Iron Chef Results - Citrus, Asparagus, Strawberry winners!

The date was set, the contestants were lined up and the three challenging ingredients were selected.  The Iron Chef dinner party was on!

If you haven't already watched an episode of Iron Chef (in English or Japanese) the premise is pretty simple - the guest chefs compete to create the best menu using three ingredients in each course.  The judges taste, review and select a winner.  For our at-home dinner party version, we assigned courses to the guests, told them what the three ingredients were, and although we were prepared to put the kitchen at every one's disposal when they arrived, all the dishes arrived potluck.

We started with six contestants.

Three days before the party, one withdrew due to illness.

The morning of, we lost another, contestant.  The ranks were already closing, the tension mounting as the remaining contestants began to see their odds of coming out on top increase.

During the day, the dessert preparations were under way.  Have you ever tried to concoct a dessert with asparagus?  Even the Internet was no help here...turning up only balsamic glazes in the "sweet" category.  We were on our own and the clock was ticking.

We began to experiment.

Asparagus Sugar.  This had to be one of the weirdest flavors I've ever tasted.  How to describe the pungent, strange, not-sweet-not-vegetable smell of this mix?

Caramel with bits of asparagus - good, but mostly because you can't actually taste the asparagus.  Bad part?  Cleaning up the pan.  (you have to add lots of water and boil the caramel off - good to know!)

Candied asparagus tips.  These were surprisingly good.  Pulled out just when the sugar hit a thick enough stage to coat the tips and harden, they were oddly sweet and savory.  We used a salted caramel, which helped join the flavors.

After going through a tasting station, including some strawberries that were sprinkled with asparagus sugar and a few others soaked in lemoncello and asparagus sugar, we settled on our dessert entry:

A cornmeal crust, a lemon-mascarpone base topped with strawberries marinated in lemoncello and asparagus sugar.  We garnished each slice with a candied asparagus tip just before serving, but they softened after being made and were "sticky and weird" in the words of our judge.  However, the rest of the dessert was delightful.  (This probably cost us the winning spot, but such is the cost of experimentation!)

The other contestants arrived, wine was served on the porch and our judge, the wise, youngest participant, was selected.

Other dishes included:

A platter of puff-pastry shells with a bright lemon-cream sauce enrobing tender pieces of asparagus and chicken, topped with diced strawberries.  Incredibly tasty.

A simple side of blanched asparagus, julienned strawberries and lemon zest, a perfectly simple combination of the three ingredients.

Salt and lime brined chicken breasts, grille, topped with a white wine and strawberry sauce seasoned with thyme and asparagus, and

An asparagus break with lime-cream and strawberries.  The asparagus bread tasted strangely of peanut butter - some strange kitchen chemistry was at work in this last dish.

Our judge dutifully tasted everything and...

After carefully weighing the dishes (and his hosts feelings, his mother's feelings and those of the other contestants) declared "it was all good so I can't choose a winner!!"

In the face of such diplomacy, we had only one choice.  We agreed!  It was a delicious dinner and as the contestants packed up their platters and wandered off into the spring-scented night, we were already imagining the next trio of secret ingredients.

Iron Chef - Coming Soon!

We're going to participate in an iron-chef style dinner this weekend - the three secret ingredients are asparagus, citrus and strawberries.

Does anyone have a candied asparagus recipe?

We'll let you know how it goes!

Orange-Strawberry Quiche

Have you ever had a dessert quiche?  I hadn't until Talia invented one.  We were talking about healthful options for her class project and she suggested this one - entirely her own invention.  I was pretty impressed with the creativity, and entirely unsure how we would go about making such a thing, but serendipity showed up and voila:

It's a pretty basic little quiche, with strawberries as the filling.  Just after she'd first suggested this combination, we were at the grocery store and saw a tart recipe with an orange custard filling.  Borrowing from that idea, we added orange zest to the cream, heated it a bit and added it to the filling.

The recipe, as with most first tries, is not yet ready for prime-time, but there was quite a deal of pride in preparing this dessert for her grandparents.  Confession?  I was not really sure this would be good.  But it was.  We'll probably try it again soon, with a slightly sweeter crust and see what comes of it.

Here's to invention: the necessary ingredient.

Endless Summer

Summertime always stretches out in my mind as a long opportunity to catch up on all those things I've been putting off.  And of coures, it always sneaks up quickly, throwing my routines off, bringing just as many   new ideas and as new minutes of sunlight.  Ah, summertime, whoever said your living was easy?

A month into it, the routine is a little more settled, and we've had time to tackle a few of the chores, making room for some fun.

We spent the holiday weekend with friends, riding horses and exploring a new place.  Our assignment was simple: dessert.  In an effort to keep refining the strawberry tart, we tried a new version and, apologies to our hosts, it wasn't quite as good.

You can see here that the dough was a little too thick around the edges, but instead of sacrificing some, we crammed it in.  That wasn't a good idea because the corner of the crust came out underbaked.  I also used this white quiche pan, instead of my metal one with the removable edge, so the crust didn't crisp as much as usual.  This recipe was a very basic sweet crust, with a little sugar and no eggs.  The last one we made was more like a cookie dough, with more sugar and eggs - it was more tender and made a better crust for these cool summer tarts.

Of course, we hadn't yet tried the crust, so the kid-chef filled it with our pastry cream and made a great whirl of strawberries on the top.  We all took turns critiqueing the results and I think we've got the right combination down now.

Phew!

On to the next summertime task!

Just like Julia

My daughter was stationed at the counter, ready to help with the strawberries.  "I know how to hold it like Julia Child!"  she said.

