USA: Thanksgiving!

If there is a meal that defines American cooking, I would have to say it is Thanksgiving dinner.  Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday, and this year due to conflicts of one kind and another, neither one of my parents would be able to travel to Virginia to see us for the holiday.  This meant that I was on my own for cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for the first time ever.  I had hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for friends some time ago when Michael and I were here and the rest of the family had other obligations, but never had I done the whole thing myself.  So I was tremendously excited to do it.

Now typically, my dad is the bird maker, and he makes a wonderful stuffing and turkey.  However, I have never been able to faithfully recreate his stuffing and so I decided to go with my mother-in-law’s recipe, which she gave me while visiting over Veteran’s Day.  My friend Cindy suggested baking the turkey in a bag to keep it moister. 

I also decided to make an apple pie from scratch.  The crust and everything.  I have always wondered if I’d be able to do this, because I am from the “unroll the pie crust from the sheet of plastic and put it in the pan” school of pie baking (love Pillsbury pie dough!).  But as the old saying goes, “American as Apple Pie!” so I was going to add that to my repertoire.  I remembered Alton Brown did a show either on apples or pie a while ago and he talked about cooking the filling first so that the crust didn’t get soggy and the filling wasn’t runny, and that concept really appealed to me.  I started with his baking book, but his only pie recipe in there was one for a galette, and I wanted a 2 crust pie, traditional, old school.  So I turned to The Joy Of Cooking and found a recipe that seemed like just what I wanted.

So, it was time to plan.  I’m big on planning when I have a big task, and I decided I’d bake the pie the night before.  The JOC recommended certain apples to be used in pie, so I went with Gala, since Wegman’s had them front and center in the produce department when I went.  I got 3 pounds, per the directions, but honestly, in the future, I might get a couple more, they do cook down and eventually I thought the pie was a little big flat, I would have liked it to be taller.  But I digress. 

I started out peeling all the apples, and immediately the peeler slipped and I peeled off a chunk of fingernail.  I didn’t even know such a thing was possible, and let me tell you, it HURT!  So I washed my finger out, bandaged it up and went back to peeling.  Here you can see my peels and my peeled apple and my bandaged finger!  I used to think what a terrible waste all those peels were, but now that I have a rabbit, I have a built in fruit and vegetable peel disposal system.  He LOVED Thanksgiving, let me tell ya!

So, once I got the peels disposed of, I used my slicer corer, a magnificent invention that allowed my apple pieces to be uniform!  Hurrah!

Next up was to melt some butter and add my apple slices and coat them with the butter.  Then I added sugar and cinnamon and let it cook down till it made a nice syrupy kind of concoction on the apples and once they were done, I spread them out on a baking sheet to cool.

  Then it was time to turn my attention to the crust.  While JOC recommends using a pastry cutter, a lot of Food Network chefs make their dough in a food processor, so I decided to go that route, it seemed easier.

A crust is a pretty basic thing, cold shortening, sugar, flour, a pinch of salt, and ice water.  I used a combination of Crisco and butter since I wanted it to be a little bit buttery.

I turned it on and I have to say, I was a bit underwhelmed at the success of this endeavor.  I think maybe my food processor is too small to handle this kind of task.

Once I got the butter and Crisco and dried ingredients mixed, I dribbled in the ice water.  I measured out the correct amount of water first and then added ice.  I presume this is the correct way to do it.

Once the water was in there, the whole thing went more smoothly, but it was not easy when at first the fats didn’t want to combine with the solids.  Eventually, though I had a pretty decent looking dough

I shaped it into a disk and refrigerated it while the apples cooled off.

When all was ready, it was finally time to assemble the pie.  I had to roll out the dough, which I am really not good at.  I have the world’s worst rolling pin—it’s the Pampered Chef pin, which actually does a good job rolling things, but it is not great in terms of rolling out large circles.  So I opted to use a wine bottle instead, as it’s larger and easier to roll.  I need to get a real rolling pin one of these old days.

Once I’d rolled out two different circles, I put one aside and put one in my pie plate.  Then I added the apples!  I decided to get fancy with the top crust since it needed to have cuts in it to vent any steam that might be in there.  I got out my mini cookie cutters and found the apple cutter and made two little apple cuts in the top crust before putting in on the pie.  Then I had to crimp the edges, at which I also SUCK!

