A Stunning Admission

Up for the Thursday night before dinner: basil oil, sauce gribiche, and some roasted tomatoes.

First, basil oil: blanch, add oil, puree. Sounds so simple, yet takes so long to clean up. Never once stop to check the book to see if you REALLY need basil oil, or instead, like the dumbass you are, wrote "basil oil" when charting out what to do when and really meant "the beginning part of basil vinaigrette." Realize this just after cleaning up when checking the checklist against recipes.

But, whatever, now I had basil oil puree in my freezer, just waiting for straining whenever I really need basil oil.

Item #2 on the list: Sauce Gribiche, for the mussels that I will FORGET TO SERVE on Saturday night. Whoops, a little foreshadowing there.

Sauce Gribiche basically should be a test on how well you mince. Because I felt like I minced thirty things for this damned sauce.

And then I got to the hard boiled egg. I don't like them, I have never made one in my life, so I am forced to google how to make one. I google it, I watch instructional videos, I cook one. I break open the egg after a sufficient cooling period. Uncooked egg white flows everywhere, so I hard boil a second. I only needed half of it, so I put a little salt and pepper on it... and fed it to my husband.

Sometimes its nice to have a human garbage disposal for a husband.

Item three: Roasted Tomatoes

Easiest thing ever. Slice a tomato into thirds, drizzle olive oil, sprinkle thyme, salt pepper. Roast for an hour. Looks delicious (even before cooking), right?

I wouldn't know, since i'm allergic to tomatoes. Which blows during this project, since at least 20% of the recipes have a tomato component.

So, I don't read directions, I can't hard boil an egg properly, and i'm allergic to tomatoes, thus I will not get to enjoy the second course with everyone. You can pick your "stunning admission" (although I think its obvious - what crazy chic thinks she can cook her way through TFL when she can't HARDBOIL an EGG!!!). I know.

Puff Pastry

First up for the next dinner: puff pastry for the tomato tart. Luckily i've made it before, and knew it was going to take a while because of the wait time, so I "scheduled" this in for a Sunday evening. And you know what? It was even easier than the last time I made it! (and I got an extra special snack treat out of it :)

Basically you mix the dough, mostly by hand, until its combined:

Then you take a giant portion of butter (a POUND!) and a little flour, and smack the crap out of it until its malleable. Imagining a hated-partner's face is optional, but may help if you start to run out of steam before the butter is soft enough.

Then your hands are too messy to take pictures of all of the next steps, but it goes something like this: roll out little triangles, stick the malleable butter block in the middle, fold it up like a package, and roll that bad boy out.

Eventually you'll have the appropriate sized square and fold it up to let it "rest" in the fridge. Because it must be exhausted after all the work.

After doing this a couple of times, I decided it was probably best to roll an appropriate sized piece and cut out the rounds rightnow, rather than waiting. It was a good call.

And the best part... after cutting rounds, there are scraps just aching to be cooked and eaten! So I rolled out the dough, but it into strips, sprinkled some cheese on them (because, really, we know that the butter needed a little cheese accompaniment), and baked for a while.


And you know what? They were delicious. Honestly comparing them to the other puff pastry i've made (from Sherry Yard's book The Secrets of Baking), the other pastry was better - flakier and a little more moist. But this was still pretty tasty, and surprisingly easy for something that took about 4 hours of time.

Beet Juice and (almost) Tapenade

Friday night. Plan was to make the tapenade, croutons, and beet juice. I did not manage to do any of these successfully.

First, the beet juice: I ran down to my mother in law's house to juice the beets.


(I love how pretty peeled beets are, with the swirly pattern)

She is impatient and insisted I must be doing something wrong or that the beets should be cooked because it was taking FOR-E-VER to juice them. She microwaved them. They juiced quickly, but only gave me half of the juice I needed. Oh, well, I figured I'd just reduce that slightly less and not add quite as much butter to the glaze the next day.

