emily ellen

a fuoco

So the night started out simply. Picked up DK from the office, stopped by his house, and made our way back home. Had some nice ingredients - filet mignon, asparagus, etc - and once we'd settled in, I set about making dinner. Dinner would be, along with blanched asparagus and parmigiano risotto,  steak au poivre, a dish that (for the uninitiated) calls for a sauce that is made by FUCKING LIGHTING THE PAN ON FIRE. That's right, you purposefully start a kitchen fire.

I'll tell you more.

It was the scariest thing I've ever done. Seriously, I was shaking, both before and after. I had to sit down (once all the flames went out, of course). Lets start at the beginning.

In a medium pan over medium heat, you heat butter and olive oil until the combo takes on a golden color (takes about a minute). Mixing the oil with the butter increases the smoke point of the butter, enabling you to cook something in it at a higher temperature without burning the butter. So I did all that, and then put my beautiful peppercorn-crusted filets into the pan. I was feeling quite confident, like a very capable, learned chef. I had everything going at once - the asparagus, the risotto, the filet, and it was all coming together magnificently. But there it was - it was looming in the not-so-far-off distance - the notion that I would have to FUCKING LIGHT THE PAN ON FIRE. The steaks were done. There was no turning back.

I donned my Orka, pulled my hair back, and said a little prayer. Oh, and I also equipped DK with a big metal lid, in case things got out of hand.

I poured the cognac into the pan. "Shit, this is it! I've gotta do it now!" I thought, as the cognac began to sizzle and spit. And I did it! I stuck my grill lighter into the pan and - WHOOOOOSH - a column of flame ignited in front of my very eyes and licked its way toward the ceiling. Holy cow. Shake, shake, shake, I shook the pan, gently sloshing the burning liquid around as the flames (which were now confined to the area directly above my pan) began to die down. Shake, shake, shake, and twenty seconds later, the fire had burned itself out. The really magical part of the whole process (I mean, in addition to me escaping with my eyebrows still in tact) is that it worked - all the beautiful brown bits from the bottom of the pan were now part of the sauce, no scraping required.  I finished making the sauce, plated our dinners, and abbiamo mangiato. We ate.

Hey, how ya doin'?

Between 24 and The Sopranos, I may just have a television-induced heart attack. Seriously. I won't waste too much time babbling about it all, but let me just say - holy cow. I mean seriously people, could the last week's worth of television be ANY BETTER? I think not.

I must have been channeling the Sopranos on Saturday, when I decided DK and I would really exploit the Italian in us and head down to the Strip District for some good Italian foodstuffs. We found some great stuff and, inspired by my surroundings, I settled on making two great dishes: Bucatini al Amatriciana and Tiramisu.

We tackled the tiramisu, and after DK butchered a couple of eggs, we set into the recipe, made all the components, and assembled. Easy! Voila! Perfect! I figured this was a sign of things to come, and I was excited to set into making the bucatini, a dish I discovered in Rome two summers ago. It's a wonderfully spicy tomato sauce with onions and sauteed pancetta (Italian bacon) over the bucatini noodles, thick pastas with a pinhole running down the middle.

I cubed the pancetta and diced the onions and set them in a pan with a little olive oil. Hmmm...not quite the scent I was expecting. In fact, the more it cooked, the more I was able to identify the smell. Wet dog. My beloved amatriciana sauce was smelling like wet dog. DK yelled from the living room, "Is it supposed to smell like that? Or is the smell going to change - into something good?" And I didn't know what to say. We had a good laugh over the fact that he thought it smelled like feet, whereas I stood by my original assessment, wet dog. I soldiered on, wet dog sauce and all, and we actually ate it and it wasn't so bad in the end. But still, I had this romantic notion that I could whip together the lovely sauce I had one night in Trastevere and of course, it didn't quite turn out the way I'd hoped. Oh well.

Self (help!)

