Tag: honey

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

197. Balsamic-Roasted Pears with Pepper and Honey p.809


The recipe

This is how dessert should be, simple, elegant, and not too heavy. I’m rarely in the mood for a slice of cake right after dinner, and the yen for creamy or frozen treats is even more infrequent. However, a cheese plate is always a welcome addition to a meal. I associate this kind of dessert with Italy, almost every menu has some combination of pear and cheese, and honey is a common touch. One handwritten menu I saw there advertised the Cheese and Fear plate, I was hoping for a high concept dessert, but it was just a typo. 

The dish is simple to prepare. You roast pears in a buttered dish for 20 minutes, then pour balsamic over-top and roast for 5 minutes more. Plate the pears, drizzle them with the juices in the pan, and serve with slices of Manchego. Drizzle the plate with honey, and a few grinds of pepper, then serve. 

The Good: With hardly any effort you can create a satisfying end to a big meal. It can pretty well all be done ahead, just pop the pears in the oven while you’re clearing the dishes, and they’ll be ready once everyone’s finished up their glass of wine. The presentation is really simple, but it looks great. Pears have a great affinity for cheeses, and the balsamic glaze makes the whole interaction more appealing. The few grinds of pepper emphasize the sweet-savoury interplay of the dish. 

The Bad: For my money, this dish could have moved a little more to the savoury side. I found the total effect of the roasted pears + balsamic + honey to be pushing the balance too far to the sweet. A more assertively flavoured cheese, or a more acidic balsamic might have brought things into balance. Also, some nuts would have been a very nice addition to the plate. Roasting pears is a delicate affair. I like them roasted so that they loose their gritty-grainy texture, but I don’t want them to turn to mush. Mine ended up a little too firm, half an hour in the oven might have served them better.

The Verdict: Overall I was quite happy with this dish, and I’ll certainly make variations on it again. I think disliking sweet desserts is largely my own personal issue, so it may not turn others off this dish at all. Even with a little more sugar than I would have liked it was an excellent way to finish our dinner.

Categories
Poultry The Book

110. Moroccan-Style Roast Cornish Hens with Vegetables p.392

The recipe

This was my first experiment with Cornish hens, and I think I’m in love. I watched an episode of Freaks and Geeks the other night. In one scene the mother roasts Cornish hens, and serves them to her skeptical family, who use the hens as puppets for a dance routine, and complain that they want normal food, like chicken. Two things, 1) Cornish hens are chickens, and 2) that show was awesome, it really bugged me when they canceled it. That episode was poking fun at the status of little birds as icons of the ’70’s and 80’s food revolution, for both good and ill. My dining companion’s mother talks about fancy dinner parties in the early 80’s where the women wore long gloves, and were asked to pick apart quail with a knife and fork. She remembers going home hungry a lot. Game birds are often considered exotic or fancy food, but at least for Cornish hens, they’re just conveniently sized chickens.

This dish emphasized how casual and delicious a Cornish hen can be. You start by making a spice mixture of caraway, salt, garlic, honey, lemon juice, olive oil, paprika, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, cayenne, and pepper. Then you cube zucchini, turnips, red peppers, butternut squash, and onions, toss them in with half the spice mix, chopped tomatoes, and chicken stock. You then take the backbones out of the hens and halve them, toss them in the spice mix, and lay them in a roasting pan on top of the vegetables. The whole thing goes into a 425 oven covered in foil for an hour, then uncovered for the last half hour to let the birds brown up.

There were a lot of ingredients to the dish, but most of them were in the cupboard. There was a good deal of prep work to be done, particularly taking a rock-hard butternut squash apart, and peeling turnip, but nothing too complicated. The results were absolutely fantastic. The use of smaller Cornish hens makes this dish possible. A full sized chicken might not get cooked through before the veg turned to mush, but with little birds everything comes out together. The juices drip off the birds and flavour the vegetables, which in turn perfume the hens.

