Author: KC

I'm a graduate student in Montreal. I spend most of my time studying drug addiction using brain imaging techniques. I'm also a foodie, exploring the culinary world both in and out of my kitchen.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

86. Roasted Striped Bass with Chive and Sour Cream Sauce p.305


The recipe. The Book doesn’t call for garlic chive sprouts though.

Finally fish! That one lonely fish dish has been an embarrassment for too long. I hated looking at the stats page and seeing the Fish and Shellfish section averaging just one mushroom. This was a much better dish, and I’m delighted to add it.

The recipe calls for striped bass, but salmon was one of the alternatives, and it was looking much nicer that day. The recipe is very simple and elegant. The fish is started in a skillet on the stove- top skin side down, then transferred to the oven to finish up. The recipe calls for moving the fish from the pan to a baking dish, but I just moved my cast iron skillet into the oven. Once the fish is nicely roasted it’s topped with a puree of sour cream, water, lemon juice, and chives. A sprinkling of minced chives, and a splash of lemon juice finish the dish.

The fish was prepared very simply, which let it show off it’s natural flavour. The sauce was a great compliment to the fish that managed to counterpoint the fish’s flavours without overpowering. I really like the sea foam green shade the sauce turned out. It was creamy smooth with onion accents and clear punch of lemon. I thought it worked particularly well with a meatier fish like salmon, cutting through the oiliness it can sometimes take on.

This made a cool, light, refreshing meal that managed to convey a casual elegance, delicious but understated. It’s the kind of dish I’d expect to see on the lunch menu at a country club. It came out near perfectly, and allowed for a great deal of flexibility in choosing the fish. It’s rare to find a creamy sauce that makes a dish seem lighter, more rare still is one that shows off the fish without trying to hid a thing.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

85. Bok Choy with Soy Sauce and Butter p.524

The recipe

This is about as simple as side dishes get. Just fry up some bok choy, toss on a mixture of water, soy, oyster sauce, and butter, cook for a minute or two, then eat. I prefer baby bok choy to the gargantuan full grown versions. They don’t taste much different, but I like the finer texture of the smaller ones. Full sized bok choy also leave you with the cabbage and celery conundrum of what to do with the rest of these enormous vegetables?

Bok choy is a prototypically Chinese vegetable, and it’s almost always prepared with that in mind. I don’t think I’ve had it any way but stir fried with some vaguely Asian flavourings tossed at it. I wonder if bok choy really has an affinity for soy sauce, or if it’s just the case that no one has ever tasted it without it? While this preparation isn’t innovative, it is quite tasty.

I liked that this dish is simple, and uses ingredients you probably have on hand. I’m not actually sure that most people have oyster sauce on hand. But, a geometric expansion of condiments is squeezing me out of my fridge, so oyster sauce was no problem to find.

This recipe was reliable, easy, and very quick. Bok choy looks great on a plate, and has a unique and appealingly mild flavour. This is a great side dish, and it could even see myself making these as dinner-for-one after an exhausting day.

Categories
Poultry The Book

84. Persian-Syle Chicken with Walnut, Onion, and Pomegranite Sauce (Fesenjan) p.372

No recipe for this one.

This is a quick chicken stew, made with pomegranate, onions, walnuts, cinnamon, tomato, lemon juice, and molasses. That’s a lot of big bold individualistic flavours in one dish. Apparently this dish is traditionally made with duck instead of chicken. There may have been a very good reason for that. Duck has got a pretty intense flavour of its own, and it can stand up to this sauce. I found that the chicken flavour just got lost.

The weirdest thing about this dish is that the sauce is thickened with ground walnuts. I really liked the walnut flavour, and it pairs very well with the pomegranate juice, but the texture was just off. It’s not smooth, it’s not chunky, it’s mealy. Runny undercooked oatmeal comes to mind.

