Slow-Cooked Shortcake

Yesterday I watched an episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, in which she made Mixed Berry Crumble. I was enchanted with the idea of slow-cooking fruit for a dessert, recalling that I had some frozen strawberries remaining in the fridge. The idea of a warm strawberry shortcake came to mind, and so I snooped around on the internet, glancing at a few recipes that used a slow cooker with fruit.

I ended up using the remaining strawberries, along with half a bag of Marion blackberries (about 8 oz each.) To that I added one-fourth of a cup of sugar (the strawberries were pre-sweetened, but the blackberries were not), a cup of water, and the zest from two limes. It slow cooked for about 2 hours, at which point it had reduced enough to be considered a compote - but it smelled wonderful. We added a little cornstarch mix, and then chilled it. I had originally planned to add a little vanilla flavor, but forgot (and don't mind, it was unnecessary.)



Served up on mini-shortcake rounds with a dollop of whipped cream (shown without due to their smaller size.) The flavor is perfect: within the first bite, you taste the sweet tart of the blackberries, but that is soon followed by the warm aftertaste of strawberries, both teased with the hint of lime.

Best part of the experience, outside of the food? Learning that slow cooking does not need to be limited to savory dishes. It served the fruit very well, and I'm eager to use it again for other sweet dishes.

Top Chef: Noteable Bravo-Blog Quotes

Anthony Bourdain:

While former rodeo clowns constitute a major part of MY show's demographic (they like to watch on satellite from their meth labs), I don't really know what they were doing in the semi-finals of a cooking competition. It was confusing. Not just to me -- but to the contestants. Were these REAL cowboys? Or post-ironic cowboys?

Given the dearth of suitable English adjectives in the mountains of Andorra (a country you probably haven't even heard of), from whence Ripert hails, I hope he won't mind if I translate his comments: "Dry elk shank ... horseradish ... sour cream ... bourbon ... red wine, balsamic vinegar, garlic, cherries, sage butter ... and now you want me to choose between overwhelming blue cheeses? What the **** is THAT about?!"

Tom Colicchio:

Sadly, all the funny shtick in the world couldn’t save the dish. Nor could the mystifying blue cheese options -- the dish didn’t need a pungent Roquefort or Gorgonzola to finish it, and leaving the choice of cheese to the guest seemed wishy-washy and inconclusive.

Ted Allen:

(An aside: Dale, does your mother need the Brokeback Mountain visual of you sleeping with “a few” cowboys? And how many is “a few?” Bad gay chef!)

Rocco DiSpirito:

I’m not sure if this episode of Top Chef reminded me of the Marx Brothers film Go West, Jim Carrey’s Dumb and Dumber, or Billy Crystal’s City Slickers. Whatever, it might as well have been set in Dead Man’s Gulch. Between the bales of hay, cowboy hats, and chaps, you might have confused the Aspen scenery with the back lot of MGM studios. All that was missing was Jim Carrey riding up on his mini bike or Jack Palance to start doing push-ups, and casting would have been complete.

Even [Eric Ripert] had the bemused look of “oh la la, ridiculous” when he walked away from the TCCs saying, “Good luck. You’re going to need it.” I had this image of Tom, Eric, Gail, and Padma all sitting in director’s chairs, cross-legged, sipping espresso as they watched our poor TCCs toil away.

Brian starts the Cirque de Ho-down off by burning sage, presumably to drive out the negative energy left behind by...the donkeys?

Perhaps if you were to wrap the elk in bacon and lard it with bacon and serve it with bacon bits and a thick butter sauce for good measure it might not taste like warmed cardboard.

Post note: For those of you who adore chefly humor, please laugh at the latest maniacal delusions of Bourdain and Ruhlman.

Top Chef: The 'game' is on, down by the river

Given the beautiful natural atmosphere of Aspen - a far cry from the crazy cities of Miami and New York that the chefs already visited - it seems right that the producers would come up with challenges befitting the atmosphere. And yet it seems as if they committed a crime against the remaining contestants, throwing them after their break into the familiar circus of early season. (It stands to mention briefly that TC4 is going to be in Chicago, of all places.) The Quickfire challenge was an echo of countless quickfires past: a race to see who could be the least clumsy in difficult circumstances. Likewise, the Elimination challenge was yet another catering for a "special dinner." TC's formulas have become fairly clear to us now, and they will need to change them or become even more circus-y in Season 4 to keep us guessing and entertained (although their contestants are truly the shining red noses in the sea of clowns.)

