It is important to list out what the soups are on a piece of paper during the telling of the soup. And when it’s time for pick up, it’s important to keep track of quantities. There’s some strategy to getting all the soup flavors you want, but I think it’s mostly luck.

I made 4 quarts of kimchi-jigae (kimchi soup), and 2 quarts of Norwegian fruit soup.  I drew a hanbok for one label, and printed out a Norwegian flag for my other.

This is what the table looked like just before 8pm…

And less than an hour later, the table looked like this…

The flavors were:
-vegan chili w/ brussel sprouts
-roasted squash w/ Thai curry
-Tex Mex turkey
-chorizo/linguica soup
-miso carrot
-spicy tomato
-chicken gumbo (4 qts)/lemony lentils (2 qts)
-angry rooster (chicken soup w/ siracha)
-split pea with ham
-hot and sour soup w/ a scallion+cilantro pancake
-harira
-monster miso (a miso soup packed with lots of tofu, etc.)
-split pea (w/o ham I think)
-kimchi soup (4 qts)/fruit soup (2 qts)
-chicken gumbo (homemade but made to taste like Campbell’s chicken gumbo)

The ones in bold are the ones I took home.  Yes, I took back one of my own soups.  lol!  I don’t have a lot of room in my freezer, so I’ll definitely be working my way through all of them starting tomorrow!

You were given to me by my second oldest sister back in the days when I was not such a food nerd. I bet you were just a $15-$20 product, but I felt like I was on the road to cooking awesome food when I unwrapped your box. (It was Christmas, I think.) You only had a two year warranty, and, to be honest, I didn’t think you’d last past it.

You were mine before immersion blenders were on everyone’s wedding registry. I think we were at around ten years together. You helped me through dental surgery, *several* times, and I am forever grateful. I thought we’d last into February at least, but it was not to be.

Rest in peace.

Please don’t hate me for replacing you with a colorful Cuisinart.

So I tried my hand at making lemon curd with some Meyer lemons.

And I made some soup with oxtail for dinner. For the soup, I rehydrated some shiitake mushrooms. I decided that my coffee press was the perfect equipment for this.

I also started planning a cookbook swap.  Details are still being worked out, but I’m pretty excited about this.

No recipes this time.  Maybe next time.

What do you like to do on cold winter days?

The last few years have been a repeat of going to our favorite bar for dinner, and then getting kicked out at 8pm so that the bar could set up for their NYE festivities. And we’d never bother buying a table for their NYE event, so we’d always wander our separate ways home. Don’t get me wrong – seeing my friends is the *best* was to pass New Year’s Eve. It’s just lame that we could never remember to do something a little out of the ordinary.

But NOT this year. I remembered to make plans ahead of time for us, and after a few days of indecision, we made reservations for The Red House in Cambridge.

We had never been there before, but the NYE special menu totally interested us. Four courses for $50. There was even a vegetarian option for each course which one of our members benefited from.

Appetizer

• Alaskan king crab bisque with parsnip chips
• potato & jerusalem artichoke latkes with smoked salmon tartar & dill-wasabi creme fraiche
• spinach & watercress salad with honey roasted pear, toasted pistachios & red lentil vinaigrette
• organic duck & pork terrine with winter truffles, preserved tomato relish & toasted hearth bread

Pasta

• pasticchio – homemade spinach pasta layered with wild mushrooms, roasted tomato & taleggio cream
• risotto with lobster, foie gras, arugula & camembert
• hand-cut pappardelle with braised wild boar, root vegetables & savory herbs

Entrée

• grilled angus tenderloin with oyster cream & fried shallot rings
• black tea infused organic pheasant breast with persimmon-ginger chutney
• pan-seared farm raised striped bass with curried cauliflower puree & toasted hazelnuts
• winter vegetable gratin with rosemary-chèvre sauce

Desserts

• panetone bread pudding drizzled with warm butterscotch sauce
• assorted imported cheeses with port wine poached pear & water crackers
• deep chocolate torte with coffee buttercream

I had the latkes, the pappardelle, the pheasant, and the bread pudding.  The latkes would have been completely unimpressive if it hadn’t been for the dill-wasabi creme fraiche.  The creme fraiche was a great punch of flavors, but latke kept it from being overbearing and overwhelming.

The pappardelle was excellent.  The pork/boar was fork tender, and the sauce was seasoned just to my liking (not too sour, not too salty).  The pasta kind of reminded me of the wide rice noodles you get in beef chow fun.  Since those noodles are probably my second most favorite (I think udon might be my #1 favorite), I ate every bit of pasta I could find on my plate.

