balmagowry

All this suddenly reminded me of one of those regional "separated by a common language" incidents, the kind of thing that happens all the time when you're on the road and every new city you go to looks like... the inside of a theatre. I was working on a show in Sarasota, and on my first morning there I went with the crew to their usual coffee-break place across the alley, and I ordered an English muffin with butter. And got... an English muffin with margarine. Called the waitress over and politely suggested there'd been an error somewhere: "I asked for butter, and this is margarine." She looked at me with the kind of blank astonishment usually reserved for little green men and gasped, "You mean... you want COW's butter?" Luckily for me, they did in fact have cow's butter, and a replacement muffin with cow's butter she then brought me - on the double. (Union crew breaks aren't long enough for dawdling, and of course she was well aware of the fact.) Once I had some caffeine in me I thought the whole thing was uproariously funny. But sometimes I have to wonder - why was it such a shock to her?

I don't think we're really disagreeing on anything at all - except perhaps the question of how seriously to take the course of the thread... and/or ourselves. I'd say my chief sin here, if such it be, was and is that I can never resist indulging in my own flights of fancy when the opportunity presents itself, and that that admittedly is not a whole lot of practical help to kew! So if practical assistance was the sole aim here, I stand guilty of distraction, digression, and possibly irrelevance. OTOH, I had me some fun flexing the old cerebellum. Read.... Chew.... Discuss.... Ah, yes, the key for kew.... key for kew... and kew for key... me for you... and you for me... :shuffle: :ball change: :giggle: sorry, the setup was just too good to resist. I'll be good now. Honest.

Y'mean, I can't get away with Christopher Cerf's schtick of stabbing you with an icicle and then melting the weapon to water down Bloody Marys? Drat. I wasn't bitching about the warhorse-ness, I swear - I was just, in my shy, retiring and SUBTLE fashion, REMINDING anyone who hasn't yet NOTICED the circumstance that I just PUBLISHED a piece about having DINNER with the BORGIAS, and therefore NOT SO COINCIDENTALLY have for the past few months been STEEPED IN POISON, which ought to make me feel RIGHT AT HOME with this topic, if you get my drift. But I wouldn't want to call attention to all that, so let's just keep this between you and me, OK? If, that is, you know what's good for you....

What th--- ??? Did I say something funny?

Oh Maggie, Maggie, not the old Fatal Food thing again! Been there, done that. Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and beat the stairs? All those weeks of realgar in the citron, powdered arsenic on the biscuits, veleno a termine in the wine, foxglove in the ring? The serpent's venom on the key?The pulverized gems in the salad? The inversion, the foaming of the bear? La Cantarella, La Cantarella, elle ne peut plus avancer.... Oy, Borgia Moi, seems to me I've rung this change before.... Oh well, what man has done, no doubt man can do. Only because it's you - maybe, just maybe, I will kill again. The drink... oh my dear Hamlet, the drink!

Uh-huh. Wonderful home-made sausage. I was waiting for that paragraph to end that way. I don't imagine you'll be seeing that other brother again....

