Archive for December, 2006

Tonight I made a salad using left-over ham from Christmas dinner. I combined an heirloom tomato with honey-glazed ham and mâché, but included a special dressing.

• 2 parts Tasmanian Leatherwood Honey
• 1 part lemon juice
• 2 parts extra-virgin olive oil
• salt, pepper

Leatherwood honey was a gift I received during the holidays, and has an incredibly unique and strong flavor and smell: a little goes a long way.

Here’s another angle for those who love salad:

I also made an awesome pasta dish with left-over mushrooms. I call it, simply, Linguini alla Funghi.

Linguini alla Funghi

This recipe serves 2.

• 5 garlic cloves
• half-carton crimini mushrooms, cleaned and washed
• one carton oyster mushrooms, cleaned, and chopped
• one shallot
• diced sun-dried tomatoes
• 2 tsp. sun-dried tomato paste
• green, ripe Tuscan olive oil
• parmesan cheese
• salt, pepper
• zest of one lemon
• juice of one-half lemon
• 4 Tbsp. beef stock
• 3 Tbsp. red wine
• 3 Tbsp. fresh tarragon leaves, chopped
• one-half pound Italian linguini

Sauté one garlic clove, the shallot, minced, with olive oil for a few minutes, then add the fungus. Add pepper, salt, tomato paste. Add wine, reduce; add beef stock, reduce, and cover on low. Boil pasta.

Next, add the sun dried tomatoes, more garlic, and lemon zest. Cover. When pasta is done, add 3 Tbsp. of pasta water, more salt, lemon juice, and tarragon. Stir to coat in sauce pan, and cover for 2 minutes. At the end, add copious streams of the Tuscan oil and parmesan cheese, and more fresh cracked pepper, if desired.

I make pasta often, but this was one of the better pasta dishes I’ve ever made. I think it was the addition of lemon, and the good-quality EVOO.

Toasted Tuscan-style bread sopped up extra dressing.

This Christmas I had planned a grande dinner, but it slowly diminished in scale. The main feature was still a honeyed-ham, which was tasty. But the opening soup, a French curried cauliflower soup, thickened with hazelnuts, was served instead for luncheon. It was quite good.

Another side dish ended up being a pre-meal appetizer: Patrick O’Connell’s green beans that get a tempura treatment, and a dipping sauce. This was a disaster, because all the oil overflowed and I had a royal, fatty mess. Tasty, though.

The side dishes that went with the ham included a root-vegetable gratin, brussels sprouts with wild mushrooms and shallots, and biscuits.

The holidays are for sharing, and we all had a good time. For some reason, my timing/planning was off this season, and the chore of putting all the dishes together as one complete meal needed help in efficiency. Nonetheless, I learned a few things, and postponed the dessert for another day.

The recipes for the gratin (celery root, parsnip, sweet, and russett potatoes) and the brussels sprouts came from the November, 2006 edition of Gourmet magazine.

Oh heaven.

I know that readers will doubtfully have ever tried Sicilian Pistachio cream. This stuff is heavenly, to say the least. It has that quality of flavor that says it’s so good, like a truffle, or an exotic honey, that maybe you shouldn’t be eating it. Luxurious, yes, but so creamy, sweet, and nutty rich.

Where did I get this spread? From the Z-Club: one of my Christmas gifts from Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. They send you a box, and it’s filled with all sorts of gourmet treats.

Supposedly this stuff is rare, and the first time it has been imported into the U.S. of A. Zingerman’s tells us that this stuff is good on toast, bagels, waffles, and oatmeal, or drizzled over ricotta cheese. I’m guessing it would make a killer addition to a pistachio-flavored soufflée, too.

Yum. Zingerman’s is likely to carry this in 2007 at their store, or through their catalog. It’s one (and the first) treat in my Z-Club box that I whole-heartedly recommend. It’s that good.

Some time ago, I read a recipe in NY Times Magazine for a passion fruit soufflé. Needless to say, keeping things like old magazines around this house is a real challenge. I lost it. So, I searched online for another recipe.

The basic idea is: whip your egg whites, make a thick sugar syrup by boiling 1 cup sugar with 2 Tbsp. of water, and a vanilla bean. Then, you drizzle this warm syrup into the egg whites. Then, at last, you add the passion fruit purée.

It must have been a bad day for the messy chef. I made the syrup too thick. Instead of a nice thick liquid to make an Italian-style meringue with the eggs, I got hard strings of sugar. It all tasted good, but… it wasn’t very correct.

The passion fruit was hard to incorporate. It was very liquidy. Yet, despite my mistakes in trying to make this dish, the taste was phenomenal! No wonder it has been a rising star in the world of dessert soufflées. Both tart, exotic (with vanilla), and sweet. I should like to try again, as I have more purée of passion fruit left. You can find it in latin markets.

• 1/2 cup passion fruit purée
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 egg whites
• one-half split vanilla bean, scraped
• 1 Tbsp. water (or more, if you boil it for too long)
• butter, sugar, for preparing ramikins

Some time ago, I reviewed on another site my two visits to The Trellis in Williamsburg, VA. While it is not in the same league as the top-tier eateries in America, I did give it “5 stars” for both visits, and it has remained a special place to visit. I recently returned for lunch, and shared their most famous dessert, the so-called Death by Chocolate.

The picture shows my portion, a sort of “de-constructed” version of the seven-layer cake. Genache, mousse, and meringue make up the most of it. Marcel doesn’t use premo-chocolate, but it’s sweet enough and rich enough to still rank in the list of excesses. Actually, sharing the dessert with one or two others isn’t a bad idea, and makes finishing it off at dinner or lunch a more plausible feat.

I reveled in the chocolate flavor as I held it in my mouth, and despite it not being the best of the best chocolate, it was pure sugar, fat, and chocolate, and the overwhelming richness brought happiness to my mind. My brain was telling me, despite the calories and the sin in eating something I did not need, life was good. I was surrounded by family, light, in a favored place, and the feeling was sublime. Chocolate is wonderful.

I did not die, but was reawakened. When I got home, I ate more of my chocolate nib cookies.