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)!

September 9th: Deb Takes On the South

Saludos, fine readers!  This is Brian chronicling Deb’s night, and we have churning winds outside courtesy of Hurricane Leslie, and a vegan southern night going on in here.  We’re talking turnip stew, collard greens, bbq tofu (with homemade bbq sauce), fresh corn, and for dessert apple enchiladas.

For a better understanding of what Deb’s had to do to get to this point, let’s recap her last 30 hours:  job interview, getting caught out in a thunderstormy downpour, several hours of sleep broken by insomnia, early morning bike ride to Comcast to get a working modem, later morning walk to MicroCenter to replace the router, an hour crawling around under the desk trying to heal our massively dysfunctional computer, then another hour researching and planning this menu and then shopping at the farmers market, Trader Joes and Whole Foods...I privately think she’s going to be asleep on a soft bed of tofu before the main course gets ready, and I can’t blame her.

As the turnips get sliced, we tackle the age old question: Dave Matthews, dull-witted or perpetually stoned?  I personally don’t think it’s an either/or answer, folks.  Let’s just say the guy who mumbled his way through an NPR interview today is the same guy who told Maxim back in ‘95 that he wished his nose was a penis because of how much he loves sex.

Also, there's this thing he does with his face.

Now that we've alienated half our readers, our first obstacle appears: the turnip stew recipe is MASSIVE.  We cut the amount of turnips from 3 to 2, debate how many carrots to put in without having it turn into carrot stew, and express varying degrees of dubiousness...

Alex: This recipe sucks!

Deb: This recipe is great!

Jim: Have you ever made this recipe before?

Deb: Of course not.

Jim: Have you ever spoken with anyone who’s made any recipes from this cookbook?

Deb: No...I just believe that anything Alex feels about a recipe is Wrong, until empirical evidence forms to back him up.  Therefore this recipe is GOOD

Alex feels, Dear Reader, that the cookbook Deb is using tonight contains the sorts of recipes where, if you asked your grandmother how an item got made and then wrote down exactly what she told you, you’d get results like these.  To Deb this implies “down-home cooking”...to Alex this implies “looming disaster”.




A skull on its cover...the mark of Quality Cookbooks

Deb, about spice amounts: If I remember correctly she never gives amounts, just “to taste”.

*Alex sobs quietly*

We decide to leave out the collard green stems (because they are disgusting).
Deb is now insulting the cooking philosophy of “no fat, no flavor”, implying its an artifact of patriarchal 20th century thought which has no place in a modern kitchen.  She’ll show us with this menu...she’ll SHOW US ALL.

Three minutes later we look at the bbq tofu recipe, which requires us to cook it in oil.  Fatty, fatty oil.     C’est la vie.

Deb begins prepping the homemade bbq sauce, helped by sous chef “the tofu recipe just says ‘pour a bottle of bbq sauce in’!  What the hell!“ Alex.  It calls for ¼ cup of worcestershire sauce; we bid a sad adieu to the vegan nature of this meal.  It also calls for ¾ of a cup of bourbon and we have slightly less than ½ cup, so we supplement it with whiskey.  As one does.

My pepsi bottle is less than ½ full so I supplement it with whiskey.  As one does.

“Okay. I’ll do whatever y’all want, Deb.”--Alex, acknowledging where the credit and blame for this meal go. 

Deb and McKayla share their dismay at the cookbook.

Alex begins making the tortillas for our dessert enchiladas, which is a surprisingly gymnastic recipe calling for boiling water to be poured into a little hollow in the middle of a mound of flour while butter fumes are waved across the top but not allowed to touch it...seriously, it’s a seven paragraph process.  The bbq sauce? Four sentences.

Jim continues to work his magic as the middleman between Hungry Deb and Dubious About This Cookbook Alex.  He fields Deb’s pensive question about how couscous would taste mixed in with the stew (terrible).

While we cook, we discuss an artifact that peaked in the 90s--not Dave Matthews this time, but ultimate frisbee.  We’re told that because frisbee(tm) is a trademarked product, at some point they had to just call it Ultimate, or in some (hopefully rare) cases “Ultimate Disc”.  Which sounds to us like a special attack Voltron shoots, but what do we know...

FEAR THE ULTIMATE DISC

“Remember how every time we tried to sweeten a dessert with dates it turned out horrible and made Brian cry?”--Jim, losing his Trusted Middleman status.

