Art Nouveau Ho

This cheesecake was well-received at my recent Thanksgiving dinner, and there have been so many requests for the recipe I thought I would put it up here.

The basic recipe came from The New Best Recipe cookbook, published by the magazine Cook's Illustrated. I highly recommend both.

( Cheesecake below )

For the past few days, I've been in Vienna at a very fancy hotel. This hotel is so fancy that among the drinks at the breakfast buffet are 4 pitchers of water with crystals in them. This morning there were little notes in English beside each one, detailing the effects that drinking the water will have on you.

( Which one would you like? Photos below )

I have made a salad!

Specifically, a tomato/basil/mozzarella salad. It's August, and all those ingredients are fine and fabulous, especially the tomatoes.

Now, I know that some of you just read that and thought "eeeeyyyyucccchhh." It seems a growing number of my friends are tomato-haters. But this blog is NO STRANGER TO CONTROVERSY, and therefore I shall forge ahead with my paean to the red fruit of summer.
( Attack of the killer tomatoes )

I have:
Flour
Sugar
Eggs
Milk
Butter
Prosciutto
Cheese
Lemons
Bananas
Nutella

I lack:
Pancakes

Let's just redress this, shall we?

After a long day of sorting out boring serious stuff, I went slightly insane and roasted a duck for dinner.

The duck turned out to come with ORGANS inside. I am a grown woman and I ought to be able to cope with ORGANS. Instead I stared at them for a while, then made a small pitiful noise and-- shame of shames-- asked my mother to extract the ORGANS from the duck's cavity.

(My mother cannot read Stephen King novels or watch movies with swearing in them, yet she can be perfectly relaxed while up to her elbows in duck viscera. Go figure.)

I did force myself to chop the ORGANS along with the neck and the wings and make gravy out of them. The rest of the duck got rubbed with oil/soy sauce/sake/5 spice powder and stuck in the oven. It was pretty damn tasty.

The one ORGAN that didn't get used for gravy was the duck's liver. All through the roasting-and-gravy-making process, this shiny red liver was lying there staring at me. As you probably know, the liver is the largest organ in the body. This duck liver appeared bigger than an actual duck. "Just throw it out," said my mother as she left to go out to dinner.

So there I was: duck roasting in the oven, duck gravy simmering on the stove, huge pot of red cabbage looming on the back burner-- and, lying on the counter, this shiny red raw liver that, only a short while earlier, had been helping the duck's body filter toxins out of its system. What toxins does a duck consume? Do I even want to know?

Various thoughts went through my head:
1) Aaaagghhhh slimy duck liver.
2) You're not a vegetarian. Eating meat means consuming dead animals. Deal with it.
3) Out of respect to the animal, you shouldn't waste any part of it.
4) Even the ORGANS aaaaagghhhhh.
5) This was a happy organic free range duck. As duck livers go, this one is probably quite classy.
6) I like pâté, and I've never made it.
7) I'm a grown woman and I ought to be able to cope with ORGANS.
8) Aaaaaaagghhh slimy duck liver.
9) PÂTÉ. NOW.

So a quick Google search led me to this recipe. You'll note that it says "any sinewous bits removed." Both "sinewy" and "sinuous" mean something very different from the consistency of raw duck liver, which is about like meat Jello. ["jelly" to you Brits.] I found this out by extracting bits of stringy connective tissue with my fingers. I think it's safe to say I am now slightly more au fait with ORGANS. Plus, the pâté turned out pretty damn tasty. I used the zest and juice of an orange and some ginger liqueur. It got the speedlime seal of approval.

Post-duck, Speedy and I got creative. I'm painting a rather frightening sea monster onto a square of silk, and Speedy is doing something unnatural to the seat of her trousers with acrylics. Apparently it is meant to give male onlookers an "insta-boner." I'm impressed with this term. I think we have all learnt something today about ORGANS.

Tonight my old friend Pete and I got together with a few other folks for a MARDI GRAS PANCAKE ORGY.

I have made an important discovery, to wit:

Sliced bananas in a bowl with some sugar and brandy and cinnamon on them+ 1 minute or so in the microwave+ rolled up in a crepe = REALLY GOOD.