I’ve been pretty harsh to the middle eastern / north African dishes I’ve made thus far. I just can’t get behind sweetened meat dishes. This one however, had dollop of honey, carefully balanced with lots of spice and some more harshly flavoured vegetables like the turnips. The little sweet note of honey was much appreciated, it was present but not too assertive.

This dish was just delicious, I couldn’t get enough of it. I couldn’t wait for lunch time, so I had some left-overs for breakfast. The Hens were perfectly roasted with an amazingly crisp skin and juicy tender inside. They were dense and meaty, with a deep chicken flavour. The vegetables roasted wonderfully, and the spice mix was an excellent compliment to all the flavours in this dish. I’d happily make this again and again. Moroccan-style roast Cornish hens with vegetables, you’ve earned your five mushroom rating.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

106. Whipped Horseradish Cream p.893

Unfortunately there’s no recipe online for this one.

Beef and horseradish is one of those great combinations, the fiery sinus clearing slap-in-the-face of horseradish works really well with the succulent richness of beef. It’s not much good with other meats, but beef and horseradish is a love story for the ages. In this preparation horseradish is mixed with cider vinegar, honey, salt and pepper, and then folded into stiffly beaten cream.

The recipe calls for 3-4 tablespoons of horseradish, to one cup of cream, then suggests that you taste and adjust at the end. It calls for grating your own root if you can find one, or gives the jarred stuff and an acceptable alternative. I had a jar in the fridge so I went with it. I had just enough left for the recipe, and didn’t think to pick up a new jar. I didn’t account for the fact that horseradish loses its pungency quickly once it’s been opened, so mine was a little anemic. I could have used twice as much of my post-haircut-Samson horseradish and not risked burning anyone’s nose. Everything else in the recipe is there to mellow the horseradish out, so this ended up tasting much too smooth and creamy. My dining companioned compared it to horseradish scented air.

I like my horseradish hot, so even if I’ve got the freshest most powerful root on the block, I’d rather not have it tamed too much. I don’t think the honey was really necessary, it doesn’t really add to the horseradish experience, and it risks taking the whipped cream over into dessert territory. Similarly the whipped cream served to add volume, and dilute the horseradish, I’d frankly prefer grated horseradish with a little cream to make it saucy, and a boost of salt and pepper. The whipped cream made it a delicate airy foam, which just doesn’t seem like the right texture for horseradish. I’d rather treat it more like hot sauce, or wasabi, pungently lurking in the corner of my plate, waiting for each bite to be dipped with excited trepidation, and punishing those brave or foolhardy souls who overdo it. Admittedly this version is a bit safer to serve to your grandmother, but the risk of horseradish is half the fun.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

76. Cilantro Walnut Filling p.420

The Recipe

This is the filling for Twenty-First Century Beef Wellington. The filling for Beef Wellington in the 19th and 20th centuries was a duxelles and paté de foie. It’s a very French preparation which was renamed and popularized by the British. This twenty-first century version has a lot more in common with Argentina than the old world. I tasted it and my first thought was chimichurri. It’s a preparation of blanched spinach, cilantro, parsley, chopped walnuts, garlic, honey, bread crumbs, egg whites, cumin, corriander, salt, and pepper. The whole thing goes into the food processor and pulsed until smooth.

As a filling for a dish called Beef Wellington it was fairly weird. As a sauce for roast beef tenderloin is wasn’t bad. I can’t get over the preconception of what goes into Beef Wellington. I understand and appreciate the need to play around with traditional dishes, to update them, to take a fresh look at what makes them good, and to help the dishes to evolve with our tastes. Maybe in the twenty-second century I’ll be ready for this filling, but to my palate Beef Wellington without mushrooms in some capacity just can’t be Beef Wellington.

I think I would have preferred to leave the walnuts and cumin out of this filling. Without them it would have been a nice pesto, and might have worked better in the dish. Replacing the walnuts with pine nuts (another pesto classic) would work well too. The walnuts were toasted, and chopped fine in the food processor. This gave them kind of a mealy texture that didn’t really break down into a paste, and didn’t retain much crunch. I also wasn’t crazy about the flavour of the walnuts with the cilantro. The cumin was a distracting touch, that I didn’t think was particularly necessary.

