Brandon Eats

Lovely Lentils

A repost — I know it's a cheat for someone who hasn't posted for so long, but I am posting over at Broken Eggs, you know. I wrote this so long ago we forgotten all about it, haven't we? At any rate, it's what I'm having for dinner.

Never underestimate the ability of a recipe to fail miserably. You can follow the directions, choose your ingredients with care, watch the clock carefully, and still — landfill fodder.  Even such a venerable publication as Gourmet gets it wrong sometimes.

In the latest issue of Gourmet (which features models instead of food on the cover--I flipped through diligently to see if Quebeçois chefs were as gorgeous as they are talented, but apparently they're just as ordinary-looking as our chefs and didn't make the cut for the cover), an article promising quick and easy meals was obvious bait and I, of course, fell for it. 

Cracking My Resolve

 


Pop a whole galette in your mouth and when your teeth hit the cookie, it'll break into crispy shards that, as they melt, will make you wrestle the tin away from your children, run upstairs and lock your door while you consume the entire contents.

I didn't really do that. I wanted to, obviously. But I love my children. And I have New Year's resolutions to keep. Plus the whole checks-and-balances thing of two daughters and a husband who are all thinking the same thing is complicated to maneuver.

However, I dare you, upon the arrival of a care package* from France containing La Galettes de la Mere Poulard not to try to jam five or six of these delirium-causing creations made of mostly butter bound with a little flour and sugar, and studded with bits of salted caramel into your mouth immediately before anyone else gets near you. It can't be done.

 

 *Our French friends know that Americans will live a black-and-white life if they don't get a little European color via foreign baked goods and candy every now and then. I don't plan to ever disabuse them of this notion.

 

España!

I assume everyone knows about my deep and abiding love of Spain. However, I received a couple of emails over the weekend that let me know in no uncertain terms that my assumption is incorrect. You haven't been reading this blog for years and years, dear cochinillos? Really? Well, never mind. We'll put that behind us. Below you'll find links to a few posts where around here it all morphed one summer from a food blog to a travel-ish blog (with food). For those of you who are sick and tired of hearing about this trip, please accept my most heartfelt apologies.

There are a few more posts (click on the category link on the right marked "Spain"), but these are the ones that will  help you make sense of my references in the future.

 

In the mountains of Asturias:Fairy Land 

 

Taramundi

Fiesta Nights

Fiesta Nights Continued

The Scent of Spanish Apples

Where and What to Eat in Luanco

5 Reasons to Make Your Own Pasta

1.  It's easy. Eggs. Flour. You're ready to roll.

2. If you love small appliances (or, if the people you live with claim you're addicted to small appliances), you really, really need to understand the purity of a non-electrical appliance, and only a pasta maker can truly bring you that joy.

3.  Fresh pasta can transform spring vegetables (sautéed, roasted, blanched, or even boiled) into the rock stars of the culinary world.  Make your asparagus sing all of its greatest hits.

4. Dried, boxed-up, plastic-wrapped pasta of an uncertain age can never compare to the attenuated, sleek and slippery pasta you roll carefully over and over again until you get to the highest setting on your machine. Just seconds in boiling water and these glistening, ultra-slender strands are ready for a judicious lashing of butter and olive oil, a sprinkle of crunchy salt, and a twirl of the fork before sliding across your tongue and over your teeth to . . . bliss.

5. I'll give you the recipe.  And there's another one below the photo.

Fettuccine with Asparagus Ribbons (by way of Cream Puffs in Venice, modified from a recipe by, of all people--I can't even believe I'm typing this but it really is a great recipe--Martha Stewart)

• 1 lb. trimmed asparagus
• 1 lb. FRESH fettuccine
• 1 Tb. olive oil
• 3 Tb. minced shallots (about two)
• 3/4 c. heavy cream (get over it--sometimes you have to live a little or just go ahead and invite company over if you need an excuse)
• 1/2 t. lemon zest (Martha uses a whopping 2 teaspoons--add to taste)
• 2 Tb. fresh lemon juice
• Freshly ground pepper and coarse salt

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil and prepare an ice-water bath.  Blanch asparagus until barely tender, about 3 minutes.  Transfer with tongs to ice-water bath.  Drain.

