Friday dinner

Menu for tonight: lemongrass skewered, marinated grilled shrimp, sake-teriyaki marinated lamb chops served over grilled garlic toasts, corn and zucchini fritters on the side with a duo of dipping sauces (herb mayo and sweet chili cucumber relish) and for dessert, zabaglione with berries and orange. Finger still messed up :( Recipes as soon as I can :(

Dinner for today

Menu for tonight: Arugula, orange and fennel salad with basil orange vinaigrette, grilled steaks with chimichurri sauce, Parisienne potatoes with parsley and chives and for dessert, strawberries balsamico with mascarpone cheese and toasted pinenuts and cloves. And I did all the chopping and cooking with one hand, I sliced my fingernail with the mandoline (ouch! ) I'll post recipes when I can type :( 

Almonds failure and picking up the pieces: Amarettinis

Usually, us savvy cooks, we only post on our blogs our success histories but with the failures, we do as somebody said: If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence than you tried. But sometimes, we listen to Beckett:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail Better"

This is my latest failure with a nice recovery. I found this delicious and simple recipe for Amaretto cookies, nice and fat little round almond balls. The original recipe called for blanched almonds, bitter almond sugar, white sugar, egg whites and confectioner's sugar. Fool proof, eh? Well, no. I had to get creative. Instead of 4 drops of bitter almond oil, I tempted fate with olive oil and Di Saronno Amaretto. I was able to roll the little balls, but once on the baking sheet, they deflated like balloons running out of helium and I got a hellish, flat, single layer of dough. Nothing has been written about cowards, so I decided to go ahead and bake it at 250 F.

The result was like a thin sheet of a chewy almond cookie, actually edible! I cut it in little pieces, sprinkled confectioners sugars and baptized it as Amarettinis :D Very nice as a snack or with cookies.

The ingredients for the cookies are as follows:

For 45 cookies
* 1/2 pound blanched almonds
* 4 drops bitter almond oil
* 3/4 white cup sugar
* 2 egg whites
* 1 tablespoon confectioners sugar, to sprinkle the cookies once baked

Preheat the oven at 250 F. Grind  finely the almonds when you are ready to make the cookies, to keep the flavor. Mix the almonds with almond oil, white sugar and lightly beaten egg whites. Knead the mixture until it gets a firm consistency. Moisten your hands and roll the dough into small balls, 1" in diameter. Place the balls on a baking sheet, covered with parchment paper or a non stick baking mat. Loosely cover the balls with tin foil, to prevent aliens reading their little minds (and over browning). Place the sheet on the bottom rack and bake for about an hour. Dust the cookies with confectioner's sugar using a sieve.

Now, if you want to go the Actor's Studio route and mimic my mess, replace the bitter almond oil with a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and 2 tablespoons of Di Saronno, make a mess, don't even bother to roll the balls, lay a layer of the dough on the baking sheet and there you go, Amarettinis! :D Once baked, cut it in pieces and dust it with confectioner's sugar.

New Baking carrito!

Tired of hunting for baking implements and ingredients, ta-da! my new baking cart, with everything handy :D

New design, new recipes

At last I have a new design, one it really reflects what's cooking in my brain! :) Thanks to the Blog Fairy (http://www.theblogfairy.com/): she works well, she works fast, she reads minds and she is extraordinarily talented. Kudos!

I completed my pending classes (Vietnamese cuisine, French pastry, ravioli) and I have nothing lined up now, I will have to shake things a little bit. Vietnamese cuisine class was fascinating, but it was not that cool to prepare 3 dishes at home by myself: we are talking 3 hours of prepping here, people. Once a year, with a bunch of friends cheering at home (better if they are knife proficient) and a nice glass of wine, but not  for every day. French pastry was extremely interesting but scary: talk about the butterfly effect. If a "pages" in Catalonia pays his electricity invoice, something may get altered in the recipe you are cooking in New Jersey. Or at least, so it seems. Yet, worth to try, a very delicate and tasty science. Ravioli was as fun as one can imagine. Once you get the knack of the machine, you start churning like crazy. Now, it comes the search for pasta recipes, the right blend of spices, flours and oils.

Today Sunday, I am going to tackle another Julia Child's classic, Coq au vin. Sometimes I am puzzled when I start reading her recipes, I wonder, is it *really* necessary to do all this? can we just jump from a) to d) and skip the skimming or the changing or pots or some weird and obscure voodoo juju? Well, once you start cooking the pieces fall into place. You see why no, you should not skip a single Child's spell and how what to do influences your food. It is a pleasure to cook but also a wonderful learning experience.

More classes at Sur la Table

This month I attended two other great classes at Sur La Table: Fish 101 and Vietnamese cuisine. I was concerned about cooking fish properly; because I never liked fish very much, I felt I did not know beans about how to handle and prepare the fish. Cleaning, prepping, right temperature...we learned the whole process and some great recipes in the process. Vietnamese cuisine was also very interesting, with the mix of French and Asian ingredients, fusion long time before fusion was invented. Lemongrass and dill, fish sauce and chiles, fish and pork. We cooked a pork with lemongrass that was not of this world and we learned how to make spring rolls.

Baguettes

And that's how my prep counter looks, a little bit like an universe and my baguettes are going to be the ships. Just a little bit of yeast, water, flour, salt, sugar and voila.

Bread!!!

Since forever, I wanted to learn to make bread, but with my poor relation with the flour, it wasn't working very well. After a few experiments and after I managed not to get completely covered in flour and spend two hours cleaning afterwards, I felt I was ready to start my bread journey. Anybody can mix the ingredients, but I heard that knead the dough was not that easy. I decided to use common sense for once and take a class. I found classes at a store called Sur La Table and off I went.  It was a great experience and I had a lot of fun. Brad, the chef and teacher explained us how to go about the process in


a clear and fun way. I learned how to make sourdough bread, French baguettes and pumpernickel bread, as well as some delicious dips. I did not waste time and I started my bread experiments during the weekend. Here you have my first sourdough rolls and my first baguettes. Woooohooo! :D

Florida calling - Key lime pie

To fight the winter blues, here is one of my baking experiments, key lime pie. I got the recipe from the book  "Greatest-ever pastry cookbook" by Catherine Atkinson . I was very pleased with the results. It looks like something regurgitated by a dragon, but my focus was on the taste of the crust and the quality of the filling. It worked well! Eventually I will get to decorations, but for now I am still working on my crusts :D

Flour is evil

I had a lifelong fear of flour. I loved to eat it, not so much to handle it. My experiences with flour ended with a winter wonderland kitchen, globs of flour stuck to the wall and countertops and me looking a drug deal going horribly wrong. Even the cats were looking like tiny ghosts, leaving ghostly white paw prints all over the house.
Recently, I decided that this had to come to an end. I love carbs too much. I started buying a book I found on sale, "Greatest-ever pastry cookbook" by Catherine Atkinson and rolling my sleeves, determined to tame the white beast and its evil minions, the dough risers. I started with shortcrust pastry, to avoid hurting myself. My first ambitious baking was a bit of a disaster, with me using eggs in the mix (what the heck was I thinking?) and mistaking Celsius degrees by Fahrenheit (I do not have an excuse for this one, only that my IQ is way cooler than the oven). Nevertheless, I did not give up and eventually I got the knack of it (sort of ). I am still wrestling the dough instead of kneading it, but Rome wasn't build in one day. A nice bourbon pecan pie on the photo, made for my husband.