Food, Glorious Food

Now, I’m not going to pretend like the pictures of the following food were taken any time remotely recently.  In fact, I think all this food was made sometime in April or maybe even March.  That was a long time ago.  Back then, I didn’t even have the Eurotrip planned!  That was forever ago!!  But, I was recently organizing all my pictures (by me, I mean Blake), and found these pictures and HEY!  A blog entry was formed.

So, when people come to visit, I typically like to prepare elaborate food and snacks, etc. that I know they will like.  You see, I don’t like to prepare all the really good stuff (meaning:  fattening) without any reason….so I usually try to come up with as many reasons as I can.  Therefore, when Austin and Leigh came into town, I just knew my cooking fantasies were made.  Leigh (at the time) was about 5 months pregnant, and craving all things orange.  If there is one thing I know, its how to take a theme and freaking run with it.

I began with this recipe for “orangettes” from the smitten kitchen (an awesome cooking blog, and probably my favorite that I have ever read…all her recipes I have tried are beyond delicious.)

I began by mutilating some oranges:

Poor little oranges. They have no skin.

You see, this recipe somehow transforms bitter, disgusting orange peels by the magical powers of sugar and water (and multiple boilings) into delicious candy!

Sugar coatings make everything delicious!

I also dipped some in chocolate, but those pictures came out pretty terribly, so you will just have to imagine how delicious those came out.

Continuing on my “Everything Orange” theme, I then made some Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies, which also required some orange mutilation:

Help us! We have no insides or bottoms! - Orange Tops

I ended up with these, which were tasty both in dough-form AND in cookie form:

MMMMmmmmmMMMMMmmmmmMMMMMMMmmmmm (times one million more M's)

Leigh and Austin dutifully ate a sugared orange peel and an orange/chocolate chip cookie and Mmmmmmm-ed in response to my incessant staring.  My ego bursting, I began the next day with another Smitten Kitchen recipe – THIS TIME for breakfast pizza!

You might be thinking to yourself (as I was), “EW.  Eggs on a pizza?  Eggs don’t belong on a pizza!  That sounds disgusting!” but you would be wrong.  Very wrong.  Turns out, eggs on a pizza covered in cooked bacon, mozzarella, and green onions is delicious!  See for yourself:

Bacon, Bacon, Bacon, Bacon.

I also decided that now seemed like as good a time as any to try some homemade cinnamon rolls.  And boy am I glad I did.  I don’t know that I will ever go back (except for in the airport, when I am feeling especially fat.  Those cinnamon rolls are goooood.)

I ate all of these. I wish.

Porky decided she would help out by setting the table:

Oh yeah. And orange juice. Can't forget the ORANGE juice!

By the time we finished, the four of us were about 20 pounds heavier and 500 times happier.

Clone of a Cinnabon
taken from All Recipes.com

Ingredients

The Julie and Julia and Kristi Project – Attempt Number 2

A group of friends and I get together “once a week” (this is optimistic, it is closer to once a month), taking turns to cook dinner at various houses.  When my turn rolls around, I usually get WAY TOO INTO IT, and decide that I am going to make 5 appetizers, 2 main courses, 7 sides, and 2 dessert options.  All after work.  This usually means that we get around to eating at around 10:00 on my nights, with me frantically trying to finish and ordering everyone around in attempt to finish before midnight hits and it is officially the next day.  However, on my last cooking night, I had the brilliant idea to plan for a Saturday – giving myself plenty of time to finish one of the hallowed recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Now, other attempts at Julia Child’s recipes resulted in 6+ hours of continuous cooking, so I knew I had to start early in order to follow all the steps properly.  Julia has very strong opinions on how EXACTLY things need to be, and she is intimidating, so I usually follow suit – no matter how pointless it seems.

I had original plans to make the menu entirely out of the cookbook, but I couldn’t stop dreaming about this appetizer I had eaten at Stephen Pyles – the Tamale Tart with Roast Garlic Custard, Peekytoe Crab and Smoked Tomato Sauce.  It was seriously so delicious.  I craved it non-stop for a straight month.  Which is especially weird for me, because I usually crave nothing but sugar and diet cokes.  On a hunch, I googled the recipe name and was more than ECSTATIC when I found this!

So my menu became mostly french, with a little southwest garlic tart to start out with.

