friday night
Christina and I went out last night, as she scored free seats at a Washington Nationals game. It was sort of a last minute thing, through one of the vendors at her work. We got to the game (with a free parking pass at the stadium!) and the seats were awesome. Fifth row, just behind third base. Baseball is a lot more fun with good seats. We also enjoyed the Ben’s Chili Bowl they have at the brand new Nationals Park, which is a very impressive baseball facility.
Here are pictures from our evening. Sorry for the quality — they are all on my camera phone.
The view from our seats.
My lovely wife and I at the game.
Afterwards, we went to the National Cathedral where they were doing the “Lighting to Unite” event (see last post). It was about world peace and unity, etc., and they felt no qualms projecting all sorts of buddhist monks and hindus and many other things on the front of the Cathedral, though they curiously neglected any sort of Christian symbol or, God forbid, the Cross of Jesus Christ. It was still interesting.
proscuitto-covered chicken in a white wine mustard sauce
Monday May 05th 2008, 11:58 am
Filed under:
recipesOr, “How to make a really quick dinner.”
Here you go, Deanna. Now pay up!
Proscuitto-Covered Chicken in a White Wine Mustard Sauce
Ingredients:
Small(ish) boneless chicken breasts, as many as you need
Thin slices of prosciutto, two per chicken breast
Small onion, somewhere between “sliced” and “chopped” (about one cup)
Olive oil for browning
2 cups white wine. We used wine that’s just a little too old to drink, but that’s not completely vinegar.
3 tbsp whole grain mustard, or a nice brown mustard if not available (zaterains spicy creole mustard, anyone?)
Maybe 1/4 cup of heavy cream or half-and-half
Maybe 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese, grated
Directions:
NOTE: Use a heavy skillet, if possible. I used our cast iron skillet.
Cook the onions with a little olive oil in the skillet over low heat until they begin to appear caramelized, about fifteen minutes. Turn the heat up to medium, and add the chicken breasts, wrapped in prosciutto slices (you can use a toothpick to hold). Cook until the chicken is done on both sides, and then I turned up the heat to make the prosciutto seem crustier. Transfer chicken to dinner plate, and turn heat back down to low. Add wine and scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze all the tasty stuff off the bottom. Stir in the mustard, adding a little more if it’s your taste. Allow to reduce to one cup, which will take about three minutes if the pan is hot enough. Pour in a splash of cream and the parmesan cheese, and stir for another minute. Immediately spoon over chicken, and serve with some sort of vegetable (I think we used cauliflower from one of those steam-in-bag frozen outfits).
strawberry chiffon cake, or, how to get your wife to nearly murder you.
Monday May 05th 2008, 9:50 am
Filed under:
life,
recipesTo get to the story, I’ll back up to a weekend summary.
After LSAT studying and air conditioner installing, Christina and I wanted to finally go get our amazing Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor (side note: If you were one of the two people who got us very nice food processors, we really love you, and we really loved them, but we wanted this large one that matches all our other stainless steel stuff. Don’t hate us. Please.) at Williams-Sonoma. Before doing that, we went and got happily tipsy at the Red Derby, a bar that was having a mint julep special in celebration of the Kentucky Derby. Those suckers (only one each!) were so potent that Christina and I decided to take a walk down to Columbia Heights before hopping in the car to drive to Pentagon City, just to be on the safe side.
By the time we arrived at Pentagon City, Christina noted that she had a bit of a headache, and reasoned that the alcohol was just hitting her a little harder than normal. She begged and pleaded for a side trip to The Limited (any guy want to join me in collectively and virtually vomiting?), to which I acquiesced after seeing the Apple Store (ooh, gahh, pretty),so we split up. After we collected our food processor, we made plans to eat dinner at Tackle Box in Georgetown, which is an attempt to recreate a Maine lobster shack in Georgetown with sustainably-fished seafood. It was good, but not amazing. For that price, I also don’t want to eat on paper plates.
Poor Christina was growing increasingly ill, and when we got back to our car to drive home, she felt very sick. A pattern which continued throughout the evening, and night, and into the next morning. So I went and bought provisions at Target (read: medicine, gatorade, and saltene crackers) the next morning. When she started feeling better around 11:00 AM, we realized: oh crap, we promised to make a cake for a pre-baptism reception for our community group leader’s baby.
