The Kitchen Troll

I cooked dinner last night – technically, Christmas Eve dinner – for 27 people…my largest crowd so far.  This is my third year cooking for the family, and my mom makes a superb sous chef.  A standing rib roast is tradition, and we got a huge 18-pounder this year.  I smeared a horseradish-herb-butter crust all over the top and put it in the oven for about 4 hours.  It was absolutely perfect.  I also repeated the homemade cranberry sauce and green beans with herb butter from Thanksgiving (at Sydney’s request), and added in a huge potato gratin and salad.  I didn’t realize it until we had purchased everything, but the food colors were right in season.  I did as much prep as I could on Wednesday night, but we still had a lot to pull together to get dinner finished up.  And too many people milling around in the kitchen once they all showed up…makes me very crabby.  I start scowling and talking in a very snippy tone of voice.  We cracked open a bottle of 2005 St Emilion – SO perfect with the beef.

SQ and I already got our Christmas presents back at Thanksgiving (a new Kenmore Pro refrigerator and Bosch dishwasher), so I wasn’t expecting anything additional this morning.  Mom surprised me with the new Misono chef’s knife I desperately wanted and an All-Clad fry pan/basket combo.  It was a good Christmas – I got to cook and I got new toys.  What more could a girl want?  Merry Christmas.

I made Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignon today – the one from MTAOFC.  Five hours in the kitchen and 2 rounds with the dishwasher, using pretty much every dish/bowl/pot/pan I own.  And the constant mess of grease I was cleaning off the stovetop and counters.  But it was SO worth it for the 20 minutes of blissful eating.  I was going to make some mashed potatoes but then realized that both of the pots that would have been large enough to boil the potatoes were already taken.  So I made some roasted potatoes instead, which weren’t amazing but they worked.  I followed the recipe exactly with one minor exception – I couldn’t find a slab of bacon with rind at the market.  So I used my regular thick-cut bacon, and I’m sure the overall flavor suffered a little bit but it was still wonderful.  I also learned today that if you heat some oil along with butter in a pan – for a saute – that it keeps the butter from burning.

I won’t be writing tomorrow, as we will be en route to Ohio for Christmas.  And I won’t be cooking again until Christmas Eve.  I offered to start cooking dinner a couple of years ago and I’ve been roped in ever since.  Not that I mind, and this year I get to cook for 26 of my family members…my biggest crowd so far.  Mom’s doing some pre-shopping, and we’ll finish it off on Wednesday.  I hope we can make it out tomorrow after the 22 inches of snow that buried us yesterday.  Two days of being stuck in the house is starting to give me cabin fever.  I think the Wrangler should be fine if we can get out of our neighborhood.  Speaking of the Wrangler…I’m absolutely taking it with me to France.

I’ve done very little cooking this week – should I feel bad?  And I discovered I am less productive when I have hours of time on my hands.  I had very good intentions of making ‘Julia’s’ Boeuf Bourguignon for dinner today.  I braved the grocery store yesterday with the masses of people shopping like they would be snowed in for weeks to get my provisions (have I used that word before?  do I say it too much?).  The weather forecast went from calling for 6 inches of snow to 18-24 inches of snow for today.  Yeah!  A whole day forced to be at home – which is difficult, for those of you who know me – and I would be so productive.  I made a big breakfast, but we got started a bit late as my daughter is prone to sleeping in until 10am on the weekends.  I had been up for four hours at that point, full of coffee and shaking like Tweek from South Park.  Not very helpful when you then try to cook bacon, pancakes, and scrambled eggs while talking to your mother on the phone about roasting pans and Christmas dinner menus.  I had no motivation to do anything after that except watch the snow and more back episodes of Big Bang Theory.  Around 5pm I decided it was too late to attempt the stew since I do have others to feed besides myself.  I ended up cooking some hazelnut-crusted chicken breasts with a raspberry sauce.  I also learned that coarse sea salt doesn’t really melt properly after only being in the oven for 20 minutes.  SQ, on the other hand, loved the salt surprise in the chicken crust.  I also need to figure out a way to get the crust to better stick to the chicken.  It kept coming off in pieces while I was browning it in the pan.  It tasted delicious, but it wasn’t as pretty as I had hoped.

