From Joy of Cooking to Modernist Cuisine

[FrogPrincesse]

The pâte de fruit looks amazing. What ingredients did you use?

I've never made pâte de fruit, so I am really intrigued and already thinking about the possibilities!

[mkayahara]

Anna had also been playing today with an idea that Andiesenji forwarded to me for drunken coffee jello squares. The recipe needs a little work to make it really pop with flavour - and it suffers from hysteresis which we are thinking might benefit from the addition of a little xanthan gum next iteration.

Hysteresis? Do you mean syneresis?

The pate de fruit sounds and looks lovely! Now I have to see if I can snag some black currants off of our friends who have bushes.

[Anna N]

Anna had also been playing today with an idea that Andiesenji forwarded to me for drunken coffee jello squares. The recipe needs a little work to make it really pop with flavour - and it suffers from hysteresis which we are thinking might benefit from the addition of a little xanthan gum next iteration.

Hysteresis? Do you mean syneresis?

The pate de fruit sounds and looks lovely! Now I have to see if I can snag some black currants off of our friends who have bushes.

yeah - syneresis and please don't blame Kerry for that mistake - it was mine and she just followed along. She knows very well that it is syneresis.

[Mjx]

I was wondering about that! I remembered hysteresis from physics, and was wondering how that was possible.

BTW, thanks for the coffee gelatin mention, it inspired me to gelatinize my breakfast (and lunch, and ongoing... there was a litre of water involved) coffee.

[MelissaH]

Add me to the list of people who are no longer confused.

MelissaH

[Kerry Beal]

Anna had also been playing today with an idea that Andiesenji forwarded to me for drunken coffee jello squares. The recipe needs a little work to make it really pop with flavour - and it suffers from hysteresis which we are thinking might benefit from the addition of a little xanthan gum next iteration.

Hysteresis? Do you mean syneresis?

The pate de fruit sounds and looks lovely! Now I have to see if I can snag some black currants off of our friends who have bushes.

yeah - syneresis and please don't blame Kerry for that mistake - it was mine and she just followed along. She knows very well that it is syneresis.

Well it was crying - and that's hysterical! I was thinking when I typed it that it wasn't quite the word I was after. As I recall the word hysterical is derived from a wandering uterous - referring to female craziness. How politically incorrect in these times!

Edited July 14, 2011 by Kerry Beal (log)

[Kerry Beal]

Lovely pate de fruit! The first time I made it in culinary school I didn't realize that one of the fruits needed to be acidic and ended up using coconut and banana purees...tasted ok, looked like snot, and kind of oozed like it too

Needless to say, lesson learned. My favorite is passion fruit.

Ah yuk! I learned that one the hard way too - you need a base fruit for all those liquidy fruits.

[Kerry Beal]

The pâte de fruit looks amazing. What ingredients did you use?

I've never made pâte de fruit, so I am really intrigued and already thinking about the possibilities!

So this one had red current puree, sugar, apple pectin (vitpris), glucose (white corn syrup)and a bit of tartaric acid and booze to finish it off.

[Kerry Beal]

Sad day for pictures I'm afraid. Forgot to take pictures of the finished PDF (but I do have some left so I'll try to remember to do so tomorrow), had friends over for dinner - fed them sous vide/BGE browned porterhouse and tenderloin, fresh peas, flattened potatoes and some mushrooms but neglected to take any photos.

Lunch today in Wiki was an Indian Taco - fry bread with taco fixins. Yum!

Took the leftover Coffee jello squared and made a batch of guacamole for the clinic there today.

[Kerry Beal]

This morning I woke to the lovely little bouquet that our guests had brought from their garden last night.

I baked a batch of Chewy Spice Cookies for work, then got called out before the last sheet was finished baking - sign of what was to come I think.

Really long day at work - made it home for a few minutes over lunch - Anna had a nice platter of Nicoise salad fixin's for us. After heading back I didn't get home until quarter to 10 at night and I was a little peckish! Anna had made the pressure cooked carnitas from MC - I fried up a little of the meat, sauced it and prepared myself some dinner.

After asking everyone and their brother where we could find Angostura bitters - two bottles showed up today within 5 minutes of each other - one courtesy of the hubby of one of the nurses that he picked up in Sudbury and another that Anna's daughter had mailed up for us. Now to figure out what we are going to put them in! Better be everything - cause the bottles I have at home have been around at least 30 years I'm guessing. I seriously thought that a third bottle was going to show up when the night staff came on tonight - but the nurse who was going to look for them in Sudbury phoned this morning and asked to have his last paycheck mailed - so I'm guessing I won't see that one. Just as well.

