Dinner! 2012

[ScottyBoy]

Holy god! I've made some time consuming stuff but...!

Was it worth it?

[ScottyBoy]

Amazing how simple comfort food from your childhood can solve a shitty day. Ribeye and an iceburg lettuce salad with ranch.

Edited November 1, 2012 by ScottyBoy (log)

[ChrisTaylor]

Camel t-bones.

Served w/ tomato, red onion, pickled red cabbage, tzatziki and fried egg in some lightly toasted pide.

[Baselerd]

Holy god! I've made some time consuming stuff but...!

Was it worth it?

I had fun making it and enjoyed eating it, so yea. But I would also say plenty of the other plated dishes in the MC volume 5 are just as good or better and require 1/3 the amount of prep. I chose this because it involved several components that involved new techniques or ingredients that I had never cooked with before. I cooked this one over the course of a week or so (starting with the 100-hour oxtail).

[ScottyBoy]

Well it looks good.

[FrogPrincesse]

The pot-au-feu looks very nice indeed, although it looks like a TON of work!

Here are some of my October home dinners.

Braised short ribs (recipe from Les Halles)

Grilled swordfish with salsa di Giovanna (Jamie Oliver), grilled vegetables from my CSA

I used the leftover short ribs in a pasta dish (lemon ziti)

Lamb chops with chimichurri (April Bloomfield), grilled zucchini & bell pepper

Grilled swordfish steaks Sicilian Salmoriglio style (Marcella Hazan), creamed spinach with coconut

Caramelized carrot soup with ginger garnish (Modernist Cuisine)

Arugula, pear and goat cheese salad

Pressure-cooked pulled pork, roasted squash and creamed spinach.

I learned this technique for pulled pork before Modernist Cuisine, from my local cooking school!

Pressure-cooked caramelized "sweet dumpling" squash soup with crème fraîche

Fresh lemon-basil pasta shells, homemade ricotta and Babbo's basic tomato sauce

Edited November 1, 2012 by FrogPrincesse (log)

[heidih]

Frogprincesse - can you elaborate on the coconut spinach - it touches my comfort zone in so many areas

[FrogPrincesse]

Frogprincesse - can you elaborate on the coconut spinach - it touches my comfort zone in so many areas

Heidi,

The coconut spinach is based on a traditional dish from the Caribbean, creamed callaloo (aka dasheen). It's from Ann Vanderhoof's book, the Spice Necklace, which tells of her culinary adventures aboard a sailing boat, a fun book which also happens to include recipes.

To summarize the recipe, you fry some garlic, onion, green onion, a small bell pepper and a piece of hot pepper. Then you add a couple of sliced okras, followed by the dasheen or spinach. When the spinach is wilted, you add about a cup of coconut milk and you season with s+p and nutmeg. At that point you cover and cook until soft (about 10 min for spinach). Finally, you blend for a short time with a stick blender making sure to retain some texture. You can also blend it a little longer and serve it as a soup.

It's very good with spinach and wonderful with dasheen, but I have no idea if the later is available in Southern California (I don't remember ever seeing it but I haven't actively looked for it).

Edited November 2, 2012 by FrogPrincesse (log)

[heidih]

Thanks FrogPrincesse - I have the book! On the menu for the weekend.

[avaserfi]

Inspired by ramen.

malted pork jowl, xo demi, grano arso ramen, bacon and eggs

[Kim Shook]

I can’t begin to go back over all of the fantastic food that I’ve peeked at over the past weeks that I haven’t been posting – I don’t think I’d be allowed to post that long a message mentioning everything that looked so good! Some of it looked like comfort food and some like pure indulgent escape from reality food and there were often times I needed one or the other!

But I do need to single one person out: Enrique, congratulations on the birth of your son! How wonderful for you and I wish you and your family so much happiness!

