Food Lab: Throwback

Or, as Mad Kitchen Scientist termed it: Food Lab - Squashgiving! 

"Why 'throwback'?" you might ask. 

"Wasn't your very first lab about eggs?" 

(yes) 

"What does that have to do with squash?"

Not a damn thing. 

BUT! 

The *idea* for Food Lab came to Chef Spouse while he was working on cream of tomato soup.

Inspired by the season, we decided to take on winter squash soup, in part because all of us have found ourselves defaulting to curry spicing, which, while delicious, is also limited.

So Chef Spouse cleaned our favorite purveyor at the farmers' market out of butternut (most flesh bang for your squash buck) and we were off! 

We started with the same base for all:

Mirepoix (2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrots, garlic)

2 parts Chef Spouse's homemade chicken stock

1 part peeled, cubed, and roasted butternut squash 

Salt & pepper 

Once done simmering, all were pressed through a chinois before moving to the all-important seasoning step, giving us four soup bases of just over one quart each.

Option 1: Spicy

2 Tbsp arborio rice
1 tsp harissa (plus more to garnish for those who wish)

Option 2: US Southwest 

Poblano (roasted) 4-5 little ones
1/2 tsp chipotle powder
1 tsp cumin
Sour cream & pepitas to garnish

Option 3: East Asian

1/2 c coconut milk
Ginger coins
4 kaffir lime leaves
1/2 tsp coriander
1 Tbsp red miso

Option 4: Pumpkin spice

1/2 c heavy cream
1 clove
1 star anise
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Juice of 1 orange
Diced apple to garnish

They came out thusly

clockwise from top

East Asian - Spicy - US SW - Pumpkin spice

Now, I have never been a fan of sweet takes on squash soup, nor am I a PSL fan, so I was shocked to discover that my favorite take on the soups was in fact pumpkin (really, baking) spice, particularly with the addition of the crisp diced apple. It was delicious.

The US Southwest was my second favorite, and the thing that most surprised us all there was that the roasted poblanos REALLY thickened it up - you may not be able to tell from the photos, but it was the thickest soup, even without any type of cream added. 

The East Asian was lovely, but needed more umami and/or acid. I still have my leftover portion, and I plan to add fish sauce when I reheat it for lunch this weekend.

The spicy harrisa was a bit of a fail. We had the idea of adding the rice for body, but the problem was we didn't pre-cook it in any way, leaving the grains a little too al dente. In retrospect, we should've toasted then ground the rice, then added it to the soup base. 

For dessert? The Executive Committee had recently picked up New Native American Cuisine: Five-Star Recipes From The Chefs Of Arizona's Kai Restaurant, which included a recipe for butternut squash creme brûlée, which seemed like the obvious choice.

Mad Kitchen Scientist decided to guild the lily, 

so to speak, 

by torching some maple sugar on top

Now, we are talking an "n" of 1 here, but this is not a cookbook for inexperienced cooks, as the recipe instructions were lacking. In short, if you don't already know the technique to make creme brûlée, you will not be able to figure it out from these instructions. The flavors were excellent, but the squash base probably would've benefitting from being passed through a chinois or tamis - it was a little grainy. 

Chef Spouse also proposed trying techniques to roast winter squash to the point of crispness rather than softness. We all thought that would be a fail, seeing as squash contains so much water, and we were right (honestly not sure what he was thinking there). And we experimented with trying to make spaghetti squash palatable, and, sadly, confirming all my previous experience with spaghetti squash, that was also a fail. It's just so freakin' bland. Spaghetti squash? Just say "nah," no matter how much pesto and parm you have on hand.

Food Lab: Chocolate Redux

Precisely two years ago, your intrepid Food Labbers bit off more than we could chew and attempted to make chocolate from beans at the same time as testing the differences between Dutch process and natural cocoa powder, methods of melting chocolate, tempering chocolate, and fixing seized chocolate.

We did not get to all of that.

But we all still had raw and roasted cacao beans, so we decided to make another run at bean to bar, still inspired by what Chef Spouse and I had seen in Cozumel in the winter of 2022.

In theory, the process is simple:

Roast beans

Hull beans

Grind beans

Combine with sugar (and, potentially, some combination of honey, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon, and/or achiote) 

Sounds easy, right?

Challenge one, which we'd discovered two years ago: hulling the beans takes some serious time.

No problem! Chef Spouse roasted and hulled in advance!

Challenge two: grinding the beans finely enough to be palatable.

When we watched the demo in Cozumel, the guy making the chocolate used a large rectangular molcajete, with a grinder that was more rolling pin than pestle, and it came out great.