[FrogPrincesse]

Kerry,

Sorry to hear that you had a rough day at work.

These carnitas look amazing! Were they fairly easy to make?

[heidih]

I like to play with a few drops of the bitters in sweets that have a chocolate, cinnamon or the like flavor tilt. I also find when a non alcoholic but refreshing beverage is in order, that soda or seltzer water with a few drops of bitters and a squeeze of lime really hits the spot;

[Kerry Beal]

Kerry,

Sorry to hear that you had a rough day at work.

These carnitas look amazing! Were they fairly easy to make?

We'll have to ask Anna in the morning - she's sacked out!

[Anna N]

Kerry,

Sorry to hear that you had a rough day at work.

These carnitas look amazing! Were they fairly easy to make?

We'll have to ask Anna in the morning - she's sacked out!

The carnitas couldn't be easier. Here's the recipe:click.

The salad I made for Kerry and the med student included some hard-boiled eggs. I had despaired of being able to peel these incredibly fresh eggs but yesterday I recalled a hint that suggested shaking the pan with the just cooked eggs to break the shells and then plunging them in ice water. Incredibly they peeled quite easily after this treatment.

Here are the MC pickled cucumbers I made:

I was not able to source kirbys so these were made with baby cukes. I think the kirbys would have made a much crisper pickle but these are perfectly fine. Are they better than ones I make without vacuum-sealing? Nope. I don't think so. But it was a fun experiment to make nevertheless.

Yesterday I also re-made the drunken coffee jello squares using a much stronger brew and today I will see if I like them better. The first batch were definitely short on coffee flavour.

[Kerry Beal]

When I finished up rounds this morning Anna and I headed out to Espanola to do a little retail therapy. There are two larger supermarkets there that carry a lot more stuff than the smaller ones here in Little Current.

There is a chip truck in the parking lot of the Giant Tiger - great place to get poutine. So Anna, Kira and I shared about half this 'family sized' order.

At about 4:30 after we had exhausted all our shopping we managed to find someone selling blueberries at the side of the road. They were hot, they were tired (they had been there since 7:30 am) and they had two baskets left! They were very pleased to have us relieve them of those last two baskets.

Our haul for the day.

After the child had been fed we decided to try making margaritas - first sip was a little off putting - but by the end we quite liked them!

Tonight's dinner was picanha on the mini BGE. It's rump cover, salted and grilled. I myself was a tad toasted after my drink (told you I was a lightweight) - so I apologize for the rather poor picture of the meat cooking.

Dessert was some of those blueberries with some whipped cream.

[rotuts]

your picanha looks very very good. it seems to have escaped the SV bag, very unusual these days

can you tell us what cut of meat you used? pre-seasonings? tenderness compared to SV?

many thanks

(btw: whats the clear-ish yellow item in the first "haul" picture, just to the viewers L from the two scrub brushes?

retail therapy seems to be plentiful in the Northern areas.

[Kerry Beal]

your picanha looks very very good. it seems to have escaped the SV bag, very unusual these days

Now, now - we've done chicken twice without sous vide, Anna did the pork in the pressure cooker.

As Anna always says when I ask "should we sous vide that?" - "if all you've got is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail".

can you tell us what cut of meat you used? pre-seasonings? tenderness compared to SV?

many thanks

The cut is called rump cover, seasoned only with salt. It was not meltingly tender, but certainly tender enough to enjoy.

(btw: whats the clear-ish yellow item in the first "haul" picture, just to the viewers L from the two scrub brushes?

retail therapy seems to be plentiful in the Northern areas.

That little item is a lemon squeezer - or should I say was a lemon squeezer. After I juiced the limes with it for our margaritas - I dropped it. Plastic meets tile, tile wins!

[Kerry Beal]

Breakfast for the rug rat this am - Golden Malted Waffle mix, Bonne Maman four fruits preserve and whipped cream. She seemed to enjoy it!

I'm working on a loaf of Semolina Filone, as well as making some simple syrup and some gomme syrup for our cocktail experiments.

