Monday, January 06, 2003

Tonight was leftovers, whereby I proved to myself that cooking on an insane scale does not necessarily a good cook make.  I was working with leftover chicken breasts I hadn’t used and leftovers bits of vegetables – red bell peppers and jalapenos from the rouille I hadn’t made for the party, mushrooms leftover from something else, some onions.  And you know, I sautéed them all up some kind of way and served it on top of rice, and it was okay I guess, but gah, how boring.  Perhaps one day I’ll be my vision of a good cook – someone with the creativity to think something up and the knowhow to make it happen. As far as advancing the Project, all I made was the cheese wafers that I had not had time to make for the party.  Figure I’ll leave them out for all my co-workers who just couldn’t make it out to the wilds of Long Island City on a Saturday night.  Cheese wafers, as it turns out, are just exactly like my mom’s cheese wafers, only they use swiss cheese instead of cheddar, and not as much cayenne, and no rice krispies.  Okay, maybe not just exactly like.  But pretty close.  You knead together a couple of sticks of butter and a pound or so of grated cheese – Julia says you can use pretty much any kind of cheese, but she uses Swiss for the master recipe – along with ¾ cup flour and some salt, pepper, and cayenne.  Then she has you form one cookie by rolling a tablespoon of the dough in your hand and flattening, and cook it for ten minutes, basically just see what happens.  My first one seemed to just melt into oblivion, so I added some more flour before making the rest.  I dipped each one in a beaten egg and sprinkled with a bit more grated cheese, and bake them ten minutes. They’re pretty good, but you know, rice krispies makes everything better, as does lots of cayenne.  I’m going to stick with mom’s stand-bys for now.  (Scroll down a little....)   7:27:12 AM    comment []