Not a damn thing - because as I also said more than once, I wouldn't dream of trying the experiment unless I still wanted to do so after making the recipe as written and finding out what it's actually like, both to work with and to eat. As for the speculating and the thinking outside the pan, do remember that that's all it is: speculating and thinking. Not by any means the same as doing and desecrating - indeed, a long chalk away from even implying any disrespect. And in that vein, I don't see it as analogous to criticizing Mozart or trying to change his work; it's more like improvising variations on one of his themes, an exercise which he himself - not to mention every serious musical performer then and since - was often required to perform at the drop of a hat. (Hey - would anyone still remember Diabelli if Beethoven hadn't immortalized him with a set of variations?) Well, hang on a sec - let's think about this a little. I certainly concur that it is unwise (as well as unfair) to criticize blindly; but I can't agree that it is unwise to speculate. On the contrary - I think it's the very essence of a healthy imagination. As to understanding this work which I haven't yet tasted, again I can't argue with that: of course I don't. But I do think that I understand it a good bit better now than I did when I first read the recipe, precisely because I've played some mental games with it. It's a roundabout way of getting there, of course, where the straightest line between the two points would have been to bake and eat; nevertheless, at the end of the day I come away from the process having given a lot of thought to texture and temperature and flavors and form and structural integrity - having imagined these things very vividly - far more than I could ever get from simply reading straight through. Dunno - maybe it's an ADD thing. I was talking to someone about this just yesterday: some people learn and grasp better by following the linear path, just reading the text and hearing the lecture; others need to stop periodically and test out the assumptions and hare off on the tangents in order to get the concepts solidly settled in the brain. IAC, it's all pure thought experiment, intellectual exercise; at worst, it's a harmless amusement, so far as it goes. Like playing variations, it keeps the grey cells limber. And - dare I say? - it's kind of fun. Seems to me this is one of the way-way-coolest things about eGullet: that it's a place where one can indulge such fancies by discussing them with other like-minded (and often much more knowledgeable) people, actually being able to ask the questions that arise instead of having to content oneself with guessing at the answers in a vacuum. I believe it's the financial biz (?) that refers to this sort of thing as "anticipating structural risks." Me, I just think of it as playing "what if" - and I don't think it's entirely inappropriate to a thread entitled "Exploring New Frontiers"! EDIT to add: Forgot to mention - while I'm a great believer in "doing" first, there are sometimes situations where it may not be feasible to "do" at all. That's where these fantasy scenarios really come in handy; at any rate, they're a whole lot better than nothin'!

Never imagined myself saying this - and me with all that vaunted purism where artichokes are concerned! - but OMG that sounds wonderful and please will you post the recipe or, if there isn't one, a few more details of how-much-how-long? Rushing back meanwhile to the purist camp where I belong... Jensen, give you joy of your all-artichoke meal - something I too often indulge in when on my own, though I don't know if I could stop at two. I'm always torn between melted butter and mayonnaise/vinaigrette-ish amalgams. But it suddenly occurs to me that I might experiment with broadening that scope a bit: I bet this saffron aioli I just discovered and immediately plunged myself into would be an exciting complement to artichokes!

Eureka! I knew there was something in that argument that troubled me, and I just realized what it is! Again, I do not disagree with the point about versatility and paying the bills. Of course it's absolutely true (though I still don't necessarily buy it as an exercise in pure logic). But it leaves something out that may - for some people at least - be important. (And mind you, all my talk about not needing to be a good cook is devil's-advocate-play: though not formally trained I am quite a good cook myself.) The point is this: there are two sides to the food writer coin. One of them is Food. The other is Writer. I hope the powers that be can forgive a touch of Off-Topic sacrilege: in the interests of paying the bills, and even of artistic satisfaction, it is possible for useful versatility to exist on both sides of that coin. I have a friend who won the Pulitzer for his work as a music critic, and is still gainfully-employed as such - a sweet deal because his wife, also a very fine writer, is art critic for the same paper. Now all of a sudden, what do I see? He is branching out into architectural and cultural commentary - clearly he has a lot of expertise there too - and sometimes this provides opportunities for husband/wife collaboration. Pretty cool. Anyway, until I started seeing these articles, I had no idea he was more than a dyed-in-the-wool music maven; like all his other readers I had done him the disservice of type-casting him. Think about some of the food writers everyone here seems to admire by consensus: MFK Fisher, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, James Beard, and so on. (And please note I am excluding my own 19th-century obsessions, though they illustrate the point almost too well.) Any one of those people could have been every bit as marvelous and compelling a writer on some other subject. MFK Fisher was, to a certain extent; at least, though food is never very far from her thoughts, her more memoirish essays cover a lot of other personal and cultural ground which is told in an equally riveting manner. All these people have personalities and styles which could lend themselves felicitously to any sort of content. They didn't need to do that; they didn't choose to. Good for them. But for those of us who do need, or who do choose, or both, there are endless possibilities out there. [EDIT: and what about Laurie Colwin? Novelist/essayist first; highly-acclaimed and much-loved food writer second.] GBS (incidentally quite a knowledgeable music critic) was quite right when he said "there is no love sincerer than the love of food" - but even that passion need not entirely eclipse all others: it is possible for the same person to write about food and also about - dare I say it? - other things. And for some lucky people it's even possible to pay the bills that way. It's also wise, fun, and intellectually stimulating to transcend one's type-casting on occasion. It's early days yet, but it's beginning to look possible that my next book will be on a non-food subject. And if this project comes about you may be quite sure I won't undertake it without an assurance of its paying at least some of the bills. Sidestepping logic again, though, FWIW I do truly believe that in the best of all possible worlds no one, especially not those who write about food, would be denied the joys of an intimate practical knowledge of cookery.

