winter spice cake

sometime (again, my memory is pretty much shot) after my final review, carrie wanted to make coq au vin from the latest issue of cook's illustrated. i offered to make dessert, and then cast about thinking of a winter dessert that would be suitable. i wanted something white, and something that didn't involve chocolate. so i thought a spice cake would do. i had a vision of a white cake (specifically, a bundt cake) that was spiced. to make it a little less predictable - the idea of a white spice cake seems kind of stuffy and overdone, for some reason - i wanted to somehow accent the cake with orange, to make it a little brighter and fresher. i think i might have a recipe for the exact cake i wanted in a cookbook at home, but i was in studio, so instead i consulted epicurious. the result of my search was a spice cake with a molasses cream cheese frosting.

i don't know why i didn't realize it wasn't going to be a white cake, but one of those applesauce-oil-based cakes that are light brown, but it ended up not being a problem. the easiest way to make any cake look really fancy is to split it into more layers; this also gives you a more favorable, easier-to-eat frosting to cake ratio. i ended up putting orange oil (a rather large amount of it) in the frosting and adding a layer of mandarin oranges on top of one of the layers of frosting. unfortunately, i didn't put a layer of frosting on top of the oranges before i put on the last cake layer, so the top cake layer didn't stick and also got pretty soaked with mandarin orange moisture (despite draining and drying them thoroughly). whoops. i would say that the orange layer was a good idea, in general, though.

so this cake is a pretty mild spice cake, in a good way. i think perhaps i would have liked a non-oil-based cake better, but this is the easiest cake to put together ever: throw together the wet ingredients, throw together the dry ingredients, mix and bake. doesn't even bake for overly long - 25 minutes - and it cools fast in the cold winter air. combined with a kicked-up frosting, it gets even better. and...eaten somewhat furtively out of the refrigerator the next day is really the best way to eat this cake.

in other cake news, i took a cake my mother made for my grandmother's birthday, split it into four layers, spread the bottom and top layers with raspberry jam, filled the middle with chocolate ganache, and filled the remaining two layers with a gelatin-stabilized white chocolate "mousse." i say "mousse" because a real mousse is made with beaten egg whites, and a "mousse" is made with whipped cream and melted chocolate. unfortunately, i put slightly too little gelatin in the "mousse," or perhaps i didn't let it set for long enough, but it tasted good and looked good, so that's really all that matters for a family birthday cake. oh, and it was covered with a thin layer of ganache. this is probably the best birthday cake i've made so far for my grandmother. mmm. wish we had the leftovers with us.

orange-scented spice cake
cake
2c flour
1 1/4c sugar
1t baking soda
1t cinnamon
1/2t allspice
1/2t salt
1c applesauce or apple butter
3/4c buttermilk
1/2c veg oil
3 eggs
2T molasses

frosting
1 1/2 lbs cream cheese, softened
2c powdered sugar
1-2T orange oil or zest of 1 orange
1/4c (1/2 stick) butter, softened

optional: 1 can mandarin oranges, drained and patted dry

directions:
1. preheat oven to 350F. butter and flour 2 9" cake pans.
2. combine first 6 ingredients in large bowl.
3. whisk together applesauce, buttermilk, oil, eggs, and molasses in a medium bowl.
4. stir applesauce mixture into dry ingredients. pour into prepared pans and bake until tester comes out clean, ~25 minutes.
5. cool cake layers, then make frosting: beat together the cream cheese and butter until smooth, then beat in powdered sugar. beat in orange oil or zest.
6. split each cake layer (level as needed) into two layers. put the bottom layer on a large plate and spread a layer of frosting (since there are four layers, you only need a 1/8" to 3/16" thick layer of frosting) on top. add two more layers of cake and frosting. top this layer with the mandarin oranges. spread a layer of frosting on the bottom of the top layer, then place on top of mandarin oranges, frosting side down. spread remaining frosting on top and sides of cake. chill and serve.

[serves 8-12]

note: i like this best when it's cold, but it can also be served at room temperature.

review: chocolate lounge @ mariposa

also several weeks ago, i had enough time (!!!) to go with carrie to the chocolate lounge at mariposa. on thursdays at 7pm, a mini-enterprise takes over the space at mariposa and it becomes a short ode to chocolate. because who wouldn't be excited by a chocolate lounge? yeah, that's what i'm talking about.

the chocolate lounge is fun, but is a little limited. there are some different types of hot chocolate, then a series of desserts and chocolate flights. the desserts are pretty standard: a chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, etc. i had the milk cake with chocolate sauce; the edges were really quite delectable, with the sugar-crunchy crust, but the cake was a bit dry for the amount of chocolate sauce (which was perfectly fine) that was poured on top of it. i may have also been expecting something different despite the accurate description by our waitress, since long ago at lmf, luis used to make a tres leches cake that was essentially a vanilla cake soaked with a mixture of milk, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. god that was good.

the most interesting thing about the chocolate lounge is the flights of chocolate. unfortunately, i didn't have one. chocolate flights are a curious thing, because you have to really be a chocolate buff to pay $8 for a flight of chocolate. chocolate is so compact that the american value of getting as much bang for your buck doesn't apply correctly here; yet it governed my choice to not get a flight, anyway. there's the fear that you don't know where the chocolate is coming from; the fear that you don't know if your palate is sensitive enough to taste the difference between various chocolates, etc.

sidebar:
that said, flights of chocolate are not absent from my life. i got a free ticket a few weeks back to a chocolate tasting of richart chocolate (located in copley) by the lab for chocolate science and mit-france. i went with celina, and of course, like in all lectures, i fell asleep for most of the lecture. but i had a nice nap, and i pretty much knew all of the information in the lecture anyway. the best part of the whole thing was the smell of a room full of chocolate. if you haven't yet experienced this, you should. because it's amazing. the chocolate tasting was quite fun as well - if you haven't had a good milk chocolate (the "upscale" symphony bar is not an example of a good milk chocolate) the richart one is pretty darn good.

back to the chocolate lounge. i would say that in general, it's a fun thing to do, but still kind of expensive. in an area full of students, i think that a menu of little $4-5 treats is the best way to go, with coffee and tea in addition to the chocolate (this may actuall exist already, but i don't remember).

review: restaurant pava

restaurant pava / 1229 centre street / newton ma / 617-965-0905 / m-sat 11:30-2:30 + 5:30-10pm, sun 11-2:30 + 5:30-10pm / reservations accepted (and recommended, by me) / entrees moderately expensive ($18-25)

yes yes, i know i've been remiss in updating foodlust. but in repentance, i will now add several posts (or, as many as my almost-completely-shot memory will offer up). i've been meaning to write a review of restaurant pava for several weeks now, especially given that i was there on nov 18 - more than a month ago.

i found restaurant pava through the boston globe restaurant reviews. i was initially attracted to the restaurant by the globe's review of its bread, which consists of three different types: a small chewy roll studded (cliched word nowadays, huh?) with caraway seeds and golden raisins; a french bread with a supersoft inside and a supercrispy crust; and a crispy flat "bread" that was somewhere between potato chip and bread, whose main ingredients i tried in vain to guess. all this comes with a dish of extremely green, extremely excellent olive oil. back to my initial thoughts: it is almost always true that any restaurant that does its bread so well is probably not going to disappoint. cold butter can sometimes be forgiven in the case of very good food, but mediocre bread is not a good way to start any meal.

restaurant pava is actually a companion restaurant to the Tess clothing store - by which i mean that it's located next to the clothing store in newton and it shares the same general decor. the decor is minimalist with overtones of boston - ie new york, but friendly. the interior is white, with black wooden tables and green accents. we were seated next to the front plate glass window, which i thought was going to be cold, but turned out to be just fine. this place is pretty small - seats maybe 20-30 - and the waitstaff is accordingly small, and thus friendlier. the menus are sheets of paper tucked under a band of green elastic that is attached to a heavy matte plastic board. the menus are kind of heavy because of this aforementioned plastic board, but i suppose i can forgive and forget.

because the food is pretty amazing. the chef is lydia shire, formerly of biba, and is known for being pretty adventurous. the food here is billed as "mediterranean" but is really the all-encompassing "new american," which is better described as "upscale cuisine (not "food") from any culture." we started with scallops and a small pizza; i've now forgotten exactly what the scallops came with, but i believe it might have been lobster sweetbreads (richer than normal sweetbreads) with some sort of crackery bread. mostly i just remember the scallops being very good. i liked the pizza better, though, which had smoked tomatoes and housemade pepperoni on it. 99% of the time, i despise pepperoni because it tastes like spiced plastic, but this pepperoni could do no evil - it was smoky, meaty rather than plasticky, and all together quite amazing.

when it came to entrees, i had a truly difficult time picking what i wanted, so let me give you a list of all of the things that sounded good: beet chitarra (short rib, candied ginger & blossoms); tagliatelle alla bolognese (which always looks really good to me, and which i need to make before my craving for it overtakes my life); pasta pyramids (fresh ricotta, pea shoots & pancetta); sole bianco (riso nero); chestnut crusted lamb (chestnut polenta and red russian kale); heritage berkshire pork (honeycrisp apple ravioli); wood oven chicken (black truffle, lovage, celery). so you can see that i had a serious dilemma here; usually i don't have this much trouble picking something.

