I was trying, when I started school to not get to this point. I swear I was. But, then I started school in earnest. And then I got made a tutor. And then I became an RA. And I just couldn’t keep it going. I will try and post every once in a while, but I can’t keep promising a post a week and not delivering. I feel guilty, my mom tells me about how she misses my posts, and everything just kind of sucks.
So, I decided to go on hiatus. The site isn’t dead, it is just sleeping.
My Struggles With Sugar
Part Le Deux
Not so very long ago I bared my soul to you all with the perverse tale of my dysfunctional relationship with sugar. My love of all things confectionary was only matched by my colossal failure at reproducing the sweet, sweet candy, of which I can never get enough. Well guess what?
A few weeks ago, I splurged and bought the Christmas issue of “Cook’s Illustrated”. This is the magazine brought to you by the humanitarian geniuses up at America’s Test Kitchen. This is like no food magazine you have ever read. Each recipe has been thoroughly vetted and evaluated by Chris Kimball and the gang. This is exactly what you would expect from them. But each recipe also has columns of directions, little tips, and precise guidance on technique, with illustrations. It’s as if Brigit, Julia and Chris are talking you through each dish. My copies are saved and treasured .
As I was leafing through, a photo caught my eye. The funny thing is, most, if not all of the photography in CI is in black and white. I don’t know how, but their food in grayscale looks mighty tasty. This was a photo of brown sugar fudge. I can’t explain it, but I studied this recipe as though it contained the secret of life. Again, I have no idea why, but I decided to make me some brown sugar fudge. I gathered my ingredients and tools, and prepared to try making candy one very, very, VERY last time.
I attached my thermometer to the side of the pot and began. I added all the ingredients, and reached to turn on the stove. And paused. Boiling sugar to make candy takes time, and normally I would crank up the heat to cut the cooking time. But Christopher urged me to cook it at no more than medium heat. And I seemed to vaguely remember the Whisk (note from the Whisk: Well, I only speak the truth), and various other people (note from the Whisk: Yeah, everyone that has interacted with her for more than ten seconds, or watched her try to wait for something), telling me I lack patience. So…I set the heat to medium. And hung out in front of the stove for what had to have been an entire geological era. But, the temp seemed to be rising slowly (oh, so very slowly), and steadily. I have to admit that I did occasionally turn the heat up a little, but basically coasted up the last few degrees to the desired temp of 234. After it cooled to 120, it was time to stir the fudge. The stirring cools and aerates the fudge, to get the silky, glossy consistency you want. I guess this is why you stir, but remember; I’ve never before made successful fudge. Christopher was very clear, most fudge gets stirred for two or three minutes, but the way to get amazing, America’s Test Kitchen results, was to stir for eight to ten minutes. So I stirred until I couldn’t stir anymore, and then stirred some more. While I was stirring, the seasons changed. Twice. I poured it into the buttered pan, and put it up to cool. Later, to my delight, I had fudge. I had beautiful, yummy, homemade candy! This past Sunday, I made pecan pralines on purpose. It is now Tuesday night, and there are no more pecan pralines left uneaten (note from the Whisk: She better make more when I come home for Christmas).
I normally shy away from any endeavor that might result in personal insight. I know myself well enough to recognize myself in a police line-up and that’s just the way I like it. But, despite my best intentions, that darn Christopher Kimball managed to reveal to me an important truth. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much you want to make candy, or what kind of fancy equipment you may own. Cooking sugar is about patience, and giving up control. It’s waiting instead of acting. It’s one more person, in front of one more stove, hoping for success. It’s also the comforting feeling of belonging to a fellowship of home cooks, standing in front of a stove and stirring (or swirling, depending on what kind of candy they‘re making). I might listen to my MP3 player while I’m making candy on my electric stove, but the process is exactly the same that an ancestor might have used hundreds of years ago.
It’s funny how important lessons you need keep popping up in your life. Patience and shutting up are big hurdles for me. Candy making is a wonderful exercise in restraint. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much for my quietude, as I can’t stop telling everyone I meet (yes, even strangers) about making edible fudge. Maybe Chris’s recipe did have a little of the secret to life.
Thank you for your time and attention.
The Mother of the Whisk.
Hey guys, wait until just a little while later tonight, and there will be a guest post from the mother of the whisk. Sorry folks, but I have finals.
or
Christmas is coming, y’all, so I
hijacked this column to give you guys
the Honest-to-Dog Holiday Post
that the Whisk will never do.