The pheasant dish was lovely.  The persimmon chutney also had golden raisins and cranberries.  You couldn’t really taste the ginger.  The meat was a bit on the dry side, but I found that the chutney was just the thing it needed to balance out the flavor and texture.  I couldn’t taste any black tea so I guess that a tiny disappointment, but with the gorgeous chutney I don’t think it mattered at all.  The pheasant was served on top of broccoli rabe (I think) and mashed potatoes.  The chutney also paired deliciously with them.

Dessert, though, I think was everyone’s favorite course.  Nearly everyone got the bread pudding.  One person got the cheese plate, and another the chocolate torte.  I got a taste of the torte – it was surprisingly light in texture!  It was good, but as much as a chocolate fiend I am, I wasn’t too interested in the coffee flavored cream frosting.  On the other hand, the bread pudding was absolutely yummy!  I don’t think I even have words that can describe how good we all thought it was.  It was sweet but not cloying.  It was everything I wanted in my New Year’s Eve dessert.  It totally made my evening out well worth the effort.  It made me want more bread pudding.  (^_~)

All in all, our dinner at The Red House was superb.  My friends highly recommend their drink “Mr. Sparkle” (absolut citron, St. Germain & lychee puree, served up, ice cold) which is part of their regular menu right now.  There were also special cocktails for the NYE menu, but I don’t remember what was what and who liked what.  Toward the end of the night, everyone had a Mr. Sparkle (partly because it was a good cocktail and partly because we like “The Simpsons”).  The decor of the house is not fancy (it was built in 1802 after all), but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t treated like you’re not in a fine restaurant.  Our waitress was a good conversationalist and made sure to check on us regularly.  The menu books are unique and cute (see under the plate in the first photo), and overall the food was excellent.  Plus, I loved the smell of a fireplace upon entering the house.

I’d be more than happy to go back there.

Happy New Year’s everyone!  And a Happy New Year’s to the Red House too!

reference link:
http://www.theredhouse.com/new/home.html

Next time David Chang is in town, I’ll get you a picture of David Chang. (^_^)b

ANYWAY!

So, the holidays are here.  I have food plans for my short winter break, but those plans can’t be put into motion until next week.  I have one last art class tomorrow night.  And then, this weekend, I have a holiday party to attend, and a play-date with my niece who is almost 8 years old.

But, cooking-wise, not all is lost.  On Friday, there’s a potluck at work.  After some internal debate, I decided that cookies were the way to go.  I could make the dough ahead of time, leave it in the fridge until I was ready, and then bake tonight without worries.  My usual go-to-cookie recipe is rosemary butter cookies, but one of my favorite co-workers is gluten intolerant.  My brother-in-law is also gluten intolerant, so I figured I’d make some gluten-free cookies for the potluck and save a few for the BIL when I stop over for my play-date.  (I keep giggling when I write out play-date.  I haven’t been 7 years old in a long, LONG time.)

I had peanut butter and chocolate chips on hand in my kitchen, so I started to do some cookie research.  It turned out that I didn’t have to search very hard at all.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies with Chocolate Chips
(adapted from everywhere on the internet)

1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup smooth peanut butter
1 egg
1/2 cup chocolate chips

1. Mix together the first four ingredients.  It will be a bit of a heavy dough.
2. Stir in the chocolate chips.
3. Cover and let the dough firm back up in the fridge.  I guess 1 hour will be enough, but I left mine in the fridge for 2 days before I was ready to bake.
4. Pre-heat your oven to 350F.
5. Taking a tablespoon of dough at a time, form balls of cookie dough.  They will be about 1 inch big.  (I doubled the recipe and made about 40 cookies from my dough.)  Place on parchment-lined cookie sheets.
6. Bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes.  I found that 11 minutes was perfect for me.  Take them out of the oven and cool on a rack.  The cookies won’t look done when you take them out but the bottom of the cookies burn easily (all that sugar!) so don’t leave them in there too long.  They won’t spread much at all, but they are done (for your reference, the cookies in the pictures were taken immediately after baking).

I tasted one.  Pretty good and still like a cookie!  I think my only disappointment was that I wanted more peanut butter flavor.  (Oh Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!  How I long for your perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter!)  That aside, I’m satisfied with these cookies.  I think the gluten-free folks I know will be pretty happy.