Thank you all for your expressions of sympathy and for the PMs I’ve received. We are slowly getting everything done and trying to get back to normal. The support and love that we’ve gotten from friends (including you ALL) and family has helped so much. I’ve passed on all the comments to my mother and she really appreciates it. She remembers when Ted used to post here and how much he loved taking the perfect photo to post and his joy when he could supply an answer to some query about English cooking/food. We used to lovingly say that he could Bore for England because he loved to instruct and lecture and eG gave him a lot of happy times that way. In spite of everything, I have been doing some cooking in the past few weeks.

10/12/2012 Dinner for Mr. Kim:

Sweet potato and turkey hash. This was a South Beach diet recipe that Mr. Kim found and wanted me to try. He and Momma loved it and thought that it would be great as a taco filling.

10/22/2012 I tried a Taste of Home recipe for brisket in a slow cooker with a sweet/sour cranberry-apple sauce. It was really good – the sauce was really rich and complex. I served it with sautéed green beans and long grain and wild rice – given that the sauce was so good, I think noodles or mashed potatoes would have been a better choice. Without sauce:

With sauce:

And the ubiquitous salad:

Which tasted more interesting than it looked. I found a ‘copycat’ recipe for Applebee’s Oriental chicken salad dressing (the only thing that I like when I’m dragged to an Applebee’s) and topped the salad with sliced almonds and fried noodles. A very successful copy.

10/27/2012 Tried a new recipe for a potato and caramelized onion tart:

This was good, but needs some work. I had a disc of Keller’s pâte brisée in the freezer and that was fantastic. I think that I’m finally cured of using prepared crusts! The potatoes were a bit hard still, in spite of me slicing them on the thinnest of the mandoline settings. I have this same problem with potatoes au gratin. The only recipe that ever works for me is Bourdain’s – in his method you slightly cook the potato slices by simmering them in the cream you are using in the recipe. That exact method won’t work here, because you don’t want the extra moisture, but I’m thinking that I could parboil whole potatoes and slice thin and then build the tart. Any advice for me here? We also had Dianne’s garlic shrimp, which was divine, as always:

Served with Aidell’s smoked chicken sausage with bacon and pineapple:

Mr. Kim wanted the sausage and Momma wasn’t sure that she’d like it (she did), so I made both. They were surprisingly suited to one another!

10/28/2012

Started dinner with some crusty bread, olives, herbs and olive oil and tapenade:

The oil and herbs was a Christmas gift and I’d tucked it away thinking that it was one of those crappy gift sets that people buy for ‘foodies’. I took a closer look and realized that it was from an olive oil store in Charlottesville. This is a new breed of stores for our area (we have one here, too) – basically a tap room for an assortment of high quality oils and vinegars. I can’t imagine it lasting a long time (here, at least), but I really hope it does. Anyway, the oil was excellent and is now sitting out on the counter to use! Dinner was spaghetti alla bolognese:

10/31/2012 late dinner after the goblin visits:

Ham, Brussels sprouts, baked beans, mac and cheese and biscuits. Those sprouts are TINY – about the size of a nickel. They were so tender and sweet – the best I’ve had for ages. The biscuits are frozen – Mary B’s – and were a Christmas experiment. I’m changing things up a bit this year and the centerpiece of the buffet will be a platter of Mr. Kim’s smoked ham and a pile of biscuits. These are the small tea biscuits and I wanted to play with them a bit – see if I could bake them ahead of time and heat just at the last minute. They worked very well and I think I’m firm on using them.

11/1/2012 Mr. Kim’s dinner:

Chicken w/ BBQ sauce, baked beans, slaw and a biscuit. Mine:

Chicken macaroni salad, biscuits, beans and a bowl of Momma’s vegetable soup.

[dcarch]

Good to have you back Kim.

Good to hear things are back to normal.

