Humble Pie

I believe it would be really disingenuous of me to share only my cooking triumphs with you, my loyal gastro-readers, and none of my spectacular, hilarious failures. Now I don't think it's presumptuous of me to say that I am an acceptable cook. Professionally trained? No. Master of the art of French (or any other nationality of) cooking? Absolutely not. Iron Chef? Far from it. But I'm no slouch here. 9 times out of 10 I produce something that the majority of people would be happy to eat. Really I do. But to present myself as a cook, and not to include any of my occasional kitchen disasters in the tapestry, like some kind of obnoxious Stepford-esque Martha Stewart clone? Totally not my style.

So in the spirit of that sentiment, I present to you, my epic failure on the VERY FIRST Gastro-Junkie challenge. Now to be fair...

I should have known the recipe was doomed from the start.

There were some clues. Now please note, it was no fault of the challenger. Lex provided me with an absolutely do-able challenge. Interesting, but far from impossible: Using shellfish as the featured ingredient, create a gluten free meal, utilizing some sort of "oh weird...but good!" sort of accent ingredient. Something that shouldn't work but does.

It took me about a day, but I ended up distilling my idea down to this--Pan seared scallops, served with a mango-lavender chutney (surprise!) and coconut-lime rice. It was summery, it had a totally unexpected floral element, and it was, in fact, gluten free, a fact I confirmed after doing a little research (ie. asking Lex) and finding out that rice, in it's un-messed with, non-instant form, is totally fine for those who are gluten intolerant. And I was only slightly put off when I discovered upon hitting the grocery store that the food grade lavender I had spied there last week was GONE. (Clue number 1.) But not just GONE. Spirited away, evaporated, and any memory of its very existence wiped from the memories of everyone who works there. No lavender for me.

No matter. I grabbed some mint instead, figuring that the cool mint would cut through the sweet mango and the buttery scallops to add some needed freshness, and went about my business. Now. Here's where everything went horribly wrong. At the advice of the friendly man at the seafood counter I turned the temperature on my refrigerator down in order to keep the scallops fresh overnight. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I took the poblano pepper I was planning on using in the chutney out of the refrigerator, and found that it was a poblano-sicle. Not the end of the world. I ran it under some water, cut it in half, and threw it on the grill to get a nice, smoky flavor out of it. No big thing. What WAS a big thing, was the fact that the mint flat-out-froze in my fridge, so it looked gorgeous and fresh when I pulled it out, and then wilted into disgusting seaweed green mush when I went to rinse it off. Oh, and my mangoes? I'd left them out on the counter to ripen, so they blessedly suffered no weird mango frostbite. But When I chopped them, instead of creating a nice, chunky salsa consistency, they disintegrated into uneven mushy goop. Yuck. Oh, and that poblano? Well it was fine, except for the fact that only after adding it to the mango did I realize that I hadn't bought nearly enough to balance the cloying sweetness of the dish, and now it was too late.

At this point I'm starting to get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that this simply isn't going to work out. But I don't give up. Not right away. Slimy,unusable, wilted mint, mushy mangoes. Fine. I am not excited about the flavors coming out of this bowl of stuff, not at all, and I'm thinking this might be an evening of Mr. Gastro nodding politely at me as he chews, trying not to give away his lack of enthusiasm, but I'm not giving up yet. I can still fix it. Maybe. But when I go to get the limes out of my fridge and find two hard, frozen, angry little green golf balls, It's the final straw. It's 9:15. This stuff doesn't taste very nice, and now it's not going to. I decide to take my own advice.

I ordered a pizza.

I dumped the soupy mess in the garbage, shut the kitchen door behind me without cleaning up, and I ordered a pizza. I'm actually waiting for it as we speak. Because it is entirely okay to mess up a meal every now and again. Especially if the reason is an over-abundance of ambition. It is not okay to eat something that you know is crap, and even less okay to serve it to someone else. Not when there are no-ones feelings to hurt but your own. I'm not discouraged, and I'm not giving up on this challenge (expect a re-match some time next week) but tonight, with a big laugh and an eye toward better meals in the future, I'm staying the hell out of the kitchen, because that was an absolute comedy of errors. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and so I ordered a pizza and shared the messy details with all of you, so that we could all laugh together.

The Challenge

Hello there fellow Gastro-Junkies. So some of you may have been noticing that the frequency of my entries has fallen off a little bit these past couple weeks. Never fear, I am not throwing in the towel, far from it. I am however settling into a new job, and therefore dealing with a still unsettled financial situation, and of course less sleep, and less free time to daydream about all the wonderful things I can cook up while I'm home!

That being said, I do truly believe in being able to have your cake and eat it too (So to speak). Or in this case, have your job and food blog too. But sometimes we all need a little motivation, and so I concocted this little game we can all play together:

I am opening up the comment section of this, and every blog entry to follow for you guys to issue me challenges. These challenges can be whatever you please, ranging from "Morgan, make something using eggplant and Brie! And potato chips!" to "Create a meal for two for less than ten dollars!" or, "Develop a four course meal featuring peanut butter in every course, a la Iron Chef!" It can be whatever you want. The more creative the better. Please refrain from suggestions involving outrageous monetary commitment (No caviar pizza), but strange ingredients, monetary restrictions, multiple courses, new and challenging cooking techniques...bring it on. Make my day.

I like this plan for three reasons: 1) It provides me with a constant influx of new and entertaining cooking challenges, even ones I might not come up with on my own, always a good thing. 2) It gets you guys involved, and I am always a fan of audience participation. And 3) It helps me get to know you guys! Now to be fair, I'm pretty certain I know a lot of you, but there have been a couple times that I've looked at my little blogger tracker thingy (technical jargon) and thought, "You know, I'm not certain I know anyone in Australia," or "Who could that be in Florida?" And I want to hear from you guys! I want a great big, tasty, juicy, meeting of the gastro-minded from all over the place.

