Lollipop, lollipop, oooh lolli-lolli pop

Sienna's first pre-school holiday party is tomorrow, and the carnivorous husband signed me up to make cookies. I like making cookies, but I really wanted to do something cute and different...so I loosely interpreted "cookie" to mean "anything flat and sweet that can be shaped." So here they are! My triumphant lollipops.
I got the idea from Martha Stewart's website which gave directions on how to make the ghost...do not be fooled, this was insanely easy. You just melt the white chocolate chips, add a little vegetable oil, then drop them by tablespoonfuls on a wax-paper lined baking sheet and shape with the back of a teaspoon. I decorated the ghost with little chocolate chip eyes; cute, huh?
Originally, I wasn't even planning on doing anything but the ghosts, but one of the boys in Sienna's class has a severe peanut allergy and cannot have anything that has even been made on equipment that has processed peanuts. For the life of me, I could not find white chocolate chips that had been made where peanuts weren't used, so out of sheer desperation to make something that this poor kid could eat, I melted some Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips and shaped the witch's hats, sprinkling them with some orange nonpareils. They were a little trickier; because of the high quality of the chocolate they didn't harden, so I stuck them in the freezer for about half an hour. I also have to keep them in the fridge or risk them melting, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I'm actually terribly pleased with the way they turned out; if I had to do it again, I would do twice as many hats but I ran out of lolli-pop sticks. Happy Halloween!

A Real Man's Cake

I have a confession to make, and it's one that any confirmed chocoholic might be ashamed of. I hate chocolate cake.
But the reason I hate it is that I really love chocolate too much. Why would you take something that's already perfect and mix it with flour, sugar, eggs, butter, etc? I'll eat a flourless chocolate cake, or a molten chocolate cake, or a bowl full of melted chocolate any day of the week, or any hour of the day. Chocolate cake, however, does not thrill me.
But this weekend I bit the bullet and made a chocolate cake for our friend Ben, who was turning 24. Besides his wife and Tristram Shandy, the two things he loves most in the world are Guinness and chocolate, so I found this recipe on trusty Epicurious.
To be honest, I was a little scared while making it. Not only does it call for huge (HUGE!) amounts of butter, Guinness, flour, and sugar, it also calls for a ganache frosting. Up until this time, every ganache I have attempted has been a disaster. I know what you're thinking...it's chocolate and cream. Simmer and stir. But I'm not a great baker, so things always fall apart. (Please, my faithful few readers, catch that reference.) However, it's usually due to the chocolate seizing since I don't have a double boiler and usually end up jerry-rigging some sort of bowl balanced precariously over small saucepan contraption. This ganache, though, called for chopped chocolate stirred into warm cream. Easy enough, right? And it looked good, too, though once finished it was the consistency of a glaze. But the recipe ordered me to put the icing in the fridge for two hours and I dutifully obeyed.
Meanwhile, I turned my attention to the weird simmering Guinness/butter mixture, which smelled exactly like baking bread. I always joke about how drinking a Guinness is like drinking a loaf of bread, and it turns out that it's not really like. It is. You Guinness lovers are drinking fermented bread. Yum, yum.
However, once the directions were followed exactly as they were written, I had a huge (HUGE!) bowl of cake batter that tasted like hoppy chocolate. It was really good, and the hops from the beer provided a nice, earthy background that really deepened and complimented the chocolate flavor. The icing was also good, after I called my mother in law in a panic because it had hardened into a too-cold mass. But we agreed on adding some warm cream, which softened it right up and made it spreadable. I actually have a pretty picture which I'll have to post later since our new computer is way too confusing for me.
The end result was a pretty, incredibly moist and rich chocolate cake. The one caveat I will add is that the reviewers on the website are absolutely right; the cake tastes much, much better the second day, so make it a day ahead and let it sit. The flavors are deeper, the texture is better (moist but not so mushy-soft) and all in all, it's yummier. Also, halve the recipe. I ended up with a very, very tall two-layer cake and a dozen cupcakes. Which the carnivorous husband is still eating.

Steak and...Marvell? Rosetti? Pound?