i picked the chicken. and let me tell you: forget about hammersley's bistro. nothing could possibly be better than this chicken. the chicken is roasted and is superbly cooked. ok, it's on the verge of being too tender, but luckily it doesn't quite go there. i didn't think the black truffle was necessarily needed, but the addition of celery is amazing. celery, in the world of marissa, is having quite a comeback these days. the celery was in a cream sauce that came with the chicken, and it was divine. i don't think i can properly express how good chicken is with celery. it has a delicately vegetal flavor that makes the chicken taste like spring. one could argue that, it being fall, this is the wrong message for a chicken to give, but that's just sour grapes on the part of anyone who has not had this chicken. yes, it seemed more french to me than mediterranean, but in a good way. this is a chicken worthy of your daydreams.

to top it all off, we decided not to have dessert because my mother had made a cake - but tess, the owner (who dresses not like an owner but like a server), told us we should have brought it, because they would have served it for us. and there you have it: it looks like a new york restaurant, but it's definitely boston.

p.s. so now my top restaurants (for nice restaurants) in the boston/cambridge area are: 1. craigie street bistrot; 2. restaurant pava; 3. pigalle. yes, it's that good. i wish it was located in boston, but what can you do.

when the french do english, or i love it when you talk LU

so i saw these cookies at star when i stopped by a couple days ago, because of course the cookies are on the way to the vegetables. i passed by the cheese nips, oreos, fig newtons, and was almost home free when i saw...digestive biscuits for $2.39. do you know how much real digestive biscuits from england cost? $4/package, at least $1 too much for me to justify consuming them at the rate at which i would like to consume them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. consequently, when i saw these, i had to try them. i figure it's one for the team (of digestive biscuit lovers residing in places other than england).

LU is a french company that makes the petit ecolier cookies, which i love - my parents used to buy them when i was a kid, so life without LU cookies is a cruel and hostile world. but they don't often come out with new varieties of cookie that i really want - case in point, the raspberry and lime pims cookies. some american executive at LU made that decision, for sure. so the french version of tastes kind of like...a french take on a british mainstay. they taste a little like a lighter version of le petit beurre cookies (think aero chocolate bars v. regular chocolate bars, but for cookies), with milk chocolate on top. and i wonder if these were also dreamt up by americans, because the milk chocolate is too milky - not even the milk chocolate on british digestive biscuits tastes so much of condensed milk.

however, as a cookie in general the digestive is really quite nice - the mildness of the cookie is balanced by the sweetness of the chocolate. (i would not, however, recommend dunking them in your tea/coffee/hot chocolate like the LU website advises you to do - it would simply make the cookie distintegrate into the given hot liquid). as a digestive biscuit, though, it misses the mark on every count but the appearance. the wonderful thing about digestive biscuits is the texture of the cookie - in which you can taste how coarsely the flour/grain was ground. (kind of tricks you into thinking you're eating something healthy, and forgetting that there's a layer of chocolate on top of your cookie.) the flour that the digestive cookies use is completely different from the real thing - i believe it's just regular refined white flour. i would prefer a dark chocolate on my digestive biscuits, and i'm surprised that LU didn't use dark chocolate, since dark chocolate seems such a french thing to do. also, as an eating experience, i hate it when milk chocolate melts on my fingers from cookies (from chocolate bars it's somehow ok) and this milk chocolate seems to melt especially fast.

but for $2.39, i'll take it.

p.s. "i love it when you talk LU" refers to the section of the LU website where you can learn how to pronounce the names of their cookies. and if this is kind of hilarious: http://www.jemarretequandjeveux.com (je m'arrete quand je veux).

chocolate chip cookies

i guess it's an urge ingrained in my head by years of consuming pop culture, but sometimes i really need chocolate chip cookies. occasionally i'll wait for someone else to make them, but generally if i want them, i'll go out of my way to get everything i need to make them myself.

i was no longer being productive in studio, distracted by a sudden yearning for chocolate chip cookies; so i went to star, bought chocolate chips (because sometimes i have a yearning for not only chocolate chip cookies in general, but chocolate chip cookies with chocolate-chip-shaped chocolate chips, as opposed to the chocolate chunks i could have hacked off our supply of callebaut), and went home to make cookies.

as it happens, i was trying to be responsible about my eating habits, and got sidetracked on the way to cookies. i needed lunch for the next day, so i made (boiled) some tortellini, and made a sauce, which i only mention because i think it turned out pretty well. it was essentially just onions and tomatoes, with a bit of thyme, crushed red pepper, white pepper, and port wine (plus a little bit of salt and sugar, but that's a given). i didn't think it was going to be that great because i had a few onions and a lot of tomatoes, and i thought the acidity of the tomatoes would outweight the onions, and i'd just have a very sharp-tasting sauce. but cooking the sauce for over an hour helped, as did the port wine, i think, in particular (added to the onions, before the tomatoes). anyway, i'm eating the leftovers for breakfast as i type this, and the early fire from the pepper has mellowed a little, and it just tastes better in general after a couple days.

back to the cookies: i really enjoy softening the butter for chocolate chip cookies, which i always make by hand regardless of how many batches i'm making. it's kind of like prepping butter for croissants: you cut up the butter into pieces and go at it with a meat pounder, or in my case, a wooden spoon. so i suppose i like it because it gets rid of excess tension and aggression.

now, i've tried different recipes for chocolate chip cookies, and i assure you that the tollhouse recipe is actually the best as a base. it has just the right amount of butter, flour, and sugar, and then you can just fiddle with the types of sugar, etc, that you use. i happened to only have white sugar and no brown sugar, which i thought was going to be a serious problem. as it turned out, i like all-white-sugar chocolate chip cookies a lot. they're crispier - perhaps as a result of the butter and white sugar melding better into "candy" than butter and brown sugar - and they spread just the right amount because i didn't bother refrigerating the dough this time. they're slightly more crumbly than your normal chocolate chip cookies, and i wonder if this is because of the elimination of the moisture from the brown sugar.

i'm not sure that i'm a total convert to all-white-sugar cookies; a day later i've still got very crispy cookies, which i like once in a while, but in general i like the chewy kind of cookies. cookies being cookies though, i'm not really going to complain about what kind they are.

a short ode to leftovers.

in the world of restaurant eaters, "leftovers" is a dirty word. it's the moldy mac and cheese festering in a tupperware in the back of your fridge, pushed out of the way by pudding cups and beer. it's the smell of mold spreading throughout your fridge as you put off cleaning it out. it's the stuff you intended to eat, but then forgot about.

in the restaurant world, leftovers become family dinners: leftover chicken parts, excess inventory from a food order, etc. fewer people ordered a dish than you expected and now you have a lot of something leftover.

restaurant leftovers are a little more interesting: it's the food you didn't make that you have brought back with you. the fact that it's from a restaurant - and thus "better" than what you can do yourself - transforms leftovers into a sort of secondary takeout.

but, my friends, if you think leftovers are horrible, then you are mistaken. i am eating my lunch right now: a "salad" of braised red cabbage, roast turkey, ricotta, and olive oil. all of these things are leftovers: the braised red cabbage was leftover from cod that we had last week, the roast turkey was leftover from my mother, the ricotta was leftover from something (...a long time ago but it was still good). the contents of your fridge, in simple combination with your staple kitchen ingredients, can be transformed into joy. combining leftovers is a different kind of thinking than shopping at the supermarket for specific ingredients; it's a lesson in constraints. how can you put these things together so that they'll taste good? and this journey often leads to new discoveries about things that go together. cooking with leftovers in a non-chop suey way will further your education in how and what to eat, and you will be happier for it.

palatal shock + awe

rob has been forwarding me google food emails, and the end result is that i increasingly want to work in what is essentially the google cafeteria. as in, i really, really, really want to work there. here's an email:

We have another new set of menus that culinary team put together for some palatal shock-and-awe action. The menu today features the cuisine of Provence, a French region whose cuisine shares marked similarities with Italian and Greek cuisines more so than cuisine we typically consider French. For example, as a mountainous region bordering the sea with little grasslands, grazing dairy-producing animals are not as common, thus the heavy reliance on olive oil as the preferred fat component. The dish Provence can lay the most claim to culinary fame is bouillabaise, which we have a variation on today. Typically the dish contains several types of seafood in a stew, however we did a filet in a boulllabaise sauce - saffron, fennel broth, etc. It should be delicious. There is also the tuna nicoise salad to consider, which the chefs turned into a quiche, an interesting twist. A wide assortment of salads and veggies are also available.

can you imagine a place where the engineers - but also the culinary team ("culinary team"? at a corporation??) gets to be creative? this is such a rare occurrence that it seems like an opportunity of a lifetime. i would gladly spend a summer working at google as a chef. or even as a food-related menial worker. let me weigh two dream options: working at google-food, or doing a stage at the french laundry...and the winner would be...ok, it would be the french laundry. but there would be a decision to make there.

p.s. i thought "palatal" couldn't possibly be a word (though thinking about it now, it's pretty logical that palate (n) --> palatal (adj), but the oed confirms that it is indeed a word, and it is used in the correct context here.

the dinner party

what i have realized as i've gotten older is that i am, in fact, like my mother. every time she cooks for large groups of people (ie family), she spends almost the entire time in the kitchen. no level of exhortation gets her to stop jumping up every ten minutes to tend to whatever is cooking on the stove.

