It's often a wonder what is more important in journey's; the physical aspect or the emotional? Can you have a journey involving just emotions without the physical? Of course, but often, the physical is what makes the emotions real.

The reality that we inhabit is what we perceive as our mind tells us. Perhaps what I see as white you see as green; just that we both agree it's white. So to what extent are our senses and emotions working in tandem with each other to create our perception of reality, and what is good, bad, real or fake?

I thought this was an interesting topic to ponder about after dinner tonight at Swilly's, the restaurant in downtown Pullman which is a lot more swanky then I first thought. The question in particular is about the substantiating satisfaction to what a meal should consist and how one should feel weighing in factors of price, flavor, enjoyment and what primal expectations are for that meal in question.

This arose from a discussion of Le Bernadin in New York where many a guests have complained about leaving not satisfied, physically and to an extent, emotionally - but are the two not connected when it comes to food? Scientists often do tests to subject humans in isolating key components of what is perceived as good or bad to us and we all well know the power of packaging and a way food is sold to us. Emotions are sometimes forgotten but we can never truly re-create that meal in the back of our minds when our mothers fed to us when we were five. These emotional journeys back into ones mind are truly both a physical and sensual experience.

I remember when I was young and probably up until I was about fourteen or fifteen, my mother would dry my hair after I showered. It is perhaps a period of time when the rest of the world could be hell bent on fire, chaos and destruction and nothing would matter knowing the maternal embrace would forever protect me. Losing myself was an option for I knew I would always be found.

So perhaps with food, one can lose oneself into it and be found again. The question of what would your final meal be illicit one answer for me: a plate of steamed rice, a fried egg and soy sauce with a little cut chili. Perhaps my mother made this for me, probably not, probably it was the other mothers I had, maids that made sure we were fed, cleaned our rooms and washed our clothes.

It is perhaps an inconceivable way and need to show respect to those that were there but not always recognized. A perfect plate of steamed white Thai jasmine rice is a thing of beauty. The steam that comes of it is mesmerizing and intoxicating if you put your head over the rice cooker. A perfume that resonates through the mind of the physicality involved in thousands of years of human agriculture. The texture is neither too hard nor too soft and it is the fine threshold too which only someone who has been cooking rice for a long time can achieve. It's not just a ratio and numbers, well, perhaps it is. But to the mind its also these emotional connections to one's food. Jasmine rice is perfumed, but on it's own it is sweet and just yielding. It's flavor is never oppressive but always encourages bonding, for it is rice that will always find friends with others being a character that is never too demanding for anything, and always accepting of everything - a quality that my mother had for me.

A flawlessly fried egg is also a thing of pure joy, beauty and ecstasy. The textural contrasts of a molten hot crispy white imbued with the soft pillow of  just set whites in juxtaposition to the creamy, rich and transcendental over flowing yolk speaks of many things. Those sharp crunches are perhaps the difficulties in life, the physical and emotional when things look tough, when one is sick and the points of which if over done results in a terrible fried egg. But these blisters amidst the soft albumin speaks of character and of journeys not wrought for simply abandonment. Much greater pleasure is to be had if there is a contrasts - work hard and sow the rewards for what is to come. The soft whites then, those fields and plains of which a thin threshold can fall over to recklessness and futile abandonment to self preservation and happiness. It is in these that a fragile existent exists, one knowing all too well that an over cooked egg, is a sad and depressing event. So we come to the yolk, a pure golden flow of fat and protein that can bind together the worst of enemies, temper angers and in its greatest form will always comfort or provide pure pleasure and bliss. The yolk is both dirty and salvation. Perhaps the more primal part of the dish, it is always the good things in life that can metaphorically describe the yolk - pleasure in an orb that can so easily fall apart if not looked after though perhaps, it is the breaking of the yolk which is more pleasurable. The act of bursting open the all that joy, all that hope and all that life has to offer to over flow over the rest reminds us that if we have a good thing amongst us, let it not go to waste ever. All the highlights of the worlds be it past, present or future lies in this very substance, one that cannot be trifled with and should command respect from the greatest of humankind.

