Since I’ve moved, I’ve been cooking less frequently but with more gusto. My desire to try new or labor-intensive recipes has been revived and lately I’ve made:
- Another batch of gnocchi, which only took 2 hours, with one hour of roasting the potatoes and one hour of actual work, and went much more smoothly and cleanly than the first time I made them.
- Another batch of sausages, this time with pork fatback. I don’t have a meat grinder, so I minced the fatback by hand:
Half a pound of pork fatback.
Let me tell you now, no matter how much you like knife work–and I like it quite a lot-mincing half a pound of fatback is not fun. Freezing it helped, but it was still slippery and time-consuming. On the other hand, this batch of sausages is much juicier than the last batch, in which I omitted fatback.
- Caramelized white chocolate
Caramelized white chocolate looks a lot like creamy peanut butter thinned out: light brown and slightly liquid.
for caramelized white chocolate ice cream, which could use a bit more milk or cream for a smoother texture but would probably go quite well with the nocino I made in July.
- Chocolate-coated gummy bears:
Stirring gummy bears into melted chocolate.
I don’t particularly like gummy bears, but the +1 loves them, especially when they’re covered with chocolate. I like the opportunity to work with chocolate and I like making him happy, so there you go. I used a candy thermometer, which you can see at the top of the photo, and this was the first time I successfully tempered chocolate! (on purpose. I did it on accident once, before I knew that chocolate had to be tempered.) This Cooking for Engineers page was quite helpful.
- Chicken stock
- Vanilla ice cream
- Chocolate Almond [& hazelnut] buttercrunch toffee
Water, butter, salt, white sugar, and brown sugar heating to 300*.
The toffee turned out fine, but it was full of air bubbles and had a very crumbly texture. It sort of falls apart in your mouth the way maple sugar candy does. I want to make something like Alfieri Farm’s brittle, which is hard, snaps satisfyingly, and lingers in your mouth like hard candy.
- Whole wheat challah, made over two days with a biga and soaker, and a simpler one day challah with honey. The +1 made the whole wheat and I made the honey challah, and we were incredibly excited. Real baking! Bread baking! Successful bread baking! The last time I tried to make bread was in 2006, when I made the no-knead bread at my parents’ house. Unfortunately, their house was too cold for the bread to rise, and so the final product was a pale, dense, unappetizing lump (although it did have a crumb, which was encouraging). The challah turned out much better, with long fibers, the soft and chewy texture of the rolls my mom used to buy for snacks, and a shiny brown crust. We shaped the challah into crowns and three-stranded braids.
- Nocciola: the taste of summer in Rome. Hazelnut gelato.
- Ravioli stuffed with fiore sardo, a firm sheep’s milk cheese from Sardinia(?), panir, and arugula. This was mostly the +1′s work, as he loves making fresh pasta and does it beautifully. Mine always sticks to the counter, but when he makes it, the ravioli come out neat and easy to cook. These were delicious with browned butter and black pepper, although the spiciness of the arugula dominated the cheeses. If I were to try it again, I’d blanch the greens before adding them to the cheese mix.