Second, the tapenade: I went to take out the special nicoise olives I had actually found at Whole Foods (LOVE the olive bar!) But… they were no where to be seen. I realized that, after my disastrous toddler-trip on Wednesday, that I didn't really recall seeing them when I put the groceries away. Whole Foods was closing in 10 minutes and takes 15 minutes to get to. So, I guess the tapenade would wait. (in hindsight, I'm glad this happened – because I may have uninvited Friday night then if I had discovered how much I hate deboning anchovies).

After this, I lost all motivation to do anything, so I crashed in front of the tv with Brandon. He got up to get a drink, so I asked him to swirl the reducing beets. Which, by the way, have NO "suggested" time for how long it should take to reduce them. I then promptly forgot about them for another hour, ran over to check on them, and found… a small pile of sludge-like beet "glaze." Whoops.

Resources: well, I think we all know this is a big fail... no salt-packed anchovies to be found, and left Nicoise olives at Whole Foods!

The Basics: Pepper Confetti

Pepper confetti makes an appearance in several recipes. I'm not so sure this is going to happen in my house, but we'll see.

Pepper confetti sounds easy in theory: red, yellow, and green bell peppers. Peel, julienne, and microwave until they are dried out little suckers.

(sidenote: the last part totally reminds me of one of the childhood stories i've heard a million times about how my brother in law liked to microwave his hot dogs for like 10 minutes, until they were completely dried out hot dog jerky. So I had no doubt about the microwaving working. Silly, naive me)

Admittedly, I didn't julienne the bell peppers in perfect strips. But, I swear, they were a little better than this picture indicates:

After julienning, I arranged in layers on my perfectly smooth (and very clean) microwave plate and zapped away.

The result: not what I think it was supposed to look like.

The peppers didn't dry out entirely, and I had those weird burn marks on the ribs (hey, but the fact that the burn marks are SO even supports my claim that I julienned them pretty well!) I tried more microwaving, and they just started sticking to the plate, so I decided that was enough. The pepper confetti was definitely not dry enough to store; it really wasn't even dry enough to sprinkle. (and looking ahead, i'm really not sure what it added to the dish... so not sure if it will be reappearing. its times like this I kick myself for getting rid of Brandon's dehydrator when we last moved)

The First Dinner: Salmon Cornets

Whenever I've had parties or people over, I've always made a list of what needed to be done, ordered it, and created a timeline. People [Brandon, uh-hum] may mock it, but it came in super handy for the first dinner.

While Alex was eating lunch/napping, I made the brunoise, chopped all veggies and garnishes, pulled out ingredients, and made the onion cream and the salmon tartare. I thought that I would have lots of time left after I started making the brunoise… but then realized that there was a lot more to it than cutting turnips, leeks, and carrots into itty-bitty pieces.

So, as I said, I chopped the leek, carrots, and turnips into microscopic dice. Then I had to blanch each separately. Then plunge into cold water. Then drain each on paper towels. After I had done this with each separate vegetable, I mixed them all in a bowl, spread the mixture on a cookie sheet, and froze it.

This better be enough brunoise to get me through the book, because it was a serious pain in the arse. And it took half of my allotted afternoon prep time.

Next up: Red onion cream

For the red onion cream, I minced some red onions, ran them under cold water, whisked the crème fraiche in a bowl for a minute, then folded the red onions, shallots, and spices in. I tasted it – delicious!

Next: Salmon Tartare

Basically the easiest thing in the world to make – dice the fish and combine everything! I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but I've never had raw salmon in my life. I don't like cooked salmon much, so I always thought I'd hate it. I (gingerly) took a bite when tasting for seasoning… and discovered it was delicious. Yay!

Even with the insane brunoise work, I still finished in the allotted time. Double yay!

And then not. Brandon came in to help me clean up… and somehow knocked over a butternut squash that knocked over the container with my cornets. My heart fell as I opened the container of pieces. Luckily, upon inspection, only three shattered, and another three lost some pieces… but manageable considering there were 22 (and I was only having two guests).

