Tag: chives

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

151. Deviled Eggs p.27


The recipe

The next few recipes are from a cocktail party we held in honour of a friend’s thesis defense. We invited her to celebrate her accomplishment, and be called Doctor a lot, at an intimate soirée at our place. I was planning a menu around her favourite dishes, and counting on eight to ten people. The day before the party, I was informed that it was going to be more like thirty, and possibly up to fifty people, and that I knew almost none of them. My first reaction was to start dusting.

Most of the time I’m pretty relaxed about the state of the apartment, and the mounting pile of dishes bothers me not at all. The second I hear that company’s coming though, I start channeling my mother. I worked myself up into a right state, gave up on the food, and decided that the best I could do would be to provide an empty and clean space for these hoards to descend upon. Then I thought that even if I wasn’t providing any food, I should really have ice, lemons, and limes on hand. From there I sold myself on baking a congratulatory cake, and decided reprising a couple of the great appetizers from The Project wouldn’t be too hard. The day of I convinced myself that adding a (soon to be blogged) dip would be in the realm of the reasonable. Once the guests had arrived I remembered that we had eggs in the fridge, and couldn’t think of a good reason not to devil them. I spent a good chunk of the evening in the kitchen cooking, but that worked out well as it wasn’t really my party. My dining companion and our newest doctor of philosophy entertained the twenty or so people who showed up, and I catered in the background.

This was a by the book deviled egg recipe, no fancy flourishes, just straight to business. First you hard boil a bunch of eggs, cool them, peel them, and halve them lengthwise, then you remove the yolks mash them up with mayo, Dijon, and cayenne, and pipe them back into the waiting egg whites. You may then garnish with smoked paprika and fresh chives.

Since this was a last minute hors d’oeuvre, I decided to skip the pretty star tip, and just pipe them with a ziplock minus a corner. Chives are lovely with deviled eggs, but the vegetable drawer had run dry, so no chives for you. All in all these were some pretty messy slapdash deviled eggs on my part, but they were devoured before anyone had a chance to notice. As is almost always the case with deviled eggs, they didn’t garner much praise, but they disappeared. If I’d asked people to tell me what they ate, they’d probably have forgotten to mention the eggs, but there was a peculiarly disappointed look that crossed the faces of our guests when they scanned the table and found the tray empty.

Are deviled eggs hopelessly outdated? probably, but who cares? They’re awesome, and I know I’m pleased to see a plate of these on a buffet table. The recipe was very standard, but totally solid. It’s very comforting to know that with a dozen eggs and a jar of mayonnaise I can put out a universal crowd pleaser with only slightly more effort than making an egg salad sandwich.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

135. Green Mayonnaise p.887


The recipe

This mayo is meant to accompany the Poached Salmon in Aspic. I wasn’t quite sure why an aspic covered fish, served with aspic on the side, needed a mayonnaise as well. My guests didn’t eat much of this mayo with the salmon, possibly because I didn’t make it obvious enough that they were meant to be served together, but I suspect it was because no one really felt it was lacking in mayo. If it had just been a poached salmon, a nice sauce would be appreciated, but it seemed out of place with the aspic.

The recipe is dead simple. I started with a cup of yesterday’s recipe for plain mayonnaise. I ran parsley, chives, tarragon, and dill through the food processor with lemon juice and half the mayo. I omitted the optional chervil. Once it was smooth, I added the rest of the mayo, and stuck it in the fridge to come together for a couple of hours.

It tasted very much like mayonnaise with a bunch of herbs puréed into it. Fresh herbs are almost always nice, and they added all sorts of flavour to the mayo. Tarragon and dill aren’t subtle, so it was fairly bold. The additional lemon juice and water from the herbs thinned it out a lot, so it was more of a drizzling than a spreading mayo. As I said, it didn’t do much for the salmon, so I was left with a lot of this. I couldn’t really think of many other uses though. I tried sandwiches, I tried serving it with grilled chicken, and I put some on asparagus. In all cases it was just fine, but I would have preferred plain old mayo, or perhaps an aïoli. Simply grilled or poached fish would be a natural use for this, which I wouldn’t mind trying it at some point, and if it were thicker it could be quite interesting with French fries.

