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
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

184. Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies p.688

The recipe

You know who I have an irrational dislike for? Katharine Hepburn. I know she’s one of the best respected and beloved actresses of all time, and the Oscar winningest lady ever, but she just drives me nuts. Admittedly I haven’t seen much of her work, but one film is all it took. In Bringing Up Baby she plays the lighthearted and carefree Susan Vance who drives the films comedy of errors with her impetuous, irresponsible, behaviour that we’re meant to take as cute and endearing. Every line she delivers just gets on my last nerve. Obviously this is some personal damage of mine, as the rest of the world seems to think it’s a pretty good film. Katharine Hepburn is a lot better in her more dramatic roles, but even there her upper class New-England accent chips away at my soul. I’m also a Star Trek fan, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway) who bears a strong resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, seems to have used Hepburn as the model for her character. Janeway has all the weird vocal ticks, the grandiose delivery of her lines, and the obstinate bullheadedness of so many of Hepburn’s characters. I can’t stand Janeway, and it turns out that she’s just a pale imitation of the grating irritation that Ms. Hepburn could bring to the screen. All that to say, I was predisposed to dislike Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, which are apparently her once-secret family recipe.

The recipe starts by melting together butter with 2 ounces of chocolate in a double boiler, then stirring in sugar, eggs and vanilla. A quarter cup of flour and a bit of salt are then barely mixed in. A cup of chopped walnuts and folded into the batter, and everything goes into 325 oven for about 40 minutes.

This is a very simple brownie recipe, unfortunately I thought they were awful. As the recipe promised the brownies were gooey-soft, which some people are really into, but it’s not my ideal texture. There were way too many nuts, which further weakened the integrity of these very soft brownies. They were hard to pick up without risking catastrophic brownie structural failure. My main complaint was that they hardly tasted like chocolate. 2 ounces was just enough to give the brownies a chocolate appearance, without any chocolate taste at all. Really they just tasted like sugar and walnuts.

Unfortunately the gold standard for judging a brownie recipe is the ubiquitous boxed mix. Those boxed brownies are not bad, but any recipe you’re going to make yourself ought to be able to beat the pants off them. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies have conclusively failed that test. If you’re going to make brownies from The Book I’d suggest the Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies on page 689. I’ve made them a bunch of times, but haven’t blogged them because I’ve just replaced the three chocolates the recipe calls for with all semi-sweet. They’re seriously fantastic brownies, and they’d just destroy Katharine Hepburn’s mockery of a brownie in a head to head competition.

Interestingly both Teena and Adam have made these brownies and given them grades of A- and A respectively. There are rave reviews for these things all over the internet, but they’re just not for me. These brownies just give me one more thing to dislike about Katharine Hepburn.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

183. Georgian Pork Stew p.485


The recipe

The Georgian Salsa called ajika, which I blogged about last time totally blew me away. This pork stew uses a lot of the same flavours, and integrates the ajika as an important ingredient, so predictably, I like it a lot. The stew uses some unusual ingredients including summer savory, corriander seeds, fenugreek, and dried marigolds, but nothing I had too much trouble finding.

I really like it when The Book pushes my limits and asks me to try new and different things, but I simultaneously curse The Book for sending me running all over the city trying to find exotic components, and damn them for not using the unusual ingredients that I have easy access to in their recipes. They have to draw a fine line between authenticity and simplicity in designing these recipes, and no matter where they make their stand someone is going to be upset. In general I’ve got to give them credit for striking a fairly good balance, or at least what seems like a good balance to someone living in a major metropolitan centre with easy access to a specialty shops. I imagine trying to do this project in Smalltown USA with nothing but a Megamart at your disposal would be a challenge. From my perspective getting to crush up flowers and put them in my dinner was good fun, but it might be a deal breaking frustration for other cooks out there.

