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]
30 août 2006
29 août 2006
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.
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.
22 août 2006
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 “13 août 2006
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.
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.
09 août 2006
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.
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.
07 août 2006
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.
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.
05 août 2006
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.]
04 août 2006
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!
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!
03 août 2006
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.
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