I’m also not a huge fan of sweet sauces for meats. This wasn’t candied or anything, but the combination of pomegranate juice, cinnamon, and nuts put my palate in dessert mode. Sweetened fruity stews and I just aren’t destined to be friends.

On a more positive note the chicken itself picked up bunch of great flavour. I didn’t eat much of the sauce on it’s own, but it had perfumed the chicken quite beautifully. I also liked having an excuse to break down a pomegranate. The little jewels are gorgeous, and a lot of fun to eat.

I wouldn’t make this one again, the sauce had a cohesive flavour, but it was going in a direction I didn’t want to follow. It completely overwhelmed the chicken, and the texture was just bad. Make it at your own risk.

Categories
The Project

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

My friend, and regular Gourmet Project commenter, Nique writes a weekly comic devoted to thinly veiled jabs at the people in her life. This week she shows her appreciation for The Project. Check out all of her fine work at niqueworks.ca.

In other news, operation 60 in 60 is significantly behind. I’ve done 30 in 45, not quite the pace I was hoping to set. So I’ll need accelerate to two recipes per day for the next couple of weeks to get up to #113 by Sept 14th.

On a brighter note I’ve finished the backlog of dishes from the spring of 2006, and can now focus on the spring of 2007.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

83. Oatmeal Cookies p.664

The recipe

People are funny about baking. Not everyone, but probably a majority of people who “don’t bake” would at least be willing to try their hand at making oatmeal cookies. When their 5 year olds help bake, they make cookies. These are the same people who will look at you funny if you tell them you’re making biscotti, they think shortbread is too complicated, and are convinced that brownies and cakes only come from a box mix. It must be an issue of familiarity and comfort, but in reality making good cookies is often harder than any of those other baking projects. The skills are the same, sifting, creaming, beating, cracking eggs, the order is just a bit different. Cookies are notorious for burning, and cooking unevenly. Pans have got to be rotated, and racks switched. This is not to say that baking cookies is hard, just that there are many many baking projects which people won’t try because they lack the confidence. Since everyone can bake a cookie, it’s a chink in their armour, and a lead in to more unfamiliar projects. It’s possible that all of these straw men I’ve set up know perfectly well that they could bake other things if they wanted to, but feel it’s just too much effort. Fresh warm cookies are pretty much universally agreed to be worth working for.

These particular oatmeal cookies are fairly standard issue, a bit rough around the edges, but in a very satisfying way. These are about as casual as cookies get, standard butter cookies spiced up with rolled oats, cinnamon, vanilla, and brown sugar. Chocolate chips are given as an optional addition, so I stirred in half a cup. Sift the dry stuff together, cream the wet stuff together, then mix the two doing your best not to create gluten. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes, and contemplate just accepting the second degree burns to your mouth while you wait for them to cool.

If you’ve had an oatmeal cookie before you know what to expect with these. When I’m in the mood for an oatmeal cookie, familiarity is what I’m after though. They’re miles better than the cracker crisp packaged ones, and the oily and inexplicably huge cafeteria cookies. The cinnamon and vanilla come through nicely, and the use of both white and brown sugar adds a bit of molasses depth. The rolled oats let you pretend they’re healthy, but the added chocolate chips give away the lie. This is my standard go-to oatmeal cookie recipe, I probably make them four times a year, and I love them every singe time. Just make sure to have a glass of milk on hand.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

82. Whipped Chipotle Sweet Potatoes p.583

The recipe

Chipotles were the taste sensation of 2006 for me. In fact they were a taste sensation that took the fast food world by storm, from Doritos to Subway you could hardy avoid these often mispronounced smoked jalapeños in adobo sauce. Bobby Flay (restaurateur, Iron Chef, and lover of limelight) is generally cited as patient 0 in the spreading chile epidemic. I’m happy to say that I’ve been infected, and that the taste sensation of 2007 are some of Bobby’s other favourites, Anchos, Gualliros, and Pasillas. I’m still deeply fond of the chipotle, it’s unbelievable depth of flavour, and layers of smoke add a mysterious smouldering quality to any dish. As it turns out this is one of Bobby Flay’s own recipes.

