Mike took me to the Pleasanton Hotel last night for a mystery dinner. It was great. The food was only so-so, but the whole evening was a lot of fun, nonetheless because Mike figured out who the murderer was 🙂
I wrote a longer review and will post it to my website later.
Author: marga (Page 117 of 120)
My second batch of dulce de leche ice cream was more sucessful. This time I used 1 cup of cream, 1 cup of 2% milk, 1 cup of dulce de leche and 4 egg yolks, milk/cream and eggs were cooked separately and then all mixed together, strained, allowed to cool and frozen. I still don’t understand what the purpose of cooking is, however.
The taste of this batch was stronger (it had a greater proportion of dulce de leche) and I thought it was just as smooth. Kathy liked the first batch better, but Mike and I preferred this one.
I’m now making my 3rd batch. I used 1 cup cream, 1 1/2 cup nonfat milk (all left at home), and probably 1 1/2 cup dulce de leche. The truth is I didn’t measure it, I just keep adding it until it was very sweet. I wanted to add eggs as well, but I overcooked them so I’m not sure how much egg were left in the mix after I strained it. We’ll see how it turns out. I’ve also runned out of chocolate, so this will be plained dulce de leche, not dulce de leche granizado like my last two batches.
Kathy arrived today for a month-long visit. She always complains that I’m always talking about this great food I’m making and yet never cook for her when she’s here. She’s right. So I offered to make dinner for the night of her arrival – she was afraid I’d back down but I didn’t. I had already eyed this recipe – I had some leftover stilton – and she was OK with giving it a try (after I explained that stilton was another blue cheese, just like the gorgonzola that she likes).
It was great. Easy to make and delicious – the sort of thing you can serve either for a family dinner or for company. It is terribly fattening (with all that butter, cream and meat). I’m pretty sure it would work just as well with another blue cheese (at least with one of the milder types), so just use your favorite. Finally, if you are not a blue cheese fan, you don’t need to sprinkle the rest of the blue cheese on the steak. The original recipe called for beef tenderloins (expensive), but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work as well with a cheaper cut of meat. I made both a tenderloin for Kathy and New York steaks for us.
The original recipe is for 6 (people/steaks) but that would leave you with too little sauce per person. I think it works best for four. I served them with egg noodles (the first thing that I found on the pantry) and that worked well. Mashed potatoes would also go well with the dish.
Recipe
-4 steaks
-salt & black pepper to taste
-1 tbsp dried tarragon
-5 tbsp butter
-1/2 lb portobello mushrooms, sliced
-1/3 cup red wine
-1/2 cup sour cream
-3 oz silton, crumbled.
Rub steaks with salt, pepper and tarragon. Let rest until they come to room temperature.
Melt 2 tbsp. butter in a large skillet. Grill steaks until done to your taste. Remove and keep warm (put them in a plate and cover them with a heavy napkin).
Melt additional 3 tbsp butter in the skillet where you cooked the steak. Add mushrooms and sautee until soft, 2-3 minutes. Add wine and deglaze the pan. Add sour cream and mix well. Add 1/4 cup crumbled Stilton cheese. Remove from heat.
Spoon mushrooms and sauce over each steak. Sprinkle remaining stilton and serve.
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We love dulce de leche ice cream. Real dulce de leche ice cream, that made with dulce de leche itself, not the vanilla ice cream with caramel swirls which Haagen Daz tries to pass on as dulce de leche ice cream. Unfortunately, the real stuff is not easy to get.
There is an Argentine ice cream store, Tango Gelato, in San Francisco (they used to be in Fruitvale but they moved!) and their version is pretty good though not as delicious as the stuff in Argentina. Of course, given how different milk tastes in the US I know it’d be impossible to make the real thing, but I’d like to approximate it.
So my new project consits in trying different recipes until I find one I really like. I started with a very simple one – Ben & Jerry’s sweet cream recipe substituting dulce de leche ice cream for some of the cream. Didn’t work well. It doesn’t taste enough like dulce de leche, which doesn’t surprise me as it’s very heavy in cream. Supposedly, cream dulls the taste buds.
Tomorrow I’ll try something else.
Meanwhile, here is the recipe for this one:
Dulce de Leche Granizado
-2 eggs
-1/3 cup sugar
-2 cups cream
-1 cup milk
-1 cup dulce de leche
-1/2 cup shredded dark chocolate
Whisk eggs until fluffy, whisk in the sugar until disolved, whisk in cream and milk. In a separate bowl, whisk dulce de leche with 1 cup of the cream mixture until well blended. Add dulce de leche mixture to milk mixture. Freeze according to manufacturers instructions. Two minutes before it’s done add the shredded chocolate. Put in a sealed container and freeze until it hardens.
