Splendid Table

So we're both huge consumers of food media. We've mentioned books and god knows we've talked about TV, but we're also happy to get our food media fix on the radio. Thank god for NPR and its Splendid Table series hosted by Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the Jewish-Italian aunt everyone wishes they had. Lynne is a warm, funny, expansive personality to really delights in talking about food. Along with her bales of laughter, she brings a really deep level of food knowledge. Moreover she's got a wonderfully inquisitive nature that brings out great bits of information from her guests. We discovered the Splendid Table on our trips to the farm. In the DC area it airs from 2:00-3:00 pm every Saturday. That means we usually can catch half of the broadcast and we then download the show via the internet to hear the rest of the broadcast. It's been a welcome addition to my morning commute.

The segments for Splendid Table include:

Road Food with Jan and Michael Stern. This earthy couple roams the country eating out of diners, drive-in and dives but is a zillion times less irritating than that guy on the Food Network. They really let you know what's good at a particular place and what the particular mood and crowd is. They are great compliments to Lynne's earthy love of life. I will say that Michael has the queeniest voice this side of Harvey Fierstein.

Stump the Cook with the nerdy editor of Cook's Illustrated. A very funny segment where people call in, give five completely uncomplimentary ingredients and Lynne has to come up with a recipe using ingredients like: pomegranates, coffee, sour cream, corn, and butterscotch. Chris Kimball is the judge of how good the recipe is. While I love both Chris and Lynne in this, the challenge isn't particularly useful because I would just eat everything separately.

Finally, there's my favorite section which is the call-in part. People call in to Splendid Table looking for cooking tips, food trivia and even advice on how to patent a recipe. For the most part the callers are delightful. Case in point - an 8-year-old who wants to make baked French toast. Lynne tells the girl to layer the bread in a baking pan and says it's ok if the slices of bread overlap. The girl responds, "there are worse things in the world."

Along with the regular sections she has segments about ingredients, farming, travel, and food history. On top of that she has delightful guest like Nigella Lawson and Nora Ephron. The only thing I don't like is the wine segments which bore me to tears (sorry sis!).

But if anyone likes talking, eating or hearing about food, the Splendid Table is a great way to go.

Babe's - crazy ass amounts of food

One of the highlights of our trip to Texas was going to Babe's, a local Texas chain of restaurants that is a true Texas experience. It's a family-style, old-time dinner joint complete with stuffed animals on the walls (and we're not talking teddy bears) and honky tonk signs saying "Life's too short to live in Houston." On top of the roombiance, periodically the waitresses would start doing karaoke to Shania Twain and Bonnie Raitt on the jukebox. Because the food is served family style, most people were coming in groups of nine or ten. Our own group included myself, J, J's brother and parents and J's sister and her family of four. We were lucky to come at 5:30 (when the restaurant was already 3/4 full) because when we left two hours later it was packed with mange many large parties waiting outside.

This was Texas so you know the servers were going to be nice. When they say family style, the food is served family style. All of the food is in platters in the middle of the table and plates are passed around. You get a choice of meat that includes fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried chicken tenders, smoked chicken, catfish, and pot roast. Since the Babe's is known for their fried chicken, we al went with fried chicken. The meal started off with salad dressed in a solution of white vinegar, salt, sugar, pepper, and water. No oil. It made for a surprisingly light and refreshing salad. J's Mom said that this was the dressing she grew up with. along with the salad came feather light biscuits accompanied by butter, honey and molasses. Already we were feeling happy and sated and the main course was yet to come.

After the salad, the chicken came in big platters along with sides of Mashed Potatoes
Creamy Gravy, Green beens, and Grandma's Corn. I'd like to highlight Grandma's corn which is shaved fresh from the cob and is in a thick corn milk sauce. It was sweet and fresh at the same time. The trip was worth it just for the corn. The chicken itself was surprisingly moist and tender. Kind of like a homey version of KFC. One good thing about the chicken is that it tastes great cold the next day. Essentially everyone was served the equivalent of half a chicken which meant many many leftovers.

For dessert we have a choice of peach cobbler and banana pudding. The clear winner was banana pudding which tasted like a banana version of creme anglaise. Babe's is kind of a once a year type of place because of the insane portions but it's well worth going there once a year.

