Monday, January 30, 2012

And much fool may you find in you

In case you missed me flipping out about it via FB and Twitter, on Tuesday Playing The Cook was featured briefly on the 92nd St Y's blog. What's really crazy about this is that they found out about my project from Francine Segan. For those of you playing at home, that's the actual author of the cookbook I'm using. My mind, she is blown.

***

Thursday was going to be dessert day. I went a little overboard on purchasing ingredients, and somehow convinced myself that I was going to have time to make three different recipes and still have time to get my reading done for class on Friday. This was incorrect. I did, however, find the time to make Sallet of Lemmons and Foolproof Gooseberry "Foole".

We begin with the lemons. The Sallet of Lemmons is included in the Sallet chapter, but its role as a food item is a bit nebulous. We're talking combination aperitif, digestif, fish accompaniment... Most importantly, it was very easy to make, and that made it a good candidate for a multi-recipe night.


The recipe itself suggests using a sharp knife to peel the lemons, but that is the sort of manual task at which I am likely to fail and/or sever fingers. I had also just purchased a vegetable peeler, so was leaning in that direction. I decided to put the two methods to the test.


Vae victis! The offending paring knife was sold into gladiatorial slavery shortly after this picture was taken. The peeler was much better at providing me with something resembling uniform strips of lemon peel.


The peel is julienned, and then I rediscover my camera's macro setting.


This is followed by triple-blanching the strips of lemon peel.  Boil, drain, rinse; boil, drain, rinse; boil, drain, rinse.


The lemon peels join the now-sliced lemons in a container...


...so that they can be tossed with sugar.


The mixture sits for at least an hour, during which time I realized that despite purchasing the ingredients for three different dishes, I hadn't actually picked up anything for dinner. A frozen chicken pot pie (not pictured) goes into the oven. At the end of the hour, I have Sallet of Lemmons (no pot pie is involved). It's hard to see the sugar on the lemons in the picture, but rest assured that it's there.


And here we have the Sallet hanging out with some crusty bread and olives, since Shakespeare's Kitchen suggests that this was the way it was commonly done back in the day.


I experiment with the dish for a bit - I eat lemon using my hands, just the fork, knife and fork, sallet on bread... Here's the problem: at the end of the day, what we have is sliced lemons with sugar. Do you have a lemon in your kitchen? Go to it. Cut it open. Try to eat it like an orange. Try again after sprinkling a little bit of sugar on it. Eat half of the lemon. Find yourself wondering, "Why? Why exactly did I do that? Why do I hate myself so much?" These are good questions to have. If you are already the sort of person to eat a lemon, with or without sugar, then this recipe is for you. There was some talk of using the lemons in lemon-drops, but there is apparently no vodka in my apartment.

On to the Foolproof Gooseberry "Foole". Gooseberries, for those of you who don't know, are not native to the Washington, DC area, nor to my local grocery stores. Gooseberry bushes also produce their fruit in June and July, which is the opposite of January. Shakespeare's Kitchen suggests that any kind of berry will work for the Fool, but I decided to get fancy and check Cook's Thesaurus to see if there were specific substitutions I should be trying to make. The entry for gooseberry suggested rhubarb, red currants, and (oddly enough) kiwis, and specified that the rhubarb and kiwi were both excellent choices for fools. I was a little annoyed to discover that everyone but me seemed to already know what a fool was, but I eventually got on with my life. I settled on kiwis, and took four of them back for foolery. Also, for more macro photography.


Here you can see three of the four kiwis skinned and ready for cooking. The last one is spared for the moment, since it will become fancy garnish.


Into the boiling water the kiwis go! They start losing color really quickly, which I wasn't expecting. Not for any particular reason, I've just never had something I cook go white from boiling. I guess I don't do enough blanching.