I think a variation on this filling served over a grilled steak would work quite well. It doesn’t stand a chance as a replacement for duxelles in my heart. I give them credit for trying to cut the calorie count of the Beef Wellington, but this isn’t an adequate substitute. I’ll give it a three mushroom rating as a pesto, but as a filling for Beef Wellington it wouldn’t merit more than a two.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

62. Char Siu p.478

The recipe

This recipe was a bit of effort, but boy was it worth it. The ingredients are simple and readily available, and they come together in the most delightful way with the judicious application of heat. The recipe calls for a 1 pound boneless pork butt or shoulder. I bought a whole picnic ham (from the shoulder, but with bones and skin left on), and had to figure out how to butcher it myself. I tried leaving the skin on to see if it would end up edible, it didn’t, but no big loss. Score one for the scientific method.

In this recipe strips of pork are marinated in hoisin, soy, sake, honey, ginger, and garlic. The pork is then roasted on a rack in the oven over a pan of water. The marinade is cooked down, and used to baste the pork strips regularly throughout the cooking. It’s really like painting on layers of flavour. The water keeps things moist, and the marinade caramelizes into sticky gold. As the layers of marinade build up the caramel colour deepens it starts to get really difficult to wait for it to be done.

Because so much effort is put into getting as much of the marinade as possible to stick to the pork it ends up being quite intensely flavored. Sweet, salty, and perfumed with garlic and ginger. It’s meant to be one of many small dishes in a Chinese meal, and it’s powerful enough that you can’t eat too much of it. I absolutely loved it, but after about four slices I was finished. The recipe mentions that once made and frozen this pork becomes a valuable commodity, excellent for adding just a bit to a stir fry, or rice. I absolutely have to agree. I ended up with a good bit of leftovers, and I used it to full advantage. It was excellent in a cold sandwich, stirred into scrambled eggs, and as an ingredient in a stir fry from The Book.

Better than the dish itself was the thinking behind it. It’s loaded with the innovation and creativity of limited resources. It takes an inexpensive and unloved part of the pig, and brings out it’s best with some tenderizing and flavorful marinade. Then it goes to great lengths to use that marinade to best advantage. Better yet, the final dish makes a little meat go a long way. In a more reasonable food economy where meat is a valuable and limited resource a little bit of this pork could bring a lot of flavour to other dishes. You can probably get as much meat enjoyment from a little bit of this, as you would from eating a big steak.

Moving this dish in and out of the oven to baste it every few minutes was sticky and somewhat irritating work. I had to jurry rig a rack over pan system, and I came close to sending the pork for a swim in the water bath more than once. I didn’t enjoy cleaning up the little dribbles of marinade that seemed to get cooked onto every available surface, but I absolutely enjoyed the dish. Since is freezes so well I’d suggest doubling the recipe and keeping more of this stuff on hand than you think you’ll need.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

12. Lamb Tagine With Prunes Apricots and Vegetables p. 510

the recipe

I’m not the hugest fan of meats in sweet sauces, and this certainly was sweet. Between the dried prunes, apricots, squash, sweet potato and honey it came close to cloying. There was a huge amount going on here, lamb isn’t a subtle flavour to begin with, and the all fruits and spices brought it near to sensory overload.

I know that Tagine’s and much North African cooking is based on these flavour profiles, but they are often more muted than they were here. The best Tagine’s I’ve had have kept the individual ingredients flavours distinct in each bite, with a mingling of their tastes in the sauce. Here I thought it blended too much, and it was texturally homogenous. I found the spicing to be quite nice, with ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg perfuming the sauce.

I would recommend cutting some of the fruit from this dish, and serving it as one of several elements in a meal. We had only this and couscous, and I really enjoyed the first few bites, I just tired of it rather quickly. The recipe also makes a whole lot of food, so my impression of this one may be tainted by having eaten days worth of leftovers.