Creamy Hearts of Palm Soup

Today I continued working through the 400 Soups cookbook that I got on the bargain rack when I picked up Countess LuAnn of New York's Classy Book of Classy Etiquette. Given the success of the spicy cauliflower soup and the easy pea soup (which, as my friend Justin suggested, was even better with the addition of cream and bacon), I figured I could branch out and try something completely new, and settled on the creamy hearts of palm soup since it used a leek and two cans of hearts of palm.

I've never cooked with either of those, or to my knowledge, eaten them.

I do know, from "Top Chef", that a leek is kind of like a big onion. I didn't realize how big until I got to Earthfare (no leeks at Kroger, I'm afraid) and picked one out:



It's like a club! If I got mugged on the way home from the store I could totally fight someone off with my leek. You could play baseball with that thing.

Of course, now that I had a leek I had little idea of what to do with it. I knew it needed washing, because I remember someone on "Top Chef" being accused of having sandy leeks (I can't remember who, but I want to say it was Top Scallops Jamie), but I had no idea if I was supposed to used the white part or the green part or peel it or what. Fortunately, a quick google search informed me that I should cut off the bottom, then cut off the leaves where the light green part started to darken. Once that was done, I cut up an onion and then peeled and diced a potato, and my mis en place was done except for draining the hearts of palm.

I have no idea what part of the palm the heart comes from, but they look like this when you dump a pre-sliced can of them into a strainer:



Do palm trees have fruit? Is the heart from some sort of palm fruit? Or is it something more sinister, like the palm tree gets knocked out and wakes up in the thugee temple under the palace and then gets chained into a harness and then Mola Ram reaches into the palm tree's chest and pulls out the still beating heart of palm with his bare hand and throws it into a Kroger can while the cultists chant and pray to the Sankara stones?

Who cares? After all the slicing and dicing prep work I was too hungry to worry.

The soup came together in stages, but it was fairly simple. I started by melting butter in my soup pot (I've gotten really good at doing this slowly and patiently rather than turning the heat up really high and burning the butter to a brown smear on the bottom of the pain) along with some olive oil, and then cooking down the onion and leeks in it:



After that I added flour, chicken stock, and the chunks of potato, and then ten minutes later heavy cream and the hearts of palm:



and then the whole thing eventually went into the blender. I was going to use my immersion blender, but that always seems to miss a chunk of something here and there, and I wanted this pureed all the way down since there was a whole onion in it. While it was baking I put a loaf of bread in the oven (a Kroger take and bake loaf, since we already know that my homemade bread is awful, nightmare fuel) and suddenly dinner was served:



I'm not sure what a heart of palm tastes like, exactly, but the soup has a creamy taste with a slightly sweet undertone, and I didn't taste the onion at all.

Grape Pie Disaster

Sometimes the things that I cook come out really well, or at least passably decent, and I get to coast for days on a smug sense of accomplishment and pretend that maybe someday I, too, can cook like a Top Chef. Sometimes I even convince myself that I have some level of kitchen skill, and I decide that I'm going to creat my own recipes. In some cases, like the blue cheese and bacon mac and cheese or that time I invented Spam and cheese tarts, it turns out really well, but other times experimenting in my kitchen goes horribly awry.

Case in point: The Grape Pie

We had a cookout at Ben and Elizabeth's house a weekend or two ago, and I brought a fruit platter. I thought the platter might not be big enough, though, so I bought some extra grapes, too. Well, we ate almost the whole fruit platter, but there were a lot of grapes left:



About two pounds of grapes. Now, I like grapes and all, but the bottom half of that bowl was going to go bad and rot in the refrigerator while I slowly picked over the top half. The only way I could eat that many grapes was to transform them into something else, but what? I went to the cabinets and discovered that I had pie crust mix, and then remembered that I've eaten grape pie at restaurants before, and it was delicious. Sure, I had no recipe, and I've never in my life made a pie from scratch before, but how hard could it be? They just did it as a quickfire on "Top Chef" a month or two ago.

"They" being professional chefs, some of whom still failed the challenge. Ignoring this I blithely sailed ahead and mixed up my crust. Following the directions on the box, I divided the dough, floured the counter, and tried to roll it out:



This is harder than it looks. For starters, you should shape that ball into a disc before you even touch it with the rolling pin. Otherwise, this will happen:



That doesn't look so bad until you try to put it in the pie pan, and the pan is round and the dough is not:



Fortunately, pie crust is somewhat pliant, and you can work wonders with your fingers:



Now I just needed to make the filling and then top the pie and bake. I've never made pie filling before but I've dumped it out of the can, so I was aware that pie filling usually consists of fruit in syrup. I assume the syrup comes from sugar and fruit juices, so I cut all the grapes in half, tossed them with a couple of tablespoons of sugar, and dumped them into the pie. In my head, this whole syrup thing would magically come together while the pie baked. This is exactly the same mistake that Tracey made during the pie baking quickfire on "Top Chef", but somehow this slipped my mind until after baking.

