Le Gourmet Club

I know I'm verging into pathetic suburban key party territory here, but a few other couples we are friends with in the neighborhood also enjoy cooking and eating, and so we've decided to emulate our parents and form a so-called Gourmet Club, through which we will take turns hosting dinner parties that all of us will contribute to. Whoever hosts gets to pick the theme and assign courses. We expect that most of these will be grown-up affairs, but figure that a few could be made kid-friendly, since we all have kids ranging from age 3 to age 13, who get along.

Figuring that since my dining room and kitchen are tight to host 8 people (though doable), we volunteered to host the first party at the end of June, so that we can use the back deck and yard. I chose a Moroccan/North African theme, partly because there are a number of recipes I want to try, and partly because I think the summer outdoor setting will be just right. I'm hoping for a very casual, sensual kind of thing, lots of finger food, paper lanterns, wine in stemless glasses, etc.

I'm considering main courses of a slow-roasted, shredded lamb with mint and pomegranate that Nigella does, served with a couscous, maybe with olives and preserved lemon, and a vegetable tagine. We'll need a selection of salads and hors d'oeuvres, and I'd like to do a rose-flavored ice cream as part of the dessert (at my birthday dinner last year, we were served a rose ice cream with raspberry sorbet and lychees that was ambrosial). I'd love to hear ideas if anyone has any.

Other themes we kicked around, besides the obvious national cuisines: upscale barbecue/picnic, ancient Rome/Greece, retro dinner party using no cookbooks from after 1960 (Beef Wellington? rumaki?), tapas, smoking, all desserts.... Would also love ideas.

And of course we have all agreed that an annual field trip to NYC to a restaurant we all want to try is a necessity.

Wish us luck!

Kitchen Garden 2009

I definitely always have eyes bigger than my stomach for gardening. I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when we bought our house 5 summers ago, but I had visions of growing my own herbs and produce. I can't bear to actually sit down and read a book about soil quality and fertilizers and other dry technical matters, so my approach has been of the trial-and-error, lazy organic variety. Fortunately, though pretty it ain't, I've managed to have lots of success with my experiments, despite the fact that by early August I tend to just pretend I don't see the weeds and the gone-to-flower vegetables.

My designated patches are pretty small, are limited in where I can get full sun, and prone to attracting weeds, but though I seem unable to resist overplanting, I get by. I've tried to limit myself to herbs and tomatoes only, but I have allowed myself a few cucumber plants (I like to have a cuke around for a quick cucumber salad), red leaf lettuce, some hot peppers, a couple of broccoli plants (one of the only vegetables Young Master Gateau will eat), and some radishes because they are so easy and fast to grow, and thus good near-instant gratification for kids. There also appear to be a few carrots and beets from last year.

The herbs this year include my monster tarragon plants, oregano, chives, mint, cilantro, basil, dill, parsley, rosemary, and lavender. Nothing particularly exotic, but all get steady play through the season. I have some nasturtiums for decorating salads, and Y.M.G., on a Roman Empire kick, has asked for a bay plant so he can make laurel wreaths.

As for tomatoes, I'm going for a rainbow of smaller heirloom varieties -- Arkansas travelers (red), Sungold and Yellow Pear, Green Zebra, and Black Cherry (a strange purple-green). These plants tend to grow out of control and produce more than I can eat, so I'm going to try to jump on the pickling/canning bandwagon and see whether I can come up with some good preserves, chutneys, etc. At worse, I can turn them into some weird colored but tasty sauce and freeze it.

Tomight we should have the first lettuce and radish salad!

Urgent Cocktail Update

Just came across this delicious-sounding cocktail recipe, the Tropicaliana (via the Al Dente blog Twitter feed, how's that for your intertextual web experience?). It combines rum, lime, ginger liqueur, and simple syrup, topped with rose Champagne or sparkling wine. Must. Have.