We have a mortar and pestle style molcajete, plus a blender, a food processor, and an electric coffee grinder that's reserved for spices. So grinding the beans should be no problem, right?

Wrong.

The taste? Well, it was great - we were adding all those optional flavors to taste, so: YUM. But no matter what we tried - and the electric coffee grinder can easily take coffee beans to an espresso grind - we could not get the grind fine enough for the finished product to be anything other than unpleasantly grainy. 

We even tried heating some of the ground beans with a little cream - on the left up there - and all that happened was the fat separated.

BOO!

Turns out, if you REALLY want to make bean to bar chocolate, you need a melanger, a device that's designed to run for 24-48 hours STRAIGHT without burning out the motor, to get the grind fine enough.

Well, damn.

What to do with all those roasted and ground cacao beans? 

Chef Spouse observed: They look kinda like coffee. What if we treated them as such?

All by themselves, the brew is too thin. But, as we've discovered in the mornings since, adding 1-2 TBSP to your usual coffee beans makes for a DELICIOUS morning cuppa.

Fortunately, we'd planned a meal of tacos al pastor, frijoles negros, and corn and black bean salad in advance, because the bean to bar experiment was a FIAL.

Mad Kitchen Scientist also brought the ingredients to make homemade Irish cream, and here's where we landed there:

1 tsp cocoa powder

1/2 tsp espresso powder

1/2 c heavy cream 

14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 c Irish whiskey (he chose Jameson)

Blend all & refrigerate 

For dessert? Chocolate flan, natch.

Food Lab: Velouté

We're back!

Your intrepid Food Labbers have still been cooking, of course, both together and individually - gotta eat! - we just haven't been doing much labbing lately.

We have, however, been planning our three-years-delayed (Thanks a lot, coronavirus!) Ten (now 13) Years of Food Lab trip to....France! No, we're not there yet, but we're headed there this fall. It will be a third return for Chef Spouse and me, but Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee have never been, so we're looking forward to sharing some of our favorite sights in Paris with them and then heading to a lovely villa in Provence for a week of farmers markets, bakeries, vineyards, cooking, eating, and drinking together with some additional friends. 

Our pending trip to France and Chef Spouse's shiny new account with ProFish (acquired in support of the Summer of Poke, which is a story for another time) did inspire our most recent Lab though: velouté.

Velouté, for those who don't know, is one of Escoffier's "mother" sauces and is a simple combination of a blond roux and a light stock, generally chicken or fish, that is then served over poached chicken or fish (or as a base for a sauce for veg or pasta).

The ratio we were using was 1 Tbsp each flour and butter to 1 cup of stock, finish with salt and WHITE pepper to taste (no black pepper spots in your pristine velouté, s'il vous plaît!)

We set our plan over oysters and bubbly: 

Test one would be: Should you start with fish stock or with water, wine and aromatics?

Test two would be: If you wish to enhance your velouté, should you use cream or an egg yolk?

Chef Spouse had procured snapper for the poaching that would give us the stock in the first place and branzino filets for the actual poached fish over which to serve the finished sauce. We also had some adorable little cabbages from our CSA that we poached and then seared on the Green Egg (which was at the ready because Mad Kitchen Scientist was also smoking some salmon, aka "Bacon of the Sea") because we figured, correctly, that we were going to have more velouté as a result of our tests than needed to sauce branzino filets for four. (That Bacon of the Sea got turned into snackies for hungry cooks spread on individual endive leaves with cream cheese enhanced with The Executive Committee's fresh-snipped chives.)

That is some good-looking fish.

Seriously, that is some GOOD-LOOKING fish.

Fortunately, Mad Kitchen Scientist had fish stock already waiting, so we pulled together a pot with water, white wine, fennel, carrot, celery, green onion, and thyme, cut the snapper in two, and poached.

The water/wine/aromatics combo was the CLEAR winner, both as a base for the sauce and as a cooking liquid for the snapper. Starting with a fish stock and then adding MORE fish, even as mild a fish as snapper, was...too fishy. (Although we did eat ALL the snapper regardless.) 

So that was easy, and we had our sauce for our poached branzino at the ready.

But what about an enhancement? To cut to the chase: Save the cream for something else, use an egg yolk, and, per Food Lab tradition, make cocktails (or something else) with the white. Even after reducing the sauce, the cream still left it thin and didn't add much by way of richness or mouthfeel. The egg yolk, on the other hand, turned what is a mildly flavored sauce into something with the richness to stand up to our wee cabbages. 

