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Realizing that I had everything in the refrigerator to make a pastrami reuben, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. It’s just about as easy as heating up leftovers, and certainly a whole lot more delicious. The only regrets are that I didn’t have Russian dressing or a better rye bread on hand. I substituted Thousand Island and made do with some Beefsteak Hearty Rye. (Sidenote: while I’ve been generally pleased with the bread I’ve been able to buy in upstate New York, I haven’t been able to find decent ryes. I’ve been able to find much better ryes in LA and the Midwest.)
Always on the lookout for nice kitchen appliances, I bought a Breville sandwich press about a year ago at Tuesday Morning. The model was being discontinued ostensibly because it had flat griddles as opposed to the increasingly popular griddles with grooves. But I actually prefer the flat pans, since the cooking is more even, and if I want to fry a sandwich in butter I don’t need to come up with creative ways to keep the butter in contact with the bread. Also, for a sandwich like a reuben, I prefer the consistent toasting to “panini stripes.”
Having finished the toasting, I put the reuben on a plate with some pretzels and homemade applesauce. I’ve really been trying to get through as much of the applesauce as possible, since I’ll be moving in a couple of months and whatever is in the fridge is not coming with me. I’m down to one jar in the freezer from an original supply of six. (Cornell Orchards had 10 lb. bags of apples 2-for-1 at the end of the season in 2007, and all 20 lbs. ended up as sauce.)
Since I still have pastrami left, this will probably be lunch tomorrow as well.
I like my sangria a little on the tart side, and this version is pretty much as basic as it gets. No peaches, pineapple, or melon. Just wine, brandy, citrus fruit, juice, and sugar. Peaches are okay*, but once you get beyond that, it really starts to take on the character of punch that you once made in a bucket at a house party. Not that that’s a bad thing, but why make life more complicated?
To start, you need a bottle of dry red wine. The bottle above is a rich Portuguese and it’s almost not dry enough, but I have a whole bunch of this stuff and it was easier to use this than go out and buy something else. Note to Ithacans: Northside Wine & Spirits has a Portuguese section that they import directly for their store. I’ve tried quite a few, they’re all really good, and not available elsewhere in the US.
Here is everything measured out. The recipe (below) calls for 1/2 cup of sugar, which I would probably use if the wine were a truly solid dry. However, I only used about 1/4 cup since some of the fruit in this wine will help pick up the slack. Use your judgment based on the wine; maybe start with 1/4 cup and go from there. You can always add more later. It’s a bit more difficult to take the sugar out once it’s already in.
The end result is eminently drinkable, with the caveat that a couple of glasses of this stuff will make for a very unproductive evening.
- 1 lemon, 1 lime, 1 orange
- 1 1/2 cups of brandy
- 1/4 – 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 cup of fresh orange juice
- 1 bottle of dry red wine
Slice the fruit, place in your pitcher with 1/4 cup of sugar, and mash it up a little bit to release some juices. Add the brandy and mix well. Let it sit for a few hours in the fridge. Then add the red wine and OJ, return to the fridge overnight, stir, and taste. Add more sugar if necessary.
* Just my opinion, but if you want peaches in wine, you’re getting closer to a dessert than a drink. Try the Italian pesche al vino instead, which is basically just ripe, peeled peaches marinated in red wine with a little bit of sugar.
This recipe comes from Paula Wolfert’s excellent exploration of French regional cuisine, The Cooking of Southwest France. A great many famous dishes come from this corner of the country, including cassoulet and countless preparations of duck; however, I wouldn’t have thought to make this ice cream* had I not had it at the appropriately-named Sud Ouest et Cie in Paris.
This recipe is made with a standard vanilla frozen custard recipe, to which prunes soaked in Armagnac (plus some of the syrup) have been added. It’s a darker color than the Sud Ouest version, as well as a bit more mellow. Wolfert’s recipe is a custard-based vanilla ice cream – my guess is that the Sud Ouest version is just milk and cream with no egg. Also, the mellowness of Wolfert’s recipe likely comes from the prune and Armagnac syrup, as opposed to just adding straight Armagnac, which I’m guessing is what Sud Ouest does. The aftertastes are equally unique, with Wolfert’s recipe having better combined the two flavors, while the Sud Ouest preparation gives you a refreshing cold blast of Armagnac across the palate.