i am not quite the same, but when i surmise about why i like dinner parties as much as i do, certain similarities suddenly reveal themselves. i like dinner parties for two reasons: i like to feed people, and i like to mix my friends (to varying levels of success). but...i don't particularly like to join in the festivities myself, because the high point for me is really the cooking part. is that strange? perhaps. but no matter how well i plan, no matter how done i am with cooking when people arrive, i'm somewhat distracted at the end of the cooking, and all i really want to do is watch everyone else have fun. in fact, since i've already had my fun, i'd go as far to say that i'd cook for everyone and then go to sleep while they eat.

that said, last night i had some people over. i didn't set a menu until the day before: carrot-ginger soup, roast chicken and risotto with some sort of green veg (which turned out to be beet greens: "great alternative to spinach!"), and a pear-gingerbread trifle. as is wont to happen when i cook for large groups, the most important part is dessert, and everything else takes a backseat. the menu wasn't quite the most harmonious combination of flavors that i could have had, but given several factors: budget, how much i could carry back from star, how much i had left to give to the dinner mentally, which supermarkets i'd have to go to, etc. i worried a little that there were too many herbs and spices: ginger, then thyme (because a roast chicken should always be roasted with thyme), then ginger/cinnamon/star anise. kind of a lot, yeah? usually when i do a roast chicken, i overdo thyme because carrien and i love thyme - there's thyme in everything. but i attempted to show some restraint this time, so only the chicken (and the accompanying chicken gravy) had thyme in it. i think that given my weaknesses, i did rather admirably: the risotto was nice and simple, just rice, butter, onions, and stock.

now for some conclusions from the evening. the soup was a little chunkier than i would have liked, though i blendered it, so i should probably invest in a food mill (or rather, i should have just sieved the whole mixture). but the flavor was pretty good - it was very ginger-y because i probably threw in more than i was supposed to. the chicken was pretty good, though i'm still horrible at carving and i put a little too much paprika in the rub for the skin. gravy: check. i always forget how much spinach and beet greens shrink when cooked, so i think i should have probably gotten more, but oh well. for some reason the bit of cream i added didn't thicken quite right, so they were more liquidy than i like them. however, the risotto was really good - it was 1/3 wild rice mix, 2/3 arborio rice, which was quite a nice combination. the "really wild" (ie, with the skin on the outside of the rice grains) rice was a little crunchy still, which usually is a huge, looming, obvious sign of failure in terms of risotto, but which was fine by my book because it added a little texture. hard arborio rice in risotto: cardinal sin; hard wild rice: somewhat acceptable.

so let me talk a little bit about this dessert. i wasn't sure it was going to work: would the gingerbread overpower the pears? would the pastry cream set? would the pears actually taste pear-like (it's almost winter and pears are not a winter fruit by any means)? i made the pastry cream first: i tried the julia child recipe again because i wanted to see if i could get it to work again. the last time i made it, i didn't quite cook the flour long enough, and this time i made sure i did. where by "i made sure i did," i mean that i accidentally cooked if for long enough. i accidentally left the stove on low when i really meant to turn it off, though, so it thickened even a bit more than i wanted to, and became more like a cold pate a choux, rather than a thick-but-creamy pastry cream base. the trick with julia child's pastry cream is that you have to add things to it (beaten egg whites, whipped cream, you name it) in order to get it into a servable state. knowing this, i bought cream to whip. but man - folding that stuff into the pastry cream was a nightmare because i just didn't know if it was going to actually lighten up. luckily, four or five cups of whipped cream later, it did. so now we have an enormous amount of pastry cream. if it were summer i would just make copious numbers of fruit tarts (how can you resist anything that is essentially ripe berries resting on pillows of whipped cream?), but it's not and the fruit's not really worth having. so...if you have suggestions for what we should do with a large amount of pastry cream, i'm all ears.

back to the dessert....it turned out quite well! i am no good at estimating how much alcohol should go into these things, and given that the gingerbread was slightly denser than what i am used to using for trifle, i should have used a bit more alcohol (i used a half-rum, half-amaretto mixture). ah well. the unsurprising but surprising thing was that both trifle and risotto tasted better the next day as cold leftovers: it was unsurprising in that i like leftovers so i would automatically like them, however it was surprising in that both were an order of magnitude better the next day. i will say this: i love salt and pepper as seasonings, and i make sure i do it right every time (although since there is white pepper in our pepper mill right now, it's a bit harder to get the pepper correct).

in retrospect, i think that what i like even better than these informal dinner parties is cooking for two or three people who will come over and chat with me while i cook. they sit, occasionally do some small thing like chopping, but really they're just there to hang out with me while i make us food. besides, then you don't have the issue of only inviting some of your friends to the type of event where you would normally invite all of them if it were logistically and monetarily possible.

sometimes you just need...

brownies from a box. there, i said it. i know you think i'm a stuck-up foodie. don't call me a foodie; i'm just a regular girl who happens to like food. "foodie" is a term for people who aren't me: who don't like fast food, who don't harbor secret cravings for wendy's, cakes from boxes, and brownies from boxes. i confess: a little bit of the foodie creeps back in when i qualify my tawdry love for "fake" food with the opinion that i don't consider it to be "real" food, and this is why i can enjoy it as much as i do. anyone who doesn't like brownies from a mix hasn't tasted them when you eat them, slightly undercooked, 15 minutes after they've exited your oven.

because after going for over a year without having encountered this forbidden pleasure (i'm afraid people will see them in my trash - five years ago i was once yelled at for making cookies from a mix), i had one. and then i had another one. and let me tell you: it was gorgeous. i think i died from my hellish week and went to heaven, a heaven filled with brownies and peach cake that's currently baking in the oven.

so these brownies were essentially an appetizer for dinner, which was chicken stuffed with ricotta, apricots, and craisins, and wrapped with bacon and baked; and a risotto (which was actually risotto and barley mixed together) with bacon, onions, peas, yellow bell peppers, and a little bit of sherry. but the brownies ruled the day. i'm going to the kitchen to eat another one.

anticipation

besides sitting at my desk in studio, fiddling with bits of chipboard all day, there's nothing i like better than planning menus. first you think of what you want to eat; then you think of what you have at home in the fridge, since you're a poor grad student, and try to reconcile the two.

contents of my fridge:
bacon.
a couple zucchini.
a couple of red bell peppers.
eggs.
leftover roasted broccoli from last week's soup
a pint of cream.

i wanted to cook this weekend, to preserve my sanity, so rocco and lauren are coming over tonight for dinner. rocco's making the main dish - a japanese chicken and buckwheat noodle dealio - so we thought up some things to go along with it. i'm going to do some dumplings (provided that my dumpling skins defrost in time) with pork, ginger, and garlic - i still dream about that pork-ginger-garlic pancake that i had in china... - and roasted butternut squash with kale, perhaps. i was trying to think of an asian vegetable we could do, and this is the closest i got within the budget. then for dessert, vanilla ice cream with langues de chat (which i've never made before) and a caramel sauce that's infused with star anise. i'm most excited about the dumplings, although it turns out that i have the wonton skins and i'm not at all sure how i'm going to cook them; and then the caramel sauce.

i'm so excited about cooking tonight that i'm going to tell you now what i'm going to do. well, prepping stuff of course, which also involves prepping for brunch tomorrow (more on that later), but mostly i want to see how the caramel sauce comes out. i'm going to get home from studio and straightaway i'll put some cream on the stove on low, with some star anise, and let that go, covered (dairy products absorb odors), until i need it for the caramel sauce.

tomorrow i'm doing a small brunch to use up other stuff we have in the fridge. the broccoli and bacon are going into a quiche, which i think i'm going to cook in the 22cm tart pan and some ramekins, and then i'll do some home fries with bacon and the red bell peppers (which i've also never done before, but my all clad pan gives me confidence), and chocolate-zucchini cupcakes. i'm thinking about putting nutella in the middle of the cupcakes, but really, i don't like the consistency of nutella enough to do it - it's too gooey. i wonder what i could thin it with. cream? hmm. evaporated milk? what really wants to go into those cupcakes is some fruit jam, like a cherry preserve, or chocolate pudding. or, whipped cream. but the whipped cream is definitely too extravagant for a brunch, given the presence of all of that bacon. hmm.

soup without vision

i was feeling kind of blah today after spending several hours in studio; not that many people were there and i missed my roommates, whom i haven't seen much of in the past week. since they weren't around, i decided i needed to cook. rather, to lovingly fashion some sort of food product; i've always found cooking to be therapeutic and this instance was no exception.

i didn't know what i was going to make, but celina was into the soup idea, so soup it was. we had red peppers and broccoli at home, and i thought i'd make something that i could put that in. when i cook for therapy, i like it to be a prolonged experience, so i can take my time. to me that means bacon and rendered bacon fat, or a roast chicken. i ended up making a soup with some stuff i thought might be good (but that i had no idea if it would be good): in addition to the peppers and broccoli i added some zucchini, portabella mushrooms, and sage.

it turned out pretty well. i also bought thick-cut bacon, which was an excellent addition; it was even slightly meatier than normal thick-cut bacon, but not quite canadian bacon or british bacon, so it was perfect for the soup. i cooked the bacon with sage to get some of the flavor into the bacon, then added a whole lot of (old, since they made me cry more than usual) onions to deglaze the pan. there's nothing like my all clad pan for utterly fantastic fond, by the way. other than the bacon, it was a basic soup: add onions, potatoes to thicken the soup (my favorite way to thicken soup), and extra veg. in the end, i wasn't sure how the mushrooms would go over; i thought of them as a meat "substitute" that would add body to the soup, but the more i thought about it, the more i thought it was a mistake. however, it ended up being ok - there were enough other vegetables to tame the strength of the portabellas.

