Good Food, Bad TV

Spent a lot of the day cooking and looking after the Edles, part of the afternoon on the bike with Edie and in the park, and the evening serving food to some good friends, watching really bad TV.


TODAY'S COOKING
Fruitcake Ice Cream & Fruit Cake short bread, Cookies & Creme Ice Cream: Fruitcake is gross, but one of the cakes of the Royal Wedding, so I deconstructed it. I made a batch of Cream Anglais, then when it hit the ice bath, I made two ice baths. One I hit with a little vanilla extract (it already had a lot of real vanilla, but the alcohol of the extract acts like anti-freeze, cutting down on crystallization and preventing it from getting ROCK hard) to be joined with ground up Newman-Os when churned, but the other half met some brandy for the alcohol, as well as a 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of freshly ground clove, a teaspoon of freshly ground allspice, a teaspoon of freshly ground nutmeg, the grated zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange. I let all that sit in the hot (but rapidly cooling) custard, then strained it through a chinois -- I didn't want gritty bits in my ice cream, and the large surface area of the zest gave up it's flavor pretty readily. For the shortbread, I used my recipe from Cook's Illustrated, adding a half cup of ground pistachios to the dry ingredients. As the buttery dough was coming together in the mixer, I added some ground brandy-soaked cherries -- if they went in dry, they'd get hard and yucky in the baking, and if I added them to early to the dough, the evaporating alcohol would interfere with the coming-together. I dipped the shortbread in chocolate, because, uh, I like chocolate.

 

Beef & Stilton Pasties, Cheese & Onion Pasties: I used this and this recipe,the crust from the beef one. It came out VERY flaky, I should of added more ice water to create more gluten, oh well. I made 7oz balls, but it seemed too much, so I cut them in half and rolled that out, came out with 14 medium sized pockets. I started by caramelizing 2 big pans of onions for about 4 hours, with vegetable lard. One pan, I cleared out, fried cubed potatoes, then tossed together with cheddar, parsley and egg. The other pan I deglazed with white wine and through in a lot of fresh chopped thyme. When actually putting together the pasties, the cheese & onion just got a lump of filling, while the beef got a layer of onion, a few snips of raw flank steak, and a sprinkle of crumbled stinky Stilton. Other than the crumbly nature of the crust (but flaky and savory in the right way), they tasted good. I did too much potato and not enough cheddar in the cheese & onion, and I was very sparing with the meat in the beef & Stilton, I could of tripled the beef in those. Live and learn. Oh, and I reversed the rations of the flours in the crust, 2 part whole wheat to 1 part white, just gave it a nice  grainy flavor.


Iced Tea: Made a gallon with Sencha green tea -- came out a beautiful pale light green color, the previous tea was closer to the usual muddy brown color. Tastes weird....in a good way, both mild and strong, if that makes sense.


BREAKFAST: 8am, iced green tea, a few pistachios, a handful of Newman-Os


LUNCH: 12:30pm, kraut perogies, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5


PM SNACK: 4pm, a few spoonfuls of cookies & cream ice cream


DINNER: 6:45pm, 3 pasties, fruitcake ice cream & shortbread, 2 glasses beer, water, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5