After they cook for a few minutes, the kiwis are drained, and mashed with a fork, and then mixed with sugar and a bit of mace nutmeg. This part was fun, because it involved mashing things. If I do this again (and I will!), I may drain a bit of the liquid that comes out of the fruit at this point. It would make things just a bit more solid. Also, there could have been more nutmeg.


Once that's taken care of, we need whipped cream. I started with the noble goal of whipping the cream myself with a fork. Then I got bored and switched to a whisk. Then my arm started to hurt and the cream wasn't moving past the thick liquid stage, so I closed the container and shook it for maybe five seconds and then my whipped cream was magically done.


Sugared kiwi mixture goes into the little dishes.


Whipped cream on top, kiwi slices for garnish, and completely forgetting to sprinkle it with turbinado or brown sugar as the recipe actually calls for. Et voilĂ !


The Foolproof Gooseberry Kiwi "Foole" was absolutely delicious (verified by roommate Kris and friend Amelia) and about as foolproof as claimed on the tin. No matter how much I want more kiwi, I'm going to try something else next time; maybe raspberries. This isn't exactly a traditional fool, which I assume accounts for the quotation marks in the recipe name. A standard fool would involve folding the fruit into the whipped cream, but I don't really care when the "foole" tastes this good. And considering how quickly the acid in the kiwi starts to eat at the cream, I wouldn't really want to mix this particular version before serving. It turned out that I over-created the whipped cream, which actually worked in my favor. By this I mean there was enough whipped cream left over that it was like dessert for dessert.


The only line in Shakespeare involving a lemon is "A lemon."

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified

On Sunday, my girlfriend Michelle came over to pick something from Shakespeare's Kitchen for me to cook for her. It was kind of like Iron Chef, but with a whole recipe.


Eventually, we settled on Flounder with Dried Plums. Boring name, but the dish itself seemed interesting. There were a number of other recipes that had to be vetoed due to a lack of Renaissance Stock - we decided to err away from cheating with storebought stock. So it was off to Whole Foods to pick up ingredients. We hit up the fish first, and learned that Whole Foods did not actually have flounder. Thwarted immediately! Luckily, the fishmongers there are extremely knowledgeable and monged us a replacement. Here we have the American Plaice in its natural habitat. And as it turns out, plaice is a type of sole which is a type of flounder. So we both did and did not have the right fish.


Whole Foods is really good about providing me with replacements, but surprisingly annoying with not having things in the first place. There was a distinct lack of both mace and savory in the spice aisle. While I futilely scanned the shelves for hidden spices, Michelle did some internet research for substitutes. As it turns out, you can replace savory with sage or thyme. Sage and thyme are already in the dish. Ah well. Marjoram also works, so we went with marjoram. We also discovered that mace is a part of nutmeg, and I totally had nutmeg. In fact, getting to reuse the dried plums from the Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit really drove home the fact that I have useful items in my pantry. The sage, thyme, nutmeg, brown sugar, raisins (standing in for the ever-elusive currants), plums, and verjuiceish were all in existence in my kitchen even before I started. We almost made carrots because I had carrots. I'm like a real adult.

I've started to notice that as I cook, I'm really good at putting away all the contained ingredients (bottles, boxes, spice containers, etc.) immediately after I use them. It keeps the kitchen clean, keeps the work area clear, and keeps me from adding the same spice twice. Although sometimes I still have to lean in really close and stare at the pile of mixed spices in the middle of the pan and decide that no, I didn't accidentally add sage without putting away the sage. Not that this happened. I blame the fact that the things I was working with weren't exactly the same as the list in the cookbook. I also learned that grating nutmeg straight into a pan is extremely gratifying.


Next, I pulled out a plate to put the fish on to season it. After getting two pieces on, I realized that the fish wouldn't actually fit. I think I had something like the panko-crusting or dredging in flour in mind, but I'm not sure why; I was just supposed to use some salt and pepper. Laying the fish out on the paper it came in was a much better idea. Michelle commented that she had been wondering what I was doing, and I had to explain that if I appeared to be messing up while cooking, I was probably messing up. So that's one plate wasted (you can see it in the sink in the pic below). The one bright side is that the plate issue led to me holding the plate over the saute pan and realizing that the fish wouldn't all fit in the pan either. Don't worry, we improvised.


