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Making mayonnaise

Via the Amateur Gourmet, homemade mayonnaise:

Look at that creamy, dreamy concoction. Even the me of yesteryear might have to dip my finger in to taste. I think anyone who hates mayo should make it themselves; seeing how it works--how the oil emulsifies with the egg yolk and the lemon juice--makes all the difference.

I've had a similar mayonnaise reawakening: when I was younger, I absolutely hated mayonnaise, to the point that thinking about it made me gag. A couple of years ago, though, I started making homemade mayonnaise, and I never looked back. It's delicious, and fun.

(It still feels kind of gross to dip a spoon into mayonnaise and taste it, though.)

Pain à l'ancienne

This weekend, I made this delicious bread, with Penelope's help. Isn't it pretty? And tasty--fresh bread is the best.

It's pain à l'ancienne, recipes here and here. The first of those is adapted from Peter Reinhart, who's written a number of great books on the subject of bread, including The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Egg(plant) salad

Via Grub Street, a promo for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, wherein he asks some kids to identify fruits and vegetables, and--tomato/potato, eggplant/egg salad, &c.--they get them horribly wrong.

I dunno. I found this inspiring as a TED talk, but as a teaser for a shocking! food! reality! television show on ABC, it feels a little... cheaper, maybe? But then again, I'm just being naive (because, is there really a difference?).

Vintage Herbsaint

via Serious Eats, Sazerac (the company, not the drink) is releasing a vintage Herbsaint:

The recent return of absinthe to the market has renewed interest in the early Herbsaint, and with assistance from Houston-based Herbsaint collector Jay Hendrickson (profiled by Robert Simonson in the March/April issue of Imbibe), Sazerac is releasing a version of Herbsaint made from the 1930s formula, complete with a label based on the original.

And just look at the lovely label!

Veselka's cabbage soup is the best soup.

I found this recipe via Adam's great soup battle (though the recipe is from smitten kitchen), and I'm so glad I did: this soup was a meal and a half, and so tasty.

One note: don't use red cabbage, even if you already have it on hand, unless you want purple soup (albeit purple soup that still tastes wonderful).

I shouldn't be craving espresso at 11pm at night.

... but the Intelligentsia Coffee series makes me want a cup of espresso, right now.

Eating & dining

Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy. Not imported chocolates, but Red Hots, Good and Plenty, Milk Duds, Paydays, Chuckles. I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I exalted: "Finally!"

via blogs.suntimes.com

Roger Ebert's "Nil by mouth" is the best thing I've read in a long time. The last paragraph is the killer, but since I'm also a fan of cheap candy, I'm quoting the above.

I want this sandwich!

This is the "banh mi du maison" from Ma Peche ("Momofuku Midtown") in New York. I want it.

In local news, I had a banh mi last week from a spot called Grab 'n Go. It was pork + chiles + cilantro + pickled carrots + bread, and it was cheap and tasty. Not the greatest banh mi in the world, probably, but very delicious & filling for $4. I'll go again.

I love mushrooms...

... and this makes me want to cook them and eat them:

Cooking them well is all it takes. Eric Ripert still remembers the oyster mushrooms when he was a young cook at Robuchon's 3-star Jamin. He had to cook each one individually to get that perfect sear. That's what it takes, that's what makes the difference.

via blog.ruhlman.com

I usually cook a handful of mushrooms along with some butter, salt, pepper, and thyme; but I might need to try this one-at-a-time method to get them just right, because a perfectly-cooked mushroom sounds delicious.

Vintage

From our Gatsby afternoon, some drinks, from the left (and not counting the lovely Hendrick's gin at the far left):

• mix (orange juice, lemon juice, grenadine) for a Ward Eight cocktail
• water x2
• root beer
• sangria (red wine, brandy, sugar, triple sec, lemon, orange, apple)
• ginger ale
• more sangria
• mint tea punch x2 (mint tea, mint, lemon juice, orange juice, sugar)
• lemon juice for Aviations

I also made fried chicken, the morning of the event (though I placed the chicken in a brine the night before).

I kept reading about how difficult it is to regulate the temperature of the oil, and I scoffed: amateurs, surely! Well, no. It's really quite difficult, and it took me a couple of tries to get it right (those tries resulted in blackened crust, but still pretty tasty chicken). Thankfully, I had a lot of tries, since I was frying twenty pieces of chicken, two or three at a time.

But overall, the chicken--and the rest of the food, and the drinks--traveled well to the picnic, so the preparations and work paid off. A lovely event.