Jim's Night: "What's going on?"

Greetings food and/or internet lovers!  Tonight is Jim's night, and he's drawn his inspiration from a number of places...[cue the Captain Planet theme song]...from Mei Mei street kitchen, we have chilled tomato peach soup.  From the Kingdom of Everything Is Deep Fried, we have corn fritters.  From FRANCE, we have a corn-cheddar souffle.  And finally, from the American melting pot, we have some sort of...as yet unspecified baked apple thing.

Sniffins: "What's a ramekin?  What's going on?!"

To ease the events of the night, Jim actually premade the peach and tomato soup.  Sometimes this happens when things have to chill.  It's actually one of the drawbacks to cooking club - anything that takes more than a few hours to make is out, unless someone preps it beforehand.  Anyway, the soup.  How was it?  Just ask Brian's shirt.

T-shirt says: want more!

Cabécou Crostini

Furthermore, as loyal readers know, Jim has been making delicious goat cheese from scratch, so we made some crostini from them.  Now that he has a cheese cave (?!!) he's taken to aging his cheese, which definitely gives it a drier and more complex flavor.  And still, it melts into delicious awesomeness.  Mix it with pepper jelly - oh yes.  Recommended!

Sniffins: "You just blog about whatever people say?  Oh, shit."

Jim: "Don't you ever read the blog?"

Sniffins: "No"

Anyway, it's been clearly established that the food part of our food blog is the most boring part, so that's why we talk about Sniffins's love life ("a mess, everybody knows that") and badass youtube videos that we've seen.

Brian has discovered that we have insufficient ramekins for this souffle, and therefore is using Jim's delightful hand-made cups.  Wanna buy one?  Bring home a piece of the blog!  A clean piece, I promise.  Prior to assembling the souffle, Brian is sauteing butter, onions and corn, which will be mixed in with the eggs and cheese in some magical way to souffleize.

Not a souffle, but better!  Go buy one!

Apples stuffed with
 crispy filling.

As part of my role as blogger, I get to make suggestions that don't really involve me doing work, which is actually pretty great.  So, since we're making an unspecified apple thing, how about...inside-out apple crisp? We'll make a crisp filling, stuff it in an apple, bake it and then cover it with caramel!  And, since I don't have to do any of the work, the fact that I have no idea how to hollow out an apple makes no difference whatsoever!  Winning!

Since it's mid-September, the enthusiastic costumers in attendance are talking about what they want to do for Halloween.  Brian is going to be Sgt. Pepper (or a Lonely Heart, I'm not sure which one John Lennon was!), and Sniffins is going to be Slenderman.  Sniffins is missing a few arms, and a few male genitalia, but we're confident she'll figure it out before Halloween!

Egg whites mixed with proto-souffle.

Ooh, cooking drama!  How much do you beat the egg whites of a souffle?

Deb:  "Are they stiff?  I hate this!  And how can they be dry if they're egg whites?"

Eggs are pretty much the most complicated ingredient in the kitchen, and I'm glad it's not me that has to make stiff peaks.  Once at cooking club, I had to make stiff peaks by hand, and that was some fucking miserable shit.  The upside of that, I guess, is that you never over beat them, because you're always desperate to stop before your arm falls off.

Fritters in the fryer!

So the souffles are about to go in, and now we have 14 minutes to deep fry our corn fritters so they're ready while we have beautiful, risen souffles.  Ready...set...fry!

With Sniffins on hand, I have to admit, things have gone a lot more smoothly than normal!  An extra hand in the kitchen is helpful, and Sniffins doesn't add a lot of stress because she follows the recipe until the recipe ends, and then just does whatever she feels like.

So, the fritters are coming out, and the question arises of what we should put them on.  The decision?  Honey mustard!  And the general consensus as we taste test?  So good!  Way better than Redbones!  Apparently dissing Redbones is the order of the night, so...take that, Redbones!  And I hate waiting in line while my stupid last member of my party comes, and I hate that you...uh...are...so convenient and have a mysterious large number of vegetarian options...and...well, other people can diss Redbones.

This is not relevant, but it IS AWESOME.

