Cooking Day

It's nearly the end of Summer here, so Kristy is going back to work tomorrow and I am starting school. Kristy has been wonderful over her break by doing almost all of the cooking and cleaning, so I thought I'd spend a day cooking on Saturday as an expression of my gratitude for sacrificing a lot of her time to make my life a bit easier for the last couple of months.

I just wanted to share what I made because I found two particularly amazing recipes and had a great time putting them together. The first was a Gordon Ramsay recipe that changed my ideas about gravy. I was brought up with gravy made from the drippings of roasts fried with flour and butter, and then having water and stock and milk added to make a thick creamy gravy which was slathered over everything on the plate. It's wonderful stuff, but it does make everything taste like gravy.

James, my excellent brother, sent us one of Gordon's cookbooks for Christmas last year (Sunday Lunch). His recipes are challenging both in the complexities of preparation, but also in the way they challenge your preconceptions of how things should be cooked. On Saturday I embarked on page 70, which was a roast rib of beef with Yorkshire puddings. It was a mission tracking down a rib roast because everything in the supermarkets is boneless now, which is dumb because, sure bones make things harder to carve, but they are where all the flavor comes from when you roast. Boneless = tasteless. I finally found a wonderful Italian buthcer in Haverstraw who prepared a cut for me "that's-a nice-a piece-a meat!"

So, after roasting the beef, the recipe tells you to put it aside to rest, and then to briefly fry two red onions, some sprigs of thyme (from our garden!), mashed plum tomatoes, and unpeeled garlic in the drippings, and then to add half a bottle of red wine and simmer, and then beef stock to cook down. After it cooks down, you strain out the veges and herbs, and cook down the liquid further. You end up with a deep red gravy with a watery consistency. So I was thinking, maybe I should add this to some butter and flour to thicken it, but Gordon's stuff always seems to work out best when it's counter-intuitive, so I left it as it was, and just as well because it was the most amazing gravy I've ever had.

I learned that the real purpose of gravy is to enhance the flavor of the meat, not to make everything taste like gravy. So, when you add Gordon's gravy to the roast and eat it, you don't taste any gravy, you just taste absolutely amazingly delicious beef (on the right side of the above pic). It was quite the learning experience. The Yorkshire puddings came out really well too (on the left).

For dessert, I found an equally incredible recipe on Epicurious.com for a chocolate orange cake. It took the whole day to make, but is probably the most delicious chocolate cake I've ever had (though the chocolate gateau at Cinnamon Cafe in Naha, Okinawa, comes very close). It has thin layers of hazlenut orange chocolate cake, with a chocolate cream filling, and chocolate glaze over the top, topped with toasted hazlenuts, chocolate shavings, and candied orange peel (which I also made). It's amazing with espresso. It was also a late Birthday cake for Kristy since our neighbor made a cake on the day of the party back in June (it was her birthday then too). There's still a bit left if anybody wants to come over to try it - but you'd better hurry because it won't last long!

I love cooking (and Kristy)!