(no subject)
Cooking is a tremendous chore lately, but I did manage to get riled up about it after getting a new cookbook, digital, from the library!!! A digital copy of a cookbook in full glorious PDF quality images and text, wow, it's pretty amazing for a reader on a budget. It's the first book of a popular food blogger, smittenkitchen, and she knows what to eat. She has the same criticisms I do about particular trends in Internet foodie land, some things get picked up with a lot for no good reason except two or three people started something and then it just snowballs and gets pushed on us. Like Mâché, what a ridiclous thing. It's expensive, doesn't taste good ( like dryish slips of bitter something), has no substantial value pertaining to EATING. A real salad should have crunch, taste of something, and be able to fill a large bowl with actual stuff. She puts nuts, dried fruits, nuts and cheeses, and practical veggies in her salads. Her meatloaf is really big meatballs, because really the inside slab of the meatloaf is not the best part, you want that outside crust in every bite. I've made her lasagna, and it was just what you want lasagna to be. Se makes a white cake that is as close to being like box mix cake, because really, every home baked white cake tastes like vanilla and sugar (boring) and are too course crumbed. You want that synthetic softness and synthetics white cake super sweetness. I'm going to one up her and buy cotton candy flavor powder used in commercial cotton candy, and add a touch of that to see if I can achieve the perfect faux box cake.
I made her apple cider caramel the other night, even exhausted after a ten hour workday, I was that intrigued. It worked, it was all caramel goodness but with the tart and scent of cinnamon apple. The magic was the tiny bits of salt that you would get here and there, she mentions it in her blurb, but to experience it is to understand that sometimes experience is the only true understanding. The hardest part was waiting for the cider to reduce, than you boil up all the ingredients together til it reaches 252F, mix in salt and cinnamon, you're done. I didn't buy no fancy sea salt, I just sifted regular sea salt in a fine mesh to get to the finer particles. You can also mortar and pestle the salt.
Okay, since I'm here avoiding homework, let me go on more about salt. For awhile I was putting sea salt into the spice grinder aka coffee grinder to make a powdered salt. It made everything I shook it on taste like commercial food. The thing it worked best on was fries and fried chicken. Makes sense, it's instant salt, while table salt takes time to melt on your tongue. I doesn't melt on fried foods, see? Even sprinkled on damp foods, it melted instantly, creating a coating, rather than what granules do which is not create a coating. I'm pretty certain, since cooks illustrated said there was no taste differentiation from one salt to the next in a taste test, that it is this fineness of the salt that creates the draw to expensive Sel de Mer, and other flakey salt.
I made her apple cider caramel the other night, even exhausted after a ten hour workday, I was that intrigued. It worked, it was all caramel goodness but with the tart and scent of cinnamon apple. The magic was the tiny bits of salt that you would get here and there, she mentions it in her blurb, but to experience it is to understand that sometimes experience is the only true understanding. The hardest part was waiting for the cider to reduce, than you boil up all the ingredients together til it reaches 252F, mix in salt and cinnamon, you're done. I didn't buy no fancy sea salt, I just sifted regular sea salt in a fine mesh to get to the finer particles. You can also mortar and pestle the salt.
Okay, since I'm here avoiding homework, let me go on more about salt. For awhile I was putting sea salt into the spice grinder aka coffee grinder to make a powdered salt. It made everything I shook it on taste like commercial food. The thing it worked best on was fries and fried chicken. Makes sense, it's instant salt, while table salt takes time to melt on your tongue. I doesn't melt on fried foods, see? Even sprinkled on damp foods, it melted instantly, creating a coating, rather than what granules do which is not create a coating. I'm pretty certain, since cooks illustrated said there was no taste differentiation from one salt to the next in a taste test, that it is this fineness of the salt that creates the draw to expensive Sel de Mer, and other flakey salt.