Did you notice I said "cocktails or something else" with the egg white? Turns out, The Executive Committee had gotten a soufflé mould for her birthday that had, as yet, not been christened. She decided she would very much like a late birthday / early July 4th soufflé for dessert, so while the boys were playing with the fish, I followed Julia's recipe for orange soufflé from Mastering. 

A few notes:

• Definitely bother with the "rub two sugar cubes over the surface of the orange before zesting" thing - it sounds silly, but it adds depth.
• If you don't have Grand Marnier handy, Cointreau makes a perfectly acceptable substitute (I wouldn't do a regular triple sec though - I suspect the sugar content is too low).
• You can prep the entire thing up to the point of whipping the egg whites and incorporating them! This is clearly how restaurants manage soufflé for service with only a LITTLE extra time required to prepare it, rather than diners having to sit there for an extra hour to wait for their dessert.
• It's better to slightly *under* do the folding in of the whipped whites than to overdo.

How did it turn out?

Also, the kitchen smelled DIVINE, and I can report that there was not a CRUMB left over.

Yes, I *will* be making more of these when we're in France this fall. Although since we'll be eight, I will probably need to make TWO at a time. 

Food Lab: Chocolate

Seeing as our last Food Lab was last summer, have your intrepid Food Labbers been subsisting on nothing but carry out and boxed mac & cheese since then?

Fear not! 

We've been cooking and eating together QUITE well and QUITE frequently, just not Labbing much, partially because we've all been suffering from a bit of topic-block. Given everything we've taken on since we first launched this crazy project in 2010, what remains?

I'll tell you what remains: CHOCOLATE

Mad Kitchen Scientist was the one who started the whole thing off, observing that "chocolate is something that WE do not know, and knowing about tempering and all such things is becoming something fashionable among foodies." 

How did it take us more than ten years to take on chocolate? How did we not notice we hadn't taken on chocolate? That I do not know, and yet, here we are.

Will it surprise you to learn that our initial plan turned out to be a bit ambitious?

We did manage to head one excess off at the pass: we decided NOT to revisit mole lab in making dinner. Chef Spouse gently observed that that might be a bridge too far for a Sunday afternoon. 

Our initial list included:

• Taste test various % cacao 
• Make chocolate from cacao beans 
• Differences between Dutch process & natural process cocoa powder
• Different methods of melting chocolate
• Fixing seized chocolate
• Tempering chocolate

Chef Spouse regularly makes me homemade truffles, and we were currently out, so we had our base already chosen for the tempered chocolate (my other idea was coconut and/or peanut butter Easter eggs, but I was overruled). Because the ganache base needs time to cool before it can be formed into truffles and dipped, Chef Spouse prepared it before everyone arrived. He favors alcohol as a flavoring agent, so we went with my two favorites: absinthe and añjeo tequila. (He used to use sweet liqueurs like Amaretto and Chambord, but we both realized they tend to be cloying.) 

We had seen chocolate made by hand from cacao beans on a recent trip to Mexico, so Chef Spouse was eager to give it a shot and ordered 1 kg of organic cacao beans. They arrived fermented - the first processing step - but not roasted, so after tasting the pre-roasted beans (pleasantly fruity and bitter), we went on to roast about 10 oz. immediately following the simple 5 minutes at 400 - 5 minutes at 350 - 5 minutes at 325 - then 300 until done (~10 minutes) recommended pattern. 

(I should point out that eating the fermented but not roasted beans can be a little dangerous - similar to eating raw eggs or meat, both of which you already know we do - so roasting not only allows you to remove the beans' husks, it also kills any pathogens on the beans. Anyway, we each tried a bean, we didn't chow down on handfuls. But do so at your own risk.)

Sooooo....getting the inner beans out of the husks turned out to be a bit of a production and put the whammy on most of the rest of our plans, including the plans to turn those beans into chocolate. We now each have a container of nibs waiting to be chocolatized in the hopefully near future. Fortunately, if you store them carefully, they have a pretty substantial shelf-life of up to two years. 

However, while everyone else was fooling around with the hot beans, I decided to get onto the cocoa powder tests. I had done a bit of advance research at Serious Eats and Sally's Baking Addiction, where I learned that in addition to slight taste differences (Dutch process, to my taste buds, is more chocolatey, while natural is "brighter"), it comes down to acidity. Dutch process produces a neutral pH of 7, while natural process is more acidic, coming in at a pH of 6 or even 5. 

Why does that matter?

Well, what are you making? If it's a baked good that depends on baking soda for its leavening, it may matter quite a bit, as alkaline baking soda requires an acid environment to be activated. 

