Poaching Needs Coaching

Jenn and Jill have challenged the Daring Cooks to learn to perfect the technique of poaching an egg.  They chose Eggs Benedict recipe from Alton Brown, Oeufs en Meurette from Cooking with Wine by Anne Willan, and Homemade Sundried Tomato and Pine Nut Seitan Sausages (poached) courtesy of Trudy of Veggie num num.

Let me state at the beginning that I knew this would be a challenge for me.  Not only have I never poached an egg, I've never eaten a poached egg, let alone Eggs Benedict.  I think it stems from a childhood disgust of all things runny when eggs were involved.  My eggs were scrambled until dry or fried with the yolks broken - no oozy stuff for me!  Okay, so that was quite a while ago and I am only gradually moving towards more flexibility.

The challenges continued.  I decided to make the Eggs Benedict on Wednesday morning - the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when I should have been making soup.  But hey, I bought special eggs for this and if I waited, they would be stale and I'd have to get new fresh eggs.  And the recipe provided suggested it took only 20 minutes to pull the whole thing together.  Well, maybe.  Maybe if you had perfect luck and mastered the technique the first time.

The hollandaise actually looked pretty good:  silky, lush.  The instruction was to keep it in a thermos or carafe or warm bowl while preparing the poached egg.  I cleverly put it in a low (very low) oven to keep it warm.  Probably mistake number 1.

The first egg I poached sat on the bottom of the pan, so I assume the "gentle simmer" was a little too gentle.  I would have used it but when attempting to remove it from the pan, I broke the yolk.  Start over.  Meanwhile, I had put the muffin in the toaster and the ham in the frying pan and they were ready.  Acckkk!!

Reheated water with small amount of vinegar.  Had a more bubbly surface this time and put the egg in - not gently enough, but I'm not up to refinements at this point.  It seemed to be doing the right thing and when the egg white was firm, I removed it with a slotted spoon - no breakage this time.  I had put my muffin and my ham on a plate, so I gently laid the egg on top.  With a little rearrangement of the trailing ends of white, it didn't look too bad!  Then I went to get my warm hollandaise with which to crown my creation.  Curdle.  I guess my plan to keep it warm was a bit of overkill - plus, of course, it was in the oven for much longer than I had anticipated, more like 10 minutes than 3.  I added a little more butter to loosen it up (I am sure there is a way to redeem hollandaise but I didn't have time to investigate), sort of poured it on.  It actually didn't look too bad - from a distance.  So quick with the camera!

Okay.  Forget the camera.  The batteries are dead and I don't know where the extras are and Bob isn't home.  Meanwhile my creation, such as it is, will soon be inedible in addition to being only passably pretty.  I give up.  The one redeeming factor - it tasted fine.  The hollandaise was clearly not the right texture but the flavor was good.  The egg was cooked right, with lots of warm yolk to sauce up the ham and muffin.

I may do this again under less stressful conditions and using the lessons I learned from this morning.  Then again, I may not.....

Now on to Thanksgiving soup!

I'm On a Roll

Let me just say this:  I have a small amount of bravery in me, at least when it comes to food.  After all, I ate a scorpion!  And I made and ate a poached egg - my first ever (I have residual issues from my childhood - no runny part of any egg was permitted).  And now, I deliberately ordered and ate not one, but TWO raw oysters.  And I even chewed them!  Now, I admit, I asked for the smallest oysters they (Jake's Crawfish in Portland, OR) had - kumamotos.  They were really small and probably didn't need any chewing but I was advised to really taste them, not swallow them whole.  So, I squeezed on a little lemon, and took a big slurp (well, OK, a little slurp), chewed and swallowed.  And they were good - smooth, briny, sweet with just a little tang from the lemon.  Bob ate six much larger oysters, but I thought I made serious strides in the exploration of new (to me) foods.

So cheers to me!

Adventures in Eating

It's been a while since I posted anything because I haven't done much cooking over the past month.  I have done some eating, however, so I want to share that with you.

