"Roasting"

It's not been an easy last couple of days.  Katherine and I had been planning for a while to go designer clothes-and-bags shopping at the Mall at Short Hills. Evelyn had other ideas, keeping us awake late into the night, and making it impossible for us to get up early enough to make the trip worthwhile. So it was time to cheer ourselves up with some more gourmet cooking.

As Katherine said in her last post, our next cookbook is called All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art (a gift from Jimmy and Sidny): 

We have already had a couple of successes with this book (which, face it, is pretty much guaranteed to be a winner given its topic).  Most notably, there is this recipe for Chicken pieces smeared all over (including under the skin) with dijon mustard, then marinated for a while, and finally roasted with wine and cream.  It's absolutely delicious, and looks pretty good too:

The rules of the game dictate that we can't do that recipe from the book tonight, since all the recipes we try have to be new ones.

So instead, we chose to do 'One-Hour Rosemary Rib Roast'.  OK, I chose it.  Katherine wanted a lean, thinly sliced beef roast; I wanted a fatty, thick cut one.  I won that one!  I bought the standing rib roast from the local Amish Market on Friday, and prepared it by cutting away the bones, and then tying them back on with a layer of rosemary above and below the meat (and seasoning heavily).
The roast then sits in the fridge overnight.  OK, in the interests of honesty, I admit that this photo was taken today; I had to retie it after realising I had tied the bones back on the wrong way round:

The roast went in the oven on Saturday at about 8.45 p.m. (after another difficult day with the little one, necessitating yet another late dinner).  Almost immediately, you could smell the fragrant rosemary singeing (singing?).  In the meantime, I worked on coriander-garlic fried potatoes (from this book, which will feature in a later post when we get around to it), and a beef stock from this book (as usual with TK, very complicated).  The potatoes are to go with the roast; the stock is for who-knows-what.  We'll keep you posted.

The thing that worried me most about the roast was the fact that we don't have an instant-read thermometer, only one which you plunge in and then wait for its needle to move slowly to its resting point.  I mean, the one we use for Evelyn is better (but for obvious reasons, I'm not going to use that!).  So I checked after one hour, and it looked like this (and the thermometer showed a promising 120º).
It was time to leave it to rest.  And time to fry up the potatoes: 

This is how it looked, plated up:

That was my plate (the outside pieces were medium rare, as Katherine likes; these were nice and rare, as I like).  Katherine made one of her famous salads to accompany the dish.

All in all, another winner.  Although the truth is that the potatoes were as good as the meat, and played just as large a role in making the meal good.  The Chateau Liversan 2006 played a part too...

The beginning - Sea Bass poached in Buttermilk from New York Times Cook Book

The Baker's Rack

Recently we bought a small baker's rack to put in the sun room which is adjacent to the kitchen. We'd been looking for one for some time because I was desperate to stick our cookbooks all together where we could see them AND be near or in the kitchen (they'd been stuck in our so-called 'office' - which neither of us goes in to). This item arrived about the same time as our little daughter (Evelyn Judith Morison, born 4th May 2012).

Our beloved little girl, Evelyn

It took a few weeks for us to settle with her of course but one thing we never sacrificed from day one of having her here, was having delicious meals. My mother started it off by making fabulous dinners for us every night the three weeks she stayed with us after Evelyn was born. After she left Benjamin continued the tradition and nearly every night he's made something rather spectacular. And much of that inspiration has come from merely having our cookbooks (some of which have been around for yonks) just sitting there staring at us. So over the last few weeks we've been randomly picking out recipes here and there, but I had this idea. A challenge of sorts really. We had not put a huge amount of thought into the order in which the books were put up, but why not start at the top row and go through each book and pick out a recipe. It can be from any section but can't be one we've done before. Yes - a bit Julie and Julia if you will. And as far a time limit - we should aim to do at least one per week. If we want to do more that's fine but the aim is one per week. So here it is (checking calendar) 25th July, 2012. We haven't a pithy title for this challenge. Just merely calling it our 'journey' through our c. 50 cookbooks. What happens when we get to the end? We start again from the beginning. And I should also add - it really is Ben who is doing ALL the cooking. We wanted to chronicle this - really for ourselves, but who knows who may be reading this.

This is the first night of our challenge and we picked a pretty good night to start. We've been using a new technique to get Evelyn to bed and it's been working (knock on a very large piece of wood). This is the third night in a row and tonight she was asleep by 9pm. It takes about two hours to settle her and even once she's asleep she tends to wake several times afterwards so it makes eating a challenge. We've been most dispirited in the last few weeks when Ben would make some really wonderful dinners which would either go cold for either or both of us while one of us, or both, took care of a screaming baby. So tonight we started with the cookbook which just so happened to be at the start of the top row on the bakers rack. It's a cookbook my mom gave to Ben for Christmas. The Essental New York Times Cook Book. It's a hefty mo-fo. Basically a huge selection of recipes taken from New York Times Magazine over the last 150 years. It's massive so not easy to choose from the hundreds and hundreds of recipes. We knew we wanted to use fish because we wanted to try out Nassau Street Seafood in downtown Princeton. We tend to only ever buy food from our local grocery store, McCaffrey's. But their fish really is dire. It came to a head when Ben tried to make a fish stew the other night with McCaffrey's tuna and it was almost inedible. Anyway - so we picked up some black sea bass for about the same price yet the quality was 10 times better. The recipe we chose was black sea bass poached in buttermilk with a mushroom stuffing on a bed of wilted spinach. 

Sea bass poached in buttermilk, with mushroom stuffing on wilted spinach

I gave it 5 out of 5 stars. I would definitely want to have this dish again and it would also make a great dinner party meal. Ben chose a nice rose - of which I am only allowed to have one glass really since I am still nursing. 


Anyway - so I am writing this when I should be getting a little bit of sleep before SHE wakes again to feed but I knew if I didn't start now I may never. 


Next book.... All About Roasting!


-Katherine