Yeah - I tried to warn her, but would she listen? Nope. Headstrong, our Hathor, and now... she's off! This is gonna be a good one, I can feel it. Hathor, I didn't know you were a New Yorker! You're practically in the neighborhood.... I too am impressed with the bike thing; I tried it at one point when I still lived in the city, and - like blogging - it ain't as easy as it looks. And unlike blogging, it doesn't even look easy. I share Brooks's interest in the fate of your wild turkey. I too have a hunting friend who often supplies me (and our considerable circle of mutual friends) with game, and on two or three occasions this has included wild turkey. Unfortunately, this happened at a time when we had all been discussing the phenomenon and logistics of deep-frying turkeys... and you can probably guess the rest. Unfortunate; I can't think of a less appropriate combination of meat and preparation. A wild turkey needs a treatment that will offset its leanness and toughness, whereas deep-frying only seems to exacerbate those qualities. Further pity: this has become a kind of tradition with this crowd. Funny, because they're not at all gastronomically unsophisticated - au contraire, in most cases. So I am really looking forward to seeing what you make of the bird. Will you do it in town or in the country? A thought about the fennel. Blithely considering it from my vantage point of no experience whatsoever, based on your description it sounds to me as though it might have benefited from sort of a par-braising, maybe in a little dry vermouth... and then finishing on the grill. The braising would take care of the toughness (depending on the size of the bulbs I assume you'd have to cut them into manageable chunks), then if you pat 'em dry before you toss 'em on the grill you'll still get that nice charky finish and caramelization. For a major treat - grill scallions, whole. Oh yum... think I'd better go get me some scallions right away....

Well, no. Carpaccio and tartare are what the French would refer to as "cru"!

Yes, indeed - and thank you, Keifel, since it really turned out to be kind of a co-blog. Hey, I wonder if Keifel thinks he backed into blog-exemption by joining during Vic's blog-week and contributing. Sneaky. That wouldn't work for jury duty... I bet you can't get away with it here either. BTW re cocktail: I do hope you guys try it (you've certainly earned it!), perhaps in the next version I plan to try: the Blender Variation! Don't you think it would make a great Frosted Drink? Keifel, you could end up as the namesake for the heir to the Daiqiri.... Oh, and I forgot to say the other day... mazel tov on the check. Especially nice that it arrived just before the beginning of the Family Weeekend!

Yes! Proof! :maniacal cackle: I was right! Just served out the penultimate bowlful from the last batch, and in the process saw bottom of container, and damned if there wasn't a little scrap of brownish curd - exactly the brown you get when the milk has scorched just a tiny bit at the bottom of the pot. Good. Now I know what I must do.