This recipe is very easy to make, because it requires no more than giving the prunes two soakings (once overnight in chamomile tea to rehydrate, two weeks or more in Armagnac), and then combining with the custard base in the ice cream maker. The alcohol keeps the final product nice and soft even after several weeks in the freezer, so not only is it easy to make, but easy to keep a supply. Thankfully, the tasty pruneau d’agen, the French prune that goes into this recipe, just happens to be the same strain that Americans know as the California prune, so the featured ingredient is easy to come by. (Sunsweet Gold Label worked very well for me.)
Added bonus: if you use the Wolfert recipe for soaking the prunes, you have enough for two batches of ice cream, plus a small container of Armagnac prunes left for snacking.
* Since this ice cream is first cooked with egg yolks, it’s technically a frozen custard and not an ice cream.
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A wok is a very versatile piece of kitchen equipment. While frying is its most common use, it’s also deep enough to hold oil for deep frying, and water for steaming. Another measure of a wok’s value comes from cleanliness. In an apartment it’s important to control oil spray, and cooking in a wok greatly limits the amount of oil that spritzes from the pan. Frying something at very high heat no longer means that your kitchen will have to be wiped down afterwards.
I bought a new flat-bottomed wok after coming back from China, and it works well with my flat-burnered stove. One of the first things that I made was a favorite Chinese dish of mine – twice cooked pork. For my first time making the dish, it was a pretty successful experiment. I used a combination of a bunch of recipes, and am still working on the best mix of ingredients (which will be posted and linked in the future.)
The final product turned out a little more dry than I would have liked, so I’ll probably double the sauce mixture and add more as necessary while I cook. Another reason for the dryness could have been due to the type of pork used; all of the recipes from my Chinese cookbooks call for pork belly, rather than the much leaner pork loin that I used.
One thing that I have quickly learned from wok cooking is that your mise is extremely important. I knew this already from being a Bourdain fan, but it’s so important with the wok. One of the hallmarks of wok cooking is extremely high heat, so timing is essential. By the time things start going into a hot wok, it must be tended religiously; you can’t go and chop some more green onions. So, two conclusions: do your mise, and use more fat.
At some point last year, I purchased an ISI Dessert Whip. It’s a cream charger, so at its most basic, you just pour in some cream and charge it with an N20 (nitrous oxide) cartridge. Voilà – instant whipped cream! But you can do all sorts of other fun things with it, including chocolate mousse, tiramisu cream, and various other flavored creams (e.g. mocha) for topping coffees and desserts.
It’s a convenient tool if you always have some kind of dessert after a meal, since the contents of the Dessert Whip sit patiently in your refrigerator until you’re ready for a shot of sugar. Plus, it’s a great way to make use of excess cream. I usually have at least a pint in the fridge for various recipes that need a few tablespoons, but I never get through the entire carton before it starts to go bad. If you dump the remaining cream into the charger – particularly with a shot of brandy or cognac – you get another 10+ days of use out of it.
My final picture of the mousse is not the best since the flash really brings out the air pockets – it looks and tastes much smoother than shown here. The best description of the texture is like a very, very light buttercream frosting with a bitter edge. This is what goes into the Dessert Whip to make chocolate mousse:
- 14 oz. chilled heavy whipping cream
- 2 tsp. instant espresso
- 4 Tbsp. sugar
- 4 Tbsp. cocoa powder
- 2 Tbsp. cognac or brandy
As a tip, when you make the chocolate mousse, it is important to whisk out as many lumps as possible before pouring into the canister, as it is possible to clog the nozzle. Also, you do need to shake the canister after charging it, but don’t shake too much, or it will solidify the mixture inside the canister making it very hard to dispense. You still want to be able to hear a thickened “slosh” when you shake it.
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