Pears poached in red wine

• Pear: a couple
• Poaching: 2 cups red wine, 2 Tb lemon juice, 3/4 cup sugar, 0.5 tsp cinnamon.
• Serve with: Melted GOOD quality (70%>) chocolate, a very small quantity of red chili

Fridge empty, so I ordered food, I forget what. But I do remember craving dessert. Fridge still empty, so I had to try and make something of what was not in the fridge: one lonely piece of pear and about a kilo of chocolate... I was facing a rather bleak dessert until I realized what would happen if I added that half bottle of red wine, left from last night...

Separate pear meat from pear-everything-else, where the meat should look like two beautifully solid pear halves. Stir wine, sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon in a pot, until boiling. Give the pear a nice warm, almost simmering, wine bath for about 8 mins, until al dente. Remove pot from fire and leave pears chilling in wine for 20 mins. Drain em and serve em together with something suitable...

Julia Child, whose receipe I was sort of following, thought that "something suitable" would be: almond frangipane (=almond custard) and a sugar-crust shell painted with jelly glaze. Glaze made from a reduction of the wine, minus pears, mixed with red currant jelly... But, as mentioned above, I only had one kilo of chocolate. A piece of that melted with butter accompanied the pear on my dessert plate.

Red wine poached pears served with melted chocolate was okay, but I think it would have been much better had I mixed some chopped red chili with the chocolate. Spicy!

The red pear was beautiful though; That perfectly deep red surface nicely contrasted the white fruit meat, when knifed, left me wanting to color pears in black, orange and gray... After having thought about that for a while, I began thinking about why Julia Child's ancestors took the stupid name "Child". Why would anyone want to be known as "child"? Makes me think of this Chinese woman, my friend met, whose English name was "Big head", because - she explained - her head was really big...

Pedigree and foie gras cream

• Foie gras cream: 1 kg duck foie gras, 0.5 l water, Pedigree dog food

Cut up the foie gras, put in blender, add water, blend. Mix some with the dry dog food, and serve...

Unfortunately, my dog didn't like this at all. :-(

Fortunately I could also use the foie gras cream for an El Bulli dish - Frozen foie gras quinoa with consommé. I poured the cream in a tray (should have been a Paco Jet container, which I don't have), froze it for 8 hours, cut up the frozen thingie in smaller pieces and stood outside in the winter weather and grated it all in a very small cheese grater. Why outside? Because inside this powder melts immediately. Then back in freezer.

Serve with HOT consommé. Ironically this is where I messed up and served the consommé only warm. But a very unusual dish for sure.

Swedish Meatballs

• Meatballs: 0.7 kg ground beef, 0.3 kg ground pork, 1 onion, 4 anchovy fillets, 2 boiled potatoes, 1 egg yolk, 1.5 tsp salt, pinch of ground black pepper, butter.

Being Swedish this is a dish I absolutely have to know how to make. And I do. The only mildly difficult part is to fry them to that perfectly golden color, and keep them juicy and small...

Mix the: meat, finely cut onion, finely cut anchovies, grated boiled potatoes (I think I used two), the egg yolk... well, everything in the list above, except the butter.

Roll firm little balls, add butter in a pan and fry the meatballs.

The anchovy makes it extra interesting...

Serve with mashed potatoes and lingonberry jam (Ikea sells that). It is typically served with a brown cream sauce as well. I make that sauce from the frying juices, stir in cream, soy sauce and a spoon of jelly or lingonberry jam.

Parmesan Ice Cream Sandwich

• Ice cream: 1.2 l cream, 250 g grated Parmesan
• Crackers: 5 egg whites, 250 g grated Parmesan
• Marmelade: 5 non small lemons, 1.2 dl sugar

This was a FUUUUN dish. Easy to make and like other molecular gastronomical dishes, people eat it with a rather puzzled look on their face. So, not just food, but entertainment. Serve it as a dessert cheese. If you put it on a cheese platter I suggest making it smaller (it's a rich dish).