We spent two weeks in China in October and it was an experience unlike any other.  Not only is China a beautiful country (and we have 3000 pictures to prove it), the people are incredibly friendly.  We were often approached by people who wanted to have their pictures taken with us - they love Westerners, I guess.  The places we visited were all different but had some things in common:  good food, beauty, cultural and historic sites, and crazy traffic!  We also discovered that, while tea is offered at meals, the beverage of choice seems to be beer at both lunch and dinner.  And no napkins.  And no ice.  I asked one of the guides about the ice thing and he told me cold was bad for the stomach.  Hmmm.  Finding ice got to be a bit of a scavenger hunt.  In Hong Kong, we went to a 7-11 so I could get a drink from a drink dispenser and have ice.  In Beijing, I asked our hostess at the hotel buffet if I could have some ice and she brought a whole glass - bliss!  In Guilin, the breakfast buffet had a little ice bucket by the OJ.  And in Shanghai, I requested ice at an Indian restaurant and the waiter brought an ice bucket and carefully added one cube at a time to my glass until I told him to stop.  Oh, and Bob found a Starbucks which was willing to put ice in my iced tea!  He's a hero.

So here are some shots:

In Hong Kong, I missed out on a seafood dinner, but Bob brought the best back to the hotel. This small lobster-like crustacean was superb!

These prawns were also on the seafood dinner menu and he saved some for me.  Excellent and so fresh.

This is a picture of jasmine.  The tea comes in a tightly rolled ball, which, when soaked in hot water, actually blooms.  We went to a tea house outside the grounds of the Summer Palace in Beijing and a lovely young woman went through an elaborate tea preparation and tasting ceremony.  I left with 6 different teas and a special clay teapot.  Some of the best tea I've ever had - fragrant, nuanced flavors, totally different from Lipton's!

One night we were taken to a restaurant which specializes in Peking duck.  The drive late at night past the Olympic buildings in Beijing and ending at an outdoor mall which could have been transplanted from any upscale community in America was a little surreal.  This restaurant, which is clearly on the tourist route, is huge and has a multi-item menu featuring virtually every part of the duck.  This particular dish was garnished with crispy scorpions!  And would you believe it - not a scorpion was left uneaten by our table of adventurous gourmands.  They were crispy but had no particular flavor.  I would have eaten more.

A slightly better shot of the actual little critter.

And evidence that I ate it!

Sometimes there were creative garnishes on the dishes - this is a lovely little swan made from a carrot.

In Guilin, we ordered (despite the server's concern) a beef dish with very spicy peppers.  Bob scarfed it down!

In the old town outside Guilin, these eggs were cooking in ash in the market area.  Didn't try one, but this is a traditional way of cooking eggs in this area.

The best dish of the trip - river crabs in ginger and scallion sauce.  Absolutely incredible!

Breakfast in the Western style hotels in which we stayed followed a pattern:  European breakfast food (salami, cheese, croissants, yogurt), American food (eggs to order, bacon, sausage, sometimes pancakes or waffles), Japanese (miso soup, vegetables, rice), and Chinese (congee, wonton soup with veggies, dim sum).  These little dumplings were served at the Swissotel in Beijing - some of the most creative we saw and all very tasty - if you could bear to eat a panda!

This was a little penguin, I think.

As I mentioned above, getting ice was an endeavor.  Here is my glass of ice water -  protected until every cube was gone!

Stuffed!

Our October 2010 hostess, Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness, has challenged the Daring Cooks to stuff grape leaves.  Lori chose a recipe from Aromas of Aleppo and a recipe from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

I have stuffed cabbage leaves and they were excellent, if I do say so myself.  However, they were also labor-intensive and, as I recall, took most of the day to make.  Between blanching and prepping the cabbage, making the filling, making the tomato sauce and cooking them, it was a considerable effort.  Bob really like them, so maybe I'll do them again some day.

This project was considerably easier and faster.  In the first place, grape leaves come in jars, pretty much read to use.  The toughest part of the grape leave preparation was getting them out of the jar!  They are rolled up and really packed in.  I used one "roll" of leaves, soaking them in boiling water first and then again in cold water, to remove the brine in which they are packed.  Then it is just a matter of unrolling them carefully and separating them.  There are different sizes, but that doesn't really seem to matter.  The larger leaves are a bit easier to stuff, but even the smaller leaves work fine.