Disclaimer: If you are a vegetarian, a PETA activist, or a Hindu, please do not read this post.
Tonight I murdered a steak.
I believe that God put cows on earth so that we could enjoy the various delights and nutritional benefits of milk, butter, cream, cheese(oh, cheese!)and beef. Killing a cow really doesn't phase me. Murdering a steak, however, is a horrible, horrible culinary crime. There were several factors involved in the murder of this particular steak, so humor me as I go on a little trip down who's-to-blame-lane.
I went to Vons last night to get a few things, and decided to buy steak for tonight to please the carnivorous husband. The steaks were all on clearance, so I got really excited for about two seconds. Then I noticed that they were all flat as a board. There was a little orange sticker on each package that said "Thin Cut! Feed More!"
Let's take a second to deconstruct the absurdity of that sticker. Just because it's flatter doesn't mean there's more, it just means there's more surface area, which is a bad thing in steak. The sticker also encourages the cook to resort to trickery in order to satisfy the people eating...they see more of their plate covered by steak, therefore they believe that they have a large steak. (Never mind the fact that if they got down level with the table they'd see...nothing, because the edges of their plate would obscure the meager slab of poor, brutalized meat.) Expanding our perspective makes the sticker even more absurd. As our nation's economic waistline has shrunk considerably, our actual waistline is ever increasing. So why in the hell are we being encouraged to "Feed More!"?
That being said, I really am to blame because I was stupid enough to buy the steaks and then not watch them carefully while cooking, resulting in a thin slice of tortured meat that had turned gray out of sheer distress.
However, I was thoughtful enough to foresee this potential disaster with the "Thin Cut! Feed More!" steaks, and paired them with this recipe from epicurious.com. It's a steak with parmesan butter and a balsamic/shallot glaze, served over arugula. And man, those flavors really work well together. The salty and creamy parmesan butter perfectly, perfectly cuts through the sweet, tart glaze, and all of the flavors are pulled into harmony by the mustard-y arugula. It really was a decent dinner, in spite of the murdered steak and the mis-matched side dish. I needed to use some sweet potatoes, so I mashed them with brown sugar, butter and a little half and half. The mash was really, really good, but unfortunately it was just too delicate a flavor to stand up to the assertive flavors in the glaze and butter. The main dish would have been much better served with some simply roasted red or Yukon Gold potatoes, drizzled with a little olive oil, kosher salt and coarse ground pepper. What you need with the strong and harmonious flavors of the steak is a side dish that doesn't actually have much flavor, just a pleasant texture that you can enjoy without having to sort of re-wire your palate with each bite.
Also a little off tonight was the wine we drank (well, I drank.) It was Menage a Trois, a jammy blend of cab, merlot and zinfandel. While the wine has the jam and big flavor I wanted (chocolate, cherry, strawberry), it has a disappointingly thin mouth-feel that doesn't stand up well to a meaty dish like steak. A thick cabernet would have worked much better, if you could find one that still has that big jam smell and flavor. Trader Joe's Coastal Reserve Cabernet might be good; Rendition Zinfandel would probably be even better, provided you opened it or decanted it an hour ahead of time to let the flavors really unfold.
All in all, it was a meal with great yet unrealized potential, mostly due to the mistakes of the chef.
I really wanted to end this post with the pithy comment, "Just like anonymous poet did with this anonymous poem." But now I'm finding that I'm not really sure which anonymous poet wrote a poem that he or she is really much too good for, although I know they're out there. So here's my challenge: fellow poets, UDers, English majors and literature lovers alike, throw some suggestions to me. Help me think of a poet or a poem who is like this meal; limitless and profound potential that somehow isn't realized, due to some flaw, whether it be word choice, limited imagination, excess of philosophy, whatever. This should be fun.