Resources:

Salmon for the tartare - Point Loma Seafoods (ok, that's not hard to find, but the fish and service were great, so wanted to recognize them!)

Gnocchi and Chive Oil

The amount of prep work I've put into the first dinner is crazy… but at the same time, I love having a little something to do each night when I get home from work. Upon my arrival home today, I discovered my potato ricer came (along with the cornet molds I ordered). I have loved all of the excuses to buy new kitchen stuff :) So, with having a potato ricer, I decided it was time to make the gnocchi.

The ingredients were super simple:

I baked the massive potatoes while I cooked dinner for the baby and got him ready for bread. I attempted to scoop out the potato after it was cooked (per instructions), but quickly realized it was much more efficient to just peel the skin off. I was also a little concerned about using the ricer… but it turned out to be SUPER simple.

After quickly combining everything, making the ball of dough, then a mini snake from a piece of the dough and chopping the gnocchi, I thought I would even have time to sit and watch tv for a while with Brandon.

And then. And then I realized that I had to roll each of the gnocchi over a fork. And there were like a billion of them. Seriously, I realized it made 20 dozen, but I didn't really wrap my head around how many that was until I had to make the little grooves. And that I had to cook them. And freeze them.

2 hours and an extreme backache later, I had this:

Notice how they got bigger as I went along? I'm glad I sucked it up and made all of them, though, since Alex LOVES them and it’s super easy to just toss a dozen (or two – kids got a big appetite) frozen gnocchi in a pan and heat them. Yum.

While mentally psyching myself out about making the gnocchi, I also made the chive oil started. First I ran a packed of chopped up chives under burning hot water. Then I blended with oil and stuck it in the fridge. Easy-peasy.

Chicken Stock and Balsamic Glaze

In preparation for the first dinner party, I made my first TWO recipe accountrements. Both seemed pretty easy. Both took an absurdly long amount of time.

First, chicken stock. Being the genius I am, I figured I could find chicken bones somewhere. I was right! Apparently they are common in asian markets (something San Diego has a decent number). My lovely husband has a 99 Ranch a couple of blocks away from his work, so he stopped by and got 5 pounds of chicken bones and a pound of chicken feet. Much easier than buying 20 pounds of chicken and butchering them.

I've never actually seen uncooked chicken feet before. They looked like little 4-fingered hands. With fingernails and all. Freaky.

I rinsed the chicken pieces, removing skin and blood and anything that would come off easily, then simmer and skimmed and skimmed and skimmed. While skimming and skimming, I cut up leeks and onions and carrots for mirepoix.

I added the mirepoix to the simmering mess of chicken bones attempting to crawl out of the pot (seriously, a chicken foot would occasionally pop up and look like a hand trying to claw its way out, freaked me out every time), and simmered and skimmed and skimmed and skimmed some more. Seriously, my arms were DEAD when I was done with this.

After that simmering, I strained it twice, ladling the stock through the strainer. Do we see how big that pot is? [insert picture] It was a lot of ladling. A LOT. More dead arms. But the stock was good. Clear. Clean tasting. I think I like my stock a little more chicken-y, though, so next time I will use a little less water.

While I was skimming, I made balsamic glaze. My mis en place.

To make glaze, dump in pot and let it reduce slowly. MUCH less work than the stock. But by the time two hours had elapsed, I had only reduced it by half (its supposed to reduce to about ½ a cup, a quarter of what I started with). So I reduced another hour. Then I decided I HAD to go to sleep, even though it was almost twice the amount I SHOULD have had, so I cooled it and put it in a squeeze bottle. Then the next morning, I decided it was still too thin, so I would dump it in and reduce more. Two hours later, I finally had around a half of a cup. I think maybe it needed more heat to reduce properly, but I was scared of bringing it to a simmer and making it too vinegary. In any event, I tasted it, it seems fine, hopefully it works fine.

Next up: actual prep work for dinner!

Resources: 99 Ranch for chicken bones and chicken feet.