Posts Tagged Food
Mango and Coconut Rice Pudding: Done
You guessed it. Ramsay again. I’m obsessed! This recipe comes from his Thai restaurant episode in season five of The F-word. The video on that page, by the way, can probably help you reach the same bliss I felt when seeing it, a bliss which inspired me to make it within two days.
I decided to do everything exactly as the recipe called for. Shopping at Whole Foods seemed to really help here as they have the kind of variety required and allow you to get lots of odd ingredients in bulk quantities as you please. Bona fide vanilla elevated the flavor of the rice like you wouldn’t believe – just sniff a bean and then some extract once and you will see why – and organic mango etc hopefully added some quality too.
Challenges
After skimming the recipe I was most concerned with properly cooking the rice. Unfortunately, being nervous about the only real cooking step involved was not too promising. But toasting the coconut and the form on everything else, including using a very helpful mise en place with liquids and solids, went well.
The Simmer
I can’t ever simmer anything correctly. I either heat it up way too quickly or leave it too cool for too long. Rice, sauces, oatmeal, it all ends up having burnt liquid or not coming out tender enough or some stupid problem! Well, this time was no exception as the rice came out noticeably (but only by a little bit!!) tough on the inside. Still, being simmered in coconut milk, vanilla bean, sugar, and then having a bunch of heavy cream and other tasty ingredients added was all that the pudding needed to be as close to perfect as any dessert has come for me. I had no negative reviews except two people at work silently not finishing theirs, but most people noticed the rice was a wee bit tough. They all liked it despite it though, so 7/9 liked it 
I neglected to snap a picture of the dish beautifully arranged in one of my bowls at home, but I think these servings that I made at work were pretty cool too.
I’ve got my eye on some strawberry tiramisu next, but I think I should probably work a more savory, less carbolicious dish or three first.
Beef Wellington: Done
Three years ago when I discovered The F Word and watched plenty of episodes, my cousin Chris and I sat literally speechless after Gordon Ramsay demonstrated his Filet of Beef Wellington recipe.
It had been the haute cooking objective of my life for all those years, unattained as of last week. Then a nice opportunity to give it a shot arose: dinner party for one of the last times in Chicago with Chicago friends.
Most worrying by far was the puff pastry, with which I’d had absolutely no experience. So I tried my hand at a Baked Brie and made one Wellington the night before to make acquaintance with this devilishly complicated baking item. It turned out not to puff, probably because I put way too much water in the eggwash. Oh well.
I was also a little anxious about the beef: what was right? How can I make sure not to screw up such high quality, important meat? Am I rich enough to afford grass-fed organic triple-priced filet? What the heck do the British mean exactly by fillet of beef? Three Costco filets mignon and two Jewel ones (once I realized there wouldn’t be enough) made the cut. All were USDA Choice as opposed to Prime. I preferred Jewel’s but that may have just been due to my request for them to be butchered whereas Costco’s were prepacked.
Rehearsal
The night before went amazingly. Properly making the eggwash with yolks only made all the difference from the Brie. Rolling the cling wrap into a barrel and folding the puff pastry, the two hardest and most technical parts of the recipe, went surprisingly well. The only big problems were trying to use a blender to finely chop portabellos for the duxelles – my fault – and prematurely cutting the baked Wellington when it was still bleeding because the pastry was super puffed and super golden.
My guests absolutely loved it!
The real deal (x4!!!)
So a whole new set of problems arose when making four instead of one. The mushrooms took horribly long to prep and have motivated me to make a food processor my next big kitchen purchase for sure. Additionally sweating them all at once in a pan was a horrible idea and added some unwanted moisture to the final product. Time and space management was pretty hectic too, as it took me over twice as long to make the four.
Yet it went off pretty much without a hitch. Having Andrew’s meat thermometer for the oven phase was invaluable and facilitated a beautiful pink in two of the four rolls. Here’s how they looked:
And plated (kudos to Jenn for the sides):
Everyone, including six dinner guests and about six people at work, loved it. Vindication and victory for the lifelong dream! It’ll be a little while before I try to solo something else as ambitious
Review/reaction: The End of Overeating
David Kessler has assembled a quick, readable work detailing how corporate food interests lay traps, how and why Americans fall into them, and how to disarm them.
As someone who suffers from the habituation Kessler claims to be the endgame of Big Food, I found his prescriptions difficult to digest, as few have really helped me move overcome overeating in the past few months. A general sense of awareness should come to anyone who reads this book, but one will have to try harder than me (or be less addicted to cheap combinations of fat, sugar, and salt) for it to end up as a tool of progress.
