Smokeydoke

After a delightful brunch at Koslow's Sqirl restaurant in Los Angeles, I've decided to attempt to cook through her cookbook. I'll post my results here. Please follow along and join in, if you're so inclined. Her food is wonderful, but I will surmise that her true deliciousness comes from using the best and freshest ingredients. I'll do my best to recreate the magic I felt at Sqirl. Here's the link to her book at Eat Your Books.

@Anna N looks like one of my rolled cakes!

I love Smitten Kitchen blog, but if I'm completely honest, I love it because it's free.

This forum is heart-warming in many ways.

It's already been a week! That was so fast. I'm ready to turn back into a pumpkin. Thanks to everyone for reading along. As a final post, here's yesterday meals and libation. It was nothing fancy, this is a typical meal at the Smokey household. For breakfast/lunch, I had the leftover scallops I never cooked from Wednesday. My after-work cocktail came courtesy of @MetsFan5 a shot of Chambord topped with champagne. This was delicious! And dinner was prosciutto-wrapped asapargus and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. Mr. Smokey is on the no-carb diet. The eggs were made in my new Mauviel 1830 skillet, I was surprised at how non-stick it was. I love it. It's my first "big-purchase" cookware ever (excluding my kitchen-aid mixer, but that was a gift). Happy Eating Everyone! Have a nice weekend.

Agree, I don't understand the popularity of that dish, it was too sour. I'd love to try Dom Perignon someday, till then I will seek out some sweet champagnes. Sounds more my style.

I'm going to try that tonight! That sounds interesting. Thank you.

I going to make a confession, I do not like Champagne. It tastes awful to me. I'd rather have sparkling wine (I like Gloria Ferrar) or Prosecco. I'm a Philistine, what can I say? But I will say this, there's very little difference between the Kirkland Champagne and the De Margerie. They are both very dry and have a not-so-pleasant sour after-note. There's not much flavor. The Kirkland is drier but the De Margerie was more bubbly. If I had to buy Champagne, I'd go with Kirkland, De Margerie gets wonderful reviews but Kirkland is half the price.

Can I make a confession? I was planning an elaborate dinner tonight, but I can't promise it. I'm already tipsy. And these potato chips are tasting might good. I was planning on making Scallops with Champagne Cream Sauce, which was just an excuse to buy champagne (and drink it, *burp*). The good thing was I finally got to Costco and bought their Kirkland Champagne Brut, $20 for 750 ml. Since Total Wines was nearby, and I wanted to do a side-by-side taste test, I got Champagne de Margerie Grand Cru, also a Brut, $20 for 375ml, twice as much as Kirkland.

That's great @kayb I can't wait to read about it.

@liuzhou I don't know why, but your food always looks good to me. Anyone else posted that and I would have scrolled past.

I'm not sure. Can I think about that for a moment? It's like picking your favorite child.

Yes, he does, but he is not as obsessed as me. Remember the anal-retenative chef from SNL? He's kinda like that. He's one of the reasons I have twelve different flours and two different yeasts in my pantry. And East Hollywood is in LA, not LV. Please don't attempt to get there in 15 mins! I didn't mention in my post that this was during my LA trip.

Recently I've read Sqirl everything i want to eat. It was an interesting read and her tiny restaurant had earned a cult following. So after days of horrible fast food and chain restaurants, I decided to get up at 730am to eat at Koslow's tiny East Hollywood cafe. This was the line at 745am on a Saturday morning. They open at 8am. The food was fabulous! There was so much care and thought put towards the food, I was amazed. It's rare to see this care nowadays. It impressed me so much, I plan on doing a cook-through of her cookbook in a few weeks. Her food really opened my eyes. I realized that if I only use the best and freshest ingredients, and put the utmost care, the simplest recipes can come out fantastic. I started out with a cappacino ($4.25) with perfect foam art. Now that's foam art. Next was the biscuit and butter with strawberry rose geranium jam. Those were the best, fluffiest, most tender biscuits I've ever had, I can't wait to make them. I could feel and taste the crunch of her fleur de sel crystals on top. I loved the salt so much, I bought a box when I got home. I also got her decadent lemon poppy-seed loaf cake, made with the tastiest poppy-seeds I've ever had. I asked for it to-go, because there was no way I could eat so much, but I ended up finishing it on the spot! It was moist, decadent, and dare I say, creamy. My eyes have been opened to how delicious ordinary loaf cake can taste when made with the right ingredients. Lastly, I got her famous sorrel rice bowl and it was the only disappointment of the day. It was too sour for my taste. Next time, if I ever order it again, I'll add the kale and avocado to temper the preserved lemons. Her perfectly poached eggs were great but the rice on it's own made me pucker, not in a good way. Overall, 5 stars visit, and a renewed enthusiasm in the LA dining scene. I highly recommend the place, and I also recommend you come early. Or you can buy her cookbook and join me in a cook-through.

