Saveur 150 Recipes Part II

I've been working my way through a goodly number of Saveur's 150 recipes, but I've sort of hit a block.  A lot of the recipes that remain are either so complicated that it would be a major operation to attempt them, or just don't sound good.  Canh Chua Ca is sour fish soup.  Uh... yum?  I think?

So here's my rating system:
*  = partial or complete failure
** = decent success but not a keeper
*** = make again! Add to repertoire! Gem to be cherished!

Here are notes on a few I've tried:

#88. Shepherd's Pie ***

I was excited about this recipe because I love Shepherd's Pie and I didn't have an authentic recipe.  This was delicious, if preparing it did make a disaster out of my kitchen.  I had a difficult time finding the right cut of lamb, so I used beef instead.  For this first try I went with a chuck roast because low-quality meat can totally ruin a dish.  But I might try stewing beef next time, mainly because it would mean less prep time; cutting up the raw roast was a chore.  Also, the wine flavor was a bit overwhelming; next time I'll try white wine, and perhaps some balsamic vinegar.  Finally, it was all a bit runny on the first serving, which I have mixed feelings about.  It was good because it meant that the leftovers weren't dried out, and were actually better than the original.  Still, if you want to impress on the first serving, perhaps consider adding a little flour to the meat and sauce layer.

Speaking of low-quality meats, I have learned my lesson with chicken.  If you are too poor to buy a decent cut of chicken, then things have come to a pretty pass (hint: I'm not too poor, I was just cutting a corner where corners weren't meant to be cut).  I was anxious about how much #48. Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic (**) was going to cost with an 8-dollar bottle of vermouth, so I went for chicken thighs, forgetting, of course, that I hate fat and dark meat.  Dumb.  Ironically, I thought the flavor of this dish was remarkably light.  The garlic is quite thoroughly cooked, so it's not overwhelming, and the vermouth, when combined with the other elements is a bit tart, but mostly light.  Still, it wasn't my favorite roast chicken recipe and I probably won't make it again. 

#24. Rosti (Swiss Hash Browns) ***- 

Stuck potatoes. >_<

Okay, so it was a bit of a strugglebus with the Rosti, mainly because of potato stickage.  I know, of course, that potatoes stick to pans.  But I forgot so I wasn't appropriately prepared to do battle for several hours with my potatoes (lucky I had the night off!).  Part of my problem is that I don't actually own a non-stick pan.  The other problem is that I didn't properly pat my potatoes dry before thrusting them into the fray.  And my pan was too hot.  Cue REALLY STUCK POTATOES.  The result was much, much more greasy than it ought to have been as I lathered on copious amounts of butter and Pam in an attempt to salvage the situation.  So word to the wise: be ready, because your potatoes will be.  Still, this recipe did some good.  I'm glad, at last, to know the trick behind white hash browns of any sort--boil them first.  Of course I also have a secret fear of undercooked potatoes, so I boiled mine a bit too much and they didn't hold their shape as well as they might have in the grating process.  Next time I might even hazard taking them out before they are completely done and let them finish cooking in the frying pan (gasp!)

#38. Biscuits with Sawmill Gravy ***!

Now for a Rousing Success!  Okay, so Nearly Rousing.  I love biscuits and gravy.  They were the only dish my undergraduate dining hall made well and and I ate them.  Often.  This recipe was quite good--I loved the gravy, which was so much more than just fat and cream.  It had a touch of bite, a touch of tart--mmm, and a healthy (or unhealthy) amount of bacon and sausage.  The biscuts were promising, but I didn't quite pull them off.  The secret to really good biscuts and gravy is fluffy biscuts with a crispy, beautifully golden exterior.  This recipe directs you to brush said biscuits in butter before baking (genius!), but unfortunately they burned on the bottom.  I'm thinking it's a) my pan or b) my oven.  I tried putting a cookie sheet under the pan but it didn't improve results--my guess is that the metal still conducts heat very well, especially when in direct contact.  So next time I'll try a pan underneath on a different lower rack.  I think that might do the trick. 

