The Failed Menu and Other Stories

There's been a lot of cooking going on in the Desert Candy kitchen, but sadly little of report. I've been busy gardening (and watering, watering, watering), painting our guest room, watching the World Cup (oh Argentina), and making my own birthday cake.

And then there's the case of the failed menu.

A while ago, we had the idea for black and white dinner party, where all the food would be black and white, and our guests could come dressed up. It sounded fun, right? That's what we thought, until we started testing recipes. We played with several themes along the following lines:

- amuse: forbidden rice, poached quail egg, goat cheese whipped cream
- grilled hearts of palm over white slaw, balsamic reduction
- seaweed-wrapped steamed fish, daikon broth, black bean sauce
- squid ink pasta, drizzle of cream sauce, seared scallops, caviar
- roast pork loin with black and white sesame seeds, ricotta-whipped potatoes, blackberry-balsamic reduction
- poppyseed cake (mohnkuchen) with labne-grapefruit whipped cream

As we tested and tasted, everything was just okay. We'd sit down to test our latest recipe and we'd end up staring at the dish on our plate, sigh, and think, maybe we should add lobster to the cream sauce, or maybe the broth needs more pepper. There were some highlighs: the delicious goat cheese whipped cream, the pok loin seasoned with white pepper and fennel. But everytime, it seemed the dish was fine for dinner, but it lacked punch or flavor. It wasn't anything we wanted to invite friends over to eat. Apparently if you remove all color, you remove lot of your flavor palate too.

So instead of shelling out money for more caviar and lobster, we just abandoned the idea. The next night, Paul made a great spicy curry, and both of us practically beamed at the idea of having color and flavor on our plates.

In the meantime, we've been eating good simple summer food. Have you ever tried toasting a slice of potato bread, spreading it with goat cheese, and topping it with sliced figs and a drizzle of honey? Well, you're in for a treat if you haven't. Or the simplest, tastiest salsa we've had in a while. And mainly, I've been cooking a lot from the archives here: ajo blanco, and apricot honey and shrimp with mango and avocado.

Stay tuned for lots of colorful recipes in the future.

Failed Recipes and What to Do with Leftover Lamb

While we are all snowed in here in the nation's capitol, I thought I'd share some recent recipes that have not gone so well. I cook a lot but I also spend a lot of time reading about cooking. Reading a lot of recipes gives you a sense of what works and what doesn't, what proportions are right for cake, techniques for cooking meat and vegetables. Often I follow that knowledge and instinct, but it seems recently I've taken the recipe's word for granted, and wound up sorely disappointed.

First up, a lovely rack of lamb on a bed of fennel and figs. I love Donna Hay's magazine, and was browsing through her site when I found this recipe. I substituted grapes for out-of-season figs, but that wasn't where I went wrong. First the 3 tablespoons of sugar, which I cut down to two, but which still left the vegetables far too sweet.

But the major problem was this recipe doesn't have you sear the rack of lamb before roasting. This doesn't give you the nice crust on the lamb, and it also causes very gamey lamb juices to run into that overly-sweet fennel. Let's just say it was bad.

(For the record, shredded lamb, sauteed in a bit of butter can be made into lamb tacos or sprinkled over fetteh, It can also be shredded and sauteed with sweet potatoes and cumin for a tasty hash.)

For our next failure, we have another case of sugar gone wrong. I love, LOVE, the pumpkin dish (kaddo bourani) at The Helmand in Baltimore. I had already assumed they used some special kind of squash to get that firm yet tender texture, which is the antithesis of the watery-mushy mass that pumpkin can be.

But then I found some recipes online, which called for slow baking of the pumpkin in massive amounts of sugar. I thought maybe it could work, kinda like this preparation of pumpkin. Sadly, this recipe was exactly what I feared, far too sweet. However, we're still looking for tips on making this Afghani pumpkin, so please send any our way!

Looks like the government will be closed for the 2nd day in a row, so hopefully I find some successful recipes to share with you next!