Not just any cake, oh no, that wouldn’t be us. We promised to make a strawberry chiffon cake to feed 25 people!
We had previously discussed a chiffon cake with strawberries and a white chocolate mascarpone icing, which would have been wonderful. I hustled the block over the the Georgia Avenue Safeway where, lo and behold, they didn’t have mascarpone cheese. Is anyone surprised? So Christina is making the cake (recipe from Joy of Cooking), adding strawberries pureed in our amaaaazing new food processor (leave out the 3/4 cup water), and I decide to make an icing with heavy cream and white chocolate, like the frosting for the chocolate stout cake I made earlier in the week. Except that icing was very chocolatey, so I halved the chocolate in this frosting.
Big mistake.
There is some ingredient in chocolate chips that makes them stay solid at room temperature. When you combine two bags of chocolate chips with two cups of heavy cream, heat to melt, and then put in the refrigerator, whisking frequently, it combines into a very nice, thick, spreadable icing. When you combine one bag of white chocolate chips (themselves less solid than semi-sweet chocolate chips) with two cups of heavy cream, as well as strawberry puree, you get a wonderful dessert soup. That stays the consistency of a dessert soup after two hours in the fridge. So at 2:15 PM (reception at 3:00 PM) we have no icing for the cake. So we whip some cream cheese, and add some of the white chocolate/cream/strawberry mixture, which made a drippy icing, that was probably workable at that point. But then I have a brilliant idea: let’s just add powdered sugar until it becomes thicker.
Second big mistake.
Not only is it not substantially thicker, it’s now an odd consistency. Which is still drippy.
At 2:45, we figured we had to go with what we had. Which was an ugly strawberry cake. We frost it on a cardboard cake round and transfer it to a cake stand. Due to the fact that the stand is very nice, and hammered silver (a wedding present), the cake itself doesn’t look too awful. And Christina was very upset about the cake, because baking is kind of her “thing.” Since the icing thing was entirely my fault, she probably wanted to kill me, only resisting because I’m good looking and because I can make a mean prosciutto-covered-chicken-breast-with-white-wine-mustard-sauce. But once we arrived at the reception, everyone said the cake tasted wonderful. Our community group leaders had been on a birthday lunch cruise the day before, with a cake from Charm City Cakes in Baltimore. They made a point to tell us that our cake tasted much better than the one from Charm City Cakes, and one friend remarked that “it tastes just like strawberry ice cream.” So the recipe is a keeper, but I’ll work on the icing a bit more first.
food
Thursday May 01st 2008, 12:54 pm
Filed under:
life,
recipesOne of the benefits of being married is that Christina and I don’t have to go out to eat or to do things to escape our 6 combined roommates. We’ve been staying home in the evenings a lot more, which means we’ve been doing a lot more cooking and baking. Christina traditionally is the baker, while I tend to cook more. The nights we’re not home to eat are the nights I’m in an LSAT class until 10:00 PM, so I usually default to Subway or Baja Fresh.
This post (it may become a series, hence the “recipes” category) is semi-inspired by the blog I found via DCFoodies, Post-Collegiate Cooking a Deaux. I was reading along, and the whole thing felt very familiar. A couple of posts in, I realized that I actually know the couple who write the blog. One is a Truman and former co-worker, and they attended our wedding. Fun and random.
Monday night I wanted to make something quick(ish), as we were supposed to help a friend move to our neighborhood. I picked Curried Chicken Wraps, a recipe from Ina Garten, whom Christina, my mother, and I all sort of idolize. Instead of baking the chicken, I used our new grill pan. I also used boneless skinless chicken breasts, because that was what Trader Joe’s had. I think I’ve finally figured out how to cook a chicken breast well, which is good, because I’ve had a lot of charred-on-the-outside-raw-on-the-inside experiences in the past. While the wraps were good for dinner, they were indeed much better for lunch the next day (even though the cashews had softened). Also, I bought cashew pieces instead of whole cashews, because they were cheaper.
For last night’s dinner, I searched the Food Network’s website for macaroni and cheese, thinking some sort of mac-and-cheese hearty entree would be in order. The two that stuck out were Wayne’s Beef Macaroni and Cheese (from Paula Deen, which means just looking at the recipe raises your cholesterol) and Giada De Laurentiis’ version. Our style of cooking and eating is generally much more in line with Giada De Laurentiis than Paula Deen (for our own health’s sake), but I’m from the South and need a home cooking fix every now and then. I decided to combine the recipes into a haute/neo home cooking macaroni and cheese entree. I’ll post what I did, and what I would do differently.
