100 Best Foods in the World

Happy Birthday to me :)

This list is a work in progress - I am giving myself at least 30 open slots for new stuff!

100 Best Foods in the World

1. lasagna
2. BLT on toasted sourdough with mayo
3. risotto
4. french fries with ketchup
5. Italian chocolate with hazelnuts
6. Manchego cheese
7. YooHoo
8. marcona almonds
9. artichoke hearts
10. grilled sweet peppers
11. pizza margherita
12. nocciolo gelato
13. giandiujia anything, especially gelato
14. Reese’s peanut butter cups
15. raspberry jam
16. apricot jam
17. croissants
18. brioche
19. champapagne
20. pasta with pesto
21. duck breast with Chinese 5 spice
22. chicken fried rice
23. hot and sour soup
24. Coquille St. Jacques
25. lobster tails with melted butter
26. Dungeness crab with melted butter
27. almond pear tart
28. artichoke and parmesan dip
29. arancini – preferably with mushrooms
30. tortilla chips with lime
31. chocolate almond cake
32. porterhouse steak grilled outside
33. blackberry pie
34. roasted chicken with rosemary
35. mashed potatoes
36. salted cashew nuts
37. chicken with peanut sauce over spinach
38. Green curry anything w/ coconut milk
39. fried goat cheese rounds on a salad of wild greens
40. Homemade turkey on rye with stuffing, cranberry sauce and mayo
41. tuna salad with sweet pickles and lots of mayo
42. ginger scones
43. napoleons
44. new potatoes and peas in cream
45. macaroni and cheese
46. snickers bars
47. homemade potato chips
48. Dairy Queen soft serve vanilla cone dipped in chocolate
49. fresh mini doughnuts
50. herring in sour cream
51. fried egg sandwich with cheese, mayo and ketchup
52. rum cake
53. grilled cheese sandwich
54. grilled beef tenderloin
55. Rose’s Cheesecake – the Cake Bible
56. blueberries
57. noodle salad with egg roll and bbq pork
58. figs with manchego
59. orange hazelnut pinwheels from Macrina bakery
60. mezzelune stuffed with ricotta and herbs in a porcini sauce, garnished with shrimp
61. leberkasemmel with sweet mustard
62. Ritter Sport white chocolate and blood orange
63. seafood louie salad
64. duck pate
65. Sfoglie di riso
66. pappardelle with cinghiale sauce
67. Ravioli rose’, with ricotta spinach filling
68. stollen
69. guacamole
70. white chocolate mousse with raspberries
    

Camera's broken, but still eating!

Pappardelle with wild boar ragu

OK - the Canon is in the shop - "lens error". Crap. though I am happy to have the excuse not to post any pictures - pulling them off the camera and putting them on the computer and then uploading to the blog site is a task that I dislike in a way that is way out of proportion to how much time it actually takes. I personally can't wait until the day that I just hold my camera up next to the computer and tell the photos to hop on over - wouldn't that be great??

Had potato chips and petit syrah for dinner the other night. Don't knock it until you've tried it! Ruffled, and salt and vinegar. You kind of have to make a potato chip sandwich with them to get the exact right blend of crunch and salt and tang. The salt and vinegar are too intense, and the chips are too thin, while the ruffled ones are too bland and too thick - together they are sublime! This always makes me think of sitting outside in a cafe in Italy at about 5:00 and having an apperitivo with some of those little dishes of chips and peanuts and olives - I LOVE that!

Last week we had dinner at il Fornaio - one of the best lasagne ever! Seriously - beschamel, a nice meat sauce, fresh pasta - it was really really good! But not as good as the ravioli pictured below - in Florence, near the central market - filled with ricotta and herbs with a light tomato sauce and pareggiano reggiano on top. This is clearly what the pillows in heaven are made out of!

Tomato Cheddar Pie

This is from a Laurie Colwin column in the August 1992 Gourmet - I still miss her. I think her food writing was some of the first that inspired me, and during all my "I'm taking all of this stuff to Goodwill" phases, her books stay on the shelf, never at risk.