A few cooking things

So Friday, I had this urge for both finger foods and vegetables. Go figure. As a result I made pigs in blankets, broccoli slaw, and bacon wrapped dates. That was like the best dinner ever. The pigs in blankets were of the crescent roll-lil' smokie variety and the broccoli slaw was a bag of broccoli slaw (yes you can find it in the bag o' salad part of your grocery store), dried cranberries, and toasted walnuts with a nice balsamic vinaigrette. The true kicker was the too easy to be true bacon wrapped dates. Basically, take a few dates and take out the seed which makes a remarkably neat hole for you to fill. I filled in with a 1/4 inch chunk of pecorino romano. then you just wrap the whole shebang in 1/3 of a slice of bacon (cut widthwise), secure with a toothpick and bake at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes. I found that the bacon needed some time in a hot frying pan to fully render out the fat. The end product was a Jaleo worthy meld of sweet and salty.

The other thing I made this weekend was an amaretto cake. While we were grocery shopping, we looked wistfully at all of the expensive holiday cakes soaked in rum, or frangelico or amaretto. For some reason they were not on sale and therefore, prohibitively expensive. I decided to make my own. I figure I'd find a recipe somewhere. In all of my cookbooks there wasn't really a cake that fit my needs so I made one up. I adapted the Barefoot Contessa lemon cake since it was a cake that required soaking the cake in a lemon syrup. I substituted amaretto everywhere the recipe asked for lemon. It made two cakes. One of which I iced and sliced immediately and the other I put in the freezer. The first was lovely, but the syrup really didn't soak through. I then took the second out of the freezer, poked a zillion holes in hte loaf and made another batch of syrup to soak the cake. We're still finishing the first loaf so I'll report later on whether the second loaf had the requisite soaking.

BTW, the homemade gyoza for New Years turned out PERFECTLY! I made it before the holidays and froze them. They boiled to perfection and none of them exploded in the pot. The key is using round gyoza skins and NOT won ton skins which are much thinner. The gyoza would also be perfect for ravioli.

Stories Coming! Happy New Year . . .

What are you doing New Year's Eve?

I love that song. It's just so wistful and hopeful at the same time. Our friend Thank Heaven For Little Girls is hosting this year and in a fit of creativity, I suggested doing a tasting menu. The centerpiece of the tasting menu is a set of soups served in cheesy shot glasses. I've collected a few from Dollywood, Disneyworld, and New York and I thought it would be hilarious to have an elegant soup in a shot glass that says "Maryland - We're not angry, just crabby."

My contributions to the tasting menu will be:

Tom Kha soup with shitake mushrooms and crab (in a shot glass)
Vietnamese spring rolls
Crab dumplings in a Chinese soup spoon with a sauce of black vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil
Fake log o' meat dumplings with the same sauce (served in a soup spoon as well)

By the way, J and I went to Central Market to get fixin's for my Hawaiian inspired meal I made for J's mother for Mother's day. For anyone outside of Texas, Central Market is like Whole Foods on steroids. It's got a whole sauce bar that has onion dip, a zillion kinds of salsa, and even mole. It's pretty incredible. It ranks right up there with Wegman's. So at Central Market we just had to get Meyer lemons because they have such a delicate fragrance and flavor. They are availabel like one month a year and even then aren't really at supermarkets. Any suggestions for using them? We were thinking a Meyer lemon panna cotta. What do you all think?

Tales from Christmas 2007 - the Croquembouche

Sorry for the radio silence. We're out in the great state of Texas with J's family. I have been reading J's mother's scrapbooks like they were the rosetta stone. I love reading personal history (perhaps that's why I read so many blogs).

As with any other family, food is a big part of Christmas with te J family. Because J's sister had to have an early dinner with her in-laws, the J family Christmas celebration was an early brunch, complete with two spirited boys in football uniforms.

It always amazes me how organized J's mother is about making big meals. The night before, the table was set, all of the food was prepared and in the freezer The only thing to do was to reheat. One the menu was:

Sunday brunch egg casserole (complete with Jimmy Dean sausage)
Cheese grits
Citrus salad
Little smokies (made because J's nephew recently had pigs in blanket and only ate the pig)
Sausage balls (sausage mixed with bisquick)
Mini blueberry muffins
Cheese pennies
Cream puffs rolled in powdered sugar
Pumpkin brean with chocolate chips
Cranberry danishes (I made)
A HUUUUUUGE assortment of cookies and candy