The method for this stew is a little bit unusual. You begin by adding cubed and seasoned pork shoulder to a covered pot without any oil, then turning the heat to high and letting the pork steam for 10 minutes, only stirring it once. I read that instruction about five times because it sounded so unsual, but it worked, the pork released juices and steamed instead of burning or sticking as I feared it would. After 10 minutes the lid is removed and the pork juices are allowed to evaporate, still over high heat. Once the liquid is gone, oil is added and the meat is sautéed until well browned. While that’s going on you make a paste of garlic, summer savory, and salt, which is added to the browned meat and cooked for a minute. You then grind corriander and fenugreek and add them along with chopped red onion, and marigold and cook for a few minutes. A cup of water is added, and stew is braised for an hour. Once the meat is tender fresh cilantro, Georgian salsa, and pepper are stirred in. The stew is served with more of the ajika on the side, and with pomegranite seeds sprinkled on top (which I never got around to).

I don’t think the steam-before-you-sear technique did good things to my pork. I can see this sort of technique working well with a really fatty and tough piece of pork shoulder, but my relatively lean supermarket pork didn’t survive the process very well. The meat gives up a lot of it’s moisture, which evaporates before the meat is browned. The expectation is that the moisture would re-penetrate the meat during braising, and that there would be enough fat in the meat to keep it moist. That didn’t happen for me, the meat gave up it’s moisture, and never really got it back. Nothing is quite as frustrating as a dish that simmered for hours, but somehow ends up dry.

Other than that fairly major complaint the dish was excellent. The flavours were absolutely spot on. The ajika is amazing, and the additional herbs really brought the dish home. The sauce was irresistible, I’m willing to admit that I went at the sauce with a spoon while pretending to put it away in the fridge. I’m convinced that a better piece of pork would have allowed this technique to work, and deliver succulent meat along with the incredible sauce. If you’re using bog-standard grocery store pork I’d recommend skipping the steaming step, browning and braising should be sufficient to tenderise the meat without driving all the moisture out.

Had the pork worked out this would be a no brainer for a five star rating. Dry pork is a fairly major flaw, so I should penalize it heavily, but all said and done I still really enjoyed this meal, and can’t bear to give it less than a

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

182. Georgian Salsa p.896


The recipe

I know next to nothing about the republic of Georgia, but this salsa has me pricing out flights. This salsa, and the stew I added it to are probably the most memorable things I’ve eaten this year. None of the ingredients used in the dish are particularly exotic, but the flavour is unlike anything I’ve had before. It’s a salsa of coriander seed, fenugreek, cilantro, basil, garlic, red bell pepper, jalapeño, red wine vinegar, and salt. The spices are ground in a mortar and pestle, and then everything goes for a spin in the food processor. I haven’t used fenugreek much in my cooking, although it’s not hard to find, its unfamiliar flavour probably has a lot to do with what appeals to me so much about this sauce.

The word salsa is misleading in this recipe, there’s nothing Latin about it, it’s closer to Indian than anything else. The basil, cilantro, and red pepper make this a very fresh tasting salsa, but it’s power comes from the wallop of garlic and jalapeño. The sweetness of the coriander seeds is so unlike the cilantro leaves it’s hard to think of them coming from the same plant. I’m utterly unable to describe the way fenugreek tastes, or what it adds to this dish. I just went into the kitchen and chewed on a few seeds to try to transmogrify flavour into words, but no luck. Fenugreek makes this taste good, and that’s the best I’m going to come up with. Maybe that’s enough. This salsa takes 10 minutes to make, try it and you’ll see what my incoherence is all about.

I have no idea if this flavour combination has staying power for me, or it’s a passing fad, but for right now this salsa is excitingly different.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

181. Persian Rice with Pistachios and Dill p.258


The recipe

My parents who spent the last two years in India, have become rice snobs. I don’t know much about rice, or think too much about it. To me it’s a side dish, serviceable, and functional, but not really worthy of notice. My parents however are attuned to the subtle differences in texture, flavour, and aroma that distinguish great rice from the mediocre. I used the same basmati I always do for this dish (I bought a big burlap sack long ago, and I’m still working my way through it) but it came out much better than I could possibly have imagined. This rice was shockingly good, good enough to get me to rethink my whole position on rice.