So go ahead, throw some ideas out there, and see what sticks. And I shall report back with all of the silly, tasty, hilarious details.

Two Meals

A while back I wrote a rather impassioned blog about the state of American cooking culture, and about what we lose by discouraging our up-and coming adults from learning how to cook. I was on a roll about how many of my peers don't know how to cook, and maybe never will, and what we lose as a generation when we lose that ability to express ourselves socially through food.

What I didn't write about in that blog was all the people of my generation who do choose to cook. I was lucky enough to be a dinner guest several times over the past couple weeks, a novel idea for someone who is much more accustomed to being a host. These were two really different dinners; the first a beautiful, festive evening with interesting strangers and close friends alike. The second, a casual, one-on-one meal with one of my oldest friends. Both times I left full and happy, no question about that, but I also left with the comforting knowledge that maybe the art of cooking and creating social bonds through food isn't a dying art after all.

One:

Heading over to Tia's house with Masha and Mike, I have no idea what's cooking. It's Tia's birthday, and she's invited some friends over for dinner, and I don't know any of them except the two I've come with. I'm also not used to being a dinner guest. Dinner host, always, dinner guest, less so, and I've got a lot of restless host-y energy coursing through me right now. I've kind of got to force myself to relax. I've come with an open mind, a healthy appetite, and a bottle of wine. Masha opens the front door without knocking, and standing in the foyer I can smell food and heat wafting through the house from the kitchen, and hear running water and clanging pans in the next room.

In Tia's kitchen, I'm hit with that familiar happy feeling from when I was growing up. A large part of my love of the art of the dinner party comes straight from my childhood, when my parents would invite a handful of their friends over, mostly writers, or our well travelled and foul mouthed hippy-ish neighbors from down the block, and get cooking. The food would be well on it's way to completion by the time people started showing up, and my mother would answer the door with a glass of wine in her hand, ("Always have a glass of wine in your hand when you open the door," she told me when I started hosting my own parties, "if you're relaxed, your guests will be too.") and Tim, or Rigel, or Mike and Jen would start in on a glass of wine or a martini, and try the dip, leaning against the counter in our kitchen saying, "Anything I can do?"My parents were great at this, timing the food and the booze and the music, so that when their guests started showing up, there would be excitement and anticipation pouring out of the kitchen, but nobody would ever see them break a sweat. It was an art form, and Tia had nailed it.

"Anything I can do to help?" I asked. Tia had me set out some cheeses on a pretty little multi-tiered stand, (Brie and pepper-jack, and a completely addictive marinated mozzarella) and whip up some pretty, summer-y grapefruit and pomegranate cocktails. Tia busied herself with a mind-blowing spinach quiche with a homemade crust that totally re-defined for me what a quiche is supposed to taste like, a chunky salad with avocados and field greens, and a vat of fresh steamed mussels that smelled like the ocean and burst their shells wide open on the heat of the stove like little garlicky, beach-grown flowers. On Tia's porch, we sat in the dark surrounded by candles and fairy-lights and drank mussel broth straight from the bowl, and Masha told us all about how in Russia, you toast the host, and then each other, and when you're done, you take turns toasting every member of the hosts family, if only as as an excuse to continue drinking. That was all well and good, but as we opened another bottle of wine and Tia appeared from the kitchen with a fresh berry tart in her hands, we simply couldn't help but make yummy noises and raise our glasses to our host, over, and over, and over again.

Two:

"Can I do anything to help?" I ask.

"Absolutely not," John replies, "I'm making you dinner." Truthfully I'm just as happy for it, because I've just come off my second day at my new job, and I'm exhausted. Normally John and I share cooking responsibilities on our semi-regular dinner nights, but tonight John has taken the reigns, and I'm inclined to let him. Apparently reading my mind, John has contrived the most comforting of comfort food dinners, meat loaf and mashed potatoes with corn on the cob. I haven't had meat loaf in probably 15 years, but somehow tonight seems the perfect evening for it. It's a hot and sticky night, probably too hot to be running the oven, but it doesn't matter. Meatloaf is exactly the thing.

We spend so much more time talking than cooking, it's almost comical. "I really am going to start making dinner, I swear!" he assures me, but I'm not worried. John tells me about the girl he was seeing until very recently, and about why it didn't work out. I tell him about my work frustrations, and about the rough week I've just come off of and how I've been feeling just a little bit fragile. About an hour in, John starts the meatloaf, and pours in so much BBQ sauce that we both have questions about how the meatloaf is going to set up, but decide, the hell with it and toss it in the oven. The sauce, it is worth noting, is from the legendary Dinosaur BBQ, the best Barbecue joint in the town we both grew up in, and that gets us started on our hometown, our families, his sister who is getting married, my sister who is just starting out on her acting career, our friends from high school who we don't see anymore, all of it.

Our concerns about the meatloaf were unfounded. It is perfectly moist and surprisingly spicy, and full of Dinosaur BBQ magic. I've got work in the morning, but we're still talking and listening to music, and then it turns out that John has the ingredients for root-beer floats, a sign if I've ever heard one that the evening is not over. (Especially when said floats are fortified with rum, a choice I strongly endorse.) We watch videos online and eat huge chunks of Italian bread with way too much butter and get a little bit drunk. There is nothing formal about this dinner, but then, there doesn't need to be. We've known each other since I had braces and he had frosted blonde tips, and a polite, formal dinner would just feel silly. Instead we eat amazing meatloaf made with hometown barbecue sauce, drink grown-up versions of a classic childhood dessert, and insist that we are going to get together again sooner rather than later, to do it all again. Perhaps next time I'll even help cook.