can't imagine *anyone* wanting to eat what I put on the plate last night, though :(

They are pretty bitter! And supposed to be just the young small tender ones (because they are less bitter!). I don't know if sitting in the fridge would make them more bitter, probably not though. Have you ever had collards? Dandelions are more bitter than them.

Yeah, I rather like collards. But they're so big and tough. Dandelion greens are so little and weak...I didn't think they would be so bitter. Oh well.

It's ok to post about our failures too, right?

Failures are important to know about. Especially if they taste bad.

Brief simmering of bitter greens, finished by saute. I don't know about adding anything specific to the water, I just use salted water cuz it boils a little quicker.

I made up a bunch of nibbles with the puff pastry yesterday: Saint Agur blue cheese and fig spread on some, olive tapenade on others, very yum and so easy.