Found the Grail at last - Brown Cow Plain finally arrived at Sherry's! (They've been great about trying to order it, but apparently there was some kind of stock problem at the mfr end or so they said....) Bought two, one to eat and one to use as starter. Oh man, that is some very fine stuff. How different trom the Erivan. Surprised to note that it contains pectin(!!) - who'd'a' think it? That being what offended me about Stonyfield, I'm inclined to feel a touch of dudgeon about it here too. But then there's that taste - hard to hold much of anything against it. Well, I will make a batch with it tomorrow. Went back and checked earlier post from Jensen re using the cream top. Was sorry to see that the answer was yes. I bet it isn't necessary. I'd certainly far rather just eat it! Ever inconsistent...I remembered that I have a good deal of Pomona's Pectin lying around from my mother's jam-making. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: maybe I'll try using a little in a batch. Don't know why though, as I really prefer the European consistency. Curiosity I guess. Last Erivan batch was very good but not as transcendently marvelous as the previous - a bit of a crapshoot, I guess. Still have to get me to Trader Joe's and check out Total, of course. But meanwhile I'm psyched for tomorrow's experiment. And I am determined NOT to come bleating to this thread every half hour with "Waaah, Jensen, it won't set!" OTOH, if you happen to be passing through the neighborhood and can remind me about how long you usually incubate this particular combination, I'd be beholden. Oh! New theory about the grainy/cheesy bits at bottom - a good one this time I think. Remember I thought it might be skin from the top of the milk and you shot that down because yours didn't have any skin? Well - what about skin from the bottom of the milk? That is, not actually skin, as such - but the stuff that forms on the inside of the pan, especially when you bring it to the boil too quickly. This would also explain why my first two batches didn't have any of the stuff: I did my whisking in a separate bowl. The whisk action, of course, is enough to dislodge some of those bits from the bottom of the pot - those then settle back to the bottom of the yogurt as it sets. I'd bet anything this is right. (And yes, I do rinse out the pot with cold water befor putting the milk in it. Old wives' tale, I think - never seems to make a bit of difference.)

I very rarely send anything back, unless 1) there's something clearly wrong with it ("Sorry, sir, the fish is a bit... off...."); 2) it isn't cooked as I ordered it - and I'm pretty explicit: greyly well-done is no acceptable substitute for bloody! Even then sometimes I'll compromise, though I always regret it afterward: but what can you do when the steak arrives only slightly overdone and you're really REALLY hungry...? Alas, really REALLY hungry generally wins out over slightly overdone until I've taken the edge off of the really REALLY hungry... by which time I've eaten enough to know I should have held out for what I ordered, but I've also eaten enough to feel that I've forfeited my right to send it back. Sigh. No strength of character; at least, not the kind that stands a chance against my appetites.... 3) it isn't what I ordered. That includes the time I ordered a Dover sole at the Four Seasons and sent it back because it arrived filleted. Felt a little bad about that because it was perfectly lovely fish, beautifully prepared (to this day I pray that that fish somehow escaped going to waste). But as Pickles says, if I want sushi I order sushi - and if I had wanted filet of sole I would have ordered filet of sole. There are few things more deflating than getting all psyched to do a perfect skeleton job, only to discover that some well-meaning soul in the kitchen has robbed you of your evening's entertainment. [Obligatory disclaimer: (A) I was very nice about it and of course so were they; (B) I had ordered the same dish at the same restaurant many times before, so I knew it was not - or at least never had been - their custom to filet unasked. Otherwise I would have specified - as I have learned always to do since that incident! - that I wanted it on the bone.]

And you bet I'll be ready by half-past eight! I think you always could buy the packets separately once you had the cruet - no? Refills. Sorry I got you going - maybe you'd better get over to the Incredibly Strange Cravings thread and make confession. It's supposed to be good for the soul.... And... ah honey, don't be late - I wanna be there when the band starts playing! Does that date us, or what?

Thanks, snowangel, you just made me feel almost normal.