In this dish basmati is rinsed in multiple changes of water, and boiled uncovered for a few minutes. Then things get weird. The rice is strained and allowed to drain while butter is melted in the bottom of the pot. The rice then goes back into the pot with alternating layers of chopped pistachios and fresh dill. You then poke holes in the layers of rice with with the back of a wooden spoon (to let steam move about?), and let it steam covered both with a kitchen towel and a lid for 30-35 minutes over moderately low heat. You then let it stand for a further half-hour, and serve.

This procedure builts up a crispy and deeply browned crust on the bottom called the tah-dig. The tah-dig is supposed to form a solid layer on the bottom of the pot, which you’re able to get out whole, and then break up and serve on top of the rice. The tah-dig is the most prized part of this dish, so everyone should be allotted his fair share. My tah-dig didn’t stay together, and it just crumbled in with the rest of the rice, so I mixed it in thouroughly to make sure everyone got some.

This rice is just absolutely amazing. It was perfectly cooked, I worried it would be overdone with such a long cooking time, but each grain was whole, and just slightly toothsome. The pistachio and dill flavours permeated the rice, but it was quite a subtle effect, and a delicious one. The grains in the tah-dig were cooked directly in butter, so they were about as overwhelmingly magnificent as you’d expect, with the very deep nuttiness of both browned butter, and roasted rice. I’m having trouble finding words to express how much I liked this rice, it’s really easy to make, and you owe it to yourself to try it.

I served the rice with a spicy Georgian stew on top, which was a mistake. The stew was excellent, and the flavours were complimentary, but this rice deserves to be eaten on it’s own. I can only imagine how wonderful this rice would be with grilled or poached salmon. This is far and away the best rice I have ever had, and I just can’t wait to make it again. It has absolutely earned its five mushroom rating.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

180. Seared Salmon with Balsamic Glaze p.290


The recipe

Jacques Pépin said it best, if you’re going to fry fish, try to do it at the neighbours’ house. I was working from home the day I made this dish, and my dining companion wasn’t getting back until 9 pm so I decided to make fish for lunch. As regular readers know she’s not entirely comfortable with things that come from the sea, fish least of all. Salmon is her most hated fish, so I try to be polite about cooking it when she’s not around. The dish is as simple as it gets, requiring just a few pantry staples, and some nice Salmon fillets (I quartered the recipe and just made a fillet for me). All the recipe involves is seasoning the fillets with salt and pepper, pan frying them until they’re just cooked through, and once the salmon is out of the pan deglazing it with a mixture of balsamic vinegar, water, lemon juice, and light brown sugar. Once this sauce is reduced it’s spooned over the salmon and served.

What the book fails to mention is the billowing clouds of fish smoke that will fill your poorly ventilated apartment, and that the first thing your dining companion will say when she gets home is “gah, fish!”, or that your pillows will smell like fried fish, and that a week later the kitchen pantry will still have a faint fishy odor. The fish is seared over highest heat in a non-stick skillet (more cancer, yay!), and it started smoking right away. After the recommended 4 minutes the skin side of the salmon was black and charred, not seared. I reduced the heat a bit to cook the top side of the fillet, and got it out of the pan once it was nicely browned. When I cut into it the fish was still pretty much raw in the thicker part of the fillet. I only served myself the skinnier side which had cooked through. I made the pan sauce, and brushed a bit of it onto my fish, but it picked up a lot of the burned flavour from the pan, and I over reduced it as well (that pan was really hot).

I suspect that my modifications to the recipe got me into trouble. I was supposed to cook 4 fillets in a 12 inch skillet, but I did one fillet in an 8 inch skillet. With less fish per square inch to cool the skillet down the fish may have burned faster. I think my fillet was a more like 8 ounces than the recommended 6, which would explain the under cooking.

Despite the snafus, the fish tasted quite good. I peeled off the blackened skin, and the meat of the thinner half of the fillet was nicely cooked. Even with the slightly burned flavour the pan sauce worked well, it was a touch sweet for my taste, and if I made it again I’d increase the lemon juice, but it did compliment the salmon’s flavour nicely.