To that we have the soy sauce. Again, a process of human ingenuity to find something that is tasty and that can keep - not enough appreciate the fermenting steps that many of our foods have. Wine, cheese, pickles. All great accomplishments which like they say, "are best friends - highly thought off, but often forgotten". The salty component which always accentuates its companions brings a certain joie de vivre to the plate, reminding us of each characteristics and what we have come to achieve. The rice is that much sweeter and toothsome, the egg whites are more crispy, sharp and dimensional whilst the silken yolk elixir becomes richer and that much more rewarding. Yes you can have life without fun, but what kind of life is without the pleasure of those around you which merely wish to have as much joy as you do and are willing to bring it?

Finally it is the cut chili's, a tang of pain which is always the guilty pleasures. You feel terrible but you can't stop. Why? Perhaps it is that negative emotion that we so wish to tap into, a darker place in the soul where opening the door can make you lose yourself. To know that pain in someplace is perhaps better then pain elsewhere. Schadenfreude? Perhaps. Guilty pleasures are the greatest - stealing food from someone always taste better then the stuff you craft or had to pay for. Sadists will be happy in this then, a plate that can compose the will of humanity and destroy its dreams at the same time.

A perfect plate of food that encompasses a physical and emotional journey, through its every crack, trough, spine and valley.

The perfect meal for ones end.

Tomato sauce, ragus, pizza, brrr its getting cold.

 Look at those clouds, arent they just the fluffiest looking things in the world? My goodness, P town a few days ago had perhaps one of the nicest days for the fall season. Too bad its slowly going away - the a couple of trees are starting to look extremely sad and I've had to add an extra layer of clothes on to me. Oh yea and the sickening frost is out in the morning, how terrible!

Never mind, a very recent efficient shopping trip got me a couple of things which I've been meaning to do: tomato sauce, stock, pizza dough, perhaps a ragu for pasta - things that can keep and be frozen easily. What I like to do is basically make a relatively large batch of these essentials which I feel enhance or act as a base for most meals that can be popped in the microwave for 2 - 4 mins and you just saved yourself 30 mins making something from scratch. Also its somewhat cheaper and better tasting then the store bought stuff. Below is the pot of tomato sauce I made, marinara sauce as Americans would  call it.

Let's see, if I calculated it correctly, that pot you see below shouldn't have cost me more then $5 and that's enough sauce to last me for at least another 2 weeks or so. I mean, as much as I like it, I'm not sure if I want to eat it at every meal. The 'recipe' I'm going to give you below is a very rough  guide of what I like to do. There are always extra things you can add in or leave out, it's really all up to personal taste.

Big pot of tomato/marinara sauce
1-2 Large Onions
As much Garlic as you want (I'm a garlic fiend so i used like a billion cloves)
1    Can of anchovies in oil (Optional... but.... i think its much better with it)
1-2 Generous thbps of oil (whatever you like - if you have, use bacon fat, or duck fat. Er.. whatever fat that you think is tasty)
1-2 Carrots 
1-2 Celery Sticks
3-4 Bay Leaves
1.5 Thbps of tomato paste
4 Dried shitake mushrooms re-hydrated in hot water for a couple of mins, or any fungi you can find although if your using something like button mushrooms just use the stalks.
3 Big cans of crushed/whole tomatoes (up to you, it's all gonna break down)
1 Cup/glass of wine
As much as you want of Herbs (rosemary, parsley, tarragon, thyme etc. Any 'hard' herbs are good for this 'long' kind of cooking. I had parsley stalks lying around going limp so they went in. If you want to get all fancy make a bouquet garni but i just fish it out when I'm done).