last weekend carrien and i made these fantastic crepes for breakfast: cornmeal-cumin crepes that are filled with a ricotta-ham mixture and then baked, with a corn and scallion relish dealio. they were fantastic - the ricotta ham combo is not to be missed. we bought ham ends from star market because they were cheap, so to give them more flavor we fried the ham in some bacon fat (best thing in the world to cook with) and browned it a little, which to me, made all the difference. god those were good. i think i had more than my fair share of the leftovers.

consider pork sausage conquered

take a moment to ponder the following phrase: "sausages with sherry caramel glazed pears." have you ever heard anything more wonderful in your life? it was even better than i could have expected.

sausage? glorious. sherry? sure. caramel glazed pears? oh yeah.

then, i was walking across the street after exiting star when i realized i had no pears. i had three pounds of sausage (specifically pork sausage, none of that italian stuff), a package of sage (one can't cook such a quantity of pork without sage), two bags of peas and carrots, a box of chicken stock, but no pears. huh. i was too tired to go back, so off i went without the pears.

i had just come back from finishing a model, and before that i was at my full-time job, so you can imagine how i didn't particularly want to cook because i was incredibly tired. but i'd said i would, and invited people, and there's nothing you can do at that point. but by the end of the night - and i know this is really sappy - i had remembered why i like cooking so much.

i always hated those people who review recipes on epicurious.com, having changed virtually the whole recipe. then i did it myself, and realized that in some cases, it makes sense. i mean, i kept the idea of the recipe...i just changed most of it according to my tastes. and now i'm here telling you all about it, as if you have the same taste as me - which in my opinion is the only situation in which this recipe switcheroo works.

so i started with the sherry-infused caramel. you make a fairly dark caramel, and then add sherry (it was supposed to be sherry vinegar, but why use the vinegar when you can use the real thing? for 5 bucks, this stuff was probably fairly close to vinegar, anyway) so it stays a liquid. then you pour off the caramel into a cup, where it stays all amber and viscous. then the onions get sauteed in the pan with sage and thyme, then you add the caramel back in. meanwhile you brown the sausages, and then you simmer them in the caramel mixture. and the result is glazed sausages with just the right balance of salty and sweet.

dinner basically became a british affair: to go with the sausages, i did mashed potatoes with gravy (a chicken broth based gravy since there was virtually no fond from the sausage), and peas and carrots on the side. the peas and carrots were - gasp! - frozen, but to avoid the evil trap of boiled vegetables, i sauteed the onions and then added in the other veg. simple, fast, and serviceable. let me tell you about the sausages: the caramel sauce is admittedly slightly sweet, since it is caramel, after all - it's like maple syrup without the maple, but plus something else...the sage was definitely a good addition. and when you brown the sausages, then cook them in the caramel for a while - well, that is quite possibly the definition of heaven. they stay kind of crispy, but absorb caramel into the casing and turn a lovely brown. the mashed potatoes - made from yukon gold potatoes, per my preference and our available ingredients - are a fantastic and essential foil to the sweetness of the caramel, letting you taste the other non-caramel flavors a little better.

so dinner was a very enjoyable affair. one of the things i like best about cooking is being efficient with the ingredients, in particular, the residues: using the fond from something you just fried to flavor something else, or in this case, letting the caramel still stuck to the pan flavor the onions and sage. it may not be particularly healthy (much butter was sacrificed to this dinner) but it sure is satisfying to see your ingredients go so far.

sherry caramel glazed sausages
1/2c sugar
1/4c water
1/4c sherry
3/4c onions, halved and sliced thinly
1/2 pkg of sage (~1/4c chopped coarsely)
1T thyme leaves
1 to 1 1/2 lbs pork sausage (ie bratwurst)
1T butter
salt and pepper

1. combine the sugar and water in a 10 or 12 inch skillet and boil until it turns a deep amber color. add the sherry and let the caramel dissolve - the caramel will hiss and solidify when the sherry hits it, but you just need to stir it until the sugar bits dissolve. pour off the liquid into a bowl.

2. put the butter in the skillet and add the herbs when the butter is hot. add the onions and saute the onions until they're browned - the remaining caramel that coats the pan will dissolve from the steam generated by the onions.

3. meanwhile, brown the sausages in another pan. then put them into the pan with the caramel mixture and simmer on low heat for about a half hour, turning the sausages halfway through, until the sausages are cooked through and glazed. if the liquid runs too thick, then you can add some chicken stock to thin it (or water if you have nothing else).

[serves 3-4]

some belated reviews: om, caffe umbra, pomodoro

i've been remiss in updating my beloved blog (which is two years old!!!), and have a few restaurant reviews to offer you: caffe umbra and om for restaurant week, plus pomodoro.

om: 8/18, 1p.m.
92 winthrop street / cambridge ma / 617-576-2800 / m-sat 5pm-1am, sun 10:30-2:30 + 5pm-1am / reservations accepted / entrees expensive ($25-35)

appetizer: borscht with smoked potatoes and sour cream
main: duck breast with mustard greens and duck confit bisteeya
dessert: lime cheesecake with mango and saffron

there is something luxurious about having a 3-course lunch that is absolutely more decadent than a nice dinner, even a 24-course dinner - because who has that much time in the middle of the day? it's just so...sinful. and in fact, we were a little rushed because i had to go back to work. thus i do not recommend 3-course lunches unless you are retired, have flexible hours and a boss who doesn't care if you leave for 3 hours, or are a student. ah, the ever-flexible life of the student.

we were given the choice of the lounge of the dining room for our lunch, and i chose for us, having arrived a little early: i saw how much trouble the lounge diners were having, since the tables were too low for the chairs to dine comfortably. what can i say? it's a well-designed lounge, not a well-designed lounge-that-doubles-as-dining-room. so upstairs we went, and you get a very pleasant view of the park adjacent to upstairs on the square from the wall of glass that you're seated against. we started with drinks, and i had this wonderful non-alcoholic drink that consisted of espresso, vanilla syrup, and chocolate in some form. it was like a mocha frappuccino, but several orders of magnitude better. the drinks are seriously good here, though a bit overpriced.

lunch was pretty good. i wasn't blown away by anything, but the flavors were interesting. this is one of those places that's very high concept, where you go if you want to try new flavor combinations, rather than well-done traditional dishes. the flavor combinations don't always work - actually i didn't think any of them were spectacular - but i was happy the chef was trying them, i guess. i felt that the restaurant was a little too new york, which is to say, a little pretentious, especially for boston/cambridge. i just want to eat good food! i don't want to be beaten over the head with the flavor combinations by a waiter who thinks he knows more about food than i do. the only time i want to be reminded what's in my dish and how to eat it is at a place like alinea or the french laundry, when the flavor combination or the sequence of ingredients actually matters.

the borscht was quite good; not having had it before, i have no comparisons to make. but it was smooth, the sour cream was wonderful, and the smoked potato was a particularly inspired touch. the duck was cooked perfectly, but the mustard greens were a little too bitter for my taste. the bitterness was supposed to be cut by the date-based sauce that came with it, but it was spread over the plate and you had to drag the mustard greens over the plate to get it. if there's one thing i really hate about high-concept food, it's when it's hard to eat. it can be a production, but i don't want it to be a production to eat it. the duck came with a cute little bisteeya in a tiny cast iron pan, which was good, but the phyllo dough totally shattered upon contact with my fork, showering me with the slivers. another big raspberry in the face of the diner who cares about ease of eating.

dessert was pretty good - the cheesecake was a bit sweet, but nice and creamy, and not too dense. it again suffered from the eating-as-a-production problem, but the lime-saffron combination is pretty good. all in all, i might come here again if i thought it was sufficiently affordable. the upstairs dining room is also quite nice and comfortable, and not too noisy, despite the uninspired waterfall you see when you enter the restaurant (it's supposed to soothe and relax you upon entry).

caffe umbra: 8/23, 8p.m. (closed as of this past spring)
appetizer: arancini
side: eggplant fries with date ketchup
main: pork two ways - tenderloin and sausage, with mustard cream sauce and fingerling potatoes
dessert: sticky toffee pudding

i didn't think it was possible, but caffe umbra did itself one better this year, over last year's restaurant week. last year, i had an ok main course, but the appetizer and dessert were phenomenal. this year, everything was really great.

ok, so my arancini were a little disappointing - good, but nothing special there. i could have done the same thing at home, happily. but other people's appetizers - especially josh's mushroom tart - were excellent, so i apparently just chose the wrong thing. i split an order of eggplant fries with v, curious to see what they'd be like. they were breaded well and fried perfectly - crusty on the outside and all mushily eggplanty on the inside, just the way i like eggplant. they came with a date-based ketchup that i didn't like, but the fries were good on their own. i could tell that the fries were slightly oversalted to counterbalance the sweetness of the dates, which is nice to see, but it didn't work in the end.

