Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

152. Herbed Lima Bean Hummus p.15


The recipe

Hummus is a staple of my diet, and although I rarely make them, I quite like lima beans, so, I figured this lima bean hummus was a good bet. I’ve been doing some serious damage to the bean spreads in the book, and this was one of the last ones that really appealed to me. In the end it wasn’t the dip I was hoping for. It took some very nice ingredients, did some very silly things with them, and resulted in a muddy confused mess.

You start this dip by simmering frozen limas, onion, and garlic in water, then stirring in cilantro and parsley and letting the herbs steep. You then drain off the water and transfer the solids to the food processor. They then go for a spin with cumin, cayenne, lemon juice, olive oil, fresh dill, and fresh mint. The dip is then allowed to cool, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, drizzled with olive oil, and served.

There were a lot of big flavours going into this dish, but the preparation did them a disservice. The onion and garlic are boiled along with the limas in this dish. Boiling doesn’t do much for aromatics unless you’re making a soup. I’d much prefer to sweat them to take off some of the harsh edges, in exchange for a little caramelization. As it was most of the onion and garlic flavour, and that of the cilantro and parsley, ended up in the liquid the beans simmered in. Five minutes later that liquid went down the drain, and the exhausted remnants of the aromatics went into the food processor. The beans were still very hot at this point, fresh dill and mint were added. Both of those herbs are wonderful when they’re crisp and cool, and they lose something when heated. By the time the dip had come together and cooled to room temperature is was a bland mush. I tried to overcompensate with lemon juice and salt to bring things back to life, but once the flavours are gone they’re gone. I added toasted pine nuts in a last ditch effort to save this dip, and they did moderately improve things, but no one was really thrilled and I had to plow through three days of leftovers.

Beyond the counterproductive cooking instructions, I think there was too much going on in this dip. Between onions, garlic, four different types of herbs, cumin, and cayenne, there were a lot of flavours competing for attention. Granted they were all washed out imitations of themselves, but it was still a busy dish. In fact there was so much other stuff in there, that the lima beans weren’t really a player. They were puréed, so their texture wasn’t an issue, and other than adding a little starchiness they weren’t a big flavour contributor. You probably won’t like this dish, but it won’t be because you don’t like lima beans.

Altogether this dish was entirely forgettable. It wasn’t particularly bad, just another bland mush. It’s only truly frustrating when you’re the one making it. You put fresh fragrant ingredients in, and methodically set about discarding or destroying their goodness, you then serve what’s left.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

151. Deviled Eggs p.27


The recipe

The next few recipes are from a cocktail party we held in honour of a friend’s thesis defense. We invited her to celebrate her accomplishment, and be called Doctor a lot, at an intimate soirée at our place. I was planning a menu around her favourite dishes, and counting on eight to ten people. The day before the party, I was informed that it was going to be more like thirty, and possibly up to fifty people, and that I knew almost none of them. My first reaction was to start dusting.

Most of the time I’m pretty relaxed about the state of the apartment, and the mounting pile of dishes bothers me not at all. The second I hear that company’s coming though, I start channeling my mother. I worked myself up into a right state, gave up on the food, and decided that the best I could do would be to provide an empty and clean space for these hoards to descend upon. Then I thought that even if I wasn’t providing any food, I should really have ice, lemons, and limes on hand. From there I sold myself on baking a congratulatory cake, and decided reprising a couple of the great appetizers from The Project wouldn’t be too hard. The day of I convinced myself that adding a (soon to be blogged) dip would be in the realm of the reasonable. Once the guests had arrived I remembered that we had eggs in the fridge, and couldn’t think of a good reason not to devil them. I spent a good chunk of the evening in the kitchen cooking, but that worked out well as it wasn’t really my party. My dining companion and our newest doctor of philosophy entertained the twenty or so people who showed up, and I catered in the background.

