Posts Tagged ‘cooking’
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On a whim, we bought a 15-lb ham Tuesday night. (This is all that’s left of it.)
For the past 3 days we have been facing the consequences.
I’ve made pork tenderloin before many times, but it was always hard to tell when it got done, and whether it would be juicy or a log of shoe leather by the end. I also could never seem to get a nice crust on the outside. So finally I decided to get down to learning how to do it right. The recipe I used tonight came from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which is a sizable compendium of classic French recipes generously annotated by both Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The recipe is simply called Sautéed Pork Filet or Tenderloin. It was pretty standard, following your classic “sear, bake, and make sauce” procedure. However this time around I made sure to follow the recipe to the letter. And when I deviated, I noted what went differently, why, and how I fixed it. As a result I think tonight’s pork tenderloin was the best I’ve ever made.
I learned a bunch of things in the process, so I shall write them down here in case you too might find them useful. What follows is my version of the recipe, adopted from and even more thoroughly annotated than J&J’s version (if such a thing were possible).
I love French onion soup in restaurants, the way they come in a little clay bowl all bubbling over with melty cheesy goodness. They can do that because they can stick the whole bowl in a hot oven and let it broil the bejesus out of the cheese. But we can’t, mostly because my mom and Yang teamed up against me to prevent me from purchasing 4 ramekins for $3 at TJ Maxx.
But it’s okay, I’m not bitter. Because I figured out another way to get practically the same delicious result.
Today I tried to make a roll cake again.
I think I know now why the cake wreck blog took off so quickly, and why it’s actually gotten popular enough to be made into a book. Cakes are immensely prone to wrecks. At every stage of the process, from mixing the batter to baking to getting it out of the cake pan to frosting can go disastrously wrong. It’s also that many things normally considered excusable in other forms of food-making suddenly seem heightened in their awfulness when you’re making a cake. People have high standards for cakes. Not only must it taste good and have good texture, it must be structurally sound and beautiful. No one cares if a stir-fry or a spare rib doesn’t stay stacked in a three-layer tower, or crumble when you try to roll it. No one cares if it looks disheveled and thrown together, which often actually adds to its devil-may-care culinary appeal.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book was awesome. First and foremost, it is hilarious. It is the kind of hilarious that is enhanced with a pinch of abject horror, but it is not sad like the way watching The Office is sad and soul-crushing. No, there is something strangely… uplifting about Bourdains account of his drug-ridden, half-crazed, sleep-deprived, machismo-driven careen through cookdom.
I like its contrasts. Sometimes it is fast and noisy action, other times it’s quiet introspection. Topics swing wildly between the gory and brutal realities of dinner rush in the kitchen, and sweetly touching descriptions of Bourdain’s love for food and all those who share this love. In one chapter, Boudain will be reveling in the playful, hubristic terrors of his crazed, drug-induced reckless young life, the next, he’ll be feeding himself platefuls of humble pie.
Though the writing style is extreme and pocked with exaggeration, he is great at maintaining perspective so I am content to romp along through his accounts of gasp-worthy excesses and crimes. Because I know by the end he will be able to wrap them up into some sort of personal critical response. Crazy as Bourdain’s life was, he has clearly done some soul-searching and introspectating, and the results are written all over this book.
He’s a great writer and has a surprisingly handy and beautiful way with words. It borders on the poetry of the insane. Because his background is what he says it is, I am never sure if the occasional gem of a turn-of-phrase is the effect of some lingering crack in his bloodstream or if he really is just that smart of a writer. Actually that is dumb; of course he is very smart. It comes through in the way he refers to important historical events like they were everyday household concepts. I kept having to look stuff up on Wikipedia, and not just the French words. And there’s also that endearing self-deprecation he constantly foists upon himself. Nothing says “smart guy” like someone who knows the limit of their smartness.
Finally, he’s made me want to learn French cooking. He’s turned me off of silly platings with squeezie bottles and towering stacks of scallops for a bit, but I do want to know how to make a good demi-glace, ever so much. Now where can I get me some veal bones in the US?
