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.)

Tales of A Grocery Store Harlot

Most people who know me well know that I love to cook.  This mainly stems from my love of food, but it also partially due to the fact that my mom didn’t do much cooking growing up.  I grew up eating out probably about 6 meals a week (its a wonder I’m not huge).  Because of this, I completely lack any sort of normal cooking knowledge (I one time tried to follow instructions to “scald milk” by burning milk really badly.  Don’t do that.  It smells.).  Therefore, I approach cooking like I do most everything else – as one big mystery with a handy recipe guide.  And man do I love that recipe.  I DO NOT VARY FROM THE RECIPE.  Every time I venture out from the recipe’s guiding hand, I end up with something gross.  It’s pretty much guaranteed.  But I am willing to try almost anything, no matter what level of difficulty.  I figure that the recipe will help me out along the way, like any good guide does.  This means that I am always searching out random ingredients (I am afraid to substitute) and visiting multiple grocery stores READ MORE