Other good stuff you could add in
I was thinking oyster sauce?
Bacon - fry the bacon first, drain, reserve and sweat the vegetables in the fat.
Sausage meat - same as above but your basically making a meat sauce then.
Other dried mushrooms - whatever you can find, the umami flavor from them is fantastic.
Tamarind paste - I think this would add a definite tang to the sauce and at the same time, a sweetness most people won't be able to place.
Paprika - I saw some in the cabinet, so why not
Stock - If you can, always use stock in replace of water. I use a stock cube cause, you know, I have other things to do also.
Citrus peel - lemon peel, lime peel gives it a nice refreshing kick


So, if your using the bacon, see above, if not, put your fat into a nice big pot, hopefully one that won't burn easily over medium high heat. Dice your onions, garlic, carrots, celery as fine as possible - it's not a stew remember, its a sauce. Add the onions and garlic in first along with the bay leaves and your anchovies, oil and all. Sweat and stir around for let's say 4 or so mins. The anchovies should be giving off a really tasty salty smell right now. Mmmmm... Toss in your carrots, celery and mushrooms and whatever herbs you've found in the cabinet. Now you basically want to saute all this good stuff until some caramalization is happening at the bottom of your pot. If it doesn't, no problem, just wait until everything is looking kinda nice and brown or when you think, "hold on, my stuff is gonna start burning" and then deglaze the pot with your glass of wine leaving some for yourself after. Let the alcohol burn off for a bit so you can turn the heat to high for like a min or two. At this point throw in your stock cube and your canned tomatoes and stir. Put the lid on and let it come to the boil, after that, turning the heat down to a low simmer. Put the lid on but let it sit so that some steam escapes (as in not a full seal) and do something else - wash up or whatever. Just stir the thing every so often to make sure nothing is burning at the bottom.

 

Now it's basically up to you to how thick you like your sauce - naturally the longer you let it cook the thicker its gonna get. If it's too reduce, dilute it with stock or water if you must. At this point you should probably taste the sauce for seasoning so go ahead and add as much salt and pepper as you like. Deploy as needed and when necessary. I like to keep this stuff by putting it in ziplock bags - get the small sandwich sized ones (like a 100 in a box) and they make relatively good serving sizes per bag if you fill them up to about just a little more then half of the bag. I store my sauce in the plastic 'box' container thing that I buy my salad mix in after I'm done with it.

So the other day at an open lab, some guy walked in with a slice of pizza at about 2pm or so. I'm thinking to myself... you know what, a pizza might be very good for dinner I feel. So I took the recipe from Epicurious which i think is a fairly easy dough to make with ingredients that aren't too hard to get and put some of my sauce (ah ha!) with some salami and salad greens. I didn't have any cheese which made me somewhat sad, but I discovered that putting salad greens on top of your pizza (which went into the oven at a blazing 550F on top of a cast iron pan that has been sitting in there for like 20mins that is now my "pizza stone", gives the greens this flavor very similar to dried seaweed. I'm talking about lettuce, rocket, spinach - that sorta stuff. Highly enjoyable. 

The dough however is nothing special and gives off a bit of a biscuity like texture after baking. I'm no pizza expert but I feel that the doughs which have a bit more chew require some extra kneading and stronger flour then I can be bothered with.

 The pizza dough which I just froze from the leftovers, I deployed again with the tomato sauce, this time however making a sort of a ragu with pork riblets (cheapest cut I could find at winco) that made a very satisfying stew. Anyway, rolled out the dough, sauce/stew/ragu, Boursin herb cheese which i found in the fridge, mushrooms and thinly sliced radishes gave us this result. I just love the earthiness of the mushrooms with the refreshing crunch of the radishes whilst the cheese imparts this creaminess that just puts so much depth into the ragu. Mmmmmm

A special walk in the fields

Pullman can sometimes be boring, sometimes sad and depressing (when its grey and nasty) and sometimes righteously ridiculous. Often times its mundane, repetitive and industrial, too many things look the same, too much food mediocre.

But sometimes Pullman can be a magical place, you just need a little help.