So I'm doing the 2006 Self Challenge, a three-month program where you record your workouts and track your weekly progress, with the goal of being "ready" for swimsuit season (as if a person can be "ready" like a turkey or a cake - no, don't take the swimsuit out of the oven yet, you're not "ready"). Swimsuit season is a strange ritual that women apparently subject themselves to annually. I say apparently because I've never really been one to buy into the idea that I should only "prepare" my body to be presentable six months out of the year. Unfortunately, this rebellion of swimsuit season results in a situation where I'm never prepared to show my limbs to the general public - I don't own a pair of shorts (and don't even ask about a bikini - I wore one once. Not one summer, my friends, but once as in one singular day. Ever. In my entire life). Like a milk-fed calf being raised for veal, my limbs stay hidden beneath whatever covering I decide upon for the day, and more often than not it's a pair of black pants and a black shirt.

So the situation has gotten a little out of hand (read: cellulite everywhere!) and I've decided to engage in the ritual of "getting ready." This effort is in no way assisted by my recent venture into cooking, which has a road paved in butter and, well, more butter. I tried to make a hollandaise sauce this weekend (big failure - the eggs curdled) and the recipe (from my Silver Spoon cookbook) called for nearly a cup of butter - almost two whole sticks! Not helping my "getting ready" endeavor, but damn it, I'm going to the gym tonight, and I'll probably cook once I get home. I'm a woman of contradictions.

Schadenfreude (and more!)

Schadenfredue (n): Taking delight in another person's misfortune (German).

The Germans couldn't have designed a more perfect word for my current state of emotions (though it isn't the slightest bit surprising that the Germans would be the ones to develop this word. And don't pretend to be offended - everyone's a little bit racist. Chris and DK, that was for you guys). Anyway, back to my current state of emotions - she failed! The woman who swooped into a project I was working on, who never talks to me like I'm an equal, she failed, and I couldn't be happier, which maybe makes me a bad person, but I don't really care right now. You can email me if you're really interested in the details, but lets just say I've been vindicated, and I am recovering the responsibility that she tried to take after her recent failure to produce an even remotely comprehensible document. And now we do the dance of joy (aah, Balki.)

So, onward.

I got my car - it's sooooo much fun to have a car that you enjoy driving. I actually woke up this morning thinking, "Yay! I get to drive into town for work!" And trust me, very few people on the planet have that thought running through their brains at 7:30AM. Only people with new-ish cars or those who have been recently paroled have that thought going through their heads (I am in the former group, in case that needed to be clarified). So yes, new car, it's awesome. It was all shiny and beautiful when I picked it up on Wednesday, and then, in typical Pittsburgh fashion, it rained/snowed all day yesterday, so now it's covered in that white chalky gunk that blankets all vehicles for the better part of the winter. I'll rinse her off one night so I can have a proper photo session and actually show her off to everyone. Kay, I'll stop talking about my car like it's my child.

I'm reading a great book, Julie and Julia. It's a piece by a woman, Julie Powell, who decided to spend a year cooking all 524 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. I'm about halfway through the book and I'm really enjoying everything - it's not so much about the recipes. Instead, it's about this woman's life and how cooking becomes a really special thing that she takes on (for no good reason) and how she can connect a year's worth of events through cooking. It's fun for me to read about her failure to flip an omelet, or how she used almost a dozen eggs just to get three that were properly poached - I had a similar experience trying to make a flourless chocolate cake a month ago. My egg whites just wouldn't make a meringue, and I went through more than a dozen eggs before getting a batch that was even close. The cake was not a success. But oh well. Anyway, one of the coolest things about the book is that it came from Julie's blog. In fact, the whole experiment revolved around the idea that she'd cook and then she'd write about it in her blog.

So that brings me to this: I know I promised to update this blog, and I know I gave you a list of reasons why I haven't been. I'm newly inspired by Julie Powell and the lure that this blog might, someday, take on a life of its own and make me a writer or something like that. I hereby swear to be more attentive to my blog. Plus, my 30-day trial period is up, so hell, I've already paid for it. I might as well use it.