Here we are, ready to go. That's butter and the verjuiceish hanging out in the middle. When I reconsider this, maybe leaving a cutting board with a knife on it hanging off the counter between the fish and the pan wasn't my best idea. Especially since I was done with all those things, so the only reason to leave them out was to inflict self-harm.


The plums are getting occasionally mashed and starting to color the wine, which means it's just about time to put the fish on. Michelle has snuck a taste, and is beginning to suspect maximum delicious is on approach.


Speaking of sneaking a taste, the one thing that I forgot to do with this recipe was taste along the way. It's the advice I've been getting most often from people who cook, and I never remember to do it. Michelle was snagging the bits of fish that broke off and poking at the sauce the whole time, and I was sort of bemused until I realized that by the end I still didn't know what the whole thing would taste like. This recipe doesn't offer a lot of room for corrections, though - all the spices go in first, so it's not like tasting the fish when it's done lets me travel back in time to change the sauce. So that's my excuse this time around.

Back to the cooking. The fish goes on top of the simmering sauce, and sits there. I may not have mentioned it before, but this recipe is really quick and easy.


After a minute or two, the heat goes away and the whole thing gets covered. Another minute or two and the fish is done. 


Since the pan wasn't big enough, we had to remove the first two pieces of fish and then repeat the previous two steps. So here they are again.



Meanwhile, Michelle has been hard at work steaming asparagus for a side dish. The biggest problem with Shakespeare's Kitchen is that the dishes are really self-contained. Most of the animal entrees don't have a significant vegetable component, and none of the vegetable dishes are really something you'd want to use as a vegetarian entree. Michelle also picked out the wine we used (a Viognier which I failed to take a picture of) at Adega, which is a fun little wine cafe in downtown Silver Spring. Any place that asks you "for here or to go?" when you hand them a bottle of alcohol is ok by me. Finally, Michelle was also also responsible for the decision to make cherry pie w/ice cream one of the ingredients of the meal. What I'm trying to say is that she did all the important parts.


Once the fish was done, the sauce was ready to be thickened. I turned the heat up, and it was done fast. I think it was partly due to the resimmering for the second batch of fish. Adding the verjuiceish and butter had to happen immediately, and the heat came off right away.


All that was left was plating. We were worried that the sauce had thickened to the point where there wouldn't be enough, but a little of this stuff goes a long way. It was seriously good, but the taste was very strong. It's mostly the plum and rosemary, but everything does its part. Any more than what we used and you wouldn't be able to taste the fish underneath. On a side note, I was a little upset that there wasn't any left to try on the ice cream. Although, I do have all the ingredients necessary to make more...


This is also where I learned that Blogger won't turn pictures for me. Oops. Anyway, turn your head to the right and feast your eyes.


Verdict: delicious! Possibly the best recipe so far. The fish picks up some very specific flavors while cooking, and they're not exactly the same as the sauce. The whole thing is really quick and simple - I think slicing the plums was the most difficult part of the prepwork. And since almost everything in the recipe comes from the pantry, this is pretty cheap to remake. I'm almost out of dried plums, but I'm going to purchase a larger container to keep around. If I were the kind of person who could keep an open bottle of wine around for more than a day, the only thing I'd ever have to pick up at the store for this would be the fish itself. I think this is going to be a staple in the repertoire. When I get around to having a repertoire, that is.


The night went well enough that I'm going to claim this is what we did for our anniversary.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones

Excelsior, true believers!

I wanted to start this entry by thanking everyone who's shown an interest in the project. It's extremely heartening to realize that people I don't already know are checking in on this. Also, shame is a powerful motivator, and the more people who are reading, the worse I will feel about not sticking with the work.

