Hometown Homage

Yesterday another one of our labmates graduated and as is becoming the custom, I made the cake. It's been a little while since I made a big cake (and as such I must have forgotten saying I would never make one during the work week again), so I was itching to do something big and extravagant. Our labmate is moving on to a postdoctoral position in New York and this is where I drew my inspiration. What better way to instill excitement about his upcoming NY adventure than an homage to my own hometown in cake? I went with a 2-tiered blue fondant white cake with vanilla buttercream. The bottom tier was rectangular while the top tier was a small round cake offset from the center of the lower tier. Around each cake I depicted silhouettes of the city in black fondant (tip: buy black fondant, don't dye it yourself!). The lower tier had silhouettes of the city skyline while the upper tier had a Brooklyn bridge silhouette wrapping it. Both cakes had the little yellow "Broadway lights" along their lower border (and great thanks to Chris's little sister for rolling all those for me!). On top of the round cake I thought I would mould a "Big Apple" our of rice cereal treat (great trick for keeping it light) and cover it with fondant. To finish it off, a Broadway street sign, a few subway line signs, and a little "I Heart NY" sign surrounded the big apple. For the first time ever, the cake I served actually looked like the picture I drew. Maybe I'm getting a little better at this or maybe I'm becoming more realistic about what I can accomplish in a week's time in cake (likely the latter).

Portabello Burgers

Hello loyal readers, all 10 of you. Sorry it's been awhile since our last post. We've been busy, but the upshot of that is there's a lot to talk about. Among those things is my first formal food post.

One of the under-appreciated benefits of living in Southern California is the fresh produce available not only in the farmer's markets that are ubiquitous throughout LA's cities and towns, but also the ease of access to that produce in the supermarket. Sure, you can get real organic heirloom tomatoes every Thursday night in South Pasadena, but you can get them all week in Whole Foods, Pavilions, or even Vons. Needless to say, the fact that we can get such vegetables without any special effort got Pam and I thinking less about what to have with chicken, and more about what to have with a produce centerpiece.

This paradigm shift in our dietary planning is much healthier, as well. Sating your hunger with more filling-but-calorically-poor foods like produce, and less from calorie-rich-but-not-filling pre-prepared foods and meats leaves you feeling full, but with fewer calories to burn at the end of the day. So, if you're concerned with caloric accounting, this is probably the easiest way to go quickly from the distinctly American habit of overeating to feeling full but having to worry less about how much you ate that day. If you're grad students like the two of us are, it's certainly the least time-consuming way that we've focused on for living a more healthy lifestyle.

Before I digress much further, this is the philosophical underpinning for some of the dishes we've been experimenting with lately. Specifically, a classic entree that shocks many when they're told how satisfying it is as the centerpiece of any meal: the Portabello Mushroom burger.

The Portabello has all sorts of health benefits of varying veracity that are detailed in other places, but the revelation that appealed to us was that each portabello has about 20 calories in it. 20 calories, and you can feel as full afterward as if you just ate a normal-sized hamburger.

The downside is that the mushroom itself has little to no taste before being cooked, but that's where the fun really starts.

To start with, we prepared a dressing consisting of a 1:1 mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Into this suspension was mixed a combination of crushed fresh rosemary (great to use the rear end of a wooden spoon to crush these in olive oil), and minced garlic, with a little fresh ground pepper and salt for extra seasoning. The flavor of fresh rosemary is subtle relative to its dried counterpart, so feel free to liberally add the herb. Also, a touch of basil similarly crushed gives a savory kick to the dressing if it is desired, but has a tendency to dominate the flavor, so be careful. This dressing was prepared in under 5 minutes, so it's a simple, healthy and fresh addition.

After removing the stipe (a mushroom's stem) to give a flat, patty-like bell, we added our well-mixed dressing by drizzling it from the bowl onto the underside of the mushroom in order to saturate but not overfill the gills. Now we're ready to cook.

We've had a lot of trial and error with the grilling side of things, but have found that the best way to keep the mushroom moist and flavorful without the leathery undercooked texture or the burnt blandness associated with too long on the grill is straightforward. Placing the dressed mushroom top-down on a squared piece of aluminum foil and wrapping gives a neat, grill-ready package for cooking.

Insofar as the grill is concerned, pre-heat to about 500 degrees, then just throw your mushrooms on for about 10 minutes, keeping the temperature in the 400-500 degree range. The foil keeps the mushroom cooking evenly, and prevents burning. Perhaps most conveniently, you don't have to flip the mushroom while it's on the grill, so if you're like me, you can watch TV (sports and other manly things, never the food network) inside, and come back in 10 minutes.

To check if the mushrooms are done, just peel back some of the foil and see if the mushroom gills look softer, in that they have lost their ability to hold their shape. Generally, if the dressing is boiling on top of the mushrooms, you're in good shape, and you can take them of the grill. Once that's done, turn up the heat to high, hopefully over 600 degrees.

At this point, peel off the package and take out the mushrooms. To the extremely hot grill, add these again in order to sear both sides, for about a minute each. Grill the top sides first to get your customary grill marks and then flip, letting the dressing fall out. This will kick up flames, so be careful. Close the grill top to keep the flames down, but after only a minute, take the mushrooms back out.

We recommend serving them with a slice of tomato and a thick slice of mozarella cheese on a bun. Let them sit for about 2 minutes with the cheese on to get an awesome texture contrast of the soft cheese with the crisp and juicy mushrooms and tomatoes. The result is a satisfactory bite with a sour and meaty burst of juicy flavor from the first bite to the last. If you still feel like adding extra seasoning, we haven't found them lacking, but we'd certainly love to hear your suggestions.

