Poll: What's in a name?

Four are the number of obstacles routinely thrown in the way of my epic cooking quest.

1) Renaissance Stock
2) Renaissance Dough
3) "place the ingredients in a small food processor"
4) "using a hand mixer comma rest of sentence"

Those first two points are on my hit-list. Also on the rhyming list. As for those others... number three was a source of particular frustration after every single person who reads the blog tripped over themselves to be the first person to inform me that grating beets is really easy with a food processor. Someone at work popped their head into my office just to tell me that.

And so, I have taken some of my ill-gotten gains [Note: Not ill-gotten, and hardly gained] and purchased some useful devices. Please cue up the video.

BAAAA

BAAAA... BAAAA...

BWADAAAAA

BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM

Ahem. Anyway. Here's where you come in. I need to name these suckers, and I'm putting it up to a vote. You probably saw the poll on the right side of the page already, which has a number of options. Please feel free to make new suggestions in the comments below; if Blogger will let me, I'll add suggestions directly to the poll itself. That means you should check back again before the poll closes at midnight on the morning of February 18. 

BONUS: I broke in the mixer almost immediately by attempting some Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookies. 

Unfortunately, these are not beginner level cookies. 

The first batch was burnt. 

The second batch was... less burnt.

I learned a lot of things about this recipe over the two batches, but who knows when I'll actually get a chance to try it again. I have all sorts of other stuff to mix and process, Renaissance and otherwise.

C'est le gâteau.

To make midnight mushrooms

This past week, I had a thought. "I've never roasted a chicken," the thought went, "and I should do that." "Good idea, Thought," I, uh, said. "I could really go for some roast chicken." Sadly, I had plenty of leftover pasta from the last cooking night, and had to make it through that first. So it was penne for dinner, penne for lunch, and looking-at-penne-but-making-eggs-instead-because-seriously for breakfast. Finally I was out of food, and chicken could commence.

Once upon a time I had come across a recipe for chicken roasted in a crust of kosher salt, and the idea has stuck with me since then. After some searching, I settled on Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Salt with Fennel, Thyme and Lemon. This was mainly because the recipe gave me an excuse to use the newly discovered mortar and pestle; also, it measured olive oil in "lugs". But how to justify that project when there were so many recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen I still had to get through? I came up with three reasons:

1) Making the chicken would give me an opportunity to cook one of the side dishes in the book - in this case, Sauteed Mushrooms "in the Italian Fashion." I like to pretend that the quotes aren't there because of the original source, but instead Francine Segan is acknowledging that people in Renaissance England had no frickin' idea what Italian food was actually like.

2) Presenting a dish in a crust that can be broken apart in front of guests is definitely the sort of pageantry that I associate with Early Modern and Medieval cooking.

3) Jamie Oliver is distantly related to William Shakespeare, which I can prove using this TOTALLY LEGIT FAMILY TREE.

Let us begin. As always, my cooking tends to run into problems immediately in the grocery store phase of the adventure. Things were actually going really well at Safeway (due to cost issues, I'm staying away from Whole Foods if I'm not cooking to impress) until I had to hit the produce aisle. The Sauteed Mushrooms require a half cup of endive, which was nowhere to be found. A trip to my trusty Cook's Thesaurus pointed me in the direction of radicchio, arugula, and watercress... none of which were available either. You'll get to see my clever solution later on.

First step is preparing the salt crust for the Chicken in Salt. What you're looking at here is 7 pounds of kosher salt, which is (as Michelle put it) enough to do a driveway. Cracked fennel seeds and peppercorns will provide some flavoring; eggs are for glue, and the water/lemon juice mixture is a little bit of both.

Here they are combined, pre-mixing. The idea is to get a texture like wet sand, or warm snow. Both were fairly appropriate descriptions of the final product, which would be applied...

...to this guy right here. This is my first time dealing with a whole chicken, and it was slightly less gross than I expected. I didn't really do any trimming except for a big piece of fat hanging off the back, so just a rinse and a pat down and it was basically ready to go. Oh, I was very proud of myself for removing the bag with the giblets and other bits from inside - I've encountered a few horror stories about that, so I was well prepared.

