Personally, I have a bit of a love affair with food, perhaps trending just a tad towards the unhealthy side.  Certain meals do bring me comfort, although I’m not sure I can attribute that happiness to much other than “this tastes beautiful and I enjoy it immensely.”  If that’s all there is to it, I’m pretty okay with that.  On more than one occasion I’ve wondered if some of us are afflicted with a strange sort of synesthesia.  You know, when the sense of taste translates into stunning feelings and imagery in your mind’s eye, physiological excitement, perhaps deeper attachments to the person you’re eating with, or the establishment you’re in … they say scent is the sense that’s most closely tied to our memory and emotions, and 75% of what we taste is actually coming from smell.  Coincidence?  I think not.

There’s a wonderful restaurant in Palo Alto called Lavanda.  It’s full of good people, energy, wine and food, and makes me happy.  I was there with my family almost exactly one year ago, for my 26th birthday, and the Executive Chef at the time, Tiny, personally brought a special dish out to the bar for us (it’s rare to find my family and I sitting at a proper table, we’re bar-lingering folks and damn proud of it).  It was so simple: fresh bread , creamy goat cheese, succulent asparagus, and truffle oil.  I later discovered the bread was from La Brea, and now it’s the only bread I’ll buy if I can help it.

Suffice it to say, I completely stole this recipe.  I make it all the time, and no matter how many times I  have it, I still close my eyes and sigh as I take that first bite.  The tastes meld together perfectly.  Before putting the truffle oil on, I cover the bread and cheese quite liberally with fresh cracked black pepper.  You should try it!  Enjoy, and may it bring you comfort.

An expert baker I am not, but there’s two things which are relatively unique to this recipe: a mixture of all-purpose flour and cake flour, and having the dough sit for 24-36 hours.  The former gives you silkiness, the latter is meant to  allow the flour in the dough to soak up the flavor from the butter, vanilla, and so forth.

When you’re at the halfway point and your dough is finished, “silky” doesn’t even begin to describe it.  It’s lacking that heavy grit a lot of doughs have, and um … yeah.  I don’t eat lots of cookie dough.  Not at all.  Anyway, another great thing about this recipe is that it encourages the use of organic, sustainable chocolate.  It names Valrhona as a preferred choice, the 70% dark I believe.  Every time I make these though, I use half dark and half milk.  The first time they were out of feves, so I got home with baking blocks and chopped them up myself.  My poor wrists.

(It was worth it.)

The clincher here comes in the form of sea salt sprinkled on top.  I desperately wanted to find that really crunchy, flaky variety that you sometimes get in very nice restaurants, but I couldn’t.  Woe.  I’m a bit of a fiend when it comes to salt + sugar.  I might murder you if you get between me and salted caramel ice cream, and when I read this recipe’s call for salt on the cookie I think I actually made them the very next day.

These came out perfect.  Prior  batches had been dicey, for which I blamed my old gas oven which is simply too hard to tame when baking something so delicate.  So I moved future operations to my mom’s, and now warm these in her nice, new, state of the art cookie baking device.  You’d think it would be an imposition, but for some reason she doesn’t seem to mind.  Go figure.

There you have it, the story of the NYT cookie.  The recipe is on their website, free for the taking.  I have a feeling this thing kicks that silly Bloomingdale’s chocolate chip cookie recipe’s ass.  Or is it Sacs 5th Ave.?  Who cares, you should go make these.

Previously only really eaten on special occasions, such as BBQs (see last blog entry), I’m now eating red meat slightly more frequently.  I still have the requisite health concerns, as well as my moral ones.  My other consumption habits have begun leaning strongly towards free range, cage free, local and organic.  Why should beef be any different?  On the contrary, it’s probably even more important.  Plus, you can follow the “Snickers and a Diet Coke,” logic here.  Add vegetables, and suddenly your steak dinner really isn’t so bad, is it?

My lovely friend Greta semi-recently introduced me to Marin Sun Farms beef, only available locally (read: Palo Alto) at Country Sun Foods.  Go buy some. The steaks are great and the ground beef is phenomenal.  When Greta made mini-burgers with this beef, I was dumbstruck.  I’ve never been a huge fan of burgers for the burger itself, it was always about the toppings for me.  Marin Sun beef changes everything.  But only if you have money in the bank, otherwise you should probably eat something else.  This stuff isn’t cheap.

 Slightly overcooked Grass Fed Beef with Herbs and  Yellow and Green Bean Salad (revised - yes, I must add feta to everything).  Until someone pins me down and convinces me otherwise, I’ll continue to assume this is healthful and eat it semi-regularly.  The bean salad is a fine light supper on its own, if you aren’t very hungry/are crash dieting for some ungodly reason.  But why would anyone do such a thing?

Mint from the garden? Check. Feta? Not so much. I was concerned about the blandness of the cheese not adding much to the recipe, but was going to try it anyway. At the store, I came across “Bulgarian Feta.” I took a chance on it, and am really quite glad I did. It’s not like other fetas. It’s stronger, saltier, and dare I say, it’s almost a stinky cheese. It contributes some serious punch to this recipe and I wouldn’t use any other sort of feta with it.

See? Salty melty goodness. These work great on their own, as shown, or as burgers. With the former I just strain some yogurt and mix in chopped cucumber with a little mint to eat as a side. For burgers, a tzatziki is more appropriate. Serve on ciabatta rolls with some thinly sliced red onion, and you are seriously good to go.One final note about lamb: if you think you don’t like it, try it again. Unless your reasons are political/moral, in which case, ignore me. But I’ve had lots of people declare they don’t like lamb, then have a bite of one of these, and practically inhale the thing. It’s my suspicion that somehow, lots of people have only ever tried Australian lamb which can be really gamy. Domestic is where it’s at.