You can see I put my little apple cutouts on the other side of the crust.  My crust is all lopsided on account of the fact I am a craptastic crimper.  Oh well!

About halfway through baking, I smelled the crust getting kind of crisp, so I went ahead and did my best to wrap aluminum foil around the edges, but this was of limited success (pie pans that have been in the oven are REALLY hot!)!  Eventually, I pulled the pie out and removed the foil and the edges DID get a little crisp, but I have to say, I think my first from-scratch pie looks pretty darned good!

 

Mmmmmmmmmmm, pie!

So the next morning it was time for the main event—I get to make a turkey from scratch all by my lonesome for the first time ever for Thanksgiving dinner.  I’m glad I did this in retrospect because my husband and I have signed up to host an exchange student and I’m excited that I’ll be able to prepare her Thanksgiving dinner this year.

Now, I must be honest, I was a bit of a disaster on Thanksgiving in the kitchen.  Already I had peeled my fingernail.  Before the day was out, I’d be hosting a burn and a grated knuckle. Right off the bat when I cut the turkey open, it was A) still frozen and B) of the mind to leak all over the place.  Thanks, bird.

So, as I said, I decided to go with my mother-in-law’s stuffing recipe this year.  I gathered all the ingredients she suggested, and she was adamant about the Pepperidge Farm stuffing in the BLUE bag, not any other color, so I made darned sure when I was shopping that I got the blue bag.

It was a pretty basic recipe requiring only a few ingredients—namely butter, Italian sausage, celery, onions, and the stuffing mix.  I started off by chopping up the vegetables pretty finely.  (As an aside, hilariously Michael refused to tell me about the celery and onions when his mom was giving him the recipe over the phone.  She later asked me if I’d used celery! haha)

Once that was done, I sauteed the veggies and sausage in a frying pan till everything was cooked through and nice and soft.

I added this mixture to the stuffing mix in a big bowl and then melted a stick of butter and poured it into the bowl as well.

I combined it all together and then Sheila suggested I add water a little bit at a time, mixing well, until it looked “stuffingy”.  That’s exactly what I did, and voila!  Stuffing!

I know there are people who flat out refuse to put their stuffing inside the turkey cavity, but I am not one of them.  Don’t I look excited to be stuffing a turkey!?

All that stuffing stuffed in, I melted another stick of better and poured it over the turkey and into the bag.  My sister said I needed to look more excited about butter, so I present to you my before and after pictures!

That done, I sealed up the bag and cut a couple of slits in it, and popped that poultry in the oven!

The smell of that turkey was totally mouthwatering, I must say.  I was never so glad to take a turkey out of the oven in my life!!!!

I had a little bit of trouble getting it out of the bag and the pan.  I channeled my inner Uncle Buck "(“This is where we separate the men from the boys!”) and used a big slotted spoon and a fork, but it still fell back into the pan and splattered me with hot grease.  Then my sister got in on it and held the platter a bit closer, and we got it plated.  It looked SLIGHTLY the worse for wear, but still pretty darned good!

In addition to turkey, we had broccoli casserole (I grated my knuckle grating Swiss cheese for that!), mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and corn.

  Honestly, even just writing this, I’m kind of choked up with pride in my own accomplishment.  GO ME! :-)  We had company over for dessert and I didn’t get a picture of the apple pie, but you can take it from me, it was awesome.  YUMMY!  Not runny at all.  The only thing I’d do is add even more apples next time—the pie was a little bit thin, I like a packed pie.

So even though it’s already New Year’s, happy cooking!!!  :-)

G'Day Mate! Time for Meat Pie!

So I was doing some research this past week. It is a challenge to try and figure out what to cook from various smaller countries and when I get a request that someone wants us to try, it can be a challenge to find a recipe from a small country and try making it. For instance, I am looking for recipes from Trinidad and Tobago. So I did a Google search and I came upon a site and found a few recipes, one of which had the key ingredient of 1 1/2 cups of lard and the other of which required a bucket of blood and a pile of intestines. Now I've gotten slightly more culinarily adventurous since this project took off (ie I ate a piece of cheese that had not been melted or otherwise modified first), but locating buckets of blood is not something I'm especially excited about. Sorry!