This pie is so good, kind of like a baked tomato sandwich. It is best if it is reheated in a 350°F oven so the cheese is melted and the pie is hot. The recipe says you can use canned tomatoes, but I never make it with anything but fresh, preferably ones you picked yourself. Or someone picked for you :)



TOMATO CHEDDAR PIE
Crust:
2 cups flour
1 stick butter
4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup milk

Filling:
2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and sliced
or 2 28-ounces cans of plum tomatoes, drained and sliced
chopped basil, parsley or chives, to taste
1½ cups grated cheddar cheese
1/3 cup mayonnaise mixed with 2 T. lemon juice

Make crust as for biscuit dough. Roll out half and line a 9-inch pie plate with it, add the tomatoes, then the herbs, then 1 cup of the cheese, then the mayonnaise mixture and then the rest of the cheese. Roll out the rest of the dough and fit it over the top, pinching the edges to seal the crusts together. Cut several steam vents in the top and bake at 400°F for 25 minutes.

Hazelnut Frangipane and Pears

Got the macro working!



Oh, and they were yummy too!

Take the tart shells as described in my August post, fill with hazelnut frangipane and bake 10 minutes at 350, then top with some pear compote. Vanilla ice cream on top is good, but not stictly required. Try not to eat them all at once!

Hazelnut Frangipane

1 cup toasted hazelnuts

3 eggs

6 T melted butter

1/2 cup sugar

Whirl hazelnuts in a blender until pretty fine - you should add the eggs after they are pretty well chopped up and that will keep the mixture moving. Then add the butter and sugar and blend until fine. Spread in pre-baked shells and bake until puffed and firm - 10-15 minutes.

Pear Compote

2 medium pears - bosc or d'anjou work great

1/4 cup raw sugar

1/4 t. vanilla

Peel and dice the pears. Put them in a small saucepan with the sugar. Cook over low heat until the pears are just tender - stirring as necessary to keep them from sticking. Add vanilla at the end. Use on top of the tarts, or over ice cream, or as a filling for a danish braid.

Chocolate and Fruit

OK - we might as well get down to it because I KNOW I am in the huge minority here, but in general, I hate fruit and chocolate together. It's not so much the flavors, because that can be pretty good and I will get to that in a minute, but it's the textures - for example, a chocolate-dipped strawberry is just all wrong – the chocolate makes the strawberry taste sour, and the acid juiciness of the strawberry makes the chocolate go all grainy and nasty. Nope, nothing to like there. Other fruits fare similarly badly – I mean maybe banana isn’t so bad from the texture standpoint because it’s more creamy, but still, neither one enhances the other, really. And pineapple and other juicy and acid fruits produce the same results as the strawberries. And blueberries and chocolate – well that’s just wrong, because it puts two lovely things completely at war with each other and why why would you do that?? Chocolate and raspberries same thing – great apart, terrible together. . . .

BUT, BUT (and this was a big revelation for me) there are some fruit flavors, if not the actual fruit, that go actually really well with chocolate. Last year, for example, I made a chocolate chiffon cake with a blackberry coulis (I love that word – but I think it just means sauce!! – hee!!) ANYWAY – chocolate chiffon cake is like the end – it is SO good – way richer than angel food, but not super dense and heavy. It sat so pretty in a pool of blackberry sauce – sweetened of course so it didn’t fight with the chocolate – amazing!

AND, now, this year, I find that a lovely chocolate bundt cake flavored with orange essence and covered in an orange glaze is totally sublime! I mean who would have thought I would like something like that – la la la – it’s so great!

Pictures to come. . . . .

Chocolate Chiffon Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 liquid melted butter
7 large eggs, separated
3/4 boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

One ungreased 10-inch tube pan

Preheat the oven to 325°F. In a large mixing bowl combine the flour, cocoa, all but 2 tablespoons of the sugar, baking powder, and salt and beat 1 minute to mix. Make a well in the center. Add the oil, egg yolks, and vanilla and beat 1 minute or until smooth. Add the boiling water and mix again.

In another large mixing bowl beat the egg whites until frothy, add the cream of tartar, and beat until soft peaks form when the beater is raised. Beat in the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and beat until stiff peaks form when the beater is raised slowly. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter until just blended.

Pour into the tube pan, run a small metal spatula or knife through the batter to prevent air pockets, and bake for 55 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center. Invert the pan, placing the tube opening over the neck of a soda or wine bottle to suspend it well above the counter, and cool the cake completely in the pan (this takes about 1 1/2 hours).

Loosen the sides with a long metal spatula and remove the cake from the pan. Invert onto a greased wire rack and reinvert onto a serving plate.

Serve with Blackberry Coulis and a dollop of whipped cream.