This is one of that damnable Bobby Flay’s recipes. I can’t eat one of these without experiencing internal conflict. Despise the man, love his food. I shake my fist at you, Bobby Flay!

To be honest, it’s a darn good thing I’m not Italian. If I were, my grandmother would be slapping the hell out of me for what I’m about to say. But I’m just going to say it, while the angels weep. In my Spaghetti Carbonara, I did not like Guancale nearly as much as I like Pancetta. So there. The photos below are of my Guancale version.

It just doesn’t have the charm Pancetta has. And if you know me at all, you know that I will gladly defy Italian tradition in the interest of charming pork products.

To date, the above is definitely my most ambitious Italian attempt. It gets easier with time; a good set of tongs is crucial and I’ve learned to temper the eggs with the pasta water. The first time I ever made this, it was basically noodles, bacon and scrambled eggs with a ton of pepper. Ideal? No. Delicious? Yes. This is a pretty great recipe, and it’s generally what I go on. But really, once you do this once it’s hard to forget how it goes.

But I’ve found that authenticity and degree of difficulty aren’t what impresses friends. What does impress them, you ask? Lemons and grain alcohol. More specifically, high proof liquor that over a period of time, extracts the oils from lemon peels then is married with sugar and water and kept at freezing temperatures to create a divinely thick, syrupy, creamy and sweet lemon flavored Italian digestivo.

Also known as, Limoncello.

If you’re familiar with the Gumbo debacle, you might know by now that when I embark on what can only be described as a culinary project, I do research. And lots of it. In fact, my tendency to procrastinate on the actual execution of my hairbrained schemes gives me lots and lots of time for research. But finally the day came where I was ready to inflict myself with carpal tunnel syndrome by painstakingly peeling (not pithing) dozens of lemons and dumping them into two liters of 165 proof everclear. Below is the result of my first half-batch being combined. This was on July 10th. I have been diligently agitating daily. I even passed the Jar of Holiness to my mother to shake for me when I was on vacation in Portland. It is now August first, and I’m just about ready to combine the whole mess with simple syrup and toss it into the freezer.

Assuming I can keep from drinking it all, this will probably be everyone’s christmas presents this year. A couple ounces of homemade Limoncello in itty bitty apothecary bottles. Of course, even if I do drink it all I can always make more.

More pictures to come. I got most of my guidance here and here.

 So when I finally got my hands on the le creuset pot I’ve been dying for (in lemongrass green, natch), the absolute first place my mind went was: gumbo.  I won’t lie and say the research process was simple.  I agonized over recipes for the better part of a week.  I’m an incurable shellfish addict, but did I want to spend a bunch of money on shrimp and crab for a first-try gumbo that may turn out awful?  I decided not, and went with andouille and chicken.

Throughout all my gumbo research, the recipes I saw kept ping-ponging back and forth between okra and file.  File and okra.  It’s enough to make a Californian’s head spin.  The recipe that appealed to me the most actually called for neither.  I didn’t trust this, so I plugged in the okra instructions from another recipe.  To make matters worse, I’d read somewhere that you never, ever use both file and okra.  But my coworker, a seasoned gumbo maker at the wise age of 56, insisted I use both.  Well, it ended up a moot point, because by the time I tossed my broth and chicken thighs in the pot, I’d completely forgotten to add the okra.

In typical Juli form, my first instinct was: panic.  Alas!  I did not.  I trudged onward and let that bad boy cook for two and a half hours, skimming from time to time, and when it was ready we sprinkled some file and went to town.  I was a nervous wreck over my roux, and babied it incessantly.  Thankfully, the milk chocolate roux I ended up turned out to work perfectly as my thickening agent.

 And while I’ve had better for sure, my gumbo was DAMN good for a west coast girl’s first stab at the dish.  So good in fact, that I forgot to take photos of the finished product.  So here’s one in the next morning’s tupperware.

Please also note that I made bread pudding.  Spongy, creamy, rich, cinnamonny, and crisp where it counts.  Hot damn, that stuff was good (again, so good the Canon was utterly neglected).  My date doesn’t enjoy food with alcohol in it, but I whipped up a whiskey cream sauce to drizzle on top and it was divine.

 As for the recipes, you can find them both here:

Chicken and Andouille Sausage Gumbo

Bread Pudding

The recipe I decided on for the lamb called for a garlic and rosemary coating. In the store, I made a spur of the moment switch to Thyme instead. I. Love. Thyme. More on that later. They were delicous, but very fatty and mostly bone. 2-3 bites of meat in each chop. I’m pretty sure this is simply the nature of lamb chops, but it also explains why they were on the thrifty side. If you make the chops, you absolutely have to reduce the salt by at least half.

The deliciousness atop the sprouts is garlic. Great recipe, I’ll be using it over and over.

I’d like to point out, for the record, that I followed the recipe exactly and used high quality ingredients.

It’s pretty though, no? Oh well. Two recipes to avoid:

Spicy-sweet tangerine shrimp

Braised baby bok choy

Sorry, epicurious!

I wasn’t really interested in doing a cake, or a shortbread dish. I wanted to do something creative though, because I’ve never really cooked with fruit before! I briefly considered a granita, but a gelato recipe caught my eye. I googled the process of making ice cream without an actual ice cream maker, and away I went! Of course, it turns out that what I made is actually a sorbet, and not gelato because there is no milk or cream in it. But either way, it’s damn tasty and elegantly showcases the character of the berries.

Believe it or not, I’d never really used my paring knife for a proper paring knive use. I hulled and halved these beauties, so they could fit in my little Cuisinart mini-prep.

The final product. I made too much! Someone needs to come help me eat this.