So I decided that what I needed to do was to looked up T & T's national dish. And I came upon a Wikipedia entry that listed the national dishes of every country on earth as near as I can tell. And I have a feeling that this list is going to be immensely useful. So we had some fun--the General would list a country and I would find the listing and tell him what the plate was.

If the General could pick one place in the world to go, it would be Australia, so when he said it and we read that the national dish is meat pie (as declared in 2003 by New South Wales Premier Bob Carr), we knew we had our next country. To be honest, I've had a little bit of experience with Australian meat pie. A couple of years ago, we went to Sunset Beach, NC with our friends Brian and Lara and Brian cut Lara and I a deal: he'd cook dinner if we did the dishes. He had just gotten Rachel Ray's 365 No Repeats cookbook and found a recipe for Australian Meat Pies in there. The recipe was so good that I actually went out and bought a copy of the cookbook myself and a couple of times a year, I make it. But how authentic is it? It was time to take on the task of doing it myself from an Australian recipe.

I did a little research on line and found a few recipes, and finally settled on one from an Australian cook. The many variations I found seem to all be pretty similar, except for the ones on the Food Network site, which I discounted as they were pooh-poohed by actual Australians. I selected a recipe from Cybersoup, and you too can find it here if you care to give this one a try.

Yesterday we did our regular grocery shopping. This was a mistake due to the fact that the storm of the century was upon Fredericksburg and everyone and their uncle was shopping. People were so freakin' rude, even yelling at the General to get out of the way, and I was getting pissed. Because we've been trying to 'eat down' our excess reserves of foods we've had left over from our various culinary adventures (a couple of pork chops here, a few chicken breasts there, various sausages over yonder), we haven't done a whole lot of shopping. Yesterday was a bad, bad day to do the first shopping in 2 weeks.

Fortunately, this meat pie recipe didn't call for anything nutty or even normal but sometimes a challenge to find, like fresh herbs. It is your basic comfort food and we were all over that.

So today with a day off, I decided to make it. I was initially going to make a pavlova to go alongside it, a pavlova being a dessert which is from New Zealand although apparently Australia and New Zealand have some turf wars over who the pavlova actually belongs to. I am very well familiar that Australia and New Zealand are two different countries, but wanted to knock off two birds in one dish and we've been falling behind lately, so I need to catch up! Unfortunately, I forgot to purchase heavy cream to make whipped cream, so we did not get to make the pavlova today. I have emailed my friend Tom in New Zealand and asked him for any pointers on it, so I hope to concoct it on Wednesday or Thursday and it will be even more authentic due to advice from a real live Kiwi!

So back to the meat pie and Australia... First of all, I must apologize to the people at Heinz. My brain was apparently taking a snow day and when I was assembling the ingredients and putting them together for a picture, I neglected to include the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce that the recipe called for. All other ingredients are included. According to everything I read in preparing to cook this dish, I was NOT to buy extra lean ground beef--only lean would do, which according to my local grocery store was 85% lean with 15% fat. And if you read the recipe, it suggests using a pre-made pie crust and puff pastry, so I am not cheating in doing so!

Ok, so the first task is that I needed to finely chop up some onions to cook with the ground beef. This was of utmost importance as earlier, the General had demanded to know if there were onions in this dish and when I replied honestly that there were, he said quite firmly, "No onions, Susan!" So if anything, I minced them. Those suckers were thin and tiny. I browned everything together and then I got into a debate with myself. You see, the recipes were explicit about using beef with a higher fat content. So was I supposed to leave all that in there? Or was I supposed to drain it off? I couldn't really find much about draining, certainly not in the recipe I was using. I finally decided that I just really didn't want to have all that grease and fat in the dish, so I went ahead and drained it off.

I returned the beef to the pan and then went ahead and added water, beef stock cubes which I had crumbled, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, oregano, nutmeg, and pepper. Then I made a paste from the remaining water and flour, whisking it together. I tell you, that mini whisk I got for Christmas with some hot cocoa mix has turned out to be the most handy little item for these little pastes that I've been putting together. It's small but mighty!

