12monthsofcooking.com

My quest begins ! This one is from Julia Child “mastering the art of french cooking” - page 258. I’m not sure why I chose this as a starting place - but it definitely sounded great. This recipe was a bit onerous… ( hmm… is it going to make the simple test?). But I pressed on anyway.

It was indeed a bit complicated. Simple in it’s essence - sautee mushroooms, carrots, celery and then chicken. Add flour to the chicken, and simmer in white wine sauce with flour. Then separately braise mushrooms and pearl onions, and then add cream and eggs to the sauce. Lots of moving parts !

It was quite good - not quite a ‘great’ however, although there’s a lot of potential. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to simplify and streamline, so with some work it could be a great. I served this with a coconut cake for desert - which got raves. Definitely a great on the desert here…

 Obviously my quest isn’t done - but did I really think it would be that simple ?

2009 was a hectic year cooking-wise ( I guess in other regards as well). With so much to do (work, family, errands, new-baby) I felt like I was always a little behind “blog-wise” and it was a struggle to keep up. There were definitely some highlights - six greats   - the orange cake; the slow cooked ribs; the sweet potato gnoochi; the herb-roasted chicken; the fetuccine carbonarra; and the chocolate cream pie. There were also six good recipes, and somehow I managed to meet my goal of 12 recipes for the year, with six magazine covers.

So what to do this year ? I first deliberated whether I even want to do this anymore… is it worth it ? I definitely enjoy cooking – and the blog is a little bit of effort but in reality not an amazing drain on time (and more fun than stamp-collecting). So I’m in for another year.

Perhaps instead of scaling back I should go “big” in some way ? Commit to doing every magazine cover, add an additional magazine, do every recipe in a book etc. etc. It’s a nice day-dream – but not really practical.

On some reflection I realized that I cook way more than I even blog about it. So perhaps I need to just blog more – even when it’s not a cover recipe ? Hmm… One other insight into cooking – sometimes the best recipes are the simplest and easiest. Last year I discovered a mustard and rosemary beef tenderloin roast recipe. It is absolutely simple to make, very delicious and everyone raves about it. On the other hand - some of the recipes last year were extremely tedious - the potato gnoochi, and the meatballs. I think I want to focus on the simple and the delicious.

So this year I am going to focus on simple and delicious. I am going to embark on a quest - by finding five ‘great’ new recipes – a chicken, a steak, a pork, a fish and a ‘family favorite’. ( I think I already have one or two greats - which I’ll describe sometime).

But first what do I even mean by a great recipe ? First of all it has to be delicious. Not just good, not just ‘yummy’ but out and out delicious. Something that everyone eating it *raves* about. Something that family and friends will ask you to make again and again.

The next part of ‘great’ also means it’s simple and easily described. This should mean you can cook it without looking at a recipe, it’s simple and straighforward enough to remember. There are many deserts I can make that are very delicious and not that hard to make. However I still have to look them up – so they are failing the “simple test” and just “almost great”.
 
Great recipes are also “forgiving”, meaning that you can mess it up a little bit and it still come out ahead.

So looking forward to 2010 – and my quest !

Now this one’s a keeper ! I decided to make this cake as a special “pre-christmas dinner” ( paired with a new-york strip roast, and gorgonzola and pear salad). It was absolutely lovely - the cake was deliciously moist, very chocolately and the blood-orange compote made it both a little different and beautiful to look at.

And all my helpers loved it as well. Definitely a great !

The December bon-appetit cover is always a little intimidating. This year was no different - the peppermint meringue cake with chocolate buttercream looked fabulous, but seemed like a lot of work. I decided (wisely) to break it up into stages, making the meringue ahead of time, the buttercream, and then finally the cake and assembly.

The meringues were a bit of work, everything else was fairly straightforward (again stages were key). The chocolate buttercream was a bit too rich - if I do it again I would “cut” the bittersweet chocolate with a little more semi-sweet. And the result ? The cake was fantastic to look at. I liked it ( almost loved it), my mother-in-law loved it. Andrea only liked it - she thought the meringues were too sweet. I don’t think I will make it again ( unless it’s a bout having something impressive to look at). It was just “good” but not worth the amount of effort required.

 I’m almost at a close for the year… this is my 12th recipe - one of my next posts will be a retrospective on the year, and set the stage for next year.