It’s a very straightforward preparation, sweet potatoes are roasted in their skins, then scooped out and beaten together with chipotles, butter, and salt. The mixture is spread into a baking dish and baked for another 20 minutes. The flavours are spot on in this recipe, the sugar soaked earthiness of the sweet potatoes is a perfect compliment to the chipotles. Heat and sweet go together so very well, and these two ingredients bring out the best in each other. The recipe also resists the temptation to make things complex, there are only four ingredients here, and that simplicity is its greatest strength.

Texture unfortunately is a weakness of the dish. The sweet potatoes are whipped, but not whipped in the sense of light and airy, more dense, wet, heavy, and textureless. There’s nothing in here that would give it the structure necessary to become light. I suppose you could fold in stiffly beaten egg whites before the final baking, but I’d rather go the other direction. I wouldn’t whip them at all. This would be much better as smashed chipotle sweet potatoes. Leaving some nice chunks of firm but yielding sweet potato in there would be a major improvement.

I’ve made these a couple of times, and once I had problems with my potatoes splitting and drying out in the oven. Be careful to use undamaged potatoes, and to prick them well. If they split all is lost.

I really really liked the flavours of this dish, and it’s texture could easily be improved. It’s designed as a prepare ahead casserole that can be warmed up when the Thanksgiving hoards arrive. If you’re making it a la minute you can probably skip the final baking step. It gives the dish a crust, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. If you felt like it adding cheese before baking would turn this into a nice gratinée, and a substantial main course. This recipe is easy, cheap, and delicious. I never get tired of the sweet potato chipotle interplay, and its become a standby for me.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

81. Spaghetti Squash with Moroccan Spices p.581

The recipe

This recipe was extremely simple, and as far I’ve seen is the only recipe in The Book that calls for the use of a microwave. Basically a spaghetti squash is microwaved, the strands are pulled out and tossed with a compound butter made with garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne, and salt. Top with a bit of fresh cilantro and you have a simple side. This dish tasted good because spaghetti squash taste good, but I’m not sure the compound butter was the best possible pairing for it. The title of the recipe is a bit of a misnomer, there’s nothing all that Moroccan about the spices, in fact they read like basic Tex-Mex cookery. I suppose it’s the coriander that’s supposed to recall North Africa?

The dish probably would have been better if it had gone more Tex-Mex. A splash of lime juice would have added some welcome acidity, and replacing the cayenne with chopped fresh jalapenos would have added more dimension than the straightforward heat of cayenne. The ground coriander was the least appealing part of the butter, it was only 1/2 teaspoon, but a little coriander goes a long way. I found it a bit distracting, and out of balance with the other flavours. The recipe could also have cut back on the butter without anyone missing it.

All of those issues are easily fixed, and the basic method of preparing the squash is great. All I did was poke the squash with a fork, then microwave on high for ~7 minutes per side. The instructions in The Book are for an 800 watt microwave, and I think mine is 1100, so it cooked a bit faster. The quicker cooking didn’t seem to have damaged anything, and you’ll know when it’s done when the squash gets soft, so the exact time doesn’t really matter. A little bit of juice flows from the holes you pricked, and the sugars quickly caramelize making the outside quite sticky. I didn’t put the squash on a plate, and the microwave try was a bother to clean.

The strands of squash come out nicely separated, and whole. They have a great texture, and they’re inherently fun to eat. My squash was sweet, deeply flavoured, and vibrantly yellow. I don’t think I’d toss it with this particular butter again, but from now on my spaghetti squash are going in the microwave.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

80. Broiled Polenta with Tomato Sauce p.266

The recipe

This recipe uses The Book’s Basic Polenta recipe as it’s main ingredient. The basic polenta is a great no-fail staple recipe. Here it’s dressed up by stirring in some cheese, putting it under the broiler, and topping with a very simple tomato sauce.

