The Turn

I found it sitting in the lobby of my building two weeks ago. The box was addressed to Mr. Gastro, but somehow I knew it was really for me.

Fire Engine Red. Ten speed with a tilt back head and a 5 quart bowl. Flat beater. Wire whip. Dough Hook. The thing weighs as much as a cement cinder block, and you can bet that if my grandmother had invested in one 50 years ago, she'd still be using it today, and it would look damn near identical to the one sitting on my kitchen counter. It's my first wedding present. The Holy Grail of kitchen appliances.

The KitchenAid stand mixer.

This must be what it feels like to dream about some sweet little classic car for decades, only to find it in your garage one morning and be too afraid to take it out for a drive. Seriously, I just want to sit here and polish the thing. It's been sitting on my amazon wish list for years, and now that I have it, it's taken me two weeks to turn it on, like I'm going to dent it, or something.

And then I got over it and made croissants.

I chose croissants specifically because I'd never made them before, and because I knew they'd take me all day. I could have made up a batch of chocolate chip cookies or a simple pie crust easily enough, but I wanted to make this first spin count. Croissants are a process, I found out. They're definitely an all day commitment. Making croissants essentially comes down to a long process of taking your lean dough, comprised of flour, sugar, salt, yeast, a tiny touch of butter and some whole milk, and layering it with the "butter square" which is exactly what it sounds like-- Three sticks of butter mixed up with about an iota of all purpose flour and formed into a SLAB. You roll out the lean dough, drop your butter brick in the middle of it, fold it up in the sheet of dough like a present. A buttery, fatty, heart stopping present. To yourself. Then you roll out that envelope of butter and flour, and you fold it on top of itself in thirds. And then you do it again. This little maneuver is called the turn, and when you're done you've got what looks like a neatly folded up blanket of deliciousness. You give that tidy little thing two hours in the refrigerator, and then you do it all again. Rolling. Folding. Turning. Waiting. It sounds a little tedious, but it's actually a really soothing, ordered process, and a big departure from my normal, off the wall modus operandi in the kitchen. You have to follow the rules. You have to take your time. When you're done with the turns and you roll it out one last time, what you are left with are layers upon layers of perfectly dispersed butter and lean dough. When the croissants bake the dough expands and lifts, while the butter melts and infuses everything around it with stop-your-heart sinful flavor. And when they come out of the oven you have a dozen perfectly flaky, golden, European style croissants, and an apartment that smells like a bakery.

I am happy to report that the croissants are gorgeous, and my new mixer did the job beautifully, as if there was ever any doubt. The dough hook is a life saver, and will certainly inspire me to take on may more baked goods in the future, now that the threat of kneading-induced carpel tunnel is off the table. I am also happy to report that fresh baked croissants freeze beautifully, and with a quick spell in the oven and a large cup of coffee, infuse a little bit of bliss into an otherwise routine weekday morning.

Challenge Response: Caribbean Shrimp

So it's still hot, but not as hot as it has been; That is to say, not so hot that I can't turn on my stove for fear that my apartment would sizzle and burst into flames. Not so hot that even entering my poorly ventilated little kitchen would be inviting a fainting spell. So I decided that tonight had to be the night. It was time to stop procrastinating.

I had to meet my challenge.

Oh yeah, remember the challenge? The one that I invited, then failed horribly with my mango chutney scallop disaster? And swore that I would re-attempt? Weeks ago? That challenge.

To recap, the challenge went as follows: Create a dish that uses shellfish as the key ingredient, is gluten free, and has some sort of unexpected ingredient combo that makes your mouth go, "huh...Wow!" In addition, the whole shebang should feed 2 for under $20, with leftovers. Which is A-LOT of challenge indeed, but I felt up to the task. But then again I felt up to it last time. When i ended up ordering pizza.

So first of all...SURPRISE! That lovely peach salsa that i posted a couple days ago? Rocks a featured role in this meal. And As far as I'm concerned fulfills the requirement for the "where did you come up with that?" ingredient dance, with the unexpected but completely fun combo of peach and cayenne. The rest of it is actually fairly simple: Grilled shrimp marinated in black pepper and lime. Heat Wave Salsa. And Coconut rice. The lime gives a little zip to the shellfish without overwhelming the shrimp's own natural flavor. The acid of the salsa snuggles right up against the creamy sweetness of the rice and does a little cha-cha. And the best part? Excluding basics I always keep in my kitchen, (like spices and olive oil) using my grocery Store's rewards card and a little bit of discriminating shopping, the ingredients for this recipe cam in at just over $18. And as for leftovers? We would have had some. If Mr. Gastro and I hadn't gone back for seconds.

Caribbean Shrimp with Coconut Rice

1 Lb Shelled, de-veined shrimp

juice of 1 lime

salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

1 cup long grained white rice

1 cup coconut milk

1 batch of Heat Wave Salsa (see previous entry)

First, whip up some of that yummy peachy salsa that you learned to make just the other day, and set aside in the refrigerator. Don't eat all of it. Save some for dinner.

In a large bowl whisk together the juice of 1 lime, and an equal amount of olive oil (approximately 1/4 cup), along with a pinch of salt and a generous amount of cracked black pepper. Toss with 1 pound of rinsed, dried jumbo shrimp. Set aside.

