GastroBlog
ok, i'm way late with this, for a variety of perfectly reasonable excuses, but they are excuses nonetheless, to i'll dispense with them. (the date above reflects the date of the party, not the post.)
we had a going-away party for melanie starkey and josh korr, who have long since left for washington d.c. and since i don't know how to otherwise convey my feelings, i cooked for the big send off, held at the st. petersburg memorial shuffleboard stadium.
so, i'll go through each thing i made, why i made it, a little bit of how, and, in some cases, what it was initially envisioned as and why it changed.
mini burgers (beef and turkey) with pickled red cabbage slaw. parties like this, i like to try to keep everything -- or as much as i possibly can -- finger food. just makes it easier, less utensils, that sort of thing. i never did burgers at a party, and while i thought it was a fun idea, i wanted to make them a little different. so instead of normal toppings, i made the slaw, which i have made as a side dish to pork before, but the leftovers always ended up on sandwiches. so this time, i just made it as a topping for the burgers. two things got changed on the way to the finish line here. first, my initial plan was to make the buns myself. i was going to make brioche. but i got a late start on the cooking because of a slight trip to the ER late the previous week, and making complicated bread was a quick solution to save a bunch of time that i was behind before i started. then at sam's, i saw the little dinner rolls in white and wheat, and was like, duh. second, the turkey burgers, in my initial draft of the menu, were supposed to be crab cake burgers. i figured they were regional to where they were moving, but ultimately i decided that those were budget-busting time sucks, so i went with turkey burgers instead, which would take no more time or process than the beef. sigh.
mini veggie burgers. josh used to be a vegetarian (i like to think i helped cure him, but not sure), but between that and the fact that mel always ordered veggie burgers from the tramor, and the fact that it was an easy parallel to the other burgers, i knew i wanted to have them. i have never had a veggie burger that made me ever want to have another one, so i decided to make my own. most, i think are either black bean or rice based. i always found the bean ones unpleasantly mealy, so i went rice. i got short grain sweet brown rice and cooked it in chicken stock -- KIDDING! i cooked it in mushroom stock with a little soy sauce until it was tight and sticky. then i added some chopped sauteed mushrooms and sesame oil. then i poured it out on to cookie sheets and let it cool, which made them more firm. i cut them with a cookie cutter, then breaded them with ground up panko and sauteed the patties. i'm no veggie burger expert, but i thought they were pretty good. i wouldn't want more than one, tho, and some of them were too thick. my initial plan on these was to make them "bacon" veggie burgers. i was going to smoke-dry slices of portobella mushrooms. well, actually, i DID do that, but when i was done, they tasted like cigarette butts. so i threw them out. to make up for that, i dusted the burgers with bacon salt, which in these parts can only be bought in the "as seen on tv" store at the mall. oh yeah. anyway, turns out bacon salt, which is in fact vegetarian, smells great, and tastes good, but i used a lot, and i couldn't taste it at all on the burger. sigh.szechuan baby back ribs. this is a recipe from roy's. i didn't really deviate. i probably needed to bring the glaze and give them a fresh coat on the table, but i forgot it.
bbq chicken sopes. ok, this one, i'm just going to start with everything that changed. my initial plan was to make sopes to carry a chicken mole. then, when i asked mel things they like, she said josh likes bbq. so i thought pork. but in the post-apocolypse of vegetarianism, josh is so far cool with fins and feathers, but not so much hoofs and snouts. understandable. so i was looking for ways to condense the menu anyway. mole is hard, and bbq sauce is easy. so i figured bbq chicken would taste just as good on a sope, which is basically a small fat tortilla, as on a bun. so i doctored up some bottle bbq sauce, a process taught to me by oviedo bbq legend lump boston and involves secret ingredients that i will never divulge (booze), then made the sopes and boom, done.
roasted red and gold beets with goat cheese mousse. hardly finger food, but i couldn't send them off without beets. we love beets. i roasted and diced a billion beets, then marinated them (for like four days) in a citrus vinaigrette. they went in the cups with a dollop of the goat cheese mousse, which was just goat cheese whipped with a little yogurt to lighten it up and thin it a little. topped with some chopped toasted hazelnuts. i made WAY too much, but somehow, that wasn't a problem. i think parts of this went home with 3-4 people. and 4-5 people came up to me at the party and told me that they didn't realize that they love beets. that was kinda cool.spanokopita. little individual triangles of spinach and feta wrapped in phyllo. i think this was the first thing i wrote on the menu, and it never left or changed. i loved these, they're easy, they can be done early and they hold.
black bean and plantain empanaditas. i had these about seven years ago at border grill (too hot tamales, if anyone remembers the early years of food network) in santa monica. loved them. thought it was a great idea. didn't think of them again until now. so i look up a recipe, and was stunned to learn that the black bean is the filling and the plantain is the dough. i figured that a combination was the filling and it was regular empanada dough. so i tried it their way. and it TOTALLY did not work. i couldn't get them to close, and the dough was all crumbly. so i still had a good bit of black bean filling, and decided to try it my way. i got some more plantain and added them to the beans, then made some empanada dough, and it worked much better. they suggested frying, but since i didn't want to cook too much on site, i baked. i thought they were good. fried is always better, tho, so that probably would've worked, too.dips. i made a roasted fennel and onion dip for chips and veggies, and had pam make her hummus. i thought both came out good.
cheesecakes. i wanted to make two. caramel with dark chocolate and lemon with white chocolate. the caramel was first, and went fine. so then i did the lemon, and the cakes kept sticking to the mini cupcake pan i was using, and when i tried to get them out, they all tore in half. and it happened again in the second batch. so i gave up. then with what was left of the batter, i baked it in a sheet tray and cut them with a cookie cutter and that worked. the problem: they were AMAZING. and i had to throw about 2/3 of them out. it was demoralizing. the two dozen or so that survived to make the trip to the party were gone in no time. at least there's that.what was really fun about the party is that after i spent a week prepping everything, i brought all the stuff to the party and i didn't really have to do anything else. it was awesome to say, jeremy, can you cook the burgers? lawrence, can you put the beets in the cups? becky, goat cheese? paul, fix a tray of burgers? and ellen did a masterful job of having everything set up. i actually kept looking for things to do, and it was fun not to have anything.
there were things i wish i had done different. i.e., better. but all in all i was pretty happy with how things turned out. i hope everyone else was, too. no one got sick -- that i heard of -- so that was a bonus.
anyway, i'll let you out of this extended entry now. just want to say, if it wasn't totally clear at this point, melanie was one of my favorite people ever to work with, and it makes me sad that the desk next to me is empty now. sigh, again. but she did the right thing. i know that. sighhhhhhhhhh.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
goodbye, melanie
