Lark Whole Beast Dinner, and pudding
Laura and I attended Lark's Whole Beast Dinner on Monday, and I have to admit that I feel a little bit cheated.
I'd assumed that we would, in fact, be eating several whole beasts. In fact, we ate small bits of many different beasts. Also, while we did have pig ears, beef kidneys, and sheep sweetbreads, most of the beast parts were fairly innocuous: guincale, pork cheeks, and so on.
Which isn't to say that the food wasn't marvelous. I particularly loved the winterier preparations, the braised pork cheeks, the pork tongue dolce forte, and the guincale wrapped, gorgonzola-stuffed dates. The (pickled?) sheep tongue salad was also superb. But last year's menu looks tastier, and a bit more daring, as well.
The table we sat with was great fun: Michael Hood and a bunch of other folks whose names now escape me (that's what they get for not having blogs!) were all generous enough to share their wine with us (next year we'll bring some to share too), and talk ranged from food to politics to more politics.
I don't want to sell the event short — I quite enjoyed it, and I plan to attend next year — but I was definitely hoping for more. I'd have been nearly as happy (though somewhat less educated, and less likely to meet new people) by any other night at the restaurant.
Right now, I have chocolate custard baking in the oven. This is an experiment: I've never made any kind of pudding or custard before. But we needed some milk tonight (for a very risotto-like orzo and broccoli dish), and I had about two cups left. The New York Times had an article on chocolate pudding and while none of their recipes matched the ingredients I had on hand, one from Bittman's How to Cook Everything did. We'll see, in five minutes or so, if I have a tasty dessert tonight...
You Heard it Here First
The New York Times' annual Ideas issue highlights food wrapping that changes color when the food is bad.
I suggested this idea back in February 2005.
Checkerboard Breakfast
Someone should take a Belgian Waffle, and fill alternating squares with scrambled eggs and cooked sausage, making a checkerboard pattern on the surface.
Okay, so it's not exactly the healthiest breakfast. But it sure would be tasty, and pretty too!
PID-Controlled Slow Cooker
This week, my Cuisinart CSC-650 Slow Cooker trashed another batch of food. The temperature was too hot, and stayed too hot, and burned the heck out of my sweet potatoes. When I made stock this week, it also cooked too hot, and spit and made a mess of the countertop. The Amazon reviews suggest that many other people have the same problems that I did.
The Cuisinart has ruined food before, but enough was enough. This time, I gave up on the cooker, and got permission from my lovely wife to disassemble it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have a real thermostat, so it wasn't something I could adjust. I ended up trashing the device, which was somewhat cathartic (not as cathartic as fixing it would have been). Oh well, I wasn't going to be using it again anyway.
Wikipedia says that , for "safety" reasons. A couple of people have also looked into hacking slow cookers, but nobody seems to have done much work to solve the problem.
I've considered just buying another slow cooker after reading some reviews and meta-reviews, but I feel sure that whatever I get will just cook at too high a temperature.
What I really want is a tweaked-out slow cooker with a PID controller that's content to let me cook at "unsafe" temperatures. It looks like this Hamilton Beach model actually uses a temperature probe to control cooking, and at $50 I might give it a try, but the absence of a high-end gadget model with more precise controls is disappointing at best.
Chocolate-Covered Peeps
That's stolen from Devina, but she's right: those little marshmallow Easter chicks could use a nice chocolate bath.
Self-Stirring Risotto Pot
I love making risotto, but all the stirring! What if there was a nice, heavy risotto pot with a top like one of those old crank-driven popcorn poppers? It could slowly spin (driven electrically, presumably), making the risotto all nice and happy.
Espresso Bagels
It's easy to find a zillion flavored bagels, all of which are too sweet and too soft.
A good bagel with some solid coffee flavoring, toasted, with a schmear, sounds pretty good to me.
More chip flavors!
Chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and peanut-butter chips can all be acquired for use in cookies. It seems that there must be a zillion other kinds of chips one might wish for: berry-flavored chips, coffee chips, and so on. The flavors might not be "real," but kitchen shortcuts sell well regardless... plus they're shelf-stable.
Litmus Paper Placemats
These would be extra-fun in kid-friendly restaurants, where a lot of food ends up elsewhere than the mouth.
Sloppy Joes for Breakfast
I don't know, sloppy joes just seem to me like an excellent breakfast food, for us protein nuts.
It'd be a little hard to get a Burger King sloppy joe, since they don't like anything you can't eat with one hand. Maybe a breakfast burrito joe?
New Packaging for Upscale Beer
I had a dream last night: a local microbrewery prepared a Maibock, and labeled the bottles "Not to be Opened until 1 May 2006."
They sold the beer months in advance, however, so that people could have the beer sitting around, waiting for it to mature, like wine, and build that anticipation.
Furthermore, the 750ml glass beer bottles were enclosed in a larger glass cylinder, which was full of water. The stated reason was to provide better "climate control" for the beer, by dampening temperature changes.
While in the waking world I can't imagine that the small volume of additional water would have a substantial effect, it would be a neat marketing gimmick.