I got the recipie for this rosemary beer bread from sweet sugar bean and it was pretty easy to make and is fantastic with soup and a nice slab of butter once out of the oven. I added caraway seed for a little something exotic but it was all very good anyway. I didn't make soup though. Also great as a dense sandwich bread for school.

Beer and butter bread with rosemary and caraway
3 cups All purpose flour
3tsp Baking powder
1/4 cup Sugar
1 tsp Salt
1 tbsp Dried rosemary and caraway seed (more or less depending on how herby you like it)
1 can of beer or 12oz. I used a home brew which had a real hoppy flavor to it, though i dont know if that really adds anything to it
1/3 cup Butter


Preheat oven to 350F.

I know i bitched about using a weighing scale in the whole macaron making post but some recipe's don't really need it, such as this where precision isn't as big of a deal. So just throw all the dried ingredients into a bowl and make sure everything is nice and mixed up. Make a well in the center of your dry ingredients and pour in the beer. You can open the beer ahead of time and make it flat if you'd like to make the mixing somewhat easier to do. Now with a spatula or whatever, slowly bring in the edges of the dry ingredients into the beer until you incorporate everything. The mixture will be quite thick. Grease a 8x8 inch pan and pour your batter in. Melt your butter and pour over the batter. With a thin knife, run the knife along the edges of the batter letting the butter get into all the creaks and creases. Bake for about 30 mins, checking at 25 to make sure its not burning or anything. Poke a toothpick in the middle of the bread to make sure its done, the toothpick should come out clean.

Eat with soup or there and then with a nice slab of salted butter.

 Oh yea, i also made red curry.
I used the Mae Ploy brand of red curry paste which i think you can get quite easily anywhere. There's no real recipe but it involved some chicken, carrots, beet roots, onion, coriander, curry paste, coconut milk, palm sugar, fish sauce and that green hard looking bits on cauliflower that most people throw away. If you cook it straight like by steaming it, it just kinda taste like some green vegetable, with a texture similar to celery but not so stringy. Oh and straw mushrooms which  i got from a can. Excellent with rice on a cold day or any day for that matter.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures on a walk I took the other day!

First post with roasted pumpkin pie spiced macarons!

Welcome to the very first post of the greedy pi, my new blog about food, cooking, drinking and just having a good time. I don't know why it's taken me so long to do this considering I waste so much time looking at so many other food related blogs I should have just started one of my own.

Anyway as some of you may know, I managed to figure out how to make those crazy macarons that are perhaps the synthesis of what a cookie can be. Ethereal, full of flavor, fun in size, colors, light, chewy and so ever sophisticated as we see from those professionally done.

Fall has just arrived in Pullman with the leaves turning yellow and some already a bright blush red. The sun is however, sadly fading more and more and an increasing number of layers of clothes are being added when walking outside. It does give an excuse to start doing more fall related cooking be it a few more braises and stews then normal.

But I stray from the focus of the post.

When I first tried making macarons a number of years ago I had no idea what I was doing. Thinking back hard on it I think I still didn't know what a real meringue should have been. Now I love the idea of whipping those egg whites to a exponential volume in something that is glossy and full of potential whether its making cakes lighter, a souffle of some sort or for macarons. The basic recipe for these macarons I used from Annie's Eats which is one of the more simpler recipes out there that uses the French meringue technique as opposed to the complicated Italian meringue involving a sugar syrup and one step too many.

It also gave the ingredients in weight - something which I feel is a big problem in baking and too an extent, cooking. If you want to bake accurately and many people to consider some sort of science, a weighing scale that can ideally go to the individual gram makes things much easier to work with. Not only do you lose the ambiguity of "1 cup of butter" (honestly I dont know how I can measure a cup of butter) but clean up is also easier in that all the ingredients can be placed in one main bowl and things are just tarred back to zero and continued on.

Moving on to the recipe itself, there are a number of points on macarons which must be addressed in order to achieve the glossy shiny smooth exterior, some sort of feet and a cookie shell that over time starts to soften and is not hard or hollowed.

