A Blithe PALATE

IMBB #18: Fried Soy-Sake Shrimp Wontons with Ginger Aioli

Living as I do in the Deep South, it is not possible to escape the culture of frying that exists here, so this month's edition of Is My Blog Burning is most apropros: "Summer's Flying, Let's Get Frying," hosted by Linda of At Our Table. I've murmured on numerous occasions that this is a food culture which can inspire both awe, and unintentional hilarity: where else can you find cuisine capable of rendering vegetables unhealthy? (And in addition to making healthy foods unhealthy, they can also make unhealthy food even worse for you. Two weeks ago I drove past a sign at a local restaurant boasting the availability of deep fried macaroni and cheese.) And where, when you go to employee orientation are you informed that you may not bring your own deep fryer to work? (I'm not kidding; the week before I started work I was told that someone had brought a "big ol' fry daddy" and was frying catfish in his cubicle). I'll bet Scott Adams has never considered this for a Dilbert cartoon...

The Deep South is also where I encountered fried turkey for the first time. Fried turkey is exquisite. You never want oven baked turkey after you've had a fried turkey. Tender, juicy meat, crispy skin. Sadly, also responsible for 15 deaths and countless houses burning down last year. Apparently some people don't realize that it's best to fully thaw and dry the turkey before dropping it into a vat of oil (hot oil + water = huge owie). And dropping it in the vat of oil appears to be the other problem -- that is, some people haven't had the same "Eureka!" moment Archimedes had in his bath (the Archimedes principle states that an object immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force that is equal in magnitude to the force of gravity on the displaced fluid). In short, if you have a vat full of boiling oil that you didn't pre-measure to include a twenty pound turkey, and you drop said turkey in, a lot of the oil is going to overflow. Boiling oil overflowing is bad; overflowing onto gas burner is usually fire-truck-and-insurance-company-call disastrous.

Frying is religion here. But don't think I sneer at southern cooking even if some of it induces alarm: I grew up eating grits, bacon and eggs, the residual effect of my father's time at Ft. Benning, and weekends in Macon, Georgia with the Bone family. Few foods afford greater satisfaction than that breakfast. My Grandma Bone has been gone many years; and still I yearn for her buttermilk fried chicken. In fact, fried chicken serves as the centerpiece of a problem I used to have: whenever I went grocery shopping while hungry, I would bring home family packs of fried chicken (which I didn't even like because I preferred homemade fried chicken!). It was like a physical tic, a culinary Tourette's Syndrome; when we were dating, Hubby once opened the fridge and said, "You went shopping hungry again, didn't you?" When I tried to demur, he simply threw the door open, revealing the damning evidence. (A much more forceful reaction than the time he opened the freezer and found a ten gallon drum of green tea ice cream inside, whereupon he simply closed the door and walked away in mute stupefaction).

I have a cast iron skillet that belonged to Emil's grandfather; it's been lovingly restored and seasoned for me by Hubby, ready to heat up lard and meat.

But I think for this event, it's best to honor my southern surroundings and go with deep frying. Here's a favorite: Fried Soy-Sake Shrimp Wontons with Ginger Aioli. It's modified from a recipe that originally appeared in Bon Appetit.

Maybe it's a little too authentic.

Monday night I was driving home from piano lessons when I nearly wrecked the car while simultaneously defeaning my mother. While chatting with her about family matters, I saw a sign for "Vietnamese Fresh Seafood" and hollered, "A Vietnamese restaurant!" interrupting Mom mid-sentence. Mom was silent for a moment; no doubt stunned by the ringing in her ear (Hubby says I am capable of reaching a high pitch bearable only to insects and deaf people). The turn I made wasn't technically legal but I did discover that the car has a terrific wheel base given the turning radius I achieved, and as a bonus, I reacquainted myself with the finer points of torque and centrifugal force.

You must understand that where I currently live, access to ethnic food stores and/or restaurants is limited. Anything that has "Vietnamese" in its moniker is going to get a fair look from me. I thought at first that I was pulling up to a restaurant; but in fact it was a seafood market and a Vietnamese grocery store. Excellent.

I chatted with the store owner, Linh, who told me that she had recently moved to the area and the store was newly opened. I asked her for some items I needed and she had them all; it rendered me nearly delirious with joy that I would no longer have to make the trek to Atlanta in today's $2.79 per gallon fuel economy. As I was stocking up on fresh rice noodles, rau ram (Vietnamese coriander) and rice paper, we talked about various other exotic ingredients she was planning to stock.