Shave asparagus stalks (not the tips) into long ribbons with a vegetable peeler.  Chop off the tips and place shavings and tips into a medium bowl.

Re-boil the asparagus water and add pasta.  Cook for 1-2 minutes.  Reserve 1 cup of the pasta water and then drain pasta into a colander.

Heat oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat and add shallots, cooking until translucent (about 4 minutes).  Add the cream, 1/4 c. of the reserved water, and asparagus.  Bring to a boil and toss in pasta.  Cook it all together until it's heated through, adding a little more cooking water if it seems dry.  Stir in the zest, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and then taste to adjust seasonings.  Transfer portions to plates and watch this lemony, creamy embodiment of springtime disappear.  Serves 4. Or two adults and two children who don't really like it. Or maybe just 3.

Bad Food, Part II

It really does take a crack on the head or a knife in the gut to make me pay attention.

So, I made this terrible quiche. It wasn't the first gluten-free baking that I've done, but it does symbolize all of the kitchen disasters that  I've been having lately.

Fear has crept into my cooking. Or is it despair? A who-cares-what-I-make attitude that sums up the spoiled, gluten-free brat I've become? Or fear + despair - attention = crap food?

That freakin' quiche up there. All of it's creamy custard made out of backyard eggs and milk fresh from the cow (not mine, someone else's) was absorbed by the stupid, yet tasty gluten-free crust. Oh, but wait. First this happened.

Every recipe I scanned for advice said to use a tart pan. ALL OF THEM. I'd never used a tart pan before when making quiche, but I had one and figured I'd give it a whirl. Wrong. The hateful gluten-free crust was too soft, and you can see (kind of — I quicky grabbed my phone, and I think it was steamed up from the ridiculously hot temperatures in the kitchen that other day) what happens when quiche liquid melts big, gaping holes in a crust in a tart pan with a removable bottom.

So much for quiche lorraine. The ingredients were now gone, gone to the trash when I tossed the whole thing away. I could have scraped the bacon and onions out, maybe added a little cheese and a new custard mixture, right? No. Not at all. The crust somehow dissolved during the time that I took my picture, called in the dogs to clean the floor, and snatched up the tart-pan-with-the-removable-bottom. Besides, who wanted quiche lorraine anyway?

Me.

(more after the jump)

Bad Food, Part I

Terrible quiche is a tragic thing. I blame it on my stomach.

Going gluten-free hasn't been easy. I have no plansto make this a blog about gluten-free food, although suddenly that's exactly what my meals are all about. I've always eaten everything, and abstinence is not my forte.

When I quit smoking in grad school, it wasn't primarily for health reasons. (♪♫ la la la ♫♪ . . . stick with me) In fact, it probably would have been better for my mental stability to have continued to smoke. The problem was that I had this terrible headache. That lasted for five months. This was a mother of a headache — it was the Grendel's mother of a headache. It was there when I woke up, insistently tapping on the wrong side of my skull, and then slowly and with increasing fury, it would pound away behind my eyes, trying to escape in the hopes that it could punch me a few times from the outside, too.

By 8 p.m., the most I could do was lie on the floor of my awful one-room hovel in Charlottesville and moan quietly. I was told that if I stopped smoking and drinking coffee, the headache would go away. I thought dropping out of grad school might be more effective, but the doctor insisted that I humor him.

So I did, because I was desperate. And my headache went away. I waited for it to come back so that I could start smoking again, but it was gone, baby, gone. Which kind of pissed me off.I almost lost my mind without a cigarette — it wasn't one-day-at-a-time but five-minutes-at-a-time. For weeks. When the headache made a brief reappearance, I'd decided that because quitting smoking was so insanely hard, I wasn't ever going to do it again. I still don't smoke, although every once in a while, sweet friends, I still want a cigarette.

(more after the jump)