#20. Kasha Varnishkes ***

Yum!  It's a bit of a carb-bomb, but it's very economical to make (grains usually are).  Certified boyfriend approved.  But I have issues with the recipe.  First of all, it was very inconvenient the order they have you do everything in.  I would much prefer to put on my onions (which have to caramelize over a period of 40 minutes) on first so they could be doing that while the kasha toasted and the pasta cooked.  Duh.  I can think of no good reason why you would do it in another order.  Then you wouldn't have to reheat everything at the end because it would be freshly made simultaneously.  The recipe doesn't actually stipulate an order, but if you're like me, you start at the beginning of the recipe and work your way through it.  Also I think the amount of oil can be reduced.  I stuck to the recipe this time to just try it, but I would venture to try even 1/2 a cup of oil next time.  That oil ruins the otherwise healthy aspects of this dish.

Onions caramelizing in 1 CUP of oil. 

Justifying Feminism

Thanks to women from centuries past, I don't have to fight for the vote or for the right to work a certain job.  That used to be the fight, in some places it still is.  But there is one battle I see regularly, and it is a catty one.  The women I see around me spend more time justifying their decisions to each other than they do to any cultural ideal or any man.  The husbands and fathers of these women pretty much sit back and watch the whole conversation take place, prepared to support the one they love once the smoke has cleared.

Ladies, why are we at each other's throats?

I'm pretty sure my mother dealt with this most of her life.  She gave up a medical career to raise five children at home, a decision she has had to justify over and over ever since she made it.  Another mother was criticized for not giving up her career and letting her husband (shocking!) take up some of the responsibility for caring for their children.  After my job this summer didn't work out, I chose to move to a place where I had friends and loved ones, rather than to a place where I could necessarily find a high-paying, career-building job.  I've felt like I need to justify that choice ever since I made it.  I've detailed on this blog the sorts of things that keep me busy: domestic pursuits, usually.  I feel the need to justify these as well, since they are not academic, artistic, or career-oriented.

We just need to stop.  Stop judging each other.  Stop assuming that what works for your family will work for every family.  Stop assuming that all men are the same, and that all women want the same things or should want the same things.  I know that it's not popular in conservative circles to say, "What right for me isn't right for everyone."  I'm not speaking here of morality or ethics.  It's not criminal to serve society and your family by being a worker and a breadwinner any more than it is to stay at home and nurture your family.  If we stop attacking each other, perhaps we would feel less on the defensive, more free to make the choices that we and our families need.

Tobogganing!

HAPPY MONDAY!

It's been a frigid week here in these parts, but we were undaunted: we went tobogganing.  You know, that sledding-like stuff you see on the winter olympics?  It began with a bowl of chili made in my crock pot (more on this later), massive bundling (over bundling, really), a car ride through the snow, and then flying down icy slopes.

The worst part was lugging a six-odd pound sled back up the hill.

Say Yes to the Dress

Sooo... everything is wrong with this dress. 

I would have taken a picture with it on, but my normal camera isn't working and you can't take a full-length self-portrait with an iphone.  Yes, the dress is missing a sleeve.  That's not the problem.  I got to this point and was so disappointed with the result that I just stopped working on it.   

What's wrong?  It's too small, too see-through, too long, and too dowdy.  The high neckline does not cut a nice shape; the white fabric shows EVERYTHING underneath, even nude foundations.  The zipper is not long enough so it was very difficult to get into.  And the waist is undefined.  Not to mention that it was too large in the bust.  Basically, a mess. 

It's fun to make my own clothes, but sometimes it doesn't go too well, mostly because you can't try it on until it's done.  So you don't know if the fabric will bunch there or snag here or if the blue and the white will go together properly.  You're not sure if the shape of the dress will flatter your figure or a hundred other considerations.

This dress had much promise.  In my head it was gorgeous, but on... not so much.   I wasn't going to give up on it, but I was daunted by the amount of work it would take to fix it so I put it away for nearly a year.  Until now.  Until this day.  I need dramatic movie music...

