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?
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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.
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