Special thanks to the American Shakespeare Center for the Facebook link, and to former roommate Shannon for driving up from Staunton, VA in order to confirm the deliciousness of the aforementioned dishes. The sauce from the Chicken did some congealing in the fridge and was much thicker when it was reheated, which improved the dish tremendously. Something to note for next time.

***

Once upon a time, I asked my friends on Facebook whether I should start cooking things from Shakespeare's Kitchen. My friend 'Stina replied that the rice balls were delicious. So when the time came to make those rice balls, I was very excited. But instead of delicious Renaissance goodness, I instead brought shame upon my house.

If you remember from the last episode, I actually purchased all of the ingredients for Renaissance Rice Balls ahead of time. The recipe requires a bunch of the ingredients to chill completely, so everything was hastily assembled and fridged before I got to cooking the Chicken and Six Onions. That part went well.

For the most part, anyway.

See, here's the deal. After the rice is cooked, you combine it with sugar, eggs, cream, and grated Caciocavallo. What's Caciocavallo? It's a type of cheese. Do you know what kind of cheese my Whole Foods doesn't have? Caciocavallo. Luckily, it's a bit like provolone, which they did have. I ran into a problem, though.


There was only one piece of fancy provolone, and I had no idea whether it would actually produce a cup of grated cheese. But it did! Which is good, because my backup plan was really, really bad.


So here is everything all whisked together and awaiting the rice. After adding the rice and mixing as thoroughly as possible, the bowl went into the fridge so I could get back to my futile attempts at cutting up chicken.


And then we travel in time from Sunday to Tuesday. VWORP! VWORP! The rice+ mixture comes out of the fridge, and then gets rolled into balls. Now, the recipe suggests 36 balls 1" in diameter. I'm not so great at estimating sizes, but damn if I didn't make exactly 36 of the things.


Some held together better than others, which would be a problem later. Oh, this is one of those moments of brilliance. I'm supposed to roll them in flour or breadcrumbs, and since I thought it would be fancy, I bought a container of panko. Panko is fancy! Also, it was a really great, passive aggressive way to further delegitimize the already questionable historical accuracy of the recipe. It's commentary in breadcrumb form. One thing I didn't think through - it's a little difficult to tell which rice balls are panko-rolled, and which aren't. But I am clever, and color-coded my plates. And, you know, covered one in panko. Like I said, clever!


So we're ready to fry, which brings us to my trusty assistant.


Lodge cast iron, 10" skillet. I'm still getting the hang of it, and my eggs have a bad habit of sticking, but it's been great for meat. I thought that it would be the best choice for doing a lot of frying. Maybe one day I'll tell you about the three different times this skillet almost set my apartment on fire.

The oil heats up, and in go the breaded rice balls. Things start off pretty well.


 But then, disaster strikes.


Several of the rice balls start falling apart, and in the meantime I'm not sure if the panko is browning right, and there is hot grease splattering on my arm so I give up in dejection. The best looking rice balls are salvaged and I clean out the pan. After some consultation with the roommate, I decide to science things up and change only one variable for the second batch. The theory is that raising the heat will get everything crispy without allowing time for the balls to soak in oil for too long and fall apart. It's... a good theory.


But theories don't always work out. It was basically a crispier version of the first go-around. There is also an added bonus in the form of increased oil splatter. I kind of wish there had been someone available to take pictures of me working, because then you'd have the joy of seeing me attempting to turn rice balls at arms' length while hiding behind an oven mitt. It didn't work especially well. See, increasing the heat meant that not only was more oil splattering around, the rice mixture was also splattering. After the second time that molten cheese landed on my face (and I realized that several minutes later I could still feel exactly where it had hit), I called the whole thing off. The best rice balls were set aside, and all of the uncooked ones went into the trash. I did wind up with a kind of fried rice hash, but it mostly tasted like vegetable oil and crispiness. That was quickly trashed as well.