Here's the stuff that goes inside: parsley, garlic, the previously-juiced lemons, and (not pictured) all of the mortared thyme and olive oil that didn't get spread around the outside of the bird. I wish I had been smart enough to get a picture of the chicken when it was stuffed, since there was so much inside it that the breast was suddenly tilted the other way. Ah well.

Kris had been watching me prep some of this, and was doubtful that anyone could possibly use 7 pounds of salt in one recipe. Here is all of my salt in play, barely covering the chicken in a stable fashion.

The aluminum foil gets scrunched up to hold the salt in place until it hardens. Jamie Oliver mentions cutting off the excess once you scrunch it closed at the top, and I seem to have failed in reaching that point.

Additional aluminum foil to the rescue! I managed to heave this thing (the world's largest twice baked potato, weighing in at over 11.5 pounds) into a shallow roasting pan just to keep it stable while I get it into the oven.

With two hours to go, I chill out for a while and then (30 min left) prep my ingredients for the Sauteed Mushrooms. I should note that at this point, the entire apartment was smelling more delicious than it ever had before. Winner winner, chicken dinner! But back to the side. First ingredient: mushrooms. The recipe calls for 8 cups of assorted mushrooms; I went with 10 cups of baby button and cremini, since that's what I had and I'm a big believer in throwing in excess vegetables.

 Oh, and remember when I said there was no radicchio? That wasn't entirely true. Booyah!

Here are all my herbs etc. hanging out, ready to go. Parsley, radicchio, thyme, and most interestingly, mint and cinnamon. Those last two flavors come out big-time later on.

When the chicken comes out of the oven it needs to rest for fifteen minutes; that makes it the perfect time to cook up some Italianate mushrooms. They go into the pan to sautee for a minute, and you know something, maybe 10 cups is a bit too much for my pan.

Two cups come out, and everything fits much better.

Because of the measuring mishap, we're a bit over the minute mark when I add the seasoning. A quick stir, and everything gets covered to cook for two minutes. I'll spare you the picture of the covered pan, although I was tempted to just reuse the picture from the Flounder with Dried Plums.

Uncover the pan, and in goes some verjuice replacement, salt and pepper to taste, and we're done. I basically doubled the required amount of verjuice, and I think that was the right decision. And I may have checked salt on an overly salted individual mushroom, because it could have used a bit more in the final accounting. The mushrooms are good enough that, after I test one out on Kris (maybe they're poisonous!) he sneaks into the kitchen to steal a few more.

Now that the mushrooms are done, it's time to wake the chicken up from its nap. I'm looking forward to seeing whether the crust is browned or just a solid white block, but instead I'm confronted with this:

Not exactly the uniform, unbroken shell that I was hoping for. On the bright side it means that I was able to lift a lot of it off without having to break anything. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that I wasn't just going to be able to crack the shell off and brush off the excess salt. No, the salt was everywhere, and both in and on every thing. This was the opposite of all my hopes and dreams.

You'll also notice that one of the downsides to this method is that none of the skin browns or crisps, so the bird looks a little naked. I attempted to remove my naked bird from the salt, and instead of prying up a drumstick I wound up with a bone in my hand.

This is a good sign, in that it tells me that cooking-wise, the mission is a success. Here's another picture which demonstrates my camera's inability to focus on the thing that I'm actually interested in. It's sort of like when you try and point a dog at something, and instead it turns its laser-like focus and keen intellect towards hunting down your finger. But man, that bone is clean. Except for the salt.

The same thing happened when I tried to maneuver a wing out: the whole thing came off.

In fact, the bird basically sectioned itself. The breast separated from the ribs underneath, both leg bones pulled out, an both wings popped off. I was a little disappointed that the two halves of the breast didn't leap apart and slice themselves. Oh, you'll notice that the wings are missing, as well as all sorts of other little bits and pieces. That's because I was already eating everything.