i really liked the main course. miriam had a fish (a firm white one...i forget which one) that was done lightly in butter and a broth of some kind, which was much more delicate than my pork, and quite nice (for really good seafood, or at least fish, i prefer sel de la terre). anyway, the pork. the tenderloin was done perfectly - i do love hunks of meat. the sausage was also good, if slightly unremarkable. the lardons were a little too meaty for me - i like my lardons fried to they're crisp and chewy, not left all canadian bacon-y. the sauce was this really fantastic mustard cream sauce, which was very mild and a perfect accompaniment to the meat. the most wonderful thing, though, was the potatoes - rarely have i had potatoes this good. i can't quite describe why their flavor was so good - suffice it to say that they tasted more potato-y than any other potatoes i've had for a while.

and dessert. well, friends, i basically chose this restaurant despite the fact that it didn't post its menu, because i knew the sticky toffee pudding would be on its dessert menu. i had it last year and it was absolutely transcendent: the best thing i'd had in a long, long time. a very long, long time. and it still is. it's basically a coarse pound cake steamed in caramel, so the whole thing is saturated with caramel, and the edges are slightly chewy with accumulated caramel. that thing is still transcendent. i can still taste it when i think about it, and think about it i do. i also tried miriam's dessert - a chocolate espresso torte - and i tell you that this is the place to go for dessert if that's what you're wanting. my god. i have never tasted such a silky chocolate torte (read: no flour) in my life. that thing is amazing. it's the best chocolate cake i've had in a restaurant (minus that chocolate confection at alinea), ever. and a bonus: i emailed the chef to see what kind of chocolate they use in the kitchen, since the server didn't know, and it's callebaut bittersweet - the kind i use. i felt somewhat justified in my love for callebaut for baking...

a note about going to caffe umbra: this restaurant, despite the great food, is EXTREMELY loud. so loud i wouldn't go there except later in the evening when people start to leave, or early when people haven't yet arrived. i've never set foot in a more poorly acoustically designed space; you literally have to yell to hear people who are two feet away from you. that said, i'd totally go back. just when it's not crowded.

pomodoro: 8/25, 7p.m.
24 harvard street / brookline ma / 617-566-4455 / 11am-11pm / reservations accepted (and recommended, by me) / cash only / entrees moderately expensive ($18-25)

appetizers: calamari, antipasto
main: pappardelle with fresh peas, foraged mushrooms, and rabbit in a cream sauce
dessert: creme brulee
cocktail: pear brandy alexander

we were originally supposed to go to la morra, but charles' parents got stuck in traffic, so we went to pomodoro instead. when my parents said "pomodoro" i got a vision of some hokey, plump times-based font with tomatoes in the place of the o's. when we arrived, i saw that it was actually a very nice-looking, hip-looking place. true to that impression, the clientele is a mix of older, cosmopolitan types (this place is in brookline; there's another location in the north end) and hip, young things.

this reservation was fortuitous, because this is the best italian restaurant i have ever been to. it has also vaulted to number 2 on my list of favorite restaurants in boston/cambridge, after craigie street and before pigalle, because of its affordability (dinner for 7 was $260 with a generous tip).

when you enter, you see a small bar that's in the middle of the restaurant. huh, unusual. if you're waiting they'll have you stand at the bar in this tiny restaurant, where people brush by you in order to get past. you know you're in a real restaurant when the people at the bar are eating, and not just drinking. true to this sentiment, when you wait at the bar, they bring you menus, napkins, water, and bread. let me talk about the water and the bread. the water is kept in tall glass carafes with lemons and mint - a lovely combination and fairly unusual for water. the bread is quite good - foccaccia and then some sort of cheese-covered lighter bread - and comes with a very excellent olive oil, and a pile of olives that have a slice of preserved lemon on them.

the main thing i like about this place - besides the decor, which is all dark browns and golds and is absolutely luxurious without being overly so - is that it's like you're welcomed by a family. not just any family - not the stereotypical tv-commercial italian family - but some cosmopolitan italian family that lives in milan or some other fabulous urban place. they brought us twice as much food, appetizer-wise, than we asked for, without charging us for more, which in retrospect was slightly too much, but made us feel very much loved. though having very little space is usually annoying, here it was only mildly so - everyone is shifting around for each other, but it's one of those things happening in the backgrounds - everyone is still focused on their conversations.

the appetizers were great - the calamari done just right, with the most flavorful (and red) tomato sauce i've had in quite a while. the antipasto were also great - traditional, with the almonds and such - and the bread is an appetizer in of itself.

the main courses were the star of the night, though. my pasta made "foraged mushrooms" an acceptable term on a restaurant menu. usually, when restaurants say this, they're just being trendy, but here they mean it. those mushrooms were simply the best i've had in this city. some chewy, some earthier than others...i felt like i was actually eating products of a forest. the peas were good, though i don't have a good enough palate to tell if they were truly wonderful, and the rabbit was done with care to ease of eating - it was shredded. not shredded too fine, nor left in chunks too large: it was perfect. though i have to admit that my palate also doesn't see much of a difference between rabbit and pork, except that rabbit is milder than a very porky tasting pork.

dessert, sadly, was a bit of a bomb. we had creme brulee (a trio) and again they brought us more - 7 instead of 3, one for each of us. but the creme brulee didn't have the silky quality it's supposed to have; instead it had the texture of a third-rate hotel school student's creme brulee, which is to say that silky it was not. it seemed to have curdled. however, eggs, cream and sugar are still a wonderful combination, and we ate away. oh, a quick note: pomodoro is cash only, so go to the atm before you get there.

chocolate lust.

oh. my. god. i try not to say those three words in that way, but i have just eaten a piece of the chocolate bar i bought yesterday, and it was absolutely divine. life-changing, even. i went to cardullo’s yesterday in hopes of buying my favorite chocolate bar (le noir extra amer, by valrhona) and i was really kind of upset when they…didn’t have it. i spend two months in a foreign country where “chocolate” only costs 30 cents a bar, but tastes like cardboard, and this is what i come back to? a barren wasteland of not-chocolate? so i disappointedly scanned the shelves of chocolate bars (there are three) for a seriously dark chocolate bar with nothing else in it. i lingered briefly at the dolfin gingembre frais bar, which has stuff in it, but that’s ok because it’s my second-favorite bar that cardullo’s carries. i'm pretty much a purist about eating chocolate: if it’s really dark, it better not have anything in it, and if it’s regularly dark, then i don’t like to eat an entire bar (over time, people, over time!) of chocolate with weird stuff in it. but this gingembre frais? better even than eating both chocolate no. 3 and ginger ice creams from tosci’s, at the same time. and god, that’s good. anyway, back to barren wasteland. so i scanned and scanned in desperation, and that’s when i saw the “theo” brand. in general i find fair trade chocolate to be of lesser quality. somehow the chocolate companies have not been in business long enough to know the finer aspects of how to make a really good chocolate bar, and a spiffy wrapper isn’t edible so it isn’t going to save it. but this bar, it has the most gorgeous wrapper i've ever seen on a chocolate bar: it’s like a painting from a period of art i can’t remember the name of (it looks like kandinsky or miro on crack, by with bright reds, blacks, and yellows). besides, the company is based in seattle. so i bought it. (it’s the “ivory coast” bar, 75% cacao, which is a bit low, but it does very nicely.) in my rather weak defense, i also bought one to send to jessica in her care package. and now i'm eating it, and now i'm happy.

review: the worst service of my life (silks)

alright, so i'm actually backdating this post, but this happened on the 13th, so the 13th the post will be dated. this is just a quick review of restaurant week at silks, which is the restaurant at the stonehedge inn in tyngsboro (tyngsboro?!). i have mixed feelings about silks.

the restaurant is basically a hunting lodge. a very nice one, but a hunting lodge nonetheless. it's what you expect the oak room to look like - i've never actually been to the oak room, but this is what i imagine: dark wood paneling, high ceilings, paintings of men with dogs and guns in the realist style.

so we were greeted by some guy with a really overdone french accent - he had a real french accent and was playing it up for the guests, i guess. well, buddy, i took french all throughout college and i don't appreciate your fakeness! ugh. so pretentious. i also hate it when the waitstaff assumes you're some peon who walked in off the street and doesn't know anything about food. they may not actually think this, but if that's how they make you feel, they're dirt in my book.

now in regards to the digs, they were really nice despite all the hunting lodge references. the chairs were nice and plushy, the napkins were this nice shade of gray, and were softer than any napkins i've ever had at a restaurant.

and in terms of food i had a duck confit with a frisee salad, citrus vinaigrette, and a few raspberries. really good - very simply done, and very well done. the confit was shredded and formed into little upside-down-muffin shapes. it was a bit hard to eat, but in the end it was fine, and the addition of the raspberry added a really nice acidic balance to the heavy duck fat-ness of the confit.

for the main course i had steak with um...i think it had some vegetables with it. the vegetables were unmemorable, but this was the first hunk of meat i'd had since china, where everything's bite size, and as such it was really fantastic. they messed up and gave my mother my steak - i ordered mine rare, she ordered hers medium, but i got the medium. it was fine in the end. the meat has great flavor, and a good amount of chew, and was really beautiful - seared on the outside, all red on the inside.