I guess this is one of those recipes that you can’t vary from too much. Many Epicurious posters appear to have had success, so I’m going to assume that this is just me. Make sure to cook the right number and size of fillets and you’ll probably be OK. Even done properly your house is going to stink though. I usually try to do this kind of smelly frying on the side burner of the grill, to better let the neighbours enjoy the fishy smell. Alas, I was out of gas the day I decided to make this. I was happy with the flavours of this dish, and it was dead simple, and lightning fast, but I was less happy with the fine film of fish oil that settled onto every horizontal surface in the whole house. I’ll plan on trying this one again and following the instructions more closely next time. For now I’ll give it at

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

179. Lemon Garlic Lamb Chops with Yogurt Sauce p.504


The recipe

The world is clearly changing, and The Book is starting to get a little bit dated. It’s only 4 years old, but a few things have changed in that time. I mostly notice it with specialty ingredients, which The Book suggests I’ll have to get by mail-order, but that are available at my local grocery store these days. The array of imported fresh fruits and vegetables is staggering, and the burgeoning interest in food from other cultures means that formerly exotic herbs and spices are commonplace. This recipe pairs lamb chops with a minted garlicky yogurt sauce, and calls for taking normal yogurt, straining it through cheesecloth, and letting most of the liquid drain away. This is the home-brew version of Greek / Mediterranean / Baltic yogurt. These days every grocery store in my neighborhood has three different brands to choose from, and that’s not counting the ones with fruit on the bottom.

This yogurt is an example of the good kind of food diversity. A beloved product from another culture, made locally, and not incurring the environmental costs of shipping fresh fruits and vegetables halfway around the world. Although, The Project wouldn’t be possible without the insane system food system we’ve set up for ourselves. No matter how much I want it to be true, tropical fruits just don’t grow in Montreal, and Parmigiano-Reggiano is only produced in Parma. I try to buy locally produced things when I can, but between the diversity of ingredients The Book calls for, and the short growing season we have up here, it’s just not possible for most of the year. That said, I picked up my first CSA box (community supported agriculture, or farm share) last week, and I’m looking forward to eating as much Quebec produce as I can between now and November.

I make a variation on this dish all the time, and I was pleased to find a version of one of my standby dinners in the book. The idea here is to marinade lamb shoulder chops in lemon juice, garlic, dried oregano, and olive oil, then to pat them dry, season with salt and pepper, and pan fry them. Once they’re done the pan is deglazed with the reserved marinade, and once the marinade has cooked for a minute it’s poured over the chops. The lamb is served with a yogurt sauce made of yogurt drained through cheese cloth (I just used Mediterranean yogurt), garlic, fresh mint, salt, and pepper.

This is an extremely simple recipe, and it doesn’t call for anything flashy in terms of ingredients or techniques. When a recipe is a simple as this, details count. The approach and ideas behind this dish are absolutely solid, but some things could have been done better. My main issue was that the shoulder chops were tough. Shoulder meat is tougher than other meat, but that’s the beauty of using lamb, even the shoulder is quite tender. The chops weren’t all that flavourful either, the pan sauce was packed with flavour, but the meat didn’t take on much from the marinade. Both of these problems could have been solved with a longer marinading time. The Book recommends 20 minutes on the counter-top, but if I did them again I’d go with at least three hours in the fridge. Epicurious posters report marinading them for up to 24 hours with good results. The chops were also overcooked by the time they were browned, using a thicker chop would have taken care of that. The idea with the pan sauce is to make a fond while cooking the chops, and then to scrape up the browned bits when making the pan sauce. The Book calls for a non-stick skillet for this operation. This is just silly. Non stick = less sticking = less browned bits to scrape up = less delicious pan sauce. Also, high temperature cooking in non stick cookware isn’t the greatest thing for your health. Beyond the chops, The Book’s instructions would have you stir together the yogurt sauce and serve it immediately, but a sauce like this one needs a minimum of an hour to come together. When it’s freshly made it’ll taste fine, but what a difference an hour will make. .