And here we have both dishes in one place. These last two pictures were actually taken from my phone's camera, without flash because otherwise it looked like I was taking a picture on the set of the new Star Trek. I've decided to keep my camera's battery charger in the kitchen from now on, because let's be honest, that's where the camera gets the most use.

Verdict: variable deliciousness! The mushrooms were rather good, though I still feel like they were missing something. Maybe more verjuice or more salt, although in this instance I was glad that something on my plate was relatively salt-free. The stalks on some of the cremini were a little underdone due to their thickness, so next time I would either use one kind of mushroom across the board or toss those in for an extra minute or so before the buttons.

As for the chicken... man am I torn on this. It was delicious. It was salty. If there was a section in the dictionary where they demonstrated how etymologically unrelated words could also overlap, this chicken would be there. And not just a picture, oh no, a full-fledged and physical roast chicken leaping from the pages of Merriam-Webster like a majestic unicorn, if unicorns resembled chickens at all. By the time I was done picking at the incredibly juicy and tender bits of chicken that were falling off the bone, my tongue hurt a bit from all the salt. And I kept eating, because it was that good. Lemon and fennel are a potent combination. Almost none of the dark meat made it to the table, and absolutely none of it survived the first night. The breasts went into the fridge, and although they were a bit on the dry side when I ate them over the next two days, that was to be expected. If I were smart I would have pulled some meat off one the first night just to see what it was like. And honestly, I've run into much drier fridgechicken. In the future, I have some ideas to help the crust, including starting my work in a pan, having a thinner crust so it bakes through, and trussing the bird so that the wings and legs don't flop out through the salt. Just looking at the breakage pattern, though, it seems like the big issues were the holes at both ends of the carcass, so steam or moisture coming up might also be an issue. Not sure what to do about that.

TL;DR - There are some alterations that I need to make to these dishes, but would make both again.

Crazy surprise post coming up on Wednesday.


Well, I guess it's not a surprise anymore.

Red, master; red as blood

If you've never heard of Mark Bittman, you should change that fact. He does a lot of food writing, most famously for the New York Times, which is where I first encountered him. The recipes in that article (two of which I have successfully accomplished) led to what is, in fact, a much more important piece of writing: The $84 Stir-Fry. Please read that article so that you can fully understand the cooking position that I'm coming from. It will help you understand this post.

***

As mentioned in previously, I had originally planned on making three dishes in one night, but didn't get to the last one until Monday. The missing piece was Sweet Beets in Puff Pastry with Crème Fraîche and Ginger, which required picking up these puppies. [Note: not actually puppies.]

I've never dealt with raw beets before, but internet consensus told me to cut off the greens and store them separately, otherwise the greens would draw all the moisture out of the roots. And since they weren't actually used in the recipe, that meant that I had all the leaves to work with.

I don't usually post non-Renaissance cooking on here, but I'm cheating since this counts as part of the meal and deals with reusing ingredients. I did a quick search on Punchfork for recipes that used beet greens but not actual beets, and this Beet Greens with Feta Pasta was just the ticket. The best part was that I only needed to pick up the onion and the penne, which made it really impressive that I somehow forgot to buy the penne. Whoops. But the pasta was delicious, and it gave me something to eat while I made dessert.

Step one, peel the beets. Apparently beets are really easy to peel if you cook them first, but that is the opposite of what the recipe calls for.

Steps two through seventeen involve grating the beets. This takes forever. And ever. And ever. This dish was quickly moving itself into the realm of "not worth it, no matter how good it is," and I hadn't even escaped ingredient prep. There has to be a better way to do this; preferably, a method that actually produces pretty, individual strands of beet instead of beet mush.

It got a little hairy at points.

Eventually, I was done. Six beets' worth of finely gratedness.

Unfortunately, by this point I had gone completely and irrevocably insane.

Kris came in at about this point, took one look around the kitchen, and announced, "I'll get a shovel and some quicklime."

Much simpler were the remaining ingredients. Kris didn't trust me to operate a grater anymore, so he found a mortar and pestle and smashed up some cinnamon. Also, apparently we own a mortar and pestle. Who knew? We also learned that, as Kris put it, a half of a half of a cinnamon stick produces about a quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon. If only those numbers could be simplified!