Simmer cream and stir in the grated parmesan, bit by bit, with a wooden spoon until all smooth. Then strain it and freeze the ice cream-to-be in something square that makes it say 3 cm high. Your freezer transforms this stuff into ice cream in around 5 hours. So, plenty of time for the next to parts:

The crackers (Tuiles) are also made with lots of parmesan, and added egg whites. Stir them together and spread as thin as possible on a silpat, in a square shape. Then store in a 180 C warm place for 5 minutes, or until they get a nice color. Take out, cut them up in squares 3x3 cm and then back into the heat, on the flip side, for a few minutes.

Marmalade... Filet the lemons, cut fruit meat in pieces, cook with sugar for an hour, while stirring. The result? In my case I got a midnight colored dish with a distinct taste of charcoal... Perhaps an example of molecular gastronomical cooking, but eating this stuff seemed rather dangerous. So, plan B: Remove the lid from a jar of marmalade, purchased in a store, and with a small metal object take out the appropriate amount of marmalade from inside the jar.

Cut up the ice cream, slightly smaller than the crackers, a dash of marmalade on top and then sandwich it between two crackers. Done!

Spaghetti with fridge stuff

• Spaghetti: 100 gram flour, 1 egg
• Tomato and sausage sauce: Tomatoes, basil, garlic and sausages
• Lonely potato salad: Salad, carrots, cucumber, ONE potato and garlic dressing

Picture 1 above shows everything I found in my fridge that didn't live in a jar. I really don't understand my collection of jars in the fridge. I have no idea what anything is, or where it comes from...
The gathering of the known fridge food looked destined to form some sort of salad. But since I am neither a girl nor an eater of a "Sausage salad" I had myself a challenge. And hunger was no helper here. I stall when hungry.
Moments before reconsidering Sausage salad, I found what turned out to be exactly 110 grams of flour and an egg, which I through Italian/Chinese baking techniques transformed into my favv dish pasta. :-)
After which my fridge stuff started to make more sense. Tomatoes and sausages joined into a sauce, together with some basil and garlic. The rest chopped up to a salad. The one potato, which I sliced-n'-boiled, played a very lonely, limited, and when met, odd part in this salad.
Overall, this was a good Thursday night dinner, and I name thee: "Spaghetti with fridge stuff".

Potato gratin with sausages

• The gratin: 4-5 potatoes, 1 onion, 3 eggs, 1 dl / 0.5 cup of whipping cream, butter, sausages, Mascarpone, Parmesan

I think Julia Child viewed food as variations of heated fat. She even managed to make a fatty version of chocolate mousse! So I guess I should have known better than to think that a potato gratin, from her cookbook, would make a healthy dish. Just check out the ingredientes above!

In all fairness though; Julia called for Swiss cheese. The mascarpone + Parmesan was just a bit of "satirical cooking" - I thought I could beat the queen of fat at her own game... Not a good idea, as it turned out...
In a Pyrex pie plate (now I know what that is), I built the gratin like this:

------------------------------------------------------------

L1: Sliced and in-salt-boiled potatoes

------------------------------------------------------------

L2: In-a-pan-with-butter-softened-minced-onion

------------------------------------------------------------

L3: Sliced sausages (a tasty pork kind I found in my fridge)

------------------------------------------------------------

L4: Another layer of that in-a-pan-onion

------------------------------------------------------------

L5: Cheeeeese....

------------------------------------------------------------

...then drown it all in egg+cream -> 190 C / 375 F hot oven for 30-40 min...

End result was too fatty and too eggy. I think the fatty was something that Julia and I have to share responsibility for (see above), but the eggy was all her. I even doubled the amount of potatoes. Following her recipe, which called for only half a pound of potatoes (= like 3 pieces), this would have been an omelet!!
I had a garden salad on the side. Salad 's my new thing. I stayed at a friends house last week, and was served a big salad with every meal. I now know how to beat my veggie deficit...