Balsamic Vinegar Can't Redeem Rash Decisions

Tonight, I was excited about dinner. I've been using this new and pretty neat search engine, supercook.com (Thank you, Monika) because it allows you to enter the contents of your kitchen and then pulls up recipes based on what you have. (You have to enter everything, though. Every trivial spice, every pantry staple.) Anyhow, I've learned through trial and error sites to follow and sites to avoid. For example, allrecipes.com tends to be a little crappy. Recipezaar.com isn't much better; it's not that they're bad, but they're a catch-all with no editing process, so if a recipe doesn't work it can still be posted. Granted, most home cooks can glance through a recipe and envision the results, so it's really just a process of whittling out recipes that aren't your style. But one good site that I love, and usually use for special occasion dinners is epicurious.com, which is (so I gather) the archive site for Bon Appetit online. I picked out a dish for tonight that was a simple way of preparing chicken; sauteeing onion and garlic, adding cubed chicken breasts, then letting it simmer in some balsamic vinegar and dijon mustard and sprinkling a little basil over the finished dish. Easy, right? I figured I'd serve it with couscous and roasted broccoli -- not my first choice, but we had it on hand.
Then I made the mistake of reading the reviews and taking the advice before I tasted the original recipe. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Lots of posters said the sauce wasn't sauce-ey enough, so they added chicken broth or white wine, or a combo. My husband ranks dry food up there with pride, lust, envy...you get it. So instead of just tasting the finished dish that was simmering and smelling delicious in a little bit of balsamic and mustard, I pulled out the divine remnants of the Lacheteau Vouvray from last night and...poured the whole thing in. The WHOLE THING. This is like, 1/4 of a bottle. So now I'm staring down at my lovely chicken, onion and garlic which is drowning in a light brown colored, sickly sweet smelling liquid that used to be a perfectly matched, perfectly proportioned and perfectly flavored light glaze (or so I imagine, since I DIDN'T TASTE IT FIRST!). At that point I succumbed to the crying baby who was trying to climb up my leg and let my husband (who himself is a pretty good cook) try to redeem a moment's folly.
After I put little Charlotte to bed, I returned to the kitchen to find the sauce reduced by 2/3 but still a horrible color and tasting like reduced white wine, cold broccoli that I had pulled from the oven too early so instead of being crispy was limp, brown, and generally lackluster, and couscous that I had added too much liquid to and was thus clumpy and mushy. My wonderful family ate it with smiles and reassurances, while I drank most of the wine I had bought especially to go with this meal, which thankfully I managed not to ruin.
I'm now drinking tea and eating cookies and going to bed right after this post, so I can get up and search for my misplaced cooking mojo in the morning.

Lacheteau Vouvray=Drinkable Happiness

As promised, here's my white wine post.
I love, love, love, love, love this white wine I've discovered at Trader Joe's, with the help of my wine guru Jason. It is, in his words, "delish." I don't believe in the application of that word to many things, especially since it is a stupid vernacular shortening of a word that, being only one syllable longer, shouldn't be shortened. But here it works, because the wine isn't delicious. Few things are truly delicious. Perfectly cooked risotto with black truffle shavings and sauteed proscuitto is one of those things; Bon Appetit's La Bete Noir (flourless chocolate cake) with homemade whipped cream and peak-season strawberries is another. This wine is not delicious. It is, however, delish; sassy, sweet, fruity and utterly drinkable. It's the kind of wine that makes you want to laugh out loud.
One of the most delightful things about this wine is that what you smell is what you get. Pear, apple, and a tiny hint of almond first hit your nose, and that's what first hits your mouth...and that's all that hits your mouth, plus a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of tartness. There's a certain kind of joy that comes from drinking wines that smell more, or less, full than they taste; or when you smell chocolate and taste leather, or vice versa. But there's another kind of joy that comes from smelling and tasting the same thing; it's a joy of harmony and simplicity, one that doesn't take a sophisticated palate to understand. That's how Lacheteau Vouvray is. And that, in my mind, is what makes a good white wine.

Quinoa: The Blank Slate

Tonight I made my first attempt at cooking that renowned and trendy grain, quinoa (keen-wah, for those of you who are saying in your head, "qwih noe ah" like I did. For years.) It was...confusing.
Because I had never cooked it before, I threw my scruples to the wind and followed the suggested recipe on the back of the box (Trader Joe's, for those of you unfamiliar with my grocery store obsession). I cooked the quinoa just like rice, 1 parts quinoa to 2 parts chicken broth. Then I stir-fried cubed chicken with thinly sliced onions, bell peppers, and garlic, and tossed it all together with the quinoa, basil, and some parmesan.
I was curious about the quinoa, and since it was done before the rest I tested a few forkfuls. After I got over the optical experience (cooked quinoa looks like fish eggs, translucent with the wheat germ ring around each grain) I was immediately bowled over by the texture. It feels in the mouth exactly how it looks -- like fish eggs. I was reminded of the scene in Overboard when Goldie Hawn is detailing how caviar should taste..."it should burst in your mouth at precisely the right moment." That's how quinoa is. Initially it is very soft, but there is a bite to it that is somewhere between the burst of caviar and the bite of perfectly cooked al dente risotto. Very interesting. The flavor, however, sucked.
It was really kind of gross. It tasted earthy, musky, almost dirty. And I did wash it in three changes of cold water, so it wasn't actually dirty. But it was strange. I'm wondering if I was tasting the flavor of the chicken broth, since it wasn't the brand I usually use and quinoa seems to be...well, a blank slate.
I say that because when all was said and done, it tasted like garlic, peppers, and onions with this strange texture added in. After I had added a ton of salt (and I'm not a salt-my-food-regularly type of person) and pepper, I really enjoyed it. But what I enjoyed the most was the texture. It was fascinating. I think it needs more assertive flavors. I'm inclined to try again with feta, cherry tomatoes and some oregano or basil, maybe sauteed with some shallots and garlic, but as my husband points out, I fall back on feta and tomatoes for everything. (However, as I pointed out, it's because they're such delicious flavors that there's no point in not falling back on them.) If any of you out there have great quinoa recipes, please send them to me. I'm really, really interested in experimenting with this neat little grain.

