I got my first request for a dish online yesterday – Dryunya wanted to know if I could come up with a dish inspired by his recent viewing of Phantom of the Opera. I suppose I should have asked which version, but I was too caught up in the idea to really bother (sorry, Dryunya).
I decided that it should be a meal, and the meal should have three parts – one representing the Phantom, one representing Christine, and one representing Raoul. It’s not necessarily the fanciest meal, but it’s one that I feel fits the feel and theme of the story.
Phantom: Dusted steak with bleu cheese.
The Phantom feels like a rare steak to me – perhaps not the prettiest to look at, and bloody when the truth is revealed, but dark and mysterious, something you can’t pull away from even with all that blood. I think the proper coating is about a teaspoon of cocoa powder (not the Dutch stuff; we want the acidity) mixed with about a tablespoon of ground coffee. This will develop a very rich and dark flavor that will go well with the caramelization of a rare steak.
The mask of the Phantom is represented by the bleu cheese, which can be turned into a sauce by melting about 2 ounces of bleu cheese in about 1 tablespoon of milk or cream. Any variety of such cheese would work – in fact, if not for the fact that the story is French and is screaming for a French bleu like Roquefort, I’d probably use Gorgonzola. At any rate, I would specifically wait until it was done cooking, then put the cheese on one half of the steak and then cover it while it rests, to create sort of a half-mask effect as it melts from the steak’s heat.
Christine: Champagne squash soup
Christine was tricky at first, because I needed her to be able to accompany both of the other dishes well. Moreover, given her status as a rising star of the opera, she needed to have an ingredient that screamed glamor. This idea came to me, since it all seemed to come together.
3 pounds butternut squash, peeled and seeded
4 shallots
2 Granny Smith apples, peeled and cored
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups chicken stock
1 cup white wine (preferrably champagne)
1 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Cut the butternut squash, shallots and apples into medium-sized cubes. Place them on a sheet pan and toss with the olive oil and salt. Divide the squash mix between 2 sheet pans and spread it in a single layer. Roast for 35 to 45 minutes, until very tender.
Meanwhile, heat the chicken stock and white wine until it starts to simmer. When the vegetables are done, put them through a blender. (Alternatively, you can place the roasted vegetables in batches in a food processor with some of the chicken stock/wine and coarsely puree.) When all of the vegetables are processed, place them in a large pot and add the chicken stock/wine mix, stirring well.
Raoul: Mustard dill potatoes
Poor Raoul, the boring part of the love triangle. That said, he’s a solid, dependable guy, and just as the story wouldn’t be complete without him, a dish feels incomplete without a starch. Also, since we’re going with a bit of a French theme here, it’d be a shame to not involve Dijon mustard, one of France’s greatest culinary gifts.
I prefer to use Yukon Gold potatoes whenever possible, but you may want to switch to a different cultivar if you prefer something else (or you just don’t have Yukon Golds in your area). One or two potatoes is enough for a single person. For the baking, merely make large cubes of the potatoes, toss with some oil, and roast at 425 for about a half hour.
When the potatoes come out, toss them in a mixture of the following:
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon honey
2 teaspoons dill (preferrably fresh)
1 teaspoon olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste.
Mind you, I’ve not actually made this dish yet; I cannot vouch for how well the experiment will work. But I do plan on giving it a spin soon – thanks for getting my mind working on it, Dryunya.
Thanks for the recipe! It sure looks tricky to make… Maybe I’ll try to emulate it with whatever I have in the fridge. =D
MMM… That sounds delicious! I really like these dishes! Maybe you can try something like a Romeo and Juiliet Cake! Or a Sherlock Holmes Mystery soup! Or a Sweeney Todd Fruit Pie! Or a Don Quixote Burger! Or a Lime Shake!
Whoa… lots of random requests in at once. Are you planning a feast or something?
I can tell you that food chemistry alone would make a lime shake nigh impossible – the citric acid in lime juice curdles milk, which is a pretty important component to a shake. And I haven’t really seen Sweeney Todd, but I seem to remember hearing that fruit not being the primary component of his pies. Romeo and Juliet cake sounds almost too easy, actually – a multi-tiered cake with each tier being a different flavor, and probably some strawberries for decoration or something.
That said, a burger inspired by Don Quixote? I believe I can manage that. I already know the perfect cheese for it, though you’ll have to give me a day or two to come up with all the seasonings and toppings.
Yes, but I was thinking- what if it’s Strawberry Fruit Pies, inspired by the Demon Barber of Fleet Street? That would be cool, and you can see a great musical to get inspired!
