Category: minutiae

Hee. I’m watching Sara Moulton cook with Gordon Hamersley, and she’s just so wee. He looks like a giant in her kitchen (which I have read was specially constructed for her petiteness).

So they’re doing something with artichokes, and I have to ask, is it dangerous to eat the choke? Because I used to. All the time. When I was in college, we were pretty close to artichoke country, so when spring rolled around, you could get them really cheap. I hated halting my eating of them in order to scoop out the choke, so I just ate it. It was a little bitter, that’s all. I didn’t really run into the problem that gave the choke its name.

Pardon me while I become a gibbering fangirl.

Next Saturday! Alton Brown! At the Stanford Shopping Center! It’s part of the Simon Super Chefs tour! Oh my god, I’m SOOO there. Thank you, KCBS (my morning radio station), for having a commercial, or I never would have heard about it.

Copy from the website:

Simon Super Chefs Live! invites local food fans to a free day-long in-mall celebration of food, cooking, wine and shopping. Get up close and personal with some of today’s most popular TV Celebrity Chefs, including: Lidia Bastianich, Michelle Bernstein, Alton Brown, Mary Ann Esposito, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pepin, Martin Yan and more.

Eeee! It’s listed under San Francisco for some reason, but whatever. We get Alton! Whee! One grumble- the announcer on the radio spot pronounced Alton’s name wrong. It’s a hard “A,” people. I asked AB about that when he signed my book last year.

So who wants to come with me?

Yesterday, Ryan hosted an AV Fest, during which we covered Ikea lamps with filmstrips and watched Mental Hygiene short films. There was a great deal of food, and some of that was made by me.

I made basil leaves stuffed with goat cheese, pork wrappers, chicken liver mousse, potato cheese sticks, salsa, roasted garlic and caramelized onion dip, and basil lime spritzers. Jon made guacamole, and Ryan made scones and mojitos (as well as cutting up the veggies served with the garlic-onion dip).

We do like going overboard with the foodstuffs. Jon’s guac, as always, was superlative. The scones Ryan made were fantastic- she has these wonderful dried cherries from Michigan, and she incorporated them into the dough. I don’t know how good I’d be at making scones. They require a quick hand, and I tend to dawdle over things. Well, I guess biscuits demand alacrity. Maybe I’ll try the scones in the near future. Man, were they good.

Julia Child’s chicken liver mousse is amazing. Totally kicks my recipe’s ass. Adding an entire stick of butter and some cream really does wonders.

The garlic-onion dip was… okay. It tasted weird with the carrots, but with more bitter vegetables, it was good. I should have thought better than to have the sweetness of both the caramelized onions and the roasted garlic.

The potato cheese sticks didn’t really turn out right. The mixture tasted fine- maybe a little overbeaten, but fine. (I don’t own a ricer, so I kind of mashed up the potatoes with a fork. Clearly, this was not going to yield the same results.) I could not get them through the pastry tube at all. I ended up shaping them into little patties and baking them. They tasted pretty good right out of the oven, but I had made them the night before, and these were an item that needed to be served fairly soon after baking.

The basil-lime spritzer was kind of a surprise. I’ve wanted to make it for a while now. I have a binder full of clipped magazine recipes, and the recipe for the syrup was in the middle of the first page. Whenever I went in there to find something, it taunted me. Really, it’s not very hard to make, and it’s really quite refreshing. Ryan had some lime-mint-sugar mix left over from the mojitos yesterday, and so I went over today and made some more. I made a few changes- added some lemon zest to the first step, and included some mint with the basil during the blender step. It was kind of a “why the hell not?” thing to make, and I was glad it turned out so well.

Yes, I made the pork wrappers for people. And they liked them. Jon even made a little dipping sauce with soy and rice wine vinegar. Seriously, every time I make them, I’m just going to feel dirty. Sandra Lee made a sauce with Cheez Whiz on Semi-Homemade yesterday. CHEEZ WHIZ, people. I fear for our nation’s digestive systems.

Bouchées Parmentier au Fromage

Potato Cheese Sticks

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

1/2 lb. baking potatoes (2 medium potatoes)

1 cup sifted AP flour

1 stick softened butter

1 egg

1 cup grated Swiss cheese

1/8 tsp white pepper

Pinch of nutmeg

Pinch of cayenne pepper

Salt, to taste

Peel and quarter the potatoes. Boil in salted water until tender. Drain, then put through a ricer. You should have about 1 cup.

