Tasty cakes vol. 2

A while back we happened upon some black truffles at Central Market south and decided to make some fresh pasta with mushrooms (leftover from Thanksgiving) and shaved truffles.



I helped make the pasta and used the machine to cut the noodles. We bought the machine at Williams-Sonoma outlet in San Marcos for like twenty bucks but also saw a similar machine at Central Market for friggin' $99. I pity the fool who pays $99 for their pasta machine!

Tasty cakes vol. 1

It's been a while since I've posted anything new to this web-log.

Here's some tasties that Clinton made last night.

Tuna nigiri.




Tuna handroll (that pic looks washed out. Ew.)







Tuna bowl. There's furikake in this one, Rosanena. You should make it too.

Cluck cluck cluck

Aside from the gobbling up of food by yours truly and the boy, there was no turkey in our Thanksgiving meal. Too much poultry for too few people. What we did eat, however, was scrumptious:

Roasted chicken
Creamed corn
Sauteed purple kale
Fresh peas
Leek and roasted garlic mashed potatoes
Sauteed oyster and cremini 'shrooms
Pomegranate and meyer lemon "pudding"

I was very proud of my organization right before cooking. I think I was on my second...or third....mimosa.


Kale with vibrant purple stems.

Leeks that eventually were cooked down with butter and chicken stock.


Creamed corn.


Peas getting a good rinsing. Clinton said they were purple hull peas or something.



Raw oyster and creminis. Eventually were cooked with thyme and butter. They just look prettier raw.

Peas at the top, cooked with bacon. Kale at the bottom, cooked with garlic and some dried berries.


My newest kitchen purchase, a tiny 1 and 1/2 cup "butter warmer" which I used to cook some chicken livers, heart, and other organs for the chicken gravy. That little pot is so friggin' cute!


Clinton expressing dissatisfaction with our blender.


Pomegranate and meyer lemon "pudding". He cooked pomegranate and meyer lemon juice with some agar agar, let it set, and then blended it with some more juice to make a tangy and tart "sauce" with a pudding-like consistency. It stood up on its own instead of melting on a hot plate.


Chicken butt.


Yummmy.




This lighting wasn't the best, but here's my plate of sides.




And his plate of chicken, mashed potatoes, and the pudding.

Comfort food

After almost a week of not having a voice, I am almost fully recovered. I still am hoarse, but I took my phone at work off of "Do Not Disturb" which means I, begrudgingly, will start accepting phone calls again. BOO.

While I was in the throes of sickness, I ate some dee-lishus food. Last week before I left for Memphis, I made sinigang. I found a tamarind soup base at Central Market that I'd never used before, but I think I'll use exclusively when I make anything with tamarind. I purchased a block of tamarind pulp, seeds and pods included, from My Thanh and to use it, I had to dissolve the pulp in hot water and strain it a couple times. This soup base was just liquid and it was cheaper than buying the pulp block. I also used lamb knuckles as a couple chicken thighs for the meat in the soup. I usually use oxtail or just generic "soup bones" but the lamb knuckles looked meatier than the beef shanks they had, and they were also a little cheaper. It's weird how people charge so much for cuts of meat that shouldn't be expensive at all.

It was a Filipino food fest too when I was in Memphis, but since I didn't bring my camera, I don't have proof. Tasty cupcakes from Muddy's in East Memphis, dinuguan and those crunchy coconut casava things from Mekini, siopao that I brought back on the plane. YUM all over.


When I got back to Austin, Clinton had made Tom Kha-type soup with chicken and clear rice noodles. I love, love, LOVE kaffir lime leaves. I warmed some of it up last night and drank just the soup broth for dinner.



Then Yaz had made chicken pot pie and brought a serving for me on Monday morning. I debated for about twenty minutes at 9 in the morning as to whether I should save it for lunch or annihilate it for breakfast...at about 9:21 I ate that pot pie up like nobody's business. So rich, so creamy, yum yum yum. No picture of that one though. Just memories of a happy belly.

