Served with homemade crackers and wilted zucchini ribbons.
I like to make things from scratch, especially when they involve learning about a new process or technique that I didn’t know about before. I have a great, reliable cracker recipe from Alton Brown, and I was looking for another course for an Italian-ish meal I was making for friends in New York. So, I figured this would be a good opportunity to try making ricotta cheese.
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One of these days I need to learn how to work a grill.
Cornbread and (in the background) a couple of different types of salads. I made too much cornbread, but people were happy to take it home with them...
Tres leches and strawberry country cakes.
Note: This is a followup to this post.
A month or so ago, I wrote about some of the constraints I faced with catering a barbecue for 40 out of my tiny Philadelphia kitchen. (Seriously, I think the kitchen is about 30 square feet, including all counter space, oven, and fridge). In this entry, I’ll talk about my experience in cooking and how everything turned out.
One thing that is surprisingly difficult to do in cooking is scaling a recipe. I mean, it’s not too hard for things like salad where you just multiply out the ingredients, or for soup. But when you’re baking things – and that can be cakes, pastries, or lots of savory dishes as well – things often don’t turn out the way you expect. For example, these miniature carrot souffles still take the 11 minutes to bake that a full-sized souffle does. I recently made some beet donuts (more on that later), and same deal, the miniaturization does nothing.
Those are easy examples, because the timing changes but everything else is fine. More heart-rendingly, take note of my experience with cauliflower gratin, which I attempted to make at approximately triple the size (i.e. three portions in a 3x baking dish).
Disaster. The dish is basically cauliflower in a rich cheese sauce. It seemed to bake fine, though it took an abnormally long time. I waited an hour or so for it to cool, and as it cooled… the sauce separated. Instead of a thick, pudding-like sauce, I ended up with a layer of fat on the bottom, and pools of grease on the top, of the dish. The grease then soaked through all of the ingredients, creating an inedible, soggy messy. I had to throw it away! Six cauliflowers’ worth of gratin, gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I guess the lesson is, don’t scale if you don’t have to. It would have been much better to just cook a bunch of normally-sized portions.
The other lesson is to make lots of different things; because I had done this, losing one dish didn’t matter. And actually, my experience with the cornbread I made was the opposite – the vastly scaled-up sheets (the recipe isn’t even for bread, it’s for muffins) were some of the best cornbread I have ever made, with a soft, moist interior and a slightly crunchy top.
Overall, the meal seems to have gone pretty well. The avocado and tomato salad, cornbread, and deviled eggs were devoured. Part of the art, of course, is to pick things that are difficult to screw up, which worked in my favor. People seemed to have an aversion to the potato salad; I couldn’t figure out why. The cakes I made didn’t get finished either (actually only about half of each cake was consumed), but I did hear several people struggle with their inability to put down their fork, despite being stuffed. Overriding your eaters’ free will is every chef’s main goal.
Shopping list...
The ingredients for ten pounds of potato salad
This is about half of the shopping I did
Note: Part 2 of this post is here.
On this blog, I write a lot about dinners for two, and more recently dinners for five, seven, etc. I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually end up catering a 40-person barbecue. Yes, inevitable!
So, when the opportunity arose to feed about half of my Wharton cohort, I took it. This doesn’t mean, reader, that I organized logistics for getting food to this event. I actually took a few days out and made all the food. This is possibly the best job I have ever had.
This first entry will be about the setup for the event, and then I’ll write another one about what I learned in trying to scale my recipes to feed more people and how everything turned out (pretty well).
Fortunately, barbecues are pretty much the easiest possible events to cater as a newbie. The atmosphere is casual, people are relaxed, everything can be served at the same time, and everything is either served at room temperature or cooked a la minute. You may even be lucky enough – as I was – to have several very skilled grillmasters who will actually do the cooking for you.
Still, I had to think carefully about what to make. Here were my constraints:
I thought about, and then rejected, several dishes such as biscuits (only really good right out of the oven, definitely wouldn’t keep overnight) and camp bananas (didn’t have time to make the truly prodigious quantities of marshmallows required). Fortunately I didn’t have to get too creative and ended up with a pretty good list of barbecue favorites:
The next problem was buying ingredients. Since I used to be an investment banker, when confronted with most problems I immediately think: “Excel”. (This is true even though I quit quite a few years ago). Anyway, I made the giant spreadsheet you see pictured on the left to keep track of everything. In retrospect, I ended up overbuying a few things – a mistake in a recipe also almost caused me to buy 17 cups of paprika (at least $200 worth).
I had to be careful to buy things in a deliberate sequence, since (a) I couldn’t carry everything home at once, and (b) some things like avocadoes had to be bought early so they could ripen, whereas fresh berries had to be bought just before using them.