When I was fifteen, I went to a municipal swimming pool in my small hometown. At the pool, there appeared a hurricane in a brown tank suit. It was as if a wood nymph and a biker had had a love child. This whirling dervish of blond hair and profanity couldn’t have been more than 4 foot 8, and I outweighed her by at least thirty pounds. She scared the crap out of me. I’d never met anyone like this in my life. Her name: O’Della Brown. If someone that day had whispered into my ear that this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, I’d have laughed, then peed my pants. This whiskey and cigarettes dame trapped inside a teenager’s body was, gentle readers, the Whisk’s famous Auntie Bo.
O’Della has always had a passion for food. And, she’s not just Kitchen Fairy Godmother to the Whisk. She is my guide as much as she is guide to my child. I had never cooked a big ole piece of pig. Pork butts and hams were big, and mysterious. I was afraid to buy such a big piece of meat and probably ruin it, and throw away the money spent. I was over at Bo’s one evening, and in her carport, she had a smoker set up. She was smoking a giant Boston butt with no drama. She was so casual about it that I found the courage to give it a go. I discovered the answer to the mysterious pig. Those parts are cheap, and easy to cook, depending much more on low and slow, and not so much on the skill of the cook. She also made me pizza on foccacia. I promise, foccacia dough makes the most delicious homemade pizza you’ve ever put in your mouth.
She’s found me when I was lost. We’ve laughed so hard Boones Farm has come out of our noses. We’ve cried so hard I thought we would break. She’s kept me out of jail, and saved my life. For this, and a million other embarrassing memories, thank you Bo, I love you.
For the rest of you guys out there in cyberspace, here is my Holiday gift for you:
I like for my Christmas gifts to be impressive, to make the recipient say wow. These days, all my extra cash is taking the Maple Express up to NECI, so wow can be problematic. So, not being flush enough to shock with a price tag, I make a lot of my own gifts.
I have about eight Christmas treats, four sweet, and four savory, that I make really well. I’ve been working on these recipes in one form or another for more than twenty years. These are the kind of holiday treats that you can’t buy and most people don’t make. It’s the homemade candy that your roommate’s mother sent every year. It’s the cheese crackers that your Aunt made. Not everybody loves everything in my baskets, but everybody has one thing that they love, and look forward to every year.
My basket list is based on a couple of ideas that make my life much simpler when it comes time to actually pack and deliver this stuff. With a mix of sweet and savory, you can tailor the gift to the recipient. For a hostess gift, or a gift to a group, a large mixed assortment is good. I have a diabetic friend that loves spicy, so he gets a whole bunch of my Copper Pennies. My mother usually gets a box of my chocolate covered, homemade marshmallows. Another friend has people visiting constantly during the holidays and loves to put out a tray of my goodies for her guests. And I must confess that I can’t wait to eat the first buckeye of the season.
If you want to put together a roster for yourself, here are a couple of tips: Choose things that you like and are good at making, because you will end up eating some of it and there are no experiments allowed in gift baskets. Recipes that can be partially made and finished later are essential. At the beginning of the season, I make a honking batch of hot cocoa mix and the peanut butter centers of buckeyes. I freeze them, then coat the buckeyes and bag the cocoa when I’m ready to give. I make the dough for my chocolate chip cookies, scoop it out, freeze it, and bake them off later. And I always keep an eye out for interesting (read: cheap) containers. That way, I have a few on hand, and the scramble to assemble a gift is a little less chaotic.
Also a good gift, a note promising to deliver their favorite dish on demand. Your gift doesn’t get lost with all the other food gifts, and you’re off the hook until the note is redeemed. You save time and money. Just make sure you’re prepared to make good on your note. And finally the most important gift-giving advice you will ever get: Never, ever, under any circumstance, give as a present, a piece of exercise equipment! It is neither thoughtful, nor funny.
To the fans and friends of the Whisk:
Happy holidays to you all. I wish for you much peace and happiness. Let’s all make 2011 a chipotle-free year!
Thank you for your time and attention, The Mother of the Whisk.
So, I don’t know how many of you out in internet land have had to deal with it, but I have often found myself going off on tangents about things that completely fail to hold the interest of anyone around you. Sometimes I am talking about Star Trek, sometimes an obscure British show, but usually… I am talking about food again. Something about the farm-to-table movement, or how I am so sick of trendy food, or even something as simple as the Food Network. Something just outside the average interests of the non-food oriented people.