According to the cookbook, I should have wound up with something like this.


Here's the actual final product of my evening in the kitchen.



It's a far cry from the image in the book, which tells us that even food can suffer from low self-esteem when faced with the unrealistic images portrayed in the media. The rice balls tasted not entirely awful. You could tell that there was a lot of potential, especially in the rice mixture itself. But the end result wasn't good enough to keep me from tossing them after eating just a few. I have some theories as to what went wrong. The main one is that I'm just not very good at dealing with this kind of frying yet. It's entirely possible that if I had stuck to my initial heat and just accepted that some would fall apart, I would have been ok in the end. The other theory is that my rice mixture was very uneven. In retrospect, I think I should have poured the other ingredients of the mixture over the cooked rice instead of the other way around. Even when I was forming the balls some were holding together better than others. The ingredients may have mixed more evenly if I had been working from the top down instead of up from the bottom of the mixing bowl. 

Whatever the reason, I can hereby declare my Renaissance Rice Balls to be a failure.


***

You'll all be pleased to know that, despite the Rice Ball Fiasco, my girlfriend Michelle is incredibly excited about the idea of me cooking something for her instead of the other way around. Later today I'll be making her a dinner of her choice, and unless I poison her I think this will be very concrete spur for future cooking sessions.

And finally, it's too early to provide more details, but there's an elaborate secret literary food project in the works. And by "project," I also mean "food."

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Where are the vile beginners of this fray?

To start this blog off with a bang (ye olde bange, as it would have been called), I decided to kick off this past Sunday with not one but two recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. I started off with two dishes because the entree would have been very lonely on the plate without a side, and because I was really worried about falling behind on the project right off the bat.

NOTE: The previous sentence is also entirely lies. I was so worried about falling behind in my cooking that I began with three dishes, since one of them involved ingredients cooling overnight in the fridge. Renaissance Rice Balls will be featured in the next post. For now, let's just acknowledge that I had already been slaving away for a while, turning on rice cookers and purchasing the wine I had forgotten to pick up earlier, before I actually started cooking.

For my first foray into early modern cookery, I chose Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit and Six Onions Simmered with Raisins, which (I kid you not) involves three onions and sauteing. The Six Onions seemed like a fairly simple dish to make, and since it takes about 17 minutes from start to finish I thought I might be able to squeeze it in during the 30 minutes of occasional stirring at the end of the Chicken. The Chicken was chosen for a number of reasons: it didn't look extremely difficult, didn't take an incredible amount of time, didn't involve kitchen tools I don't possess, and didn't serve ten people. It also didn't involve the two "ingredients" that are going to become the bane of my existence: Renaissance Stock and Renaissance Dough. Many of the recipes in the book involve these two things, which are separate recipes in and of themselves. The Stock in particular is going to be a bitch, since it's fairly labor-intensive, will use up my one big pot, and will overall be annoying to deal with. I know I can freeze it in useful quantities, but some of the recipes call for a tablespoon or two and I don't want to thaw out a cup to get a spoonful.

Let's move on to ingredient prep. This is always the thing that takes the longest when I cook, and I harbor no small amount of ill-will towards cookbooks that promise 15/30 minute recipes but fail to mention that prep time is extra. I'm also really bad at judging what I can do while the cooking is actually occurring, so I like to have everything out of the way. Prepping for the Six Onions was really simple, and mostly involved slicing onions and onion-related vegetables. The great thing about the recipe is that the ingredients are added in two batches, which makes it simple to get everything ready. Onions, leeks, and scallions in the bowl on the right; raisins, brown sugar, salt, and five-color pepper on the left.

Also, did you know this is what leeks looks like in their natural state? I did not. This is the first time I've encountered them outside of a production of Henry V.

I did run into one issue with the recipe, which was the presence of verjuice. I'd never even heard of the stuff before this week, and it turned out that my Whole Foods doesn't carry it. Some in-store internet research later, and I learned that both white wine vinegar and lemon juice could be used as substitutes. I decided to hedge my bets and use a combination of the two.