October’s cover of Bon Appetit was a “slow cooked” short ribs with sun-dried tomato gravy ( note to Bon Appetit - why don’t you have all your cover recipes always on-line?). It looked absolutely fun to make - and it was.

I’ve wanted to do short-ribs ever since I had a version at a restaurant in Napa. After cooking this I realize why restaurants love to make this - it comes out amazing and it’s all about just cooking it slowly. All the food was on a long-slow simmer in the oven - filling the kitchen with delicious smells.

The end result was great - I topped it off with mashed sweet and regular potatoes. This was a fabulous recipe - definitely great. I get the feeling that with a little more practice this would be absolutely spectacular.

The October gourmet had a recipe for sweet potato gnoochi that was impossible to not try. Admittedly it looked a little intimidating and a lot of work - but worth a try.

It was indeed a lot of work, roasting the potatoes, then making the dough, kneading it, shaping the gnoochi etc. I eventually got good at shaping the gnoochi. Frustratingly chestnuts are not in the store as yet - so I settled for Trader Joe’s “pre-peeled chestnuts” ( awful - don’t try it).

The result was good and almost great. The brown butter sauce with the sage was absolutely amazing. The gnoochi was also great. The only strike against this was it was an incredible amount of work, and I’m not sure that the gnoochi was that different from a good “freshly” made one. I would probably up the sweet potato to make it stand-out a bit more from regular gnoochi.

P.S. I’m searching for my pictures for this one… somehow may have been misplaced. I’ll post when I find them.

What are the chances that you’ll have whole milk, heavy-cream and buttermilk all in the fridge at once ? Happens to  you ? It happened to me - on a lazy sunday morning in September ( yes I’m catching up). Most of the time - I meticulously plan what I’m going to cook - this time I happened to like what I saw in Bon appetit, I had all the ingredients and I spontaneously did it.

This was super easy - 2 cups chilled whole milk, 1 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup whipping cream, 1/3 cup chilled buttermilk. Put it in your ice-cream maker ( I chill the ingredients before hand), churn for 15-20 minutes and you’re done ! ( for some reason bon-appetit doesn’t have this posted in epicurious.com, shame on them )

I served this with homemade pear and ginger crumble, and everyone loved it ( or was it the pie?)

Unknown to most there are five ( not four) basic tastes… bitter, salty, sour, and sweet and the fifth taste - umami. Umami is commonly described as a protein taste - “the essence of chicken stock”. One of the reasons roast chicken is everyone’s favorite is how much it matches the essence of Umami taste.

When I first began to cook -some of the most basic recipes like roast chicken were quite hard to pull off. So I’ve always been looking for a roast chicken recipe, and until recently the best was November’s Herb roasted chicken.  September’s bon appetit with with a herb-roasted italian style chicken, or “chicken al mattone” was impossible to not try.

This recipe was fairly straightforward. I love the technique of butterflying the chicken ( I butterflied it myself), then searing in a pan. This ensured that the skin was beautiful and brown. And the result ? A new family favorite - my wife commented how much she liked this. File under great !

I’m not a big melon person but I thought the granita from the August issue sounded interesting ( unfortunately Bon Appetit has chosen to not publish this recipe on-line…  so no link). The honeydew in the grocery was fantastic, and this was super easy to make.

The result - a cool light refreshing desert that’s a bit different and very summery. Great to make and easy !

You’ll notice this is my third desert in a row - I’m not sure what the trend is but I’m liking it.

July’s Chocolate Raspberry cream pie just had to be made - a no-bake, no-fuss good-looking summer desert. It was as easy as was advertised - the only hard part was that I found myself making creme-fraiche again. Other than that this was really a snap.

It looks great - and it was great ! Creamy texture and a wonderful set of contrasts between the tang of Raspberry, the sweet and chocolate. Andrea loved it - she said it is easily in her top three deserts. ( perhaps the only thing was the crust set a little too hard - so it was hard to slice it out).

What I really like about this dessert is how many variants we thought of that would be equally wonderful - the same filling but in a cocktail glass with a wafer cookie, the same pie but with graham cracker crust, and either peach or kiwi. The possiblitlies are endless. File this under great ! And sebastian liked helping me make the crust as well…