And yes, all of these dishes were for a dinner party. I didn’t think of the idea of a Lime Shake (I’m still yelling at Larry for that idea.) That said, I still think a Sherlock Holmes soup would be interesting to see.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of musicals. Anyhow, I know enough about Sweeney Todd to know that he was all about meat pies. I mean, I do have a really awesome shepherd’s pie recipe, but it doesn’t connect at all with Sweeney Todd.
The problem with doing a Sherlock Holmes… anything, really, is that Holmes was a known cocaine user. One of the side effects of cocaine is stomach pains, which typically cause users to not eat as much. Another is loss of appetite, and yet another is nausea. There’s a reason Sherlock is often depicted as skinny. To be honest, the only food I can think of that’s appropriate to him is a light broth or, at most, a consomme. I may not be a chef, but even I want something a bit more challenging than that.
Then make something about Sherlock Holmes that DOESN’T involve cocaine!
Maybe you can do something like a Moriarty Crime Spree soup with plenty of dastardly spices, or a Watson appetizer! I just know that I need a Sherlock-related dish to serve at my dinner party!
Wow. You need to chill out. Also, you need to stop relying on others to get you out of your own predicaments. It’s not cool to just snap at strangers online – I know people forget it easily, but there are real people out there, and they like to be treated with respect.
Look, I like doing recipes, and I do sometimes take inspiration from fiction. But like I said, I’m no Iron Chef – I can’t just take any idea, or any ingredient, and turn it into something. I wouldn’t even call myself a chef – I’m a cook, and I like to think that I’m a decent cook, but I do know my limits.
I don’t know why you’re so tied to Sherlock Holmes, anyhow. Even if you’re restricting yourself to detectives, the mystery genre is huge. Why not just pick a different fictional detective? Like that guy from the Oriental Express… I think he liked to eat a lot. I’m sure there’s plenty of inspiration elsewhere.
Sorry, Rick. It’s just that the main story of the dinner party is Sherlock Holmes. While I enjoy Sherlock and his mysteries, I wouldn’t think that a Book Club should just focus on one piece for a dinner party. I’ve also brought other dishes out, like the lime shake and the Quixote burger, but things haven’t been hunky-dory, if you know what I mean. I’m sorry for all of this stress.
:(
I often find recipes difficult to understand, but this time, I think I got it loud and clear. My friends always INSIST I’m trying to get them drunk when they come round, and there’s no way they won’t believe I am if I serve this! Still, there’s a specific group of four pals that I really want to try this recipe with. (Incidentally, here’s a great link about what I’m saying; you should check out the effects in Real Life): http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InVinoVeritas
On an unrelated note, have you ever tried making Lime Cookies? I spoiled the last batch I tried to make, but with your cooking skills, I think it’s awesome enough to work.
Oh, man, did you really have to link to TV Tropes? Are you trying to get me to waste a day poking around on that site? I’ve got meals to make! That site’s like the Internet’s black hole – once you go in, you never get out.
I admit, I did take a quick peek at that page. But since the top says it’s about how someone’s “true personality” comes out when they’re drunk, and I’ve never talked about being drunk at all on this blog – and I certainly don’t advocate it – I don’t think it applies, and I honestly didn’t bother reading the page through. Beyond it not applying, again, I don’t want to lose a day to reading various entries on the site.
As for the part about cookies, I’ve made dozens of different varieties of cookies over the years. I actually first started cooking by baking cookies. Lime cookies have been in there somewhere along the years, but after a certain point, all the cookies start blurring together. Just what went wrong with the lime cookies you tried last time? I can give advice on what you did wrong if you give me more details.
You asked how I spoiled my lime cookies, and it’s… kind of hard to explain, actually. I know tvtropes can be time-consuming, but I think if you jump to the bottom of the page, last entry, I linked you to, you’ll understand what I mean.
First, on the cookies – it can’t be that hard to explain. What kind of cookie did you try to make? Was the problem the flavor, the texture, getting the ingredients to bind… there’s only so many things it could be.
Now, as for your other part… well, I just spent the better part of an hour going over things. I see you and several other people are a bit confused.
This blog is a gift from a friend of mine, who I presume is running this alternate reality game that you and the others are playing. This friend asked several months back if I wanted a blog, since they knew how much I liked talking about food. I agreed, and I started this up. I did forget about it for a while until I was reminded about it, probably around when the game actually got going. I felt a bit embarrassed about forgetting about the blog, but I figured I might as well catch up with it.
