Bad Boy!!

The VMAs and life kicked my ass all weekend and I didn't have time to update my lil blog. I'm a bad boy and I promise to do better.

In the meantime, here's a cute picture of the boys watching their dad on the VMA Pre-Show last night. They loved the show and concur with the world that Kanye West is also a very bad boy and should get either the squirt gun or the newspaper treatment.

Le Pamplemousse!

As you can imagine, I read a lot of food magazines. I get lots of recipe ideas and I love reading about new products and gadgets. One of my favorites is Bon Appetit. I read it from cover to cover. In the new issue, they give out the Bon Appetit Awards and have featured a Hot 10 consisting of "people, companies, and products setting new standards of culinary excellence in food, drinks, travel, and design." It's a great list and you can check it out here.

I bring this list up because one of our favorite liqueurs is featured on it!

Here's the glowing praise Bon Appetit gives this lovely concoction:

St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur (Robert Cooper, creator), for giving innovative artisanal "flower power" to the home bar. Our hearts leapt at the sight of the bottle alone—individually numbered and faceted with alluring Art Deco lines—but it's the straw-colored liqueur with a bouquet oflychee and pear that made us forget the remainder of the liquor cabinet's contents. Created by Robert Cooper, a third-generation distiller, St-Germain is as freshly floral as only a liqueur made from handpicked wild elderflower blossoms can be. And while this artisanal elixir has us longing for crisp afternoons at a bistro in Paris, a bottle at home means one needn't bother with a barkeep to shake up a drink that tastes as rare as the first days of spring.

If you are unfamiliar with St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur I urge you to pick up a bottle or, at the very least, hit a bar and ask for a cocktail with it. The St-Germain website has a great recipe page (and the site's design is sublime). Go here to see that.

Here's my favorite use, however. It's a perfect drink that we've adapted from one featured on the menu at Marseille in midtown NYC. It's delicious if not just a tad, well, gay. It's got pink grapefruit and elderflower in it, hello!

Le Pamplemousse

3 parts chilled vodka
(we use Ketel One but for extra fruitiness use Absolut Ruby Red)
1 part St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 parts fresh squeezed pink grapefruit juice
splash of Campari

shake in martini shaker with ice, strain and serve up, with a salted rim

A New Recurring Feature: Grrr!

This is my first post in a new recurring series called "Grrr!"

Duncan makes this noise when he wants me to play ball. Finn makes it when he wants me to get off the computer and pay attention to him. I make this noise when I'm served something awful, when something in my kitchen gets broken or lost, when produce is not up to par, or when I fail miserably at making a dish.

The two biggest culinary "Grrr's" in my memory involve the serving of a mostly raw turkey at a small Thanksgiving I was hosting in Brooklyn about 8 years ago and the all-to-hasty pouring of my lemon custard filling into a still-to-warm pie crust last Thanksgiving that resulted basically in lemon soup in a bread bowl. They'll be many more "Grrr's" featured here for sure. I've had some great successes in the kitchen but I've also been known to really screw stuff up. I had a really big "Grrr" yesterday involving the tomato on a very ordinary ham & cheddar sandwich. Look:

grrr! tomato core! grrr!

TRAVESTY!! GRRR!! All it takes to make sure something like this never happens is 3 flippin' seconds and $1.49.

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/red-handle-tomato-corer/628950.html

Not in the Kitchen Tonight!

Too much good TV on to stand over the stove this evening!! I'm a huge fan of So You Think You Can Dance, Glee AND Top Chef... all of which are ON TONIGHT! I could almost implode. So here's the mise en place for my dinner:

I love the Natural Jif, it's so creamy and great. And, although I do love concord grape jelly, tonight I went with some French Cherry Preserves. So good! My Davey prefers PB&H though. (H = honey!)

Puff Piece

Are you a fan of frozen puff pastry? If you're not, I think you should reconsider. If you've never used it, then get thee to the market! I consider myself a decent baker. Not good, mind you, just decent. I can, thanks to my pop, Jack, finally make a homemade pie crust worthy of the Thanksgiving table. Dave and I make several kinds of great cookies. I can bake a cake, a loaf of bread and cinnamon rolls, too. However, I am self-actualized enough to know that I'm just not able (read: patient enough) to make croissants or puff pastry. Thus, my love for frozen puff pastry abounds!

It's perfect and delicious. My favorite use is as the top to a chicken pot pie. You'll be seeing some of the many sized chicken pies we make at my house once the weather cools down a bit. We also love to use the pastry sheets to make pockets filled with delicious and sometimes unexpected flavors. For last week's labor day picnic we wanted to take something sweet, easy to transport, and easy to eat. So here's what we did:

That up there is thawed puff pastry as the base (cut into strips), filled with two slices of crisp Granny Smith apple, a half dollar-sized piece of triple cream cheese (we used St. Andre), and smeared with fig jam that had been cooked with a splash of cognac. Just egg wash the edges, fold over, and fork closed the three seams. Add another coating of egg wash on top then bake until golden. That, my friends, is a seriously hot pocket!

Uncooperative

Just my luck. Finley is not a fan of the video camera.

Taking Stock...

My life and meals go much better if I just take a few (actually, about 4) hours on a day when I know I'm going to be home to make a great big pot of homemade chicken stock. There are a thousand recipes for the "best chicken stock" on the internet and it really couldn't be easier. I have a great recipe and some helpful pictures that I'm going to post for you very soon.

Anyway, tonight's dinner (which the dogs loooooved, btw) was so good and so easy. It took roughly half an hour to make but I was doing eight other things at the same time. I freeze my chicken stock in quart containers, I've found that size works best. Lately I've been reusing these great containers my favorite ramen soup comes in from a big deli in Times Square. They literally pour boiling hot ramen soup into these containers so they're very thick and very sturdy. I couldn't live with myself if I sent one of these things to a landfill. Here's a couple filled with frozen stock in my freezer:

Back to tonight's dinner. We threw 3 chicken breasts in the oven (coated with kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper and olive oil) to roast for about a half hour. I'd planned early and moved two containers of stock from the freezer to the fridge this morning to thaw. I cut up 4 big carrots, 4 stalks of celery and one medium onion. The stock and all vegetables went into a pot and were brought to a boil. I boiled everything for about 10 minutes so the carrots would be cooked. (You may need to add a couple of cups of water if you want your soup, you know, soupier. We like it full of noodles!) Add about half or 3/4 of a package of egg noodles to the boiling stock. By the time they cook, your chicken should be done in the oven. Pull that out, and cut into chunks using tongs and a knife since they'll be hot. Stir the chicken in. (Make sure to add the chicken juices left in the roasting pan to the soup! Deglaze that pan with a little of your broth if necessary... that's ALL FLAVOR!) Let simmer for a few minutes to meld all the ingredients. Do a final seasoning of salt or pepper if you like. Eat.

You now have a meal that tastes like it took most of the day... but it totally didn't.