Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Does The World Go Round?

I finally got around to making the Inside-out Pie, thus completing my delayed attempt at celebrating a Renaissancey version of Pie Day. But since a pie isn't technically a meal, I needed something to go with it. I thought that the protein-to-vegetable ratios of Grilled Tuna with Carrots and Sweet Onions would make it a passable dinner (it's in the Sallets chapter), so off I went.

The first step was making a simple vinaigrette, which was simple. I wish I had a better camera, because things floating in oil/oil floating in things is always a great image.


I was supposed to whisk the balsamic (my substitution for sherry vinegar) and the olive oil together, but discovered many and many a year ago that it was much faster to put them in Tupperware and shake.


Here is my fish! For the first time, I got it at Safeway instead of Whole Foods. I thought I should at least give them a shot. More importantly, they had exactly the correct amount of tuna hanging around. No more, no less. Although I'm a little concerned about the fact that they apparently caught it in Colorado.


Here are my tuna steaks. Perfectly good color for previously frozen tuna, and perfectly non-fishy smelling. If I had any problem with them, it was picking them up and realizing they may have stayed slightly frozen on the surfaces that were placed directly on ice at the counter. But nothing that seconds on heat wouldn't cure.


Here's where the presentation in the cookbook becomes an issue. Look at what we're apparently aiming for:


So we've got slices of tuna, cooked at the edge, and then the onion and carrots being all decorative. Now, the instructions for the recipe tell you take a pound of tuna, cut it into slices, and then grill them. Seeing the disconnect? Slices of tuna don't cook around the edge when you place them on a grill. Clearly there are shenanigans involved here. You get to the picture by grilling then cutting. I decided all by my lonesome that I would aim for picture true rather than following the recipe. Not sure if this was a good idea or not, in the end. That meant marinating the tuna in whole pieces as opposed to slices. Into the fridge for an hour, which lets me work on the rest of the ingredients.


Not that there are a lot of ingredients. There's half an onion, thinly sliced.


Which leaves me with half an onion. I was playing around with my shiny new apple corer earlier, and practicing on apples. And I thought, "What does it do to an onion?"


This is the answer. It's... not all that impressive, really. You mostly get the same effect by applying a knife. Except for the little circular bit in the middle.


It's entirely possible that someone will need these little onion circles one day, so take note.


You may have noticed a theme so far, with way too many macro photos. So I tried to keep it up. Here's the carrots after skinning them. I could have kept at it to make carrot ribbons, but I had a faster method.


Caliban has blades, but also teeth.


And then there are lots of carrot bits, huzzah!


The carrots and onions sit around, and then it's time to cook the fish. It's supposed to get grilled, but I only had a skillet. Close enough. One side.


And the next.


That wasn't going to help with the sides, however, so I used a super-fancy technique I learned to deal with steaks.


And then repeat everything for the second piece of fish.


The recipe says to arrange the carrots and onions (soaked in the rest of the vinaigrette) in the shape of an oak leaf on a platter, with the tuna slices on top. But I didn't have a platter big enough to really do that, so the hell with it.


And there were bits of tuna on the second piece that were done to perfection (see picture below). Most was rarer.


Verdict: I'll confess, I like my meat bloody. The rare end of medium rare. I want my burgers dripping on the plate, and I tend to look the other way if that means they're literally raw in the very center. I had a bistecca in Italy that was basically blackened on the outside and raw meat in the middle and my biggest issue was that it was way too difficult to chew through the muscle. When I walk through the meat section in the supermarket, I look at the really red stuff and wonder what it would be like to just eat it. And sushi, of course, is a great goodness. That picture of the tuna up above? Any more and it would be overdone.

And yet, I couldn't eat the tuna. I tried, I really did. But for the first time in my life I thought "There is raw meat in my mouth, and I really can't deal with that." Maybe it was the quality of the fish. Maybe it was because I don't trust my cooking yet. Which is silly because I got what exactly what I wanted, but I'll happily eat undercooked meat when it's given to me by a stranger even if they didn't mean to do it.

I threw out all the food, and moved on to dessert.

The Inside-out Pie starts with a lot of bread. Look, I've got bread! Nine breads.


And just like any petulance powered project involving bread, the crusts need to come off.


Some lightly beaten eggs, camouflaged in their natural habitat.


The recipe calls for chopped pitted dates, and I thought I'd skip over the pesky chopping step by buying chopped dates. They're very much hard and candied, though, which will probably give a different texture to the end product.


