King Cake update

Photograph © Lori Korleski Richardson

Even a bad King Cake is pretty good. I used a recipe from nolacuisine.com, after ascertaining that the Epicurious one was way beyond my meager baking skills. It came out (to my taste) too dry and flat, and the pecan filling leaked out all over the cookie sheet, but the simple icing was a hit (1 cup powdered sugar to 1 tablespoon bourbon plus coloring). Yet even that I had trouble with; I got food coloring all over my fingers, and the blue seemed intent on overpowering any red I added to get a good shade of purple.

They say no one in New Orleans makes a King Cake; they all buy them from bakeries there. I now know why.

Pasta update

Tried some more sous vide pasta today (while cooking my first King Cake - more on that, later), using 2 ounces of pasta and 3 ounces of water. It was a lot firmer, even after an hour and a half cooking. (I checked it at 45 minutes; not quite to al dente. The starchiness was still a little too overwhelming, even after a rinse in fresh water. And those who have said that the salt intensifies too much in sous vide cooking - I don't think they've cooked pasta. Still pretty bland.

More experiments to come!

Sous vide pasta

Crockpots are good for things that need to be cooked for a long time, slowly, but often, the meals that are best with a slow-cooked sauce have elements to them that do not need to be cooked as long.

Case in point today: spaghetti.

The sauce went in around noon, and by 3 p.m., it was smelling pretty good. Next up, pasta. But heating up a big pot of water that will later just be drained seemed like a waste. Could there be a better way? I knew if I just threw in the dry pasta into the sauce, it would cook, but it would absorb all the liquid and the starch would leach into the sauce, making it gummy and not so appetizing.

But with the vacuum bags from the store, there was another option: Put the dry pasta, broken in half, in the bag with water; seal; then put the washed bag into the sauce to cook along with it until dinner time.

It worked - well, it sort of worked.

When I checked on it two hours later, it had more than doubled in size. And when I opened it, it was in separate strands, but it was overdone and very starchy. I rinsed it and got most of the starch off of it, then added it to the sauce. Topped with Parmesan, it was good, but not great.

From what I've read on sous vide cooking, the length of time shouldn't have been the problem, so perhaps I used too much water. Next time, instead of doubling the water to pasta, I'll just use a bit more than what's needed to cover it.

Getting on my King Cake

It's not likely anyone will send me a King Cake this year, so I'm thinking I may have to make one (or more). I'm about to scour my cookbook collection and the Internet for recipes, but if anyone has a favorite, please post a comment or send me a message with it. Gold, purple and green icing, here I come!

A New Year's morning brunch

I did the same New Orleans-style brunch that I did last year for a similar group of friends: Eggs Hussard Strata, followed by Bananas Foster. (Click on the names in color to be taken to the recipes that I posted a year ago.) This is a photo that my husband Jim took of me as I took the plain strata out of the oven, before it was topped with the two sauces and served.

A younger friend, no stranger to good food (I used to cook with her mother at Trinity Cathedral events in Sacramento), said: "This dish had so many wonderful flavors I never knew existed. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! It was great."

Beef products aren't beef

Americans love hamburger. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of eating out in the backyard, my dad making special cheeseburgers (two VERY thin patties with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese pressed between them and the edges sealed), with buns toasted to perfection on the grill, smeared with bright yellow mustard and maybe a dab of ketchup, a big beefsteak tomato slice and a fresh, crisp green lettuce leaf. All the major food groups, held in a package that even kid hands could handle.

Yet as the horror stories of E. coli have grown in the past several years, I've basically avoided commercially made hamburgers, preferring to buy local grass-fed beef and grind it myself (the food processor can do the job, if you don't mind the uneven chunks, which I kind of like). And even then, beef isn't on the menu very often.

So it was with a detached squeamishness that I read today's excellent New York Times story headlined, "Company's Record on Beef Treatment Questioned." To think of all that effort to eradicate problems that come up with processing, when for years just following common sense and sanitary practices were enough, just boggles the mind as it turns the stomach. And the company, while turning down the Times' request for interviews or tours of its facilities, sounded rather cavalier in its response:

“B.P.I.’s track record demonstrates the progress B.P.I. has made compared to the industry norm,” the company said. “Like any responsible member of the meat industry, we are not perfect.”

But it was this line that stopped me in my tracks:

The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Yes, adults can make the choice not to eat at McDonald's or Burger King and the other restaurants that rely on Beef Products Inc.'s ammonia-treated ground beef parts, but what choice do those children have? To eat or not eat? To go hungry and not be able to focus on the afternoon's assignments?

And yet despite their record of repeated contamination, which indicated the ammonia treatment isn't consistent at best, the officials of Beef Products Inc. are free to run their business as they see fit.

I have just one word for the practice: Criminal. And no amount of weasel-talk can make our food safer, just action on the part of the government we trust with our health.

More a question than a post today

What is it about flying that makes one crave chocolate, caramel and nuts? Here I am trying to eat healthfully, having a packed a breakfast and all, but still I'd just rather be munching on a Tolberone (OK, I know it's nougat in there, but the sugar/nut mixture gives it a nice crunch, which makes a great stand-in for gooey caramel). What's up with that?

It's not like I'm getting much exercise sitting here in this pressurized tube hurtling 492 mph through the air. And the ultra-violet (hyphenated, because the purple likely doesn't contain harmful rays) lights gives this Virgin America flight the feeling of being stuck in a crowded bar without enough space around the bar stools to keep from elbowing the other customers.

Just to make this clear, I'm blogging from 34,693 feet, heading to San Francisco. No restaurants this trip, just friends, fun and good food. Ciao!