webcowgirl

Well, I was feeling a little restless and grumpy as I came home tonight - work sure isn't doing much for me lately. But I had not one but two guests coming over for dinner, and a big chicken in my purse, and I was going to make some magic happen. I was supposed to make cauliflower pasta bake happen but couldn't find any C, so bought zukes instead.

So: Chicken has garlic cloves and rosemary stuffed in it, under its skin, and inside the cavity. I smothered it with lemon lime marmalade and in she went.

Next was the pasta. I kind of combined all the recipes I had. I sauteed halved zuke slices, adding raisins, then when almost done parsley, then some saffron and a bit of water. I took the cooked rigatoni (enough for four), made a slop of ricotta, grated motz, and two eggs, then mixed in the pasta and then the cooked zuke mix. I put it all in a buttered casserole dish, put a little more motz on top (to reduce the top layer of the pasta burning), then sprinkled the whole thing with bread crumbs.

I'll try to post the real recipe for baked cauliflower pasta at some point, but later on tonight I'll let you know if what I made up worked. Now I'm going to eat.

This is the recipe for roast lamb I mostly followed last Sunday when I made the "Agnello Miracoli." It's from The Silver Spoon, which has become one of my two food bibles, right up there with the Joy of Cooking.

6 T butter
4 1/2 lb leg of lamb
3 oz pancetta, cut into strips (I actually used cubed, frozen pancetta, about 1/3 cup)
6 fresh sage leaves, cut into strips (I skipped this)
1 T rosemary needles (I used a bunch of fresh rosemary, on the stem)
olive oil (for frushing)
4 garlic cloves, chopped (I had mine in fat slivers, or whole)
5 T white wine vinegar
5 T white wine
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400F. Grease a roasting pan with the butter.
AT THIS POINT THE RECIPE SAYS:
Lard the lamb with the pancetta and, using a small, pointed, knife, make small incisions all over it. Insert the sage and some of the rosemary into the incisions.
BUT WHAT I DID WAS:
Jam some holes into the lamb with a sharp, thin knife. Shove cubes of frozen pancetta into the holes, then stuff a bit of the garlic (a whole clove if it will fit or a sliver otherwise) in after the pancetta. Add some of the rosemary stems in, cutting them off at the skin. Jam a few more holes in, deep, and thread the rosemary stems into the holes, adding some more garlic if you have it.
THE RECIPE CONTINUES
Brush the lamb all over with oil, place in the prepared roasitng pan and season with salt and pepper according to taste. Sprinkle the garlic and remaining rosemary on top.
WHAT I DID WAS:
Oil the lamb, pepper it, then sprinkle sea salt on it. Put diced garlic (1-2 T) and a few branches of rosemary (whatever you've got left) on top of the lamb.
THE RECIPE CONTINUES
Pour in the vinegar and wine and roast for 1 1/2 hours. Turn the lamb half way through the cooking and baste occasionally with the cooking juices.
WHAT I DID WAS
Pour in vinegar and wine and roast until done (175 degrees is about right). You can completely forget about it provided the lamb sits fatty side up in the pan.

Well, I opened the poussin, and they smelled like fish. Only fish should smell like fish, and generally fish shouldn't really smell fishy, either. Meat should mostly smell like nothing. So I threw them all out, apologizing to the God of All Chickens for the horrible waste of these little birds' lives - and yet, really, really not wanting to get food poisoning again. My guess here is that the fridge at work just wasn't cold enough to store them in for two days. My bad.

This put me in the unfortunate situation of having three people (including me) expecting me to make dinner, so I put on my Iron Chef Putney! hat and made miracles happen. In this case, I took half a container of ricotta, mixed it with some cheeses (edam and parmesan) and an egg, boiled some pasta, fried together the one remaining Italian sausage and some back bacon, stirred some chopped prosciutto into the cheese mixture, then dumped all of it into the pasta once it was done. Voila! Um ... warm food! I also served a bit of acorn squash (it was goign to be stuffed with rice, but that only made sense with the chicken) and salad, and we had melon for dessert.

Anyway - it wasn't genius but it was warm food and everyone said it tasted alright - and, really, it did.

And now - reviewing shadowdaddy's play, and maybe an early evening - I'm just really worn out.