Stir the potatoes over moderate heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan for 2-3 minutes until they form a light film on the bottom of the pan, indicating most of their moisture has been evaporated.

Beat the flour into the potatoes, then the butter by fractions, then the egg, cheese, and seasonings. Taste and adjust seasoning.

Preheat oven to 425. Either butter 2 baking sheets or cover them with parchment paper.

With a fluted pastry tube 1/4 inch in diameter, squeeze the mixture into 2 1/2-inch lngths spaced 1/2-inch apart onto the baking sheets. Bake both sheets at the same time for about 15 minutes, or until the sticks are lightly browned.

Roasted Garlic and Caramelized Onion Dip

Olive oil

1 head of garlic

1 Tbsp butter

3 cups chopped onion (about 2 medium onions)

3 Tbsp sour cream

2 Tbsp cream cheese

3 Tbsp mayonnaise

1/4 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat the oven to 350. Cut the top off the head of garlic, place in a baking dish, and drizzle with olive oil. Bake for an hour. Squeeze the garlic from the cloves, mash with a fork, and set aside.

Meanwhile, heat a large skillet over medium-low heat and add the butter. After it melts, add the onions and some salt and cook slowly for about 20 minutes, covered, stirring occasionally. Unocver and turn the heat up to medium high. Cook the onions until golden brown, stirring quite frequently. Remove from heat and cool.

Combine the sour cream and cream cheese, stirring well. Add the mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, and cayenne. Mix to combine, then add the garlic and onions. Stir, then cover and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

Basil Lime Spritzer

Food and Wine Magazine

3/4 cup sugar

Zest of 1 lime, removed in strips with a vegetable peeler

1/2 cup fresh lime juice (2-3 limes)

1/4 cup water

1 cup loosely packed fresh basil

Bring sugar, zest, juice, and water to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let syrup stand, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

Discard zest and pour syrup into a blender. Add basil and blend for 20 seconds. Pour through a fine sieve lined with a rinsed and squeezed paper towel unto a bowl or measuring cup, then cool. The syrup will keep for 2-3 days, covered and chilled.

Pour 1-2 tablespoons into an ice-filled glass, top off with sparkling water, stir, and enjoy. Very refreshing.

Below is the cookie recipe from The Joy of Cooking. The changes I made were that I did not chop the raisins, I toasted the oats a little in the oven while I was getting the rest of the recipe together, and I used a spoon to smush the cookies instead of my hands. I think I also used a smaller drop size, because I got 48 cookies out of the recipe as opposed to the 42 it indicated. Also, the thing about parchment paper was me. I find greasing the cookie sheet to be overkill. Plus, with parchment paper, cleanup is much easier.

The salsa that I made the other day was Number 5 with more chiles. I watched the broiler more carefully this time and pulled them before they became spicy nails. However, with some of the smaller chiles, I will probably add them raw next time. It was too difficult to separate the skin and seed them and have anything less. They were quite small. With the extra chiles, the salsa was much hotter (duh). Still very tasty. After cooling, I found that it needed and extra shot of lemon juice and salt.

The hummus, as I explained in my comment below, was not good. It saddened me, because it was Alton Brown’s recipe, and while I have the utmost respect for the guy and adore his shows to bits, his recipes always seem to fail for me. Well, not always. 50/50. I’m not going to crib the recipe from the Food Network site, but here’s a link. It had far too much lemon (I would suggest using just the juice, not both the juice and the zest) and was lacking in spice/spicyness. I tried to improve the situation by adding some cumin and Tabasco, but it didn’t really work. Also, the final product was very, very loose. I do like a looser hummus for popcorn-dipping, but this was going a wee bit too far. I’d cut back on the oil or the reserved garbanzo liquid.

I should review recipes over at Food Network, but… it doesn’t seem right, a positive review for a Sandra Lee recipe and a negative one for AB. (I made the Pork Wrappers again to finish up the wonton wrappers before they expired, and they are actually kind of tasty. Bad Sarah! Bad!)

D&D Update

We were able to raise our cleric from the dead, so yay. My armor lost its magical bonus to protect me, so boo, but I was only going to keep it until I reached next level (trying to be optimistic). My armor class has been knocked down by two points, and I’m going to lose money on its trade-in value. My belt of displacement totally proved its worth tonight. I think I missed out on some major hurting because of that.

We ran away from a dreadnought, killed a crapload of umber hulks, discovered our gnome NPC companions were actually good metallic dragons, and failed to kill a nightwight (but we did manage to kill a creature it summoned).

We’re not meeting next week. Sadness.