Egg-Yolk Orange

Crayola should make a new color "pastured hen egg orange."

It would replace lime green as my favorite.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies suck. I mean, they're pleasurable to eat, because they're sweet and they contain chocolate, but if you can look past your inherent taste for anything sweet, they're just awful. The chocolate just completely overwhelms the pumpkin. Literally, no pumpkin flavor comes through, and any pumpkin dessert which doesn't taste like pumpkin sucks. Therefore pumpkin chocolate chip cookies suck, and if you think I'm wrong, send me a batch and we'll see ;)

Ideas in Food Dinner

I've been reading the Ideas in Food blog for a while, tracking their thoughts and admiring their ideas. It's really a great place to go if you're in search of inspiration.

Yesterday night I made a reservation for the Ideas in Food Dinner at Blackfish on November 2nd. This is the major dinner, since I went to Daniel in New York over a year ago, that I've saved up my own money for., and I'm really excited. My "major meal frequency" has dropped significantly. I just have too many extra expenses that come with getting older.

Anyway, check out the menu. This really isn't anything I'd be interested in cooking myself, but I'm enthusiastic about eating it. Smoked Pumpkin Ice Cream- my favorite fall flavor in ice cream form + smoke: what could be better? Potato Chip Soup? What a concept!

This should be an intriguing experience.

Sous Vide Fried Chicken?

I wonder how sous vide fried chicken would work out. Of course I could simply cook the chicken sous vide, then bread it and fry it at a high temperature, but how would this work: bread the chicken beforehand, then sous vide it, causing the egg to coagulate and therefore setting the breading (hopefully). I would then just fry it off.

It will be something to try.

Farmer's Markets: English Speech

I received this awesome assignment in my English class to write a speech, using various rhetorical devices which we had learned in class, about anything that we wanted. I chose to talk a little bit about farmers markets. This material won't be anything new for all of you, but if you're interested, check it out.

They’re red, shiny, brilliant, and plump, but aesthetics aside, they’re incredibly succulent and juicy. At this time of the year, the flavor, the texture, the taste of this fruit is far superior to those of another season. A single bite reveals crisp yet moist flesh and a taste that is altogether purer than that of the grocery store varieties, I speak of the apple, but apples are only one reason to make it out to the farmer’s markets this fall. The markets are filled with a plethora of fruits and vegetables fresh from local farms.

To eat fresh produce from a local farm is a sublime experience, and such an experience is accessible now more than ever. Markets are still full of summer’s bounty, yet are likewise beginning to stock fall’s produce. Pumpkins, apples, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, are becoming increasingly available, and are at their best now. I urge you to pick up these autumnal items from your farmer’s markets rather than your grocery stores.

Markets offer produce picked at peak ripeness, whereas grocery store produce is often ripened artificially, in countries like Chile. Farmer’s market produce has also traveled only a couple, rather than thousands of miles, and is therefore fresher and inevitably better tasting. But don’t solely buy produce from farmer’s markets because it tastes better, buy it because it’s more environmentally friendly, and often in your best interests economically as well. Farmer’s markets support the farmer’s who labor day in and day out, often seven days a week to bring you food. The government however, seems to care little about their hard work. The government subsidizes the growing of crops such as corn to be grown by major corporations, which cuts into potential profits for the farmer. That and the fact that much of what was previously the job of the farmer, has been taken over by the major corporations, whose ruthless tactics, and cutthroat campaigns rarely produce produce of comparable quality to that of small farmers.

True such food (the kind grown by major corporations and sold in grocery stores) is less expensive, but who would you rather give your money to, a small farmer whose life’s work is ensuring that you get a premium product, or a corporate executive who couldn’t care less about the produce he’s providing? What would you rather support, the local economy, or a major company like Monsanto, in which the large concentration of money is at the top, and that gives 9 figure bonuses to its executives ?