After it was all mixed smooth, I added it to the beef, which began to thicken beautifully and the most amazing smell filled the kitchen. It was rich and warm and YUM! I let it boil a few minutes and then put it aside as it was supposed to cool before I put it in the pie shell, which I had unrolled and lined my stoneware pie plate with.



After a while, I came back--I had decided to spend my afternoon productively watching the Food Network. Everything was cool, so I preheated the oven to 450 and poured the meat pie filling into the crust. Then came the good stuff: covering it with PUFF PASTRY! Yum, yum! We love puff pastry in our house! After I got it covered, I tucked it in lovingly, cut off the excess, and brushed it with a beaten egg.



Now, here is where I quibble with the recipe, sorry Australian Chef Knockdonagh. The directions said to bake at 450 for 15 minutes, reduce the heat to moderate (I did 350) and bake for 25 minutes or until pastry is golden. I did the first 15 minutes fine, turned the heat down, but after about 10 minutes, I started smelling what could only be construed as the beginnings of the end of a normal bake cycle--any longer and it was going to burn.

I dashed upstairs, and lo and behold I was right! But what I pulled from the oven was magnificent.



Cutting into it was almost a sin. Seriously. I just wanted to stare at it in wonder. But it smelled so good, it would have been a sin not to cut into it. The filling was nice and rich and thick, not runny at all. The pastry held together on the bottom and the top, which I think is quite impressive--usually the bottom crust gets kind of soggy if you don't blind bake it first, but that was not the case at all with this particular dish.



There aren't words. I never thought cooking with nutmeg would be so exquisitely delicious, but two dishes in a row now we have used it (this and the fondue) and it's been fantastic. It really lends a warmth to the dish and while it tastes nutmeg-esque, it's also understated. It's just a wonderful flavor.

The General wanted his smothered in ketchup and I ate mine just plain. I had mine with a side of broccoli and carrots and the General did not. We were just in absolute heaven, seriously. It was so good! Subtley different from the kind I've had before (RR uses tomato paste instead of ketchup, flour, and water for instance), and I would say I preferred this way, but RR was very close to this recipe. We have both agreed that we would add this recipe into our regular rotation!

The General has devised a play list in honor of our meal tonight, so if you want to eat meat pie and listen to some Australian tunes, we suggest:

• Men at Work – Overkill
  
• Air Supply – Don’t Turn Me Away
  
• Kylie Minogue – I Should Be So Lucky
  
• Olivia Newton John – Hopelessly Devoted (to You)
  
• Robert John – Sad Eyes
  

Also, as you know, Australia has had some devastating brushfires and many lives and tons of property have been lost. If you would like to donate to help those affected by the wildfires, please visit The Australian Red Cross's Bushfires Appeal and donate today.

We'll be back with you in a couple days with our pavolva! Till then, happy eating!

80 Plates: Rule Brittania!

So this weekend's two countries, as stated, were Israel and England. I have since discovered that my dish from Israel wasn't so much Israeli as it was Jewish, so I think I'm going to have to have a do-over of Israel. As for England, it represented a true success and a true failure, the failure of which was a bit disheartening as I am a real tried and true daughter of England. And there is a recipe that has always been one that I have always thought I would very much like to try, but never have: beef wellington. I am a devotee of puff pastry, and I figured you wrap it around some beef and voila. Oh no. No, no, no. It's not that easy.

I decided I was going to try Paul Burrell's recipe from his book In the Royal Manner. Burrell for many years was Princess Diana's butler and is vilified for being a total sell out after her death. I have 2 copies of this particular book, one of which is autographed and I keep under wraps. I pulled out the other copy, but I noted with some disdain that the recipe was for mini beef wellingtons, and quite frankly, I wanted to go whole hog and make a big one, and also that it called for foie gras.

Ok, well, I did not know this about beef wellington. So I quickly defected from Mr. Burrell and went to Darren McGrady's book Eating Royally. McGrady, you will recall from my review of this book last year, was Diana's personal chef and also a chef for the entire royal family during his career before moving to the US. He had a recipe for a big beef wellington, but also his called for foie gras.