Having learned from the first crust round, I quickly did the second one, cut vents in the top, draped it over the rolling pin, and then unrolled it onto the top of the pie, just like I've seen on the Food Network:



The box of crust mix said that it would be done when the crust was golden brown and the juices from the filling were bubbling. Those seemed like easy indicators, so I checked it every ten minutes until it looked done:



I noticed when I took it out and peeked through the vents that there was some liquid in the pie. A lot of liquid. Like if you tilted the pie back and forth, you could see a lake of fluid washing back and forth over the grapes in there. You know what my filling recipe was missing? A thickener. Some cornstarch, some flour, something. I still though I could save it, though, by putting the pie into the refrigerator. Somehow, in my head, this would magically cause the filling to gel.

This did not happen.



Collapsing crust, filled with loose grape halves tumbling across the plate and vague purple liquid. The grape pie was an utter failure, even worse than the hunchbread.

Orange garlic chicken, on the other hand, was a smashing success!

All you have to do is mix the sauce:



dump it over the chicken in the slow cooker:



and ignore it for six hours. Add in some instant mashed potatoes:



and I have self esteem again.

Also, I threw out the grape pie.

Not Especially Quick

My parents bought me the "Top Chef" Quickfire cookbook for my birthday this year, and then got me a stockpot for Christmas, and I've been waiting to have a quiet day with no other plans so that I could use them.

Today was that day:



I decided that I was going to make Season 5 Cheftestant Jeff's Fennel-Apple Soup. Jeff made it for the quickfire challenge of "Reimagine a Recipe from the Top Chef Cookbook" (which my parents bought me for Christmas last year) that turned into the "Oh, Wait, Now Make That Recipe Into A Soup" challenge after Padma's buzz wore off or something. Everyone on the show seemed to like it, and they liked the fennel-apple salad that it started out as, so I assumed it would taste pretty good. I could get most of the ingredients at Kroger, except for the fennel.

Also, I had no idea what fennel looked like.

Whenever they show it on "Top Chef" or Food Network, somebody's already chopping up the fennel. They never show raw, unchopped up fennel, and it never occured to me to just google it. I knew that it was kind of like a big onion, and people talk about it having stalks and fronds like celery, so I had a vague idea. I know there's nothing like that at Kroger, so I figured I needed to go to one of the fancy grocery stores in town. Earthfare didn't have it, but the Fresh Market did, and I managed to get through both stores without being seduced by their ample and well stocked cheese cases. Take that, temptation!

Fennel in hand, I headed home to being cooking, or, more accurately, prepping for cooking. First I needed to peel and dice three apples, which gave me a perfect excuse to use my apple wedger.



All you do is push down.



I love that thing. All that was left was the peeling.

Once the apples were taken care of, I had this to contend with:



That's a bulb of fennel. It's like bringing home a houseplant and then hacking it to pieces. The cookbook assumes that I know all about fennel already, and tells me to just dice a cup of it, but wasn't really specific about which part to use. As I said above, the pieces that people are chopping up on television are always white, so I immediately chopped off all of the green pieces and then diced what was left.

After that I peeled and diced the shallots, which are like tiny, expensive onions:



Then it was time to mix the apples, shallots, fennel, and garlic together, and sweat them over low heat. Wait, what?

"Sweat the vegetables? What the hell does that mean?"

"Maybe you run on the treadmill for a couple minutes and then rub them all over you?"

"That can't possibly be right."

"Are you sure? Jeff had his shirt off every episode of Season 5. Maybe it was so he could rub vegetables on himself. All over his abs, and his torso, and then..."

"That cannot possibly be correct. If Jeff spent the season smearing himself with food, not only would I remember, I would have that season on DVD so that I could watch it over and over."

The cookbook was more helpful than my inner dialogue, and explained that "sweating" vegetables means cooking them on low heat in minimal fat in a covered pot so that their own liquid sweats out and they poach in it. It's a recommended technique for foods with a lot of water, like apples and fennel, and allows them to slowly cook without carmelizing. The cookbook didn't give any examples of minimal fat, so I sprayed the bottom of the stockpot with olive oil, dumped in the vegetables, and hoped for the best:



It worked really well. I stirred it a few times to make sure everything was cooking evenly and nothing was sticking to the bottom of the pot, and when everything was tender I added the wine:



(after I tasted it to make sure it hadn't gone bad; I've had that bottle for a while) and then later added the chicken stock:



When half the liquid had cooked off I lowered the heat, added the cream and the herbs, let it simmer until the top had bubbles, and then pureed the whole thing with my immersion blender. I didn't make the little blue cheese toasts to float in it like the recipe called for, but I think it turned out pretty well:



It tastes pretty good. When you first take a spoonfull it's sweet, but then there's an undertaste that cuts that which I guess is from the fennel, so when it finishes as you swallow it's actually kind of savory. It would pair up really well with the toasts I didn't make because the sharpness of the cheese would bring out that savory taste more and downplay the sweetness of the apples.