And finally, a croquembouche. J's brother recently has gotten into cooking and is pretty ambitious about what he'd like to make. A croquembouche really intrigued J's brother and J is as adventurous a cook as he is an eater. So Christmas Eve, we made the vanilla pastry cream (quite delicious) and the cream puffs (or choux). The pastry cream went without a hitch but hell's bells the cream puffs bedeviled us. You see, choux paste is a very old recipe with very easy proportions. The basic recipe (which I got from Mastering the Art of French Cooking) goes like this:

1 stick of butter
1 cup of water
1 cup of flour
4 eggs
1 teaspoon of sugar
1/4 teaspoon of salt

You melt the butter in the water, bring to a vigorous simmer and dump the flour in all at once. Stir until the paste gathers together and is hard to stir. I like to stir in on low heat to make sure the flour incorporates. Many recipes say t take it off the heat once you add the flour. Once the paste is made, add the four eggs either big stirring even more vigorously (and building your forearms) or dumping the paste into a food processor and incorporating the eggs that way. Once done, quickly dump tablespoonfuls of the paste into an old ratty cookie sheet that is completely uninsulated. A pastry bag would be helpful here to pipe the dough and made sure the surface is smooth. Bake for around 20 minutes until the choux are puffed and golden.

That's how it SHOULD have worked but for some reason, the first batch of dough we ended up with turned into a batter. I grilled J over and over about our measurements and decided the dump the whole thing and start over. Luckily, the next batch was a sucuess. That night we filled the choux with the pastry cream and set them in the freezer.

In the morning we made the caramel sauce and the melted sugar to bind the whole shebang together. The melt sugar consisted of sugar, water and corn syrup heated to 320 degrees. on there we dipped one side of the choux in the sugar and stuck it onto another cream puff. Once we had a nicering of choux, we pour the caramel sauce on top. We had enough pastry to make a very nice castle wall with cream puff turrets. A little less than the big tower of cream puffs, but I pointed out, we only had 11 people for brunch. The best part though was dipping a few forks in the melted sugar and making spun sugar that glistened around the castle wall. it was nice collaboration between J, j's brother and me. And while I won't kid anyone about it being a pain in the ass to make, we all had a good time making it.

It's All Nigella All the Time

That's because I used a Barnes and Noble gift certificate to buy How to Be a Domestic Goddess, Nigella's baking book. Like every other Nigella book, it's an out and out great read. I've been salivating to make something from the book and I decided to go all out and making something really complicated - Danish. This would be a complicated recipe what with all of the butter and the rollng, but while there were many steps involving many hours of rising, no one step was all too complicated. It turned out wonderfully - buttery, flaky, and absolutely delicious. There isn't too much sugar in the dough itself so you could just as easily put in a savory filling like ham and cheese or spinach and feta. I used two types of fillings - cranberry jam (from the same book) and raspberries and blackberries. I found the berries were too wet and a bit too tart. The danish needed something more sugary.

Here's the recipe:

1/4 cup warm water
1/2 cup milk at room temperature
1 large egg at room temperature
2 1/4 cups of all purpose or bread flour
1 package of yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 cup of butter cold, and cut into thin slices.

Pur the water and milk into a measuring cup and add the egg, beating with a fork to mix. Put to one side in a warm place. Put the flour yeast, salt, and sugar in the processor, and give one quick whizz to mix. Add the cold slices of butter and process briefly until the butter is cut up to visible chunks around 1/2 to 1/4 of an inch. Empty the contents of of the food processor into a large bowl and quickly add the contents of the cup of liquid. Use your hands or a rubber spatula to fold the ingredients together, but don't overdo it: expect to have a gooey mess with some butter lumps pebbling it. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator at least overnight or up to 4 days.

After having it sit overnight, take the dough out of the fridge and let it got to room temperature and roll out to a 20 inch square. Fold the dough into thirds like a business letter, turning it afterward so that the closed fold is on your left, like the spine of a book. Roll out again to a 20 inch square and releat the steps above 3 times. Cut the dough in half and fold up each half to a manageable size and wrap both pieces in plastic wrap. Let sit in the refrigerator at least 30 minutes and up to 4 days. To make the Danish, cut each dough into eight squares.