The BIGGER news is that I am now the extremely proud owner of the mac daddy Cuisinart food processor!!!  Even if no one else is reading this, my husband is, and he drove all the way to Williams-Sonoma on Wednesday to buy it for me as an early Christmas present.  I did spend some time today pulling it out of it’s packaging and petting it.  Now I have a really nice, gently used, two-year old 11-cup Cuisinart food processor that needs a good home.  I could post that on my Facebook page, but I need to make sure it’s new owner will care for it the way I do.  Why am I talking about my kitchen tools like they are pets?  Probably because it’s after 11pm and I really need to go to bed.  I will make the Boeuf Bourguignon tomorrow – my first attempt at Julia’s version.  Wish me luck.

There’s a new Cuisinart food processor that I’m just DYING to get!  I have a really nice one now, and I’ve only had it for a couple of years so it’s still in really good condition.  But this new version – the ‘Elite Die-Cast’ – really is the mac daddy, nay, the queen mother of all food processors.  It has 3 different bowl sizes which can be switched out without making a mess, a retractable cord, and storage cases for all the parts (a major problem for me now…I have to move gingerly around the pieces lest I slice off a finger), along with several other features.  Maybe someone would buy mine from me so I can get this new one!  Williams-Sonoma is selling the 16-cup version for $300, and Sur La Table is selling a 14-cup version for the same price.  Hmmm, wonder which one I should get??  If you have never used a food processor they can make your life so much easier in the kitchen.  Granted, the cleanup is a bit involved, but it’s so worth it.  I’m not putting this on my Christmas wish list as there are so many other kitchen ‘things’ that I think I want, and I don’t think anyone is going to fork over $300 to purchase this for me.  And I’ve already hit up my husband for a totally useless and expensive, but gorgeous, bracelet.

I completely intended to cook dinner tonight, but forgot that Sydney has a choral concert at school.  So, ashamedly, it was a fast-food kind of night.  And we live in a very small town, so the options are quite limited.  I won’t be back in the kitchen until Thursday – I have a holiday dinner party with my office colleagues at Clyde’s Willow Creek Farm tomorrow night.  Beautiful and historic building, but the food is unpredictable.  They do have really great brunch.

I really love making different dishes all the time.  I’m not the kind of person who likes to make the same thing over and over again, even if it’s something I like a lot.  Tonight, I tried a soup recipe that I pulled out of one of my Gourmet magazines – Barbecue-Rubbed Scallops and Creamy Sauerkraut Soup.  I was in too much of a time crunch to make my own sauerkraut, not that I would know how, and I couldn’t find sumac but it still turned out to be really delicious.  I did a quick search for sumac substitutes, and the only thing I could find said lemon zest and salt would be a decent stand-in…so that’s what I went with.  Turns out sumac is a Middle Eastern spice, and I’m sure I could find it locally, but I was too exhausted to make the attempt after Christmas shopping for 4 hours yesterday.  I don’t normally care for sauerkraut, and I think it smells awful, but after it’s been cooked in a bit of white wine it’s not so bad.  This is part of my ever-continuing quest to expand my food horizons.  The other thing this soup has in it that makes me happy is bacon.  And heavy cream.  I have started buying Kunzler’s thick-sliced bacon, which comes out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  It’s the best bacon I have been able to find so far in a grocery store, and shockingly they sell it in our small-town Giant.  My next bacon experiment is to order some from Surry Farms, which raises Berkshire pigs.  There was nothing complicated about this soup, and didn’t really challenge me, but I needed something easy and elegant.  Sydney had Girl Scouts this evening so I didn’t have time to be doing something crazy in the kitchen.  We finished this off with some baby arugula and a decent bottle of white Bordeaux.

I love wine, and would like to figure out the landscape a little bit better, maybe take some classes.  Oh, right, that would be after finishing my cooking classes, re-learning French, finding property in France, and navigating the tricky legal waters that surround a move to a foreign country.  And I didn’t start up on my Rosetta Stone this past weekend like I intended.  I’m thinking that will have to go on my New Year’s resolutions list now.

The theme this week has been ‘food that goes with rice’.  I made a Cuban ropa vieja tonight – SQ actually liked this one (he doesn’t generally like ’stews’).  I need to focus more on making dishes that require my complete attention, otherwise I just stand in the kitchen and snack on anything I can find.  Tonight was no exception.  The beef and peppers was in a slow cooker all day, so I had almost nothing to do but make some rice.  I stood around drinking a Negra Modelo and popping Butterfinger bites into my mouth.  I’m generally not a big fan of slow cookers…I think they slow cook the taste out of most things, though the fancy All Clad version I have has been very nice to me.  I made this dish with a flank steak, and was pleasantly surprised at how nicely it shredded up at the end of 8 hours braising.  And my house smelled like oregano and cumin all day, which is a really nice smell when you have to work on a laptop all day.  A bit of fresh cilantro sprinkled on top of the whole thing at the end really made the dish.