I'm just surprised it took so long. The recipe said it would only take an hour, and on the show quickfires are really short, but this took me almost two hours. Probably because I'm not a professional chef. And also because I spent too much of my cooking time fantasizing about Jeff smearing himself with food.

the pain of eating out

Oh God, I think I'm dying.

My parents wanted a Friday's gift card for their anniversary, and I thought I would get myself some dinner while I was there. I haven't been to Friday's in several months, and never in Tennessee, but I figured it's the same everywhere and I could just get chicken fingers and be fine. And I would have been, if I just had the chicken fingers.

They have this deal right now where you can get an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert for $12 something, and that seemed wonderfully simple. I opted for the fried macaroni and cheese (“Top Chef” has informed me that reinvented versions of old classics are hip and fun; I guess they forgot to inform Micah), the chicken fingers (when faced with a menu where I don’t immediately want something I tend to go for the chicken fingers as an easy default), and the mini mousse desserts, which allow you to pick two different shotglasses of mousse. I chose peanut butter and orange cream, comforting flavors of childhood that seemed to go with chicken fingers and mac and cheese.

The fried mac and cheese was good, coming in hot little nuggets of crispy batter with creamy macaroni and cheese inside. Alone, they would have been wonderful, but the sauce that’s drizzled under them on the serving plate is disgusting. I thought it might be some sort of mustard since it was yellow, but the flavor was so offensive I ended up scooping up a forkful by itself, just to evaluate it. It tasted like onions and fish, without a hint of mustard. It actually tasted like they took the grease that they fry everything in, mixed it with a little cream, and drooled it over the plate. It was vile, and I ate the rest of the nuggets as carefully as possible, to avoid getting them anywhere near the sauce.

The menu at the restaurant or online makes no mention of this bilious concoction, by the way, so this may be your only warning.

Next came the chicken fingers. You get a choice of barbeque or honey mustard sauce, so I picked honey mustard. I wasn’t totally committed to either sauce, but then it came out with a little cup of barbecue. I didn’t want to stress the waitress, though, since she was probably stressed already, and wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t said, “Oh, you wanted honey mustard. Don’t eat those yet!” Instead of taking the barbecue away, she brought a little cup of honey mustard, too, and then sailed away. Now that she’d gone to the trouble, I felt obligated to only use the honey mustard, and attempted to do so. It ran out before I ran out of chicken fingers, though, just as she walked by.

“Do you need another honey mustard?”

“Oh, no, I’ll just use the barbecue.”

Her smile said love, but her eyes screamed betrayal.

The meal finished with the pair of mousses that almost finished me. While waiting for them, I heard a waiter describing them to a couple near me with the kind of brutal honesty that I’m sure the TGI Friday’s corporation, a division of Kraft Foods, would prefer that their waitstaff not employ.

“Well, they’re shotglasses, so they’re not really filling. And they’re really sugary. Like too much sugar. The chocolate raspberry might be ok, but the rest are kind of, I don’t know, so sweet you almost feel sick. And it’s mousse, so it’s like, kind of like ice cream, but not really cold, and sort of thick but not really thick. I don’t really know what it’s made out of, but I think there might be dairy in there somewhere.”

I actually peered over the top of the table divider to see if he knew how loud he was being, but the sight of me, eyebrows raised, did nothing to slow him down. I imagine he won’t be at Friday’s for much longer with those kinds of sales skills.

When my pair of mousses arrived, I tried and tried to take a picture, but the waitress wouldn’t leave me alone.

“You need a refill? How do those look? Did you taste them yet? I love that orange one? I’ll be right back with that gift card.”

More than anything I wanted a picture of the orange cream one, because it just looked bizarre. The mousse was about the sherbet color that you would expect orange cream to be, but it was decorated with these weird orange and white lumps, too big to be sprinkles and too small to be chips, that looked exactly like aquarium gravel. They turned out to be lumps of pure sugar with a little bit of citrus flavor, and actually paired well with the mousse. I ate the entire thing and then used the tiny spoon to scrape the sides and make sure I didn’t miss any.

The peanut butter cup, on the other hand, is the reason that I’m sitting on my lounger holding my belly and erupting with explosive burps that feel like projectile launches. It looked like peanut butter mousse with tiny little chocolate chips in it, and I love peanut butter to the point that I will eat it out of the jar with a spoon, so I eagerly dug in.

