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
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.
