success/failure (sort of)

Table is all set, a balance of shamrock, ivory, turquoise, and sunflower Fiestaware. Glasses are out for some pink wine to be poured. Nuts are there for snacking. The ribs? They came out of the oven from their first bake a while ago, and now they just await a sauce I threw together from ketchup, soy sauce, sriracha, molasses, vinegar, and I think that's it. It should be a good dinner with John and Bryan.

Should be.

Dinner, in fact, was. I had everything all set so there was minimal fussing in the kitchen, and I could even join Conrad and our guests on the balcony for a while before glazing the ribs, getting them back in the oven, and getting the veggies going (corn on the cob and salad). Finger bowls, even, finger bowls!
We ate, it was good.

And then came dessert.

Ah dessert, I am so out of practice. I tackled a new recipe that evening, and didn't quite get it right. See that?

That's a mango upside down cake. Doesn't look too moist and syrupy, though, I know. In fact, it looks rather like a coffee cake topped with streusel, and truthfully, that's how the upside down part turned out. It didn't stay soft and runny, getting soaked into the cake. Well, a little. Instead, it hardened into something of a candy (not too hard a candy, mind you), and I had to work at it to get the brown sugar mixture out of the pan after I turned out the cake. Once I had smeared it back on the cake top, it hardened a little further, and essentially became the streusel. I blame it on using too fine a shred of unsweetened coconut. Darn it.

Still, it tasted pretty fine with a dollop of whipped cream (stirred with a bit of yogurt for tang and coconut extract for scent). If I'd not told anyone, they'd never know.


But I can't lie to you, the three people in the world who read this blog. Sorry. Sort of a cake failure, but one that we devoured altogether easily in the end.

pretty enough, but overcooked

Two blog entries in one night. Remarkable.

A shorter entry. In amidst all we've done today, I whipped up a very quick dinner. No, really. Only a few dishes, things cooked simply. Tasty enough, pretty enough. A pity I overcooked the fish.



Oh, it wasn't bad. The salmon was entirely edible, certainly with the aid of what we might loosely call a Veracruzana sauce. Atop the arugula (which wilted some from the heat of the fish) and with roasted asparagus, it made for a decent enough dinner. I'm a little miffed at myself, but how full I am now is a testament to how not-exactly-horrible it was in the end.

:-)

But never let it be said that I only make great food. I make a lot of mediocre food, and I have shocking habits (cereal for dinner) when Conrad is out of town (he's in town right now). You just don't get to see those on this blog!

wildly inconsistent

I like to cook for others. I like to explore simple baking, easy dishes that taste good. Cookies recently, but also some dinners I've not bothered to blog, such as tonight's turkey thigh oven-braised with chorizo, then sliced and served on rapini with a reduction of the braising liquid. Nothing too hard, truly, but tasty just the same.

My trouble is that I'm lazy and careless and don't do things with much precision. Tonight's cookies being a case in point. I won't even photograph the peanut crisps that varied so badly from sheet to sheet. I will say that it is the tastiest cookie dough I've eaten in ages - I think I made a second dinner of it tonight. The results, though, don't please me outright, and I'm forced to pick through them to find reasonable-looking ones to take up to the UP this coming weekend.

The other cookie tonight was also a Martha recipe, done for the first time. I just about choked after I made the dough and saw that it makes only 1 dozen cookies - some big cookies, I tell you. The Ne Plus Ultra Cookie, it is called. Or, we could call it one honking big chocolate chip cookie that also includes nuts and raisins.

:-)

Even these were not consistently sized, and again I'm picking out the better ones to go up north.

[sigh]

As for the others, well, doubtless someone at work will eat them!

C is for Compulsion, and that's...

...not very good. Rather like the recipe I tried tonight. Mexican chocolate and pepita shortbread. Cut out into little howling coyote shapes that in retrospect rather resemble cats with heads tipped to one side.

Anyway, awful recipe. Oh, great for pressing into a pan and using as the crust for a cheesecake or similar dessert. Far far too dry and crumbly to make cut out cookies. A shame - the dough tasted fine. Yes, I'm on another cookie dough binge. I will stop, I promise.

I added eggs to the crumbliness, and that bound it some. The result was still difficult to work with, fragile. I made four trays and retired the rest to the freezer for use as a crust one day. Or to discard when I need some room. The latter is more likely.

The kicker is I thought the recipe looked so very good and easy, I doubled the batch.

I think I should get a good night's sleep and keep out of the kitchen for a few days save to make dinner.

In the end, meringues

So, meringues it is. Home early from work, I quickly put together dinner (charred some tomatoes in a hot skillet; chopped them; tossed them with red onion slices, chopped rosemary, coarse salt, and a bit of olive oil; let it sit while cooking pasta; tossed the pasta and uncooked sauce together with a bit of feta; served with a salad), then set to work on making meringue cookies while waiting for Conrad to come home.

The recipe comes from an Emily Luchetti cookbook, Stars Desserts. It's one of the bibles in my kitchen. I searched high and low for it in hardcover, and I'm using it enough to have to take it for rebinding one day, I think. The chocolate meringue cookie recipe is a simple one requiring exactly the 6 egg whites I had on hand. So, cookies it was - rather than the cake I thought I might do - and a batch of imperfect but delicious chocolatey blobs sit on my counter. I hope the humidity lately will not affect them adversely, else Conrad will be taking in to work tomorrow a collection of tasty chocolatey crumbs that resemble this:



I don't care to discuss the Valentine's Day Meringue Massacre, however. Read for yourself.

Should I pack tonight, I wonder?