Meringue: prior to some popular belief, I've discovered thanks to brave tart, you don't need to age the egg whites. However the egg whites ARE the first thing I take out of the fridge, separate and let to sit at room temperature before I get on with the rest of the ingredients and what not. Some add salt or cream of tartar though I've yet to do this although. More sugar in the meringue means generally a stiffer more stable meringue also (or so I've been told). So what i've done to reduce the sweetness of some of my macs have been to cut down on the icing sugar used in the other portion but increased the sugar in the meringue. I think this technique worked in the humid environment of Singapore but isn't really needed over here in Pullman where its relatively dry.

Macaronage: Ahh yes, the ever terrifying macaronage - one stroke too many and its a wasted batter which will not rise nor give you any feet. A stroke too little and you basically end up with meringue and not macaron batter. This is the hardest part of macron making to explain but the basic idea is to end up with a batter that will flow slowly out of your piping bag just from gravity but a batter that is also not so 'loose' that it doesn't retain some sort of round-ish shape. Many describe the batter that it should flow like magma. Considering i dont really know what that looks like in real life, i prefer the method where you take some batter and make streaks of it with your spatula - the batter should fall back into the batter in about 15 or so seconds.

Drying: So I did a test where I popped the macs in straight into the oven without leaving it out to dry
and the macarons cracked and didnt even rise. From what I can tell, the drying process creates a skin around the macarons so that the hot air pushes downwards into creating the feet and thus prevents them also from cracking. As such I leave my macarons out to dry for about an hour and a half or so, or until it is completely dry to the touch.

Banging: Once you pipe the macarons don't forge to bang it down on the counter top or table. What I also do is slap the baking tray from the bottom to pop any air bubbles that may be present which will make your macarons crack.

Oven temp: This is more of a trial or error thing. The first macs I made came out at 300F or 150C. Back in Singapore I had to dial it down to about 125C or so. In this oven I'm using right now it hovers about 275F or so. Do a test run, cut a piece of baking paper and pipe a lone macaron on it and test between the oven temperatures, saves you a ton of either over baked, under baked or burnt macarons.

So onto the recipe. Thanks to the fact that the ingredients are by weight, you can pretty much figure out the ratio of recipe. Egg whites are the 'hardest' to measure out so I take the weight of the whites of 3 eggs and then adjust to it. Some math may be involved but it makes it more fun.

Since that's the case, the following recipe is for the macs i just made, but go to the link from above and you can find the original recipe

Cocoa tinged roasted pumpkin 'pie' macarons with Pâte à Bombe

Makes about two dozen sandwiched cookies depending on how big you pipe them – these are piped about 1 inch in diameter. 

For the shells:

92g Egg whites (These are about 3 “large” American eggs. Make sure there is absolutely no yolks in it and its not contaminated or else your meringue will be sad and never occur)

101.2g Almond flour/meal (go ahead and grind your own if you want too/can, just make sure its as fine as possible)

184g Icing/confectionary Sugar (I’ve heard of variations between powdered sugar with starch in them. I’ve yet to face this problem, but then again, I’ve never took noticed. From what I’ve read, this doesn’t really matter whether there’s starch or not.)

46g Granulated sugar

4g Cocoa powder

Start with the egg whites – take your eggs out of the fridge and separate the yolks from the whites. Put the whites in to a CLEAN METALLIC (or glass or ceramic, NOT plastic) bowl. Save the yolks for later (this you can put in whatever container you want. Plastic sometimes retains fat in it which will prevent any meringue from happening.

Sift your almond flour/meal, ICING sugar and cocoa powder in a separate bowl (of whatever material, just make sure its dry). What I do is take two large bowls (small bowls = messy counter top) and sift everything in one bowl and sift again into the other bowl. Get it? Just make sure everything is well combined and sifted.  