Blackberry Coulis

2 cups blackberries
1/2 cup sugar

Cook blackberries and sugar in small saucepan over medium heat until the fruit breaks down and the sugar is dissolved. Push through a sieve to strain out seeds, but press down hard so that the resulting sauce is thick with fruit puree. Yum.

Favorites

Crab cake sandwich with fried egg and cheese. OMG - seriously. I could have this as my breakfast every single day and never be sorry there wasn't something else. Chanterelles - sauteed with butter and oil and stirred into pasta or risotto.

Eclairs - Darking Bakers' August Challenge

This month we were challenged by Tony Tahhan and MeetaK to make Pierre Herme eclairs. You can see the recipe and technique on their blogs. I've made eclairs before, but it's always fun to have an excuse to make a dessert, and to try variations on a recipe. I waited until the last possible minute and made these last night! The pate a choux was easy - I like the food processor method. And I got 22 little eclairs - very close to what the recipe predicts. That said, I agree with other posters that they were too eggy and too soft. I don't know that there is any particular benefit from adding milk - so I will stick to my old recipe - four ingredients, perfect and crisp every time - 1 cup water, 1 stick butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs.

I elected to do my variation on the pastry cream filling - I added a few tablespoons of hazelnut praline to the pastry cream as it was cooling down. This is a very good recipe and I will make it again, though I have a tendency to want to shortcut the tempering process and nearly scramble the eggs everytime. Ah well, that is what the seive is for, no?

As far as the chocolate sauce, all I can say is hmmm. There are a damn lot of steps and ingredients to get something that is no better than ganache. OK, maybe that's not fair - is anything better than ganache? But you know. I would be interested to hear what others think, but it seems like a darn lot of steps to get essentially a chocolate ganache. I kept waiting for the secret to reveal itself, but I got nothing - add water and then boil it off? How about we start with heavy cream instead? Ah well, that's why these challenges are so fascinating - you get other people's view of the world!

I think I will definintely make the pastry cream again, and make eclairs more often, but i will use my own pate a choux recipe and a simple ganache for glazing.

White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream for Dessert

I've been reading blogs all along, even while claiming to be too busy/tired/out of memory to post anything. Finally got inspired (read, overcome with guilt thinking I am a slacker) and decided to cook, photograph, and eat, in that order. The mandarin orange bundt cake came out much better the second time, but I still have no photos for that, so more to come later.

Last week I had a good but ultimately less-than-satisfying crab roll for lunch - clearly, more crab was in order to scratch that itch. Dilemma - to buy the ready to go crab meat out of the shell, or buy the whole crab and pick the meat out? Thank god I chose the latter - apparently the guys a the fish counter wanted to reward me for making the right decision cause when I told them I wanted two whole cooked crab, they didn't pull them off the ice in the case, no, they pulled them out of the boiling water steaming hot!! Oh man oh man oh man. The crab was buttery and sweet - as good as I have ever had.

Crab cakes for dinner, with a tomato salad and fresh corn on the side. As Homer would say - can't talk, eating . . . .

For dessert I wanted something rich, but with fruit. So, I searched David Lebovitz's site for an interesting ice cream recipe and came up with the White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream - simplified as a non-custard ice cream, with fresh figs. . . . .and balsamic vinegar. . . . . A little blurry, yes, but no less delicious!

White Chocolate Ginger Ice Cream

About 1 quart

2-inch piece fresh ginger

½ cup sugar1 cup milk
1 t. vanilla extract

2 cups heavy cream - divided

4 ounces white chocolate, chopped

1. Slice the ginger into very thin rounds, cover it with 1 cup of the heavy cream in a medium saucepan, bring to a simmer, then turn the heat off. Add the sugar and stir to combine. Let steep for at least 30 minutes, preferably in the fridge to cool it off.
2. Put the chopped white chocolate in a large bowl. Warm up the other cup of heavy cream until very warm but do not simmer or boil. Pour over the chocolate and stir to melt the chocolate. Add the cup of milk to this mixture and then stir in the vanilla. Put this in the fridge too.
3. After the two mixtures have cooled, strain the ginger cream mixture through a sieve into the white chocolate cream. Discard the ginger. Put the combined mix into an ice cream maker and then freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.

More eating . . . .

Dungeness crab roll from Pike Place Chowder

Orange ricotta brioche with currants - the Dahlia Bakery . . . .

Corn fritters from http://www.ayankeeinasouthernkitchen.com/ - thanks Kim!

Mandarin Orange bundt cake - no link, it was a disaster! But I think I know how to fix it. . . .