I served this as part of a vegetarian dinner. It was nicely substantial, and made a good centerpiece for my menu. Very often polenta is served straight from the pot, so that it’s thick but still runny, which highlights the risotto like creamless creaminess. Here the polenta is poured into a baking dish and allowed to cool and set up before it goes under the broiler. This gives it a completely different texture, it ends up gelled and reminiscent of a rice or bread pudding. In this application it seems much more substantial, which is a better base for a sauce. Putting a sauce on a custardy plate of fresh polenta might be a little unidimensional on the texture front.

The recipe calls for fontina to be stirred into the hot polenta. I don’t think I’ve ever used or tasted fontina, and I didn’t use it here. I substituted a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, and called it good enough. It browned up nicely, and melted seamlessly into the polenta, so it seems like a fair substitution to me.

The tomato sauce was extremely simple, perhaps too simple. The sauce is nothing but softened onions, a bit of garlic, a can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and a pointless dash of parsley. I’m writing this in August when the local tomato crop is at it’s peak, and it seems like the less you do to them the better everything ends up. I made this sauce in April, using canned tomatoes, when charms of a minimalist sauce aren’t quite as beguiling. I’ve got nothing against canned tomatoes, they’re much more flavorful than the mealy, flavourless, perfectly red, imported California tomatoes we get in April. But, they can’t compare to the hight of summer’s flavour. If you’re going to do a slow cooked sauce based on canned tomatoes I think a bit of flavouring is important. I would definitely have added a bay leaf to the sauce, and thyme or oregano wouldn’t have hurt anything at all, a splash of vodka would bring out those flavourful alcohol soluble compounds in the tomatoes, and a hint of fire from a chile or red pepper flakes wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Once the sauce was finished I tasted it and stirred in some fresh rosemary, which really improved things.

This dish was fine, but a better concept than execution. It started with a really excellent polenta base, but didn’t do enough to it. The addition of cheese and time under the broiler added great flavour and texture, but the lackluster sauce was at best a missed opportunity, and at worst dragged the dish down. There’s a huge amount of room to play and experiment with a dish like this. It’s rare that I accuse The Book of being too simple, or lacking in obscure ingredients, but this is one of those times.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

79. Dark Chocolate Shortbread p.688

The recipe

I made this recipe before I’d formally started The Project. I didn’t have my own camera back then so I invited friends over to both eat, and photograph, my food. I recently received a batch of those photos, and now I’m trying to remember how something tasted a year and a half later. Frankly I’m quite surprised at how well I do remember some of them. There’s a Roast Pork With Sweet-and-Sour Chile Cilantro Sauce that has faded from memory enough that I don’t feel confident writing about it, so I’ll submit it to the redo pile. But, on the whole I feel pretty confident in my memories. For next few recipes you might have to excuse some hazy spots in my recollection. I’ll try to fill in the missing bits with lies and wild imaginings.

The Book is a fan of shortbread, it gets integrated into all sorts of squares, cookies, bars, confections and who knows what else. Both of the ones I’ve tried have turned out beautifully. Shortbread is about as simple as a baked good can get, and provided that the very short list of ingredients that go in are top quality the results are inevitably delicious. It does burn rather easily, so careful monitoring is a good habit to get into. In this recipe the shortbread is cut into wedge shaped cookies, and eaten on it’s own. The recipe recommends pairing these with a glass of port after dinner.

The twist in this recipe is the addition of 1/4 cup of dutch-process cocoa powder to the basic recipe. The cocoa was successful in turning the shortbread a dark chocolaty colour, and between the name and appearance of these cookies you’d expect them to taste chocolaty. In fact they taste like shortbread, with a hint of bitterness. I was surprised at how un-chocolaty these ended up, food colouring would have produced the same result. Now, shortbread is delicious, but when you bite into something billed as Dark Chocolate Shortbread, you might expect it to taste like chocolate. I was a bit let down by that trickery.

