Friday, January 7, 2011

Jamie: Last Meal of 2010

 
so pretty
A note: while we haven’t blogged about it yet, and Jo and I made the white bean and escarole soup (and oh the hijinks that ensued). We also were going to attempt the (perhaps too) ambitious recipes for Christmas lunch but only ended making the smashed potatoes from the cook book.

I started writing this post a few days ago, but in the intervening time I realized that the recipe I used for the braised artichokes was not, in fact, the same recipe from Ad Hoc At Home (I had looked it up online. I'll never trust the internet again)! As it turns out, the recipe I used had about a third fewer ingredients and steps that Keller’s. Whoops. And because we couldn’t get halibut at the fish market, we used haddock instead, so my cooking for this week is more Hydrox than Oreo. 

And, I made perhaps illegal use of my boyfriend as sous chef, and he took care of the fish so I can’t talk about that too much (although, don’t cut haddock into pieces and expect to be able to flip them over easily. Almost all of the haddock ended up a little shredded and torn up). 

The artichokes. I hadn’t dealt with a whole artichoke before, so I was looking forward to getting to know what they were all about. I read in my most trust-worthy cookbooks (except for Ad Hoc at Home... if I had actually looked in that book I would have used the right recipe!) to see how it was done, and later consulted some videos on YouTube to see how to trim artichokes. It was helpful. Not helpful was the insanely dull knives I had to work with (we were in someone else’s kitchen) so getting the choke out was a little difficult. 

I braised them in oil, white wine, and what sounded like a Thomas Keller approved sachet (minus the cheese cloth). We also made a version of his smashed potatoes (sans smashing). 

Boyfriend-sous chef plated everything and I would say he did a fabulous job:
note ghetto paper towels as napkins
Now that I have fairly successfully trimmed some artichokes, I’m looking forward to make the real braised artichoke recipe...