Fettuccine with chicken rosemary sauce

• Fettuccine: 100 g flour, 1 egg, 1 Tbs water, salt
• Rosemary sauce: garlic, red pepper, rosemary, olive oil, tomatoes, chicken breast, flour, milk, salt, pepper

Note to self: Next time, make this dish with spaghetti. Fettuccine, with a thick sauce like this, sticks together. Or maybe that was for a different reason. But spaghetti would have tasted better.

Another note: Don't boil frozen chicken breast. :-(

But, having noted these two things, the taste was great. And now I know what my little dog eats everyday, as I boil her frozen chicken for dinner. It is dry...

Fresh pasta recipes call for letting the dough rest for 20 minutes, which I hardly ever do. And I can't tell the difference. So now I make it faster than dried pasta, including boiling the water. Yay.

The rosemary sauce was interesting. Chopped garlic, pepper and rosemary, fried in oil. Then cooked for 15 minutes in tomatoes (I avoid canned ones). I added some chopped - what was now boiled - chicken breast. And this is the part that I won't repeat. The flour thickened the sauce nicely.

Grilled chicken, roasted veggies, brown sauce

• Chicken: Chicken drumsticks, red pepper, garlic, Canola oil, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper
• Veggies: Potatoes, asparagus, green beans, mushrooms
• Sauce: Chicken fat, cream, flour, black pepper

Came home, super tired, and just started cooking things I found in the fridge. Grilling too many drum sticks and roasting all vegetables I had. Well, I steamed the asparagus and the green beans.

My mom told me to bend the asparagus and it would naturally break off an upper part that you cook. They turned out pretty good, so I think I remembered this advice correctly.

...While in school I worked extra in a deli. I had the job for many years, and once I estimated that I must have grilled over 10,000 chickens during this time. Mass grilling of chickens produces an enormous amount of fat. We kept it in barrels, stored for weeks, before someone picked them up. Weeks old chicken fat in a barrel is VERY disgusting... Especially so when combined with left over alcohol circling your veins, from less than mature consumption of alcohol, the night before.

So... I typically am no fan of chicken fat. But when I found a near empty container of cream, in the fridge, I decided to make a sauce of that fat anyway. And, it turned out to be the best part of today's meal. Cream is gooood.

Rib eye, béarnaise and grilled veggies

• Béarnaise: White wine vinegar, fresh tarragon, pepper, egg yolk, lots of butter
• Veggies: Carrots, onion, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, rosemary, olive oil and green beans.

Long gym workout made me crave blood. Well, proteins rather. And a classic piece of meat with lots of healthy veggies, balanced by lots of unhealthy sauce, is what I decided on for dinner.

Cooking, unlike baking, should be more about winging it, so this time I decided not to follow any recipes with the Bearnaise sauce; Chopping some onion and lots of fresh tarragon, crushing some black pepper, a dash of vinegar and tiny bit of water. Boil it until most liquid had evaporated (this turned out to be a mistake). Stirring in an egg yolk and then a shocking amount of melted butter. Result was too little vinegar and I needed to add salt, for some reason. Both easily corrected. Maybe recipe for this sauce is the way to go, after all.

I chopped the veggies, added oil and salt, and lots of fresh rosemary from my garden, and then into the oven. The beans I prepared in my double boiler pasta maker, which makes a great steamer. Truly THE way to cook beans.

A chef ones told me that to cook meat right, one has to use an oven. It is nearly impossible to get it medium rare, rare or medium if one only uses a pan (which explains a lot of badly fried meat I've been served, over the years). And it won't look very nice either, with gray edges. As I lost my thermometer, used for knowing exactly when the meat is done, I had to look for juices. When these show, the meat is medium. Or what ten years ago was referred to as medium rare.

There has been a shift in the meat rare scale, apparently. Salt and pepper AFTER cooking the meat.

Nice sturdy meal, though I never know how to actually serve a rib eye. Do I free it from fat or serve it with it? If removed, it separates into two or three pieces. Hmm.