But enough of that. I cannot help but wonder, like Bourdain, why Ripert was made the guest judge on plates of elk, when he is an expert on seafood. Ah, but he was judging the quickfire of trout! Well, I have been corrected by cheftestant Brian: trout is not a seafood (one must suppose that it is, then, poultry, beef, pork, or vegetable.) It is a pity though that the trout used were probably not fresh caught at the stream that morning; they were likely purchased from a fish market. The contestants were clearly out of their element; one only needed to watch Hung leave his fish get cold, completely uncovered by a river inevitably buzzing with insects, or fish and pots falling to the grass.

As for the Elimination challenge, I think Casey says it best: "I don't know how you guys do it." Like most modern chefs, Casey ascribes to the KISS motto: "Keep it simple, stupid." This late in the competition, and given the judges gracing the table, you might think that the chefs would be counting ingredients in their head, being more critical of their choices. But these are young chefs, and in the effort to impress, they are raiding pantries and refrigerators. In Dale's case, it made a rare chance at success, furnished in part by the luck that his other contestants made enough mistakes to lower their standing. But, should that mentality furnish a menu, Dale will have a high risk of finding his tables empty.

One last note: a great deal of time is being spent talking about Hung and his lack of "soul" in his dishes, and, more importantly, the lack of a demonstration of his culinary heritage. It is definite that Hung is proud of being a kitchen baby when he speaks; but one must wonder why he is restraining his cooking to everything but Vietnamese. It seems to me that he is intentionally hiding or repressing those flavors he grew up with (and for those doubting his parents had a Vietnamese restaurant, please verify that Kim's Dragon Restaurant is, at the least, Pan-Asian.) Is he ashamed? Does he feel the pressure to be part of the melting pot, that he must let his own culture melt away to succeed in the United States? Is he trying to "break away" by cooking with as little Asian influence as possible? I must also wonder, if so proud and honored by his mother and that restaurant of his youth, why did he not return to help her business after an accident almost closed them down - why is it his brother instead? Whatever does go on in the mind of Hung, I hope he has enough courage to show at least a little of his own soul in the finale.

Yesterday's Disappointments

Thai Udon Noodle and Peanut Tossed Salad (Sweet Tomatoes/Souplantation): As described, romaine and napa cabbage, julienned carrots, udon noodles, peanuts, red peppers, and a peanut sauce/dressing. On the plate: initially appetizing in appearance. Alas, I could see little napa cabbage as promised - only a few stem chunks (not where the taste of napa lies). One piece of red pepper in my serving. Once inspected and tasted: rejected. The udon noodles were undercooked; from the same bowl, my husband had one that was still crisp. The red pepper (I was the only one of both of us who had any red pepper) was inedible; it was a cut piece of the end of the pepper. The romaine sealed the deal, however: some of it was old and beginning to rot. Once I tasted the bitterness of darkened, soggy leaves, that salad was not going any further into me. Disappointing? Absolutely. Had the lettuce used been quality, the red peppers present and properly served, and the udon cooked properly, the salad would have been perfectly appetizing. The peanut sauce was not overwhelming. The carrots seemed unnecessary, however, and added nothing to flavor.

Tamales with BBQ Chicken, Red Onion, Cilantro, & Smoked Gouda Cheese. Served with Mango-Ginger BBQ Sauce. (Corn Maiden): First of all, the BBQ sauce served with the tamales was bizarre. It was very runny, and smelled syrupy; tasted, it was flavorless except for an unidentified bite (it was not ginger). It was thrown away, and had it been had with the tamales (which sounded terribly delicious), it would have ruined them further. The BBQ chicken of the tamale was not what was expected at all. With the compliment of smokiness of Gouda and sweetness of red onion, you would expect the BBQ sauce of the chicken to be tangy, with just a hint of sweet - your typical, off-the-shelf hickory BBQ sauce. Wrong; the BBQ sauce may have even well been the very mango-ginger that was served on the side. The BBQ had a tiny hint of tang, and an flood of sweetness. While the red onion was cooked wonderfully to bring out its sweetness, the Gouda was the only thing that saved the flavor of the tamale enough to make it edible.