dessert was so-so. we all had the chocolate mousse, which was encased in puff pastry, with a pile of poached peaches on the side. the peaches tasted like canned peaches (and looked like them too), and weren't integrated into the dessert, so i don't know what that was about. anyone who has eaten cold puff pastry knows how gross it is - the desserts had been thawed too fast, so the layer of chocolate on top of the puff pastry was cracked, and the puff pastry was still pretty cold. the mousse inside was pretty good, though - nice consistency, but i don't really like milk chocolate mousse.

so now we get to my real gripe about this place. the service was the most awful service i have ever had in my life. we suffered from having too many different waitstaff - not too many waitstaff, but too many different waitstaff. they incorrectly gave us silverware for our appetizers, didn't notice when we switched, gave us the wrong appetizers. oops. they apologized. then it happened again for the main course. they even got the wineglasses wrong. now, this is just unacceptable. at such a nice (and expensive) restaurant this is a cardinal sin in my book. good thing we all got the same dessert, because they couldn't mess that up.

my general verdict is that the waitstaff is so inept and pretentious that the prevalence of french accents can't possibly make up for the poor service. unless you have millions of dollars and come draped in fur stoles, i would stay away from this place.

taking liberties with relish

it's just past midnight and i'm sitting down after spending the past six and a half hours running around the kitchen. i'm tired, but it's a good tired; i've ended the day having made a nice diagram in illustrator, fed five people an excellent dinner, and of course, since it's wednesday, i watched project runway.

lauren and i had planned on making dinner this week, and she left the menu up to me. this is an exciting fact because this is the first time i've actually planned a menu with days to spare - the past several days, i've just been picking stuff out at the supermarket. i'm not sure how i came up with the idea of a relish - and i use this term loosely - but it was probably the combination of two things: one, our current obsession with fresh corn; and two, the thought of pork chops and the first thick-cut pork chop i ever had. i don't remember how old i was - either in middle school or early high school - but my parents took my sister and i out to dinner with them and my dad's boss. we went to the vault, which is near government center and has since gone out of business. this was also the first nice restaurant i'd ever been to, with the whole crumb-scraping deal, dark colors and leather and wood. the pork chop i happily ate definitely had some kind of relish on it, where by relish - lauren and i discussed this - i mean something between a garnish and a salad. it's something full of diced things, and is probably kind of crunchy.

so now we come to my relish. well, i had decided on thick-cut pork chops (not on the bone - the supermarket didn't have exactly what i wanted), so for the relish, i thought we'd do corn, onions, tomatoes, squash, and thyme. for a starch we'd do more onions, some butter and thyme, and pasta, with a side of roasted broccoli (because this is the easiest way to cook broccoli). and for dessert, a chocolate cake with the rhubarb-ginger jam i'd made a couple days ago, and whipped cream. i thought about making a trifle, but it was too much work - the past week or so, i've been really exhausted from work for no reason. so i envisioned a chunk of cake, dolloped liberally with jam and then cream.

i didn't really have a set plan of how to go about making dinner, so i started with the cake. then i moved onto vegetables; we did the onions with the thyme, sauteed the zucchini until it was al dente, and tossed them together with raw corn, diced tomatoes (fresh, because diced tomatoes from a can are only useful for pasta sauce), salt and pepper. then i did the pork chops in the skillet, 9 minutes per side. in truth, i should have trimmed them so they were prettier and cooked more evenly, but i was tired at that point and just went with it. they did brown nicely, though, especially in the all-clad skillet (i knew there was a reason why i bought it besides pure vanity regarding its physical beauty), which made quite a nice gravy. i was, as i had said, feeling a little lazy so i just deglazed the pan with some port wine, added a little chicken stock, and then dumped in the leftover gravy from the pot pie we made a couple days ago. let me tell you, rubbing your pork chops with salt and pepper before you brown them makes a huge difference. that was a good sauce if i say so myself.

dessert ended up being a sundae type of affair, where i made a bunch of stuff and let people choose what they wanted. the chocolate cake was pretty good, if uninspired (i used richard sax's recipe, since i knew the man can't go wrong). to go with it, we had the rhubarb-ginger jam and whipped cream, but i also had bought some plums, so we macerated those in sugar and cointreau, and then i made some hot fudge. for someone who grew up on hershey's syrup and packaged hot fudge, real hot fudge - which is really easy to make - is a dream. a lovely, happy, sunny one. i had mine with everything but the plums, and it was quite good.

and now the kitchen is spotless, the trash has been taken out, and the dishwasher is running - i guess putting the oven on the clean cycle will have to wait until tomorrow. oh, before i go...i was looking at chocolate cake recipes online, and i found one for a "deconstructed black forest cake." well, dear readers, i heartily disapprove of deconstructed food. i mean, if i wanted to eat all of the components separately, i'd do that. but when i eat a black forest cake, i want to eat a black forest cake, not a chocolate cake with stuff on the side. honestly - would you want to eat a deconstructed sandwich? there's a logic to a layer cake like there's a logic to a sandwich - the point being the combination of things. someone put those flavors together because they're good together, as opposed to separately. hmph. i question the people who make "open-faced ravioli" - isn't the point of ravioli that it's this little pillow of pasta that encloses something good? yeah. presumably you might want to know what exactly is in your pasta or your layer cake, but that's what a cookbook is for.

western food + the labor of love

today carrie, v and i made a pot pie. we started with the thought of corn on zephyr, then headed to star after we got home from our respective workplaces, where corn blossomed into a summer pot pie. "summer pot pie," i know, is a vaguely odd phrase, since pot pies are hot and staying for wintertime, and it's...well, summer. we started with sausage: i browned whole sausages (sweet italian sausage, divested of the casing), then broke them up and browned those bits. a nice fond developed on the skillet (p.s. you cannot develop fond in a nonstick skillet. do not use nonstick skillets.) and i dumped the rendered grease in our second-best skillet, then browned the chicken in the fond-covered skillet. we had decided that the sausage fond might not turn into a full-bodied gravy on its own, so we added some chicken breast, though what chicken breast can do for fond is beyond me, since real chicken flavor comes from the dark meat or the bones. anyway, once the chicken was out, we added some onions and deglazed the pan with a little port wine, tossing the remaining onions into the other skillet to caramelize them a little for the pot pie. going back to the gravy pan: we added some water and the corn cobs for more flavor. carrie had gone to the supermarket for thyme and chicken stock, and when she got back we added some stock. after finishing the caramelized onions, we sauteed some zucchini, dumped it into a bowl with the meat and some sliced grape tomatoes, and used that pan to make a roux for the gravy. for once, i made the right amount of roux for the gravy, and didn't add too much flour for the volume of butter i had melted. however, i must be doing something wrong because my roux always cook really fast when i do them in a stainless steel (read: not nonstick) skillet, which makes it difficult to cook evenly.

so everything went into our rounded square (ha! square candies that look round...ok, i'll stop with the random references) pyrex dishes, and we topped them with pastry dough we'd made while prepping the other stuff. i made sure i seasoned them correctly - the one v and i did over the weekend was sadly unseasoned - and we popped them into the oven. and waited - for a long time! those thing took at least forty-five minutes before the pastry crust browned. they were, however, quite lovely, if i do say so myself.

and there you have it: food that's a labor of love. it occurred to me that chinese food is not a labor of love - the general philosophy of food is one of speed, production, technical prowess, eating the food, but not so much on enjoyment of the process of making food. the western philosophy is so different: people become chefs because they love feeding people, but when you work in a restaurant i imagine that you start realizing that the important thing is a love for the process of making food. think about the love that goes into a chicken broth, for example - no love, no broth. "labor of love" is a phrase i associate with thomas keller and the way he cooks, so in a way, i am channeling thomas keller when i cook. at least, i like to think of it that way...i like to think that food as a labor of love is also a rather flexible one, so that it changes as you change. so someone like grant achatz does a stage at the french laundry, but then moves on to do something fantastic that's all his own - but you can clearly see the thomas keller influence. it's so satisfying to see the world operate in the way it should.

really fabulous dishware

looking at my favorite food blogs, i'm starting to realize that half (ok, maybe a third) of having a successful food blog is having a really fabulous variety of dishware and silverware. porcelain, stoneware, metal, glass, different colors and shapes, and the like. i have my bowl collection, but it sits in the cabinets, loved only by pasta and ice cream; apparently i need to make better use of all of these things i have acquired. these are the times when i wish i had a couple of people to cook for every night, and then i could plate everything individually and it would be wonderful. i think the most successful dishware use i've had in the past year or so was the chocolate party celina and i had, where i got to break out all of my ramekins for the panna cotta, plus sundry tiny glasses that i own (like those fabulous amber glass ones that i bought for 25 cents at the mit furniture exchange). it reminds me of the times in high school when i would go to yard sales in concord with jessy and nicola, trolling for cheap glass in pretty colors that i could use in my pottery (for your information, crushed glass settled in the bottom of a piece of pottery destined for the glaze kiln melts into a crackled pattern). i've thought about yard sales a few times since i've moved to cutcat, but i don't really want cambridge yard sales - students' yard sales, young people's yard sales, containing random ikea furniture and other bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. i don't want another "lack" style table, i want cool random crap - something more readily available in yard sales in the wealthy suburbs. i dream of a kitchen full of mismatched yet beautiful dishware that holds the possibility of infinite permutations.

tonight v and i made dinner. i was feeling too lazy to go out to the supermarket (also, i had gone out a couple times already so i didn't want to spend more money, and i felt the need to be near my computer to at least feign doing work), so we worked with what i had in the fridge. and in the end, it was quite respectable. there is always a very specific type of satisfaction that comes from using up the leftovers in your fridge. i had some roast turkey that my mother had made and given me last week, along with some snow peas, grape tomatoes, and broccoli. then there were the staple onions, some shallots i found in a cupboard, and v's yen for biscuit (or starch of some kind). we decided on a casserole, so i sauteed the onions, then the shallots with the snow peas and tomatoes, then the broccoli, and tossed it all into a bowl. i thought some eggs might be nice, but instead of adding them raw, i scrambled them and tossed them in as well. we found some cheese in the fridge and grated that in, then baked it covered with the biscuit topping. it was actually rather like a patchwork pot pie, which is entirely wonderful when you're still subconsciously missing american food.

the cookies, before i forget, are actually pretty good the day after the flavors get to meld for a while. accordingly, here's the recipe:

white chocolate lime cookies with dried cherries
2 1/2c flour
2 sticks butter
1c sugar
1 egg
1/4t b. soda
1/4t b. powder
2T lime zest (zest of 3 limes)
2T lime juice (from one to two of the limes - really you could just use the zest and juice of two limes total)
1 1/2c white chocolate chips
1c dried tart cherries

1. cream the butter and beat in the sugar; mix well. add the egg and mix well, then mix in lime zest and juice.

