Cooking the In-Laws

Cupcakes!

The cupcakes I made for Poppa Dad's* birthday were featured on Cupcakes Take the Cake just the other day. Yay!

* what my boyfriend's nephews call their grandfather!

Would that count as umami?

Or, a funny link. And placeholder.

]]> Appetites has a dead simple veal marsala recipe I'd like to try.

"I serve this dish with a soup made from the tears of my defeated victims. But you can substitute a nice crusty bread." Heh.

I had veal marsala when out with my parents & cousins last night. It wasn't very good, which was a disappointment as the starters at the restaurant were excellent: simple, fresh bruschetta (isn't it surprising how easy this is for a bad Italian-American type restaurant to fuck up, eh?) and a gorgeous white pizza with grilled shrimp, sundried tomatoes and fresh basil. I guess the place has a real brick oven master working in one corner of the kitchen; next time I'll stick to his side of the menu, as the Veal was somehow simultaneously gummy and dry. Not to mention waaay oversalted.

Of course, I've already forgotten the name of the restaurant; my family has execrable taste in local restaurants so I walked in with my expectation meter set to zero and didn't even glance at the name on the door. It is my constant shame that my parents consider penne alla vodka an unbelievably daring dish.

Oh, also, I'm working on some proper entries, but for some reason I'm having a mental block when it comes to my camera. I've taken loads of pictures of things I want to talk about but I can't seem to get around to loading them onto Teh Internets. Anyway, someday. Whatevs.

Attack of the Quilting Club

or, the Barefoot Contessa's Lemon Bars

]]> As I mentioned in my introductory post, the boyfriend's mother is an avid quilter. Upon her return from le continent on Wednesday, she announced that her quarterly quilt club meeting would be in just two days. I vaguely recalled her mentioning the meeting to me when we were making plans to move down here, but I had kind of forgotten most of the details. Speficially, I had forgotten about this one little detail where I promised to make lemon bars for the guests. Sigh.

I sat down with the lemon bar recipe I had brought from home--it's from Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte. But I had misgivings. Sure, Amanda Hesser is crazy whack anal about her cooking, but I had never baked anything using her instructions before. And baking is the sort of endeavor where you can't just toss everything in the pan and hope it turns out right. Especially not if there's a gaggle of quilters d'un certain age breathing down your neck.

I turned to the Amateur Gourmet, a well-known Hesserphile (and fox).

A quick search of his archives revealed a botched attempt at her lemon bars, saved by switching in mid-bake to a Barefoot Contessa recipe instead! It looked like the messed up Hesser recipe had been corrected in my paperback edition (for one thing, he mentioned using 1.5 cups of flour, while the copy I had clearly called for 2 cups) but now I was sweating bullets. I needed to get the Barefoot Contessa recipe!

I don't have Barefoot Contessa Parties but I do have Google. Thanks to enterprising pirates* on Teh Internets, I found the recipe in no time. One trip to the market for lemons later, I was good to go.

BAREFOOT CONTESSA LEMON BARS

For the crust:
2 sticks of butter (every Barefoot Contessa recipe begins with 2 sticks of butter, except the ones that start with 4 sticks of butter)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cups AP flour
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

For the filling:
6 large eggs (she actually calls for extra large; I don't feel it really matters for this particular recipe)
2 3/4 cups granulated sugar (she calls for 3 cups; the awesome folks at Hanover co-op recommended cutting back on that so the sharp lemon taste is brought to the forefront)
7 lemons: squeeze 1 cup of juice and grate 2 tablespoons of zest on a microplane
1 cup AP flour
confectioners' sugar for dusting

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy; add flour & salt and combine until you get something resembling a damper version of the "large pea" pastry stage. Press the dough together with your hands into a ball.
3. Flatten dough in a 9 x 13 pan, covering the bottom and a 1/2 inch up the sides.
4. Chill for 30 minutes, then bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly golden.
5. While the crust is cooling after baking, begin the filling. Leave the oven on.
6. Gently whisk together the eggs & sugar. Add the lemon zest and juice and stir. Fold in the flour. Try to avoid making it too bubbly or frothy
7. Pour filling over crust and bake 30-35 minutes. These finished in about 27 minutes because the in-laws' oven runs hot.
8. Cool to room temperature in pan.

To serve, sprinkle with confectioners' sugar and slice with an offset spatula dipped in hot water. Place on a platter and cool in the fridge for an hour. Await the cooing response of the quilting club; only the finest lemon bars will draw their attention away from a deconstructed quilted ladies' blazer made of tomato-pattern fabric with tiny metal slug buttons. You only THINK I'm kidding.

* I kid; recipes can't be copyrighted in the US so there's no piracy involved. Not that that would have stopped me. Hell, I've been using a "borrowed" Cook's Illustrated login for the last 8 months.

Introduction

or, grilled corn

]]> After 10 months in NASCAR country, the boyfriend and I got the chance to move back to the New York area. Ah, blessed civilization. He's working at a law firm for the summer, for very little pay. Subletting a summer place ended up being out of the question, so we're living with his parents. Yeah, you read that right. I'm spending all day at home with his mother, a quilter & knick knack collector.

In exchange for room & board for two months, I have to cook for the in-laws.

This little side project blog will chronicle the trials and tribulations and horrors that will almost surely ensue.

For the first few days that we were here, the boyfriend's mother was in France; cooking for his dad turned out to be a simple task. He gets home from work late and is used to scrounging for leftovers. Basic grilled corn was a special treat for him. I used a recipe from The Cook's Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue (an unbeatable reference), although it's so simple it barely even calls for a recipe at all.

GRILLED CORN

1. With a charcoal grill, you'll want to spread 2/3 of your coals on half of the grill and 1/3 on the other half, to create a hot zone and a medium-hot zone. With a gas grill, preheat on high for 15 minutes--unless you have a rocket-fueled high end Weber, gas grills don't get as hot as charcoal.
2. Prepare corn by removing the outer layers of husk. Just leave one complete layer so the kernels are covered but barely visible through the translucent inner leaves. Cut the tassel off so errant strands don't catch fire.
3. Grill for 8 to 10 minutes on the cooler area of your charcoal grill, or anyplace you like on the gas grill. You'll want to turn the corn every two minutes until the husk is charred on all sides.
4. When ready to serve, peel off the remaining husks and silk; they will come off very easily. Season with butter, salt & pepper.

The benefits of grilling corn are many--you don't need an enormous stock pot even if you want to feed a dozen folks, and you don't have to turn the stove on inside at all during a hot summer. The direct heat also sweetens the corn, so it will taste great very early or very late in the season. And if you're the only cook around, you can monitor the corn on the cooler side of the grill while cooking the main course over the hotter side; no running from the stove to the grill and back.

I love the CI book, since my dad kept the arcane grill knowledge to himself when I was growing up. Plus he's one of those well-done-steak types, so I don't know that I really could have learned much about grilling from him anyway!