OK, so once you’ve sifted everything, line a heavy baking pan (ideally, if your pan is thin like mine, use double layer the pans when baking the shells) with non-stick parchment paper, cut to fit whatever size it is. Try to keep it as flat as possible, trust me, paper sticking out is a pain. If you can, a silicon baking mat works extremely well and is reusable. 

Prepare your piping bag. I use a 14” piping bag with a round tip of about 0.25cm. I think its Ateco number #11or #9. I like to put the piping bag inside a big tall glass or vase as its easier to fill especially if you don’t have anyone to help you.

Now start whisking your egg whites. If your lucky, you’ll be using a stand mixer of some sort (I just realized that some stand mixers have plastic bowls, so CLEAN these bowls as much as possible), if not I have made macarons using a hand mixer before, so that works fine, just a little more of a pain. Start on a slow speed for about 3 mins, adding 1/3 of the granulated sugar (just estimate, the idea is to not add all of it at the same time so the meringue doesn’t collapse on any weight). After 3 mins, up the speed to medium (about a 6-7 on a kitchen aid), add another 1/3 of the sugar. After 3 mins again, turn it up to high and add the last bit of sugar. Right now your meringue should start looking darn glossy or if not, soon to be. If not you screwed up somewhere with probably a bit of fat contamination. You know your meringue is done when it looks like glossy shaving cream and it can stand on itself, meaning, its somewhat solid. If you tip your bowl upside down, it shouldn’t fall out. Really. Try it. I dare you. (It’s never fallen on me, honest). 

So this is the hard part: Macronage. Pour 1/3 of your thoroughly mixed and sifted almond/icing sugar mixture and start folding with a rubber spatula. The bigger the spatula the easier I’ve found this to be. What you wanna do is (I’m right handed) run the spatula along the edges of the bowl about ¾ of the way, and then fold the entire thing over onto the middle. Rotate the bowl a little (just keep going in one direction, so if you rotate left, keep going left), and run the spatula along the edge and fold over again. If it’s easier, look up youtube videos for how to fold stuff, or just look up folding macarons or something like that. Anyway, the idea is that we want to fold to just the right amount and so you fold until just a few streaks of the almond/sugar mixture is left then you add in the next 1/3, keep going at it and then again with the rest of the mixture. The picture below is when I was making Kaya macarons which had green coloring. If your using coloring, add it in AFTER its nice and glossy.

So this is when you want to be really careful. Your mixture shouldn’t have any streaks left of unfolded/mixed flour/icing sugar because it will mess with the entire structure of the cookie and bad things can happen if it is not integrated into the batter. So to test for whether the batter is folded enough, make some streaks of the batter and if it sinks back into it so that it looks like there wasn’t any streaks in the first place after about 20 seconds or so, your good to go. Another test is to take about a teaspoon of it, place  a blob on a small plate and invert the plate vertically so that the streak should run down the plate just nicely so that it stops after a bit and doesn’t run off the plate.

Er, if it runs of the plate, you’ve gone too far. If the streaks disappear in like, 2 secs, you’ve gone to far. If it looks water and won’t hold a shape when you pipe it… well you get my drift. However, if it just kinda clumps there and the streak doesn’t disappear, give it another couple of folds. If it doesn’t even run on the plate, give it more folds.

So take your piping bag and fill it. Your batter should run out just slightly, not so much that there’s a mess on the kitchen floor – you’ve gone too far or you’re just careless. Pipe your macarons about an inch in diameter, making them as big or as small as you like. Careful about the ones at the edges though, the batter will spread just slightly and also during baking, so make sure to leave about a cm or so between each cookie and the edges of your baking tray. Once you’ve finished piping, get your baking tray and bang the crap out of it on your counter top/table or smack it underneath to get rid of all your air bubbles. The macarons should spread out a little more once again after the banging/smacking. 

Once your done with the physical contact, let your shells dry out for about an hour or so. I’ve been told that if you don’t over mix your batter you can skip this step – I’m a little skeptical about this so I just let them dry. If it’s a humid day or area, it might take 2 hrs. The tops should be dry and feel like they have a ‘skin’ around them. 