Crap. Well, that was not going to happen. Although I can actually get foie gras at my local supermarket, I have some issues with forcefeeding ducks until they die just so they have plump livers. Yes, you can make the argument that the cow was probably unhappy to face its end so unceremoniously, but at least it wasn't forcefed with a metal tube that could have punctured its esophagus. Still, I decided to put it to a vote--if the General wanted to try it, then I'd buy some and put it in there. But I wasn't going to like it. The conversation went a bit something like this:

Me: Darling, what's your opinion on having foie gras with dinner?
Him: Foie gras? Don't believe I know the chap.
Me: Oh, you know darling, foie gras. It's made of duck liver or sommat...
Him: Go on. Pull the other one then.
Me: No, truly.
Him: Well, if it's all the same to you, I mean...
Me: Right-o, darling.

Well, if we lived in England, that could have happened. What actually happened was:

Me: Honey, the beef wellington has foie gras in it.
Him: What the hell is foie gras?
Me: Duck liver pate.
Him: Like hell it is.
Me: Seriously.
Him: I'm not eating that.
Me: Yeah, me either.

And thus the matter was decided.

Everything else I was completely faithful to.

Sunday morning, I headed out for my supply procurement expedition. I hit Giant first, by virtue of the fact that it is closest. And then I nearly had a heart attack.

I needed 3 pounds of center cut beef tenderloin. Giant's price!? $14.99 per pound.

"Go on. Pull the other one then."

Seriously!? You have to be the Queen of England to afford $45 dollars for beef for one freakin' meal! This is a week when we needed very few groceries, fortunately, but I can assure you, there's no way I'm spending $45 on some beef. I don't care if that was the happiest cow on the planet before he surrendered to his fate. Sorry.

I looked around desperately for other options. Of course, as you well know by now, I know absolutely nothing about cuts of beef. And nothing appeared even remotely do-able. So I went home to think about it. My dad called. He suggested I should get a boneless prime rib. The General and I pondered the matter over breakfast and the Sunday paper. We were looking at the ads for Best Buy, as he needs a new monitor (that's another story in itself), and we decided to go over to Central Park. I figured I could try Shoppers for the beef while we were there. I also needed a souffle dish for the pudding. (more on that later as well)

Although my dad was skeptical that Shoppers might come through ("Really, Cheese, they specialize in very cheap cuts of meat"), I was undeterred, and Shoppers proved my faithfulness was well placed. I got 2 1/3 pounds of beef tenderloin for about $20. I have no idea if it was center cut or not, but the savings made me very happy. After a quick stop at Target, where I used the money I saved on a souffle dish by Corningware, It was time to go home and cook.

On one of the pages near to Beef Wellington in Eating Royally was a recipe for Andrassy Pudding. A chocolate souffle topped by a rich chocolate frosting, I thought this would be a great way to add a dessert into the mix--I don't believe we have done a dessert yet. I have always wanted to learn to make a souffle, and the directions in the book assured that this was a good one to start with, as if it falls, it's fine, you're going to let it fall anyway. Perfect, I figured! So, I decided to make that first, since baking was involved and I knew I would need the oven later for the beef. The ingredient list was pretty simple: butter, sugar, flour, cocoa, cream, milk, and lots and lots of eggs. I combined the dry ingredients--sugar, flour, and cocoa--and added them to a half stick of melted butter in a sauce pan, where they promptly formed a muddy paste.



However, the next step was to whisk in some milk, which made everything go nice and smoothly. It turned into a lovely smelling, smooth mixture, a lot like I suppose hot chocolate might be like if it had flour in it. Per the directions, I took it off the heat and poured it into a bowl to cool while I beat some egg whites into stiff peaked submission. And, if I may, I'd just like to take a chance to re-iterate how much I love my mixer. It's one amazing piece of machinery. It took no time to whip egg whites.



So that done, it was time to butter the living hell out of the souffle dish, which I enjoyed. Normally I don't like getting my hands greasy, but I was feeling optimistic about this souffle, so I enjoyed it very much. Then, I began to carefully fold everything together, and then poured it into the dish.



