FFwD: Fresh Orange Pork Tenderloin

Sometimes taking initiative with a recipe is not a good idea. Dorie's recipe for Fresh Orange Pork Tenderloin (pg 273 of Around My French Table) calls for four large oranges. We're still hauling in mandarins from the last tree in my landlord's grove that we haven't picked clean. He has orange trees, too, but the fruit doesn't taste like anything. I chose to use the mandarins instead.

I've been making batches of marmalade out of them (OH MAN--SO GOOD), and the marmalade recipe allows using the entire mandarin peel, pith and all, since the skin is so thin. It works beautifully for marmalade.

The same concept of using the entire peel does not work beautifully for pork. This whole dish turned out bitter. Really bitter. It was unpleasant. Those cups of sugar that go into the marmalade do a good job tempering the bitterness. Maybe if I add cups of sugar to the pork....

Just kidding.

I don't blame the recipe. This defeat was all my own doing. I'll give it another shot with normal orange zest one day.

Don't I Look Like a Well-Balanced Eater?

According to Nigella, "apples long past their prime make for magnificent muffins." Good to know. I made her Apple and Cinnamon Muffins (pg 128-29 of Nigella Kitchen) with two crisp apples, but I regularly have a few sitting around that have gone soft, so now I know they can be salvaged and transformed into muffins.

This recipe is forgiving, which is a blessed relief to me after yet another Baking with Julia disappointment. I didn't realize until I'd already mixed most of the ingredients together that I only had one egg, rather than the required two. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the omission wouldn't make much difference. It didn't. Phew! These muffins poofed nicely, with a moist, light crumb. Sweetened by honey and brown sugar, they're just sweet enough without overdoing it, and the inclusion of chopped almonds in the batter makes them feel substantial. One muffin for breakfast was enough to hold me until lunch.

With the fruit and nuts and non-white-sugar sweeteners, I don't feel guilty, like I'm feeding Charlie cake for breakfast. 

Conclusion: Loved them, and Charlie approved!

Peanut Butter Hummus was fine. Nothing spectacular. Apparently, Nigella prefers the flavor that peanut butter lends better than tahini. I prefer tahini. This tasted saltier than I would like. I read a blog post by The Tipsy Baker the other day in which she realized that the reason one of the bread recipes in her book (Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) came out too salty for one of her readers was because the reader used Morton's salt, while Tipsy used a different brand. I had no idea that different brands made a difference. Did you? Perhaps this explains my salty hummus. I've always bought Morton's out of habit. It may be time to try a new brand.

They have purple carrots in the local supermarket here! Hee hee!

Conclusion: Just okay. Most supermarket brands taste better to me than this did. It reminded me that I wanted to retry the hummus recipe from Around My French Table now that I have my proper food processor back.

TwD: Foccaccia

As of this post, I officially move my Dorie posts back over to Cookbook Immersion Project, rather than My Mandatory Fun. Since I decided to restart my cookbook blog, it makes more sense to keep all the cookbook-related posts together. If you're at all interested in keeping up with my Italian adventure, please keep reading about it on the other site.

I'm fairly confident that I will once again be in the minority when I say that this week's recipe from Baking with Julia didn't work for me. I wanted the focaccia to succeed so badly. I let my dough sit in the refrigerator (aka my spare bedroom. It gets cold in these uninsulated Italian concrete houses!) for the full 36 hours. I very gently flattened the balls of dough and tugged them into a semi-rectangular shape.

I guess I wasn't gentle enough. These babies didn't poof in the oven. At all.

Bummer.

They were crispy in the center, which was the thinnest part. At first I thought maybe I messed it up by using a knife to slash the dough instead of the specified razor, but that wasn't the case. I didn't slash the third ball at all, and it looked exactly the same when it was done baking as the previous two.

I'm sorry, folks. I think I'm finished with Baking with Julia. I haven't loved any of the dozen recipes I've made. My favorite was the white bread, but it murdered my KitchenAid, so I won't be repeating that mistake. For whatever reason, these recipes just don't seem to work for me. They work for other Doristas, so it may well be my fault. Perhaps I'm too distracted by my toddler to execute the recipes properly. Perhaps I'm too rough with the dough. I don't know, but I'm tired of being disappointed in the product. I'd much rather concentrate my baking time on Dorie's Baking, which I want to bake through, but was too late to the party to join Tuesdays with Dorie in time for it (or Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet or The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion). I'll see the Tuesdays with Dorie crew in a few years, when hopefully Dorie will have published another book of her own wonderful (and more forgiving) recipes for us to bake together!

What Would Bob Marley Think?

I'm not an aficionado of Caribbean food, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Nigella's recipe for Rice and Peas (pg 344-5 of Nigella Kitchen) is not altogether authentic, and errs on the side of being bland. I added an extra onion and two extra cloves of garlic, swapped the red chile for a jalapeno pepper because that's what I found at the store, and added shredded chicken to the pot. Maybe if there were less rice involved (the recipe calls for 2 cups), the flavors would be more pronounced. Or maybe she keeps it bland because in the book, she pairs it with Jerk Chicken. In hopes that Charlie would eat some, I opted against the Jerk Chicken. It's entirely possible that the creamy blandness here is designed to offset the chicken's spice.

That may sound like a bashing of the recipe, but I must say that the blandness didn't really bother me. In fact, I found my steaming bowl of coconut milk-flavored carbohydrates to be cozy and warm, like a good bowl of oatmeal can be. Matt, however, dumped what looked like a whole lot of salt and pepper into his.