The choice of stuffing was up to us, other than using rice.  The short grain rice is soaked in water for 30 minutes to soften it slightly and then mixed with the other ingredients - in my case, sausage, mushrooms, pistachios and Vermont cheddar.  The leaves are rolled around a couple teaspoons of filling and placed in an oiled saucepan.  They are then covered 3/4 of the way with a mixture of lemon juice, salt and water, weighted down in the pan, which is covered, and braised for an hour in the oven.  I also stuffed extra mushrooms in amongst the grape leaves and actually wish I had used more - they were really good!

This is how they looked in the pan.  Not exactly things of beauty, but definitely grape-y.

After I cooked them, I took them out to test them.  The filling was quite good, but the grape leaves were a mixed bag.  Some parts were tender but they were really salty.  I think the soaking process didn't remove all the salt or perhaps the salt content in the sausage combined with the additional salt in the cooking liquid was just a bit too much.  If I were to do this again, I'd leave out the cooking liquid salt and just use the water and lemon juice. 

Bob got some of these in his lunch the next day after they had been refrigerated overnight.  Very portable!

If I were to do them again, I think I'd try some fruit variation - maybe dried figs with pine nuts or pistachios, spiced with cinnamon or allspice.  I think this is the kind of challenge for which it is fun to dream up different stuffings, paying less attention to the traditional fillings and trying things that sound appealing to you.  The best part of Daring Cooks is the freedom to be creative, not just follow the recipe as written, but use it as a starting point for doing something you think sounds good.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it is all educational!

Apple Butter plus Cheddar Gougere = Pie in a Bite!

The September 2010 Daring Cooks' challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun.  John chose to challenge the Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing.  He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it.  John's source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

This challenge was more about learning a process than producing a specific product.  There was an extensive tutorial on preserving - both canning and freezing.  Coming from a long line of food preservers, you would think I would be really comfortable with all this, but I have never been a jelly/jam maker and it has never even occurred to me to "put up" fruits and vegetables.  I've seen it done but I've never done it on my own.  My daughter, Elisabeth, probably knows more about this than I do!

Nonetheless, I followed John's suggestion and made apple butter and chose freezing as the preservation method since it requires substantially less equipment and time.  The butter came together really quickly and easily and I was ready for the preserving piece of the challenge in no time.

We are not big users of jellies or jams or spreads in this house.  I use them as ingredients in recipes sometimes, but never on toast.  Nick loves his Grandma's Oregon grape jelly, but he's the only one who uses jelly as a spread.  However - I had a thought about how to use the apple butter.

I eat apples raw and in salads and in ... pie!  Could I find a way to make a pie-like product with the apple butter?  My thought was to make gougeres with cheddar cheese in them, bake them and then fill them with the apple butter.  An experiment in an alternate pie universe, perhaps.

And with little effort - pie in a bite!  The gougeres have grated cheddar added before cooking.  After they puffed up, I filled them with the apple butter by just inserting a very small spoon into the center of the gougere and adding the apple butter.  Topped with some whipped cream and a little mint sprig, we have a bite-sized dessert which, if not exactly a pie, comes close. 

I found it best to use a somewhat milder cheddar since a very sharp cheese takes over the flavor of the gougere and doesn't complement the apple butter as much.  These are best hot, right out of the oven, but the pastry can be cooled and refrigerated or frozen and then heated up at a later point.  I think I would add the apple butter before reheating to be sure everything was piping hot when served.

Fun little experiment. 

The Big 6-0 and a Special Birthday Treat

Ron turns 60 today, but we celebrated yesterday with a dinner.  I thought a recap of the meal would be fun, especially since there were some special treats involved.

I forgot to take a picture of the pre-dinner nibbles and they disappeared before I remembered, but they were, for the most part, purchased treats.  There were Organic Blue Star Farms Stone Ground Wheat Crackers (made in Kent), Boat Street Pickled Figs (from the Boat Street restaurant in Seattle - really good!), and Dinah's Cheese.

This cheese was wonderful!  Soft, buttery, and golden - and made on our very own Vashon Island, so local as well.  A totally locavore appetizer without even trying.

The special treat was something I made.  Let's see if you can figure it out.

Know what these are?  How about a bigger picture?

Does that help?  How about this?

Yep!  Gummy bears.  Now, what happens to gummy bears when they "marinate" in vodka for a few days?

They get bigger!

Inflated with vodka!

But not only that.  They become lethal - a child's candy transformed into a portable adult cocktail.  They are also very easy to eat.  We didn't indulge enough to know if one can become tipsy from these little nibbles, but we laughed a lot!