Still, Kessler’s varied accounts of corporate officers’ behavior with respect to the content of their products compels me to believe they want you hooked. An executive of the industry reviews the cheesecake factory menu in terms of the layering of fat, sugar, and salt, and it is absolutely disgusting. Studies on mice where addiction to popular food items is shown to cause conditioning approaching that caused by cocaine is startling. A third piece to the puzzle, the general argument that, in nature, size matters, is equally believable and compelling.
On the drug note, a lot of Kessler’s solutions did involve increased government regulation in the form of labeling requirements and transfat type bans. While in extremely limited cases this type of action may be warranted, I tend to be swayed away based on the Becker-Posner blog’s general consensus: such requirements are useless and burdensome where the costs of knowledge to the consumer are low. (Becker, Posner)
Labour Day
Food and Home
The peanut butter and raspberry preserves sandwich that I’m currently enjoying would certainly suggest otherwise, but I’ve begun to cook some in Houston. This change from breakfast burritos and lots of eating out signifies that here is becoming home, and I’m both glad and comfortable with the development.
I made those lettuce/fish wraps from NYT and got a lot of praise for them, despite having browned the butter and hence the lettuce because the gas was burning way too hot. Also let Cody and Emily sample the avocado tomato toast from Men’s Health, but without the basil leaves and honey mustard and with the superannuated olive oil that had been scorching in my trunk, they were not at their best.
Right now while they’re at dinner I’m doing laundry, cleaning their kitchen, and, again, delighting in this tasty sandwich. Like in Tuscaloosa I’m steps away from a wonderful grocery store, so this could go well for a while.
The job situation still reeks of limbo but managed to eke out a few inches of progress on Friday, possibly putting my best prospects on power instead of emissions, but much sooner.
Obama
I’ll start this spiel with a GOP example of what’s really bugging me. Political slander and scandal synthesis have always been obvious, but I’m starting to realize a dire implication: people don’t put forth even one teency-weency brain-unit of effort to apply skepticism or try to interpret reality. They just witness it, accept it, and if applicable forward it to every soul with whom they’re connected.
While reading some google news items or fivethirtyeight.com, my favorite polling site this season, I came across a blog that had the YouTube above with “John McCain stares at Sarah Palin’s breasts.” Irrelevant as the authors’ motivations are (could have just been jest perhaps), countless people will see it, believe it, and forward it to as many people as possible.
My take on it is that he was looking at her speech text. Hey, it’s possible; and I’m for Obama!
That’s what sucks about this election and probably every one that goes down. The people are usually wonderful – I definitely cheered for McCain during the republican primaries – but the more ig’nant, malicious, and marketer-oriented individuals who surround both their campaigns and their parties make them into slimeballs. So as much as I like McCain as a person, I’m going to have to say go Obama for the record.
Not without reason though. Now that Russia has, according perhaps to their cultural attributes of not giving a damn about death (it’s the cold weather!), started swinging their nukes, I do not want someone who would ever respond haughtily to Putin. Of course I don’t want to get drafted and suffer the same fate as both the armies of Napoleon and Hitler’s 3.5million in Operation Barbarossa, but the world going up in a mushroom cloud of radioactivity is just a tad more undesirable.
Of course, I’m not accusing McCain of having such intentions. Only when thought about in terms of probabilities does the situation begin to frighten me. Probability of provocative, Iraq-like action with Obama: low. McCain: higher. That’s what matters most to me, I’ll try my best to weather the economy.
As for the Spartans..
Here’s a long story that I’ll try to keep as short as possible.
Uncertainty regarding the energy job and successfully living abroad and alone for a few weeks, along with episodes of Heroes, magazine articles talking about life expectancy and education’s correlation, and a quick 4 hour read of Frankl’s masterpiece convinced me to check back in with MSU. But circumstances did not arrange themselves in my favor; it’s not like I engineered the situation to work for me at all.
So long story short I want to finish what I began last fall, I have a 1+ year ban from MSU, but a very understanding and influential individual there has begun to guide me. Could be somewhere else I applied like Florida, could be somewhere completely different, could even be MSU again, but for now I want to finish. Of course wavering again in a year is possible, especially with how I’ve planted the seeds of opportunity in so many places, but if none pan out (and I don’t just mean getting the job, I mean loving it and seeing huge potential in it) I’ll do my damndest to get back on the trail.
Now that I think about it, I should have put more jelly.. completely overwhelmed by pb.