Thursday Night Smackdown: Wherein I Fail to Learn a Lesson 05 Jun 08

Another mistake, or a deliberate refusal to learn?

I’ve been wanting to start cooking more vegetarian meals; we’re definitely a little meat heavy*, which is both pricey and not super great for us. I’ve got the Moosewood book and Patricia Wells’ Vegetable Harvest, the most butter-and-cream heavy veggie cookbook I’ve ever seen, and I recently picked up a copy of Veganomicon. It’s a vegan cookbook, and I freely admit that while I had read good things about it, I bought it mainly for the title. Because who doesn’t love Evil Dead II? “Give me some sugar, baby.”

I thought I’d use the book this week because I knew I’d be eating a giant hunk of filet mignon at a gala event Wednesday night. Also because I have not learned my lesson about tofu (although as with the mac and cheese, it was not the tofu that doomed this dish (not that the tofu helped)). So: vegan moussaka.

If you don’t want to read about vegan moussaka, I’ll sum it up for you using Brian’s description of the meal: “Tofu? Tofucked.” And I promise animal fats up the wazoo next week.

*Understatement.

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Thursday Night Smackdown: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here 16 May 08

Really, abandon it. Now.

I will give you $10 if you can guess what is in this bowl of soup.

I can make that bet because I know you will not be able to guess, and if you did, you are obviously a cheater. What we have here is a bowl full of “noodles” made of pureed, extruded, poached, fried fish.

Pureed, extruded, poached, fried fish is UNHOLY. And not in the good way, the way candied bacon is unholy. It is a thing that should not be. Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and your New Art of Japanese Cooking, you have failed me. I should have known better than to trust the Iron Chef most likely to make salmon cupcakes with veal cheek buttercream.

And I gotta tell you, I’m not even that excited to write about it. Never have so many worked so hard only to have to order a pizza at the end of the night.

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Friday Night Smackdown: Welcome, Fish Overlords 11 Apr 08

This red snapper wants to be taken to your leader.

Tonight, a special edition cranky and overtired Friday Night Smackdown: Whole fish baked in a salt crust from Cooking with Jamie by everyone’s favorite British scruffmuffin, Jamie Oliver. Because it’s a method I’ve been wanting to try, and it seemed like a pretty straightforward dish to prepare after a long day on the road.

Cue ominous strings of foreshadowing.

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Thursday Night Smackdown: Thomas Keller is a hardcore motherf*cker. 20 Mar 08

The news said there was a 65% chance of vampires, so I figured better safe than sorry.

Tonight: Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook (cue foreboding music)

I tried to keep the title clean, in case, you know, your frigging kids are reading over your shoulder (go to bed). I’m in a bit of a mood, you see, because Thomas Keller has roundly defeated us with his precise ways and time consuming techniques and bizarre use of hard-boiled egg yolks. How does the man get a single dish out of his kitchen - a phalanx of oompa loompas? Because we’ve been working for 3 days here; we’ve used every dish and pot in the house and I believe several workers may have died of cholera during construction.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate. 27 Jan 08

It was a dark and stormy night.

Waiter, there something in my… thing that was meant to be a terrine, but is, as we will soon see, not. Many thanks to The Passionate Cook for inspiring my first Abject Failure Blogging.

Although this blog has been savory-focused until now, among my circle of ravenous office-mates I’ve primarily been known as a maker of sweets. I haven’t had the time or occasion to do a ginormous layer cake, my dessert specialty. So when I saw that the theme this month at Waiter, there’s something in my… was terrines, I thought I could transfer my love of sweet, layered things into the terrine format.

I decided to do a sweet terrine riffing on the layers of flavor in a good Thai peanut sauce - peanuts, a little heat, some coconut, some ginger, maybe a little lime and sesame - and create layers of mousse, panna cotta and curd that would bloom on the tongue at different rates, gradually introducing all the flavors and letting them mingle. I settled on a peanut butter-chili mousse, a coconut panna cotta, white chocolate mousse infused with ginger and sesame, and mango-lime curd.

That was my intention. It sounds like a good one, doesn’t it? Apparently, the road to hell will be paved with my terrines. Watch out, because the mango-lime curd is slippery.

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