I’m really fond of this style of dish, but this recipe didn’t work out for me. I’ll stick with my improvised marinades and yogurt sauces. This absolutely could have been a good dish with just a few changes, but as it was I can’t give it a rave review.

Categories
Soups The Book

178. French Pea Soup – Potage-Saint-Germain p.96


The recipe

I was really excited to try this soup. I went looking for a pea soup recipe in The Book, expecting to find a hearty split pea version with ham hocks, instead I got this spring vegetable centric Potage-Saint-Germain. It wasn’t really what I was looking for that night, and the idea of mint in my soup seemed a bit weird, but one ingredient captured my imagination and I knew I had to do this recipe ASAP. That ingredient was lettuce. I’ve been toying with the idea of cooked lettuce since I saw an early Julia Child episode where she braises whole Romaine heads and serves the flaccid results. It looked terrible but she assured me that it was an excellent treatment for lettuce. As we all know, Julia’s word is law, or at least worthy of a test. I’ve never cooked lettuce in any way before, I guess it’s not that different from cooking bitter greens, bok choy or cabbage, but it seems delightfully sacrilegious and just plain wrong.

To prepare this soup you start by making croûtons with an old baguette, butter and salt in the oven. The soup starts with softening leaks in butter, then adding chicken stock and water. Once it’s boiling you add chopped Bibb lettuce, and frozen peas. As soon as the peas are tender you stir in fresh mint, and purée the soup in the blender (seriously be careful, hot pea soup was used as a viable substitute for napalm in the Nam). The soup is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and served hot topped with croûtons and lightly beaten cream.

The idea with the beaten cream was to make elegant drops, and to run a knife through them to make a stunning pattern. You can see how well that worked out for me. I think my central problem with this soup was that it was served hot. The hot soup melted the slightly whipped cream and sent it running all over the place, and it just tasted weird. Minted things are rarely served piping hot, it’s an odd juxtaposition, mint is the universal symbol of cool and refreshing, but this was a thick, hearty, hot, soup. I tried some the next day at room temperature and I was much happier. The lettuce experiment was a success though, the lettuce along with peas, leaks, and mint were the prominent flavours in the soup, and the lettuce really worked. The Book describes the flavour of the lettuce in this soup as “grassy” and I’m glad they got in a food writing buzz word there, but really it tastes exactly like uncooked lettuce, and in this case that’s a good thing. Again, hot lettuce isn’t really for me, I much preferred that flavour when the soup was cool. I like croûtons in any context, and this was no exception. The soup was thick enough that they floated easily, and didn’t get soggy.

I won’t be rushing to make this soup again, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t serve it warm. The flavours and ideas were pretty good, but the temperature was a big miss, and I wasn’t fond of the drizzled cream on top. I think the ideas behind this soup are solid, and I’m looking forward to playing with different combinations of these ingredients. Pottage-Saint-Germain is a beloved French classic, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

177. Baked French Toast p.650


The recipe

The blurb for this recipe suggests that it’s an easy and fuss-free way to make French Toast. I couldn’t disagree more. This looks like a scaled down restaurant recipe to me, and what works for breakfast for hundreds doesn’t necessarily make much sense when serving six. The idea with the recipe is to make a basic French toast batter (eggs, milk, salt) and pour it over buttered slices of bread in a buttered baking dish. You then let the mixture soak into the bread in the fridge for at least an hour. The bread then needs to warm up to room temperature, whereupon it’s sprinkled with sugar and baked in a 450 oven for 20 to 25 minutes. I can make normal people French toast for six and have everything cleaned up in 25 minutes, so what’s the point of this recipe? The Book suggests that you should assemble the dish and let the bread soak overnight, so that it can be popped in the oven while you’re setting the table and squeezing the orange juice (I wonder how many oranges are juiced rhetorically for every real life glass of fresh squeezed orange juice). I guess one advantage of this approach is that all the dishes can be done the night before, and you do have a bit less to do in the morning. But you also have to wake up extra early to take the baking dish out of the fridge and preheat the oven. Making normal French toast requires washing a cutting board, a mixing bowl, and a frying pan. I’m willing to wait until after breakfast to get to those. If I was serving this dish to twenty people this approach would make a lot of sense, but as it is it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

The greatest crime of this recipe is that it didn’t taste particularly good. There was nothing bad or objectionable about it, but it was very very dull. I always add vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg to my French toast, and I prefer to use a more interesting bread (sourdough is good) than the “soft supermarket Italian” loaf the recipe calls for. I understand that French toast is mostly a vehicle for maple syrup delivery, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be boring. I should give The Book due credit for calling for whole milk in the recipe, I was sure they’d find a way to integrate heavy cream.

