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.