• Translator? José Andrés .
• Other guests spotted in the audience? Carles Tejedor, David Chang, Najat Kaanache, Harold McGee, and I think Pere Planagumà.
• José Andrés is the most awesome Spanish translator. Even though he’s translating for his good friend, he can’t stop himself from putting his own spin on the dialogue. Early on, Ferran caught him for adding his own words to the translation, and Jose’s reaction was “I’m going to be fired.”
• The lecture was about El Bulli as a restaurant, and the reinvention of El Bulli as a foundation. I think he said that the new building will start construction in 2014. There will be research materials, and it sounded like the 1,845 recipes in the El Bulli archives will be made available. At the moment, the foundation will be in three buildings. The research library, the meeting/conference/presentation room, and the kitchen. All the buildings will be environmentally friendly.
• We saw videos of 1) making a hollow coconut milk ball with the aid of a balloon and some liquid nitrogen, 2) spaghetti where the it’s made from cheese instead of wheat, 3) spun threads of caramel, and 4) pressed flowers in not paper but cotton candy paper.
• Ferran spent some time talking about the book “Natura” by Albert Adrià. It’s a book on desserts, but the food presentation is very organic and inspired by nature.

And that’s it! The semester of lectures is over.  (^_^)

So, I guess you can expect an update afterall! ^_^

Honestly, I don’t have too much to say about this lecture. As my lecture buddy Judy said, “it was disjointed.” There were some really good things going on, but the presentation didn’t feel like it was quite ready.  It started out strong, and then it sort of loss direction.  (Apologies to Bill Yosses, the White House Pastry chef.)

I could watch Najat Kaanache cook all day long though. lol! Najat, who originally hails from Morocco is Spanish but of Moroccan descent, started her professional cooking background in Holland with someone who once worked for Heston Blumenthal. Eventually, she landed jobs at Alinea, Noma, French Laundry, and finally wound up at El Bulli with Ferran Adria. During the whole presentation, she was constantly playing with liquid nitrogen, nitrous chargers, powders, and who knows what else. She demonstrated the use of Manitol, a sugar alcohol, that you melt at 300/572F. It’s sweet like sugar but it doesn’t brown. She dipped frozen concoctions into it just to get a thin coating of Manitol on the sweets. Eventually, the original mixture melted inside the shaped Manitol. Not something you can do at home, but it’s got some cool cooking applications to it.

Najat also made some sorbets using juice and liquid nitrogen.  (Stir furiously, then let it melt a bit before serving.)

Bill Yosses showed off some equipment – a Thermomix and a Paco Jet. I don’t know if I’d have any use for a Paco Jet, but I always wondered about the Thermomix.

We got to taste olive oil spheres.

What I was really hoping to taste was the taste-film inside the box of Visionaire, issue no. 47.
Per a blurb on Amazon, “experience 12 original flavors produced exclusively for Visionaire in the form of fast-dissolving breath-strips in individually marked, custom-designed cases that correspond to images printed in an accompanying hardcover book.” The flavors are Youth, Art, Mommy, Life, Luxury, Feast, Guilty, Adrenaline, Summer, Power, Orgasm, and Exotic. Alas, the box never made it to me. Either we ran out of tasting strips or someone took off with it. *sigh*

And with that, the lectures are done for the semester.  Ferran Adria is still to come but (although free) tickets must be picked up beforehand.  That lecture is on Sunday.  Tickets can be picked up at the Harvard Ticket Office in Holyoke Center, 1350 Mass Ave, Cambridge, Ground Floor.  Tickets are available starting at noon tomorrow, limit is 2 per person.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be going.  I don’t work anywhere near the ticket office so it’s kind of a pain for me.

Reference links:
http://elbulli-arco.blogspot.com/ (related to Najat Kaanache)
http://www.morewhimsy.com/ (looks to be Najat’s official site, but it’s under construction) Per Najat herself, use the previous link.
http://www.visionaireworld.com/issues.php?id=47

Anyway!

For those unfamiliar with Nathan Myhrvold, he’s the driving force behind the “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” books. It’s a six volume book that retails at $625. The books set out to show 1) step by step instructions for cooks at all levels, 2) show technique, 3) be modern, and 4) explain some food science. It’s 1500 pages. One volume alone has four pounds of ink in it. It’s got food history, equipment explanations, and an insert of the recipes on washable paper. Nathan admits that 50% of the recipes are doable by your average home cook. Another 25% requires some high tech equipment, and the last 25% of the recipes cannot even be done at the more high tech, haute cuisine restaurants.