Hard to tell if Charlie liked this or not. He ate a few spoonfuls of rice and beans, and then I got cocky and tried to slip a piece of chicken in. Mistake. He spit out the whole mouthful and refused to try any more. Sigh.

Conclusion: Liked it. As with many of Nigella's recipe, it can be pulled together from a well-stocked pantry. I'll be making this one again. I think I'll try to work a vegetable into it, too. Unfortunately, a girl can not live on white food alone.

Back, with Revived Purpose!

Hello, Internet. Are you still there? Do you care any more? Even a little?

I've been thinking a lot lately about restarting my little cookbook project. I have a few reasons for this.

1) I thought that I'd just move ahead, blasting through one cookbook after another, even though I wasn't blogging about it. That has not proven to be the case. Now that I've moved to Italy, I flip through my cookbooks, and feel instant anxiety. Salmon? I've never seen it in the store. Mussels? But I'd have to debeard them! Kale? I've looked for it all winter. Haven't found it yet.  Cilantro can be found sometimes, but it's often a wild goose chase. Lamb? Nope. I've got my fingers crossed that it's seasonal, and that I can load up my freezer with it in the Spring, but at the moment, any recipe involving my favorite meat is out.

Point is, when I go food shopping with a grocery list, I rarely come home with all the ingredients needed to complete any one dish. Thus, I select basic, boring recipes from all over my library without developing a real understanding of any one book.

2) Forcing a focus on one book will, out of necessity, force me out into the great wide world to find the key ingredients. Some may be a lost cause--lamb, for example. If I want horse, I can find that, though. I may not find the exact ingredient, but hopefully I'll be able to pinpoint a decent substitute. It's more comfortable to simply roast a chicken every week, but where's the adventure in that?

3) I keep buying more books, but because I'm not focusing on any one of them, I'm not weeding out the bad to make more space. From the scattering of recipes I've tried from here and there, I definitely have some questionable books. (I'm looking at you, Weeknights with Giada. When did salty become her favorite flavor??)

4) I often can not remember much about a recipe a year later. I can't tell you how many times I've scrolled back through my posts here, and had the photo instantly jog my memory. For this reason alone, I want to start again, even if no one is reading.

That said, I am going to institute some changes (and will therefore need to come up with a new tagline for my blog). I'm not going to demand a month of myself. I can give a book more time or less time, depending upon my mood. Matt thinks it's stupid that I rarely cook the same recipe twice, so I want to make a concerted effort to cook dishes that were successes in the past in conjunction with new ones (I obviously won't post about those, though.) Removing the time limit of a month will remove the pressure to only cook new recipes. Secondly, I'm not going to post as often as I used to. Certainly not with each recipe getting its own post. Maybe once a week. We'll see.

So, if you're remotely interested in following along, I'm going to start with Nigella Kitchen.

I've developed a complicated relationship with this book. I love to look through it. I've actually cooked from it quite a bit over the past few months. The thing is, the recipes are not at all reliable. Some are great, and are things that I've cooked multiple times (African Drumsticks, Egg and Bacon Salad, Tarragon Chicken, Small Pasta with Salami). Others flat-out don't work. I've burned a lot of food by following the temp and time instructions in this book. Basically, anything that needs to go in the oven. Other recipes are bland. One (Crustless Pizza) was vile. Is it me? Is it the book? I want to try more recipes and see if I can figure out if there are enough great recipes to justify so many misses.

The End

I'm closing up shop over here at Cookbook Immersion Project. You can keep up with me at my other blog, Mandatory Fun. See you there!

FFwD: Eggplant "Tartine" with Tomatoes, Olives, and Cucumbers

I'm back in business, baby! My family has officially moved to Naples, Italy. We're currently staying at the Navy Lodge, which is actually a lot more comfortable than I expected. Our room is basically a two bedroom apartment with full kitchen, living room, and a washer/dryer. I'm still equipmentally challenged, but I should be able to keep up with the group until we're able to move into our apartment. It's going to take a while. There are all sorts of contract loops to jump through, and the earliest appointment they could give us for the "pre-contract meeting" was September 25th. Oy. If I'm lucky, we'll move in by November. It'll be worth it, though...

View from the kitchen terrace. AHHHHHHH!

Anyway, Eggplant "Tartine" with Tomatoes, Olives, and Cucumber was within my capabilities for this week. Thank goodness the stove here came with a baking sheet, because the one I brought from home is way too big to fit. Woops.

I was disappointed that there was no bread involved in this tartine. I don't really see how this could be considered a tartine, by any definition. Unfortunately, I forgot to peel my eggplant. The skin was extremely tough, so we couldn't eat it, and the eggplant's flesh clung to it for dear life, so this turned out to be harder to eat than it should have been. That may be the reason why I felt like I preferred the tomato/cucumber/caper salad on its own, and that the eggplant didn't contribute. (I couldn't find a normal size jar of olives. Everything was enormous. My fridge is small. The olives didn't make the cut.)

This dish was unremarkable to me. Not bad, but unmemorable. Matt's not a huge eggplant fan to begin with, so he won't be asking for it again. He ate it, but I don't think it overwhelmed him with eggplant love.

Regardless, it feels good to be cooking with the group again, and I'm glad that this was a straightforward recipe that I could handle. Ciao!