Take Four
“Merry Christmas,” Steph said last night as she swept into my car, gracefully handing me a bag with gold foil peeking out of the top. I reached for the gold foil that seemed to be attached to a bottle and, oh my, Veuve Clicquot was in my hands. Merry Christmas indeed.
Late December and early January have been a time of culinary experimentation in my kitchen. Friends thought after New Year’s, I would grant the two working burners on my stove a reprieve; instead, my desire to employ all the pots and pans in the kitchen has increased, and last night I roasted a duck and insisted that Steph try the remaining chocolate square, the pâté, and some saltimbocca that I made as the asparagus were roasting. Steph couldn’t be with us on New Year’s, and we missed her terribly, so it was lovely to be able to feast with her excellent champagne and catch up, dipping asparagus in aioli and tearing off crackly pieces of skin.
Continuing our proper etiquette, we ate the marsala tart with blood oranges out of the pan and decided that Steph’s LBD was too fabulous not to go out. And so we did.
The most perishable ingredient from the New Year’s party was, of course, the caviar. Stored correctly, caviar can be used for a few days after opening the container, so I pulled the ultimate cheat and made caviar pasta.
I stirred alfredo sauce (boil 1 cup heavy cream for 10 minutes over med, stir in 4 tbsp unsalted butter and 1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano) and torn prosciutto strips into lingini fine (capellini would have been better as the noodle thickness should not overwhelm the caviar). Little hits of saltiness throughout balanced the creamy sauce, and I reflected how odd it was to feel like an ideal reader of Gourmet magazine, someone who really might need a way to repurpose leftover caviar.
My interest in salt-highlighting recipes began in the middle of December, when my roommate Ben and I hosted an Americanist gathering where we screened John Sayles’s 1996 “Lone Star,” a film set in Texas about corruption, caudillos, and border crossings. I decided yellow roses would be banal and that these blue thistle flowers from Hedge worked better with our theme.
To echo the careful, balanced tension that the conclusion upsets in “Lone Star,” I opted for a salted caramel gelato to accompany the apple turnovers. The egg base below waits for the caramel to be incorporated before chilling the custard and adding it to the gelato machine.
Caramelization happens slowly in the pan, and I am always in wonderment as I watch sugar transform; I feel cosmicomical, observing the mysteries of the universe as the color deepens…
And Jennifer, Gabriel, and Scott helped fathom other Americanist mysteries later at the gathering.
Before I left for Christmas in Atlanta, I decided, as a good, upstart Americanist, to begin on the 100 tastes Food & Wine informs me I must try in 2007 with #14. house-cured bourbon. I emptied a 750ml bottle of bourbon into a 1 quart glass container, added 2 quartered Granny Smith apples and a quince (the original recipe calls for 3 apples—I thought a quince would be fun), 2 vanilla beans, and 3 cinnamon sticks. The recipe instructions direct you to shake the concoction and taste every day for two to five days, which Ben and my friend John, who visited us for the holidays, were very confident they could handle.
After Christmas, I returned the bourbon to its original Bulleit bottle, (which, frankly, I chose because I liked the typography best and was determined to find a bottle labelled “Frontier Whiskey”) and poured some on the rocks.
The three of us decided to give the bourbon a thorough tasting, which it passed splendidly; my only nagging concern was the container of apples, quince, cinnamon sticks, and vanilla beans too fragrant to toss.
Dear readers, when life gives you thoroughly macerated apples, make bourbon applesauce.
This applesauce does take a while since Granny Smiths were chosen for their firm internal structure, but persevere (about 45 minutes adding 1 and a half cups of water as necessary over medium-high heat) and you will be rewarded with two additional yields from this bourbon recipe: a house that smells like what mulled wine should taste like and killer applesauce. Ben and I tried a spoonful before yoga and decided any more and we wouldn’t be able to stand up in class. If F&W is correct that the house-infused bourbon and vodka trend will continue, my great hope is for those lacing ingredients to show up this winter on dinner menus as fruit stuffings for pork tenderloin or on dessert menus in bread pudding. Who needs hard sauce?
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Posted Sunday, January 7th, 2007, 6:56 pm | Filed in Entertaining, Food. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 8th, 2007 at 2:39 am
What will our next spirited infusion be? The bourbon was fantastic, a perfect digestif for the portabella mushroom dish Kristen made for her sister. I had a bit too much that one evening…or those two evenings.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Kristen, I am convinced that your bourbon might impel one to the highest Wordsworthian heights (from “Tintern Abbey”):
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused [that'll be the cinnamon],
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit [i.e. bourbon], that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…
January 9th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Oh, bother–I see that that Tintern Abbey nonsense is still making the rounds…