I made it through two bites.

It was not mousse. It was a shotglass full of peanut butter, but not just peanut butter. Something thick and sweet was added to it, possibly sugar syrup. Whatever it was caused the peanut butter to coat my mouth and throat like that melted candle that Homer Simpson drank at the chili festival. I’d barely finished coping with the giant first bite I’d taken when I decided to give it another chance and not make any snap judgments. The second bite confirmed that, no, I was not mistaken and it was wretched.

It was so bad I tried to cough it up out in the parking lot, to the alarm of a family nearby. I continued trying to dislodge it all the way home, and now I can feel it twisting and bubbling inside me like a culture in a Petri dish.

Next time I’m just getting cake.

top chef sara m.'s savory tomato bread pudding

A few episodes ago on “Top Chef Miami”, Sara M., one of the contestants, made tiny little savory tomato bread puddings as an appetizer, and they looked delicious. It didn’t win, sadly, because the judges were much more taken with the third serving of beef carpaccio this season, but as a consolation prize they were nice enough to kick off Sweaty Howie. Still, when I watched the episode, the only thing I wanted to eat was one of those bread puddings, and I went to the Bravo! website to find the recipe.

Trouble started right there. The recipe listed is for ten or more people, and I live alone. Also, it called for an inexact amount of bread: three baguettes. Is a baguette the same size everywhere? The baguettes at Food City (home of the claw machine) are two feet long, and I was wary of any recipe that required six feet of bread. Fortunately a nice poster on the Television Without Pity forums explained that s/he had made it and how much bread they used: three two-foot-long baguettes. Knowing that, though, I was able to half the recipe to a much more tolerable one and a half baguettes. I had a half baguette already because I made crostini with herbed cheese and olive tapenade last weekend, so I really only had to buy one.

The recipe said you had to finely dice the baguette. This sounded easy until I tried it.



It’s really hard to cut round bread into square pieces. Fortunately, by the time I finished the half baguette and started on the whole one, I remembered seeing Sara M. cutting up long strips of bread, and once I starting slicing into strips and then cubes, it was much easier.



After the bread was ready, the recipe said I had to mix milk and tomato paste in the blender. This recipe used a lot of dishes, by the way. The paste and milk mixing didn’t sound gross until I started doing it, blending the milk and slowly adding the paste.



It looked like the most disgusting milkshake ever.

In true “Top Chef” fashion, though, there is a container from the Glad Family of Products sitting in my sink in that picture.

After the tomatoshake was ready, the (halved) recipe called for me to add three cloves of garlic and a finely diced quarter of “a large red onion” until “translucent”. Now, I know what “translucent” means; it’s in between “clear” and “opaque”. I have no idea what it means in relation to food, though, so I decided to just cook the hell out of it. Sorry, sauté the hell out of it.



My finely diced onion came out a hell of a lot better than Casey’s did during the “Restaurant Wars” episode, by the way.

After the cream was added, I mixed it with the tomatoshake and five whole eggs (I broke the yolks before pouring in, so it would be easier to mix) in a large bowl. It looked like vomit, a large bowl of orange vomit.



It looked even more like vomit when the bread was added.



Even worse, I decided that the easiest way to mix it and be sure it got all the way through without breaking the bread down too much was to do it with my hands. This left them covered in sticky, tomato-smelling orange slime, and I had to turn the sink on with my elbow to wash them off. While the bread was resting? sitting? absorbing? congealing? for 45 minutes I got to work on the basil cream that goes on top. Unlike Sara M.’s, mine was think and clumpy.



This might be because I didn’t push it through a tanis, like the recipe said, but that might be because I don’t own a tanis or know what it is. Either way, hers looked kind of liquidy and mine kept the consistency of frosting no matter how much I beat it. I guess I need that tanis after all.

Rather than put it in a muffin tin, like Sara M. did, I used a baking dish, and made it as one big batch that I just cup up when it was done, like portioning a lasagne. I did my best to drop my globs of basil cream evenly over the top, but some of it got bigger globs than others. Still, I think it turned out pretty well.



It was even better reheated in the oven today.

letter to "Top Chef"

Dear “Top Chef” contestants:

Please refrain from ever again referring to food as “sexy”. I don’t like to think of my chicken as vaguely sweaty, a little bit sticky, or unwilling to sit in the wet spot on my plate. Likewise, unless my vegetables are curled on their sides in the fetal position the next morning practically falling off the edge of the plate they’re shamefully trying not to share with a meat whose name they can’t remember from the night before, they don’t have much in common with sex, either.

Also, Tre, this isn’t “Memento”. You don’t need to tattoo instructions on your arm.

In closing, please develop a challenge for this season that incorporates Twinkies.

Thank you.