I’m sure there’s a dish out there just begging for a drizzle of green mayonnaise, but I haven’t found it yet.

Categories
Poultry The Book

125. Chicken with Cornmeal Dumplings p.373


The recipe

I had The Book for a while before I started The Project, and this was one of the recipes I used regularly before The Book and I got serious. Making it again emphasized how much The Project has changed my cooking style. The biggest difference is that I actually read the recipe this time around, and it came out much better.

You start by breaking a chicken down into serving sized pieces, browning them, and then simmering them with white wine and shallots ’till the pieces are cooked through. Meanwhile you put together a dumpling dough with flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt, pepper, butter, chives, parsley, and buttermilk. The chicken is moved to the oven, and the juices left in the skillet are fortified with stock, cream, salt, and pepper. Once this gravy is simmering the dumplings are gently dropped in and allowed to cook for about 15 minutes, then it’s time to eat.

This time around the cooking went well, there wasn’t anything too tricky about it. In previous attempts I’ve managed to really mess things up. The biggest lesson I learned is that the cooking vessel the recipe calls for really is important. In the recipe all of this happens in a deep 12 inch heavy skillet, I don’t have one of those (but if Santa got my letter…), so I used to make it in a 5 quart pot. It seemed like a pretty decent substitution at the time, but I was wrong. Getting the dumplings right depends on the depth of liquid they’re simmered in, too deep and they disintegrate, or raft together into one super-dumpling. This time I used a 10 quart oval dutch oven, which has a similar surface area to a 12 inch skillet, and things worked out. The other lesson I’ve learned is the difference between a simmer and boil. Previously I had my gravy boiling away, and the bubbles tore my dumplings to shreds, a gentle simmer with just the occasional bubble reaching the surface is the way to go. I’m kind of amazed that I made this recipe about five times trying to get it right, and I didn’t pick up on what I was doing wrong.

My previous attempts also fell prey to my undiagnosed culinary dyslexia.I constantly mix up shallots and scallions, I have the hardest time keeping them straight. They’re very different, but it’s a coin toss as to which vegetable I’ll imaging when I hear one of those words. I’m embarrassed to say that I have the same problem with elevators and escalators, weird eh? Long simmered scallions turn kind of yellow and gross, I wouldn’t recommend the substitution. Some practice with The Book has made me sensitive to my neurological condition, so now I double check that my shopping list corresponds to the ingredient list.

My standards for what constitutes a successful recipe have also changed over the course of The Project. In the pre-Project days this came out reasonably well a couple of times, and I was quite impressed by it. I still love the dumplings, and I’d be happy to make them again and again, but the chicken is lacking, and the whole dish is bland. I’ve ranted about chicken skin and wet cooking methods several times, and it was just as unappealing here as in every other dish. The chicken is poached in white wine and shallots, which is fine, but the addition of another herb would be nice, maybe thyme, rosemary, or tarragon. The chicken gives up flavour and interest for the sake of the dumplings, and it’s almost a fair trade. The dumplings have an excellent texture and flavour, they pull in loads of chicken flavour, and have a wonderful buttermilk tang. They’re absolutely the highlight of the dish. I’d rather skip the whole chicken making part of this dish, and just make the dumplings in a stock based gravy. The chicken would be better served by being simply grilled, then served along with the dumplings. Doing something about the beige on beige colour pallet would be nice too.

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair. This dish is a Southern classic, but I have no clue what it’s supposed to taste like. I don’t have any reference point, so I’m probably trying to turn this dish into something it was never meant to be. Using a chicken like this allows a little bit of meat to be stretched into a hearty meal, so there are perfectly good reasons for recipes like this to have developed. And, Its blandly fatty simplicity is what comfort food is all about, but it’s not really my thing these days.

Pre-Project me liked this dish because the dumplings are awesome, but also because it’s essentially a one pot dish, it’s quite inexpensive, not too hard, and it makes good leftovers. Present day me doesn’t mind working a little harder, spending a little more, or using a few more dishes (much to my dining companion’s chagrin) for a better dish. I agree with my former self about the dumplings though.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

102. Spaghetti with Handfuls of Herbs p.204

I couldn’t find a recipe for this online, but this is more a concept than a specific set of instructions anyway. The idea is to toss spaghetti with extra virgin olive oil, butter, minced shallots, and any and all herbs growing in the garden. The pasta is then sprinkled with bread crumbs which you’ve toasted in olive oil. The heat of the pasta releases the flavours of the herbs, without wilting them too much, and the uncooked shallots are warmed but retain their sharpness.