It's going to be leftovers at the Smokey household for the next few days, so I decided to blog about my cookbook obsession instead. Cookbooks. I love them. I never counted all of them, but I would say close to five hundred. It started when I peered through my husband's (untouched) collection and became fascinated by all the knowledge contained within. Before that, I was relying on allrecipes.com (gag!) and Food Network for all my recipes. Since then, I've amassed quite a few myself and have stolen a few from Mr. Smokey's library. I religiously cook from them and consider them old friends.

@blue_dolphin All those penzey spices! I'm in heaven! And Baker's Joy too.

Here's the spread: homemade Japchae, bulgogi, salted daichon with raw oysters (I never make this except for special occasions but it's traditional), red leaf lettuce and perilla leaves. It doesn't look like much but that is the culmination of three hours of work. You eat ssam by tearing a piece of lettuce, then adding a perilla leaf. Next you slather some dangjang or chochujang (traditional korean pastes) and layer with rice and your choice of meat. Lastly you put the whole thing in your mouth like a taco.

Last night dinner required a trip to the Korean supermarket Greenland. Here was my haul Sweet Potato Starch Noodles for the Japchae. They have to be reconstituted, then pan-fried. Dried Shitake mushrooms, same as above Perilla leaves for the ssam. Raw frozen oysters, these are surprisingly good kimchi, of course and toasted sesame seeds. As you can see, Korean food requires a lot of ingredients and a lot of hands, which is why I never make it.

I like eGullet much better, but I still post to Chowhound occasionally.

Tonight, we're having a Korean feast! That other-we-do-not speak-about foodie website is having a Maangchi cook-along that just happened to coincide with my blogging. Since my heritage is Korean (even though I never cook Korean food, I mostly cook Thai, if any Asian) I decided I want to something Korean. I'm going all-out Maangchi and doing bulgogi ssam, japchae, fermented pickled oyster, kimchi, and rice. I never eat this way except for the holidays but I wanted to cook something special for eGullet. And I highly recommend Maangchi's website, her recipes are legit.

Dinner was my meatloaf! I'm actually embarrassed to post this, as I created this recipe years ago as an adaptation to a horrible AllRecipes.com recipe. Mine is not great either but it's a household staple and I keep making it. Meatloaf 1/2 cup milk 2 eggs 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 tsp bp 3/4 cup saltines 1/2 onion 1/2 green pepper 1 lb ground beef 1/2 lb ground pork 350F for 1 hour, last 15 mins, baste in sauce Red Sauce 1/2 cup ketchup 1/2 cup brown sugar dashes of hot sauce dashes of worchester

Last night's creations: Rose Beranbaum's Money Dunkey Bread This was fabulous, well worth the effort. It's Rose's brioche dough (best I've ever made and, of course, the hardest and most time-consuming) rolled into balls with dark chocolate inside. Then it coated in a caramel sauce and put in an angel food pan and baked. Lastly it is topped with more caramel sauce. Decadent? Definitely. But surprisingly, not too sweet. The brioche is dreamy soft and buttery. She makes it the hard way, using a starter, then slowly adding all the butter till it's incorporated, then chilling it again till it's a sticky mess. You can taste the difference, the final product is so fluffy. It really didn't need the chocolate and caramel, but it's a nice way to gild the lily.

http://eat24hrs.com/restaurants/order2/menu.php?id=68508 I'm not a BBQ aficiando, but I would guess Kansas-style BBQ sauce? It was much thicker than their vinegar-based sauce.

I didn't detect a bark on the pulled pork, the rib tips and brisket had a nice bark. They served it with God sauce, it was excellent, I don't know what to compare it to? Baby Ray's? They also served a white BBQ sauce that reminded me of ranch and a vinegar sauce.

It was incredibly tender, sauce was great, but excuse my ignorance, I think I could've imitated the pulled pork in my crock pot.