Dom Perignon

I'm hosting a New Year's Day party and I wanted to do something fun, new, and different. Aside from the standards (chili, wings, little hot dogs and more to follow...) I decided that it would be fun to try and make festive icebox cookies from scratch. You know those tubes they sell at the grocery store where you slice up the raw cookie dough and there are colored santas or snowmen or christmas trees in the cookies? That's what I wanted to do. After pondering chili pepper, green olive (with pimento), martini glass, and bunch-o-grapes, I settled on the bottle-o-Dom-Perignon shape. Why Dom? Not because it's the best or the priciest or the fanciest, but because it has the most unique bottle with the gold shield label.

This was my first time preparing such a cookie, so the whole process was pretty new to me. Well, not the whole process. Step one is to make a nice big batch of rolled butter cookie dough. This is the same dough you use to do your holiday cut-out cookies. This dough is used because it is very flavorful, but has the structure to hold up to physical manipulation in the form of rolling, molding, and freezing. Why freezing? The butter in the dough makes it soften rapidly when handled, so, in order to maintain the shape of the cookie while molding, it must be chilled periodically. After making the dough, the constituent parts must be colored. I used food coloring, a few drops of green and one of red for the bottle and a few yellow and one red for the label. I divided the initial dough with about equal amounts of white and green, and a bit less of the yellow. It was all very experimental, so I wasn't that precise with the ratio. One tip though, make sure you have more dough than you think you need. Worst case scenario, you bake it as is and eat it while no one's looking.

[I'm about to talk about shapes. When I talk about shapes, I am speaking two dimensionally. They are actually strips of that shape a little over a foot long]
To Begin, I molded a triangular shape out of the yellow for the bottom half of the label. I then surrounded it with green for the bottom section of the bottle. Next, I made another yellow triangle, but sliced along both sides of the edge, spread them apart, and filled in with green, in order to make the top of the label.


Next, the two pieces were fused together through the magic of thaw-and-refreeze. After that, It was time to wrap in green to finish the bottom of the bottle. The neck was made with one strip of green flanked by two strips of white, with a tiny bit of green sticking out for the bulbous part of the cork. Further wrapping in white, with some minor shaping to form something that looks vaguely like a rectangle. I coated the outside with black decorating sugar, but in retrospect, more dough, colored and flavored with cocoa powder, rolled into a sheet, and wrapped around the rectangle would have been neater, tastier, and more attractive. After another round of freezing, they were ready to slice and bake. Though the recipe said 375, about 300F was good to make sure the cookies baked through without browning at all. Browning, you see, defeats the point of coloring dough entirely. I'm pleased with the results, considering it was my first time doing anything like this, and I'm not a baker.

Tangerine Trout and marshmallow update

Tangerine juice and zest mixed with honey makes a fine glaze for broiled rainbow trout.

Raspberry jam works nicely to color and flavor marshmallows, but the seeds can get in the way.
Anise extract, when abused, makes for a rather pungent marshmallow.

Chocolate Marshmallows

After watching the Good Eats episode "Puff the Magic Mallow", and seeing how easy it is to make marshmallows at home, I decided to adapt his recipe to make chocolate marshmallows. the cost to make these is about the same as a bag of store-bought marshmallows, but these have a lot more flavor, a much nicer texture, and you can do whatever the hell you want with them.

1. Bloom two packets of gelatin in 1/3 C cold water.
2. Combine 1 C sugar, 2/3 C light corn syrup, a pinch of salt, and 1/3 C water in a pot and cook to 240F.
3. Using a stand mixer with a whip attachment, drizzle the sugar into the gelatin, whip on low to mix, then crank it up to high.
4. Whip for about ten minutes, then add what I'd guess to be about 2T cocoa powder.
5. Whip for another two minutes, then add about 2t (real - don't waste your time on artificial) vanilla extract.
6. After another minute, turn off.
7. While whipping, combine equal parts corn starch and powdered sugar, you'll need about 1/2 C total.
8. Using a brush or paper towel, wipe a 9x13 or slightly smaller, flat bottomed glass baking dish with vegetable oil. [any pan will work, as will molds - you can also pipe shapes using a large zip lock bag with a corner cut out if you don't have a pastry bag]
   
9. Sift starch/sugar mixture liberally onto the dish, cover with foil, and shake to ensure even coating.
10. Once the sugar is fully whipped, work quickly to spread an even layer into the baking dish, using as few motions as possible. It will begin to set almost immediately.
11. Sift more sugar/starch onto the top of the marshmallow. Allow to set for about four hours (or longer).
12. Turn out marshmallow onto a flat, open surface and cut into desired shapes using a pizza cutter, or really any king of cutter you like. Make sure all sides are well coated with sugar/starch mixture before storing in large zip lock bag or other container. They'll stay good for a couple weeks, but if you're anything like me, long-term storage won't be an issue.

Goat Ragu

I saw some goat at the store the other day, and since they usually don't have it, I bought some for dinner tonight.

1. Grind meat in food processor.
2. Sweat minced carrot, onion, celery.
3. Brown meat in same pan.
4. Deglaze with red wine.
5. Enhance with tomato paste/sauce and some form of stock
   
6. Cook on super-low until meat is completely tender, about six hours.
7. Serve over pasta (preferably fresh tagliatelle)

Lamb Bacon

So I decided to make lamb bacon. Here's how I did it.

1. Purchase lamb breast aka lamb belly. The breast has layers of fat and meat just like pork belly.
   
2. Remove the thin tough outer membrane; this is inedible, even if cured and smoked
   
3. There are also some small, thin rib bones that need to be removed. They are connected by a strip of cartilage which must also be removed. It's also important to try to damage the meat as little as possible when removing the bones.
4. Create a dry cure consisting of two parts salt to one part sugar (I used brown for no particular reason). In addition, the cure can contain whatever spices and herbs you want. I used crushed coriander, fennel, and cumin seeds, black pepper, and dry Italian herb mix, as well as some paprika and red pepper flakes.
5. Coat the bottom of an appropriately sized cookie sheet/sheet pan/any non-reactive tray/dish with the dry cure and pack the breasts on top of it. Then, rub down the tops and sides of the breasts with the cure.
6. Since lamb breasts are very thin, they will not need to cure very long. Two days should be sufficient. The meat and fat will be noticeably different; the meat will be firm and the fat will seem somewhat creamier (for lack of a better word)
   
7. If desired, hot smoke the bacon until it reaches an internal temperature of 140F.
8. Refrigerate the meat.
9. Once chilled, meat can be sliced into strips, or prepared any other way, as you would with pig bacon.