"Authentic Vietnamese ingredients," she said. "Things you wouldn't find anywhere else." She paused, then became animated. "Come look!" She tugged my arm and pulled me towards the front of the store. "We have mangos from Asia and Vietnamese bananas!" she said, showing me a box full of humongous mangos and miniature bananas. "We'll get durian soon, too." (And I'm thinking, great, next time I will enter the store wearing an oxygen mask) Then, beaming with pride, she pointed to two knee-high stacks of cartons laden with eggs. One stack had larger eggs than the other. "See? Hot vit lon and hot ga lon."

Translation: "Fertilized duck eggs and fertilized chicken eggs."

"Completely authentic," Linh said, smiling.

It's a southeast Asian delicacy, known in the Philippines as balut and is popular in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. Writing the specifics of it makes me squeamish, but it's essentially a boiled, incubated egg. Those who love it swear by the broth and the flavors. It's a favored street food and you eat it the way you would a soft boiled egg.

When I was little and being indoctrinated in the wonderful world of street food cuisine (which goes a long way to explaining the cast iron stomach and the nematodes that can fight off any sissy western bacteria), I absolutely loved the cooked egg yolk. I'd have to shove aside some dark stringy material to get to it, but the yolk was worth it. When I was about eight, I finally connected the dots and realized that the gooey gunk I'd been pushing out of the way was actually an embryonic bird.

"It's a bird! It's a bird!" I screamed at my mother.

"Don't look at it!" she exclaimed. "Just eat it!"

(I'm sorry, I didn't realize that part of your role as a parent was to be Joe Rogan from "Fear Factor.")

I most certainly did not eat it and never ate it again. There are some childhood traumas that run deep. It makes me think of my former classmate, Dave. When Dave was six, he went to flush the toilet he was using at a public restroom and the urinal exploded, splashing him from head to toe with water while he stood there, screaming. To this day, Dave apparently jumps back a few feet after flushing. Well, seeing the cartons definitely made me jump back a few feet.

Dinner that night was another street food specialty -- banh uot: steamed white rice noodle crepes, thinly sliced pork sausage, fried shallots, chopped greens, and bean sprouts, doused with a fish sauce-based vinaigrette.

Authentic is good. Authentic food I want to eat, even better.

More Madeleine Madness

Lacking the time to bake last week in San Francisco (Wendy and I found better use for our time over tea at the W Hotel instead), I made the most of this weekend by making Madeleines. My sister's recipe was, as she had promised, superb: meltingly delicious and easy.

I am trying to recall if any other cake in the literary domain is as celebrated as this one; and I am coming up short (yes, yes, thank you; I know I'm 5'1). Marcel Proust makes so much of the Madeleine in what amounts to three pages of melancholic recollection that any word association game involving "Madeleine" might necessarily resolve with "memory" or with "Proust." The memory of a childhood in Commercy and of eating Madeleines in his aunt Léonie's bedroom comprise the opening sequence of his novel, A La Récherche du Temps Perdu, and mark the scalloped cookie's chief claim to fame.

But Madeleines existed long before Proust. Lynne Olver, a reference librarian who runs Food Timeline, notes that the exact origin of the Madeleine has not been discerned, although one legend attributes the cake to Avice, chef to Tallyrand, the French statesman. The inspiration of the name is also unknown; there abound many chefs who claim to have created the cookie in honor of a certain young woman. Linda Stradley, at What’s Cooking in America writes that a girl named Madeleine from Commercy made them for Stanislas Leszczynska, the exiled Polish king, and that the cakes grew to popularity under the reign of his daughter Marie Leszczynska, Queen of France, and her husband, Louis XV. As Marie was singularly quiet and virtually invisible in court life following the birth of her ten children (and the advent of Louis' mistresses), the notion of her popularizing anything at the French court seems unlikely.

According to Rare Bits: Unusual Origins of Popular Recipes, three facts are known about Madeleines: One is that Madeleine is the French version of the name Magdalen (Mary Magdalen, a disciple of Jesus, is mentioned in all four gospels). Another is that Madeleines are always associated with the town of Commercy, whose bakers were said to have paid a "very large sum" for the recipe and sold the little cakes packed in oval boxes as a specialty of the town. And finally, nuns in eighteenth-century France frequently supported themselves and their schools by making and selling a particular sweet. Commercy once had a convent dedicated to St. Mary Magdelen. Perhaps the nuns sold their recipe after all the convents and monasteries of France were abolished during the French Revolution? Perhaps to a group of bakers in a small town in the Lorraine region?

