Gordon must have known when he came up with this recipe that cheese is the way to my heart...and possibly my heart attack. Seriously, there's so much cheese in this souffle that I got confused and thought we were making mac n' cheese at one point.
Sure, there were half a dozen eggs and some milk and flour in there too, but let’s get back to the good stuff:
The three (yes, three) cheeses we used were Monterey jack, cottage cheese, and cream cheese. And, yeah, I'm wondering where the pepper jack is too. The second, er, fourth best part (after all the cheeses, of course), is that the recipe was super easy - it's called a cheat's souffle for a reason. Just combine everything in a bowl...
...and bake until golden brown and absolutely delicious.
Boom baby.
Did someone say malt-chocolate doughnuts for dessert?
When we were planning this adventure, the first thing we did was to narrow down the selection to 100 recipes (unexpected, but it turns out there are a lot more in the cookbook than the 100 he promised on the telly!). That done, we broke them up by season - a lot of it was fairly arbitrary, but Curried Sweetcorn Soup was a pretty easy one to throw in the Winter pile. It's been a pretty miserable winter in Seattle so far - not cold enough to snow, just grey, wet, and cold enough to be, well, cold. A soup would be just the thing!
First up we had to make our curry paste - this was really going to be the backbone of the soup's flavour. Gordon was very clear on the importance of toasting spices before using them, and after a couple of minutes I could see - or rather smell - why. A raw coriander seed doesn't really smell at all, but given just a little time in the hot pan they were full of citrus and peppery goodness.
And then - into the molcajete!
Why use a mortar and pestle when you can use a dramatic hunk of Central American lava, that's what I always say. Because it's really uncomfortable, might be one reasonable answer. Anyway, it didn't take long before the coriander and cumin seeds had been ground down - throw in some garlic, curry powder, and a bit of oil, and you've got yourself an easy homemade curry paste.
Throw some onion and potato in the pan, add the curry paste and let it get all delicious before adding the stock and most of the corn. At this point you could basically just heat it and call it done, but it wouldn't be gourmet without one last touch. So, into the blender!
Lacking an immersion blender - another one for the list - we did it in batches, the old-fashioned way. Once it's a nice smooth bisque, back on the heat with it and add the last of the corn to give it back some texture.
And there it is! Still working on the presentation, but again - easy, healthy, delicious. It could maybe have used a little more spice, it was a little mild for our tastes, but easy enough to up the ante on that next time around.
Up next: a three-cheese souffle!
We struggled a bit with this one. Kedgeree, it turns out, is basically an Indian risotto. It’s not terribly difficult to make, but we were pretty much flying blind since this is one of the few dishes that did not appear on Gordon’s show and he wasn’t even kind enough to include a picture in the cookbook. Rude.
The recipe calls for smoked haddock, which, apparently, is not too abundant in Seattle (and while I’m on the subject of hard-to-find ingredients, we also learned that red chilies are not currently in season). We finally found some haddock fillets in the Market at the place where they throw the fish, although they didn’t throw them to us because they came out of the freezer. Again, rude. We’re not entirely sure that the Market meets our standards for ethical meat, but it was 30 degrees out and we were desperate. At least we supported the local economy.
So we simmered the fish, threw in rice, tomatoes and spices - including super yummy curry powder - and added lemon juice and the cooking liquid we had reserved from the fish. We stirred and stirred until the rice absorbed all the liquid, and then we topped it all with cilantro and hard-boiled eggs (note to self: learn how to hard-boil eggs).
The result…
…a brown pile of mush staring up at us with Cookie Monster eyes - not our best plating.
But it was, as Gordon promised, a tasty, comforting meal for a cold day. Even so, I don’t much care for fish and thought it would have been just as good, if not better, without the haddock.
I’m much more excited about our curry-spiced sweetcorn soup tonight!
SPOILER ALERT: This is one of the most delicious things we've ever cooked. Ask me for the recipe.
We knew going in to this that meat was going to be a challenge. Christina and I have been largely vegetarian for the past couple of years, and Gordon - well, Gordon likes him some meat. (Though he may be going soft in his old age, as an all-vegetarian Indian place was the runner up in his search for the best restaurant in Britain.) Luckily we were able to find an excellent source which we plan to use for all our beef and pork this year: Skagit River Ranch. Local, organic, grass-fed, no antibiotics, processed on-site - and more importantly to Chef Ramsay, incredibly tasty. It ticks all the boxes.
The first test for the Skagit River beef: Meatballs in Fragrant Coconut Broth. This was one we'd been looking forward to ever since we saw it on the show - simple to prepare, but oodles of flavour.
The meatballs themselves were fairly basic: the beef mixed with some sauteed onions and garlic, along with some breadcrumbs for texture and milk to bind it all together. Simple enough, although Christina did somehow manage to break our Magic Bullet making the breadcrumbs, of all things.
The real star of this dish, though, is the broth. Fragrant doesn't begin to cover the layers of flavour to be had here. Not to get delusions of grandeur, but it was almost reminiscent of the depth of a seafood broth we tried at Morimoto (of Iron Chef fame) in New York, which might be the single best thing I've ever tasted.
Point being, it was delicious - and suspiciously easy to make. Once the meatballs were browned, we just added the spices, the ginger, and the lemongrass (which somehow didn't make it in to my shopping bag at Whole Foods, necessitating a last-minute dash to the local Asian market where a two-foot stalk cost all of 20 cents; why we don't always shop there I'm not really sure), let them get their aromatics on, and then added the stock and the coconut milk.
Let it bubble away for 10 minutes or so and this ends up on your plate:
No joke, it really was that easy, and that delicious. The subtitle of the show was "100 recipes to stake your life on," and this one definitely lives up to that billing. You need to be making this dish. Like now.
Next time, we'll try our hand at Kedgeree! Not entirely sure what that is, to be honest.
Gordon, you are a madman. Who else would make a traditional bread and butter pudding with pain au chocolat and two (!) vanilla pods, and put the recipe in the "Good Food for Less" section of his cookbook? Well, I'm not complaining (except about the raisins).
After some relatively easy prep work on my part - measuring and whisking while Robin painstakingly buttered every single slice of croissant - it came time to apply Chef Ramsay's technique for scraping out the vanilla seeds from the pods.
Not bad for our first time.
Then it was into the oven...
...and 40 agonizingly-slow minutes later, we ended up with an ooey, gooey, deliciously chocolatey late-night snack. What a great way to follow up a long afternoon at the pub!
Next time: Meatballs in a fragrant coconut broth......drool.
Grape and grain; light and dark; wine and beer; champagne straight from the bottle at one in the morning - between us we hit most of the traditional milestones on hangover highway last night. And if there's one thing that a hangover needs, it's a good breakfast. Success had become imperative - if we wanted to start the New Year off right, and not spend the whole day paying for the excesses of the night before, we'd have to turn this:
into a fair approximation of this:
I'm sure there's laws and whatnot about sharing the recipe online, but there's not a great deal to it - which is why we picked it to be first. Basically you just chop everything up, cook it for a while, and then put the eggs in. Oh Gordon, you make it look so easy on TV!
In truth it was fairly simple, but when you're embarking on a culinary odyssey and hardly have room in your frying pan to add salt and pepper, it might be time to buy a new pan. Point taken.
The cramped quarters meant that the wells for the eggs were more like swimming pools, but poached eggs are just as delicious as fried - if a little harder to judge when they're cooked.
In the end, though, it turned out pretty well!
Hearty, healthy, and delicious - if a bit disappointingly lacking in spice - our hangovers were satisfied, and the year begun right.
Next time, bread and butter pudding!