Yeah, I too would try it as written first - in theory - though in practice I often find it very hard to refrain from a little tinkering. This is probably why I'm better at cooking than baking! kew, I'd love to try this recipe (believe me, I bookmarked it the moment I got a good look at it), but I'd have to have SOME kind of occasion for it or I'd end up eating the whole batch myself. I'm not dancing these days, so that would constitute a Very Bad Idea. And BTW, for the record, I do think the one-big-cake thing is a potentially dubious undertaking, fraught with peril at best. But to play devil's advocate just for the hell of it - sorry, but I can never resist thinking outside the pan, as it were - here are a couple of my further thoughts on the subject. First of all, the potential messiness of serving - yeah, that's why I said "for some crowds." Like cozy friends who like to get their fingers into the yummy goopy stuff. I.e., NOT for a formal dinner party, but maybe for a gossipy afternoon kaffee-klatsch. The potential structural pitfalls - the texture of the cake not being strong enough to hold up in that form factor, and the inside temperature not being high enough to melt the balls - yeah, well, as I said I'm not at all sure about that, nor would I be until I'd had some experience with this particular batter and the texture of the cake as written. Yes, those could both be serious problems. But - one thing I was thinking was that if you were to try putting it all together in one, you'd probably want to, or indeed have to, make the balls smaller. Which might solve both problems. Using a relatively shallow pan would also contribute on both fronts, I imagine. As for defeating the purpose and pleasure... well, maybe, maybe not. Yes, this recipe was designed for single-serving presentations. But it was also designed for a restaurant, for which it's perfect in that regard: customer orders it, you take your refrigerated single ramekin or mold, put it in the oven, and 14 minutes later it's hot and delicious and fresh. You couldn't do that in a restaurant setting with the big cake, so in that instance form really does follow function. But in a different setting a different form might be just as wonderful in a different way - you can't be sure until you try. (It's like saying Mozart, to be authentic, should only be played on a fortepiano because in Mozart's day there was no pianoforte. But nobody can say with any confidence that Mozart wouldn't have jumped at the chance to play and to write for a modern piano if the technology had been available!) Hey it's just a thought experiment, something to play with. In any case you'd never serve something like this if you hadn't done a successful trial run (or I wouldn't, at any rate, except to very close and sympathetic friends - the kind you can invite to an Eat-My-Mistakes party). As for how to place the balls - assuming all the other doubtful elements actually do miraculously work - that part should be pretty easy if you have the right kind of pan. As long as it's sufficiently ornamented and embossed that there are clear ridges in the shape of the finished cake, your slicing pattern is going to be pretty clearly predefined anyway, so you would just place the balls accordingly. This pan isn't an ideal example, but it certainly illustrates pretty clearly how you could place the balls with some confidence as to the results at slicing time. That said... I'd certainly try it as written first! And after doing so the whole idea of the adaptation might just go right out of the window based on any or all of the above obstacles/objections, not mention those we haven't even thought of yet but which might become obvious as soon as you have the real actual cake itself in front of you.

Do we detect a theme here? I think I'm the only person in the world that didn't own any of Julia's books Good heavens, then replace that with a ! How wonderful to be able to look forward to reading all those for the first time! Or even if you've read them or dipped into them before, owning them is a whole different gig. When they're yours you can gloat and savor whenever you feel like it. You'll usually feel like it. I don't have the newer ones of those, but I can't remember a time when I didn't have Mastering the Art and when it wasn't my primary bible for any question of technique or appropriateness. (I also have one of the "French Chef" collections, and that is sheer fun reading.) This is an occasion for rejoicing. Put on your party hat!

Funny - although I too thought mayonnaise was a proprietary mystery of the Hellmann's company when I was a child, I had the opposite experience with vinaigrette. I don't think I knew that you could buy salad dressings in a bottle - no, I must have known it from TV ads, I guess, but I couldn't understand the point: far as I was concerned, vinaigrette was something you made at home, in an old jam jar. Speaking of TV ads - remember Anna Maria Alberghetti and that whole Good Seasons thing? Never thought about it before, but what a scam! You pay your money for their special bottle and their packets of stuff... and then you have to put together the oil and vinegar yourself anyway... so you're paying them for the privilege of making your own dressing. Now there was a piece of marketing that really understood its target audience! Women back then didn't want to be told that they could just make their own fresh from scratch - too scary - but they did want to give themselves and others the impression that they did so. So they totally bought into the deal. Such a business! Is this a great country or what!