The Plan.

Here's my plan.  I'm going to replace the white lining which is too see-through with a solid satin dark blue lining.  I entertained the idea of completely altering the neckline, but now I think I'll drop the neckline of the lining and let the white sheer fabric cover the collarbone.  I'll drop the neckline in back as well to situate the zipper farther down.  I'll shorten the skirt to make it more youthful and add a blue satin belt.  I'll take it in at the bust for a better fit.  The sheer fabric I will edge with blue satin.

Now you understand why I put all this work off for a year...

Step one: cut the dress out (again!) in blue satin
Step two: dissassemble the dress... completely.  Each piece of sheer fabric is basted to the lining before being sewn together, by the way.  This took about an hour and a half.
Step three: sew the lining back to the sheer fabric and reassemble the dress.

Here are a few photos of my progress.

Blue satin underdress is being cut out.
I modified the two pieces you see at the top
for a dropped neckline. 

The skirt detached from the dress,
but with the new underskirt. 

I ended up dropping the neckline of the blue fabric a bit

more after trying these pieces on,

but here's an early stage. 

The almost finished dress!  It looks pretty much like I wanted.  I haven't shortened and evened out the skirt yet, mostly because I don't know how long I want it to be.  What do you think? Current length, which is more mature, or shorter?  Originally I wanted shorter because the original dress was too matronly.  But I think the adjustments to the top of the dress made enough of a difference that I'm now leaning towards the longer length.  

Almost done!

Cheese Puffs, Soup, and Disaster

Cheese Puffs!  Seriously, who could resist THAT? 

DOWNTON ABBEY DRAMA!


It's okay, I'm okay, but it's just marvelous/tragic.

Back to food.

Sometimes it's easy for cooks to get in a rut--to cook with the same spices, the same basic ingredients, the same cuisine over and over.  So I try to be adventurous.  I try to cook recipes I don't necessarily have faith in immediately.  One way to do this is to pick at random a selection of recipes and vow to make them all.

I vowed such about Saveur's 150 Classic Recipes, which leads me to this post:

In Which I Ambitiously Decided to try three new recipes in one day--nay, in one meal.  #18: Cream of Tomato Soup; #22: Cheese Puffs, and #27: Caesar Salad.

The boyfriend was not pleased.  Well, he wasn't pleased by the Disaster (#27) but then, neither was I.  I should have known.  Anchovies and raw egg don't exactly spell: P-R-O-M-I-S-E.  I was determined to see it through.  The boyfriend was brave.

Anchovies: Eww... Also a stray seed
from the lemon....

It didn't begin in a terribly promising way.  I opened the first   can of anchovies while the boyfriend watched, "I don't know, Brenda, that smells pretty bad."  It did.  I had never had Anchovies before and they are I salty.  They were roughly chopped and meant to be broken down farther by whisking.  I couldn't get them to break down, which may have been part of the problem with the eventual salad.  The dressing flavors overall were just too strong.  I ate a whole bowl, and the remainder was foisted off on a luckless neighbor who made the mistake of saying he liked anchovies in my hearing.

Yuck.

Okay, undaunted: the cheese puffs were a success.  Looking at the pictures, I was very intimidated--these things puff.  They must be difficult.  The wonderful thing is that they were not.  If you love gruyere cheese, this is an excellent use of it.  I think I may, boringly, and like an American, prefer cheddar.  We shall see next time I try it.  The instruction to cook the doughy mixture until crusty was a little intimidating, and I don't think I ever saw any actual crustiness.  I assumed that step was to serve two purposes: to reduce the liquid slightly, and to work the dough for elastcity and smoothness.  I probably cooked it a minute or two.

I'm also on the hunt for the perfect match for these cheese puffs.  I think they would be quite yummy dipped in marinara sauce, but what do you think?

Melt butter and heat with water and milk.

Add flour and cook until it forms a dough. 

About to go in the oven. 

Freshly baked cheese puffs!

