So I am only just now getting to the point where I feel confident enough in my cooking skills that I feel I can experiment with at least a chance that the results will turn out edible. I tend to cook for large groups, and I've shied away from experimenting in the past because if I fail in that instance, well, my large group will have no dinner! But I am now at the point where I know how certain things react to certain cooking methods, and how different flavors go together, so I think it is time that I try to expand into developing my own cooking style through experimentation. This weekend saw two major forays for me.
There was a "welcome back" party at Elsinore this past Saturday conceived by blendedchaitea*, ostensibly just for people we missed who weren't here over the summer, but which pretty much ended up being a gathering of Hold Thy Peacers, which in my opinion is never a bad thing. We did it as a potluck of finger foods, for which I was planning on making a simple tomato-basil-mozzarella bruschetta. But when my family came up early in the week to help my brother move, my dad brought me two big coolers full of vegetables from his garden. Eggplants, zucchini, butternuts, tomatoes, garlic, hot peppers, sweet peppers, and three different kinds of unidentified volunteer squash. They were really great vegetables, but he brought me so many that there wasn't room for all of them in the fridge, and I was afraid the ones that had to stay in the cooler weren't going to last very long. Matt and Lise had also brought me beautiful Roma tomatoes from their garden, and I had only used a few of them so far. So I decided to make my standby dish for when I want to use a lot of different vegatables as once, a simple ratatouille. It would put the veggies to good use before they had a chance to go bad, and even though it wasn't a finger food, I figured I could also serve it at the party.
The kitchen was really buzzing with a lot of us busy making our party contributions in there, so I wanted to get the ratatouille going quicky and give it time to cook, so I decided to take a chance and throw it together without a recipe. Enlisting lovely friends blendedchaitea* and nennivian* to help me chop, I tried to get the veggies that I knew would take longer to cook into the pot first, which meant the eggplant, the onion, and the butternut squash. Breaking down large squashes with firm flesh and hard skin can be really tough, but I've found the most effective technique is to take a large, cheap knife and tap it through the squash with whacks on the spine from a wooden rolling pin. Safe, efficient, spares your hands, and doesn't dull up your good knives. I did notice that the rolling pin was starting to take nicks from striking the back of the knife, so I may end up buying a wooden mallet to do this instead to spare my beloved pie-making instrument. So I threw it with the other longer-cooking veggies into the Dutch oven with a few tablespoons of oil, stirred to coat, and let that cook while we then went on to the tomatoes. I decided that Matt and Lise's Romas would be better suited to a veggie stew than the bruschetta, so they went into the ratatouille while my dad's heirlooms got cut up for the toast topping. I then dug around in the cabinets to see what else I had to throw in. Fortunately I had about a cup and a half of red cooking wine, which went in when the tomatoes did, and some dried basil and oregano. That was left to cook for about thirty minutes more, reducing the wine and softening everything up, before I called in some brave souls from the party to taste it. Aside from requiring a bit more seasoning in the form of salt and pepper, the stuff wasn't half bad! Topped with some fresh basil chiffonade sliced up for me by Charlotte, I was pleased to send it out in a serving bowl to the rest of the party. It was late enough in the course of the evening that people had become too full to eat much of it, but I enjoyed having as lunch and dinner for myself the next day.
My next cooking experiment that weekend, however, had more mixed results. Jared had brought me back a lovely big bag of apples when he went apple picking during his recent visit, and though I was happy to eat the sweeter varieties out of hand, I didn't really have a taste for the tarter ones. So I decided the way to properly use them was to bake them. Now when it comes to apple pie, one of my all-time favorite desserts and the first real dish I ever learned how to cook, at this point I can make it in my sleep. So I decided to do something a bit different. After making up the dough for the crust, I divided it into four pieces rather than my customary two, wrapped them individually in plastic, and put them in the fridge to chill. The filling was made up according to my usual recipe, but there was a good deal more of it this time because of how many little apples I had to use. I then got out my four four-inch mini pie plates and one of my regulation eight-inch pie plates. I took two of my wrapped dough balls and again divided them further so that each half would become the bottom crust for the one of the mini pies. Since they were so small, I decided it would be easier to press them into the pans rather than roll them out. Now on to the filling.
So the one other time I had tried to make mini apple pies was for the time Jenn and I made dinner together, and for some reason they just didn't come out right. They were dry, somehow. So I decided to make sure there was enough gooey goodness binding the fruit together by topping the apples with a tablespoon of sliced-up butter per mini pie. I then rolled out the third dough ball from the fridge and sliced it into strips so that I could lay little lattice crusts on top of each one. I almost ran out of dough, but with some clever patching they came out well enough. A milk wash and a little sprinkled sugar finished them off. Now came the tricky part-- baking. Again fearing that they would be dry, I decided to bake them at 400, like I would a normal pie, but only for fifteen minutes, and then I would check them.
While they baked, I turned to my other experiment, a pie-like apple tart. I took the last piece of pie dough and rolled it out extremely thin. It was really tough to get it round enough, and it tore in like eight places, but I managed to lay it out just inside the eight-inch pie tin. Then I poured in all the remaining apples and dotted with the typical two tablespoons of cut-up butter I normally do for a pie. But since I didn't have a second shell to lay on top of it, I dug around in the fridge to see if we had some kind of jam I could use for a glaze. My preference would have been apple or apricot, but we didn't have any. So I settled on a sweet berry mixture that gave the apples a pinkish tinge. After pulling the mini pies, which did look done to me after the fifteen minutes, I put the tart into the 400 degree oven. I wasn't sure of the bake time for this one either, but since it didn't have a top crust, I decided to set it for a half an hour and check to see how it looked. By the end of that time the apples were ever so slightly starting to singe at the edges, so out it came. I wrote a little note that said "Please eat!" as an invitation to my roommates and stuck it next to the mini pies. The tart, I decided, I would take to that evening's read through of A Winter's Tale.
After letting the mini pies cool for a while, I decided to try one. I was very disappointed. It was still kind of dry, both the crust and the apples inside! What happened to the extra butter? Digging a little further in, I found it-- it had pooled on the bottom and was making the bottom crust soggy. Ew. I guess a tablespoon for a pie that size was too much; after all, I only used two tablespoons for a much larger full-sized pie. I immediately went back to the kitchen and tipped each of the remaining three pies over into the sink to let that pooled butter run out. I hope that improved them at least a little. Roommates who ate them, feel free to let me know how they were, and what you think they needed. The only thing I can think of is that a 400 degree oven is just too hot for a pie that size, even for as short a time as fifteen minutes. I guess what I should do is look up a recipe for a pie that size and see what temperature is recommended, and for how long. I can probably get away using my own recipe and have it come out if I do that. Alas, despite how I love miniaturized food, this particular one still eludes me.
Since the mini-pies didn't come out very well, I was nervous about the tart. I brought it to the Winter's Tale read through with trepidation, and made sure to secure myself a piece to make certain it didn't completely suck. To my surprise and pleasure, it was pretty damn good. The top was the slighest bit overdone, but the jam glaze compensated for it, and the layers beneath were just right. I also liked it in the thin crust. I was pleased to see it disappeared in fairly short order. Also present at the read through was a really unique and unusual cinnamon brownie that Steph made, as well as tasty sweet oatmeal cookies.
So I suppose when you experiment with food, you're going to hit some and you're going to miss some. The more I try it, the better I'll get at it, and in turn my all my cooking skills will improve. Heh, after all, my new motto when it comes to entertaining is Horace's fine quotation, "A host is like a general-- it takes a mishap to reveal his genius." I certainly can't be afraid that things are going to go wrong with that outlook, now, can I? :-)
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