I baked it up and voila! I MADE SOUFFLE!!!!!!!!! It puffed up beautifully, cracked a bit on top! I was stoked! Not only had I conquered crepes, I conquered souffle, and I did it all in one day!



Per the directions again, I let it cool a bit and then slid a knife around the outside and then flipped it onto a cooling rack to fully cool. That it did not fall apart, I took to be a very good sign. But it was at this time I realized I was running dangerously short on eggs. Remember in an earlier episode when I stated there are certain things we just don't keep around the house because we don't tend to use them very often? Well, eggs is one of those things. However, the souffle part of the pudding called for a full dozen of them, which fortunately I had the foresight to purchase, and the beef needed some too, as did the 'frosting' part of the pudding. When I began this day, I had 17 eggs in my fridge. By the end of the day, I had zero, and I had used up my egg beaters too!!

However, this was to be the last good news on this pudding, which went on to turn into my first kitchen failure. However, my good friends Elizabeth and Jacalyn/Lady Ozma have informed me that I really should report on my failures as well as my successes, and so, despite my desperate need for all of you to think I am the perfect chef, I am going to report on the full treachery of this pudding. Later.


But isn't she a beauty?

For now, it was time to turn my attention back to the beef. I gathered up all my ingredients again and laid them out. The first thing I had to do was to make a paste out of a pound of portabella mushrooms. Knowing that they would be turned into a paste, I decided to get baby bellas, which I cleaned and then naively crammed into the food processor.



Note to self: the food processor is a powerful tool capable of annihilating many ingredients. It was not, however, designed to do a full pound of mushrooms all at once. So basically, after letting it run a good 4 minutes, I wound up with paste on the bottom and whole mushrooms on top. I had to pull the whole thing apart, scoop out the paste, slice up the mushrooms so that more would fit in near the blades, run it again, scoop out more paste, cram in more mushrooms, and so on until they were a nice mushy paste. Also, it should be noted that the feed chute for your food processor was not really designed to stick the handle of a spatula down to "try and stir things up a bit". There is a high probability that the food processor will not like this.


Isn't the color of the paste beautifully rich?

Then I hacked up some onions and sauteed them in more butter. When this was completed, I added the mushroom paste and let the whole thing cook until "the mushrooms release their liquid and the pan runs relatively dry."

This seemed like it would take a while, so I decided to turn my attention to the beef. If I'm being perfectly honest, I'm not that crazy about how raw beef smells, and also thinking about those poor little ducks got me to thinking about the poor little cow, and I got a little teary eyed over this tenderloin, which is not a happy looking piece of meat. I mixed up a spice rub of dry mustard, celery seed, and salt and fresh ground pepper and rubbed that beef down, giving it a final massage on its journey to becoming food. Then I put it into the only frying pan I had that was even remotely large enough to handle the task of searing the whole thing, which was my electric frying pan.




Yeah, for a cut of beef, it looks kind of hideous

While it may not have looked too pretty, I will say, the smell of it was FANTASTIC. The General came downstairs, stood in the doorway of the kitchen and just inhaled. We both did. It smelled amazing.

Ok, so then it was time to turn my attention back to the mushrooms, which I figured were in pretty good shape by now. I added some heavy cream to them, along with some Worcestershire sauce, and let them cook up a bit more while I rolled out the puff pastry into what I hoped was a large enough rectangle to cover this whole thing.



After that, the hard part was done, if you can call it hard. It really wasn't that challenging. There was a lot to do, but not anything difficult. I had the pastry on the counter, and then smeared it with the mushroom and onion mixture. Then I put the beef on top of the mushrooms and brushed the edges of the pastry with the egg beaters.



After that was completed, all that was left was to basically folded the pastry up, over, and around the beef and kind of seal it, and then brush it with more egg. Then I put it in the oven and finished cleaning up the dishes while preparing the rest of the side dishes. In this case, I acquiesced to the General's demands for mashed potatoes and I added a side of peas.

I decided to bake the beef on a piece of parchment paper, figuring that it would a) be less likely to stick, b) be easier to clean up, and c) make it easier to lift and transfer the beef from the pan to the cutting surface. It turned out I was correct on all accounts, and I highly recommend doing this if you don't have one of those lovely little silicon mats, which I don't. The beef looked glorious when I removed it from the oven. There was some moisture in the bottom of the pan, which I took to mean that I probably had not let the mushrooms cook up enough to really get good and dry, something I would do if I make this again in the future.



