Hello, readers! It's Saturday the 14th and Boston Marathon Weekend, AND both Deb and I have had to work before coming here, so tonight is going to be Special.
Rommy the Wonder Dog quickly notices that my arms taste good, and devotes his full attention to me for the first five minutes after my arrival. Um, yay?
Tonight's Menu:
Root Vegetable Croquettes with Goat Cheese and Golden Raisins with Mint Creme
Quinoa-Spinach Torte with an Avocado-Orange Coulis
Tomato Cake
First thing we make: Tomato cake!
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| Tomato batter |
Note one: The recipe calls for a can of condensed tomato soup. Ha! We've blended up our own roasted tomatoes to create a soup-consistency tomato 'soup'.
Tension rises when we measure flour: Alex wants to do it the way described by, oh, every cook and recipe book ever, while Deb is instinctively suspicious of "quote-experts-unquote". It's Alex's night; we measure it his way.
Alex can't remember where he got the inspiration for this...Deb wonders if the pepper jelly from last week was a subconscious influence, and it does seem possible.
Batter stage now, and there are lumps. We fear the lumps. But we cross our fingers, and the cake goes in the oven.
Sidenote one: Is prostitution legal in Colombia? None of us are sure. It's not a pressing issue (though maybe I should note that I'm just assuming that), but it's the part of the news story about the Secret Service scandal that we're all puzzled by.
Sidenote two: Deb is off her juice fast! Hello renewed interest in solid foods! Yay! Hello new determination to make healthy low-calorie vegetarian meals for both her and her spouse (me) to eat! (Um...yay?)
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| Spinach, we assume |
Sidenote three: We are all stymied, utterly STYMIED, by the question of whether or not a certain leafy green in the fridge is spinach or not. It's one of the (few) downsides to getting local organic (and unlabelled) stuff. We're going to use it, don't get us wrong, we THINK it's "spinach tree", but for all we know we're about to make the world's first quinoa-cilantrolery torte.
At what point did the sidenotes get bigger than the post? Let's just forge ahead. As the sky darkens over scenic East Boston Deb is getting the quinoa ready for the torte as Alex works on the spinach and Rommy licks my elbow. To every thing there is a season, turn, turn, turn.
We now have a debate over whether something is a potato or not! It might be a yam, or maybe a sweet potato....then we have to pause and figure out whether there's a difference between a yam and a sweet potato. Yes, it's that sort of night.
"If I were the body of this, where would I be?" asks Jim, as he looks for the mixer. There's a brief mental struggle to turn that into a "That's what she said!" joke, but it's not quite possible. :(
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| Mixing the vegetables for the croquettes |
Jim takes a brief break from making mashed root vegetables to put Fiona Apple on MOG. As she brings us '90s flashbacks in the background Jim gets Deb's opinion with an Excel problem, part of his coursework. Alex, meanwhile, sautes the quinoa over on the stovetop. We move on to making the root vegetables into little breadcrumb-coated patties, preparatory to frying them.We "go a little nuts with the breadcrumbs". We have Panko, and we're not afraid to use it!
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| Croquette dredging! |
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| Pre-fried croquettes |
Update to sidenote one: Prostitution *is* legal in some parts of Colombia. Knowledge is power!
Alex is taking the quinoa-spinach delight out of the frying pan and into a prep bowl, and then into a baking dish, as Deb grates cheese for the croquettes.
Deb is trying to tell me something through sign language and lipreading that looks like "I have a hand that's very large". I'm not sure that's right, somehow. A minute later she manages to grate part of her finger, but when it comes down to the possibility of the food taking longer to be ready she WILLS the blood back inside her body and keeps on prepping the cheese.
Alex knows a surprising number of Fiona Apple lyrics by heart. I'm just sayin'.
Jim is enforcing mise en place rules in a hardcore way! He's also describing the plot of an episode of 'Bridezillas'; just hearing about it raises Deb's stress level. Deb prepares the mint, and we all commiserate with Alex over his having to work on Patriots Day. (Note to out-of-towners: many folks in Boston have Patriots Day off, due mostly to the fact that the Boston Marathon runs right through the middle of town and shuts down pretty much every major roadway.)
Jim and Deb compare notes about growing up Catholic, and manage to make it sound (to this former Nazarene who still has his 1st place trophy from 5th grade Competitive Bible Quizzing ((Book of Matthew, boyee! )) ) like an astoundingly Bible-free time. Scandalous! Alex, to round out the religious training, describes the sermon he had to give as part of Hebrew School.
We try a sample root vegetable croquette, and it's nummy! And HOT, ow ow ow the hot oil burns my hand ow. But we're definitely on the right track.
Deb praises the orange--it's *perfect*, and she feels sad that Jim won't have it any more after we chop it up for the coulis. Jim, who has different priorities, is okay with this.
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| Alex being cheffy |
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| Jim working and Brian... |
Deb takes a break from hanging over my shoulder to take pictures (which you are probably looking at right now! Well, not RIGHT now, you're reading this, but you've been and/or will be exposed to them very very very shortly). "Do something cheffy, I need an action shot" is overheard.