I, for one, would rather support the farmers: the farmers (anadiplosis) who tend to your food with their very own hands: the farmers whose lifestyle is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain: the farmers whose food not only tastes better, but is better for the environment. So if nothing else, at least try some apples from a local market this fall. They’re red, shiny, brilliant, and plump, but aesthetics aside, they’re utterly superior, economically, morally, environmentally and in taste, than the grocery store variety.

Dinner for Four

Just this past Monday, I got a call from my friend's mom (who I had never met). She asked me to cook for her and her husband, and another couple on Saturday (2 days ago). I was to come over to their house and cook a basic 3-course meal, and be paid for my efforts. It was pretty short notice, but I quickly agreed. I would be getting paid for something I would have lots of fun doing!

I immediately started planning out the menu, choosing similar proteins to those that I hope to serve for the library auction dinner in a few weeks just to make sure that I could pull them off under the circumstances. The guests had absolutely no dietary restrictions so I was really able to do my own thing.

For the first course I chose scallops, corn and a tomato, red pepper sauce. I chose corn because at Lacroix, they make this awesome corn that they really just sweat in butter. I cooked mine in a little butter, some bacon fat, garlic, shallots, and sage, then tossed in some bacon at the end. I got the idea for the tomato-red pepper sauce because last week on Avec Eric on PBS, he kinda cooked down some red peppers in some red wine and olive oil to make a sauce for cod I believe. I saw this awesome looking tomato from my garden and wanted to throw that in there too, so I sweated some red peppers with some garlic, onion, and rosemary, before deglazing with a little bit of red wine and a chopped up tomato. As the liquid evaporated, I added a little chicken stock and cooked it down further. Finally I passed it through a food mill. To order, I finished it off with a dab of butter.

For the second course I chose chicken confit with homemade spagghetti, because it's a very similar dish to the duck confit risotto that I hope to do for the auction dinner. I cured the chicken confit for 24 hours in garlic, peppercorns, cloves, brown sugar, thyme, and I placed some bacon over each leg. I then cooked them sous vide at 176 for 8 hours in duck fat. For the pasta, I used Thomas Keller's French Laundry Recipe, which is real nice and rich because it's loaded with egg yolks. I rolled this out as spagghetti on my pasta machine. To finish the dish, I pulled apart the confit meat, reserving the skin. I then seared the pulled meat in flaming hot oil while crisping the skin in the oven. I then tossed the meat with the pasta, some pasta water, some butter, some olive oil, and some pecorino, then topped the whole thing off with a piece of crispy chicken skin. I made sure none of them were on a diet before I served it to them.

For dessert I served good ol' American apple pie. I was inspired by some massive honeycrisp apples from a local farm that I saw in Whole Foods, and decided that a simple pie would be the best way to utilize them. For the dough I used a 3:4:5 ratio of water to butter to flour, rather than Ruhlman's 1:2:3, because if you can get away with a higher butter to flour ratio, why not do so!? I used completely butter for my dough; it may not make as flaky a pie as shortening but it's just so darn tasty (and anyways, there's a bunch of ways to ensure flakiness even with an all-butter crust).

I prepped almost everything beforehand, and there really wasn't much to do besides sear the scallops, cook the pasta, and warm up everything else. I warned people I was cooking for that I could set their smoke alarm off when I was searing the scallops, but I used their overhead fan and that turned out not to be a problem. Overall, everything went quite smoothly and I got paid for something that was lots of fun to do.

My only regret was that I forgot to take a picture of the scallop dish before I sent it out. I wish you guys could've seen it. It looked awesome.

Colonial Kitchen

One of the few aspects of colonial life I desire is an oven like this one. My boy B Frank probably made some sick pizza.

(I'm pictured in the Harriton house, a colonial home that was once the residence of the 1st and only secretary to the continental congress, Charles Thomson. Pictured is the cooking area, and the little wooden door is the opening to an oven-- a brick, wood-fired oven. In going I received extra credit from my history teacher)