I began cooking the FREAKING NIGHT BEFORE, thanks to Julia’s demanding that I make my own lady fingers.  It appears that Julia HATES lady fingers you purchase in a store.  She mentions how absolutely HORRIFIC they are a number of times throughout her cookbook, so I, not exactly knowing what a lady finger looks like, began following her instructions exactly at around 11:00 pm Friday night.  I ended up with these:

Yummy yummy yum

So that’s what lady fingers look like.  Honestly, the powdered sugar topping is supposed to be “sifted” on top, but having no sifter, I tried to sort of, throw the sugar on top as evenly as possible.  I failed at this.  It didn’t really matter in the end, especially considering I then dipped them in orange liquor.

Oh, orange liquor.  You are so hard to find.  Blake and I went to 3 different liquor stores before we found the proper liquor to use.  At first we though Grand Marnier would work, but after sniffing the bottle (and almost vomiting), Blake and I realized that that liquor was not quite what we were looking for, unless we wanted our delicious Charlotte Malakoff aux Fraises (oh yeah, I guess I should have told you what we were making!) to taste like cognac.  Which I did not.  So we finally found an orange liquor made by Patron that seemed to serve our purposes much better.

Eventually, I whipped the whipped cream, made some sort of almond cream mixture, washed and cleaned strawberries…

Red!

… set up the dessert…

… and had this!

So pretty! Way prettier than things normally made by me!!

And then I smothered it with pureed strawberries and sugar and all sorts of deliciousness and we had this!  The prettiest dessert ever created by me (and it tasted damn good as well!)

Charlotte Malakoff Aux Fraises

Of course I would start with the dessert.  I am sugary like that.

The Stephen Pyle Tart (my new name for it) took a crap ton of roasted garlic and burnt fingers (roasted garlic is HOT and I am impatient) and delicious crab meat (and a carefully made tamale tart crust) and tasted IDENTICAL to the one I had at the restaurant.  I loved it and wanted to take it from everyone and eat it myself, but I didn’t.  I let them have some.  But I wasn’t happy about it.

For the main course, I attempted the famous Boeuf Bourguignon.  Or as Blake likes to say, “Blah, blahblahblah!”  I carefully followed all the instructions, and managed not to do anything TOO stupid (although I would say doubling the recipe was up there on the stupidity scale.  Can I please explain to you how LONG it takes to brown 6 pounds of stew meat?  It takes forever.)

First I cooked just a little bit of bacon (Ha.  By just a little bit, I mean a full pound.)

This looks gross, but it is delicious. Let me tell you.

Blake was in charged of peeling one million pearl onions and quartering two full pounds of mushrooms.  He was so proud:

Check out the sweet guitar cutting board. We are cool.

After approximately one million hours of cooking, we were rewarded with this!

This is very delicious.

The entire thing was more than a little bit delicious and also more than a little bit fattening.  Now that I have done the obvious Julia Child recipes, I will have to branch out into something a little more unusual.  I will let you know what I decide.

Oh, and get ready for more cooking posts, because that is where my obsession has been lately.  You know how I am.

So THAT’S Why You Are Supposed To Be Careful Mixing Hot Liquids In A Blender

So, as I continue to plod my way through my very own Julie and Julia and Kristi cooking project, I settled on the next recipe from Mastering The Art of French Cooking – Potato and Leek Soup.  After the adventure that was Coq Au Vin, I decided to try something a little easier.  This recipe had all of about 5 ingredients, potatoes, leeks, water, salt, and cream – therefore, it had to be easy.

And it was.  Except for one little detail.  You see, I guess they didn’t have blenders back in the 1950s, because Julia instructed me to simply use a fork to mash the tender vegetables together after they hung out in a pot of simmering water for what seemed like eternity to hungry old me.  If that didn’t work, I could, as a last resort, rely on a food mill.  Well, I’m not entirely sure what a food mill is, and after half-halfheartedly chasing the leeks and potatoes around the giant stew pot with a tiny fork for a while, I decided that blenders hadn’t been invented during Julia’s time, and pulled out the trusty blender.