And indeed, she did.

We were making some strawberry-rhubarb sauce (yes, again!) and my assistant had helped herself to the largest knife available and was nimbly chopping up the strawberries.  I admit it, I was a little nervous.  She was not.  She had her fingertips tucked in, just like Julia, and was having a blast.

A while back, I'd borrowed the French Chef DVDs from our local library and we'd watched a few episodes.  I vaguely remember pointing out how Julia kept her fingers tucked away from the blade, but we spent more time laughing at her inability to find things that we, with the camera's view, could see.  She slapped the behemoth lobster, making us all laugh.  By the time she pulled a steamy, bubbling tripe dish out of the oven, we were all ready to try it, and I had a hankering to stuff some sausages of my own (far superior, she insisted, to what you find at the store).

I don't suppose old French Chef reruns are typical family entertainment, here or elsewhere, but I'm glad we watched a few episodes together.  I'd never seen any of them, and I was struck by the pure fun of the episodes.  I always assumed Julia Child was...well, you know, Julia Child.  And yet, reading her memoir a while back, I was amazed to learn she wasn't the Julia Child we know until later in her life.  No matter the time or book, one senses with overwhelming certainty that she was herself, through and through.

At dinner this evening, my son recalled two lines of a poem I'd told them months ago - uncannily appropriate:

"You got a bell man, ring it,

You got a song man, sing it."

I love cooking and spending time with my children, and I hope that whoever they may be, they'll find some pleasure in the kind of time we're spending together. Knives and all.
By Robert Creeley:
One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough
So they beat the bell to hell, Max,
with an axe, show it who’s boss,
boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in
someplace one could relax
but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
You got a song man, sing it.
You got a bell man, ring it.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Tartlets

This weekend, we decided to take a chance on some tartlets.  So we got out our gear and consulted a few recipes and....off we went!

I have a recipe for mini-quiches that I love to use for parties.  They're made with puff-pastry and filling.  I also have a recipe for pastry cream that's delightful.  I have a recipe for a fruit tart (large) that involves a similar cream and a short crust.  But the vision I had was for mini-puff pastry shells with pastry cream and a fruit filling.  So many questions were unanswered: could I bake the cream in the puff pastry?  Or would it fall apart?  Would the puff pastry overwhelm the cream if the cream didn't fall apart?  should the fruit be added before or after?  Would there even be room for fruit?

My assistant was game for a challenge, so we threw all caution to the wind (knowing I could always pick up some baklava if things went terribly wrong) and we decided to give it a go the morning before a party. 

We prepared the crusts as we do for the quiches.

Scooped in some pastry cream and baked them until the pastry was golden brown, about 12 minutes.  They didn't have the neat flat form of a quiche, which left us wondering whether the sliced strawberries I'd prepared would stick.  Clearly, we needed glue.

It's strawberry season around here and we'd found some amazing local berries, along with some fresh rhubarb.  I love the tangy, bright flavor of rhubarb and we find excuses to eat vats of strawberry-rhubarb compote around here.  It's great on toast, mixed into yogurt (as we learnd in the yog-wich post!) and on top of cereal in the mornings.  Turns out it makes great glue, too!

We dabbed each of the tartlets with our compote and put some of the fresh berry pieces on top.  The tartlets were amazing.  The pastry was light and flaky, the cream held together well through the short baking time, puffing and setting nicely, and the bright berry toppings made the whole dessert a perfect finger-food addition to the party table.

Our compote is super-simple.

In a saucepan, combine:

4 cups of rhubarb stalks, ends trimmed off, chopped into 1/2" pieces

an equal quantity of strawberries, tops removed, large berries cut in half and

1/3 cup water

Cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally until the mixture softens and begins to simmer

reduce heat and cook for about 20 minutes, until the compote has thickened slightly and all the fruits have dissolved.

You can add sugar to taste, about halfway through the cooking, but depending on your preferences and your fruit, you may not need any. 

We keep our extras in the fridge, but I have no idea how long it lasts since we never make it more than a few days!

Yog-wich

We had a light lunch today - ham and cheese sandwiches and a dish of yogurt with strawberry-rhubarb compote and fresh strawberries.

I looked up from my sandwich to see this:

Yes, she was slathering her sandwich with the yogurt, fruit mixed in.  My first reaction was easy enough to imagine, "did you just put yogurt on your sandwich???"  I was tired and was already getting upset over the wasted food and mess and someone was going to have to make a new sandwich and so forth....

"It's really good!"  she smiled.  And ate it.

"It is," my son nodded in agreement and slathered some on his sandwich.

Shoving aside all those adult understandings of what can't possibly be good, I did something that didn't come easily.  I tried it. A little bit.  With my nose kind of pinched up the way theirs is when I say they have to try one bit of whatever that disgusting thing is they're avoiding on their plate.

You know what?  It actually was good. 

I was then treated to a recitation of the many things that are good dipped in yogurt:  carrots!  apples!  bread!  rasins!  and as they were describing all the things that the school cafeteria teaches them, I was thinking....there's a long tradition of eating yogurt as a sauce, filler, and seasoning. 

I love Lebanese food, Greek food, soups thickened with yogurt, ranch-like dipping sauces.  And if all that is good, why can't turkey and cheese pair up with yogurt and tart fruits (cranberry jelly, remember that stuff!?)  for a novel sandwich?  I can imagine a chicken salad with this too. 

I'm always curious about how people find that new idea or novel combination that  turns out to be delish - here's to keeping an open mind.