Hi Anna,
I just decided to check the blog and have come to realize that for the last 3 weeks, you were having a fascinating, articulate conversation on food...with yourself. School has been crazy lately. I have 5 papers due in the next 2 weeks, on top of prepping for internship interviews for the fall.
Do you remember certain times in your life where at some point in the day, you go - "Oh yeah, food!" Or you're so busy, you don't realize what you're eating? That's been me.
I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with bread. I'm not the breadbaker, Rob is, but all of his stuff has turned out scrumptious. I've heard of The Bread Bible, but you might also want to look at The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.
Also - check out this link: http://steamykitchen.com/168-no-knead-bread-revisited.html
This was our first bread back in California. A successful, no fuss bread ought to make you feel better. Put on extra butter for me.
Back to researching suicide statistics in the elderly. What fun, eh? I'll talk to you soon!
Becky
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Eat Your Heart Out... or Work Your Ass Off...
Ok Becky- the meal I just made topped Thanksgiving. Seriously. I cooked for 8 hours and ate for 6, and now I can't move. Matt's family stopped by for dinner and requested seafood pasta, so what do we do? We make (in no particular order): grilled calamari with aioli, bruscetta, a parade of Trader Joe's appetizers, salad, *the* seafood pasta, and a ricotta cheesecake.
The most difficult part of the meal? Nope, not cleaning the clams or cooking the calamari. It was the caramel orange sauce that topped the cheesecake- literally an hour segmenting oranges, simmering sugar water, cursing over broken food processors and hardened caramel... all for 3/4 cup of sauce that was, while much appreciated, admittedly a disposable part of the meal.
Surprises?
1) The cheesecake survived in the the oven without a water bath- you know, I sometimes think that recipes are designed to scare people away. "Don't bake this without a water bath, or it will most definitely be dry." Well, we hesitated for a minute, after realizing that we didn't own a roaster pan- but what the hell are you supposed to do with a half finished cheesecake filling? Replace the water bath with a small pan of water on a lower rack, and reduce the cook time 15 minutes. Voila, moist cheesecake.
2) Matt has mad pasta rolling skills- pounding the daylights out of semolina pasta ain't easy, and he slammed 1.5 pounds into submission in 15 minutes flat. I actually felt like a jerk feeding the already rolled dough through the automatic press, me standing idly against the hum of the machine, while sweat glistened across Matt's forehead.
3) Bread flour is evil, and I will never bake another loaf with it again- another failed, entirely too dense loaf of French destined for croutons.
How's your weekend going?
The most difficult part of the meal? Nope, not cleaning the clams or cooking the calamari. It was the caramel orange sauce that topped the cheesecake- literally an hour segmenting oranges, simmering sugar water, cursing over broken food processors and hardened caramel... all for 3/4 cup of sauce that was, while much appreciated, admittedly a disposable part of the meal.
Surprises?
1) The cheesecake survived in the the oven without a water bath- you know, I sometimes think that recipes are designed to scare people away. "Don't bake this without a water bath, or it will most definitely be dry." Well, we hesitated for a minute, after realizing that we didn't own a roaster pan- but what the hell are you supposed to do with a half finished cheesecake filling? Replace the water bath with a small pan of water on a lower rack, and reduce the cook time 15 minutes. Voila, moist cheesecake.
2) Matt has mad pasta rolling skills- pounding the daylights out of semolina pasta ain't easy, and he slammed 1.5 pounds into submission in 15 minutes flat. I actually felt like a jerk feeding the already rolled dough through the automatic press, me standing idly against the hum of the machine, while sweat glistened across Matt's forehead.
3) Bread flour is evil, and I will never bake another loaf with it again- another failed, entirely too dense loaf of French destined for croutons.
How's your weekend going?
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The Salted Lemon by Anna Fishman and Becky Ong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
