[TND] Fell behind again

I am bad at blogging. Reliably. Reliably modifies both bad and blogging.

Shortly after the last time I posted, we had a passover seder, after which we skipped the next Tuesday night dinner. I made creme brulee, and the salt crusted beets mentioned earlier. They came out quite lovely, and the creme fraiche horseradish sauce was amazing, especially with the beets. I would like to do more with beets, I feel like they're underrated and delicious.

We also had a BYOM(eat) celebration to mark the end of semester and my probable future employment. I made some steak au poivre, which I later replicated (sort of) for mother's day. The first time I did it right, grinding the pepper with the mortar and pestle, the second time I did it with a small food processor. The result was very very fine pepper dust, which had a much more intense pepper flavor on the meat. Much more intense. Filed it away as something potentially useful, but not for au poivre with good meat.

Prior to that, I made a gourmet-ed version of chicken fried steak. I was looking for, but unable to find, skirt steak, so I used a cut of meat Highland Park has been carrying, called southwestern fillet. It's a shoulder cut, it's sort of halfway between flank and tenderloin and priced similarly to flank. It's a great cut, I've gotten for a number of uses and been very happy with it. I made sausage cream gravy, whipped potatoes, and some sort of vegetable which was purely ancillary to the meat and gravy.

Ryan made a beef and mushroom risotto two weeks back, which was quite delicious. I made the banana-caramel bread pudding to go with it, which were really simple, really tasty, and will be added to the default dessert rotation. I will take the time to make my own caramel sauce next time, because store bought is generally flavored corn syrup, which is the opposite of yummy.

Last Tuesday I intended to make lamb, but was unable to find reasonably priced lamb of an appropriate cut to make kebabs out of. So I used some chicken and beef, covered generously with cumin and paprika. I also made flatbread from a recipe in the most recent Fine Cooking, done on the grill. It came out wonderfully, and is something I'll repeat often, as it was very easy and versatile. I made cucumber (leech the moisture like you would eggplant), dill, mint yogurt sauce to top these little Mediterranean tacos, along with red onion, cucumber, and tomato. Gotta use the full fat yogurt, none of that low fat stuff, and a good dollop of creme fraiche really brings the sauce together. I actually have a good bit of sauce leftover from this weekend, so I may try to find some lamb to grind up into a sort of doner kebab for this week, but last week doesn't inspire confidence.

I also made pie. I'm getting better with the crusts, but baking seems to be pretty fundamentally alien to my style of cooking. Measuring is for the birds. I made a strawberry-rhubarb-mango pie, which was quite delicious. You don't see rhubarb and mango together, probably because the places you can get good rhubarb you by definition get horrible mangoes and places where you can get good mangoes you probably just don't get rhubarb. It's too bad, because it is a fantastic combination, the tart rhubarb and the smooth sweet mango.