This was a by the book deviled egg recipe, no fancy flourishes, just straight to business. First you hard boil a bunch of eggs, cool them, peel them, and halve them lengthwise, then you remove the yolks mash them up with mayo, Dijon, and cayenne, and pipe them back into the waiting egg whites. You may then garnish with smoked paprika and fresh chives.

Since this was a last minute hors d’oeuvre, I decided to skip the pretty star tip, and just pipe them with a ziplock minus a corner. Chives are lovely with deviled eggs, but the vegetable drawer had run dry, so no chives for you. All in all these were some pretty messy slapdash deviled eggs on my part, but they were devoured before anyone had a chance to notice. As is almost always the case with deviled eggs, they didn’t garner much praise, but they disappeared. If I’d asked people to tell me what they ate, they’d probably have forgotten to mention the eggs, but there was a peculiarly disappointed look that crossed the faces of our guests when they scanned the table and found the tray empty.

Are deviled eggs hopelessly outdated? probably, but who cares? They’re awesome, and I know I’m pleased to see a plate of these on a buffet table. The recipe was very standard, but totally solid. It’s very comforting to know that with a dozen eggs and a jar of mayonnaise I can put out a universal crowd pleaser with only slightly more effort than making an egg salad sandwich.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

150. Pumpkin Apple Bread p.599


The recipe courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet

A loaf is a dangerous thing. It hardly ever occurs to me to bake up some banana bread, or a lemon loaf. If you asked me to name my favourite desserts, no loaf would make the list. I don’t think about them, or go out of my way to get them, but the second a sweet cakey loaf comes out of the oven, I’m lost.

The insatiable craving that takes hold isn’t a conscious one. I have a slice with an espresso, dining companion and I chat about how nice it is, then I get on with my day. About half an hour later, I find myself back in the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and another reasonably sized slice on my plate. After all, it really is better when it’s fresh. I trick myself into the next slice with a lie about pumpkin and apples making it a healthy snack. It gets worse from there, I probably won’t have any appetite for dinner, and my dining companion may not get a second slice. These types of loaves are a triumph of marketing. They’re not cake, they’re bread! and look! they’re full of healthy fruits and nuts! At least a black-forest cake is honest, if you eat it for breakfast you know exactly what a bad person you are.

This particular temptress is made by sifting together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in one bowl, canned pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another, and then adding the dry stuff to the wet stuff, and folding in chopped apples. The batter is divided between two loaf pans, sprinkled with the inevitable streusel topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter), and baked.

This bread is about as autumnal as it gets. Think pumpkin pie, now with carbs! If you’re a fan of the pie, this is the bread for you. Being in the house while it baked was a pleasure. Someone should distill it into a perfume. The bread was exceptionally moist, with a loose spongy crumb, and the barest hint of toothsomeness. The chunks of Granny Smith added a necessary textural counterpoint, and a little bit of bite to keep things in perspective. This topping worked better than some of The Book’s other efforts. In this case it was a flavourful glaze on the loaf, and not the overwhelming mess that sometimes results. I might toss in some crushed walnuts or pecans next time, but as it is it’s a winner

If you’re the sort of person who has a modicum of self control when it comes to baked goods in the house, I happily recommend this bread. For those of you who don’t, bake it and give it away, at least you’ll be able to enjoy the way your kitchen smells. Unfortunately I tried the second strategy, and for possibly the first time in human history a lab full of grad students was too busy to polish off free baking on the first go-round. I ended up with a third of a loaf on my desk for the afternoon, I’m not at liberty to say what happened next.

Categories
The Project

I Forgot My Own Birthday

Happy Birthday Gourmet Project!

On Thursday March 6th The Gourmet Project had its first birthday, and I forgot to mark the occasion.

I’ve been having a wonderful time cooking, photographing, and writing the blog and I’ve been thrilled with the steady growth in readership over the past year. My first month out the site had 142 unique visitors, while last month 4575 of you came by. I’ve really enjoyed interacting with all of you in the comments, and I’ve been especially pleased to hear back from those of you who’ve tried some of the recipes.