Finally, I had to schedule everything properly. Some things, like the avocado salad, I had to make the day of. Other things, like the cornbread and the cakes, I could make several days before. And then a few other things could be partially made in advance, and finished closer to the time – I made the potato salad and barbecue sauce, and marinated the chicken, the night before; I glazed the cakes the morning of the event, etc.
Fruit salad with plums and berries, including kiwi berry (actinidia arguta)
The full spread. Frittata, scones, fruit salad, orange juice, asparagus...
Frittata closeup. Check out the beautiful crust that develops.
For the first meeting of my Wharton learning team, I decided to make dinner. So I thought that, for the last meeting, it might be fitting to make breakfast. Plus breakfast would give me the chance to make a frittata; an excuse to make a new dish is often an important motivator for me. And I thought it would be a nice thing to do!
I got up early – real early; sunrise in our apartment is beautiful since we have a northern exposure. I made a fruit salad with a lemon/yogurt/honey sauce, I experimented with substituting strawberries for onions in this scone recipe (result fine), roasted some asparagus, and squeezed some orange juice. Oh, and I made this basil-potato frittata, which you can see in closeup on the left.
Fruit salad is kind of cheating, isn’t it? (So is fresh-squeezed orange juice, but it’s a crowd-pleaser). Regardless, people seemed to enjoy it. Since the Trader Joe’s that I live above doesn’t have great produce, I had to make some last-minute decisions about what went in, but the banana/plum/ berry combination seemed to work well.
I also had a chance to include actinidia arguta, also known as the hardy kiwi or kiwi berry. This was a fairly expensive addition, but I always like to try interesting products when I see them. The kiwi berry is basically a miniature kiwi, with a grape-like skin that you don’t need to peel off. Not really worth the extra money, but an interesting eating experience. I should mention, however, that I usually eat kiwis with the skin on, so perhaps I find regular kiwis (actinidia deliciosa) easier to handle than others do.
The frittata came out really well, also, and made great leftovers. I had never eaten one before this – for those who don’t know, a frittata is sort of like a quiche or giant omelette. However, unlike a quiche, there is no pastry shell, and unlike an omelette, the ingredients are cooked within the egg mixture instead of on top. This recipe includes a little baking powder as well, so you get some extra fluffiness, and since it’s baked for about an hour, a delicious and beautiful brown crust develops around the edges.
Not all was successful. I invested a huge amount of time in making this hash browns recipe – peeling 1.5 lbs of potatoes takes forever – and it was a total failure. I have never made hash browns before, so perhaps I did something wrong in making the recipe. Did excluding the lardons make that much of a difference? Did I just not wring the shredded potatoes out enough? Whatever the error, I was left with a disc of shredded potatoes, burned on the outside and soggy and uncooked on the inside, that stuck fast to the pan.
Dessert.
Cookies made with the leftover custard.
Together with this dinner, I also made this lemon pudding with basil custard sauce. To make the pudding, a mixture of gelatin, water and lemon zest is added to a meringue (egg white foam).
The result is hardly what I’d think of as a pudding – it’s very light and airy, almost like a lemon Italian ice without the ice crystals, if you can imagine that.
To this is added a basil custard sauce. To make the sauce, the recipe says to bring milk carefully to a boil, without letting it boil over, and then add plenty of basil leaves to steep in it as it cools. Once the milk has cooled, you can remove the basil leaves and heat the milk again.
Finally, you add several egg yolks, which help to thicken the final sauce.
Egg yolks are interesting to work with in conjunction with hot liquids. Typically the proteins in eggs coagulate at high temperatures, and this coagulation gives you scrambled eggs (for example). Even in a simple fried egg, the solidification and opacification of the yolk results from the coagulation of the egg (white) proteins. This is my understanding, anyway.
But when you’re making a custard, you don’t want coagulation. That would give you a custard base plus scrambled eggs. You avoid this by tempering the yolks, which means that you mix them together with a small part of the hot liquid to raise their temperature, then mix that mixture back into the larger batch of liquid. Doing so causes the eggs to heat up more slowly, which for some reason prevents them from coagulating. (I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory explanation of why, yet).
Once the custard is made, you simply pour the basil custard sauce (also known as a creme anglaise) over the pudding. It’s a really interesting and extremely refreshing combination. It’s best served with a basil leaf for garnish – see above photo – and some berries, e.g. raspberries or blueberries. I originally made the pudding in a giant dish but next time I’ll pour it directly into wine glasses to set.
We got through the pudding pretty quickly, but there was a lot of custard left over. To try to use it up, I just added a huge amount of flour and made cookies out of it. They tasted OK, but the texture was really off.
I don’t know if that was primarily because my oven freaked out – it often goes to 500 degrees for no apparent reason, which forced me to pull the cookies out immediately – or whether it was because there is something wrong with the recipe I improvised.
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