Vegetarian chili (the reheatening)

What? Vegetarian?

I have friends who are extremely bad at eating meat. So bad, in fact, that they're not often seen around our apartment for dinner, despite being engaging folks with whom I enjoy hobnobbing.  I decided to remedy this by trying my hand at making a vegetarian (vegan, even!) friendly recipe, albeit one that has plastered all over it "HOW TO MAKE THIS TASTE BEEFIER!"

I started from a Cook's Illustrated recipe, and I'm posting largely because:

1. while it was in fact a tasty recipe, it was sorely under-spiced (huge surprise there)
2. the step-by-step instructions were inefficiently - perhaps even extremely poorly - ordered!
3. I need to post some pictures of cats

I'd like to make this again but without stupidly wasting a bunch of time, so here, presented in all its basic glory, is the recipe!

dot likes to help.

Mushroom Risotto with Pork Tenderloin

Tonight's dish was seared pork tenderloin with mushroom risotto and asparagus.   I based the risotto recipe off of this one.  As I had fairly irregular oysters as my wild mushroom, I was slightly less fussy about separating the caps from the stems and chopped everything up together.   Using the chicken stock from the roast chicken made earlier this week was a bonus.

The pork was fairly simple.  I heated my oven to 200F.   I bought a smallish pork tenderloin from the butcher, which I cut into 1" pieces and seasoned both sides with salt and pepper.   I heated up some macadamia nut oil in my cast iron skillet and placed in 6 of the pieces at a time, allowing each side to sear for 1.5 minutes.   Once each side had a good sear, I finished by placing the skillet in the oven for 5m and then let rest under foil.  The pork was tasty and tender and went wonderfully with the risotto.   I should have done a quick pan sauce to go with it, but alas I was too distracted by conversation, Oscar updates and cooking wine.  Next time. . . next time.

Keller's Ad Hoc Roast Chicken

I made Thomas Keller's roast chicken recipe from his Ad Hoc cookbook.  It is so easy and so delicious; I've more or less forgotten if there is another way to roast a chicken.

The seasoning is perfect.  Roasting it on a bed of root vegetables makes certain all that delicious fat, butter and seasoning doesn't go to waste.  You get deliciously caramelized carrots and potatoes which are almost better than the chicken itself.  Roasting it in an iron skillet concentrates that effect.  I find that when I do it in a roasting pan, the drippings burn and boil off without properly coating the veggies.  A tragic outcome.

Two things that are not mentioned in the recipe but should always happen are: giblet gravy and post dinner stock making.  The stock from this bird will make it into a risotto experiment later this weekend. . .

Julia

We have perhaps reached a critical mass in ownership of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in our little group of cooks. I have found myself impressed with Julia Child's humor and . . . challenged. . . by the astonishing amount of butter required in any given recipe.



There have been various crepe attempts and cheese puffs. Beef Bourguignon and Wellington. The Demi-glace weekend was where things started to get interesting. Watching people roasting the bones and a day of skimming and reducing a zillion quarts of stock to a tiny amount of rich, dense, flavorful goop.

Everything it has been added to since has been fantastic.

Food Blogs We Read

So we read a lot of food blogs. I thought I'd list a few of my favorites.

Smitten Kitchen: always something good, usually an irresistible dessert. One of my favorites.

Michael Rulhman: My friend Robert lent me his copy of Charcuterie and I haven't looked back. These days, when I see "uncured, nitrate free" bacon and sausage around SF, I find it vaguely offensive.

Simply Recipes: It's what it says it is. Tasty, clever, practical recipes that I have enjoyed reading and experimenting with for years.

Dark Salted Caramel

The phrase "damn it smitten!" is often repeated in my company. Every couple days she will post some new exercise in dessert that I will be tempted to execute on. Usually my innate laziness kicks in before trying any of her more complex recipes, but the latest dark salted caramel looked simple enough. Well, simple from a time and materials perspective, not a getting it right perspective.

My first batch was passable.

Caramel Experiment #1:
1 cup sugar
6 tablespoons salted butter
1/2 cup of heavy cream + 2 tablespoons

Taste:
Nutty and sweet on first taste, not very salty. Sharp, somewhat bitter aftertaste that lingered. Seemed not as thick as I would have expected.

Perceived Mistakes:
#1. My gas stove is old and has really uneven flame which i expect made the pan too hot on one edge, over cooking some of the sugar before most of the sugar had melted. There never was really a "golden brown" where some recipes say stop, I seemed to go right to dark copper. #2. I did not kill the heat immediately after the butter had melted, leaving it on the flame as I whisked in the cream. This probably didn't improve things either. #3. I used plain old generic grocery store
salted butter, which had been in my fridge for ages. Some higher quality stuff would probably taste better.

Spontaneous Brunch

My good friend Rob decided to host brunch this morning. He basically said "their will be Mimosa's and Bacon and bring whatever else you feel the desire to eat or feed us." I decided to make crepes. There were a variety of omelet makings already prepared by the time I arrived. Mushrooms and onions sauted in bacon fat, deli ham fried in bacon fat, swiss cheese slices, diced avacado, baked bacon with brownsugar & cayanne pepper glaze. These all went into the crepes nicely :)

Not really posting a recipe this time, i just used the crepe recipe from AllRecipes.com. Doubled and mixed in a blender rather than by whisk.