The Cream of Tomato was successful enough, but not my favorite.  As one of my victims said, it tasted just like vodka sauce, just not as thick and without the vodka.  I grew up on Campbell's condensed tomato soup, and I begin to wonder if there is as much merit as I would like to think in making it fresh.  I disliked the meat flavor brought on by the bacon, and I thought the soup overall had an odd texture.  So I have yet to find a definitive Cream of Tomato Soup recipe.

Three new recipes in one sitting is perhaps too much, even for me.  Also, it was expensive.

That was that.

I tried one more recipe from this list this weekend, to general acclaim:  Mostarda di Frutta.  It was much more successful than I thought it would be, and wonderfully easy to make! Those of you who asked for the recipe, here it is!

A few notes:  I served this with Wheat Thins, over cream cheese to balance the tart/spicy taste of the preserves.  I also chopped the fruit up a bit more to make it easier to scoop up onto a chip or a cracker.  I followed the recipe exactly, but next time I make it I would like to experiment with cutting back on the amount of sugar--1 1/2 cups is a lot of sugar, even for a dessert--and this isn't a dessert!  I think it could also stand to be spicier--I don't know if it's my cayenne, but it didn't seem spicy at all.

  

The Value of an Excellent Cookbook

At one point in my life I thought that the need for cookbooks was slowly disappearing.  With recipes.com and now pinterest, I thought, who needs a cookbook?  You can instantly look up how to make something online, for free!  Fabulous recipes and ideas abound!

How wrong I was!  If you believe this, dear reader, and are anything of a cook, I am warning you now: don't fall for it!  So some of my best recipes come from the internet, some of which now I consider top secret (a little silly, as they come from the least secretive place you can imagine).  But 90% of recipes I have tried from who-knows-where on the internet have been flops.  Usually some critical detail about how to cook the item in question was left out.

Cooking is not so much an art as it is a trade, learned through apprenticeship.  As few of us can afford cooking school, at least all the time, we must apprentice ourselves--to our recipes, but more especially, to our cookbooks.  There are all kinds of definative cookbooks that have been honed for the last fifty to a hundred years--my cookbook of choice is Joy of Cooking, mostly because of one my editions of it was given to my mother as a wedding gift.  Yes, one of my editions.  The recipes are different in each one.  It's almost as if you can witness the evolution of eating in America, right before your eyes.


In the 1950's, there was a limited, seasonal larder, and most women cooked, learning how from their mothers.  In the 1970's, the larder was still seasonal, but less so, and extensive instructions on everything from how to carve a turkey to how to set a table are included.  By 1997, the cuisine has radically expanded, now with a section that features food from around the world, and a cuisine that presupposes access to a modern supermarket and fresh food all year.

One thing that Joy of Cooking is sadly lacking is recipes for my slow cooker, which is proving tricky for my Crock Pot on Trial project.  But yesterday as I was picking up parchment paper for my cheese puffs (they were quite delicious, thank you), a special edition of Cook's Illustrated caught my eye: best recipes from Slow Cooker Revolution!  I know a home chef (a quite excellent one) who aquires her new recipes by going to Barnes and Noble, perusing the cookbooks, and then copying down the recipes she wants to try.  I'm sure she's not completely aware that it's illegal (I didn't bother to tell her), but her logic is simple: you might get two or three recipes that are good out of a great big cookbook, but that's all.  I think it greatly depends upon the sort of cookbook in question (for full details, read up a paragraph or two).  Anyway, the point is--get it while it's hot.  If you'd like to have a slow-cooker cookbook, run out and get this magazine.  It's not huge, but it's inexpensive and I have it on good authority that it's a good buy.



It may be the oldest trick in the book, but I wanted to share one of my favorite tricks: bringing lettuce back to crispy life by immersing it in cold water in the refrigerator.

Viola! Crispy lettuce!

That's all. Up ahead: Cheese Puffs! And culinary disasters!

Travels and French Onion Soup

I return from frolicke, from merrymente, from traveles.  

