As rheumatic as two dry toasts

The fix is in! With a stunning 33% lead over the nearest competitors (i.e., one additional vote), Caliban and Ariel have swept the Poll results! In case anyone was confused, the food processor is now Caliban, and the mixer is Ariel. Ariel is, after all, an "airy spirit", and the mixer is what I would use to whip air into eggs and batter and also into etceteras, which are notoriously thin without a good whipping.

A while ago I mentioned a super-secret literary food project, and we're close enough that I can finally tell you what it is. This weekend I am co-hosting (along with fellow PhD student Susanna) a literary/culinary smackdown! Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Shakespeare's Kitchen vs. Katherine Anne Porter! Special appearances by Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner (under negotiations), and Big Papa Hemingway (spiritually, via alcohol)! I will take pictures, and write an entry to let you know how it goes. Susanna bears much of the blame here. On a class trip to the UMD special collections and the Katherine Anne Porter Papers, Susanna rifled through KAP's kitchen notes and came away with Guinness Punch, Imagination Beef, and some crazy biscuit recipe that makes Elizabethan cooking instructions seem precise and exacting. After a lot of joking about making these for class, we decided that we should combine forces and throw a dinner party. My contributions will include Flounder with Dried Plums since it has been tried and tested, and a few new side dishes or desserts to knock things off the list. I will also get drunk and say inappropriate things, which is itself a tribute to Conversations of Ben Jonson with William Drummond of Hawthornden. The best part is that, at the end of the day, we can connect absolutely anything we eat or drink to some author or another (link courtesy of fellow student Ashley).

I spent this past Saturday attending Katsucon, where friend Bridget provided me with a container of mace that she was not using. Depending on how you think about it, an anime character tossing you cooking supplies across a hotel room is either extremely weird, or not weird at all.

***

This past week, I had my heart set on making two different dishes: Dried Plums with Wine and Ginger-Zest Crostini, and Autumn Squashes with Apples and Fried Parsley. I figured that they would make a great appetizer and side for my remaining portion of carnitas. This was not to be. I waited too late on day-of to get both done, and by the time I finished the Crostini I had "accidentally" eaten enough to make the Squash unnecessary. The squashes I purchased (squashes? squash? squaesh? squashii?) are still sitting in the kitchen, which is kind of cool because it makes me the sort of person who keeps squash on hand just in case.

With the minor exception of switching french bread for baguettes, then vice versa, then versa vice, then yes, definitely it's supposed to be the baguette, picking up groceries was fairly simple. Sometimes I worry that if I don't have crazy food-purchasing adventures I won't actually have enough material for a good post. But it is what it is.

First, we deal with the plums and wine. I thought I would have to run out and deal with buying some red, but it turned out that an extremely foresighted friend had left some for a movie night a while back.

It certainly passes the interesting label test.

It also passes the all-important "is there enough to pour myself a glass?" test.

Unfortunately, it failed the "tastes good" test.

But I had already tossed the wine, sugar, and cinnamon stick together, so I was already committed. Next was 6oz of dried plums. I had no idea what 6oz of dried plums looked like, so I guessed.

And then it turned out I guessed wrong by a factor of 3. So we go from seven to 20.

While that stuff cooked down, I started to prep for the crostini. The recipe says to toss the bread slices on a baking sheet under the broiler, but that is impractical due to my oven construction.

So it's the broiler tray again, but this time with some aluminum foil wrapping to keep me from scraping burnt bits off it all night.

And here we have my baguette slices brushed with olive oil and lightly salted. That's actually a barbecue brush I picked up as a freebie at the 2010 Barbecue Battle. Glad it finally came in handy!

There was also a bunch of cut-up bread left over, since I didn't realize that I had already hit the baking sheet saturation point. The recipe doesn't actually tell you how much bread to use, or how many slices, or anything like that. Just one loaf french bread, baguette style. Anyway, it worked out for me.

Ginger and lemon zest are up next. Apparently I forgot to rotate this picture, so just pretend I was kneeling up on my kitchen counter for some reason.

I decided to start by hitting the ginger with the vegetable peeler, which worked fairly well except for the part where bits of ginger and ginger bark went flying everywhere, even on my bread slices. Oops.

The idea was to finely julienne the ginger, but it didn't go amazingly well. Ginger is hard and fibrous, and the results were fairly uneven.

I was also supposed to zest half a lemon, but I figured that haphazardly zesting a whole lemon would go faster. Of course by "zesting" I mean "smacking with the peeler."

Half an hour after it hit a summer, the wine had boiled down quite a bit and soaked into the plums.

Out comes the cinnamon stick, and mash mash mash. So it's sort of like plum jelly, except the individual plums are still almost discrete units. Lots of middle bits made it out into the mixture, but the skins pretty much stay together.

Now that I can commit my full attention, bread goes under the broiler.

I leave it cracked a bit so I can observe my bread as it transforms into toast.

Of course, I did assume that I would only have to do so towards the start of the minimum toasting time given in the book. But by then it was already too far gone. 50% of my breads are dead to me. With the lit-food smackdown on its way, I wondered how I would deal with a food-failure of these proportions right before people were supposed to show up.

Here's the answer. Good pieces on a plate, burnt bits in to keep them out of sight.

A little of the plum-wine mixture on the toast, ginger and lemon zest on the mixture. The lemon-slices and an extra scoop of the mixture go in the middle for extra fancy.

And this is what it looks like up close. I bet I could pass it off at a party.

Verdict: Good, but needs technical improvement. The cinnamon and sugar in the plums took out a lot of the tartness I was expecting, and although I wouldn't drink that wine, it worked well with the other flavors. Then the ginger and lemon are a great addition when they show up in a bite. As for fixes, the first thing is that I need to not burn the toast, which I guess means pulling everything out early to take the center pieces and then toss the rest back in. Or toast in batches. Either one should do. Also, I need to do something about the size of the ginger and lemon pieces. Smaller bits would make it a lot easier to spread the garnish around evenly, and also prevent a final bite from having a giant piece of ginger or lemon peel in it to kill the rest of the taste. This may mean picking up an actual zester for zest, instead of a peeler for peels. Will make again.


Sometimes I worry that the simple posts aren't crazy enough.

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."