I'm already beginning to think that ingredient substitution is going to be a running theme of the blog. I couldn't find real currants for the Chicken, so I settled for Zante currants (basically small raisins from black grapes). Although, if Segan wanted currant currants, you'd think she would have specified red or black or etc.

But moving on to the Chicken. Here we have the fruits and spices and such. I learned that dates are absolutely magical, and I would like to eat them all the time.

That's cinnamon and nutmeg over everything. Interesting fact about fresh cinnamon and nutmeg: the good folks at Whole Foods are convinced that if you shake the jar really, really hard, something useful will happen. Note the plastic tops. I'm not a real chef, though, so I had to settle for a grater.


Also! I accidentally poured too much wine into the measuring cup, and there was only one good solution.
Note to self: do dishes before cooking so sink full of dishes doesn't end up on the blog. End note.

The most important thing I learned from prepping the chicken itself was that I am not cut out to be a butcher. The recipe calls for four legs with thighs, separated. I watched two videos and read three tutorials on how to do that, and in the end wound up cutting all four apart through the end of a bone rather than through the joint. Slight fail on my part. Luckily, aside from some ugly drumsticks and marrow bleeding out, there were no ill effects.

At this point, it's a little after 9pm, and I'm starving. Luckily, I have some cold leftover pizza, known in Elizabethan England alternately as "the time-traveler's special" and "what devilry is this?"

Moving on to the cooking. Step one was to brown the chicken, and I was already at a loss. I know that when I brown ground beef, I'm basically cooking it all through. But what about chicken? Was I cooking it, or just putting a crust on it? How long would it take for everything to be cooked completely? Would the 30min simmering in the wine later be enough to keep me from dying if I didn't cook the chicken all the way now? I had no idea.

Here's the chicken browning:

Deglazing with some of the white wine:

Fruit in the pan to make the sauce (can you spot my next mistake?):

Chicken back in the pan with the rest of the wine, and then set to simmer:

Cover that up, and back to the onions! Into the pan they go:
After those saute for a while, the other ingredients get tossed in. Some stirring, then the verjuice-replacement, and then they're done.

The finished product:

I had almost ten minutes to spare when that was finished, which gave me time to check on the Chicken a bit more thoroughly and drink my wine a bit more thoroughly. After determining that the chicken was actually cooked and would not kill me, I was done. 10pm, and dinner was served.

For dessert, I splurged on a pint of Goat Cheese and Cognac Fig ice cream from jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. I did not eat the whole pint. I did manage to fling a large amount of it onto the floor.

The Verdict

Everything turned out delicious! The chicken was really tender, and had a nice fruity taste. I find that a big problem with chicken (at least when you don't marinate it) is that the flavor is all concentrated in the skin. That was the case here to a certain extent, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the taste the meat picked up. The dish needed some salt, and in the future I may reduce the sauce a bit more or thicken it so that it sticks to the chicken better.

The Onions were great, but they don't exactly go with the Chicken. Combining the two in one bite was a good way to erase the Chicken completely. I had hoped that the raisins would be a flavor match with the fruit, but they don't seem to add anything to the flavor of the Onions as a whole - they're just bursts of sweetness in the middle of everything else. I was also afraid that all the strong tastes in the Onions would somehow overpower each other (I'm not sure how that works, now that I think about it), but that wasn't the case. The really interesting thing is that when I added the bootleg verjuice, the flavor of the whole dish went in a completely different direction than it seemed to be heading previously. Next time I may just stop the recipe before that step and see if it plays better with others. Interestingly, the original recipe for the Onions involves boiling and an egg tossed in with the verjuice. 

The Chicken is also good cold. The Six Onions is a great sandwich topping.

The ice cream was delicious, as was the wine.

I need to decide on a tense for this blog.