It occurs to me that if you're making this at home it might also lend itself to a slightly less formal - though still spectacular - presentation. I bet it would be pretty simple to adapt the recipe to make one big cake rather than individual ones. Sometimes for a small party one large handsome cake is just more impressive. I don't know exactly how you'd have to adjust the baking time - but wouldn't it work in a bundt-type ring-mold version? use the tuiles as petals so that the whole thing is like one big daisy. If you're clever about spacing/placing the ganache balls in relation to the pattern on the mold you can probably cut and serve it without giving away the "surprise" until someone actually puts fork to slice. OTOH, depending on the crowd and the occasion, it might be fun to have the ganache contiguous all round - the serving process wouldn't be as neat, but it would have a wonderfully generous look and feel. The only reason I can think of why it might not work would be the density of the cake; I assume the individual ones get some of their structural integrity from the crusty edge. I suppose without that the cake itself might be too fragile to work as a reservoir. Still... I'd sure be tempted to try it! Oh all you experienced real bakers out there, what do you think?

Same here, though as a rule if I'm at a white-tablecloth joint I'll be more inclined to trust the dressing; and/or the server's description of same. My problem with most dressings is that they are much too sweet for my palate; I don't sweeten my own at all, so even a subtle touch of sugar can be enough to ruin a salad for me. In which case... I'll have to send it back after all.

Started the evening with The Keifel Cocktail ... as discussed on the Ms. Victoria's foodblog thread (recipe in this post). Then, inspired by the newly-arrived Cesar cookbook (delightful spoils of victory from Round 19 of the Smackdown), Shrimp with Saffron Aioli. Sorry, I forgot to photograph the spinach....

Am I the only one who went straight from this post to eBay and immediately started monging these? I expected you'd all be there bidding them up, but in the event I was the sole bidder on the one I bought, for a very reasonable 6 bucks and change. It arrived today, just in time to squeeze the lemon for the saffron aioli I wanted to experiment with. No wonder you love it! Man, I thought I had some pretty good lemon juicing equipment, but this beats everything I've tried. Besides, it looks like all the other gadgets I remember from my childhood. Instant nostalgia. Thanks, Smithy!

. Very well, then. Behold in all its simple glory... The Keifel Cocktail ... a work in progress, but already rather tasty, if I do say so. (Ironically, when the time came to try this I was a bit more constrained myself than I had expected: a minor spot of car trouble has made me wheel-less for the weekend, so I'm on my mettle to feed myself as best I can from what's at hand. Ain't doing too badly, either, but that's a story for another thread.) Proceeding from the premise that you had tequila but lacked the makings of a Margarita, I took the liberty of hoping that you might normally have a little orange juice around the house. I've kind of lost the OJ habit myself, so - I confess! - I made up a small amount from the emergency can of concentrate in the freezer, and it worked very well. My first thought was to call for a small lump of sugar, but I didn't happen to have any around myself and didn't figure you would - so I used about 1/2 tsp ordinary white sugar. I'd be willing to bet, however, that your special grey sugar would be a brilliant substitute. I don't have any of the fancy mixologist tools or the experience to know for sure which ones would be appropriate to this particular mixture - we can ask our local experts about this later. The formula, then: equal parts tequila and orange juice - I used 1 shot of each 2 dashes Angostura Bitters 1/2 tsp sugar (adjust to taste) plenty of ice Stir (or shake in shaker maybe?) until thoroughly blended and well chilled. Garnish with lemon, if available. (NB I like a nice little chunk of lemon, and I like to squeeze/twist it to get a touch of both juice and oil - but again, the lemon garnish was a flight of fancy on my part - YMMV.) To your very good health! Respectfully submitted....