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| Blogger at work |
A brief war of our own erupts over whether we'll be four people splitting three small pies or whether we'll be making TWELVE pies tonight. Jim raised my worst nightmare when he suggested that we might not have enough pie fillings to feed all of us, but after a flurry of horrified questions thrown at Bri, we eventually got things figured out. He promises we'll have enough, and my, I mean, our, gluttonous gullets are appeased.
"Did you look at the menus of the other New York Fuck Trucks?" Jim asks, which made us all gasp and then laugh. "I mean, FOOD trucks," he exclaimed, but it was too late. We're all laughing and considering what a future with fuck trucks circling around town would be like. Imagine competing fuck trucks. Fuck truck wars!
Jim claims that he's tired from moving pantyhose shelves just before he came over. Long story. In general, he seems very sore, which is unfortunate, since Bri puts him to work rolling out 12 pie crusts tonight. Long after everyone else is done sauteing, poor Jim is still slaving over the rolling pin. I can only commiserate from my comfy observer perch. Bloggers are not allowed to participate, dontchaknow. We must stay OBJECTIVE.
Empanadas
This is what the guys were busy chopping and sauteing. The links point to recipes we used as inspirations to help us along. For the Portabello one, we had to wing it.1. The Argentine one": fake beef, onions, peppers, scallions, potatoes and no olives. Jim seems sad about Chef Brian's no olive rule and he sneaks in some cider vinegar in rebellion.
2. The Portabello: spinach, portabello, mozarella, basil
3. The Shitake: curry, shitake mushroom, eggplant, zucchini and no red peppers. This last bit is to appease Jim who hates all bell peppers.
Brian's got a soundtrack going on tonight. Basement Jaxx, Broken Bells, Bowie...we seem to be stuck in the Bs.
Alex mentions that he's been working on techniques on how to politely tell someone that what they are doing in his kitchen is ALL WRONG. I laugh and tell him that he never seems to have trouble telling ME when I am doing something wrong. He tells me that he ALWAYS has trouble telling me. Oh my god, I say, I can't imagine what it would be like to be around when you're NOT holding back...
That's what cooking club is all about, though, folks. It's an exercise in how to get along with three other crazy ass, ridiculously opinionated screwballs. Therapy in action.
Alex insists there is a one true way to make things and sometimes other ways are just WRONG. As a trained anthropologist, I say, I must protest. Everything is relative. The crowd hoots with laughter and says if there was ever ANYBODY who could not obey the Prime Directive, it's me. "Hey!" I say, "I'm not a meddler!" I have to concede, though, that it's a good thing I didn't go into Anthropology as a career. I might be able to see the rules but I'll be damned if I'll conform to someone else's stupid ideas....
"Brian you don't have 12 identical mini pie pans?" Alex teases.
Bri replies, "Well, I did but then the panhandler came around..."
"Do you grease a pie pan?" Jim asks. We have to look it up. Yahoo Answers says, "NO! And if you do you might ruin your pie." Jim asks if the empanada dough has butter. Bri answers that not only does the dough have butter but he has FROZEN the butter because he read that you should do that to make the crust deliciously flaky.
Broken Bells "The High Road" comes on and that leads me to ask the group if they've seen the YouTube version of Insane Lullaby, which is SO MUCH better than the cd version that I use it whenever I need to test the media equipment in a classroom, as a way to spread the joy. Here, I'll share it with you, too. If you've ever heard the cd version and thought the song was crap, well, take a listen to this.
The kitchen is starting to smell...like cumin.
Pumped up Kicks comes on. Alex says, "Now THIS is a song I'm not even over, yet, [despite the fact that it is played constantly, unlike that horrible Kids song you love by MGMT,...Deb]." You have to read a lot into what Alex doesn't say.
Brian intercedes before I start throwing things to talk about Days Go By by Dirty Vegas. Bri says it's one of those videos that does more in 3 minutes than some movies do in 3 hours.
Meanwhile, Bri is making our dessert tonight. It's supposed to be Tipsy Cake on a Stick.It requires a half cup of Jack Daniels! This is my kind of dessert!
Alex was surfing off the coast of Gloucester this morning. He dropped some surfer lore on us: so, there's wind swell and ground swell, you see. The latter can come in from as far away as Portugal if there is a good storm in Atlantic. This has been a great summer for surfing because of all the Atlantic storms. Wind swell also creates big waves, but they're not as good, apparently. They can be too choppy, not as desirable. Now you know.
"That's a Deb face! Jim, you should have seen the face Alex just gave me. He scoffed!" Apparently, Alex did not approve of Brian's review of the curry pie mixture. Since Alex made it and didn't think it was that great, he thought Brian was being too polite. Hey, it's not just me. Everyone thinks Brian is too polite. [And everyone can just kiss my honey bunches of oats--Brian]
Somehow that leads us to talking about the Nazis. Bri is in history class and they're reading about some guy named Ludendorff who broke away from the Nazi party because he thought the Nazis were TOO MODERATE...to Christians, that is. He was disappointed that they tolerated Christianity so much. Ludendorff himself was a worshiper of Wotan, you see.
