I’ve got a couple plates of chaud-froid de poulet with blanched asparagus waiting on my wife to arrive home. I failed to fully dissolve the gelatin powder, so my jelly is a kind of speckled, but otherwise it’s a pretty dang attractive-looking dish.
Tahitian Grade B beans (which are only about 6 inches long) are about $15 a pound on Ebay. Honestly the only difference I could see between these and the type we buy at Target where we only get 3 for $10 was the size, these were about an inch shorter. Taste and scent is just as good as anything we’ve used.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230397336772
There really is not much of a recipe. To meet U.S. guidelines for extract you just need to use 37.5-40% alcohol, 75-80 proof and about 8 beans per cup of alcohol (we’re doing some rum and some vodka just to try it out).
Slice them in half, scrape the insides into the vodka, then throw the husk in with it. Shake it every day for a week, then once a week until it’s done. Two months minimum up to six months. Then just drain it through cheesecloth into fancy bottles. http://www.save-on-crafts.com/corktopbottles.html
I guess we’ll see around Christmas how it turns out.
Edit - My wife just said she actually thinks these beans were better than the stuff we got at Sur Table which we thought were a little dry. And I think they were even more expensive than Target. Also more info on all things vanilla and extract is here. http://www.vanillareview.com/
I thought the same thing, and only went for it because we figured most of the people we’re gifting it too probably wouldn’t know good vanilla extract anyway, so if it turned out poorly they’d still be impressed. After this experience I’m ready to try again though. We love experimenting with new spices, but in Northern Utah there aren’t a lot of options, especially for fresh stuff. If I can find more as good as these beans I’m going to go crazy stocking up.
Chocolate-orange macaroons. I made them for a work potluck, since my husband doesn’t like coconut, the weirdo.
Pro tip: when separating eggs with your hands, bring the eggs to room temperature first.
I don’t like the coconut either. I am also a big weirdo. Possible connection?
I had some yummy fish tacos at work this week from the cafeteria. I want to make this for my family this weekend, but I need help.
I can probably handle the fish, but I wonder if anyone knows of a good recipe for the relishes? At work we had a choice: a nice fruity mango sauce or one with corn and (I think) cilantro, possibly some tomato. A little hot sauce and they were both very good. I wish I were a more capable cook, but I seem to need very explicit directions to pull anything like this off. I was hoping someone might be able to point me to an online recipe somewhere?
Athryn
1967
Do a search on epicurious.com for mango salsa and/or corn salsa. There and the food network’s site are good places to start. Allrecipies.com can be good too, but some of their recipes are of the Sandra Lee school of cooking.
Nellie
1968
I hesitate on a predominently US based forum to call tonight’s dinner a Chowder, but it involved haddock, some home grown sweetcorn, potato and cream.
Made a veg stock with some onions, bayleaves, garlic, pepper and celery. Added some potatoes and boiled until the potatoes were cooked leaving the original veg in the stock.
Meantime I poached the smoked haddock in a mix of water and milk until just starting to flake, removed the skins, flaked the fish and reserved the poaching liquor.
Blended the veg in the stock and sieved. Bought back to a rolling boil and added chunks of potato and the sweetcorn and reduced to “more than a simmer” for about 10 minutes until the potato was just on the edge of being done.
Added single cream and the flaked fish, cooked for a couple of minutes and served topped with a sprinkling of gruyere cheese and some red onion and garlic flatbread.
Awesome. Sometimes just having the right language is all you need. My googles for fish tacos hadn’t turned up as much as corn/mango salsas. Thanks!
nlanza
1970
Nothin’ wrong with fish chowder. That sounds really good.
Athryn
1971
Haha, googling for fish tacos is potentially dangerous!
So I’m making a multi-purpose cranberry syrup because I got kind of embarrassingly hooked on Smitten Kitchen today, and I was wondering.
This is a bloody simple syrup: cranberries, sugar, and water, strained and drizzled into all things that could use an infusion of cranberry goodness.
There’s a bottle of mango vodka staring me in the face on the kitchen counter.
At least according to the local smoothie places, cranberries and mango go well together.
Anyone have any tips for making this syrup slightly boozy, but not enough to knock me out if I drizzle it over ice cream before an evening rehearsal?
Result: the mango flavor really doesn’t carry over, so I have slightly boozy cranberry syrup. Still, not a bad thing at all to pair with ginger ale. :)
Leah_C
1975
I made pumpkin pie pop tarts last weekend. They looked a little boring on their own, so I used the dough scraps to turn them into STAR WARS pumpkin pie pop tarts. Everyone seemed to want Yoda or a Storm Trooper for some reason. Boba Fett and Darth Vader got very little love.
I used this recipe with a few changes. I added a dash of nutmeg to the pie filling, refrigerated the dough longer (mostly because it was really humid here and it seemed to be extra sticky), and I let the glaze sit for a few hours before putting it on. The glaze tasted kind of gross/bland/sugary straight away but seemed to take on more of the maple flavor after sitting awhile.
So me and a friend of mine from Bordeaux entered a food competition for students about a week ago. We went for French food. It was the kind of event where you bring along your food, and there’s no good way of reheating it there, so we opted for food that could be served cold. We went with a classic vichyssoise soup with homemade baguette (pain l’ancienne from the breadbaker’s apprentice), raspberry macarons (tricky as my piping bag exploded a few days before and the store was sold out), and canele, which is a really cool specialty from Bordeaux that requires special molds.
There were 26 teams in total and we came third, which I’m pretty happy about. Thailand won and Mexico came second. They put a lot more effort into their presentation, so since our food pretty much kicked ass I think we could’ve won if we had printed out some stuff and made it prettier. Oh well, fun times.
XPav
1978
I’ve been cooking lots of recipes out of Cooks Illustrated recently. None of them have been bad.
Gendal
1979
Trying to learn how to cook myself, and it’s where I have had the best luck. Absolutely worth the money for the web site or magazine.
The Holiday Baking Blitz begins soon! Among the planned goodies to be distributed among family and friends are oatmeal scones with maple glaze, cinnamon coffee cake, chocolate gingerbread cookies, etc. I’ll have to repurpose a card table because I don’t have enough counter space to roll out dough.