I’ll admit that some of the ideas that were put up here did come to mind after chatting with my friend – probably intentionally planting ideas in my head. As I’m sure you noticed, that’s not exactly hard to do. Though some of the things you guys came up with were way off-base, like the Japanese knife. I bought it a couple years ago. It’s a santoku knife from the Edo collection by Shun. You can buy them for about $200 each online, along with other style knives in the same collection.
I hope you understand that I won’t join in on the game you’re playing, for several reasons. One being that it’d be a bit unfair to have someone close to the people running the game join in on the player’s side. For another, you obviously have a ton of stuff to go through – I can’t imagine trying to take all of that in at once. Finally, I could see that game eating my life even more effectively than TV Tropes would, and I have real life friendships I want to maintain. That said, I do hope that you and the others keep reading this blog – I have had fun working on the recipes that you’ve all suggested, and I hope that you liked the recipe ideas I’ve given out.
Two last notes. One, if you really wanted to catch my attention via TV Tropes, you probably should have picked a page that would have described my blog much better than In Vino Veritas. Two, now I know why my friend was mentioning limeade the other day.
Thank you for getting back to us, we appreciate this being cleared up and I’m sorry to have bugged you (and the recipe blog is still cool, I’m glad you’ve had fun with the ideas – the in vino veritas thing by he way was because the recipe apparantly included champagne. We were kind of stretching a bit, I know.)
Uh… And on the cookies related note, seeing as you really ARE a chef… they always grow to twice the size I expected, bleed together on the silicon lining, stick together and yet they’re still go too hard and dry. :/ I can do cupcakes and pastries and everything no bother (okay I lie, pastry is difficult), but for some reason this always happens when I attempt cookies and I have no idea why. I’ve tried varying the mixture (like trying non-milk based cookies) or just using less dough but it still happens.
Well, I’m a a cook, really. A chef runs a kitchen. I just make meals.
That said, I do good cookies. I generally have fairly buttery cookies, and I’ve discovered that how you treat your butter determines how your cookies will come out. There are two parts to this.
The first part is, you should have your butter at or just below room temperature before you start making your cookie dough. Butter needs to completely blend with all of the ingredients, the sugars need to cut into the butterfat in order to create the proper texture and not create mini-friers, and the flour needs to mix just enough to begin gluten production. Butter that’s too cold is too hard, and butter that’s too hard will not blend with the other ingredients properly.
The second part is, you need to proof your cookie dough. Cookies may not require the sheer amount of gluten that bread does, but keep in mind the much lower moisture amount in cookie dough (since most of the moisture comes from the butter and eggs, as opposed to water or milk). A properly proofed dough will result in better gluten formation, which will yield a softer, chewier cookie. The process for proofing cookie dough isn’t as long – 4-24 hours, as opposed to up to 48 for certain types of bread dough. One further advantage is that because the butter in the dough is cooler, it spreads out less when baking.
I’ll mix it up a bit depending on how I want my cookies to come out – I like a little crisp to my chocolate chip cookies, so I don’t proof those, but I do a full 24-hour proof for ginger snaps. But definitely, it’s all in the temperatures at which butter is treated that determine just how a cookie will come out.
Thank you! I really aprpeciate you getting back to me, especially after we caused you that little bit odf bother. :D
In retrospect I don’t think I’ve ever made cookies with room temperature butter. I get impatient and either use it straight from the fridge or perhaps don’t leave it long enough. >.< (You should see what I do with the butter for cakes, I… let's just say it involves a microwave. I know, I'm ashamed.)
My baking terminology is lacking here: Is proofing cookie dough, similar to tempering chocolate? Does it mean I have to leave it in the fridge as with pastry?
I will give this a go once I know, I think! Thanks a lot! :D
Oh, I highly recommend against microwaving butter when you’re using it for baking. If it melts too much, you end up with the base for a roux, and you’ll interfere with the gluten development of the flour. Depending on just how warm it is, you could end up with either too rapid development of gluten or shocking the flour and not producing gluten at all (gluten production having a sweet spot of around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, as I recall).
My recommendation, when baking with butter, is to take out the butter well before you plan to bake. Put it in a bowl on the counter, cover it as well to avoid attracting pests, and leave it for a few hours – for example, take it out, go to work, then come home and bake.
“Proofing” dough is the process of allowing the gluten production to complete, allowing the dough to take a more solid yet more elastic form than it does initially. It’s generally done in a cool, dry place – so if you’ve stuck pastry dough in the fridge, you’ve proofed dough before. Tempering chocolate is technically a different process – it’s heating chocolate to the correct temperature range to encourage the polar bodies within chocolate to line up, which both gives chocolate a nice luster as well as a crisp snap when it’s bitten into, both producing a much nicer mouthfeel when eating the chocolate.