Bittman strikes again

I have been following @bittman on Twitter, who is none other than our beloved Minimalist. Yesterday he posted a link to his Bitten blog, which had a recipe for Roast Chicken with Cumin, Honey and Orange. I immediately began craving this dish, so I went to the supermarket on my way home from work and got a chicken. One nice thing about this dish is that you're likely to have all the ingredients but the chicken already in the house. Anyway, it was beyond easy to make -- I love dishes like this that require you to dirty only one small dish other than the roasting pan (see also Donna Hay's cookbooks). You can't really get away from the kitchen while it's cooking, because it has to be basted every 10 minutes, but I found that was a value-added aspect, because it made me sit at the dining table with a magazine and a glass of wine for an hour.

The chicken came out glossy and crisp, with delicious juicy meat. We had it with some string beans dressed with olive oil, salt, and garlic. Just perfect.

Unsmiley Pops

Ms. Cake and I set forth to start what we hoped would be a new monthly tradition of getting together to do some crafts and/or baking. We thought it would be fun and easy to make these adorable smiley face cake lollipops.

So we headed to the supermarket for cake mix and icing, and had a long detour at the craft store, where we went into a fugue state and bought enough stuff for about 15 other craft projects. This turned out to be the smartest move of the day.

The instructions required us to mash a cake together with a can of frosting:

And then to roll the mixture into balls, which are then impaled on sticks:


After this it should be simple enough, you simply dip the balls in yellow candy melt, wait to dry, and then decorate with those cunning edible magic marker pens.

Well, it was an unmitigated disaster. The icing clumped, the balls were flat on one side, if we were lucky, and a large number disintegrated in the icing bowl. Even the children refused to eat them.

At one point we dissolved on the floor as several of our master creations slowly slid down the sticks on which they had been suspended.


The edible marker pens were impossible to work with. Eventually we ended up with this, and threw the rest away:

The (unsmiling) end.

Save it for a Rainy Day

It's a rainy Sunday at the end of a week of school vacation, so Young Master Gateau was hounding me to bake something with him and his friend, the Girl Next Door. I dug out a fancy cake mold in the shape of nine train cars that we'd bought for his 5th birthday party, and baked up half a batch of a Bundt cake mix from Williams-Sonoma that came with it. Then YMG and the GND went to town with the odd bits of candy lying around the house and a supplemental bag of Skittles picked up at the grocery story. The result was impressively artistic, if a little too sweet, and super sticky.

One Billion Chinese Can't Be Wrong

I finally had enough time on my hands today to take on one of my never-used cookbooks, from the Shun Lee restaurant in NYC. I was really intimidated by this, and by Chinese cooking in general, but I psyched myself up and went for it. Most of the ingredients were easy enough to find, and when I couldn't find certain items, I substituted as best I could. They recommend balsamic vinegar for black Chinese vinegar, for example, and that worked. In one case, I couldn't find Schezewan pickled vegetable, but from the description (basically pickled mustard greens) I figured I could get by with pickled ginger, which I had for another recipe. In another case I couldn't find dried Chinese black mushrooms, so I used dried porcini and they were fine. I'm not sure I have the right spicy bean paste, but that also worked with what I had. There was lots of prep work to have all the ingredients ready before cooking started, but nothing particularly complicated. Even dumpling making turned out to be easy to master.

So the menu was:

Fried pork dumplings (so much easier than I had imagined, and the recipe made 30, so I froze 20 of them for later use). The store didn't have round gyoza wrappers, so I used a cookie cutter to cut rounds of square wonton wrappers. Served with a dipping sauce of soy, balsamic vinegar, and sesame oil.



Cold Tofu Salad. Soft cubed tofu dressed with sesame oil/soy/sherry/vinegar/sugar/spicy chili bean paste and sprinkled with cashews, minced scallion and the pickled ginger in lieu of the Schezewan vegetable.



Duck Breast with Pickled Ginger. Stir fried with sliced garlic, water chestnuts, scallions, and the ginger. The meat was beyond tender, and the sauce tangy and delicious.


I will definitely do this again. There is a braised tofu and a braised pork belly I really want to try. And now we have leftovers to reheat tomorrow. No cute little cardboard take-out boxes, though.