After the bite of chicken Escabeche I got at Patagonian Gourmet, I was in the mood for more, so I tried making my own. The recipe that follows (from an Argentine site) is quite simple. It’s nowhere as tasty as the one at Patagonian, but it’s quite good and addictive! I still haven’t served myself a dish, I keep going back to the pot and taking pieces of chicken (don’t worry, I only made it for Mike, Mika and I – we share our germs in many other ways)! We are going to have a lot of wasted veggies (next time I’ll use less). Mika also liked it, despite the vinegary tasty.
A word of caution, I cooked the chicken for 2-3 hours and that was probably too much (or at too high temperature). You may want to check the texture after 1 1/2 hours.
I just posted two reviews from my trip to Los Angeles.
We stopped at Mike’s Roadhouse Cafe in Kattleman City in our way to LA. It was just OK, better than Denny’s. They have a beautiful collection of (overpriced) pedal cars, however.
In LA, we had dinner at Patagonian Gourmet, a whole-in-the-wall Argentine restaurant in Tarzana that was actually quite good. They have a killer chicken escabeche that you have to try.
I love cheese and, like with almost everything else, my taste for cheese has expanded as I’ve aged. I’m almost to the point where I’d be willing to try those stinky cheeses my father loves so much. Michaella is a dairy-fiend herself and she is extremely fond of cheeses. She likes almost all of them, though I recently found out she is not fond of chevre. Her dad didn’t use to like it either, and I think Mika has inheritted Mike’s taste in food as well as his looks and personality.
I don’t know very much about cheese, however, so I figured I’d start writing about different cheeses I tried so that I could remember which ones I liked and disliked and why. I’m starting with Stilton, even though I wrote a little bit about that cheese in my posting below, as it’s a new cheese I tried today.
Stilton is a blue cheese from England. I found it at Safeway (Clawson brand) for $13 a lb. I really like it. It’s quite creamy for a blue cheese, though it can crumble, and has an intense flavor that is still less pungent and bitter than other blue cheeses (like Roquefort or Gorgonzola). Indeed, it doesn’t taste completely as a blue cheese – it even reminded me a little of gruyere. It was good in the blue cheese burgers I made, but it’s actually one blue cheese I’d eat by itself. Indeed, it’s recommended that you enjoy it alone with a glass of port, though I think it would also go great with the cherry preserves we had at Piperade. This is definitely a cheese I could serve as part of a cheese course or, as the British (used to?) do, as a finish to a meal.
Here is some more info I found on the web about it:
I made these for an impromptu Memorial Day BBQ today. They are quite good. As I learned, make sure to not overstuff them. I use ground buffalo as a healthier alternative to ground beef but you can use ground beef just as well. I made them with Stilton cheese, it was the first time I tried it and I was very pleased with it, it’s less intense and yet creamier than other blue cheeses. You can substitute with your favorite blue cheese, of course.
-1 lb ground buffalo
-1/2 tsp. Worcestershire Sauce
-1/2 tsp. dried mustard
-1/2 tsp. salt
-1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
-a dash of Tabasco
-2 oz Stilton blue cheese
Mix the ground buffalo with the Worcestershire sauce, the dried mustard, the salt, pepper and Tabasco. Hand-form 8 equal size patties. Put 1/2 oz of cheese in the middle of a patty, cover it with another patty, press the sides until the cheese is completely covered and flatten with a spatula. Repeat making 3 more patties. Grill for about 5 minutes on each side. Serve on a burger bun with your favorite fixings.
I haven’t posted anything to this blog, or my other one, because I’ve been gone for the last week. Mike and I went down to Southern California, left Mika with my parents and took a 4-day cruise. It was relaxing and the food decent, though not actually good 🙂 I hope to write more about the cruise and the food I’ve had lately, we’ll see if I can manage the time.
Anyway, I just posted two reviews of San Leandro restaurants that I wrote before I left.
The Blue Dish is a small deli-like restaurant serving light American, Middle Eastern and Mexican menus. We tried the Middle Eastern stuff (prepared by a Latino cook) and our experience was mixed: Mike like his salad while I felt my shawerma was overwhelmed by the tahini sauce.
The Sandwitchery is, as it name suggests, a sandwich joint. They offer a large variety of sandwiches which are better, and more expensive, than those at the chains (there is a Subway and a Quiznos nearby) but otherwise not remarkable.
On a final note, I’ve heard that Cafe Zula closed. I’m not surprised given its out-of-the-way location and a menu that did not justify its prices. Unfortunately it isn’t going to be replaced by another (better) restaurant, Trader Sports has expanded into that space.
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