I did discover two additional things about Madeleines this weekend: one is that silicone molds are sold only to marketing victims (Hubby: "Pot, meet kettle.") because they're crap and utterly useless, failing to properly convey the golden crustiness of a traditional mold. And secondly, that some people are infinitely more obsessive and have far more time on their hands than me: this article, The Way the Cookie Crumbles" takes the cake. Literally.

Madeleines

Contrary to existing assumptions, I actually do sleep at night (bake at midnight a few times and you get this strange reputation). Granted, not always as much as other people or as long; or even as deeply as I’d like, but I do sleep. Over the last few days I’ve been sorely lacking in good sleep as I’ve been visiting Hubby and keeping time with his hours – not good as he’s been waking as early as 4:45 and sleeping as late as 11:00. When I got on the plane this morning to return to Atlanta, I really felt debilitated by lack of sleep, an unquiet mind (the OCD and ADD fighting for control as I was in a weakened state) and a distinct sense of malaise. It’s partly due to having to be separated from Hubby again until the end of the month; interminable, after having already been mostly separated (which isn’t the same as all separated) for the last several months; and partly due from external stresses which have intruded upon my happy-go-lucky little self in the last few weeks. That I haven’t had a proper meal in five days, subsisting almost solely on little more than junk food has also wreaked havoc with my system.

I'm more fortified now; Chris fed me when I popped into MF Sushibar to kill the layover time and I got to download my email. One in particular cheered me: my sister Souris and her husband Silvio have been renovating their kitchen. Now boasting state of the art appliances and exquisite countertops (and space), she has been having fun cooking at full speed again. After years of being mixer-deprived (on a notable occasion, when I was giving her instructions on making a cream cheese frosting and wrote, “Mix on high speed for 5-7 minutes,” she wrote back: “I only have one speed. I’m doing this by hand.”), she has decided to pick up a Kitchen Aid. She solicited advice from our sister Kaly on what to buy. Kaly included with her response a very tasty-sounding recipe for madeleines.

I'm currently on my way to San Francisco; and after dinner tonight at Bacar with colleagues, I am going to see if Wendy and Jesse can meet up with me for more culinary adventures. Maybe they'll let me use their kitchen to bake these madeleines. Although technically, they're three hours behind so I'd still be baking at midnight, wouldn't I?

Kaly's email:

Regarding the madeleines, do not change the proportions of the ingredients (you know, add more butter, take away the sugar, etc.). Emily Luchetti, whose book I got this recipe from, is a genius and this is the perfect madeleine. Follow it exactly and you will always get perfect madeleines that taste like they came from Paris. Also make sure you have a separate dry measuring cups for the dry ingredients and a liquid measuring cup for liquids. Dry ingredients (e.g., flour) should never be measured in liquid measuring cups.

Excuse all my side comments in the recipe, but it's stuff I learned while making these every week and they help.

I know the directions seem long because of my commentary, but by the second time you make these, you'll see that it takes about less than 10 minutes to make the batter and 10 more minutes you have warm, good madeleines for Silvio's coffee.

Bon Appetit! Call me if you need anything.

Pâte à Choux & Cream Puffs

Since I only used about 1 cup of the pastry cream for the espresso pot de crème (combined with a cup of sweetened whipped cream), there's still about a cup and half of pastry cream left. What to do with it?

I leave Wednesday to see Hubby in Port Clinton, OH, where he's currently situated with his team and I won't be back until the following Monday so everything perishable in the fridge must be dealt with quickly. Since eating the pastry cream straight from the bowl with a spoon is inadvisable given my current interest in walking and not waddling, the best way to give it away is to make it irresistible to others. Which means: cream puffs!

Cream puffs are made from choux paste, also known as pâte à choux, which is composed of water, butter, flour and eggs. The water in the recipe is the rising agent: during the baking process, the steam it generates helps to create the distinct “puff” with hollow crevices.

According to Classic Patisserie: An A-Z Handbook, choux paste was originally invented by a chef in the court of Catherine de Medici, who followed her when she moved to France to marry the future Henry II. The recipe for the paste changed over the years, as did its name until the mid-eighteenth century when it became known as pâte à choux because it was only ever used to make Choux Buns. The recipe as we know it today was essentially perfected by Antoine Carême.