It was time to dish up and eat! I decided to get a little bit creative with my mashed potatoes and my Pampered Chef scoop, in honor of the Pampered Chef party last night, and I made a little daisy out of my mashed potatoes. Oh c'mon, you love it! The General just got a mound of potatoes, but I got a flower. It also made my meager serving of potatoes seem like more than they were, which is always a good thing. I expect mashed potato daisies to be all the rage in haute cuisine in the very near future. The beef sliced up beautifully--it was so tender. I cut off the two ends, as they contained only mushrooms and pastry, but I'll be quite honest--I ate the end later and it was amazing. The only thing I thought was that it was a bit salty, which was when I discovered I had used celery salt, not celery seed as I thought I had done. So read those labels carefully when buying this stuff at the store!

I asked The General to give me a thumbs up after he assured me that he liked it, so here he is giving the dish a positive review while not pausing to pose. He wanted to eat, damn it!



After supper, we cleaned up and the General requested that I put some beef in his lunch for the next day. Mind you, this beef was LOADED with mushrooms and onions. There is hope for picky eaters yet!

Ok, so I cleaned up everything and then it was time to turn my attention to the frosting for the pudding. I had actually made it earlier in the day, combining more flour, cocoa, and sugar with heavy cream, butter, and eggs. It was supposed to sit, so I wasn't too concerned with the fact that it seemed very, very soupy. However, as I returned to it at 8:00 that evening, it was still very, very soupy. I decided to make up some whipped cream, as the recipe said it should be served with whipped cream, so while my mixer was quickly making delicious clouds of cream, I debated the problem with the 'frosting soup'. Clearly, I had forgotten to put something in. I re-read the ingredient list and could not find a single thing I had missed. I went through it line by line and nothing seemed amiss.

I sliced up the souffle, and I was supposed to spread the frosting on the cut part. But there was no way it was going to spread. Honestly, it would have soaked right through. I was also left with another problem: the souffle, when sliced, was falling apart. It was very, very moist in the middle--not underdone, but just very moist--and when I pulled off the top half, it broke. I managed to sort of push it back together on the cooling rack, but this was devolving rapidly.

Ultimately, I decided that what I should do was to fold the chocolate mixture in with the whipped cream. Unfortunately, it was so thin that it really turned the whipped cream into soup too. But even more unpleasantly, some of the cream refused to give in and formed little clumps in the overall mess, so I had a kind of chunky tan mass. But there really wasn't anything to do with it, so I decided to just put it on the souffle and hope for the best. I poured some of it onto the bottom layer, and as you can see, it started to run out all over the place. After this picture was taken, it made a break for the counters even.

In for a penny, in for a pound, so I then picked up the entire cooling rack, said a prayer, and flipped. Well, when a fairly heavy substance hits a fairly soupy substance, you can imagine one result and one result only: splatter. I didn't get a picture of it, but there was soup in the toaster. Ugh. I was getting kind of upset now. I had been looking forward to this chocolate fantasticness for some time, and it was rapidly turning into something horrible. The cake was falling apart, the sauce was going everywhere. Ugh. I poured the rest of the cream over it and quickly snapped a picture, then called the General.



I mean seriously, could it look worse?

We 'cut' into it with a spoon and scooped out a couple of servings. And I have to say, despite its spectacular failure, it tasted delicious. It was chocolately and sweet without being too sweet or too rich. It really was an amazing dessert and I think I will try making it again without messing up the frosting this time! Because, you see, it occurred to me in the middle of the night that what I'd done wrong was to put in 1/4 cup of flour and not 1 1/4 cups of flour. And that clearly made all the difference.

Sadly, we had to put the rest of it down the disposal. While we were eating, it just literally fall apart and went everywhere. I've never had such a chocolatey mess to clean up!

I have lots more recipes to try from this book, but these are the two I'll count from England! Great success and great failure, but everything tasted great, as usual. And if Mikey likes it...