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Recipe: beet salad

I love beets. I mean *love* beets. I rarely think to cook them since Jeremy is the limiting factor on the range of foods we eat (he’s getting better – you should have seen him at the tender age of 19 when we met). But while I was walking through Whole Foods the other day, I was dazzled by their produce section. That’s why they put it right in front of the doors – so parrots like me will make a beeline for the rows of beautiful produce stacked perfectly enough to make you forget you are paying Way Too Much. I always find it amusing (or downright aggravating, take your pick) that we pay extra money for foods without chemicals and other things that Monsanto likes to add to our foods. Where was I, oh yes, in the beets aisle. I grabbed a bunch of gold and regular beets.

I’m a beet novice and didn’t realize you could cook the greens too. By the time I read about this wonderful use for the tops, I had already sent them to the compost bin in my over-eagerness to cook and clean up at the same time. Damn me.

Recipe: mocha hazelnut torte

After making a chiffon cake with swiss meringue buttercream, I usually wind up with at least a dozen egg yolks. I saw that David Lebovitz posted about using up egg whites which is the opposite of my problem. While perusing my old Chocolatier issues, I found a recipe from 1994 that uses at least ten egg yolks (more, if you go all out on the plating). Sweet! Except it’s a three truffle recipe. It doesn’t mean the recipe is necessarily difficult in terms of skill level, rather – it means there are several steps. That’s fine, I thought.

I had made the espresso pastry cream a day ahead because I knew doing all of the steps in one day would put me in a foul mood. Fine – that worked out alright. The recipe didn’t say to strain the pastry cream through a sieve. I am here to tell you to definitely do so. I like my pastry cream to be smoooooooth. The next morning I baked the chocolate genoise which turns out to be a little more brittle than I expect from genoise, but I was cool with it. While the genoise was cooling on a rack, I started on the hazelnut meringue. The first step was to skin some hazelnuts. God, I hate skinning hazelnuts. It’s fairly straightforward, just roast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet for about 10 minutes and then wrap them up in a kitchen towel to cool. When they heat up, they expand and bust their skins. When they cool, they shrink and will theoretically release from the skins with ease. Theoretically. My advice is to roast 25% more hazelnuts than called for because some of those suckers will refuse to release.

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Recipe: galbi (bbq korean short ribs)

I am a barbecue whore. I think it originates in part from my southern roots – growing up in southeastern Virginia you end up loving seafood, barbecue, white trash food, and good country ham among other heart-stopping delights. I also love Asian food because I grew up in a household run by Chinese immigrants (my parents and my grandma) who all three are fantabulous cooks. This summer has been my summer of bbq (and pastries, and whatever else I feel like trying to cook). When I declared the Summer of BBQ, I meant I wanted to get my bearings straight on the King of BBQ (pork – according to where I grew up) and its loyal subjects beef, and chicken. But… Sarah Gim piqued my interest in galbi (or galbee), that is, Korean bbq short ribs on one of her posts.

It sounded so good. I had to try it when my List of Recipes to Attempt and Master cleared out a bit. And so it was that earlier this week while grocery shopping in Boulder I met my first obstacle… that no one in Boulder knows what short ribs (according to the Korean style) are. Safeway’s “I don’t normally work this department” butcher led me to something that looked nothing like what I sought. In Whole Foods, I was pointed to beef back ribs which had a lot of bone and fat and not so much meat. Where the hell were all the beef rib racks? At least the butchers at Whole Foods are willing to do just about anything you ask. So I handed the fellow five pounds of the meatiest back ribs I could find in the case and asked him to please cut them across the bones. I got a funny look, but he obliged me. I should have asked him to cut each piece into 3 strips instead of 2, but I have issues with shouting to someone while they are operating a bone saw.

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