Do Instant-Read Thermometers Ever Work?

Thanksgiving.
I think the very word engenders fear and depression in most cooks.
See, Thanksgiving is a holiday that, whatever its roots, has become centered around food. But not just any food, no! A very specific menu is laid out in front of football-watching half drunk family members on the fourth Thursday of every November by home cooks in various states of exhaustion, stress and panic. And if, like me, your husband's mother is "the world's best and most amazing cook" (sorry about the air quotes, Suzanne. You really are a great cook, but I'm trying to build a rapport with my readers) your Thanksgiving must at least be similar to hers, and may not include the cornbread dressing you grew up on and love upon pain of death. (This is what happens when a Texan marries a Californian. It's like a culture clash.)
So this year I decided to ease away from my mother-in-law's traditional meal with a little help from Bon Appetit and Cooking Light. I made the Sage Butter Roasted Turkey with Cider Gravy and stuffed it with Sourdough Stuffing with Sausage, Apples and Golden Raisins, accompanied by Green Beans with Bacon, cranberry sauce with a dash of allspice and cinnamon, my mother's fantastic mashed potatoes and her also fantastic pumpkin pie cake.
So here's my question: Do instant-read thermometers ever work for anyone? This year, after two overcooked turkeys that registered cooked from two cheap thermometers in previous years, I put my foot down and insisted on a more expensive one, which I dutifully calibrated in boiling water. After about an hour and a half of cooking, my 16 pound, beautifully basted and burnished turkey registered 165 degrees! This is way too short, I thought to myself. But I inserted the thermometer repeatedly into every part of each thigh that could be considered "thickest", taking care not to hit bone, and still it kept telling me that this bird was done. So I took it out, removed the stuffing and heated it to a safe temperature, and made the gravy. By the way, if anyone ever has doubts about the flavor homemade turkey stock adds, you should stop those doubts right now. I made the homemade stock from the website, and oh man. This was the most flavorful, richest-tasting and most beautiful gravy I've ever had. I could have eaten it by the spoonful. (I know, that's gross. But it was that good.)
Okay, back to the turkey. As the carnivorous husband is carving it at the table, we noticed a somewhat alarming amount of pink-ish juices pouring from the turkey. Our guests got white meat (thank goodness), but I like the dark meat so I requested a bit of both. The white meat was wonderful; incredibly juicy and perfectly cooked. The dark meat, however, was like a turkey version of carpaccio. It was simply raw.
Everything else was great; the sourdough bread made the stuffing much more interesting than normal bread cube stuffing, and the sausage added a textural element that was a nice counterpoint to the chewy raisins and crisp-ish celery. The potatoes and gravy were the highlight; there was actually no gravy left over! I think I was the only one who really liked the cranberry sauce. The cinnamon and allspice made it taste like Christmas, but as my husband said, "Then why are we having it on Thanksgiving?" The green beans were all right, but next year I think I'll venture into the mysterious world of creamed brussel sprouts.
All in all, it was not a failed meal, but in the interest of not serving potential salmonella to my family next year, can someone please explain to me how to get a meat thermometer to work?

Steak and Potatoes, Deified

Yeah, you read that title right. The writers of the amazing cookbook The Best Recipe have managed to do to steak what some cultures do to rocks or Megan Fox: turn them into something you would happily worship.
On Saturday I made beef bourguignonne. I'm purposely not writing "boeuf" because this recipe wasn't the classic French recipe, or Julia Child's recipe. It was a riff on those that, as far as I can tell, reduces the stew to those ingredients which are essential for it to be called "bourguignonne." These ingredients are bacon, steak, onions, mushrooms and red wine. And, well, wow.
The reason this became a famous combination of flavors is because it makes you weak in the knees when you taste it. Seriously. It is a truly, truly fantastic dish. Be warned: it is very labor intensive, and requires at least two loads of dishes plus lots of hand washed pots and pans, but it is so, so worth it.
The recipe starts pretty much like any other stew recipe, with the exception of crisping the sliced bacon before the beef and aromatics. You then pour off and save most of the bacon grease to saute everything else in...I know.
So when the bacon is done, you have to brown the meat, and I will say this: Julia Child is absolutely right about drying the meat. I still don't have a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but that particular gem was tossed into the movie Julie and Julia, and it is really true. Every time I have cooked a stew, I have always assumed that "brown" meant "to cook it so it's gray on the outside and not pink." WRONG. The gray color comes from the liquid being exuded by the meat, and also from the pieces of meat being crammed right next to each other. You really do have to dry each piece of meat thoroughly and brown them in very small batches. This time, about one third of my stew meat was lovely and browned before I lost my patience and threw the rest of the undried meat into the pan at once. At least it was a lesson learned, right?
Then you remove the meat and saute the onions, then the garlic, and toss in a few tablespoons of flour until it is all a light tan color. At this point, you add the liquid. This recipe calls for a combination of red wine and chicken broth, and they explain that the beef broth sold commercially is both foul and will completely ruin a good stew. I picked a fairly decent full-bodied Argentina blend to use. I really wanted the earthy, chocolate flavors that come through in Argentina wine, but I didn't want a wine with lots of jam, so I got a blend instead of a straight Malbec.
You then add the meat, bring it all back to a boil and stick it in the oven for a few hours, and while that's simmering you brown the mushrooms and pearl onions in the rest of the bacon grease to be put in during the last half-hour of cooking.
So at this point I turned my attention to the potatoes. The potatoes were deified not by a cookbook, but by my mother.
For my mother, there is no middle ground in the kitchen. What she does well, she does really, really, wickedly well, and mashed potatoes top this list (well, right next to her incredible brownies.) It's actually pretty simple, and it's all in the butter and the sour cream. Seriously. I boiled eight medium-sized potatoes until they were falling apart, drained them and threw them on top of a stick and a half of butter, then scooped in about ten ounces of sour cream (the full-fat kind, folks. There's no room for compromise here.) I whipped the whole thing with an electric mixer, added a bit of half and half and a whole lot of salt and pepper, and had the most incredible mashed potatoes ever made (except the ones my mother makes.)
The best thing about these potatoes was how perfectly they went with the stew. The stew was seriously moan-worthy, with the most incredibly deep, rich sauce, meltingly tender meat, slightly chewy and flavorful mushrooms, and those all-important pearl onions that provide a crisp bite to foil all the richness. The potatoes, on the other hand, were light, airy, rich and smooth, giving the stew a creaminess and picking up on all the flavors of the stew without losing the textural contrast. But you have to serve the stew over the potatoes, otherwise you just don't get the incredibly matched textures.
At some point, I will try Julia Child's boeuf bourguignonne, but I'm pretty happy with this one for now.