The surreal thing about this conversation was that as we were having it, what should come on the playlist but Papa Legba by the Talking Heads? The fascinating thing about this song, which is off the soundtrack to the movie True Stories, is that the Talking Heads recruited a revered gospel singer called Pops Staples to act in the movie and sing this song...this song which invites voodoo god Papa Legba to ride his white horse on in... in...i.e. take possession...of you. Go on, I dare you sing along.
"Papa Legba come and open the gate
Papa Legba to the city of camps
Now we're your children, come and ride your horse
In the night, in the night, come and ride your horse"
If you've had any Christian dogma thrown at you in your childhood, this song kind of raises some chills, huh? And knowing that a Christian Gospel singer is singing it creates some extra frissons, no? It's kind of a potent mix for this ex-Catholic. On the other hand, it's an incredible song and I loooooove this guy's voice.
"Did yo mama teach you roll like that?" Alex is trying to get Jim mad again so he can get another picture of the face he made when we told him to roll out the extra dough to make a thirteenth pie.
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| I don't think he quiiiiite captured it .This is still a bit too happy. |
Alex here. I made Deb go and put away the dishes that I washed (since I have no idea where things go in Deb's kitchen - enough blog fodder there for another post!) but the upshot is that I am now both SITTING DOWN (yessss) and blogging. As I blog, our basil is turning brown, which is something that I remember reading about before...the problem is that basil bruises easily when chopped, so our carefully prepped basil for later? Sadly brown. But this discussion suggests that if you coat your basil in oil, then you chop it, you can spare yourself that browness from the cut basil cells reacting to the oxygen. Neat, huh? We'll have to try it next time.
Brian here just pointing out that it's "brownness"; browness is something they talk about at Sephora as a mascara technique that makes your eyes really pop. Just sayin'. Now back to Alex:
Speaking of next time, we just discovered that the Tipsy Cake needs to cook for 90 minutes, and given that it's 9pm, ohmygod! Therefore, instead of making Tipsy Cake Pops, which do sound quite amazing, we're going to eat dessert before 11pm instead. As the blogger, I was able to also persuade Brian that we definitely need to make frosting for our cake, but I get to remain seated for this whole process. When you spent all day surfing, biking and moving heavy crap, sitting down is definitely spectacular. Unfortunately, since the pies just came out of the oven, I have to now take pictures of them! Wheeeee!
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| SO MANY PIES! |
Tonight's Scores
For the three different pies:
The Argentine one: fake beef, onions, peppers, scallions, potatoes and no olives.Deb: A-. Extremely tasty. The fake meat taste was a wee bit too strong.
Bri: B+ A little cheese on top would have pushed it into the A range.
Alex: Tasted like sausage! B. Of the 3, I got the best bite of this one: the crust was perfect, the favors were good. It was novel! B+ even
Jim: C. If it didn't have peppers it would have gotten a higher grade
The spinach one: spinach, portabello, mozarella, basil
Deb: A. My favorite. I LOVED the flavors. All those delicious mushrooms! Yum.
Bri: Considering that the person making the spinach [himself] didn't even think to taste test it once during the course of the cooking process, it turned out surprisingly well. B+. Cheese. I have to admit: portabellas look terrible, but they actually taste pretty good.
Alex: B+. Cheese, mushroom, spinach=good combination!
Jim: B+ It was delicious. This was my favorite, but of course it was, it had cheese
The Shitake one: curry, shitake mushroom, eggplant, zucchini
Deb; B- It was a bit curry powdery tasting instead of curry.
Bri. B- Honestly, it's a challenge for any recipe that involves curry, zucchini, eggplant to not taste like vegetarian dining hall food. It tasted like a veggie co-op meal. [Alex: I tried every trick that I know! I started with butter, I cooked spices first (didn't grind them myself, though). I chopped all the eggplant, salted and pressed it all. I grated the zucchini instead of chopping it, AND I drained it. I added salt, coconut oil (which I think helped a bit), habenero hot sauce, cinnamon, garam masala. I tried EVERYTHING I could think of to make it taste good. Maybe I should have added toasted cumin or black mustard seeds at the end, I guess.]
Alex: B- Yeah, I tasted it as I went along and at no point did I think, Oh, yeah, this is great. For me the eggplant was the hard thing to incorporate, because it's just like a big mush cube. I added fat, salt and even sugar to try to bring out a good flavor, but it didn't work.
Jim: B. Little muddy tasty. I mean, the flavors were a little muddled.
Dessert
Deb: Not terrible.
Wouldn’t want to make it again, myself, because I thought it was TOO chocolatey.
Bri: Unexceptional. C. Just wasn’t tasty. Wasn’t fluffy
enough. It was somewhere between a brownie and a cake. Hybrids don’t work very
well as desserts. They’re like ligers, not very tasty.
Alex: B. I liked its fudgy consistency and its boozy tinges.
Jim: Not chocolatey enough. Too dense. Not very cake-like,
it didn’t rise. Kind of like a dry brownie.
The buttercream frosting separated and it looked like we just poured melted butter on top. Still tasted good, though.
I am not over Pumped Up Kicks, either.
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