Weekend Pictures

rose-prosecco

Rose prosecco is pretty and refreshing when very cold.  Unfortunately, it does start to taste an awful lot like bubble gum as it reaches room temperature!

raw-salad

There is something about warm weather that makes us crave raw food.  My taste buds have also been clamoring for simple sides like sliced cucumber, greek yogurt, and chopped oregano tossed together.

buttermilk-cake

I have discovered that while cooking is a hard task for our 4 year old to help me with, given the sharp knives and hot pans, baking is something that is not beyond her reach.  So all of a sudden I find myself baking.  Last Sunday, we made the raspberry buttermilk cake Smitten Kitchen recently posted, and it was delicious.

Well, okay, actually munchkin and I started the cake, then realized that we had no eggs, started driving to the store and got a flat tire. This happened right next to an angus beef farm, and it was a toss-up which was more exciting: cows or daddy “fixing” the broken car (I did not disclose that I know as much about cars as I do particle accelerators or cricket rules, i.e. very little).  As I took the car in to buy a new tire, Lisl finished the cake.  Thankfully eating this cake was a lot less dramatic, and a lot more enjoyable!

Roasted Lamb with Grain Mustard and Soy Sauce

lamb-soy-mustard-plated

Lisl first made this lamb roast not long after we met. If I went for sensational titles I’d call this the “how to impress your new boyfriend without slaving in the kitchen, but make him think you did” lamb roast.  It actually remains my favorite way to cook lamb by a long shot, and it is so easy to do that it isn’t really a recipe but a simple process (which is one reason why I have time to blog it at the moment).

Lisl prefers to do this roast with a leg of lamb, but we used a boneless lamb sirloin roast and while it fell apart a bit when slicing, I found this cut to be incredibly good.  I also loved the gratin we served with it, which I’ll describe at the bottom of the post.

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Birthday Pavlova

pavlova-full

Every year on my birthday, my family would have my favorite dessert, Pavlova. Inspired by the famous prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova, who toured Australia in the 1920s, this meringue, whipped cream and fruit concoction is an Australian institution. I’ve since heard that it has been also claimed by New Zealand, which Pavlova also visited on her 1926 tour. This is, of course, just one in a long line of disputed cultural icons ranging from film actors to politicians. Difficulties in Australian/NZ relations aside, it’s a pretty delicious dessert.

Being a busy working woman, my mother purchased my birthday pavlovas from Pavlova Pantry — yes, the dessert was so popular in Sydney through the 1970s and 80s that a chain of these popped up serving huge and quite good pavlovas. I don’t know if they still exist. Much later, after moving to the US, I found that it is really easy to make yourself, and quite a bit nicer than the store-bought variety.

Preheat oven to 275 degrees

Beat the following until stiff peaks form:
4 egg whites
¼ tsp cream of tartar
¼ salt

Add:
1 cup sugar, ¼ cup at a time until incorporated and mixture is stiff and glossy

Then add:
4 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp vanilla essence

Put mixture into a lightly greased and floured 8” springform pan, heaping so slightly higher at sides than center (don’t worry about what the top looks like, as this will be completely covered at the end)

Bake for 1 hour until firm and lightly browned. The pavlova will have a crisp meringue crust but stay moist on the inside

Cool slightly and unmold. When completely cool, top with 1 cup heavy cream whipped stiff. Top this with berries tossed in Grand Marnier. You can also use other fruits (e.g. passionfruit, kiwi fruit). Refrigerate uncovered until ready to serve.

pavlova1

Out to Lunch

strawberries

By “out to lunch”, I mean that work has been an all-day, all-night thing lately, so while I have been making some time to cook with the family, the closest thing I’ve come to a food blog in the last two weeks has been reading David Lebovitz’s absolutely delightful The Sweet Life in Paris on the train.  My RSS reader has quite a backlog.

My goal with this blog is to continually improve the quality of content and photography, so I’d rather be quiet than slapdash, but please pardon the radio silence (speaking of photography, I’ve been bothering a few of you out there about Digital SLRs and thank you so much for helping me make sense of the Canon/Nikon world).

We did disappear up to the Catskills last weekend and I was delighted to see that we had beaten the deer to the wild strawberries.  Hunting tiny strawberries makes for a marvelous 4-yr old activity.  Of course, like a scrawny kid dreaming of Charles Atlas, our wild strawberries can only fantasize about becoming the beauties shown at the top of the post, which came from a local farm.

beef-ice

I also briefly attended an event held at the Institute of Culinary Education put on by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (that picture is chef Dave Zino doing a demonstration).  I rarely work with tenderloin, so it was fun to roll up my sleeves and learn how to properly trim a full tenderloin from an expert.

The PR team is smart to reach out to food bloggers, who can be considered the “early adopters” and “evangelizers” of the food world. I winced, however, when we started with a braise 101 demonstration.  I know that I braise a *lot*, but I would have been surprised if any of the food bloggers in the room did not already know the information.  I guess food bloggers are a tough audience to calibrate, since there can be such a range of background and experience, but there are a lot of very sophisticated cooks out there.  My advice, which I try to follow when I speak at conferences, is to always over-estimate your audience rather than under-estimate them.  With the former, you risk confusion but at least the audience feels challenged; with the latter, you risk boring or, worse, offending.

However, I don’t want to sound snippish because I enjoyed myself.  The Beef representatives were incredibly nice, put a lot of effort into the event, and even deflected my attempts to talk agri-business politics in the sweetest of ways!

choc-cake

I haven’t completely abandoned the kitchen for financial models and startup planning.  For Lisl’s birthday, kiddo and I made the chocolate cake from Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food, albeit with all-purpose flour not cake flour, and it was fantastic, like everything from that book.  My wife tells me that my newly discovered, and positively surprising, interest in baking must be from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book.  It reminds me of a a funny T-shirt at Fleisher’s that says “bacon, the gateway meat”.  Perhaps that book is the gateway bake!

Finally I’ll note that when I last made a peasant bean stew (my hack cassoulet), I speculated that leftover braised pork shoulder would be great in the dish.  I can now emphatically state that this is the case, but I suppose there never was much risk of that being wrong!  (I don’t braise a pork should quite as often as Stacey roasts a chicken, but it might be close!)