And then here's the problem with freshly grating nutmeg. I mean, how do you measure this stuff?


The weird ingredient! A quarter cup of prosciutto, minced. I just rolled the slices up over themselves and started, well, slicing.


It worked out pretty well, and there were leftover pieces to save eat.


Everything in the bowl.


Oh yeah, and then there's cream. Forgot to mention that.


And this is what it looks like stirred together.


But what about that bread? Cubing it would have been easier with a bread knife, or at least I think it would have resulted in some less squished cubes.


Bread cubes go into the wet mixture and, I can't really pretty this up, it looks like vomit.


The vomit has to settle for a while, which means it's time to get the apples involved. If you're any good at Where's Waldo? you noticed some butter hanging out in the springform pan. It was nice and melty at this point, and I used it to grease the pan. Next come thin apple slices, shingled in a spiral. I didn't really know what that meant, so I guessed. The recipe calls for a single apple, but look what that got me.


Luckily, I was clever and bought a whole bag of apples. Couldn't get them to go up the sides very well, though.


And here is the mixture dumped into the apples, ready for baking.


...yeah, still looks like vomit.


This is what it looks like in the end. It's supposed to be golden brown, but the parts that were golden brown now were going to be black by the time that the rest was correct. Anyway, this isn't the side that people see.  The whole thing gets inverted.


The springy, formy bit comes off.


And then I use an exciting technical maneuver to flip the whole thing over.


Ta-da! Oh, no, hold-on.


Ta... da?


It's not exactly as impressive as I thought it would be. There's a dusting of powdered sugar that goes on top. Apparently you can broil the whole thing to caramelize the sugar, but I didn't bother. Mostly because I didn't want to deal with transferring it to yet another plate.


And this is what a slice of it looks like.


Verdict: It's decent. It's secretly a bread pudding. It's a pretty good breakfast since there isn't really any sugar added. But it's not the best bread pudding I've had, or the best apple/dessert/breakfast thingy (so far that might be this, or some apple cakes I don't have convenient links to). I'd say something like "next time I'll be more careful about where I pour the batter because you can see the heavy stuff settled in the middle," but not sure there will be a next time on this one.

But more importantly, how is this inside out? What is inside-out about it? Ok, normally you have a thin layer of crust on the bottom, then lots of filling, and maybe a thin layer of crust on top. But this ends with a layer of crust on the bottom, and then filling on top with maybe a little bit of the crust stuff. That is not an inside-out pie! That is regular pie! Regular pie with horrible ratios! Bizarro Pie, possibly, but certainly not inside-out. I want my inside-out money back. It's exactly like regular money, except it's exactly the same.


The last episode of S2 Doctor Who was a poor choice before bed. I am inside-out sad.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Much Like A Cheese

This past Saturday was St. Patrick's Day, but by spreading out my pub visits I managed to invent St. Patrick's Day weekend. You're welcome. Here's the story of how some cooking fit in there.

But first, let's back up even farther to a week ago today - Pi Day! That's 3.14 for you non-math-nerds, or Pi Approximation Day for teh ubernerds in the audience (keep your lousy 22/7). For Pi Day I decided to make pies. That's what you do. So the night before I made a crack pie that cooled down overnight just in time for breakfast, and then a chicken pot pie spruced up with rosemary. Deliciousness may have been involved. Why am I telling you this? Originally I had wanted to pick recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen, and settled on Chicken Plum Pie and Inside-Out Pie. But then I realized that the Chicken Pie required Renaissance Stock, and gave up on the whole idea.

The plan haunted me, however, and come Saturday I decided I would nip down to McGinty's for a pint (or three) and then grab me some ingredients for Inside-Out Pie. I also decided to complement it with Cheesecake “in the Italian Fashion” which sounds insulting because of the quotation marks but is made in a pie dish and therefore close enough for me. I decided to start with the Cheesecake because it was a simpler recipe, and then go from there.

Also, I did math! For reasons that certainly had nothing to do with the fact that I was drinking, I flipped through the entirety of Shakespeare's Kitchen, noted which recipes used Renaissance Stock, and tallied that shit up. As it turns out, if I quintupled the Renaissance Stock recipe, I would have enough to last me the entire cookbook. So now all I need is a stockpot capable of holding roughly 22.5 lbs of chicken parts as well as the other ingredients, a stove large enough to deal with said stockpot, and then a second freezer to put all the frozen stock in. I'm thinking I can take care of all of this with a livingroom hot-tub and some liquid nitrogen. Easy peasy.