The paste serves as the basis of other desserts: profiteroles are essentially small cream puffs. Their invention is credited to Guillaume Tirel, also known as Taillevent. Eclairs are made by piping the paste in long tubes.

My aunt used to make swans, by piping thin little question marks (sans dots) for the necks, ovals for the body, and free form wings. They were actually quite lovely and elegant. She served them at my 17th birthday party. One of the swans, too close to the birthday cake, caught on fire. Watching his little head blaze away, I felt compelled to scream, “Michael Jackson! Michael Jackson!” as the singer had recently suffered a bizarre pyrotechnics accident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in which his hair caught on fire. Even then I lacked restraint.

At what point a vanilla custard was piped into the hollow interior is not known (or at least, I couldn’t find it) but other fillings include whipped cream and ice cream. I’m a purist and prefer a vanilla pastry cream. Occasionally I'll dunk the cream puff in chocolate but they're really quite good on their own. This is my mom’s recipe for pâte à choux.

SHF #11 (Coffee): Espresso Pot de Crème with Honey Sabayon

Coffee is this month's main ingredient for Sugar High Fridays, a monthly cooking and blogging event created by the Domestic Goddess. This month's event is being hosted by loveSicily.

I love coffee desserts and had a whole list of things I wanted to try. I spent the week obsessing over how to make a deconstructed Vietnamese Iced Coffee (and probably driving Greg batty with my musings on said subject although he's been remarkably restrained and polite while listening to me). The furthest I got to re-engineering the drink was to envision a base of condensed milk ice cream but I can't figure out the proper vehicle for the coffee yet, so until then, I'll keep mucking with the idea. I made cafè liègeois (essentially a coffee float) for Joetta Friday night which resulted in caffeine induced insomnia. This was probably not the best thing to do to a woman who has a two month old baby and is barely getting enough sleep as it is. I thought about making the Banana Walnut Cake with Coffee Buttercream from the Sweet Serendipity cookbook, but in the end, decided to go with my favorite coffee dessert.

For my first foray to Sugar High Fridays, I'm offering Espresso Pot de Crème with Honey Sabayon.

It was created by Pastry Chef David Stevens at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston, who calls it "Cappuccino Crème Brulée with Honey Sabayon." Although I'm not fond of crème brulée, I originally ordered it because I'd never heard of a honey sabayon and was rather intrigued (I'm a marketing victim when it comes to well-written menus). It became the dessert of choice for the entire week I stayed at the hotel because 1) it wasn't crème brulée in the traditional sense, lacking a sugar crust and 2) the flavors were extraordinary. The honey sabayon was the best part, with a rich, silky texture; I thought at first it was flavored whipped cream, but it wasn't and being curious (and obsessive-compulsive), I asked for the recipe.

Chef Stevens kindly sent up the coffee custard portion, but omitted the sabayon. Being persistent (and obsessive-compulsive), I went down to the hotel's restaurant and waited for him (Hubby: "You stalked a chef?"). We ended up having a nice chat and I thanked him for the partial recipe, then asked for the sabayon part.

"It requires making a pastry cream."

Aha! Pastry cream. Now the flavors and texture made sense.

I assured him I could make a pastry cream and he perked up. "Most people have no idea what it is so I never include that in the recipe. I'll get the rest of the recipe for you."

I originally served it by its proper name, but got so many confused reactions from dinner guests who were expecting cappuccino-flavored crème brulée that I started referring to it as a pot de crème. I also started using espresso and changed its name again (really, after you put a mustache on the Mona Lisa, why stop your vandalism there?) although it's got milk and cream in it, so cappuccino is probably the more correct term.

I made it for dinner last night with Jenn and Joetta (who ate 1/4 of the dessert - probably because she actually wants to sleep tonight).

In order to take pictures this morning, I had to eat a couple of the pots de crèmes. I just didn't like the way those pictures came out but I felt it was necessary to suffer for my art...

Molten Chocolate Cake

Kellie and Matthew came by for dinner tonight. Kellie asked me a few weeks ago if I knew how to make a molten chocolate cake (also known as fallen chocolate cake). She and Matthew had fallen in love with the dessert when they were in New York on assignment a few months ago. I told her I did know how to make it, but it's not one of my favorite desserts. Actually, upon further reflection, I can make a bunch of desserts that I really don't enjoy most of the time: crème brulée, cheesecake, and cookies to name a few. (Greg: "What wrong with you?" Me: "I have ADD. I get bored of the same desserts.")