2. add baking powder and soda, and then stir in the flour. stir in the chocolate chips and cherries. chill the dough for about an hour, until it stiffens up.

3. preheat the oven to 350. drop 1-2T sized balls of dough on a cookie sheet and flatten with your fingers. bake the cookies in the top third of the oven for 14-18 minutes, until they start to turn golden brown on top. for best results, rotate the pan halfway through.

[makes about 2 dozen large cookies.]

cookies don't exist in china

they don't! at least, the idea of a soft, chewy cookie seems to be a particularly american thing. i guess they'd be less attractive in china because they don't keep well - although cookies nowadays have so many preservatives in them that they would probably last longer than you would think.

while i was waiting around on my way back to the states, i did a lot of daydreaming about food, and what i would cook when i got back. and what i really wanted to have was a really nicely roasted chicken, with herb butter stuffed underneath the skin, which would be rubbed with salt and sugar to make it crackly (yes! a lesson successfully picked up from my mother!). i wanted to roast it, eat it with my roommates. then i would pull apart the chicken, eating the crackly, salty-sweet skin, putting the meat aside for soup. and then i would saute the bones in thyme, onions, and carrots, and then add water, and make a lovely soup. i used to not like soup, but i love chicken soup now because of all of the labor that goes into it - it somehow redeems it. and i've labored over these chicken soups: one time i made the broth, then caramelized two pounds of carrots, added the broth back, and boiled the flavor out of the carrots (the carrots, to those worried about waste, did not go straight to the trash: i tossed them in the blender with some pasta sauce, something i highly recommend). the last time i made the broth, we boiled it down until it was silky smooth and slightly unctuous - how could that not seduce the most finicky eater?

wait, this was about cookies. i was at work today when i decided i wanted to make cookies: chewy, soft, almost candy-like cookies. with stuff in them. carrie mentioned that we had limes, so off i went to star to grab things to put in them. what i really wanted was white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts (unoriginal, i know, but so good), but i couldn't find macadamia nuts, so i settled without them. i was consoled by the large amounts of ice cream on sale - if we have any rule at cutcat, it's that we always buy ice cream when it's on sale... when i got home, i neglected to see the eggs on the left side of the fridge, since we always put them on the right before i left for the summer. (seriously, everyone - when i got back to the kitchen everything was in disarray! this is what happens when the anal-retentive-around-the-kitchen person leaves! disaster and mayhem! well, worry not - in a few days it will all be lovely and organized again; i already bleached the sink.) so off i went to harvest - harvest and star are probably equidistant, but star is psychologically farther away because you have to cross mass ave to get there. i got some limes - carrie's had gone moldy - and headed off to get eggs when i was struck by a wonderful thought: cherries. dried cherries in bulk. so i got a pouch of dried cherries and was on my way.

i basically used a chocolate chip cookie recipe but added lime juice and lime zest. and...i have to say that i was a little disappointed. what i had a yen for was a seriously unhealthy cookie - so full of butter and sugar that it reached that candy-like cookie consistency. what i made was a nice cookie - it had great flavor, but lacked the correct texture. even the macadamia nuts would have made it better - and it could only have been macadamia nuts, because they're the only nuts of that kind (ie, not walnuts or pecans, which are too soft) that are soft enough for cookies but also remain somewhat crisp. accordingly, i can't help but be disappointed. all that anticipation, for nothing!

hell's kitchen

so for all of you who were disappointed by top chef - poor structure to the show (tom colicchio, mentor and judge? seems like a conflict of interest to me...), lame host (katie lee joel has the most uninterested monotone voice i've ever heard), lame contestants...where was the drama? apparently it all got sucked away by the contestants on "hell's kitchen." i was home on a monday night and was watching random tv, and saw that it was gordon ramsay's show. well, gordon ramsay is purportedly very abusive in the kitchen - blunt to the point of brutality. the premise of the show is basic: get through the challenges and you win your own restaurant in the vegas. and let me tell you, this is what we really want from reality tv: entertaining host, entertaining contestants. this is the show where all of the bitchiness comes out, and it's really fun to watch, since it's not happening to you. you want to slap people for the constant weeping, complaining, and crying, but you can't help but keep watching so you see when they manipulate each other and stab each other in the back. all the while, gordon ramsay is like a fountain of expletives - in my opinion, he does yell quite a lot, but it's really just like a very blunt review: to the point and intended to kick your butt into gear so you can be better. conclusion: you should watch hell's kitchen. it's on fox, mondays at..8? 9? something like that.

sloth

i know, i know, i haven't updated this in ages. but it's still alive! just give me some time to get used to having a kitchen again and i'll feed you more stories about food.

canning joy

so a few weeks ago i bought a bunch of weck canning jars. let's get down to business and state this right here: i bought them before they appeared in the new york times, which appears to have copied me (check the style section from last sunday). i, in turn, copied a food blogger in germany who was using her jelly jars for tiramisu. and it looked so good! (where "it" refers to the jelly jar, not the tiramisu.)

i saw the jars back in february, but kept holding off on buying them because it seemed like a frivolous expense. enter carly's wedding registry. i bought her a spice rack for her wedding, but i felt like it was impersonal (and is it me, or was there no place to enter a note that would get sent to her?!) and wanted to get her something else, too. i thought about a photo album but they were kind of out of my price range, so instead i went for preserves. so i'm going to mail her a card and a cute little jar of jam. it seemed appropriate since part of her family is from germany, but in reality i have no idea if she'll recognize the jars (which, in the US, are only available by mail order or telephone from a company in illinois, called glashaus. glashaus has two specialties: weck jars and glass bricks).

i also planned to give my mother four of the jars (i have eight), but then mother's day loomed large, and i panicked. then i remembered the jar scenario, and thought, well, it would be nicer if i gave her jars with something in them. so jam it was.

as i've never actually made jam by myself, i went with easy. i did a strawberry jam, a rhubarb-ginger jam, and an orange marmalade. as it turns out, i totally misread the recipe for the marmalade and accidentally got much less orange poundage than i needed, but i had sufficient fruit to make a surprisingly good marmalade that almost exactly fit the two jars i had set aside to contain it. by "good marmalade," i don't mean that it gelled correctly - gotta wait 'til it cools for that assessment. but the sugar balance was good, and the time spent shaving off all of the pith from the zest i cut off was well worth it, as it wasn't at all overpoweringly bitter.

i did use pectin in the strawberry jam. you can make your own pectin by boiling pith, but it's a long process and the pith is damn bitter. so i went the store route, and really, pectin looks like flaxseed goop. the color on the jam held well, but i don't know how the flavor will mature. i think i may have overdone the lemon balance - i added the recommended lemon juice, plus an entire quarter of preserved lemon, minced. oops. i thought i had enough fruit to balance the lemon, but i guess i'll taste it tomorrow and see. why is strawberry jam so testy? mine seems to be overly tart. the rhubarb-ginger combo is fantastic, though! mine might be just a touch sweet, but overall i think it's great. it's also probably the closest to jam consistency, though nothing has cooled completely yet.

usually when my mother makes jam, she uses old food jars that she's sterilized. this is high treason to the weck people. ah well. the weck canning process has glass jars (both jar and lid), a rubber ring that goes between the jar and lid, and little metal clamps that hold the lid down. the clamps go on after you fill the jar, and then you boil the jars, and then you can take the clamps off. it's an excellent setup. i guess you have to be careful with the lid after you open the jar, though, huh? i guess at that point, you can put the clamps back on.

tomorrow is my sister's bachelorette party, and we're having dinner at her friend's. each of us has been asked to bring a side. if i had planned it, i probably would have provided more direction for the sides, so they'd go with the main course, but whatever, it'll be fun anyway. i thought i'd make something vaguely healthy, so i'm making a green bean salad. sounds awful, doesn't it? it's a loose interpretation of a green bean salad that carrie made once that has a dill dressing and feta cheese. i don't really like feta cheese, so my salad will have green beans, red/yellow/orange peppers, a little cucumber for crunch, fresh mozzarella, basil, and a balsamic dressing of some kind. or maybe the orange muscat vinegar? i dunno. at any rate, i will eat it if no one else will.

