February 17, 2011

Valentine’s Day Dinner

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This past Saturday, I cooked up Ingrid her Valentine’s Day dinner…I know it was a little early, but doing it on a Saturday allowed for more time and we got to walk it off on Sunday. We started and ended with chocolate- toasted rye bread with melted chocolate and sea salt to begin with and homemade salted truffles to end. I used Italian sea salt, Swedish flaked salt, ancho salt, hibiscus salt and himalayan salt to dust the truffles. In between the chocolate courses we had a puff pastry ham and cheese with homemade honey mustard (ham was prosciutto and cheese was gruyere) and a RI braised short rib with chard, mashed potato and roasted onion. Below are scenes from the meal:

             -Josh

 

January 13, 2010

Other reasons to visit NYC

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In addition to eating donuts, Josh and I spent some time checking out some markets in NYC.  We first visited Whole Foods the Bowery Store.  We had read about it, mostly Josh read about it on Beer Advocate.  It was rated very high for it’s range of beers.  This Whole Foods has what they call a “beer room” with close to 1,000 different beers.  I was picturing a cellar with low lighting but it was a nice, bright room at street level with a very extensive beer selection.  They also had about six beers on tap.  It’s really amazing how many beers there are out there – we saw many of the beers we tried in Italy including Baladin.  I was pretty impressed with their chocolate selection but I’m sure no one is really surprised about that!

One of the other markets we went to was the Essex Street Market.  This Market was right around the corner from our hotel. I had read about it online before heading to NYC.  However, at Doughnut Plant on Saturday morning, I picked up the latest version of Edible Manhatten and saw an article about Roni-Sue’s Chocolates.  The article was about Pig Candy – dark and milk chocolate covered crispy bacon.  I’ve had bacon chocolate bars before but this was a little different – super-crispy bacon dipped in chocolate – you have to taste it, you really do!  We also tried a beer and pretzel caramel chocolate there – porter and stout had been added to the caramel which was then covered in milk chocolate.   And on the top was a small piece of pretzel – perfect combination of flavors!  Click here to read the Edible Manhatten article and see pictures.  The Essex Street Market was great to visit – in addition to getting chocolate covered bacon, you can get all kinds of cheeses, fish, meat, fruits, vegetables – the list goes on.  It’s not the biggest market but those small stalls/stores hold a whole lot of stuff!  One product that I had not see before was champagne soda.

Just so you know, we didn’t eat and drink the WHOLE time.  We checked out the Urs Fischer exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.  Three floors of the gallery space was his work.  He works in a number of different medias and it was interesting to see.  If you go to the second page of the Urs Fischer brochure from the exhibit – you will see  his piece Cumpadre, 2009 which is hanging at about eye level, danging on fishing wire from a ceiling about 30 feet up.  Cumpadre 2009 is the real name for it – Josh called it “Fishing for Ingrid”.

More to come on the NYC trip from Josh.

~Ingrid

 

January 6, 2010

Sous vide?

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This past weekend, Josh and I had family down to celebrate a birthday (my mom) and a retirement (Josh’s Aunt Barbara).  It was a fun evening and unlike past dinners, I actually helped out a fair amount – besides doing the dishes that is. We had some completely new dishes and some favorites.  One of our new favorites, the pork belly from Christmas Eve returned.  Josh is very imaginative.  The pork belly has to be prepared sous vide with this type of sous vide machine and since we don’t have it, he came up with what we call “quasi- vide”- see picture to the right.  Basically, he wraps the meat (in this case, the pork belly) is saran wrap, weighs in under water with a pyrex measuring cup, puts the candy thermometer in the water and away we go.  It works like a charm – the pork has been cooked perfectly each time.

We also had blinis with “eggplant caviar” – a Thomas Keller recipe (in French Laundry).  The pancakes were superlight and fluffy and the eggplant caviar had the perfect amount of garlic.  This recipe is what set us off on Thomas Keller’s cookbooks.  A little over 5 years ago Josh and I were looking for recipes for eggplant and I found blinis with eggplant caviar in French Laundry.  We have made them a few times but I think this was the best version.

As a “pre-dessert”, Josh made “Egg” from On the Line – the book/cookbook about Marguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin.  The full name of the recipe is “EGG” Milk Chocolate pots de creme with caramel foam, maple syrup, amd maldon sea salt.  The picture to the right shows the chocolate filled eggs without the foam, syrup, and salt.  Josh cleaned out all the eggs and then cooked the chocolate cream in the empty egg shells.  They were amazing – thank goodness there was an extra one – I had it for breakfast the next day!

Another great dinner with great company!

~Ingrid

 

July 15, 2008

Chocolate withdrawal

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So we are at the end of our second week of the 100 mile diet and I have to say (this is Ingrid writing) that I am dying for some chocolate. I think I miss it more than Josh misses his beer! I miss my bread – I would have loved to have had a heavily buttered piece of cinnamon raisin toast yesterday – but I really miss chocolate. I didn’t realize how much I eat it or enjoy it until I haven’t been able to have it. When I was living up in New Hampshire, I spent a lot of time at Cacao right over the border in Kittery, Maine. Susan, the chocolatier and owner of Cacao, made the most incredible chocolates – the fleur de sel (caramel with a dark chocolate shell and salt on top) was my absolute favorite. There is a place in Rhode Island - Ocean State Chocolates in Wickford RI that has similar super-good chocolates but no one grows cacao around here so we can’t have it. If someone grew cacao around here they could make a lot of money off of me! All I can think of is the Rolling Stones’ lyric- You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need! Though Josh made a fabulous chicken tonight, I just don’t think it filled the chocolate craving. You know where you’ll find me when this challenge is over – passed out on our kitchen floor with hand full of empty chocolate paper cups and a belly full of Ocean State Chocolates!

 

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