In any case, when she mentioned that Matthew loved the dessert too, it seemed singularly mean not to make it for them. This is actually one of my favorite recipes (even if it's not a favorite dessert) because in the eight years I've been making it, it's almost fool proof (which makes sense since I got it from Cook's Illustrated).

Kellie came by while I was whipping up the eggs so I had her butter and flour the ramekins. She was far more generous with buttering than I ever was and the final results were spectacular: the cake puffed up and out of the ramekins like perfect little soufflés -- so be profligate when buttering the ramekins! It's a really quick dessert to make; it only took me 20 minutes to prep and assemble, then a further 12 minutes to bake. In the time it took for us to finish our main course, the cakes were finished.

If you have leftovers (no, seriously), let them warm to room temperature, then warm them in a water bath (200 degree oven) for about 5 minutes. Alternatively, nuke them in the microwave for about 30 - 45 seconds to get the cake warm but don't overdo it because you want the chocolate center to still be gooey.

Sugar High Fridays

Nestled in my cozy little blog world, I get lazy about leaving and checking out the wider digital world. Well, that changed last night after I decided to check out some of the food blog links on Chez Pim and 101 Cookbooks' lists. Four bleary-eyed hours later (mind you this was after watching Gordon Ramsay on his reality show), I was nearly wiped out but dying to read more food blogs.

Along the way, I ran into a couple of online foodie events which utterly fascinate me: cooking with theme ingredients and everyone shares their experience. How cool is this? Being a newbie, I thought I'd try my hand at Sugar High Fridays. The premise is simple: one Friday every month, a theme ingredient is chosen and everyone who wants to participate simply makes a dessert with the selected ingredient and writes about the experience. On the designated day, everyone submits their stories, emails, pictures, etc.

August's Sugar High Friday is being hosted by Love Sicily, which blog I still have yet to read; but oh joy of joys, the key ingredient is coffee.

I'm a little torn about the possibilities. Coffee desserts are one of my favorite things to make. I'm thinking all sorts of things: a deconstructed café sua da (iced Vietnamese coffee), café liégeios, coffee affogato, or the ever popular espresso pot de crème with honey sabayon.

Speaking of the last -- I called the Four Seasons to get the pastry chef's name (although I've bastardized it repeatedly, I wanted to properly credit him) and managed to scare the hell out of him. He thought he was in some sort of trouble when I asked for the spelling of his name. Why I thought green card problems is beyond me since the man's British. I think I was probably as rattled about upsetting him as he was to get a call from a stranger demanding information about him.

A few minutes of brown-nosing and worshipping at the altar of his pastry genius smoothed the ruffled feathers.

The event takes place on August 12 so I have ten days to figure out what to make.

The Reception

Two dear friends are getting married again in November. I met them two years ago; they had dinner with Hubby and me a week before they were married in a hastily arranged and brief wedding. She wanted to be a bride, to have her dream reception. There wasn't time: not too long after their wedding, they were deployed -- she to Afghanistan, he to Iraq. In the subsequent two years of marriage, they spent a grand total of three months with each other -- not always consecutively. They're both back now and her thoughts have turned once again to the wedding of her dreams.

My wedding day was the happiest day of my life. I owed my happiness to Hubby; but the perfection of the wedding day itself was due to the collective grace under pressure of Sondra, Julie, Mom, Ellen, Anna and Marni. Sondra and I had spent months discussing aspects of the wedding, refining each detail every time we talked. So two days before the wedding, I turned all operational aspects of the wedding to Sondra. In a memorable moment recounted later over (lots of) alcohol, Sondra confessed to informing the reception site and catering staff that any problems were to be brought to her: "If the kitchen burns down and we have to go pick berries for dinner, come to me and we will take care of it! She doesn't need to know anything from this point forward!" The kitchen didn't burn down and we didn't need to pick berries. But I knew that if anything was to go wrong, Sondra was going to fix it. So unlike a lot of brides I've talked to, I actually enjoyed my wedding.

I think every bride should enjoy her wedding day, so I offered to host our friends' reception because I want her to have the party of her dreams. It's karmic payback for the fête Sondra and the girls gave me.

I love throwing parties, so the reception is taking place in our backyard. I'm also insane: I'm cooking for the event.

3 months, 18 days until the event.

I have a first draft of the menu, a few design sketches, a draft schedule, a logistics plan for the backyard, and 17 recipes for Red Velvet Cake (the wedding cake) to test.

It's rocking to me to sleep every night.