I might make these again if I was serving a shortbread tray a Christmas and wanted to alternate light and dark pieces for visual effect, but as it was it just built up and dashed a hope of chocolately shortbread goodness. I might try cutting the white flour down to 1/2 cup, and bumping the cocoa up to 1/2 cup, maybe then we’d have a chocolate shortbread recipe worth talking about. These were by no means bad, but they were by no means chocolate either.

Categories
Cakes The Book

78. Ginger Pound Cake p.704

no recipe for this one.

I served substantial pieces of this pound cake following our Beef Wellington supper. If that sounds like a ridiculously rich follow-up to one of the heavier items of the British cookbook, you’re absolutely right. I served both the cake and the Wellington to one of The Boys and his lady friend. The last time they had us over they tried to plumb the depths of the English butter first cooking philosophy. Their opening volley was rabbit braised in a butter sauce, and asparagus gently floating in a butter pond. When we had them over, what could we do but wrap meat in pastry, and try to get as much butter into a cake as is humanly possible? The next round of this escalating war on our arteries has been planned, and intercepted intelligence indicates he’s got a duck wrapped in bacon, possibly stuffed with a rabbit ready to deploy.

This is quite a large cake, it fills a 10 inch tube pan and ends up about 6 inches tall. You really need a crowd to get through it, because as much as you might want to you’ll only be able to eat a little. The traditional proportions for a pound cake are a pound of flour, a pound of butter, and a pound of sugar, hence the name. This recipe does indeed include a pound of butter, a bit more than a pound of cake flour (at 4.6 oz / sifted cup), and a pound and a half of sugar (at 8 oz / cup) add six eggs into the mix, and you’ve got an appropriate retort to the buttered rabbit. Those proportions should tell you what you need to know about this cake. It was decidedly buttery, and a bit too sweet. In this case the more than traditional sugar level had a very good reason. When they call this a ginger pound cake they’re not fooling around. The recipe starts with 6 oz of grated fresh ginger, and they give explicit instructions about preserving every precious drop of ginger juice. Just to punch it up a bit they call for one and a half teaspoons of dried powdered ginger as well. The main flavour of the cake is not at all subtle.

Actually making the cake was very easy. I used my stand mixer, while the recipe calls for a hand mixer. There was a lot of creaming of butter and sugar to do, so I’d say go with the stand mixer if you have one. The method was straightforward, sift the dry stuff together, then cream the butter and sugar, stir in the ginger, and add the flour mixture and milk in alternating batches. This cake is already pretty dense, so building gluten would be a very bad thing. The recipe calls for cake flour, which is less prone to gluten formation, but it’s quite important to mix the flour in slowly and as little as possible. The standard recipe phrase “mix until just combined” really means until it doesn’t quite look combined and there are still some little chunks of flour, but it no longer looks like a swirled lollipop. The batter goes into a buttered and floured tube ban, and baked at 300 for up to an hour and a half.

The final cake was rich and dense, but managed to have a really excellent crumb. I was quite surprised by how good the texture was. Many pound cakes end up having a uniform, tiny, dense packed crumb. In this version there was a lot more texture, it gave the appearance of a much lighter cake, but had the mouth filling feel of the rich beast it truly is. The ginger in it’s various forms came through loud an clear. The sweetness of the cake mellowed its spiciness, and recalled the heavenly balance of candied ginger (if anyone wants to get me a Christmas present, a box wouldn’t go amiss). I served it with raspberries and whipped cream. The berries were a nice contrast, but honestly enough is enough with the dairy. I prefer a fruit coulis with a pound cake, but I guess with everything going on in this cake it would have been overkill.

I was really happy with the way this cake turned out. The texture was excellent, and the flavour was just what I’d hoped for. This cake would be best served at a function, or a pot-luck. You’ll never get enough people around one table to eat it all.