In a sauce pan combine 1 cup of water with 1 cup coconut milk and a pinch of salt, and bring to a boil on the stove top. Add i cup of rice and immediately cover and reduce heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Grill the marinated shrimp on high heat for approximately 3 minutes on each side or until the tails turn pink and the shrimp are opaque all the way through. Fluff the rice, and plate with grilled shrimp and a generous scoop of peach salsa. Serve immediately.

Heat Wave

Guys. It's hot. Too hot to sleep. Definitely too hot to even THINK about turning on the stove, or god forbid, the oven. And I have not spoken to a single person this week, in any region of the country, where this isn't the case.

It's just unpleasant.

That being said, I haven't updated in several weeks. But I have had a handful of mini Gastro-adventures. A lovely mozzarella tomato basil salad with John last week. Truffle pizza with Masha and Mike. (So good! Why didn't I think of that?) Burgers on the 4th of July. And I tried rose flavored ice cream at a lovely little shop in Cambridge. (The first bite was beautiful. ROSE FLAVORED ICE CREAM! But I will not be ordering an entire bowl of it again, not even a small one. There is a reason rose is used as a palette cleanser between the big stuff, or as a sprinkle of fun on an otherwise familiar dish. A whole bowl of rose flavored ice cream crawls into your throat and your nose and under your tongue and becomes far too much of a good thing very quickly. But I'm glad I tried it.) There has been good food these past several weeks, but there has also been sweat, and bad feelings and disrupted REM cycles. Therefore, bearing the weather in mind, please enjoy the following (fire-free) foray into the world of salsa. Sweet and spicy, salty and creamy, and most importantly, best served cool.

Heat Wave Salsa

1 Avocado

1 Large ripe tomato

1 Peach

1 Lime

3 cloves garlic

Salt

Black pepper

Cayenne pepper

Dice the tomato, peach, and avocado with a medium-fine dice--Small enough that the components can easily come together as a salsa, but not so fine that they begin to break down and become mushy. (Especially important concerning the avocado.) Drain excess liquid from the tomato if necessary. Mince the garlic, and combine with tomato, peach, and avocado in a large bowl. Add the juice of 1 lime, plus salt, black pepper, and cayenne to taste. Stir ingredients together gently, turning with the spoon so that the avocado doesn't fall apart. Enjoy with pita chips and central air.

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.

Float

I've been having a rough week.

Okay, it's been several weeks, really, of exhaustive job searching, financial freak outs, not enough fresh air, not enough fruits and veggies, and a lot of couch-grown negativity. But this week, it kind of came to a head, and I have been acting just a little (read: a lot) like a person in need of some serious pharmaceutical help and a lot of talk therapy. There's been crying. Totally irrational, red in the face crying. I think everyone is allowed a little bit of this every now and then, but I am becoming increasingly aware that I am nearing my quota for the year.

Meanwhile in the midst of one of my semi-normal spells earlier this week, I passingly mentioned to Mr. Gastro that I had stumbled upon a food blog out there in the great big blogosphere on the topic of foods from our childhood, specifically root beer floats. And I thought this blogger had a pretty good point. I mean, when was the last time that you, as an adult, had a root beer float? If you had to take more than 7 seconds to think about it it's been too long. Anyway, it was one of those random sentences that sometimes flies out of my mouth, and having said it, I promptly forgot about it and returned to wailing uncontrollably or gnashing my teeth, or whatever it was I had been doing before my synapses randomly misfired and prompted me to want to talk about root beer floats.

And is anybody surprised that the very next day, on a disgustingly hot night, Mr. Gastro came home from work carrying a bottle of A&W root beer and a gallon of vanilla ice cream? Maybe not you, but he surprised the hell out of me. I swear to God, I jumped up and down like a little kid, scaring the crap out of the cat and probably out of Mr. Gastro. I was so stupid happy at the prospect of root beer. And ice cream. TOGETHER.

Later that night while watching District 9 and drinking ridiculously huge root beer floats, I thank Mr. Gastro for thinking of it, and he blushes, saying, "I mean...I know it was silly, but..." and without even thinking about it, I cut him off, and shouted, "It's not silly, THIS IS THE HAPPIEST I'VE BEEN ALL WEEK!"

There was all kinds of stuff wrong with that statement. Like the fact that it was true. And the fact that something that was so bad for me could make me feel so much better. Is that wrong? Probably. I was mortified as soon as I said it. And then I just stopped. Because my own personal dietary health aside, when you're feeling that low, it doesn't really matter what it is that brings you out of it, as long as you get out of it one way or another. For me it was a root beer float. But I maintain that if I had gone down to the store myself, bought the root beer and the ice cream and had a root beer float all by myself, I would have ended up feeling even crappier than I had started. It was Mr. Gastro who picked me up, pumped me full of high fructose corn syrup and made me feel all better, something I'm not certain I could have done for myself, regardless of how much sugar I had thrown at it.

So here is my assignment for all of my fellow Gastro-Junkies out there tonight: If you have somebody you love, and who loves you back, make them a root beer float. They probably haven't had one in a while. And while you're at it, make one for yourself.