As I plugged everything in and poured as much of the pot into the blender as it could possibly contain, I vaguely recalled warnings from a previous corn chowder recipe regarding the risks of steam when blending hot liquids.  Being entirely to lazy to actually find any sort of instructions, I decide that I needed to allow some of the steam to release by not securely fastening the lid onto the blender and allowed the lid to crack open at the side.  Then I turned it on.

Potatoes and leeks exploded out of the top of the blender over my entire kitchen.  While my naturally good-natured husband laughed at the predicament, I immediately began yelling that the soup was RUINING MY COOKBOOK!!  I frantically blotted the cookbook, while Blake doubled over and laughter and the dogs began enjoying the people-food heaven they had found themselves thrust into – licking everything in sight.

I eventually laughed as well, and Blake and I poured the remaining soup back into the stew pot.  Deciding that the mistake was leaving the blender’s top cracked open, we re-poured the liquid into the blender and this time, securely fastened the top in place.  We went as far as to hold the top down.  Once again, I turned the blender on.

AND AGAIN MOLTEN HOT POTATOES AND LEEKS AND WATER EXPLODED ACROSS MY KITCHEN.

This time I was also able to see the hilarity in the situation (especially now that my cookbook was safely drying in the living room).  The dogs resumed licking the floor, and Blake and I resumed laughing hysterically.  I came to the conclusion that I should probably look up instructions on the blending of hot liquids in a blender.

After a short internet search, I discovered that you are supposed to puree hot soups in the kitchen in small batches with a slight crack in the seal in the top as to allow the steam to escape and the liquid to expand.  Information in hand, we careful tried a fourth of a cup worth of soup to see if we would once again find ourselves covered in onion-y soup.

And no soup coat!  We succeeded!  Tiny cup by tiny cup, we pureed the mixture.

We ended up with some delicious soup and gigantic mess (later cleaned by Blake, what a guy.)

Adventures in Coq Au Vin

I finished Julie and Julia around Christmas-time last year and was immediately jealous that I hadn’t first thought of the idea of cooking every recipe in Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year.  That sort of challenge has “Kristi” written all over it.  But, unfortunately, around the time Julie Powell was cooking her way through that extensive cookbook, I was taking Algebra and worrying about which pair of pajama pants I was going to wear to school tomorrow (I have always been stylish).  However, after receiving the cookbook as a Christmas present, I came up with my own mini-Kristi and Julie and Julia project.  Instead of cooking all the recipes in one year, I would simply cook a meal from the book every Sunday.  That was four weeks ago.  It has happened exactly once.  Those recipes are HARD!  There are so many steps!!  SO MUCH BUTTER!  (yum)

For my first recipe, I went with coq au vin.  There was no reason for this, except for the fact that I love The Melting Pot and one of their cooking styles is coq au vin.  And I like it.

Now, the first challenge with using a cookbook from the 1950′s is deciphering the ingredients.  Luckily, my dad is old and therefore was able to tell me that a “frying chicken” is a real option from the butcher section of a good grocery store.  I was planning on buying a bunch of various chicken parts and hoping that would suffice.

So, I went to Central Market, and approximately one million dollars later came back with all necessary ingredients.  Including this!

Blake posed these. Obviously.

Chicken pieces artfully positioned on the cutting board, I began with the healthiest part of the recipe – cooking bacon in butter.  Being a Martha Stewart fan, while also finding myself diametrically opposed to her particular brand of perfection in just about any way possible, I followed her sage advice of setting out all my ingredients before I began and read through the recipe multiple times.  Here is my ingredient arrangement:

This is as neat as humanly possible (for me)

See how much I am concentrating!!

This recipe has a bunch of steps.  Many of which I forgot even though I read through the recipe like 10 times before I started.  Cooking mushrooms was one of these missed steps.  I also managed to do things like, add the bacon to the mushrooms only to find myself frantically scooping the bacon back out of the mushrooms one second later.  It was a very typical Kristi cooking experience, with messes everywhere, and ingredients forgotten or burned, or cooked in the wrong order – but this recipe was fail-proof!  It was amazing!

Approximately 4 hours later, Blake and I found ourselves inhaling about 1 cup of bacon fat, a full pound of butter, a bottle of cooked wine, and an entire chicken.  It was delicious!!

This tasted way more delicious than it looks!

I find pictures of food to look gross – but let’s just say that with all that bacon fat and butter, it would be pretty hard for it not to be completely delicious.  AND IT WAS!