Melted butter, cinnamon, honey. This is the delicious bit right here. It gets added to the beets. I combined it in one place first just because it made for a better picture.

And... you know, I'm not sure why I took this picture since the beets look exactly the same with and without the butter mixture.

After those are mixed together and set, the container gets covered wi- SONUVABITCH!

And I was out of aluminum foil at 11:40pm. This called for drastic measures.

But then I realized that I could take drastic-yet-useful measures. My building contains a 7-11, so a quick trip downstairs, a jog around back, and I am re-foiled. Two observations:
1) There's a weird sort of logic to the items placed together on the shelves.
2) I've been using Safeway store-brand aluminum foil since I moved in, and it is amazing how much thicker the real stuff is. Heavy duty, seriously.

As I was saying, the mixed ingredients get covered in foil and tossed in the oven for a while. This gives me time to prep for the end of the dish. I don't really need to measure out the crème fraîche, but there's some crystallized ginger that needs to be minced. After the beet grating, however, I am content to mini-julienne. Observe!

With that done and some time still on the clock, I can move to prepping the pastry shells. I'm kind of excited about this, since the man with the duck bursting out of his chest proclaims this stuff to be a winner of the International Fancy Food Show. Can one thing win the whole show? I kind of like the idea of the judges declaring that these pastries were better than the caviar.

I open it up, and experience total dread.

"SHENANIGANS!," I cry. Well, I may have been more explicit than that. The point is that it's just after midnight, there are four minutes left until the beets come out of the oven, and I'm feeling skeptical about 7-11 having any pastry shells. I was not prepared to deal with pastry dough.

In the meantime, the sweetened beets need to come out of the oven. The recipe tells me that I should pour out the excess liquid, and I'm a little worried that there is none. The beets weren't evenly spread out in the dish, and so some parts have cooked through a bit more than others. I thought I had burnt some of it onto the Pyrex, but it all turned out ok. In retrospect I might have used a bit more of the sweetening mixture, but that's personal taste. Well, personal taste and the fact that I always feel like actual vegetable size throws off the intended ratios in a recipe.

Back to the pastry dough. And I mean, seriously, dough? Nothing on the outside of the package suggested dough. Nothing about dough, or sheets. Just "pastry". I didn't even know this was a thing! To be fair, the word "shells" never popped up but I assumed there was no way a grocery store didn't have them and this was clearly the correct choice and anyway. I stopped caring at this point, so I grabbed the dough and ripped it into irregular pieces and shoved them into a muffin tin. Then warned Kris that the kitchen may catch on fire in the next few minutes.

The kitchen didn't catch on fire, and the pastry cooked, but they didn't exactly have "insides" in which to place the beet mixture. So there was really only one solution.

If you're a fan of Patton Oswalt, this is the dessert version of a failure pile in a sadness bowl. And this is me sitting on the floor in the corner of my kitchen, dejectedly eating a dessert meant for six people and wondering where my life went wrong.

Actually, one of my bootleg pastry puffs came out with the right shape, so I assembled one serving just to demonstrate the original intent. It was a fine looking dessert, if I may say so myself.

And the cutaway view for those of you with engineering backgrounds.

The verdict: tasty, but man what a pain. All of the flavors come together really well at the end, even if the dimensions of the pastry and my casualness with the crème fraîche caused me to under-beet and over-crème. The ginger on top is a really nice touch, and I don't think a lack of mincing really hurt me in any way. If I had a way to magically grate the beets with minimal effort, I would certainly make this dish again (especially since I have a pound of crystallized ginger that will last approximately until forever). As it stands, I will think very hard about making this recipe and then cry and eat a gallon of ice cream straight out of the container.

As an added bonus, I had one leftover beet that I roasted in the oven the next night with some olive oil, and forgive me it was delicious so sweet and so cold.

But seriously, those pastries are amazing, duck-chest-man was right to give them an award.