If I had a giant group coming for breakfast I’d consider tripling this recipe, and adding some flavour to it. Beyond spices and different bread I’d increase the called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt to 1/2 teaspoon. As it was it was OK, we ate it, and once it was drowned in maple syrup we enjoyed it, but I’d say this recipe is a definite missed opportunity.

Categories
The Project

Vacation

Sorry for the blog silence. I just got back from a week at the beach. Our place was supposed to have internet access, but didn’t.

Categories
Cakes The Book

176. Apple Raisin Cake p.704


The recipe

I’m really trying to work on my hosting skills these days. I love to have friends over, and I love to cook for them. Unfortunately that often means that we don’t spend a lot of time together once they arrive. I’m pretty rotten about sharing kitchen space, or involving others in the cooking process. Being territorial about ones kitchen seems like a natural, if not admirable trait. I wish I was the sort of person who could invite a bunch of friends over, give everyone a kitchen job, and just let them do it. Unfortunately, I’m a kitchen control freak, if I do invite someone to cook with me I can’t help but looking over their shoulders and making little “suggestions” which make me feel like a patronizing ass. I’m not a particularly controlling or dominant person in other aspects of my life, but I don’t think I’ll ever play well with others in the kitchen. So, if I want to see my guests, and I can’t share the cooking with them, I’ve got to get better about doing prep work well ahead.

When I made this cake The Boys were over for the day. It’s quite rare that we all get together in one place at one time, so I should have made the most of it. They’ve been very supportive of The Project, and I like to share, or occasionally inflict, recipes from The Book with / on them. I decided to make this cake, and yesterday’s ice cream while they were over. The recipes list the combined active time at 1 hour 10 minutes, but I probably spent two hours at it between prepping and cleaning. Two hours isolated in the kitchen is a fair chunk of the time The Boys were over. Both the cake and the ice cream were good, and I really enjoyed sharing them with my friends, but I should have thought it through and prepared those dishes the night before. I am getting better about kitchen time management, but it’s definitely a work in progress.

The cake is easy to make, you sift together flour, baking soda, and salt in one bowl, then wisk together vegetable oil, eggs, white and brown sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, dark rum, and vanilla in another. You fold the dry stuff into the wet stuff and gently incorporate diced apples, and raisins. The batter goes into a Bundt pan and bakes.

This was a very soft, moist cake. It was gently spiced, and packed with apples and raisins. When I served it to the boys the afternoon it was baked I wasn’t too impressed. There was nothing wrong with it, but it wasn’t as good as I was hoping. The recipe suggests that it improves with age though, and I’d have to agree. It was much much better by the third day. There was no great change, all the flavours were the same, but it really came together and the texture firmed up a bit. If I baked it again I would choose a firmer apple. The recipe calls for Cortland or Empire, and the blurb ahead suggests that Golden Delicious or Gala will do, but my cortlands melted into the cake, and those other options are evens softer. I would use Granny Smiths both for the bitterness, and the very firm texture. The cake was a little on the sweet side anyway, so a more assertive apple wouldn’t hurt anything.

This cake worked best as an opportunistic snack. Since it keeps at room temperature for five days (read a week), it was nice to have it there ready to go. The first night I served it I was thinking of it as a big Bundt spice cake for after dinner. It didn’t really fit that application, it’s much more of an afternoon coffee cake (the rest of the coffee cakes are in the Breakfast and Brunch section, and I don’t understand why it wasn’t grouped with them). I’m not going to rush to make it again, but if it was sitting on the counter I’d certainly cut myself a slice.