To make specialized danishes, Nigella offers two recipes, one with a homemade almond paste and a cheese one with ricotta. I decided to use the cranberry jam and the mixed fruit. Jam or a thick fruit compote is ideal. There are two ways to put together the danish. One is to put the filling in the middle diagonally and then fold two edges towards the middle. The other way is to plop a heaping spoonful of the filling directly into the middle of the square and fold all the corners towards the middle to keep the square shape. Either way, let the Danishes rise in a warm place for an hour and a half. Brush with an egg wash made from a beaten egg and 2 tablespoons of milk. Then bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes until golden. Let cool and drizzle a glaze made with 1/2 cup powdered sugar and 1-2 tablespoons of warm water.

One final thing. Is anyone watching Battle of the Choirs? It's twelve kinds of awesome. And the superstar of the show is Nick Lachey and his choir. As someone who sang in a choir for eight years, I love that he actually wants the choir to sing as a choir and not just a singer with some backup singers. But boo Blake Shelton whose choir kind of blows.

In Defense of Milk Chocolate

Ok. It seems as if chocolate is the new cheese which was the new wine. It's all about the percentages of cocoa nibs and all artisinal and crap. even more so it's all about the dark. Good chocolate has to be dark, dark, dark or it's just some plebian slab of sugar. To that I say phooey. I have a deep and abiding love of milk chocolate and want to defend the milk chocolate and mellow flavors in general.

You know I do love bitterness (hee!). I love bitter greens. I love sharp flavors like lime, mustard, and vinegar. Anyone whose been with me to an Asian restaurant know I can bring the spicy like noone's business. But does that mean they should push out lovely soft mellow flavors? For all of the oohing and aahing about dark chocolate with high cocoa content, you've just got to love the balance of sweet, sharp and creamy in a bar of milk chocolate. Milk chocolate certainly adds a lot to bake goods, enhancing the sweetness instead of competing with it. While dark chocolate may be a better vehicle for flavors like coffee, flavors like hazelnut really sing in a matrix of milk chocolate. Finally, while everyone is all purist about their truffles, I've found milk chocolate makes a smoother and more stable truffle.

I hope someone out there starts making some artisinal milk chocolates so it doesn't get relegated to the Halloween candy aisle for good. While dark chocolate may be about sophistication, milk is about comfort.

Nigella's Christmas Kitchen - Salzburg!

Oh MY GOD! We're in Salzburg, land of Mozart and the Von Trapps. The Salzburg Christmas market looks like a postcard and winter really agrees with Nigella as she's in a comfy white trenchcoat and is happily declaring her love of Christmas and its twinkling lights. OH! The Nigella Christmas Kitchen lights! Oh how I love them! Cut to yet another market shot, this time with candied apples. And then linzer cookies! Next Nigella's on a balcony overlooking the market talking about the aroma of mulled wine. This episode she will make Christmas cake (fruitcake), ham, and spiced hard cider.

Dear god I want to hop a plane right now to do to Salzburg. It's so quaint and pretty. (And it really is that way). Nigella comes home with her suitcase and waxes on about the aromas of Christmas at home. Her first dish is mulled hard cider. To show I'm a lightweight, I spent my year in England drinking pints and pints of hard cider as I still couldn't appreciate a good lager (I still can't). Nigella points out she's doing cider instead of wine because wine can get a cough syrup thing going on. I completely agree. One time J and I bought this bottle of organic cherry juice form Trader Joe's and it was like drinking cough syrup. BLECH! Anyway, into the pot goes cinnamon sticks, cardamom (Scandinavian and Middle Eastern at the same time), brown sugar, clementines with cloves stuck into them, bay leaves (?), and ginger and apple tea and finally a splosh of rum. She lets the mixture simmer for 10 minutes and ladles a cup for herself. I love that she admits she cracks cardamom with her teeth. Oooh! Bumper with the Christmas lights!

Bumper back to the show, we get Nigella slicing a ham and then a happy scene of people eating around a Christmas tree. At the kitchen, Nigella says that until recently she's cooked her hams the way her mother does, which is to say immersing them in simmering water to leech out the saltiness. Nigella says that the new hams aren't as salty so that method isn't relevant. In the bottom of her couscous steamer, Nigella puts the ham (snugly!) and red wine. Nigella wins me over even more by expressing her disdain fr highfalutin wine writers that talk about blackberry scents and new car smells (hee!). She does, however, appreciate the aromatic flavor of wine. Into the pot goes fennel, an onion, garlic, fennel seeds, peppercorns, and star anise. She then adds enough water to over the ham. The ham will cook for three hours to infuse with the winy juices. Oh more Salzburg!

