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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Monday, August 07, 2006

A tip of the toque to chef Curtis Stone.                   12:20:33 AM    comment []

Alive Alive Oh! I felt really bad about slaughtering a whole bag full of mussels. Some of the poor little fuckers clamped their shells onto the paper bag I’d used to transport them here from Whole Foods, the mussel-universe equivalent of a freight train to Auschwitz. Not to trivialize that. Okay, bad image. Still, all these mussels died ay my hand and my conscience wasn’t completely clear until I sampled the sauce they were cooked in. Add some white wine to the red pepper, lemon zest, and zucchini and, if the poor little fuckers have even a primitive sense of smell, they had a moment of hog heaven before the grim reaper sauntered into the steaming pot. Adios, mussel guys, you have died for a greater cause.       12:15:59 AM    comment []

I forgot to shoot the salad, but it was the perfect starter with a Caesar reminiscent dressing based on egg yolks, parmesan, and garlic. I did shoot the Parmesan wafers, made by fine grating the cheese and baking it a few minutes in an oven of unspecified (in the recipe) temperature. I used 350º F. The recipe says this will form into a nice lacey wafer in about 5 minutes, but mine took closer to 15. No problem, a few years of making things from recipes and you learn to look for endpoints, not the passage of an arbitrary period of time. The wafers are done after the cheese bubble a bit, settles down, and browns slightly. This process intensifies the parmesan flavor and these are a delight. You break them up a bit and top the salad with them. The salad called for a poached egg on top and I developed that motif by throwing some bacon on too. This was also a tasty little sucker.     12:03:32 AM    comment []