A Birthday is a good time for a little state of the blog update. With 149 recipes written-up I’ve maintained a pace of 2.8 recipes / week, and completed 11.5% of the project. At this rate I’ll be finished on Dec 1st 2015. All in all I don’t think I’m doing too badly. I still have a serious backlog of recipes to plow through, and it’s growing rather than shrinking. I’ve grown to appreciate the time between cooking and writing which allows me to mull the recipes over. But, in my ideal world, I’d only leave a couple of weeks lag, the present 3 months is too much.

Over the year the blog itself has been upgraded with features like categories, tagging, comment management, sharing on social networks, statistics, and progress tracking, which hopefully make the site a lot more useful. We’re looking into adding new features in the next little while. I’m planning on making my trek through the book more seasonal and thematic in the coming year, and focusing on some of those chapters that I’ve been neglecting.

It’s been a great year, and I hope you’ll join me for eight more.

* The lovely birthday cake photo is courtesy of Pinkcakebox’s excellent CC licensed photostream on flickr

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

149. Chicken Long Rice p.247


The recipe

The Book is at it again. I’m beginning to understand that when the blurb before the recipe mentions comfort food, I’m in for a boring dinner. This time it’s comfort food, Hawaiian style.

I’ve just started to get to know Hawaiian food through a few of the recipes in The Book. I don’t have a good sense of it, I’m not clear on what they’re going for, or trying to be. They’re all a little bit odd, using unexpected ingredients, in initially strange combinations. I get the sense that there’s an underlying culinary theory that just hasn’t been explained to me, and if I could tune into it, all these dishes would just come together. I visited my aunt in Hawaii several years ago, but we mostly ate Korean barbecue, and Japanese soups. I missed out on the luau experience, without even trying the cheesy pupu platters and grass skirts kind. I’d dearly love to be invited to someone’s back yard for the real deal. Maybe thinking of this luau classic as fortification for a night of hard partying gets me a bit closer to groking it.

The recipe is really straightforward. You start by simmering chicken thighs with ginger and salt, then let it cool. You then remove the skin and bones, and shred the meat. The broth gets strained, and brought to a boil with water, bouillon cubes (not stock), onion, and dried shiitakes. You then add bean thread noodles, cook for a few minutes, then allow the dish to sit for half an hour while the noodles absorb the broth. You then add the chicken, reheat the soup, and stir in scallions just before serving.

The preparation went easily, except for cutting up the bean thread noodles into 3 inch lengths. Those things are incredibly tough. I’ve never used them before, and I was expecting that they’d break apart like rice noodles, but I practically had to get the power tools out to get the job done. Kitchen scissors were an abject failure, my chef’s knife just turned on the noodles and tried to cut me, and hitting them with a cast iron frying pan made me feel better, but inflicted very little damage. In the end my bread knife did the job, but sent little bits of adamantium noodle all over the kitchen. Next time I think I’ll get out the pruning sheers.

After all that noodle cutting effort, I was hoping for a tasty dish, unfortunately this was as bland as it gets. You’d think that ginger and mushrooms would bolster the chicken and make a satisfying soup, but all that flavour just disappeared. It tasted like a weak broth, with a hint of ginger, and some washed out watery chicken chunks. I liked the noodles quite a bit, they had a fun texture, and they seemed to concentrate what little flavour there was in this dish. This recipe makes a whole lot of very bland soup, so I had to get creative with the leftovers. Stirring in some sriracha chile sauce, and swirling in a beaten egg improved things considerably.

Another lesson I’m learning about Hawaiian food is that the name of a dish is a pretty poor clue as to what you’ll be served. Chicken long rice is indeed made with chicken, but the rest of the name is a mystery. Maybe I’m just missing the point of this dish, but as it stands the only way I’d make it again is if I was serving someone on their deathbed and even the slightest titillation or elevation of their heart rate could push them into the great beyond. Those of us with many good years ahead can spend our dinners more wisely.