ode to pork products

mmm...i could tell as soon as the wind started blowing that it was going to rain hard. as a result, i didn't go outside the entire day. instead, i worked on my thesis all day in my room, watching the rain come pelting down outside. however, carrien had to go to class, and she came back soaked and wanting soup for dinner.

the contents of our fridge, which really wants a washing: one emaciated, very....tanned carrot, one bag of carrots, celery, potatoes, a couple onions, broccoflower and broccoli. huh. you know what would make all of this work? chicken stock! or....bacon...

we'd done a potato-leek soup with bacon and rendered bacon fat a couple times back in the fall, but we decided to do a broccoflower bacon cream soup once keith consented to buy us bacon on his way home. anyway, this soup was pretty standard: render the fat from the bacon, pour some of it off, cook the onion/celery/carrot mixture, add diced potatoes and broccoflower, add some water, and boil. i do very much like to cook with rendered bacon fat, even though it's horrible for your heart. it makes everything taste so wonderful, and it's nice to know that you can use the fat for something. to add more bacon flavor, we steeped the cream in the bacon pieces (de-fatted), then stirred that into the soup after we'd pureed it.

for all of you out there wondering what to do with your weirdly bright green broccoflower, this soup is it. it doesn't require much in the way of ingredients except a bunch of vegetables, cream, and salt, and it's really fantastic. it got the roommate sticker of approval as the "best soup [he'd] ever eaten." also went well with the remaining four cheddar-black pepper scones i'd made last week.

and the red sox won 14-3.

*
by the way, we transplanted the petunia to a bigger pot, and it seems to be doing just fine in its new, roomier environs. doesn't seem to want to contain itself within the pot anymore than it did previously, though.

and a random rant: someone in an archinect.com thread said that he taught himself how to make a website before anyone else was teaching it, with the possible exception of cranbrook and mit. wait, seriously? who teaches web design here? (ok, i taught my students how to use dreamweaver, but it's not the same thing) we're a tech school, not an art school - thus we do things more along the line of inventing the programming language that makes it possible to make webpages. please. get your facts straight.

yessssssssssss

STEPHEN IS GONE. long live the happiness that is life without stephen.

dear lord, save me...

that is, save me from top chef, the show that has replaced project runway on bravo. maybe i am suffering from project runway withdrawal (i must say that i only enjoy the challenge episodes, and not the finale episodes)?

top chef is a horrible TV show. it has such characters on it that i forget to refer to them as real people. my list of complaints:

1. who thought up this idea of doing a project runway-like cooking show? part of the allure of project runway is being able to judge the designs for yourself. you may not be able to touch them in real life, but you can at least get a sense of what the thing looks like. food? i can list a lot of things that looked way better than they tasted. do i want to take the judges' word for the way things taste? no.

2. the host - katie lee joel - is awful. what about her is awful? her monotone voice. her inability to show interest in the show. she may be pretty to some people, but if she has any interest in food, we, the viewers, aren't feeling it.

3. the structuring of the show is wrong. tom colicchio is fine as a judge or a tim gunn character, but not as both. the two roles are a conflict of interest, so he has to forego being a support to the contestants in favor of being a judge.

4. why does one of the other judges look like katie lee joel? it's like those two characters on veronica mars: both blond, tallish, tanned, and almost indistinguishable from each other unless you watch the show faithfully and carefully.

5. it's much easier to be a top fashion designer than a top chef because the nature of the fashion industry is more about image. chefs are more about the food. sure, there are a lot of "chefs" out there selling themselves out for money (emeril comes to mind) but there are many more chefs doing good to sublime food. for those chefs, the focus is on the food, not becoming world-famous. did thomas keller set out to be a world-famous chef? well, i don't know, but i'm guessing not, judging by the integrity of the food at the french laundry.

6. stephen is an asshole. stephen is the most obnoxious person i have ever seen in my life. every single atom in my body hates him. i am thrilled when he gets taken down for his pretention and overly ambitious attempts to create a new kind of cuisine. i'm kind of glad he's experimenting, but he's lost his integrity and interest in good food along the way. now he's just one of those "weird-combinations-are-intellectual-and-trendy" people. there's a fine line, my man, between perfectly balanced and melodramatic theater.

7. the show's editing is horrible! the voiceovers that are done after the show has been filmed, the choppy video action where the picture switches between people so that you're not sure if what you're seeing was actually a part of the scene...i feel like i'm being manipulated (but in this case i gleefully submit to manipulation that makes stephen look like the asshole he is).

8. in fact, i don't like anybody on the show. so logically, if there's anyone i really, really hate, then i will watch it because of my morbid fascination with the person i hate.

however, despite this long list (i am probably forgetting other things i hate about this show), i watch it. i watch it like a crack addict. my propensity for watching this show matches my hate of the clock while i am erging. dear lord, how i hate this show.

but i watch it.

i watch it every week to see stephen taken down.

st paddy's day

though none of us are irish, 24 and 44 joined forces on friday night for a st patrick's day dinner party, i guess you could call it. mirms made colcannon, corned beef, and soda bread, and carrien and i brought beef stew and cupcakes. cupcakes, you say? ok, so they're not particularly irish, but when you consider the stout and bailey's that went into them, there's a less tenuous cultural connection there. they were kind of like those hostess cupcakes - the chocolate ones with white "stuff" inside (i don't like to speculate as to what that white paste actually is) - but, unlike hostess cupcakes, were actually good. i found a chocolate stout cake recipe on epicurious and then dug out a hunk from the middle of each cupcake, and filled them with whipped cream. whipped cream with bailey's in it, and gelatin to stabilize it, that is. the cupcakes were then frosted with a chocolate ganache, to which, because i deemed it slightly too bitter (it was bittersweet chocolate with a couple of ounces of unsweetened chocolate), i added a little bit of bailey's.

the cake turned out quite nicely, for a cake with only cocoa in it for the chocolate component. it was a little less sweet than i would have liked, but it was pretty good. in general, i prefer chocolate cakes with both cocoa and chocolate in them, so in that sense this was a bit of disappointment. i can always taste when a chocolate cake is made with oil, because the crumb is really moist, or when it's made with cocoa - it just lacks a little bit of the richness that chocolate would give it. it's also quite possible that it's due to the kind of cocoa i used. usually i would use valrhona, but i was almost out so most of the cocoa was hershey's. any cocoa that's not dark brown is suspect, in my book, and hershey's is a nice, light reddish brown. hmph.

i find that whipped cream, when it's stabilized with gelatin, does really well as a filling. it kind of departs from the whipped cream we know and love because of what the gelatin does to it; it's not quite whipped cream, yet it's not quite custard either. it has the flavor of whipped cream, but it's somewhere between whipped cream and custard with respect to consistency. entirely pleasing to eat, because it feels like you're squishing the air out of it when you eat it.

the ganache was quite good - a pound of chocolate and two cups of cream. we were in a hurry, so of course it seemed like it took forever to thicken. in reality, it was about forty-five minutes before i threw in the towel and stuck it in the fridge to set a little bit. these cupcakes proved that i still have much to learn in the realm of ganache-making, because the first cupcake's ganache was too runny, and the last cupcake's ganache was too solid. the cupcakes, assembled on a cookie sheet, reminded me of the time i made flan for the house. i had caramelized the sugar and was pouring it into the ramekins, and each ramekin had a darker shade of sugar syrup than the one before it. i think i must just be too slow. ah well, they tasted good, anyway. there was no time to do the ganache well, so we went for "artistically messy" instead. we garnished them with white and green nonpareils that carrien and lauren picked out of a package of vegan nonpareils that i had bought at harvest.

there was so much extra cake that we almost didn't know what to do with it. oh, of course, we planned to eat it (don't know why i just got a vision of izma-the-cat: "i'm not going to drop it! i'm going to drrrrrink it!"). it was just a matter of how we were going to eat it. as we had both extra ganache and extra whipped cream, i made a trifle out of part of one extra cake (we had 24 cupcakes and 2 loaf pans' worth of cake). hmm. still one and a half loaf pans left. so i made some layer-cake-with-ganache-in-a-bowl for lauren to take with her. hmmm. still one loaf pan left. and that's where we are now. we're trifle-less, having finished it yesterday, but we still have one cake left.

* * *
yesterday carrien and i made lasagna, following a desire triggered by far-too-sexy images of lasagna on the homepage of epicurious (damn you, epicurious!). as we are wont to do, we made a hybrid of various recipes: lasagna with eggplant, a meat sauce with cinnamon in it (from a recipe for lamb lasagna), and a white sauce (minus the feta cheese). it was quite good, although i think i prefer it without the eggplant. we broiled the eggplant before putting it in, but it still didn't absorb as much liquid as i like it to, so accordingly it wasn't as soft (translation: mushy) as i like it to be. however, it was still excellent. i think i would also not brown the meat before adding it to the sauce. it might provide better browned-meat flavor, but i would take softer meat over the flavor boost. also, seeing the threads of meat (the threads created by grinding the meat) is just gross. perhaps if we had added some milk to the meat while cooking it? guess i won't know 'til the next time we make lasagna. anyway, the addition of the white sauce is nice - kind of a replacement for the cheese - but i think it makes the whole thing a bit rich. it does have a nicer texture than ricotta cheese, though...