After Salzburg, Nigella makes a glaze with red currant jelly, smoked paprika, cinnamon, and red wine vinegar. While the jelly melts, Nigella takes the rind and a little of the fat off the ham and cuts a diamond pattern into the remaining fat and inserts cloves into the diamond pattern. She puts the glazed ham in a hot oven to cook the outside for 15 minutes. A typical entertaining Nigella meal scene. Lots of conversation around the giant Dr. Seussian ham.

I feel a kinship to Nigella because she's telling us how she prefers winter holidays in the snow to tropical vacations. As someone who honeymooned in Toronto in January, I heartily agree. She does this in front of a gorgeous ski slope. At home, Nigella makes cookies with her kids. This time they actually cook with her, measuring the flour, butter, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon and black pepper (to keep the children from eating them all). To the mixture she adds an egg, beaten with honey. What I love is that the ids are doing the cooking. I can't wait to see her daughter Cosima all grown up because right now she has those interesting, slightly awkward features that say "supermodel in five years." The kids roll out the cookies and bake (making sure to cut out a hole to turn them into ornaments). To decorate they use white icing and silver dragees.

Nigela then narrates the cookie decorating from the ski slopes. Her kids genuinely look like they are having fun decorating. Nigella's last dish is a fruitcake! Yay! I love fruitcake. It was something my grandmother loved and it just brings back Proustian memories. If only they would leave out those bizarre green things. Anyway into a pot, Nigella throws raisins, currants, and chopped prunes (which she describes as wrinkled up teddy bear noses). As she chops, she talks about the horror of bad fruitcake but says fruitcake is necessary. Her version is to put everything into a saucepan. Into the fruit she throws in Tia Maria coffee liquer, butter, pumpkin spices, dark brown sugar, and honey. To the thick mond of liquid she puts in the zest and juice of an orange. Finally she adds a few tablespoons to chocolate to give a ghost of chocolate flavor. She lines the cake time with a crown of reusable baking parchment. Into the fruit and stuff, she adds the cake ingredients of eggs, flour, and baking soda. The cake goes into a low oven for two hours.

When the cake comes out she decorates it with chocolate covered espresso beans and edible glitter (to choirs of angels singing) along with edible gold stars and another round of silver dragees. What is up with her thing with dragees? Is she trying to break a tooth? Ah another Nigella entertaining scene with kids decorating the tree and people eating fruitcake. We end with Nigella diving into a huge piece of fruitcake as a late night snack and having a nip of Tia Maria.

Late night inspiration

Ok. It sounds like the Nigella Christmas specials are happening all December! Wheee! I loved the last one (which I will be recapping) mainly because it has scenes set in Salzburg, land of Mozart and the Von Trapps. And if anyone doubts that I didn't hit the Sound of Music Tour while I was in Salzburg and I didn't force my friend to do the Sixteen Going on Seventeen Dance at the the gazebo, you obviously don't know me at all.

Anywhoo, I was in bed reading Feasts when I got to the chapter on cranberries where the easiest jam recipe ever appears. As most of who've made cranberry sauce know, cranberries have a LOT of pectin. That's why the cranberry sauce sets up so well. Therefore, the only ingredients you really need for cranberry jam are cranberries and sugar. So at 11:15pm, I raced out of bed, got the bags of cranberries that were lingering in our freezer form Thanksgiving and made the jam. It's 2 minutes of prep, 7 minutes of cooking, and 15 minutes of cooling. That's it.

Here's the recipe as I did it.

4 cups of fresh cranberries
1 3/4 cups of sugar
I added the zest and the juice of one orange and the juice of one lime (they were hanging around!)

Put a little dessert plate in the freezer. In a large saucepan, toss all the ingredients together and simmer until the sugar dissolves. Once the sugar dissolves, turn the heat up to a boil and let the jam heat vigorously for 7 minutes. Test the jam by putting a half a teaspoon of jam onto the frozen dessert plate. if you run your finger trough the drop of jam and the track your finger made is still there (because hopefully the liquid is thick enough not to ooze back), then the jam is ready. As you all know I can't be bothered sterilize jars so I put enough jam for a week in a jar that goes in the fridge and the rest of the jam goes in tupperware in the freezer.

I highly recommend this recipe. It is very forgiving and open to add-ins (ginger!). I just had some this morning on a brioche roll and it was heaven on a bun!