Boy, it's quiet in here today. I don't know if the girl who was sitting next to me will even come back, ever. It's ... disturbing.

Last night I tried my hand at paella, as I wanted to do something with the chorizo I'd brought back. I was mostly inspired by a recipe on Cooks.com, but if you know what I like to eat (i.e. no seafood and no asparagus) you can see where I had to change it a bit. This chickpea and chorizo paella looked tastier (quadruple the spice level), but I was convinced by the use of both ham and pork shoulder to go with the Cooks.com recipe instead (though I liked the "quick" element of the chicken and chorizo recipe on Epicurious). Ultimately my paella had onion, bell peppers, green beans, the three porks, white wine, parsley, garlic, saffron, and cayenne pepper (about a teaspoon) as well as the chicken sauce, and it was DEELISH. Key elements: add all liquid at once (unlike risotto); bake after initial add of liquid (makes a nice crust on top).

And now it's off to the Haunted Holborn walk, and tonight we're going to see an election year play, Now Or Later.

So it turns out I really do still know how to bake a cake. I'd consider it a bit of a miracle, all things considered - by which I mean the fact that it was broiled for part of its life, that the butter separated from the rest of the ingredients, that one of the layers was cooked in a frying pan.

Broiled cake It tasted really good, too, nice and moist. Maybe the coconut makes it like that. The icing was so indulgent, butter blended with cream cheese AND some cream added into the whole mixture. If you look below the cut, you can see me icing it before I cut the final inch out of the bottom layer - I figured it would be better to frost the raw edge of the cake than have it have the big uneven lump coming out of the bottom.

(Click the cut link to see a picture of me frosting the cake. Doesn't it look better in the other picture?)

( Read more... )
I was also frustrated by the fact that somehow my cake carrier was left behind in the move. Where it is shadowdaddy has no idea. It's a fantastic piece of deco aluminery, layered shiny silver sides with a curved black top, sitting perfectly on the edged circular bottom (where the cake would rest) and of course a HANDLE on top of it al to make it easy to tote yer cake to a picnic or Quarterly Feed or what have you. We searched the apartment high and low and it was nowhere to be found. While there are still two boxes of Mysterious Stuff in which it might be hiding, my gut instinct is that it's probably hiding in the basement at my brother/sister-in-laws house, to which I say Foo, because I've had that thing for about 15 years and I think this is the first time I actually needed it to carry a cake to an away event rather than just cover it and keep it from collecting dust!

At any rate, I am certainly good at improv, and one pie pan, three Tupperware shot glasses, one large swatch of aluminum foil, and a glass pie plate later, and the cake was ready to rock, or at least to go to wechsler's birthday party. spikeylady and ciphergoth were very kind to fill in as hosts during this rain-filled day, and we had scores (or sixes, at least) of other guests: bathtubgingirl; the entire booklectic contingent, including the very small and fun one and asrana for a total of five; werenerd and some_fox with their houseguests, one of which was weegoddess, for a total of about 6 (they moved fast, I'm not 100% sure how many people came with them, though there was an [Bad username or site: aster13); the brillian <lj user=thekumquat @ livejournal.com], whom I very much missed last night; and a late arriving babysimon, who missed the singing of the happy birthday but most assuredly got some cake.

Wow, it's 60 outside and raining sideways. Brr! I've actualy fished out some sweats and an Expedia baseball jersey. I'm cold!

The cake was a big hit; 3/4 of it was gone. I covered it back up as best as I could, yet somehow with not as much success as the first time, as all the angles were off and the pie plate seemed to be sliding sideways. wechsler then turned to me and said, "It appears that your cake will not be foiled a second time." Oy. Clearly the boy is suffering the ill effects of SOMETHING. And he liked the book of Goon Show (a Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers radio show) scripts I bought him; I can hear him in the back room reading it and giggling as I type. We headed back to our place at around 4:30 or so, as nearly everyone seemed to be struggling heavily with last night's indulgences and naps were called for all around.

Time for a Pimms or something for me, and finally for some sitting down and relaxing, the first time all weekend when I can really relax and do nothing for a while. I love that the sun will be shining for another three hours, even though it makes for difficult DVD watching. Perhaps a round of Boggle is called for.