Category: 52cookbooks

last week (10 days ago) I had the honest to goodness verifiable with a swab (gross), infuenza type A.  I woke up Sunday morning with a weird painful cough.  By Monday morning I had a migraine that was like a mallet with every wracking cough and Z sent me to the Dr.  Best Martin Luther King Jr Day ever.  The doctor asked me if I’ve ever had a swab before and then said that I should have one since i had a fever.  I said I thought I had one before.  As it turns out I was wrong. If I had known what was coming I would’ve run.  They practically poke you in the brain.  That junk is intense.  Anyhow, like five minutes later she said I had the flu. So POW.  I was down and out for the week.  I still feel  tired and semi-rotten but definitely better.  All that to say, I didn’t cook anything last week.  One night I ate mango sorbet for dinner.  One night Z reheated some sloppy joe’s I had stashed in the freezer.    My taste buds all broke when I was sick and everything tasted horrible and hurt my tongue anyway.  This week was better.  I actually made dinner and felt like eating it.  So, back to the book.  I cooked two dinners out of this week’s book called Fire In My Belly by Kevin Gillespie.  Kevin was a cheftestant on Top Chef and he cooked lots of Southern type food.  This cookbook is Southern in scope but also a lot of regular old chef-style comfort food.  The two meals we made seem like things a chef would eat at about midnight or 2am after dinner service.  The foods are pretty accessible and the ingredients easy to find for the most part.  Story runs through the book and I think the blurbs by recipes are funny.  ‘Feeds 2 ravenous snackers’ 

The first thing I made were twice hash filled baked potatoes.  A load of sausage and cheese are hashed with the insides of baked potatoes and sprinkled with diced jalapenos.  They were topped off with a really fresh and tasty lime creme fraiche (sour cream because we can’t really get creme fraiche here)  We really liked the dish.  It was easy and comfortable.  The leftovers reheated great the next day at work too.  The second dish was cheddar waffles.  They totally went sideways.  I’m not sure what went wrong with them exactly.  Somehow the egg whites didn’t incorporate and the baking soda didn’t do it’s thing because they didn’t rise at all.  But the cheddar waffle combined with Blis bourbon barrel maple syrup and fried eggs was AMAZING.  I could eat that every day.  A little bit of hickory thick cut bacon didn’t hurt either.  Both dishes were easy.  They both tasted great.  We’ll be back to this cookbook a lot more often.

because of things totally in my control I made this the most complicated dinner I’ve made in the last six months – and that’s saying something after Thanksgiving which wasn’t that complicated, just took a long time.  I’m cooking from one of the first cookbooks I bought myself when I picked up my cooking ‘hobby’.  It is called Potatoes by Annie Nichols.  The worn sticker on the back proclaims I bought it at Williams Sonoma but you can pick it up for a song on Amazon.  I have cooked more than a handful of recipes from it-everything from Rosti to Champ to the best Massaman style Thai curry.  Never anything Indian though.  I’ve made one or two Indian meals in the past and let’s just say that they aren’t my forte.  I one time, having maybe eaten one Indian meal made an Indian feast for like 12 people.  It took me ALL day.  

Tonight we made dosa-which are essentially/roughly/kind of crepes and dhal aloo (lentil potatoes masala) with sambar.  The dhal aloo was from the Potato cookbook.  It was fairly easy to follow and took about 45 minutes to make. Overall, a more challenging recipe than most in the book but doable.  On the side we had pappadoms and chili chutney.  The only things here that we actually tried to make were the dosa and the dhal aloo.  Hilariously the dosa didn’t turn out and I burned the dhal aloo. I do not fault the recipe because I love this cookbook and really, it was tasty other that a kind of undercurrent of burnyness.   My stove is glass topped and irritates me endlessly.  Because of that the dosa seriously stressed me out so Z had to take over.  He did a way better job than I did and we at least ended up with two-one for each.  We stuffed them with the potatoes and dipped in a Patak chili chutney that was fiery!  The photos tell a story of a really well put together dinner.  It could have been. 

The first cookbook off the shelf was probably meant to be.  Z received a box of chemicals for Christmas.  Little foil packets of white powder…  Riggghhht.  Anyway,  weirdly two of my gifts for him came in silver foil clear fronted packets this year.  And he bought me a Besh Box that had a 1# bag of pecans in it that also came in a big foil pouch.  More on that another day I guess.  Foil packets  must be what all the cool kids are doing for packaging this year.  Anyway, one of his packets was Versawhip from Willpowder and is actually ezymatically changed soy protein that can be hydrated and used to whip things into a foam that ordinarily wouldn’t want to do that – like maple syrup.   So, for our first meal, I chose Try this at home, by Richard Blais.  If you aren’t familiar with Richard Blais, he was on Top Chef (and won All Stars) and known for a few notable things, fun hair and molecular gastronomy.   He  probably also made molecular gastronomy with it’s foam, liquid nitrogen and powders more accessible to the home cook.  I guess.  I don’t really know if that’s true exactly but I guess what I mean is he made me feel like I could probably do it.  I don’t know why exactly.  But what I can say about these things is half the work is in procuring the obscurish ingredients and/or kitchen paraphenalia and then being able to have a recipe to use it.   Z bought me the book this summer, for my birthday I think and I have used it once or twice but this time, with a vengeance.  We made the simple into the sublime.  Pancakes with Coffee Butter, Maple Foam, syrup & chopped pecans.  Seems complicated and yet with both of us cooking really only took 20 or 30 minutes.  I made the pancakes while Z combined reduced coffee with butter until it was creamy and also beat the maple syrup with versawhip until it was soft peaky- think sugary meringue.  The whole thing was like the most intense happy brunch meal ever.   It hit us differently.  Z said, ‘I thought it was fun.  I’d make it again and I’d make it for guests.  I’m not sure it’s a good dinner.’  But like I said, I thought it was a super intense happy supersweet brunch dish.  He didn’t get the sweet.  It was really fun to make and probably a first go for us with the ultra forgiving versawhip.  Plus, just look at it!  Delicious.