Top Chef: Noteable Bravo Blog Quotes

Anthony Bourdain:

...the Trial of The Chicken is traditionally seen as a near religious passage, a station of the cross, an early task on the One True Path to chefdom. Just as it is widely believed that "you can tell everything you need to know about a cook by how he makes an omelet", the cooking of a simple chicken makes an open book of whoever prepared it.

I don't care how fine Brian's “Sausage Shepherd's Pie (with Chicken)” tasted. Let's assume it was indeed, delicious. Spectacularly so. I would argue that it was an effort more redolent of chickenshit than actual chicken.

Ted Allen:

Let’s put aside Top Chef’s decision to portray him as the sweet, lovable gay guy. Dale has capital-B balls.

Rocco DiSpirito:

At the Judge’s Table [Sara] tried to tell some story about how she is reserved. Yeah, like a banjo at a square dance.

[Dale] said something about how you could tell who got laid the night before by their food. If that is true, I would hate to know what happened to him the night before this challenge when he decided to do a duet of two things, neither of which tasted good.

Top Chef: The Final Four

I've put off writing about last Wednesday's Top Chef episode because, honestly, I didn't have much to say. The episode was, as Bourdain expressed, a true test of culinary aptitude, lacking the typical brand-name dropping of episodes previous, and lacking the subsequent bizarre tests designed to challenge the chef's ability to cook in odd situations with odd requirements. Both challenges were simple in nature, and allowed the chefs the chance to express their technical skill and their ability to put together a wonderful meal.

Of all the chefs, only one failed both tests, and that was Sara M. Sara managed to fail both challenges on the same note - a note of technical skill so basic it is perhaps one of the top three essential skills in a kitchen: cook your meat thoroughly. Now, Sara is unique in that she's a cheese maker. But, in any kitchen, the last thing you can do is serve undercooked meat, especially chicken. And rather than be horrified that even one piece of her chicken was undercooked, Sara remained defiant. Didn't she try to once save Howie from the same predicament? Perhaps someone needs to teach her about the terror of salmonella poisoning before she returns to cooking proteins. Despite all that, I rather liked Sara M. from the start. Unfortunately, I watched her show her lack of skill in the last few episodes, and I knew she would soon be one of the next to go home. I believe she needs to stick to what she loves to do - that is, make cheese - rather than branch farther out of her league than she is prepared for.

Besides that, I really don't have words to lend to this episode. For once, it truly lacked drama and spoke about the food. We can only hope the finale will provide us more of that... but alas, we know that product placement will win the day.

Mm, shortbread

I just had to make note that Archer Farms' brand (aka Target Premium) Vanilla Bean Shortbread Cookie Mix is absolutely to die for. It is the best shortbread that I have ever tasted. Yes, it even surpasses Walker's. If you have a Target with a food section, seriously go get and make these beauties as soon as possible. They will only require two and a half sticks of butter.

Note: I think these would be great with a nice simple chocolate ice cream, served ala mode.

Kitchen Nightmares (US): WTF?

I've long been a fan of the Kitchen Nightmares series from the UK. So when I saw that Kitchen Nightmares was coming to the UK - while the UK was also starting a new season - I was thrilled. Now, having watched the first episode, I'm shocked.

I have to admit, I can't stand the American Reality Show Narration. I much prefer Gordon's own dialog; I imagine they decided Gordon was too vulgar to narrate. And that was a wise choice, once the problems of the first restaurant were revealed.

Rotten food? Outside a place with a Zagat plaque? Terrifying. The kitchen was 90% nonfunctional in technical aspects. Normally, a great deal of the problems with restaurants featured (at least in the UK edition) are on the menu or the kitchen staff. Here, the kitchen staff was operative, and the menu, while revised, was still fair. But at Peter's, the kitchen itself was in complete disrepair, and the state of the food! Reheated food purchased from a depot, refrigerated vegetables that had gone rotten, mostly due to a refrigerator that was leaking and wasn't cold enough. Terrible! And the owner... I've never seen such a temper or an attitude. Really, this episode can only be expressed by watching the nightmare literally unfold before your eyes.

And the next episode is supposed to feature a restaurant so incredibly infested, the place deserves to be condemned. This series is making the restaurant industry in the US look terrible.

