Savory Palmiers

Most mornings, my husband is woken up by the sounds of me in the kitchen, usually starting with the coffee grinder followed by the emptying or loading of the dishwasher. This particular Saturday morning, however, he awoke at my request, so that he could help me with this recipe. He was not altogether pleased at the laborious nature of filling, rolling, and slicing puff pastry at 9 AM on a weekend, but has, I believe, recognized that early-morning pretentious-food-related tasks really are his fate for the rest of his life. (Fond memories of the time I broke all of the teeth off of one of the gears on my KitchenAid trying to make brioche pretzels and he spent half of the weekend fixing that.)

I gathered all of my items for this recipe a day ahead of time so I’d be all ready to do the cooking in the morning. Going through the cocktail chapter has caused some difficulty for me - with whom should I share the fruits of my labor, especially when those fruits are a cocktail I finished making at 1 AM??? This recipe posed a similar problem. I wanted to serve the palmiers hot, as the recipe suggests, but I didn’t want to get up early on a workday to make them for my coworkers. Then Dan came home and told me he had to work on Saturday and I thought to myself, “Behold! A couple dozen Air Force mechanics are the *perfect* audience for an uppity cocktail hour snack!”

Nothing was particularly difficult to acquire for this; I was, however, advised to just buy an actual basil plant out of which to get 5 cups of basil for pesto, rather than buying those tiny expensive packets of it that almost always have brown leaves inside. For those who know how deeply non-green-thumbed I am, the idea of me keeping a live plant is laughable. I attempted herbs in my house two summers ago and didn’t even throw out their dead remains until like three months ago. People have tried to advise me on the positioning of Huey, my hydrangea, because I keep getting mad that he won’t make flowers, and they’ll ask me how much sun this or that section of my yard gets and I always feel dumb when I inevitably respond, “Dude, I don’t KNOW, I’m not home during the day!” Anyway, Proud Parent of a New Basil Plant:

Since bringing home this basil plant, Huey has really stepped it up and now has several blueish purple flowers on him. Dan says I’m showing Plant Parent favoritism, especially because after I made this pesto, I have basically stopped watering the basil plant. I got my 5 cups of basil. I’ve moved on.

Here’s the basil plant after I got what I needed.

Pesto In Progress

After I made the pesto, I started rolling out the puff pastry which, thank goodness, only needed to be rolled into a slightly larger rectangle than it already was. I still managed to somehow not do the best job of that, because I suck at rolling things. This battle will likely make a more significant appearance when I reach the dessert chapter. Pie crust is truly my culinary nemesis.

Because Ina is super awesome and specific about everything, she actually gives dimensions of the size the puff pastry should be, so I actually did use my pig tape measure that I use for knitting to ensure that I’d achieved the correct size. That finished, I topped that thing:

Grossest Thing Ever to Cut, ok? (Sun-dried tomatoes)

We had to YouTube how to roll an elephant ear because that is not an idiot-proofed concept, and certainly not in this recipe. She does explain, but inadequately. Yeah, I said it.

Cutting the logs of these was the worst, because you felt like you were crushing it and everything in it. Even the pictures of the slices make you wonder how that’s gonna turn into something that looks cool and delicious. Dan did most of the slicing, and I tried to advise him that it was like cutting sushi from that one time we took a sushi-making class together. It didn’t help. BUT, as weird as they look here, they came out looking exactly like they were supposed to:

My taste-test verdict is that they kind of seem like snotty-people Hot Pockets. Dan’s coworkers liked them rather well, I was told, though one of them absolutely could not figure out why he was eating salty elephant ears. (Dan: “I don’t think he knows what ‘savory’ means.”) He apparently kept swearing that they could not be elephant ears if no cinnamon sugar combo was present. I brought the rest to a high school basketball tournament that my friend’s son was in, and since she had been busy in the concession stand selling tub cheese and overpriced Skittles, she hadn’t had time to eat, so she ate several of them off of my Le Creuset plate, standing in the parking lot.

I think when I’m done with this project, I’m going to send some editorial notes to Ina about her recipe intros. She’s always giving these super specific scenarios for the usage of them - like “eat this when all of the tomatoes at your neighboring Hamptons mansion are perfectly vine-ripened” or “whole figs are in season and sold in grocery stores for exactly two hours each year; they’re PERFECT in this salad”. If we’re really going Back to Basics, I’d introduce this recipe like so: “Make this when you buy a basil plant on a whim and have leftover goat cheese from the last time you had to make a salad that people could pretend to like. Your husband’s greasy mechanic buddies will love it for a snack in between launching jets, and your sports-mom friends will rave about it when they’re six hours into an all day tournament and can’t leave to get Wendy’s.”