Cooking Club de los Muertos

Hello folks and welcome to the first cooking club in a while!  It’s 11/2, Dia de los Muertos, and we have guest cook Katherine from Alex’s co-op housing.

Our kitchen in spirit, if not in reality.

To greet the Fall and the spirits of our departed, we are creating ricotta-kale tartlets with squash foam on top (!!), an apple/red onion slaw, a squash gougere, and a fig tart dessert Deb describes as “like a giant open-faced fig newton”.   It’s Alex’s night!  

This is what our kitchen actually looks like.  More bustling, fewer skeletons.

Katherine hits the garlic (because we ALWAYS need garlic), Alex is grating the havarti, Deb is hooking up Mog to play Neko Case and going on to scoop out ricotta, and Jim is working on the dessert, getting the pine nuts pulsed. (Recipe at ‘Fig Tart With Cheeses’ on the Top Chef Home Edition website) Deb is critiquing the Neko Case concert we went to last night, which was...challenging for someone unfamiliar with her lyrics and the shortness of her songs.  Deb suffers from a Long Attention Span, so any song shorter than 2:45 is *dead* to her.  DEAD.  She describes the band as “four Duck Dynasty guys and a stand-up comic from Atlanta, and Nick, the hardest working roadie in show business”.  

On the other hand, she performed for NPR dressed in a gorilla suit.  This automatically wins her lots of points.

Alex is critiquing Deb’s kale chopping abilities.  Katherine is chopping MORE garlic (see previous paragraph, re Alex’s night), we have onions browning on the stove and roasted squash cooling off to the side.  

Deb returns to an oft-debated question about a local restaurant:  Is Live Alive the place that serves the best food in the universe, or a place that sells vegetarian glop that’s on a level with pretty much any veggie food co-op?  Katherine falls somewhere in the middle; she’s had smoothies there and they were mostly okay until she hit the big solid chunks in the bottom.  I guess that’s the equivalent of a B grade?

Here’s the fun part: almost all the recipes are on post-it notes, sometimes multiple ones for a single recipe, and they’re already scattered around the countertops!  Lemme transcribe:

Squash Cream recipe

puree ⅓ cup squash

⅓ cup mascarpone

sage, smoked salt, roasted garlic.   Pass through sieve/tamis.  Mix with ⅔ cream, add to magic thing and chill.

Ricotta Pie

mix 1.5 cups ricotta

4 minced garlic cloves

½ cup grated havarti

2 eggs

one chiffonate kale bunch,

1 t salt

large pinch herbs du provence

Put in oiled ramekins and bake @425 until done (25 min)

In stand mixer, 2 gougeres, add 4 eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth.  Add in 1 cup milk, ⅔ cup squash, ½ cup buttter, 1t salt, 1 gougeres.  Bring to boil over medium heat.  At 1c + 4T flour, stirring constantly, until a ball forms.  Cook a few minutes, stirring constantly.  Transfer to stand mixer with paddle.  Beat on medium 1 minute.

Scant ½ cup milk  (add in fat)   ⅓ cup squash   ¼ cup butter  ½ t salt  Bring to a boil over medium heat  Add ½ C  ?????

Cryptic, right?  I know!  Have fun with this, scholars and researchers!

Deb is ramekinning the kale creation while Katherine is cooking the gougere flour concoction...I’m running out of verbs.  She’s concocting?  Flouring?  I hope these pictures tell you the story, folks.

The fig jam is “just as a garnish, so I omitted it” says Alex.  There is a momentary consultation on whether its awesomeness means we should try to tackle it, but the consensus is not tonight.   Alex, meanwhile, is resorting to stuffing the foam-to-be into the spray cartridge with a chopstick, because it’s not running down the funnel on its own.  

It made the foam!  Eggs, meanwhile, are going in the gougere!  Excitement!  

We are carefully, cautiously asking Alex details about his trip to California for a job interview.  That’s right, folks, the Cooking Club might be going bi-coastal!  We face the future with braveness and open minds, especially since the alternative is hiding under our beds and howling.

Deb is done with her job (and ate no lunch), so Alex assigns her the task of creating deep-fried kale chips to be a garnish on top of the cream (and also a snack!)   

Deb has never had fresh figs, and fresh figs were the only ones Jim could find for the dessert tonight, so it’s sampling time.  Shock and revelation, it tastes like a fig newton!  Except without the doughy bit.  And a little crunchier.  And not as sweet….okay, okay, it’s a *little* like a fig newton.

Also like a deflated munchkin.  Or a dried ear from a 'Body Worlds' exhibition.

There’s a pause while I go on a tour of the nearby neighborhood with Rommie, local guide and faithful canine.  I return to get told that deep-frying kale (which turns out to be full of water--who knew!)  turned out to be fraught with danger, so for a few minutes the whole group was standing several feet away and trying to toss the leaves into the hot oil without getting burnt!  You just have to imagine this, folks.

You can't spell KDANGERL without k-a-l-e. 

The gougeres have been in the oven for what feels to us, instinctively, like a long time.  We pull them out and take a look at them while there’s still ten more minutes to go, and WOW they’re done like done things!  

GRADES!

Gougeres:

BRIAN: A!  Tasty dough-cheese nuggets!

JIM:  B+...I think they needed a dipping sauce or something.  They were a little dry.  But tasty.

ALEX:  I give them a B+.  I liked them.  I think I really wanted the salt to be a little more on the insde--my attempts to to sprinkle salt on the outside were not successful.  Also, the amount of time the recipe said to bake them made no sense.

KATHRYN:  I would give them an A-, mostly because I made them.  They were a little well-done.  They were maybe too small--we made more than 40!  

DEB:  I liked them too; I’d give them a solid A.  

Coleslaw:

JIM:  C+.  I think it needed more dressing, and it needed to sit together and mix a little longer.

ALEX: I give it a B+.  I liked the dressing; Jim might be right that more dressing would have been good.  The apples are really nice!

KATHRYN:  I’d give it a solid A!  It was very very enjoyable.

DEB:  I liked it; the slices could have been a bit thinner.  So I’d give it a B+.

Ricotta Kale Tartlets:

pre-garnish

post-garnish!

JIM:  I give it a good strong B.  I think there was too much kale for a higher grade.  The flavor was good, the espuma was awesome.  

ALEX:  Was there any salt in it?  No?  IT NEEDED SALT.  I missed salt!  It tasted totally flat.  So I give it a B as well; it had potential to be pretty good.  The squash topping wasn’t a particularly good pairing for it.  

KATHRYN:  It was very great.  I’m going to give it a B+ (I’m grading it with the foam...I wasn’t sure about it.  It was thick and dense and not what I expected).

DEB:   It was kind of a B+ territory for me too.  I’d suggest a mushroom sauce would have been good.

Fig Pie:

JIM:  I’d give it a B, but after I put some marscapone mixed with honey and used it as a dipping sauce, then it became SO much better...maybe an A-.

ALEX:  As served, I would give it a B-.  I do not understand why that cheese is supposed to go with it.  It’s like an order of magnitude saltier than the pie, which made things tricky.  The pie was good but a little soft .  (I liked the honey marscapone a lot--I’d give that a B or B+.)  I liked the crust but it was kind of subtle.  Nice, but subtle.

KATHRYN:  I’d give it an A-.  I really liked it with the honey.  I’m a sweets fiend.

DEB:  C+.  It was okay.  Needs something serious like I think I should have tried the honey cheese mixture on top.  Definitely not a fig newton, man.