[Anna N]

At the end of August Kerry and I will be cooking at the 2011 Niagara Eggfest to be held at HERNDER ESTATES WINES. We will be using a large Big Green Egg but I wanted to test out a recipe for Turkish pide bread here. We have only the mini egg so you can see that one end of my bread is just a little overdone – that would be the part that didn’t quite fit. Nevertheless it was a largely successful experiment though next time I would roll the bread much thinner. Here it is with its eggwash and sprinkling of sesame seeds ready to go on the egg:

And here is the baked bread:

We used slices of it to soak up the juices from Kerry's picanha last night.

[Kerry Beal]

Anna put together a lovely cold soba noodle lunch with some leftover beef.

I made Tom Cat's Semolina Filone - usually the poolish would go overnight but I hadn't planned ahead, so did it all in one day.

Lively poolish

Finished loaves

I made a batch of Tom Kha in the thermomix this afternoon - not really paying a whole lot of attention - added the galangal - thought nothing of the colour. Realized later it must have been fresh turmeric.

Decided to go with a gimlet tonight - kinda one dimensional - won't really bother again I don't think.

Had some nice marcona almonds with it.

Reheated some carnitas, and after using the oil for that cooked some chicherron from the pork skin Anna had saved from the shoulder. I pressured cooked the skin for about 30 minutes.

[Anna N]

So yesterday I tackled the pickled figs from Modernist Cuisine. The recipe calls for dried black mission figs but I was unable to source these either on the Island or in Sudbury so Turkish figs had to be subbed. Kerry got a great chuckle out of me carefully measuring ingredients even so far as to get out the gram scale and then dumping half of the pickling liquid as I tried to move it from a bowl to a jar to do the sous vide part.

They have a unique flavour that tends to grow on you but finding a use for them is a bit challenging. Not to worry though. I am happy to eat them for themselves.

Today Kerry would not be home for lunch so I raided the bounty of the fridge and larder to make open-faced sandwiches on Kerry's lovely bread. Leftover beef and a side of MC pickled cucumbers:

Yesterday I blanched and soaked the mustard seeds for the MC Aromatic Alsatian Mustard and today I added the remaining ingredients and blended everything together in the Thermomix. Any sane person begins to laugh at themselves after they have purchased a whole bulb of fennel to discover that the amount needed for the recipe (2.2 grams) is a tiny sliver. However, we will see how the mustard tastes after 7 days in the fridge:

Tonight we are having baby backs that have been sous vided and then Kerry will sear them on the Little Green Egg and we will eat them with this potato salad:

I tried making my own mayonnaise given the number of beautiful eggs we have in the fridge but it was a disaster and even following instructions for rescuing mayonnaise I am afraid it was a total failure. So commercial mayo mixed with sour cream it is.

[rotuts]

very interesting stuff:

re BGE:

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/do-you-use-a-big-green-egg/?scp=1&sq=big%20green%20egg&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/dining/the-cult-of-the-big-green-egg-united-tastes.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=big%20green%20egg&st=cse

I cant top the LL's but i make mayo in this:

http://www.cuisinart.com/products/food_processors/dlc-2a.html

its light and skids around unless you put it on a towel. I use it because I have it. i might not buy it for that.

doesnt that Thermo-Mix make mayo?

[Anna N]

very interesting stuff:

....

doesnt that Thermo-Mix make mayo?

Operator error!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Kerry Beal]

very interesting stuff:

re BGE:

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/do-you-use-a-big-green-egg/?scp=1&sq=big%20green%20egg&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/dining/the-cult-of-the-big-green-egg-united-tastes.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=big%20green%20egg&st=cse

I cant top the LL's but i make mayo in this:

http://www.cuisinart.com/products/food_processors/dlc-2a.html

its light and skids around unless you put it on a towel. I use it because I have it. i might not buy it for that.

doesnt that Thermo-Mix make mayo?

Thermomix makes beautiful mayo - but there are a few tricks.

[slkinsey]

I've found that the easiest thing to make mayonnaise with is the small bowl of my KA food processor. Just drop in one egg yolk, a hefty pinch of salt and the juice of half a lemon, then start the motor and slowly drizzle in a cup of oil (I like 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil and 3/4 cup grapeseed oil). At the end I like to blend in the zest of the lemon. Has literally never failed, whereas I have multiple failures trying to use blenders and other such machines. Something about the food processor seems to whisk it at the right speed for me.