“Do we have any vegetable boullion?”

“Yes--I put it under there to remind us of our glorious past”--Alex, still sous’ing his heart out.

We test the stew--Deb insists it’s good, but her face says otherwise.  We team up to doctor it--maybe adding some collard greens and spices will help.

We note with dismay that the tortilla dough needs to chill for an hour.
 
The soup is arguably ready; it’s too hot for some of us, just right for...no, wait, the spicy afterburn bollixes everyone.  It’s not exactly the most attractive food we’ve ever cooked...honestly, it’s not the most attractive thing I’ve ever scraped out of the inside of a cooking pot after a long night as a dishwasher...but it’s not that different from other vegetarian stews we’ve made.  Considering all the trouble with the cookbook, maybe that counts as a win?

So....much....BROWN....

 

Deb is newly dubious about the vegetables in the bbq tofu recipe...we take a closer look at the recipe and see that it calls for sauteeing it and some vegetables, then baking the darn thing, and THEN letting it all sit for a while.

The collard greens, at least, are pretty straightforward--we sautee them up until they’re tender and we’re done.  They’re boiling in no time...which means we face the task of deciding what constitutes “tender”.

The granny smith apples, which were on a tree in western Mass yesterday, are delicious, we’re happy to note.  It’s tempting to just eat them while we slice them instead of cutting them into the right size for the apple enchiladas.  Mmm apples.  (It’s 8:06 and I’m starting to get peckish).

We’re experimenting to see if a raw potato can take out some of the hot heat kick in the stew.  Science!

Jim notes that our cookbook tonight, “The Dirty South Cookbook”, also includes ‘white bean bruscetta’ and crepes!  He is struggling to find the recipe for the apples, and the sheer amount of butter--1/2 cup--causes even him to shake his head and say “worst cookbook ever”.  Deb insists that it’s fine, it just requires a little improvisation!  Jim counters by pointing out the syrup the next part of the recipe calls for, without any explanation for where the syrup came from...but it’s okay, REALLY it is, we’re flexible.
 
Alex is about to put the tofu in the oven...while the recipe calls for it to be swimming in sauce, the strength of the sauce we’ve made causes Deb to feel we should be less about “swimming” and more about “wading”.  Maybe just “splashing”.  Tricky.

8:24 and we’re still plugging away; we’re flouring and trying to roll out the tortillas, but just MAYBE they haven’t chilled enough...or maybe we didn’t knead it enough...or maybe it just needs more water.  We forge ahead!

We’re nervous about the vinegar in the bbq sauce, but hopeful that as it bakes with the tofu it’ll lose a little of its bite.

And now we have a Very Special Moment...let’s put it this way. When there’s a pot on the stove with vegetables inside, it’s logical to think that it’s not just the top part of a double boiler, so of COURSE it’s safe to pour another two cups of broth in.  And YET.  And yet, my friends.  The left side of the stove is now Lake Okeechobee.

Our Final Result

Grades

Turnip Stew
Deb...F after my 5 tbs of hot sauce, C before that.  But maybe D if it tastes good tomorrow
Alex...echoes Deb . It needed some love and improvisation.
Jim...F.  not a huge fan of turnips.
Brian...For the amount of time and effort this recipe took, this would have needed to cure my sciatica and put money in my bank account to get an A.  It. Did. Not.  F

Collard Greens
Deb--would make them again, which means A-...as a base for sauce they're great.
Jim--B, in part because of how well they worked with BBQ sauce.  On their own they were a bit bland.
Alex--C+ The boiling sorta makes sense for collard...however, the other vegetables didn't work.
Brian--B-.  They tasted like greens.  Meh.

BBQ tofu
deb--A or A-...thought the sauce worked really well and they were perfectly crispy.
Alex--B...don't like BBQ sauce very much!  Was okay.  Tough to get texture right... Inside tasted like BBQ sauce.  Nice texture.
Jim--B, texture was good, better than expected
Brian--Maybe I was unlucky in my selection of which tofu cubes I got, but I’ve never had to hack tofu with a knife before.  B-

Apple Enchiladas
Deb...A or A+, definitely want to make them right away again
Alex--we learned a lot about tortillas as we went.  The tactic is something I'd never think of. A.  A lot of room to explore there too.  Enchilada to work with leads to lots of potential.  Nobody makes Pie Sauce...
Jim..,A, it was surprisingly delicious, and the tortilla wasn't overly-crisped and blended with the filling very well.