This is our first go-to thoroughly vegetarian meal, and has inspired us to look into more. So, as the summer starts to wind down, give it a shot... happy grilling!

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

It was as if Gourmet magazine knew that my little sister had bought me the Cuisinart automatic ice cream maker for my birthday. In this month's issue (August 2009), they had a whole frozen desserts section that I promptly flagged for weekend cooking fun. First on my list was the salted caramel ice cream. One thing that always lacks for me with store bought caramel ice cream is the homemade caramel aftertaste. I don't think I could put words to it, but if you've ever made caramel at home, you know what I mean. And if you haven't made caramel at home, it's about time you did!

This recipe starts out with a simple dry caramel. Most caramel you make begins with a sugar/water solution and gradually boils off the water. This takes quite a bit longer than just dumping a cup of sugar in your pan and heating it up - as in a dry caramel. I had never done this dry caramel before but I think I've been converted. Just watch the heat so it doesn't cook too quickly. Once you hit that deep amber color, you can start adding the cream. The recipe says this splatters, and it's correct. Add the cream slowly so that you don't hurt yourself or your stove. From there onward, it's a standard ice cream recipe with a cooked custard base combined with the caramel sauce.

The end result of this was beyond my expectations. Hands down this was the creamiest ice cream I've ever had. Even after 2 days in the freezer, it still has a texture that can only be compared to silk. As far as taste goes, it's distinctly homemade, very rich, and very sweet. The added sea salt really enhances the sweetness of the caramel. I'm usually one to dress up my ice cream with toppings or whipped cream, but this one must stand alone. It needs no help at all.

The Other Half

Ever since Le Petit Chef got started, Pam's been insisting I find something to post about. I've got a few ideas, but as a first step, I'll just say a couple things about how I got into actually enjoying the art (and science!!) of food preparation. I remember when I first started grad school, a coworker asked if I liked cooking. I said 'god no,' and he was shocked. His reply was something along the lines of 'how can you be a good chemist and not cook!' Through watching Pam and trying a couple of things myself, I've certainly discovered that organic chemists (at least) have a natural inclination, if not an outright affinity for the culinary arts.

Pam has already shown a penchant for things in the kitchen. In fact, I'm not allowed to do anything in the kitchen except prepare things for the grill. Needless to say, the stovetop and oven are not my forte. I won't go so far as to suggest that the grill (or if we want to be pretentious about it, the grille) is my forte, but I am learning. If you, our reader(s), start early on enough, you can learn with me that grilling is much more than 1/4" patties of low grade beef turned twice and served over cheese between buns. In fact, grilling goes much deeper than that, as I have recently discovered, to facilitate the preparation of almost any food.

So, as we proceed, I will do my best to chronicle my hopefully educational, sometimes comical, inevitably disastrous and ideally edible (if not downright delicious) experiments for you. Best-case scenario, Pam and I become a wildly successful Michelin-rated two-person operation. Worst-case scenario, you learn a thing or two that inspires you to fire up your cheap propane gas grill or Webber kettle and give some pork rubs or vegetable marinades a shot, and eat more happily and healthily.

In either case, I hope it's a fun ride. Bon apetit!

As American as Apple Pie

I don't think it gets more American than apple pie, so that was my choice for a 4th of July treat. Chris and I spent an awesome weekend out in Malibu on the beach with our west coast family and friends. As usual in Malibu, there was no shortage of good food! My contribution was this apple pie, which I adapted from "The Joy of Cooking." I cook the filling, first cooking the apples in butter for several minutes covered before adding sugar, a healthy dose of cinnamon, and a bit of nutmeg. After cooling the filling, I spooned it into my pie crust with the accumulated juices and syrup. For the top of the crust, I used aspic cutters to cut stars out and used the little star pieces to further decorate the top before placing it on top of my pie. After an egg wash, I sprinkled a little bit of coarse sugar on top to lightly caramelize the pie crust upon baking. In all, if you cheat a little (like I did here) and use a pre-made pie crust, you can make this pie in less than 2 hours, before cooling.

One Word: KitchenAid!

Or is it two words? Who cares! Thanks to my awesome (and baking enabling) parents, I welcomed my first KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer this week! KitchenAid has a great deal where you can buy a refurbished model for about half the MSRP through their website. I chose the 5 qt. Artisan stand mixer in "Ice" and couldn't be happier with it. It comes at a great time where I'm pretty sure that one more batch of icing would have burned out the motor on my small hand mixer. I'm most excited about beating perfect egg whites with it and not having to stand there holding the mixer while trying to slowly add sugar and such! That may not sound super exciting to all of you, but it's thrilling to me! I feel much more legitimate now as far as baking goes, that's for sure.

An Herb Garden Companion

As you may have read previously, Chris and I have been growing some herbs on my balcony in pots for everyday cooking. When Chris' mom was visiting, she taught us how to cut the herbs, dry them, and freeze them for future use. I for one certainly was worried what I would do when she left and we were left to our own devices in caring for our little garden. This was quickly remedied by Chris' mom (and sister!) who sent me (as a birthday gift) this great little guide to growing your own herbs and using them called "Your Backyard Herb Garden". It covers everything from growing your herbs to using them in cooking and crafts. I'm especially interested in the handy chart on pests and molds to watch out for. In short, this is exactly what we needed to keep our little garden thriving and keep cooking with our herbs through the winter season. Thanks for the awesome gift!