Lesson 1
- Cucumber Salad with Mint -- this is the hit of the meal! Surprisingly, the whole family enjoys this simple dish. The only planning required is salting and draining the cucumbers. Fresh mint allows my "anti-mint" wife to enjoy the dish without her ingredient affectation rearing its ugly head (stereotype alert: this appears to be a very Italian trait -- see Thrifty Fifty post on garlic and cilantro).
- Roast Chicken -- I've gotten very comfortable with roasts over the last decade. Three keys to success here: 1) know your oven. Too many people assume "425F for 12 minutes/pound" is a universal directive. That's like saying "buy her a drink and tell her she's got a nice a*@" to get lucky. Ovens, their installation/insulation and the size/shape of the items you put in them introduce variations that inevitably lead to overcooked food. Get an oven thermometer, a meat thermometer and practice. 2) Don't rely on {in pompous PBS-produced cooking show voice} "when the fleshiest part of the poultry reads 170F, it is done". Yup. In fact, it was done half an hour ago and will be at a gravy-evaporating
185F by the time people eat it. Get accustomed to pulling roasts out early and testing. Think of it as desirable premature ecookulation. When a chicken is at 160F, it will cook through on the counter while the juices return to the meat. 3) Brine. Briny briny brine. OK, Le Cordon Bleu doesn't call for brining chicken. Screw them. Brine the bitch. It is easy, doesn't cost much and only requires a little advanced planning (in this case, a 6-pound Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster required only 4 hours in the salt bath). - Spring Peas with Lettuce, Chervil and Onions -- ok, just because it's 39F outside and raining, we're pretending it's spring vegetable time. Again, this went over surprisingly well, though LFP and BFP (Little Fuss Pot, aka Alaina and Big Fuss Pot, aka Deidre) pushed the pearl onions aside. And that after I painstakingly peeled 3 dozens of the little bastards...the onions, not the fuss pots.
Time: 2.5 hours Complexity: 3 (of 10) Cost: $37.28 Mess: 3
Lesson 2
- Country-Style Vegetable Soup with Noodles -- wow! First time I'm cooking with cabbage
as a main ingredient and realizing I've misunderstood this smelly beauty all these years (feel this way about several women I know as well). Thinly sliced, blanched, sauteed then boiled with the homemade stock, this stuff comes sweet and tender. Even the fuss pots (save FP extraordinaire, Alaina) love it! Used Contadina dried vermicelli to put in the soup (half a pound) but should have cut it in fourths instead of in half. Lots of tableside mess while we tried to cut down the brothy pasta into some size that was manageable. - Veal Scallops with Apples and Calvados -- the baked apples (used golden delicious) was a big hit. Will think about making desserts around this aromatic, simple dish in the future. Everyone loves the veal (even Donna "Eat Right for Your Aging Blood Type" Thompson). Of course, as with so many things, we have to call it "steak" to get the kids to eat it. I think when we take them to the dentist, we'll call it "lunch at Morton's" in the future. Had trouble finding calvados in the liquor store, but it's a nice addition. Thought I'd thrill the kids by flaming it on the stove and Deidre screamed bloody murder (dragging the other two down with her). I grumbled something stupid about never doing anything fun for them again (why didn't they think of me potentially burning the house down as fun?!?) and got on with the meal.
- Caramel Custard -- this is a clear attempt to move outside my comfort zone (yes, I bring tired business cliches to the kitchen -- get used to it...I'm several months away from a diet and exercise regimen that will be called "rightsizing"). I typically don't do dessert. When guests come and insist on bringing something, I feign "just bring an appetite" before I tell them to bring a dessert. The problem is, with time constraints, health crazes and general American laziness, everyone goes to the store to buy dessert (and not even a bakery these days, people go to Kings for dessert -- yes, I'm aware they make desserts on the premises, but my snobbery forces me to look down on this practice). The Custard goes exceedingly well. I have used a bain marie before, so I'm ok with this (even though I am criticized for not using the hot water feature on our Poland Spring water dispenser -- I am so appalled at this hypocrisy in my tree-hugging approach to life that I pretend it's not there...except when I need a cold drink of water, of course...in which case I grumble something about my wife forcing me to do this and I chug it down). I use my creme brulee dishes -- first time they've had a dessert in them, even though they were purchased during a Chef Central splurge about 6 years ago -- which gets me a snide "'bout time" from the Unnecessary Expense Police. I make one without caramel for LFP, but she still doesn't bite. BFP puts up an argument about caramel until I show her what it is (sugar and water). In my fustication with BFP, I let the caramel cool too long in the pan and make stained glass
instead of caramel. I have to reheat the image of the Virgin Mary that I've created and get it into the dishes. This is a serious imposition on my blustering (an important part of cooking), but I get the dish right. Delicious! I'm back in the dessert game.
Time: 3.5 hours Complexity: 6 (of 10) Cost: $71.15* Mess: 7**
*-The creme brulee dishes killed me here -- a full cycle through the dishwasher, then hand-washed, 2 minutes/dish.
**-Though there are no veal or custard leftovers, we have two full soup meals and stock chicken left over, so -- veal costs aside -- this is not as expensive as it first appears.