The souffles are risen!  (Check out pictures below to see the before for the before and after comparisons)  Much like Christ, who you were quite confident would never rise no long how you waited, they have risen!  Unlike Christ, however, upon rising they were not browned on top.  Given, we also didn't have to wait three days, so that's a win...anyway, here is a comparison of a raw compared to a risen souffle.  The general consensus was that there was maybe too little egg and too much flour, as the consistency was a little less souffle-like and a little more muffiny.  You win some, you lose some, right?

 

So as part of the intensity of cooking club, we try to make a beautiful plate of all of the food that we have.  What you can't see here is that the lighting at Jim's place is not conducive to beautiful pictures, so Brian was actually holding a ridiculously hot lamp over this plate of food while I barked at him to move a little bit this way and that.  Still, look at this tantalizing meal, huh?  The souffles were only a little cold, but the well-lit memories will last a lifetime.  Or however long google manages to host our pictures.  The soup garnish is Jim's favorite vanilla balsamic vinegar, with fresh basil.

So...I basically insisted that we make caramel, which is short, but relatively involved!  All sorts of melting sugar, buttering, foaming, creaming.  Crazy!  Look at this crazy shit:

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/caramel_sauce/

Caramel making involves melting sugar, which is a ridiculous process.  As above, It turns from solid to melted very quickly, and then starts to get the caramel depth from the browning of the sugar.  Of course, good caramel lives somewhere between melted sugar and burnt sugar, and finding that point can be sort of a challenge!  Especially when you're impatient and want to watch the next episode of True Blood and eat the stupid dessert which is already ready already except for that caramel that nobody really wants except for Alex.  Sorry, team!

Inside out apple crisp with
homemade caramel and vanilla
ice cream.

So how did we do?  Well, as far as TV goes, True Blood is so much better than Deep Space Nine that I can hardly believe it.  One wonders actually what would happen if HBO were to do a Star Trek reboot with all sorts of melodrama and a high budget and lots of cussing and gay and boobage.  It would probably be pretty freaking awesome, actually.  Seductive forehead aliens and a custom soundtrack and a southern gothic spaceship full of vampires...Oh yeah, food.  Here you go:

	Alex	Bri	Deb	Jim	Sniffins
Soup	B+ - Very smooth, and Interesting flavor profile - but it had kind of an unpleasant mouth feel.	B+ - Very smooth, I personally think more bread would have been good...	B - I don’t really like cold soups, but it was definitely good.	B+ - It had a little too much pepper, more peaches and cumin!	A - That was the first time I’ve ever enjoyed could soup in my whole life!
Fritters	A - Delicious flavor, lovely texture, nice sauce.	A+ - Fresh, light, wonderful honey mustard sauce.	A - Light and fluffy, and there were enough of them!	A+ - Just awesome.  Especially with honey  mustard sauce.	B - I just have a bias against fried food.  I would never cook and eat that myself.  But very, very tasty.
Souffle	C- - Bland, bad texture.	B- - It was really bland.  Parmesan and cheddar were maybe not bold enough.	B- - It was a bland flavor, and we already had the corn.	C - I think it had too much onion and the flavor was not cheesy enough.  I am determined to make a good souffle!	C - It felt empty.  Empty of flavor and the texture made me feel empty.
Crostini	A - Lovely melange of flavors.  Great cheese.  (Good job, Jim!)	A - If I’d paid more attention it might have been an A+ (poor, burnt crostini)	A - On a day when I’m not trying to be a vegan, I want a whole sandwich of that!	A - It was delicious.	A - Could have used more pepper jelly.
Crisped Apples	B - I like the crumble.  I like the part of the apple that is soft.  The caramel had a complex flavor but a strange texture...	C+ - Without ice cream and caramel A- - With ice cream and caramel.	F - I ate too many fritters [Ed.: witness the glory of hungry Deb.]	B - I think the apple skins are really tough, but it’s pretty good.	C - It was too sugary.  [Note: Sniffins has been talking about how to get more caramel into her body for the last 15 minutes]

Until next time, loyal reader(s)!