Bonus points if you add Nutella.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

In honour of the Valerie Plame trial, I'm making leek-and-potato soup.

This is pretty easy. 2 leeks, 2 big white potatoes, some vegetable or chicken stock and one big pot. Cut off the tough green parts of the leek, cut them in half lengthwise, and wash the grit out. Then cut off the root ends and chop them into little pieces. Sauté them in a little oil til they're soft but not brown. Chop the potatoes and add those, plus enough stock to cover (about 4 cups US.) Cover and let simmer for about half an hour, or until the potatoes are soft. Mash with a potato masher. Eat. (This goes well with a toasted onion bagel and some feta cheese.)

While chopping leeks I had the following thoughts:

Why do leeks not make you cry when onions do?

Leeks are a major motif in Shakespeare's Henry V. Directors tend to cut the St David's Day scene where Fluellen forces Pistol to eat a raw leek, though it's one of my favourites.

Backstage at the Folger Theatre in DC is a piece of graffiti that says EAT MY LEEK! It may possibly date from the production of Henry V which was the first Shakespeare I ever saw. (I think I was nine?) The director was brave and did not cut the leek-eating scene.

Henry V was also the inaugural performance at the replica Shakespeare's Globe in London. I paid £5 for a "groundling" spot standing in the yard. I remember the sun on the timbers, and the sound of drums, and tears in my eyes as I stood there. Those close to the stage got bits of chewed-up leek spat into their hair (since that director, too, was brave and did not cut the leek-eating scene.)

The Czech word for "leek" is porek.

When is St David's Day, anyway?

These were my thoughts. Look at that, my soup's almost ready. Have a good Saturday, everyone!

It's 4.30AM and I feel limp. Today speedlime and I have made:

--Cranberry sauce (2 batches)
--Cranberry-apricot-Amaretto tarte (2) (one without the Amaretto, for pvcdiva) (Speedy put a little pastry skull on the one with the booze, to warn her)
--The second phase of the Three-Day Stuffing
--Candied sweet potatoes
--vegetarian stuffing for acorn squashes

We spent the entire day either trudging back and forth to the shops, or cooking. We now have approximately A METRIC FUCKTON of food. The free-range turkey arrives in about 5 hours. Wish us luck.

Yesterday I went to the little artisan-food-market thingy that happens here on Saturdays. I go there regularly enough that I have a handful of favourite vendors, some of whom also recognise me when I show up. In particular, I get on very well with a girl named Judith, who comes to sell fruit and vegetables from the farm where she works.

This week, when I bought a bag of tomatoes, a cucumber, some strawberries and a smaaaaalllll aubergine, Judith was nice enough to slip a handful of long green things into the bag for free. At the time, I thought they were runner beans. When I got home, I realised they weren't: they were curly, had sort of bulblike appendages on the end, and smelled sort of like chives. Due to the curl, I wore one as a bracelet for the rest of the evening. What were they, and how could I cook them?

I phoned my mother, but she was in a meeting. It wasn't until this morning that the mighty Internet yielded an answer: what I have are garlic scapes. That is, the stem and flower bud of the garlic plant, which growers take off so that the bulb will grow bigger. Its taste is mild, like the leaves of wild garlic, and looking at recipes online, a favourite use seems to be pesto.

The scapes are such a lovely shape, it seems a shame to chop them. But tonight they are destined for pesto, oh yes. I'll report back when I'm done.

Weird food cravings plus bag of apples indahouse= "I know! I'll bake an apple crisp! Or, in British, an apple crumble!"

So I haul out my well-loved, time-honoured, battered, spattered copy of the first cookbook I ever owned: The Joy Of Cooking.

I still haven't started the crisp yet, because I'm now so lost in what an awesome cookbook this is. I have the old edition, not the mimsy new one with its calorie-counting and microwaves. The old edition spits upon microwaves and wipes its hobnailed boots upon calorie-counters. My edition tells you how to skin a squirrel, how to kill a squid, how to choose a chicken (bright eyes, a red comb and a flexible breastbone, apparently). I just opened it to a random page and it said "About Brains." This cookbook is badass.

OK, so the old edition has its faults-- there's a lot of 1950s stodge in here-- but where else are you going to find a recipe for making your own cream cheese?

Right. Time to chop some apples.