Brian...A.  I <3 granny smith apples.

Brian's Night: Preparing for the FOOD TRUCK WAR

Welcome, fellow food eaters,

Blogger at work

Deb here, live blogging one of Brian's chef nights. Bri is celebrating the impending Food Truck War between Boston and New York by doing an anticipatory taste testing of one of the New York contestant's menus.  Tonight's menu was inspired entirely by Nuchas, which is a food truck all about empanadas, a current fave in our cooking club. But to mix it up a little, Brian's idea is to make the fillings of three of the empanadas and put them inside little personal pies instead.

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!

Jim's still hard at work making all the pie crusts. Alex is washing dishes and Brian is dancing to Dirty Vegas.  He's regaling us all on the intricacies of how to make cake pops. I'll spare you.

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.

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!

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 

Tipsy Cake

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. 

This is what happens when you're impatient and you put the frosting on before the cake cools ------------------------------------------->
The buttercream frosting separated and it looked like we just poured melted butter on top. Still tasted good, though.

Brian's Night: Inspired by Boston Restaurant Week

Welcome to our Deep Space Supper Club (so called because of our fascination with science fiction, the future and what the aliens are going to think about us when they finally get here). Tonight's plan is to watch some more True Blood, which doesn't really qualify as science fiction, sadly, but it's really good, nonetheless. The other plan for tonight is Brian's: he will once again attempt to recreate something that he read about somewhere, but never got to try and goshdarnit, that just stuck in his craw.

[Craw? Doesn't that imply he DID eat it, you ask?Whatever.]


Corn Bisque
We'll be opening tonight's festivities with a Corn Bisque. The menu that Brian was drooling over when he made this decision was one offered on the Boston Restaurant Week website: 49 Social. Since we don't have access to their actual recipe (or cilantro oil.... and no doubt the idea of a 'jalapeno emulsion' scared Mr. I Hate Anything Spicy right off...),  he's using one he found at JustAPinch.com  Nice, hearty, safe and not spicy at all: this recipe is exactly Brian's kind of thing. Surprisingly, it was also the sleeper hit of the evening, as you will see in the reviews below.

Salted Chocolate Caramel Tart
Brian had a brief panic attack just before Jim and Alex arrived when he realized that the dessert he chose (getting the idea from Aquitaine-Chestnut Hill) has 3 different chilling times, totaling 2 hours, overall. He moved around the kitchen like a whirling dervish getting the dough ready as fast as possible. It's about half way through the first hour of chilling and it looks just like gingerbread, but Bri tells me he is making a chocolate tart crust. This dessert has a fairly simple but -as it turned out- delicious chocolate/flour/egg crust. It also involves making your own caramel, which you do by melting sugar in corn syrup and water and stirring for a really long time. Then, on top of the caramel layer, there is a thin spread of a chocolate cream sauce, which is easy to make: you just melt the chocolate in the microwave and add cream. In the Restaurant Week menu, this dessert is described as coming with "Nutella powder" and espresso ice cream, but we skipped those as being too over the top.


Moroccan Cigars

"Since this meat is completely fake, I'm not going to follow the recipe and cook it for another 15 minutes."
That's Alex with his ever so logical ideas that don't occur to other people.  Alex and Jim have arrived and are hard at work getting the other main entree prepared: Moroccan Sephardi Cigars, which, usually,  are deep fried, spring roll-like packets of spiced ground beef, but as vegetarians we are substituting in some fake meat we found at Trader Joe's (Note: We couldn't find Gimme Lean in time, but that would have been our fake meat of choice.) We used a recipe Brian hunted down on another Blogspot site, which is written by a guy with an impressive vocabulary. (Degustations? I had to look that up, but now I want to work it in everywhere.). The spices smell wonderfully Moroccan as the "meat" cooks. This turned out to be an extremely easy dish to make...right up until it was time to put the filling in the phyllo. Phyllo is really hard to work with, and I can't say anything we've ever made with it has ever turned out pretty, and tonight is not much of an exception,  but hey, that's not really one of our highest priorities, anyway, right? Right. This recipe idea came from The Beehive in the South End (Boston).