Modern Food Writing

I got a delightful laugh out of this news blip from the Grub Street of New York Magazine. Today, Slate published an article by Paul Levy, in which the writer states why he is leaving the food writing business. Besides an incredibly sexist attitude, Paul states:

Over the years, I've done my best to write seriously about food, assuming my readers are an educated audience who would get (and smile or learnedly chuckle at) allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Damon Runyon, readers who would understand cryptic puns and whose jaws would not slacken when asked whether they knew "the land where the lemon trees bloom?"

Well now, that would explain why you're flopping about so desperately in the modern world of food writing. Look: while we foodies appreciate art as much as the next fellow, we don't want to have to check an encyclopedia to understand how an egg was cooked. Food is a common experience to all life forms. A food writer - like any good journalist - should speak to the common person, not to the elite crowd of snub-nosed alumni of Ivy League Schools. Levy points this out well to himself:

No editor today, for example, would be content with the way I dealt with durian, the cherished oriental fruit that looks like a giant hand grenade, which I wrote about for the Observer in 1984: "Some find the smell excremental, some find it reminiscent of sick." I'd now be booed off the fellas' food-writing team for excessive gentility. Today the correct vocabulary is shit and puke.

30 years ago, that was the correct vocabulary too.

Writing needs to be honest. It is what writers are supposed to be; exquisite at lying and bluntly honest with the same tongue. Levy's desire for esoteric chat about cuisine and a polite vocabulary is Victorian at best. Only the few left in that aged circle actually care for that kind of discourse.

As Grub Street puts it:

If this is what we’re missing, bring on the barbarians. Food writing is too important to leave to gentlemen.

Amen, dear comrades, and farewell to the past.

Yose Nabe

Yesterday, we went to Kyoto restaurant, a fine Japanese establishment here in Salt Lake City. It had been a while, and I had initially the intention of trying their udon. It has been years since I've been to Kyoto, and in that time I have appreciatively expanded my taste for Japanese cuisine. But as I looked over the menu - also pondering trying Kyoto's tonkatsu (another favorite dish of mine), I noticed a menu choice I had never heard of before: yose nabe, described as assorted seafood and vegetables cooked in broth. Curious, and far more interested in trying new foods than years ago, I ordered the dish and settled back for a fine dinner and chat with family and friends.

My dish was last to reach the table, and it arrived in a stockpot identical to their udon dish. It's important to make a note here that stockpot meals - at least as they are served at Kyoto - are a different experience than any other meal. A large cast-iron stockpot is set right in front of you, having just come off the heat in the kitchen, and full to near the brim with your meal. This means that over the course of the meal, you sweat. This generally makes you hungrier, or more tired. Now imagine that you're tired already, the person next to you has an udon stockpot, and it's a crowded restaurant on a summer night, and you'll understand what I went through eating this dish. Whew!

Looking into the stockpot, I first only spotted a few components - a simple broth (which radiated the warm smell of seafood), clear rice noodles, scallions, assorted greens, and chicken. Chicken, hmm? I hadn't expected that. I placed a little in my serving dish, and as I was eating it, I spotted sticks hiding below the top level of rice noodles in my stockpot.

Sticks? Slipping my chopsticks in to investigate, I pulled forth a stick, and found skewered fish. In total, there were seven skewers: two tuna, two halibut, two salmon, and one scallop. There were also two shrimp floating in the broth, along with tofu. All of the fish, and the chicken, had been cooked by the heat of the broth itself (with perhaps the exception of the scallops, which seemed they had been possibly precooked slightly beforehand.) The tuna and scallops were a real surprise - tuna is often reserved for customers who specifically order it, and the same is especially true for scallops which are, in Kyoto, only offered on the sushi menu. Also included were a few fish cakes and some small brown mushrooms.

To be sure, the yose nabe was a delightful treat. Meat excluded, the flavor of the soup was akin to a light cabbage broth, with only a hint of seafood taste - even after making a reheated meal of it this afternoon. If you ask me, a seafood stew that can manage to not taste briny or like soggy fishsticks after a day is quite exceptionally executed. Because they were broth cooked, all of the proteins were moist, but retained their firmness, with the realistic exception of the halibut (one of my pieces had fallen off the skewer by the time I pulled it out of the broth). I would argue that the only meat done a disservice by the broth was the tuna; when I retrieved it, it had already gone into the gray stage that tastes more like canned tuna than fresh fish. Most assuredly, though, I will be ordering the yose nabe again; it was both hearty in the stomach and light on the palate.

For more info on Kyoto restaurant in Salt Lake City, UT, click here.
For more info on yose nabe, click here.