Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
My Pasta is a Food52 Winner!
My Pasta with Peas, Prosciutto, Mint and Cream won this week’s Food52 contest! Thanks again to everyone who voted!
My Recipe: Done Video Style
Watch Amanda and Merrill from Food52 cook my Pasta with Snap Peas, Prosciutto, Mint and Cream!
I get a meat hat shoutout. Thanks guys!
For those of you who are wondering, I made this meat helmet for a wild game cookout that my buddy Marcus does every year, called Meat Storm. It’s hand-stitched London broil with an oxtail bone “flower” on the side. I used waxed sail twine, but if you want to go totally edible, you’ll have to use beef sinew.
A Fresh Meat Helmet
Food52 Finalist This Week
My pasta with snap peas, prosciutto, cream and mint is a Food52 finalist this week! Thanks again guys!
Vote here if you like my recipe
LeChef
Food52: Chef’s Spotlight
Well, looks like Amanda and Merrill over at Food52 decided to give me the Chef’s Spotlight treatment this week! Check it out on the link below. Thanks guys! Cheers!
Blackfish about to be dinner, Summer 2009
Sambuca Seared Scallops with Shiitake Truffle Creme
This week’s Food52 theme was scallops. I decided to go for the appetizer-portion seared scallop, and added a bit of licorice flavoring with the Sambuca crust to compliment the truffle. These are rich and satisfying, and if you serve them at a dinner party you will pretty much rock (if I do say so myself). They take about 10 minutes of cooking time, and 5 minutes of prep time.
Here’s my writeup for Food52:
“This recipe doesn’t have an origin in anything other than coming up with an elegant starter course featuring diver scallops. I knew that I wanted to sear them, and I knew that there would be a truffle cream sauce to finish. Working out the details was a matter of tasting and testing. Adding Sambuca for a bit of sweetness and the anise flavor came to me in the shower, as do a lot of my ideas for these contests: hungry, starting the day, with quiet time to come up with crazy ideas. I think it wound up working out nicely, and it does come through in the crust, and pairs nicely with the truffle. It’s a little French, a little Italian, and a tiny little bit Asian.”
Man, I hate writing those things. They always sound pretentious. Anyway…here’s the dish:
And the winner is…
My Zesty Herbed Chicken broth! Thanks Food 52, and thanks to everyone who voted!
Zesty Herbed Chicken Broth at Food52
My recipe will be published in the Food52 cookbook at the end of the 52 weeks. Only 13 more weeks to go, so I need to get in gear to try to get another one in there!
Photo courtesy Sarah Shatz/Food52
Taste Test: Ugli Fruit
As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous entries, I have an affinity for strange produce. Strange food in general, really. If I run across something new at the store that I’ve never seen before I am powerless to resist the temptation to buy it. And so you, my lucky readers, will get to hear all about the new and exciting foodstuffs that find their way into my kitchen.
Thus, I found myself in possession of an Ugli fruit. The sticker on the fruit said “Uniq” fruit, which I came to find out is the commercially trademarked name under which this fruit is sold in the United States. Native to Jamaica, this fruit is a hybrid of the Tangerine and the Grapefruit. It really isn’t all that ugly, but when the tangerine and grapefruit trees woke up after that fateful night when they both had far too much Jamaican rum to drink, I think there may have been a bit of a moral hangover when they saw what they had done:
The Ugli, Ugly, Uniq fruit
Making Fresh Pasta
There is nothing quite like a really good fresh pasta. I can’t pretend to be as good as the guys at Frank’s or Roberto’s, but I can make a pretty decent noodle that is much better than store bought. Making pasta is a labor of love, and you do it for the satisfaction that it brings to have made your pasta from scratch, rather than having bought it at the store. It takes time, it can be messy, but it’s fun.
First off, if you are going to be at all serious about making pasta, you should invest in a decent pasta maker
Sourdough Bread: A Starter
Today I decided that I wanted to make my own sourdough bread. From scratch. Which means no cheating and using yeast, or ordering a starter kit. Sourdough breads are made from a live yeast culture that leavens the loaf, just as a packet of active yeast will do, but it adds that “tang” that sourdough breads are famous for. A little internet research provided a straightforward approach to making a starter, using just water and flour (1 cup of each) mixed together, and left at room temperature for about a week. The catch is that you have to “feed” your starter (the colony of bacteria that will eventually become your leavening agent) every day while it is at room temperature, to get the little guys going to produce the C02 required to leaven your bread. The process is to 1) empty out half of the starter, and 2) to mix 1/2 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of water into the remainder of the starter. Here is a day-by-day report of what happened! Prepare to be…bored!
Day 1: Mixed 1 cup of warm water and 1 cup of unbleached flour into a container. Left it on the counter, uncovered, at room temperature. Looks like wallpaper paste.
Day 2: Some dried crusties on the side of the container. A couple air bubbles. Nothing exciting. Emptied out 1/2 of the starter, and added 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water to “feed” it. Stirred it up, and placed it back above the stove.
Day 3: There is something happening here! Definite patches of bubbles gurgling up through the flour-water skin, and a smell not unlike sour beer. This might be working! Drained half, fed with 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. The idea that I am growing a colony of yeast is fun, but slightly disconcerting. I am waiting for them to try to escape and take over the kitchen.
Sourdough on the horizon?
Le Chef Est Arrivé!!
Hello all,
If you’re reading this you’ve either made it all the way back to the first post of my blog after years of great successes and hundreds of interesting posts, or you’re simply the first person to whom I’ve sent the link to this little web page. Either way, thanks for being here, and thanks for reading! I decided to start this blog, today, simply to have a way to document and share my cooking, eating, drinking, and general culinary experiences with my friends, family, and the internets in general. I’ve been cooking now (non-professionally) for about 15 years, and have waited far too long to get a blog about it up and running. So, I hope that you enjoy reading about my culinary exploits, and I hope that you might try cooking some of the dishes that I put up here. This will by no means be a “learn-how-to-cook” blog, but I will do my best to share the process as well as the end product, and hope that you find what I’ve written here to be interesting and informative.
A bit about the blog title: my friends, a few years ago, decided to nickname me “Le Chef”. This is in part because my last name sounds French (Lambert), which it is not (it’s English, and we hate the French, or at least they hate us). It is also for the most part because I like to cook a lot, and I wind up cooking up elaborate feasts for pretty much no reason, and generally make a large mess in doing so. I have been known to cook and eat wild mushrooms after a quick internet consultation to determine (probable) toxicology, and to cut open and consume raw sea urchin off the rocks on a remote Brazillian beach. Some people call this “risky behavior”. I consider it haute cuisine.
So, join me for what will hopefully be an interesting exploration of the world of food, in and around New York City, and beyond!
Drew Lambert
The hand-stitched London broil meat fedora, circa October 2008.