" Since this meat is completely fake, we should add a lot of fat."
Jim splashes olive oil into the meat mixture as it cooks and some into the corn bisque just for good measure. Alex wants to smear butter on the outside of the finished phyllo cigars, then midway through the cooking we brush them with more olive oil. It's enough to make this diet conscious, vegan wannabe cry, but sometimes it's hard to put the brakes on three hungry men.


"Should we keep these cigars vegan?" Alex asked me. Who am I kidding, even I said no. The Hunger is upon us.  Butter smeared phyllo? Sounds great! On the positive side, I "accidentally" bought whole wheat phyllo dough, earlier. That's got to count for something.

Other than Alex, who is painstakingly making all the cigars by himself, the rest of us are having a remarkably easy cooking night. So we start to have fun.

Jim is singing along with Regina Spektor:
"It breaks my heart art art art art art art art art art art art art art...  Naturally, an argument ensues on how many 'art's are in the chorus, and it took us a long time to decide on 14, let me tell you.

Alex mentioned at one point in the evening that all he wants in a trashy novel is for it to be at least more intriguing and unpredictable than, say, the average Deep Space Nine episode. I say, "Yeah, or, like all those werewolf novels." This seems to be going Too Far for Alex, because he asks how I can jump from his Deep Space Nine comment to wiping all werewolf novels off the table. Jim says, "Hey, she extrapolated!"  Damn right, Jim.

We paused to appreciate a Luscious Jackson song. "Wearing nothing is divine... Naked is a state of mind..."

This got us talking about music, which somehow got us talking about Kate Bush and this bizarre and wonderful video and her amazing dance style:

And THAT got us talking about another favorite of ours, the amazing Marquese Scott, who has taken dub step to a whole new superhuman level. Did you even know human beings could do this?

Oh, yeah, but this is supposed to be a cooking blog, so back to the food...

Soup
"I've never heard of putting cornmeal in a soup. That's kind of ...interesting...." Between you and me, it sounds terrible, doesn't it, but again, wait until you read the reviews below. This soup won us ALL over, even Alex.

Cigars

"Oh hell no. We're not deep frying anything in oil. " Unlike Romney, we are pro-biofuels. We used butter, instead, and we lathered the hell out of those cigars with it, but at least we didn't cook them in a vat of oil.

We baked them.

 

Dessert
Brian made the whole thing while we were distracted by the phyllo dough process. After the dough chilled for an hour, Bri divided it into four pieces, rolled each out and spread it into a tart pan. Then the crust was baked for an hour. Meanwhile, Bri began the laborious stirring of the caramel in a saucepan- that seemed to take an hour, too. The tarts needed to cool for a long time after they baked, then the caramel was poured in and they were placed in the refrigerator. Too soon, we took them out again to pour the chocolate on top. That didn't work out too well, so back they went to chill some more and we went off to eat dinner. Another hour later, we spread the chocolate and chilled it for another half hour or so. That damn dessert took forever to make. When we finally did eat it, it was STILL too liquidy.

The Results of the Degustations

Moroccan Cigars

Deb: A-  I loved them. To improve them, I think we could add mushrooms, or something more than just meat and onions, but the taste was incredible.
Bri:   A   Needed mushrooms, maybe. Or actual MEAT meat.
Jim:   B+ Needed salt, hot sauce. Maybe needed to be deep fried.
Alex: B+ Needed nooch, soy sauce, something Umami. Umami-ish? Umamamesque? Umamoid?


Corn Bisque
Deb:  A I liked the fact that it was chunky. Great texture. Tasty. The hot sauce added a lot. These are 2 recipes we should definitely put up on the blog because people need to KNOW about these.
Alex:  A- Maybe it needed more fat. [Ewwwww! -Deb]
Jim:    A With Trader Joe's Chili Pepper Sauce, an A+
Brian:  F. Hahahaha. Just joking. A.

Dessert:
Deb:   OMG if you eat the whole thing, you will die. I tried a bite of it and the sugar nearly put me into a coma. ["Welcome back, Full Deb!" -everyone else.]

Bri     B- Given another 6 hours to chill properly, this could really be amazing.

Alex:  B crust is really good. Caramel- too much, Chocolate topping very good. Needs some spices  to make it a bit more sophisticated.

Jim::   B- Love the crust. Less caramel. More chilling time. Maybe  raspberries mixed in with the caramel?
 

The cooks tonight: Alex, Jim and Brian. (I mostly sat around and typed.)