Simplicity is Beautiful

And the dinner I made tonight was just that; both simple and beautiful.
Due to the dreadful recession and the general lack of money in the lives of Ph.D candidates and their spouses, we've been eating lots and lots of flash-frozen chicken and frozen vegetables lately, something that in the past I would have snottily eschewed. However, I'm discovering that these two things can be just as good as the real thing, and a thousand times more convenient because you don't have that pressure of the "Best By" date hanging over your head. With that in mind, tonight I pulled out my several years-old copies of Cooking Light to bring some new ideas to a stale routine of fajitas, stir-fries, and various chilies and stews. I came across a recipe that I had intended to make years ago and instantly went to work.
The recipe is Rotini with Chicken, Asparagus and Tomatoes, and of course the main attraction was the picture. Anything that combines pasta with tomatoes is bound to grab my attention, and it should grab yours as well. I was also interested in what seemed like a too-simple vinaigrette that gets tossed over the whole thing...I had my doubts about that.
I was so wrong. This recipe was not only the soul of simplicity, but it was also a remarkably well thought-out harmony of flavors. The chicken and pasta (I used whole wheat rotini) provide a nice, chewy, hearty backdrop to a variety of fresh yet mild flavors.
In my experience, pasta recipes that showcase asparagus tend to call for way too much of it, which creates an overwhelmingly asparagus-y texture and flavor. Asparagus may be a thick, meaty vegetable, but I don't think it should be given center stage. This recipe, however, called for a perfect cup of 1-inch asparagus pieces. The one warning I would add here is this: if you use fresh asparagus, make sure you get pencil-thin stalks. The thick ones will simply be too big to complement the small pieces of chicken and the corkscrew pasta.
I used grape tomatoes instead of cherry, and while the flavor worked, next time I'll stick with the cherry. The grape were too small and we ended up with several tomato halves in every forkful. That being said, slicing and quickly sauteing the tomatoes is certainly the best way to handle them in this recipe. They need to be just warmed enough to burst when you put your fork to them, but not so cooked that the skin shrivels and they become mushy and lackluster. The tomatoes are one of the joys of this recipe. They provide a nice, crisp juiciness to offset the chewy pasta, meaty chicken, and delicate asparagus.
The balsamic vinaigrette was absolutely perfect. With a light and flavorful pasta like this one, the last thing you want to do is drown it in a sauce, heavy or not. But there was just enough oil to coat the pasta, basil punched up the flavor with a little more freshness, and the balsamic really came through to provide a bit of sweetness and tang with every bite. The only thing I might do next time is whisk the basil into the oil and vinegar mix before adding it to the completed dish, just to ensure that it's all evenly distributed.
Finally, I must take a second and gush about the goat cheese. I think you all know about my devotion to goat cheese, and if you didn't know, now you do. Goat cheese is the star player in this recipe. Even my husband mentioned what a wonderful pairing it is. It is such a flavorful, creamy cheese that it truly is wonderful in almost everything, but the mild flavor it has especially complemented this pasta. The crumbles melted into a lovely cream over the hot pasta, which helped to both bind and enrich every single ingredient. And I was really shocked at how well it worked with the balsamic vinegar. The two of them played off each other wonderfully; the tang of the balsamic was matched by the tang of the cheese, and also toned down by its creaminess.
Altogether, this pasta was phenomenal and took a little less than thirty minutes to make. Can you beat that?

A note about wines: We drank 2007 Nero d'Avola, a Sicilian wine with big jam, light tannins and a little acidity. While this is a really good, drinkable wine, it did nothing for the pasta. A pasta this light and harmonious needs a wine that is equally so; the last thing you want to do is drown a good meal with a mis-matched wine. That being said, I would probably urge you to pick a nice pinot noir. I think that California's Russian River Valley does fantastic pinot noirs, and you can usually get one for a decent price, at least for a pinot noir. But because pinot noirs to tend to be pricey and are truly not worth compromising on, you might want to go for a dry riesling or a chardonnay that's neither too oaky nor too buttery. Pacific Rim does a nice dry reisling that might work with this dish. La Crema's Chardonnay would probably be much better. The carnivorous husband thinks a merlot would be best, but through no bias against merlot (even though I totally have one) I disagree. I think a heavy or thick red would kill the harmony of this dish. Perhaps even a syrah would work all right, as long as it's not too acidic. Hmmm. I think this is a question for my sommalier brother-in-law. So stay tuned, and hopefully I'll have an answer for you before you make this pasta.

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.