Suddenly I am surrounded by people that, if nothing else, all share a love of food. Honestly? It is kinda weird to know that I could go up to just about anyone here and be able to start a conversation about just about anything food, and be able to talk for hours. Any other topic is kind of iffy, but food? Yeah, food is a common denominator.
The way that classes work up here is that students are broken into groups of between 8-10. Those groups (they are called blocks) take all of their classes together (that is 37.5 hours a week). So we talk. We talk often. And the other day we had about an hour long conversation making fun of Food Network, its shows, and its ‘chefs’. I was struck by just how well that conversation would have gone over and just how long it would have lasted at my old school… It would have gone over like a lead balloon, and lasted maybe 2.2 seconds. It would have been over before it had begun… But here, I can even makes jokes about how much Rachel Ray attempts to carry from her fridge to her counter and people will laugh, and not look blankly and not get the reference.
My first day here I had a twenty minute conversation about strawberries and balsamic vinegar. It is like one of those “You know you’re a redneck when…” jokes, but in this case “You know you’re in culinary school when…” Today’s answer would have to be make a 56 pound batch of pumpkin muffins… Which was pretty painful as I tend to hate all things pumpkin, not limited to, and including the smell. There was ten pounds of pumpkin puree in those muffins. It was kind of miserable.
But still… I got to make croissants. Croissants! Chocolate ones, even! It was kind of fantastic. No matter what else I might have to deal with up here, and no matter what I may think about the state of Vermont (It. Gets. Cold. Especially when a fire alarm is set off at midnight and you forget a coat or shoes other than flip flops in your rush to exit the dorm…) I still love to cook. And really, the food is what this place is all about.
So, I am not going to pretend that this is anything other than a homework assignment, but I thought you guys might want to see what is happening up here.
The assignment was to write about the most important concept we have learned, and the ingredient that most exemplifies that. I chose putting care into your food, and a vegetable stock made from compost, composed of peels and vegetable ends. Nasty, right?
Oh, and sorry about the delay in the post. My website messed up a bit, and it didn’t autopost like I told it to. I also didn’t realize it until this morning. So, here you go.
I would say that the most important concept that I have learned thus far in Cooking Theory would probably doing the best with what you have and putting care into everything you do. I had already possessed that philosophy when it comes to food, but through our experiments I have reinforced that idea. It seems that too many people take food for granted, and through that make choices that might look good, or cut corners without any care for the final product. One must put care and love into everything one makes, and then one can get a fantastic product.
Without any sort of care, or doing things with no regard to the science of food, everything falls apart. The best example thus far in class would have when we made the test vegetable stocks. While the members of the class were able to use different vegetables to make the stock, William had to make a stock made from compost scraps. It was an assumption and something practiced by members of the class that a vegetable stock could just as easily be made with scraps and compost. Not only just as easily, but more so, and indeed cheaper. Rather than a bit of extra effort, they’d rather be lazy and compromise not only the stock, but whatever might be made from the stock.
If one uses a clearly inferior and hastily thrown together stock, it would be easy to tell. Most of the stocks were fine enough, but the compost stock was bitter and tasted terrible. The tomato wasn’t good either, but that was more of an exercise of learning what happens to acid cooked in water for an hour. The compost stock tasted like compost. It had no pleasantness to it at all. There were no redeeming features of it. There was nothing that could make it not horrible. It would ruin anything it touched.
For some people, compost is the only way to make vegetable stock. Because of that, all dishes they make with it suffer. If they were to make a soup, it would be ruined and neigh inedible. A soup is based around the stock. If you do not have a good stock, a garden full of fresh vegetables would be unable to save it. You would still have the bitter, green flavor. It would be the same with a risotto. Risotto is one of my favorite dishes, both to make and eat, but a bad stock would be absorbed by the rice and ruin everything.
If one is willing to take time and pride in their food, the product will always be far better. Love needs to be in your food, or there is no reason why you shouldn’t just get take-out. Indeed, if one cannot muster putting love in their food, it would be even better to avoid cooking for oneself. It would be more money in the industry that one day will be putting a roof over my head. Not only will you get better food, but you won’t have to be constantly disappointed by your own food, and misguided by your own apathy to improving the food.