It's noted that the pottery you're seeing in these pictures was made right here in this very apartment! Jim is an excellent potter as well as a scholar. And nothing says 'Happy Solstice' like a new mug or platter. YOU know what I'm talking about.
"Sea of Love" comes on MOG. Does anyone else remember the Honeydrippers and their version of this song from the mid-80s? Every time I heard it, I felt my soul die a little, like salt falling on a snail. I'm not saying this version is worse...it doesn't have a backup chorus singing "BUM bum bum"....but. But.
We now do something Alex calls Ridiculous: we are RE-BLENDING the coulis! (I'm glad I'm sitting down.) The food processor leaves chunks, you see, and Alex demands smoothness. We shall not rest, we shall blend it over the stove, we shall blend it on the beaches, we shall blend it in the streets. And then hold onto your britches, because after our blending has triumphed we're going to put it in a squeeze bottle and get Artistic on this.
Jim Goes There, by saying that there's no difference between Fiona Apple and Alanis Morrisette. A million Canadians weep.
It's time to assemble our plate!! We have, unfortunately, used every single mint leaf in the house leaving none for garnish (where was the Lorax to stop our reckless ways?)
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| Dinner is served! On the left Quinoa Torte, on the right, Vegetable Croquettes |
One meal later.....
Brian's notes: I expected to like the root vegetable patties, and I did, but the real pleasant surprise was the quinoa. YUM.
Alex's: He really liked the croquettes; the goat cheese inside mixed with the potato was really good, and he thinks the thing that would have made it even better was if there had been more golden raisins. Each time he bit into one was a moment of happy delight! The mint stuff was very elegant; it was fluffy and had a subtle flavor, which he thought paired well. The quinoa, he felt, was pretty good. B or B+; it could have used a little more spark. It was solid.
Jim's: Croquettes were awesome! He liked the mint sauce a lot more than he thought he would; they were good with the orange and avocado; he would make them again in a heartbeat. Quinoa was also pretty darn good--B+ for that one.
Deb's: C- on the croquettes, not a fan. They tasted like bread and cheese. The quinoa, on the other hand, gets an A...she'd make that again right away. She loved the avocado-orange sauce! It would make a great salad dressing. The mint dressing, she feels, would have been better with more mint and more blending. (She doesn't like things that taste like cheese or fried foods, she says, so YMMV on the croquettes).
Note on the cake: the tomato coulis was mixed with baking soda; the tomato being acidic, this caused immediate foaming action! The tomatoes were roasted first in an attempt to bring out their tomatoey flavor...the baking seems to have taken this flavor largely away, though. We make it a two layer cake, with a little pepper jelly in the middle.
Cake notes:
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| Fugly cake, hidden tomato! |
Deb: It tastes like a breakfast cake. Which is good! Cakes are overrated! This tastes like a muffin! (Alex: "Ouch".) Deb says: I'm not sure why you're not into the 'black beans in a cake' idea. (Jim: "Because it sounds horrible") Later addition to her review: This is really good with a lot of frosting and the jelly! This is basically like the innards of a cannoli. B+, liked it a lot! Not sure she'd make it again like THIS, though.
Alex: His frosting job makes it look like a tombstone, he says. He liked the cannoli frosting, thought the cake was too dense; the tomato taste was forgettable. C+....he DID have seconds, note ye, but it was mostly a frosting delivery vehicle. Could he have done the soda and powder wrong, he wonders? He notes that he made herb butter to enhance the flavor, and it was all lost, lost!
Jim: He gives it a B-. The flavor was alright but the texture was too tough.
Myself: B-, but with potential...it's like it gave a tiny hint of what it COULD have been, but there wasn't enough flavor (read: pepper jelly) to overcome the blandness. More spices! Of course, you could also cut the tomato and just make a spice cake and I'd be happy, so maybe my advice isn't what's needed.
Our Farscape episodes tonight: Season 2's "Look at the Princess", parts 2 and 3. There's disappointment with an escape in the first of the episodes, which leads to debate about how long someone unprotected can survive in vacuum, which leads to googling astronaut deaths in space, which...is not really the road you want an upbeat cooking club night to go down, amirite?
Walking into cooking club today, I was greeted by a tremendously organized kitchen, a la Stations of the Place, but today it's even better, because the blogging station has also been set up. Epic. Anyway, Deb takes a very healthy approach to cooking club, where she, you know, plans ahead of time, and apparently spends as much money as is necessary to follow the recipe. You know what that means? Chantarelles. (!) Who are we that get to eat fancy pants mushrooms? I like it. Even in spite of being mostly sick. Sniffins (Sarah) is here, which is fitting, because she totally got me sick. She's on cupcake duty, and her mise en place is epic. Epic!
As it turns out, 'turning into pretzels' requires more panache and skill than was expected, so the job was turned over to Jim. Jim, working with pottery, has lots of practice in this sort of thing, so we passed the job on to him. Sniffins, who hates being told that she can't do something, then decided that she could do it too. And finally, Deb gets a go, too, so we can compare everyone. Some pretzel recipes call for boiling the dough in baking soda water, but this one just calls for dipping in the baking soda solution. It's ambiguous whether you dip before or dip after, and also ambiguous whether it calls for an egg wash. Sniffins decides that egg wash is the way to go, so it happens!