There are no specific instructions for which herbs to use, or in what proportions. It’s totally dependent on what you have on hand. I had a grand old time out on the balcony with a pair of scissors. I ended up with basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, parsley, chives, sage, lavender, and lemon balm. Those last two were unexpected flavours, but they absolutely made the dish for me. I got really lucky and randomly combined my herbs into a near perfect flavour medley. I couldn’t repeat the process, I just snipped a bit of this and a bit of that, and I ended up with a completely delicious and intensely fragrant plate of pasta. My dining companion thought it was good, but not transcendent, but for me it was exactly the right dish at exactly the right time. It was perfectly suited to a warm night out on the balcony.

The bread crumb topping adds a textural counterpoint to the pasta, but not one I thought was really necessary. The Book says that the bread crumbs don’t weigh the dish down the way cheese would, but I just found them oily. Admittedly my bread crumbs weren’t coarse, and they might have worked better if they’d been more like tiny croûtons. Mine were more of a sandy coating on my pasta. It didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the dish, but I think they ruined it for my dining companion.

You may also notice that I didn’t use spaghetti in this spaghetti dish. I can’t bring myself to care about the different shapes of pasta, and I resent having to remember all of their names. They’re all exactly the same, shells, spirals, round strands, flat strands, big tubes, and small tubes all interchangeable in my mind. Sure, some shapes hold on to some sauces better, and finding things hidden in little shells can be cute. But, the idea that we all need to keep fifteen different shapes of pasta on hand to do justice to the traditions of some particular Italian hamlet is just annoying. They all taste exactly the same, and I’m going to use them as such. The only downside is that the different shapes really do differ in surface area. The amount of sauce needed to coat is proportional to area, which has little to do with mass or volume, so it does take some guesswork to avoid over or under saucing.

The concept of this dish is great, it’s simple and summery. It uses herbs at their peak, and allows for creativity around a central theme. It also has the advantage of not heating the kitchen up too too much. I was thrilled with the flavours at work in my version, and I can only hope you get as lucky as I did if you try this for yourself.

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
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

54. Herbed Spaetzle p.241

No recipe for this one.

This recipe was a bit of a disaster. As disaster’s go it tasted quite good, but the result bore little resemblance to the recipe description. The Book says

“The tiny drop-style German dumplings called spaetzle are juged by their lightness, and these practically take flight”

My efforts yielded large, dense, and doughy dumplings that no German would have recognized even as a failed attempt at spaetzle. The recipe is fairly simple, a dough of flour, salt, eggs, and milk is lightly brought together. Then the dough is worked through the holes of a colander over a pot of simmering salted water, and the resulting dumplings are boiled for 5 minutes, then tossed with butter, chives, parsley, dill, salt and pepper.

My issue came with getting the dough into the simmering water. I put the dough in the colander which is part of my set of pots. It fits snugly into the top of the pot I had the simmering water going in. I began working the dough through, at first everything was fine, and I made a few 1/4 inch dumplings. As I continued working though, the heat of the simmering water and steam began to cook the dough in the colander, and it gummed up all the holes. I ended up having to force partially cooked stuff through the colander, where it globed together into tablespoon size dumplings for me to scrape off the back. Anyway, I cooked the resultant dumplings longer than recommended, and they were fine, but not spaetzle.

The herb butter was a wonderful compliment to the dumplings, in fact the butter pretty much made the dish. I prepared this during the winter, and I really appreciated having my kitchen perfumed by the herbs as they were tossed with the hot dumplings.

I’m really unsure what went wrong with this recipe, but it just didn’t make any sense the way it was. Maybe the problem was in the shape of my colander? maybe I was supposed to hold the colander mid-air while I pushed the dumplings through? But that seems incredibly awkward. Piping the dumplings into the water would work, but it might be a bit slow. There is such a thing as a spaetzle maker, which I can only presume would do a better job. The poor man’s spaetzle maker suggested here isn’t an adequate substitute.