On Making Your Food Your Bitch
Provocative title, no?
Have you ever been around people who work with animals for a living? The good ones treat the animals with a casual lack of ceremony that can border on harshness to the uninitiated. They don’t treat the animals like babies, or their BFF, or breakable china. They treat them like animals. They’ll bump them out of the way, speak to them in a stern tone, and expect obedience. And you know what? The animals thrive because of it. They know who the boss is, and that is good, because animals in the wild have a leader, and that’s the way they like it. A dog may be man’s best friend, but a good dog owner is the pack leader.
Why am I giving a short lesson on animal husbandry? Because a good cook is pack leader in their own kitchen. Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in respecting your food (I will speak to this topic in another post). But, a successful cook is boss of the food they handle. I can hear you now, “What the heck is this crazy lady talking about?”
This is what the crazy lady is talking about: make a commitment. Don’t be tentative, don’t be shy. If you’re kneading bread dough, don’t lightly massage it. You aren’t on a date with it, you’re making bread. Get in there and knead the darn (*Note from the Whisk* I kind of love that though the name of this post is “Making Food Your Bitch”, she self-edits the word ‘damn’) stuff. If you do it right you’ll feel it in your arms. It’s exercise. You aren’t doing your dough any favors by babying it, and you’ll end up with crappy bread that never reached it’s full bready potential. If you’re whipping cream by hand, whip it! Otherwise you get bubbly liquid cream stuff. Take charge, your food does not know from being nice. Treat your family nice, treat your food the way it needs to be treated.
Yes, there a plenty of foods that demand a light touch. You overwork pastry or biscuit dough, and you get something that bounces, and can’t really be called food. If you are putting herbs under the skin of a chicken, you can’t pretend that you’re the incredible Hulk, or you’ll get a ripped up hot mess. Know which foods need a light touch, but you are still the boss. You can’t charm food into being delicious.
So, my message is this. If you are chopping herbs, chop them, don’t bend them. If you’re searing a piece of meat, put it in a smoking hot pan, and leave it alone and let it brown. Don’t coddle your eats, and you will get a better product. If you can’t bear to take charge in your kitchen, collect take-out menus, because you will never be a good cook.
*On another note; please accept my apologies on the missed post last week. Who knew moving a child into a dorm and leaving them to fend for themselves would be such a stressful experience? I had the best of intentions, but writing a column completely deserted my brain. I can’t promise I will never let you down again, but if I do I will be really, really sorry.
Thanks for your time and attention-The Mother of the Whisk
Soo… This is embarrassing. I will not have time to write a post tomorrow, and I was going to be totally awesome and have a guest post go up, and there would be much rejoicing. But alas. My mother is my source for guest posts, and she has been with me on this long trip to Vermont, and has been just as busy getting ready for move in day tomorrow as I have been. As such, she forgot.
Apologies from both of us, and expect the guest column next week.
Carpaccio has always been one of may favorites. I think that it stems from liking my beef so rare that it is pretty much blue. Any time I can eat it raw, I’m happy. I figure it has something to do with primal urges and eating meat that I have run down and all that. I may not hunt and kill my own cows, but I can eat it nearly raw.
I have never eaten carpaccio outside of a restaurant before, but thanks to the magic of a fairly cheap and small piece of fillet mignon, I got to try my hand at something that I never thought I would get to make at home.
A chef friend (Chrissy, for those of you keeping track) was employed for moral guidance, and he suggested to take the steak, slice it in half horizontally, and pound it out rather than attempt to cut super thin slices.
The next step was to figure out what to have with it. Extra Virgin Olive Oil, for a bit of fruityness, Dijon mustard to add a bit of spice and heat and that good wine flavor, capers for a briney bite, lemon for some freshness (not enough to really make it leamony, just a bit more bright), fresh pepper, and flaked sea salt. Somehow the flaked sea salt isn’t as… Hit-you-about-the-head salty. And you get a bit more texture from the larger bits of salt. A bit of crunch.
It didn’t turn out quite as thin as I was hoping, but it turned out really well. It was so very good. It was like butter, and the accompaniments were fantastic. It was far easier than I would have thought it could have been. I need to try it again, and soon.
Hey guys, I just can’t manage the time this week. I’m really sorry, but I am trying to pack for college, and… Yeah. You will get a post next week, but this week just isn’t gonna happen.