Sympathy pains

I think Lola's passing is giving me sympathy sickness. Out of nowhere, really, I started feeling very congested and weak and just generally sick to my stomach. I made sinigang yesterday to make myself feel better, and it helped a little bit, but not much. Mom called me just before midnight. I had just picked Clinton up from work and I was feeling really congested, and I was having a difficult time taking deep breaths. Mom told me that Lola passed, and then the congestion went away.

I have a small compact of solid perfume that I found years after she moved from Memphis to New Jersey. It smells exactly like her and I try not to open it too much, as if the smell will disappear. And on the dresser that Ronni has in her bedroom, I remember carving into the wood "Lola Nena" and some date when she first movd from Memphis back to New Jersey. I was so mad at her for leaving us, and I remember thinking years later how silly it was for me to deface furniture because Lola left. And then when she moved back to Memphis, I secretly was like "SCORE!! Take THAT, New Jersey!"

I remember in Jacksonville pretending I was a cat and crawling out of mom and dad's bedroom (really, it was mine and Rosanena's, haha, mom and dad!). I saw Lola doing her calisthenics: kicking her leg up midway and touching her hand to her toe, huffing "one, two, three." And that one time I was walking on those logs outside of the house and fell into an ant hill. I remember watching television with Lola later that night, and she had put Vicks all over me, so everything that I saw that night was tinted blue. Like someone had made reality black & white and then put a blue tint to it. Whenever I smell Vicks Vaporub I think of her.

I remember when we were in New Jersey and Rosanena, Claire, Cheeky, and I were en route to New York. We were in Hoboken and it was so frigid and windy, but right before we left, Lola made me put Vaseline on my face. Because of her, my skin wasn't chapped.

She totally got me hooked on coffee. A little bit of coffee, a lot of milk, and a ton of sugar. She said chocolate was okay to eat. Man, she had a sweet tooth. I remember buying those chocolate bars for her all the time from Walgreens, the kind with raisins and almonds (the label said fruit and nut, but it was just raisins and almonds), wrapped in that dark purple wrapping. She'd give me $20 and have me buy two, although it was something ridiculously cheap, like buy one at $1.99, get one free!

One of the first few months that Clinton and I lived in Austin, we went to the Erwin Center to see this type of kickboxing match which was kind of weak, but CHUCK NORRIS had started the league. I remember wanting to tell Lola "I saw JACK MORRIS in person!"

When we first got Phantom, she had so many fleas, and Lola would pick them out one by one, squish them with her nail, and then put the carcass in a shallow bowl of soapy water to make definitely sure they were dead. Phanny would always bite at her heels and her clothing since she always wore those long layers and Lola would spank her with the broom.

I'm not going to mourn our loss....that's selfish. I'm going to celebrate her life.

Foie Crinton

Best Wurst

As promised, pictures of Wurstfest down in New Braunfels.


One of the many polka bands we saw. There was one that I swear had Conor Oberst in it...
No, that's not a costume. It's on sale amid that awesome fringed denim dress and the George Michael printed shirt to the right.
Marketplatz = haven for all the fried goodies.


Possibly the scariest thing next to that drunk couple that kept dancing. Was that girl really with her boyfriend?!

The best picture is of
me and Yaz eating giant sausages on a stick. I was too busy eating the sausage to remember to take a picture of it. Heh.




Bread pudding with "butter sauce."




Sausage and cheese balls on a stick, fried olives and cheddar. The olives were actually chopped up olives and cheese, not cheese-stuffed olives like we'd hoped. But really...we weren't disappointed all that much.

A wider shot with fried dill pickle slices (we preferred spears, but they were still 'licious), and potato salad in the background.

Fried cheesecake.

He done heathcliffed that bone.



I'll only take full responsibility for two of those cups. I didn't want to fill up on beer. Needed to have enough room in there for the fried goodies.