• He recommends “hyper-decanting” wine. Sounds fancy, right? It’s just opening a bottle of wine and whizzing it in a blender before serving. He claims that in a blind taste test that a wine maker preferred the blender wine over wine that had been decanted the normal way.
• He wants people to break rules, be creative, and surprise diners.
• Recipe #1 – Asian Pear, Watermelon, and spicy pickle chips -> compressed with pre-gelatinized starch. Watermelon has no starch in it. So, slice them paper thin, and place them in a bag with a starch slurry. Vacuum out the air and cook in a sous vide machine. Deep fry to finish.
• Recipe #2 – Pistachio and hazelnut gelatos -> frozen constructed creams. Since pistachio is mild in flavor, refrain from milk/cream/eggs which will just diluted flavor. Grind up pistachios to collect their oil. Make an emulsion of pistachio oil and sugar. Freeze the emulsion and serve.
• Recipe #3 – Ricotta gnocchi, pea juice, and pea butter toast -> flourless gnocchi and centrifuged pea. Puree frozen peas. Then place them in a centrifuge. Three layers of pea products will be produced – top layer is pea broth, middle layer is pea butter (where most of the flavor compounds end up), and the bottom layer is pea “sawdust” (flavorless solid matter). The pea sawdust can be used in the gnocchi for color, but it’s really the pea broth and the pea butter that you want to serve. Nathan claims that the pea butter is intensely flavored.
• Recipe #4 – caramelized carrot soup -> caramelized in a pressure cooker. Maillard reaction is not true caramelization, it’s browning. For the soup, carrots are quartered and the cores removed (cores are where the bitter flavors live). In a pressure cooker, the carrots are mixed with salt, baking soda, and water. The cooker is sealed and pressurized. After cooking 20 minutes under high pressure, the carrots are browned all the way through. This is pureed into soup.
• Grilled meats taste good because the flare ups from dripping fat create the flavor. Since veggies aren’t fatty, there are no flare ups and therefore less flavor. Nathan recommends basting veggies in oil or butter for grilling.
• Recipe #5 – cyrofrying bugers. So you take the best ingredients for a burger. You cook the burger meat in a sous vide machine. After that, dip the burger meat into liquid nitrogen briefly. Finish by cooking the burger meat in a deep fryer.
• Darker foods cook faster than white foods because the white will reflect light/heat.
• Their instant souffle recipe took 150 tries to get it right. The idea was to make a batter that could be kept inside a cream whipper. The nitrous-oxide charger would make it airy, and you could make souffles as you needed to. The trouble that they were having when making the book was getting the air bubble to behave correctly inside and outside the cream whipper. (When a souffle is baked, hot gas expands and makes the water vapor puff out. That’s what gives it structure when it is done. It is also why it sinks as it cools.)
• And the lecture was finished with some Modernist Cuisine high speed videos: 1) a water balloon being popped, 2) zesting an orange next to a lit match (my favorite of the night), 3) a kernel of popcorn being popped, 4) a bullet going through ballistics gelatin, and 5) a bullet going through a row of eggs.

(image at top nicked from msnbc.  Sorry msnbc.)

I don’t think I have much to say about tonight’s lecture. It was more formal than David Chang’s lecture last year, and it was solely about edible bacteria, whether it’s from lacto-fermentation, inoculating fish that has been steamed/smoked/deydrated with koji mold (katsuobushi), dry aged beef, or David Chang’s own invention of pork bushi.

• As we entered the lecture hall, David and company were searing steak. Such a tease!
• Koji, more specifically, is aspergillus orzyae mold. David’s pork bushi was pichia mold.
• We got to taste 1) koji, 2) monosodium glutimate (MSG), 3) peanut-barley miso made by the Chang group, and we got to smell 4) something inoculated with koji (I think it was small bits of pork? or maybe it was barley? I didn’t quite catch it.). David recommended that we do not eat #4. lol!
• Peanut-barley miso? OMG! SO DELICIOUS. I’ve been miso-obsessed this past fall, so I found this to be extra interesting and awesome. I wonder if I could write an email to South River Miso and ask them to add this as a flavor in their catalog. I hope David Chang wouldn’t be insulted if I did. They stopped the Q&A section just as I thought I should ask David if he had applications for the peanut-barley miso in his restaurants.
• The Chang group were able to grow neurospora, the same mold that is used in fermenting oncom, a peanut pressed cake from West Java.
• David had his biologists on hand again this year.
• David reported to us that Magnus Nilsson, chef at restaurant Fäviken Magasinet in Sweden, has figured out a way to make native soy sauce and native miso (using ingredients available to him as opposed to inoculating with Asian molds).
• No, pork bushi is not being used in any of David Chang’s restaurants. The time and effort needed to make it is not in David’s favor.
• Total tease?  Issue #2 of Lucky Peach was available for sale tonight even though it’s not officially released until tomorrow.  Dammit!  I want my issue to come in the mail now!  (^_~)

(Yes, I totally inserted an image of koji mold from the Japanese manga/anime “Moyashimon” into this entry.  I think Masayuki Ishikawa’s rendering of bacteria deserves a little bit of love.  Apologies to David Chang.  I just couldn’t resist.)