Goat Cheese, My Savior

Last week, inspired by the newest issue of Cooking Light, I decided to try something I'd never worked with before: eggplant. (Vegetarians of the world, feel free to gasp in horror.) I did a really easy eggplant sandwich on ciabatta bread, with roasted eggplant and bell pepper, arugula, pesto and goat cheese. It was amazing! And here's why: goat cheese could make cardboard taste delicious.
I'm not saying that the eggplant tasted like cardboard, cause it didn't. It was actually pretty good, and even my carnivorous husband, who grunted and grumbled about blasphemy when a meatless sandwich came to the table, liked it enough to tell his mom about it. But let's face it, a sandwich built around three different vegetables is bound to be a little daunting to anyone who's not a vegetarian. The great thing about eggplant is its texture. It's really thick and meaty, sort of like a portabella mushroom without the slime factor. The bell pepper really added a dimension as well; it gave a bit of a deeper flavor to the sandwich. I blackened it and left the skin on, which added a smoky (well, burnt) flavor that went well with the brightness of the arugula, the heavy basil in the pesto, and the heavenly, heavenly tart creaminess of the goat cheese. The one caveat I will add is, if you are planning to make this, make sure you get a wide, wide loaf of ciabatta. Ours was shaped like a small French loaf, and the eggplant fell further out of the sandwich at every bite. Annoying, especially when the sandwich is a good one.
We drank a red wine that night, mostly because that's all we had, and I was surprised at how well it complemented the sandwich. I was a firm believer in basil and cheese being unsuitable with anything but a red until my brother in law Thomas (who's working on his sommelier certification) brought me a glass of a very full bodied, oaky chardonnay to drink with a goat cheese appetizer once. It really went well with the cheese, cutting through the tartness and matching the creaminess of each bite. So my first inclination would be to serve such a wine, but as good chardonnays are expensive and bad chardonnays are really, really bad, I think it would go just as well with a lighter-bodied, easy-drinking red. We had Napa River's Merlot (available at Trader Joe's) which is truly not like most merlots, and therefore went well with the flavors. A nice pinot noir would be good, maybe a syrah or shiraz. I dunno. What you basically want to avoid with a meal like this is any big wine with lots of jam, because it will kill your taste buds and will not allow you to taste the various complexities of the sandwich. That's my wisdom. Please feel free to discard it at will, or correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm going to try my hand at quinoa tonight, so check back for an update later.
Also, I'm drinking one of my favorite white wines of all time, so be prepared for a long, gushing post about the various joys of truly delicious white wine.

Hello, and Welcome to Sensory Confusion

This blog is about food and wine, and sometimes poetry. The name, Synesthesia Mei, is actually from two different languages which is, I think, fitting, given the meaning. Synesthesia is the Greek word for sensory confusion. In poetry it means using one sense to describe another, like in this:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
(Li-Young Lee's "From Blossoms")

In medicine, it is when one confuses senses: eg., words taste like peaches. Mei is the Latin first person possessive: I here claim the confusions of my life!
Together, they mean this: I confuse food and wine with love. Really. Come have a meal with me, with lots of good, good wine, and I will be convinced by the end of the night that I love you. Some call this intoxication; I call it synesthesia.
My eventual goal here is to create menus matched with wines that convey a meaning, as perfectly as possible; passion, grief, zeal, hilarity, despair, &c. In the end I hope to match these menus with poems that will resonate, note for note, line for line, flavor for flavor, with a harmony of our senses. In the meantime, here is synesthesia mei.