Macaroni and Cheese
Ingredients:
One standard box of pasta — you can use macaroni, but we used riccioli
2 cups chopped bell pepper
2 cups chopped onion
2-3 cloves of garlic, chopped (approx 2 tbsp)
1lb ground turkey — I would probably have used 1.5 lbs if I could do it again
2 cups canned crushed tomatoes — we got Italian style, but go for San Marzano if you can afford it
1 tsp each dried basil and oregano, or 2 tsp Italian seasoning
2 cups grated cheddar (not super sharp, or it will be overpowering)
2 cups grated fontina
2 cups grated mozzarella
1 cup grated parmesean
1 cup heavy cream
1 tsp flour
Directions:
Boil the pasta until it’s not quite al dente — about five minutes for riccioli. Drain but don’t rinse. It will cook further in the oven. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Sautee the bell pepper, onion, and garlic until soft. Add in the turkey and cook until browned (though it doesn’t look brown) and separated into small chunks. Add in the crushed tomatoes and Italian seasoning, and simmer on low heat. Combine the heavy cream and flour in a bowl, and add in half of each kind of cheese. Add in the ground turkey mixture, and then the pasta. Combine the remaining cheese into another bowl and toss. Pour the pasta/turkey/cheese mixture into a buttered dish — I imagine 10 x 14 would be sufficient, or 9 x 13 plus another small baking dish — and bake for 20 or so minutes, until the cheese is just starting to turn brown. Let sit for ten minutes before serving. Makes enough for a small army, or several meals for two.
I also found a fun recipe for Chocolate Stout Cake (from Bon Appetit) which I decided to try. The recipe calls for any stout (including Guinness Stout), but my first legal PM (as opposed to the 12:05 AM) beer on my 21st birthday was a Chocolate Stout from the Rogue Brewing Company (in Oregon), and it’s an amazing beer. So I visited our local wine and beer store (who promised to have some in) and picked up a 22 oz bottle for SEVEN DOLLARS. So it’s a treat to be sure. About three quarters of it went into the cake, and I drank the other quarter of the bottle. Here’s a big tip: Cut the recipe in 2/3. We didn’t have three 8-inch pans, so I used two 9-inch pans. I would use two 8-inch pans if possible. The beer makes the batter rise significantly, so the finished layer cake itself is at least 9 inches tall (it’s really huge!), and doesn’t fit under the lid of our cake stand. It wouldn’t even fit under a pasta pot, so it’s wrapped in cellophane wrap. Another note: the icing was coming together quite nicely for an hour and a half (stirring frequently), but I left it alone for another hour in the fridge. It became pretty hard to spread, so be careful on that end. The cake itself is amaaaaaazing, with a deep flavor without being too dense. Very rich, and wonderful. It’s my new standard cake for when I want to impress folks or just make something great, like for community group snack, where we have a history.
annoyance
Sunday April 27th 2008, 7:50 pm
Filed under:
lifeIf you google the ExecuStay Marriott on 15th Street NW in DC, and call the phone number, know what happens?
It rings at our house.
Three people called today, asking for the Marriott.
I might call RCN and ask them to change our number — this is annoying!
why should I fear?
Friday April 25th 2008, 1:49 pm
Filed under:
songs/poemsIn response to this week’s community group discussion, I’ve been trying to let this one “percolate” (to quote my LSAT instructor) in my brain a lot. May the Lord let it sink into my heart. From Red Mountain Music.
Why Should I Fear?
My soul thou art immerged in sin,
So deep that none can trace;
Look to the ransomed God decreed
To clear the guilty race
Had I the guilt of all the world
He’s able to forgive;
Why should I fear?
The debt is paid, if only I’d believe.
The atonement once made on the tree,
Can balance many more
Than all the sins of Adam’s race,
If numbered o’er and o’er.
Had I the guilt of all the world
He’s able to forgive;
Why should I fear?
The debt is paid, if only I’d believe.
He paid the mighty sum and died
For sinners yet unborn;
From men, the works of his own hands,
He suffered shame and scorn.
Had I the guilt of all the world
He’s able to forgive;
Why should I fear?
The debt is paid, if only I’d believe.