Bake your macarons for 14 mins (if you piped them the inch like I said so). Obviously if their smaller then don’t bake them for such a long time. At about the 5 min mark, you can tell if your macarons are coming out right or not, for this is about the time when the feet come along. If there’s no feet and the macaron collapsed/didn’t rise or doesn’t look like macarons… er, you’ve done something wrong. The cookies that come out are still good eating, but macarons they are not. Never mind, just tell people you made almond cookies. 

You can tell their done if you take them out of the oven for about a couple of mins. If you can peel them off the parchment/silicon mat their done. If they still stick, put them back in for a little longer, though mind you, further cooling will make it easier. 

Your shells can be kept in the freezer for some time, I hear about up to a month (I’ve never done it though). I suggest a hard container btw, if you don’t want to crush em’. 

Pate a Bombe/French Buttercream:

I used the recipe adapted from “Professional Baking”, since I had 3 yolks I scaled down the numbers. Yeah, do the math.

Follow the instructions as the site says. However I did do this using a hand mixer since the stand mixer (kitchen aid) I have is way to big for such a small scale. Also I don’t have a candy thermometer but a meat/probe one so I let my sugar syrup go up to 120C on my readings. The syrup itself should look clear and colorless but have large bubbles bubbling around it and furiously also. If it looks dark/amber/golden you’ve gone too far. 

Another way to test the syrup is the soft ball stage test. Get a spoon and flick some of the syrup into a bowl/vessel of cold water. The syrup should instantly ‘solidify’ due to the cold and you should be able to roll essentially a soft ball of sugar syrup around your fingers. Google it for pics.

The end result should be very much like a very, very thick honey, with a very creamy yellow color. And sticky as heck. 

Roasted Pumpkin:

I used half a butternut squash (their still pumpkins right?), cut them in chunks and roasted them at 350F for like… I don’t even know… until they were soft. By this time their ‘skin’ had kinda hardened (dried out I guess) so I just cut them open and scooped out the steaming flesh. I was worried about the moisture content however so I cooked the flesh on the stove top, continuously stirring for about 10 mins. If you put a small amount of the squash with the pate a bombe and you feel its ok for a filling (not too wet, not too dry), your good to go.

Assembly:

Mix about a 1:1 ratio of roasted squash/pumpkin with the pate a bome. Add in as much cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice or your favorite flavoring.

Pipe filling onto one macaron and top with its hopefully, identical brother/sister macaron.

Store in the fridge for about 4-5 hrs before eating, what this does is allow the shell to soften ever so slightly by the filling and basically makes the cookie a singular tasty entity. Trust me, this step shouldn’t be ignored.

Congratulations, you’ve made macarons! 

Couple of pointers:

• ·         If you omit the cocoa powder the macarons will come out white – add whatever coloring you like but you need to experiment with different types of coloring and their brands. Some are more liquidy then others so you can only use less (color isn’t so intense). You add the coloring at the end of the meringue process, as in once its nice and stiff and glossy (stop the machine/whipping, add your coloring and start whipping again on high).

• ·         Pate a bombe can be flavored with whatever you like, experiment.

• ·         If you use a wet filling such as a jam, you might not need to let your macarons sit for those 4-5 hours and just eat them an hr or so.

• ·         Don’t be surprised if you fail the first 5-6 times, I did.

• ·         Don’t use my recipe and expect it to be fool proof, it’s still under works and I still mess up every now and then. 
• Case in point, if you can tell in my photos, the last few ones which are these pumpkin filled macarons have very different looking 'feet' then the other pictures of previously made macarons. I think this is due to oven and thus temperature differiences which i still need to figure out although I don't mind them looking like this. 
• Oh and one last thing, if your oven is the type with the fan, turn the fan off since it makes the oven hotter then it really needs to be. 
• Good luck!