Texas, NJ, New York, and Philadelphia: in pictures.

The Six Flags of Texas: Spain, France, Mexico,
Texas, Confederacy, and US.

Texas capital dome.  Ain't it purty?

Us in the capital.
Yes, my sweetheart is the cutest boy alive.

NYC! And colors!!

Times Square.
We got to 57th st but couldn't get closer.

In Philadelphia I got this flight of beers to go with my cheesesteak.  Yum!

I must admit I was glad to get home, even though I jumped off the plane and went straight to work, with my suitcase in tow.  I hitched a ride home to an apartment full of mold cultures (ew!) and a car with a flat tire and a flat spare.  But I'm so glad to have a kitchen again.  There's something comforting and also powerful about one's own kitchen.

Nothing I had previously made that was not in the freezer was fit to eat, so I attacked the onions before they could become mold cultures too.   French Onion Soup is the feast of peasants, and that's what I am, basically, these days.  It transforms lowly onions into a culinary masterpiece, through a slow and painstaking process.

How did I achieve such beautifully sliced onions for my soup?  All I can say is I love my mandoline.

I'm on a mission to create superior French Onion Soup.  It's not an easy recipe to master, and it requires a great deal of patience, which I don't exactly possess in great abundance.  The trick is to make a soup that is not overpoweringly strong but also not weak and watery.   French Onion Soup should have body and a slight bite, but "overpowering" can only be the most accurate way to describe many soups I have had, at Panera, for example. 

 One of the most important details of French Onion Soup (beyond the important browning process), is the beef broth.  I don't make beef broth from scratch (as of yet, anyway), and in an effort to economize, I decided not to go with Swanson's.

Which left that powdery stuff.  And the other stuff.  On the left is little tubs of goo (animal fat and flavoring, presumably), and on the right, granulated broth, which I have used many times and grew up consuming.


In theory the homestyle stock ought to be superior, but, of course, I wanted to test it.  It's a bit more expensive, for one thing.  One of the benefits of the powdered stock is that it's easy to dole out as much as you need, whereas the tubs make 3 1/2 cups of broth at a time. Which can be annoying if you need, say, four cups.  The benefits of Homestyle Stock is that it contains almost half as much salt.  Powdered stock contains a whopping 1040 mg of sodium per serving. That's 43% of your daily allowance, and I dunno about you, but one cup of French Onion Soup is not nearly enough.  Homestyle Stock has 700 mg--still a lot, but not quite as devastating.

So I tried it.  The homestyle stock has the smoothness that comes from having a stock with some fat in it.  Overall it has a gentler flavor, a very useful medium for the other flavors of the soup.

Granulated broth was salty.  Tasted side-by-side with the other almost all I could taste was the salt, which leads me to believe it's a pretty major rip-off.  It's mostly salt!

I modified this recipe mostly by accident;  I was in the middle of making it when I realized I didn't have wine, so I put the beer in instead.  Then the boyfriend dropped by with white wine, so I threw that in too.  The result was remarkably yummy, so I kept it. 

FRENCH ONION SOUP

1 TBS butter

1 TBS light olive oil

4 large onions, thinly sliced (don't use sweet onions--they are too mild)

2-5 garlic cloves, pressed

1 tsp dried thyme

2 TBS flour

1/2 c dry white wine

1 c stout beer

Heat the butter and oil over medium heat; add the onions and cook, stirring frequently, until they are soft and just beginning to brown. Add the garlic, sugar, and thyme and continue cooking for 30 to 35 minutes, until onions are browned and soft.

Sprinkle the flour over the onion mixture and stir until incorporated. Add wine, beer, and stock and bring to a boil. Skim off any surface residue and simmer for 45 minutes. 

Serve with garlic bread or cheese toast. 

So those pears crossed with apples? Whatever they are called? Papples? They have the sweetness of a pear but not the ripe texture.  They are crunchy like an apple but have the tender peel of a pear.  They're okay, but I would rather have my pears and apples independently.