But back to my cheesecake.

Sadly, Caliban is not big enough that I can ignore the existence of "packaging," even when the full container is the perfect amount of an ingredient. You can see Ariel's mixing bowl in the back, looking all sad and lonely. Don't worry. Ariel gets used all the time for non-Renaissance recipes. He is not neglected.


When you take the ricotta, cottage cheese and egg out of their packages, it all fits perfectly fine. I don't have a good post-blending picture because it just looks lumpy and white and kind of gross.


Cinnamon, sugar, and mace are hanging out and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille.


Once the sugar and spice is pulsed in, it's suddenly worth taking a picture.


There's only one remaining ingredient for the filling - 1/4 cup of coarsely chopped pistachios. Sadly, you can't buy pre-shelled pistachios at Safeway, so I had my work cut out for me. Also, you apparently can't buy unsalted pistachios there either, but I don't think it ruined the recipe or anything. I took a guess that a heaping half cup would get me somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4 cup unshelled.


Close enough! And since I know facts about volume, I knew that chopping up the pistachios would also condense them a bit. Well, except for one minor detail.


Chopping is for losers.


My new cooking maxim is "when in doubt, hit it with a hammer." You should see the souffles. Or the soup.


Pistachio bits get folded into the filling, and then it's time to grate biscotti for the crust. Except grating is for losers. When in doubt, hit it with a hammer.


I kid, I kid! Aside from getting as many crumbs on the counter and floor as I did in the pie dish, this went fairly well.


I thought it was sort of weird that the recipe doesn't use any kind of moistener for the crust. There's no butter mixed in or anything. But them's the breaks. In the end, the filling moistened just enough of the crumbs to stick to the bottom of the cheesecake, but there was a thick layer underneath that just hung out and stayed in the dish. I guess that was the point.


These tracks are side by side. Sand people always walk single file, to hide their numbers.


Not going to lie: when I was sorting through the thumbnails for this entry, I could not for the life of me figure out how I had managed to get a picture of ranch dip. As it turns out, this is the filling in the pie dish on the oven rack outside the oven and I guess I ran out of prepositions there.


It was at this point that I realized I had made a minor mistake. While I had followed all the directions correctly, I had failed to note the cooking time: one and a half hours. I had to leave for my St. Patrick's Day plans in roughly one hour, twenty five minutes. Showing up five or ten minutes late wasn't going to be a killer, but... I'm not really sure how I thought I would be making two desserts that afternoon. I blame the Guinness.

So 90 minutes later, this comes out of the oven and goes immediately into the fridge and then I leave. This is one of the saddest stories ever.


When I stumble back into my apartment, several pubs and over 24 hours later, I finally get to cut myself a slice.


And then, through the miracles of TIME TRAVEL I take this whole cheesecake into work the next day.


Either that, or my last two pictures are out of order and that is what it looked like when it came out of the fridge. People at work seemed impressed by it - a few went back for seconds. I apologize if they are readers here, but I think it was just low standards. I will caveat by saying that when you are sitting in an office all day, any dessert suddenly becomes magical and life-affirming. I say this because it was true, and not to retroactively justify that time I kept going back to see if maybe this jelly-filled Munchkin would actually have any jelly inside.

Verdict: Meh. It was ok, and really simple to put together, but a heck of a time commitment when you factor in cooking plus chilling. And it just wasn't amazing, as far as desserts go. I'm not going to lie, I prefer New York style cheesecake, but I've definitely had better Italians. In the amount of time this takes to prep and cook, I could have made the foole two or three times over. I don't plan on repeating this one.

Pet Peeve: Rih-CAHT-uh. Man-ih-CAHT-ee. Ugh. Please. No. There are a few other pronunciations based on where in Italy your friendly neighborhood Italians are actually from and where in the US their families have previously spent time, and any of them are better than these. I grew up with Rih-GOT and Man-ih-GOT. And pro-ZHUT, for that matter. All of my actor friends are currently wincing because I'm not using IPA for these pronunciations, and they are right to do so, but it is early in the morning and I want to finish this up. The point is, I died a little inside every time I told someone that the cheesecake contained rih-CAHT-uh because I didn't want to bother explaining what I meant. My mom (hi mom!) only recently found out that some people pronounce it this way and was legitimately horrified. As is right and proper.


I had a friend who used hard g and long i sounds in gyro. We're not friends anymore.