The real dinner followed:  A green salad (very local lettuce, from Bob's garden) with peaches and candied almonds in a peach viniagrette, tomatoes stuffed with robiola and gorgonzola cheese, risotto, and Alaskan king salmon.  Thanks to Emma, I managed to deal with the salad and salmon while she was tending the risotto.  It is wonderful having a God-daughter who is bright, entertaining, cute and an extremely capable sous chef.

Peaches and candied almonds in Bob's homegrown lettuce.

Robiola and gorgonzola stuffed tomatoes

Emma's risotto

Roasted Alaska King Salmon

When dinner was done, it was time for the official birthday dessert.  Cake is not a big dessert favorite for some of the guests, so we had an alternative:  A chocolate-mint Bailey's cream pie, based on a 1975 New York Times recipe.  The chocolate-mint Bailey's was combined with cognac and mixed with a mousse-y filling in a chocolate cookie crust.  What was I thinking?  Start with vodka-infused gummy bears and end with Bailey's and cognac cream pie?  Did we have a designated driver?????

Boozy cream pie with 6 candles (because 60 candles would have been a fire hazard).

The birthday boy and his birthday pie!

While I love cooking these birthday dinners because I get to try new things with a receptive audience, the best part is an evening with some of my very favorite people.  And Sarah, if you are reading this, I had a great meal planned for your birthday so we will have to do it next year!

Ooops!  Almost forgot - no picture but the pie was accompanied by a freshly- made strawberry-tequila (or was it rum?) sorbet, kindly whipped by Bob to add to the overall alcohol level of the day.  (NOTE:  Dr. Bob is in charge of ice cream/sorbet production (and he has extraordinary talents in that category) and coffee roasting/grinding/making (scientifically approached, as you would expect)  and hashbrown cooking (his skills far excel mine).  All other food production on his part is incidental and not necessarily enthusiastic.)

A Reconstructed Classic Summer Meal

The August 2010 Daring Cooks' Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n' Bites and Anula of Anula's Kitchen.  They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

What meals do you think of when its 80+ degrees outside and summer has finally popped out?  Hamburgers?  Barbequed chicken?  Hot dogs?  Pierogi?

Wait - pierogi?  These dumplings which are the found in Eastern Europe and Russia, among other places, are generally filled with hearty ingredients - potatoes, sauerkraut, sometimes cottage cheese.  Lots of variations and lots of local variations in both the dumpling dough and the fillings.  This is not what comes to mind when I'm thinking of a simple summer meal filled with tradition; however, my roots are more German and Scandinavian than Eastern European, so maybe that explains it.

A friend I used to work with has a holiday party every year, just after Christmas.  While the timing has never worked out for me to go, I know she makes 1000 pierogis for this event.  Patty has very strong ties to her Polish heritage, unlike many of us who may remember the traditional foods of our childhood but no longer regularly turn out krumkake or rullepolse or lutefisk(!).  Now that I have tackled pierogi on my own, I have nothing but admiration for anyone who can do 1000.  I managed a couple dozen before I was too tired to roll dough.  I had lots of filling left over, despite cutting the recipes down considerably and I could have made more and frozen them, but I didn't.  I'm no Patty Wagner!

I decided to skip the local option, which would probably have been salmon in combination with something, since I've done salmon variations on other Daring Cook themes.  Instead, I re-imagined hot dogs and potato salad and made bratwurst/sauerkraut pierogi and potato pierogi.  The bratwurst was cooked in advance, sauteed onions added, along with sauerkraut and all was cooked a little longer in a small amount of chicken broth and then cooled.  The potatoes were also cooked and then riced and mixed with sauteed onions, butter (lots of butter) and milk.  Really, they were more mashed potatoes than potato salad, but the pairing was there.

The pierogi are assembled and then boiled in salted water until done - about 8-10 minutes.  When served with a traditional hot dog topping of mustard and a traditional potato topping of sour cream, they were a great alternative to a dog in a bun and potato salad.

This was a fun challenge, although I think we would have really loved eating the little dumplings on a cold rainy day in the winter.  So hearty and warming!  The potato pierogi were especially good - buttery and rich, like decadent mashed potatoes in a little slipcover - I'd do these again, maybe as a side dish with a roast - in the winter!