Good to see you are betting even better in cooking!

dcarch

[Norm Matthews]

Kim, if interested, you might try this shrimp boil. It makes really good shrimp

2 tablespoons rosemary

2 teaspoons dried thyme

1 teaspoon black pepper

5 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped

1 teaspoon celery seeds

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

2 quarts chicken broth

3 ounces tomato paste

½ cup butter

1 ½ pounds shrimp, peeled, tails on, save shrimp shells.

Combine all the ingredients with the peeled shrimp shells and simmer 30 to 45 minutes, Strain out the shells, return to heat and cook shrimp a few minutes, until just opaque.

[Nicolai]

Dinner tonight, Burrata and Chablis, a marriage made in culinary heaven.

[patrickamory]

Hey Prawncrackers, sorry for delayed response on the massmun curries and peanuttiness, and that was not meant to be a loaded question!

I like peanuts in their whole form, and sometimes crumbled. But anything that resembles peanut butter in even the slightest way is something I cannot abide, and sauces and curries incorporating peanuts sometimes get there. (Same goes for peanut oil in some applications, and even sesame pastes for some reason). Crumbled peanuts on top of a curry don't seem to evoke peanut butter usually.

I've had bad experiences with penang and massamun curries in restaurants because of this association in my mind, and was wondering whether homecooked versions have to be like that, and what yours was like specifically. As you know I love Thai cooking and am pretty deep into it, but those are two dishes I haven't attempted for this reason.

[rotuts]

Nicolai

Chablis! Yum and not from the Trader!

Kim: consider microwaving the prepared potatoes a bit (carefully re time) in an enclosed container I do this all the time. if the skin is left on and not cut up I micro wave whole with fork stabbings to release some steam.

cuts down on cook time a lot and does not release potato goodness into the liquid

Edited November 3, 2012 by rotuts (log)

[ScottyBoy]

Dinner tonight, Burrata and Chablis, a marriage made in culinary heaven.

God I love good Burrata....

[rod rock]

Buratta is wonderful! Combination of mozzarella and Italian cheese is simply wonderful. I like herb decorations, they always give me more apetite.

[Rico]

I've been doing loads of lazy lurking in lieu of actual participation - for shame, I know, but it's so easy to merely meander through in the food on this thread!

I got a steak-like cut from the chuck the other day from my butcher. Threw it in the SVS for an hour at 141 and seared it before the chimichurri. It was good, but still had a little too much chew; going to try a significantly longer time at a little lower temp next time. The flavor is killer, though. Marinated bell peppers in the back.

Edited because, despite the fact that I have been on egullet for years, I have only just now figured out how to post links to photos. See what I mean about this lazy thing?

Edited November 5, 2012 by Rico (log)

[munchymom]

Yellow curry with tofu and mixed vegetables, brown rice, and cucumbers in vinegar:

[EnriqueB]

But I do need to single one person out: Enrique, congratulations on the birth of your son! How wonderful for you and I wish you and your family so much happiness!

Many thanks Kim! And I'm sorry for your loss, hope things go better little by little.

[EnriqueB]

Red cabagge gazpacho, from Heston Blumenthal at Home. I didn't love the flavour profile, but it had a pretty color!

Veal tongue sous-vide (48 hours at 65ºC), apple, fast-pickled cucumber (from Momofuku), and marcona almonds. Sauce from the reduced bag juices plus créme fraîche. From the Umami Madrid spanish blog: http://www.umami-mad...8-horas/lengua/

[mm84321]

Sole glazed in lobster coral with caviar, champagne and leeks.

[ScottyBoy]

Had you been saving the coral from when you made other lobster dishes or could you buy it straight? I usually blend mine into butter and make blocks for the freezer if I'm using it for that same dish.

[mm84321]

I bought this. Basically, I did what you do, and blended it with softened butter. Then, you make a stock from the sole bones, reduce to a glaze, mount with a bit of butter, chill, then mix in the coral butter. After the sole is cooked sous vide for 4 minutes, you pat it dry, spread over this mixture, and stick it under the broiler (or salamander, if you have it) and let it color and glaze.