I’m so excited for Christmas – I have a long laundry list of kitchen ’stuff’ that I want, and I hope I get at least a little bit of it.  I’m Le Creuset-less right now, as well as having no money to invest in it, so I’m hoping Santa is nice to me again this year.  My favorite French dishes would be so much nicer in a saucy black Le Creuset dutch oven.  My next project is to find a bit of space and materials to keep live herbs growing in my kitchen.  It’s so annoying to have to keep re-buying them, and then making dishes each night that call for said herbs until they are gone, lest I waste any of it.  Throwing basil or thyme down the sink should be a crime.

I made the pork tenderloin stir-fry tonight instead of last night, as promised.  Don’t hold me to my promises – my desire to cook on some nights is severely dependent on how much sleep I got the night before.  So, it was what SQ would call ‘meh’.  He DID have a great suggestion to add cashews, but overall it could have used a little more zing.  If I repeat this dish, I will swap out spicy Asian chili sauce instead of the sweet variety that I used.  It also had some sliced-up tangerines, green onions, soy sauce, Chinese 5-spice powder, and bok choy.  It was a nice easy dish for a busy weeknight, but I was almost too tired to even do that much.  I’m glad I live in a small town where the ‘eating out’ options are pretty limited.

I still need to get our Christmas tree put up, fill out my Christmas cards and send…but I think I will go back to my ‘Big Bang Theory’ marathon for the next couple of hours now.  Good night.

The new L’Academie de Cuisine catalog showed up in my mailbox today.  I’m now spending my evening browsing through a yummy set of classes that I won’t be able to sign up for – karma currently has other plans for our money (or lack thereof).  Sigh.  I’ve taken a few classes there over the past couple of years in my quest for superior kitchen skills, and they have great instructors.  Like Brian Patterson, who carries his knives in a tackle box emblazoned with what is officially my favorite bumper sticker of all time: ‘I didn’t rise to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.’  I’m still wishin’ and hopin’ to get into their Cooking Techniques program, but it’s out of my budget range right now.  Certification would go a long way to giving me some more credibility.  I just don’t think ‘10 years gourmet home cooking experience’ is going to entice people to fly to France and then pay me to teach them.

And I don’t have cable anymore, so I can’t watch our local DC-area chef, Bryan Voltaggio, compete to win the finale on ‘Top Chef.’  I guess I’ll go back to my catalog.  Must get started re-learning French this weekend with the Rosetta Stone software that’s been sitting in a drawer for the past year.

I couldn’t be bothered to do anything more tonight than boil some De Cecco spaghetti and heat up some (expensive) Lucini Tomato Basil sauce, which was actually pretty good.  I didn’t even have a good Pinot Noir to go with it.  SQ was relegated to drinking beer.

SQ hates spaghetti, and he begged me to make him something else.  If there’s one thing I’ve never been it’s a short-order cook.  I refuse to replay all over again what my mother did for my sister and I when we were growing up.  So Sydney has learned to eat pretty much everything, and they are a joy to cook for every time I’m in the kitchen.  So, I’m trying to get Christmas cards filled out and presents ordered online before the big day catches up to me once again.  I’m searching for ‘friend’ presents, but I keep getting distracted with all the kitchen gadgets I would like for myself.  Check in tomorrow evening – I’m going to try a stir-fry with the other pork tenderloin that came in my package from yesterday.

I love Alton Brown. Really, he’s the biggest food nerd so I can completely relate. I’m not a Food Network fan at all, but I occasionally catch his show ‘Good Eats.’ Less often now that I don’t have cable. I was in Phoenix last week, and on my last night in town I came across his show. As I love all things from a pig, I watched. He marinated and grilled (I’ll have to give that a try in another season), then gave a little history lesson on Beef Wellington, finally suggesting that you could replace the beef with pork tenderloin. Wow – pork wrapped in pork. I decided to give it a go tonight, and it was easier than I thought it would be. Here’s the recipe for Pork Wellington.   I served it with a side of balsamic-roasted vegetables, and we washed everything down with a very jam-y Argentinian Malbec that paired better than I thought it would.  Prosciutto di parma is very salty, so if you have concerns with that be careful.  SQ was in heaven, but was still asking if I could make it with beef next time.  You can take the boy out of the midwest, but you can’t take the midwest out of the boy….