Chiclet? Who you calling chiclet?

Caw-ca-caw-ca-caw!

Last night we whipped up some delicious chicken sandwiches that evolved into the ultimate club sandwich (take THAT, Tyler's Ultimate).



Seared then roasted chicken thighs and pulled the meat off the bones, made roasted spring onion mayo, then smushed it all together with avocado, tomato, greens, Muenster cheese, and bacon on sour dough. Mine actually was sans bacon in an effort to recover from the best weekend ever of sausage and polka: Wurstfest (photos to come).

Don't call it a comeback

Amid all the camouflage and shit-kickin' boots, hacky sacks and bleached blonde hair, I saw something that frightened me to the core.

The Sak. Seriously? Is it coming back? I'm not even talking about the cute saks that look like little luggage bags (which I'm still not a fan of, but it's okay). I'm talking about the saks that are relics of the 90s, the kind that Gina Spence and Tiffany Loeffel had in 6th grade. Why would anyone want to carry one of those glamorous trash bags anymore? Is it just a San Marcos phenomenon? Please say it ain't so.

Lobster

lobster "ceviche"

orange puree, charred orange broken vinaigrette, shaved fennel, fennel
"powder", fennel ice, fennel fronds, blis elixr vin

Hotate

Dish tonight. It's been just over a year since he's been full-time at work and he's fortunate enough to work at a restaurant that is willing to let him experiment and let them push the envelope on Austin cuisine. Can't find much to complain about here. He's been poring over his newest cookbook acquisition from Alinea so many of the sauces he's been whipping up are based on Alinea's.



Seared scallops. Romesco sauce. Grilled panko. Yellow bell pepper and sherry vinegar "puree." Fried tomato skins. Savory garlic chips. Grilled spring onion confit. Micro lemon-basil.

lobster

Clinton had another dish on the menu this week:











He's not here to tell me the details of the dish, but I know the description doesn't do much justice to it. I wasn't able to post his first dish that was on the menu last week, but that one was a scallop dish that was a play on Asian trail mix that you can buy at the grocery store.

La cena

All things Spanish have dominated our kitchen, our entertainment, and our delusions of expensive vacations. My friend Yaz let us borrow her dvd of Anthony Bourdain’s tv special “Decoding Ferrán Adria.” Clinton's boss will add "Spanish Restaurant" to his arsenal soon. Old episodes of Jose Andres’ “Made in Spain”, Bourdain’s recent episode of No Reservations in Spain, and Mario Batali’s "Spain: On the Road Again" will forever occupy 4% of our DVR hardrive. (Well, maybe not Batali's; I don't know how many more closeups of Gwyneth Paltrow and indiscreet Mercedes Benz product placement shots I can stomach.) A few weeks ago, Clinton practically stole a case of Spanish wine from Specs. It only makes sense that on the third day of his four-day respite from work, he got creative and I got lucky.

First on the menu: calçotadas.


Spring onions broiled and served with romesco. Add this dish to our list of “stuff to cook once we get our own house” under the subheading “stuff to cook once we get our own grill.”


The main course was inspired by one of Jose Andres’ dishes: snap peas with sausage, mint, and squash blossoms. The bite of the peas, spiciness of the sausage, and the cooling mint was a refreshing mouthful. The squash blossoms were delicious too except that farmer’s market squash blossoms are far superior to Central Market’s. Score one for local farmers. He found a caterpillar crawling around inside one of the blossoms too. It was green and looked scared.

It reminded me of one time Lola Nena and I were washing raspberries that we had picked from the bush outside my old bedroom at Keats Rd. She found a tiny grey slug/caterpillar/creepy crawly in one of the berries and squished it in between two giant paper towels. Score one for Lola.

Whut the...

Is this how this works? I'm copying my mother and my sister, and now I'm waiting for my other sister to copy too. Hey. Hey! Don't judge.