So I pulled out my mom's simple chocolate eggless cake recipe, which I remembered relying on baking soda, and got to work. I measured out all the dry ingredients into two bowls, one with natural and one with Dutch process cocoa powder.

Then I turned to the wet ingredients: canola oil, water, vanilla....damn it. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the recipe also includes a small amount of vinegar. FOR ACIDITY. 

So much for that test. Both layers rose just fine. 

So I said screw it, made some cherry icing, and turned them into a cake. 

Meanwhile, the hullers were still at work.

Eventually, they finished and were able to return to the ganache and form the truffle centers.

At this point we broke for dinner: cacao-crusted hangar steaks and roasted cauliflower and steamed green beans with Mad Kitchen Scientist's take on a Cacao Picada Sauce

----------

Cacao Picada Sauce (loosely adapted from Saveur)

3/4 c olive oil
8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 c almonds
1 c fresh parsley
~3 T of dark chocolate (baking chocolate at least 60% cacao)
~2 T sherry
salt, freshly ground white & black pepper

Toast almonds. Simmer garlic in olive oil until just getting some golden color.

Put almonds, chocolate, parsley in food processor or blender. Process in chunky salsa. Add sherry and garlic & oil. Blend to desired consistency. Season with salt & peppers and adjust other flavors as desired.

After eating, it was on to the idea that started this whole thing: tempering chocolate and, more specifically, covering the truffles in the tempered chocolate.

----------

After diner, it was back to the truffles. 

(Due to a promise to an old friend, I am forbidden from taking part in the making of truffles, so I was merely an observer at this point.) 

So I asked Chef Spouse what he learned about working with tempered chocolate, and he replied that it gets hotter than you think it will faster than you think it will, it keeps rising in temperature longer than you think it will, it's harder to get it to working temperature than you would think it would be, it's harder to hold it at optimum working temperature that you would think it would be....and having three pairs of hands to dip the truffles was a MAJOR improvement over his usual solo process.

I'm sure that's all true, but the finished product is so delicious, who cares about your troubles, Chef Spouse? ;) 

Drinks to accompany? A take on a Oaxacan old fashioned (reposado tequila, mezcal, agave nectar) that we tested with both mole and chocolate bitters, universally agreeing that the chocolate bitters win. (I think we should rename it a Mayan old fashioned.) 

We never got to playing around with seized chocolate or the chocolate tasting or, of course, making chocolate by hand. As I said, overly ambitious. 

Food Lab: Brewing

Confession time: this wasn't really a Food Lab. Mad Kitchen Scientist has been home brewing for more than 30 years and is, truly, expert at it. But I've never brewed beer, and wanted to at least learn what the process is, so this was more like a tutorial or demonstration than an actual lab.

Beer-brewing is conceptually simple:

• Crack the grain 
• Combine with warm water to form the "mash" 
• Cook the mash at a low temperature
• Strain the grain out of the mash water
• Add the "sparge" water to form the "wort"
• Add your other flavoring ingredients (hops, malt)
• Boil the wort
• Chill the wort QUICKLY 
• Strain the wort into your VERY VERY CLEAN fermentation container
• Add the yeast and a little more clean, cool water 
• Let the yeast do its job (aka ferment the beer)
• Bottle the beer

As Mad Kitchen Scientist is fond of reminding us, no known human pathogens can survive the brewing process (as long as you're careful not to introduce them in the fermentation and bottling), so beer is not only, per Ben Franklin, proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, it's also proof that She doesn't want us to die from drinking bad water, a major concern throughout much of human history. 

In fact, historically, beer tended to feature at every meal, even for children, due to the aforementioned water quality problem. Of course, those beers were not juiced to the high alcohol levels of today's imperial stouts (the beer we brewed this weekend), Belgian IPAs, and Scotch ales (or the even higher levels of speciality beers than can start to approach the proof of distilled spirits). Still, our forefathers - and foremothers - were likely rarely sober as judges. Of course, while alcohol abuse is very serious, it turns out the communities of tipsy apes do better than the communities of sober apes, and beer can be an excellent way to induce that cooperation and sense of bonding. So on to the brewing! For the good of our community of tool-using apes! 

If brewing is conceptually so simple, what's the deal with good versus bad homebrew, and the dizzying variety of beer options available? 

Recipes (and temperature control). And Mad Kitchen Scientist has been refining his for decades. 

The grain is primarily barley, but there are all different types of barleys for brewing at all different levels of roast.

Mad Kitchen Scientist's super-secret

Imperial Stout blend

Cracking the grain is cracking the grain - and it's a delightfully analog process.

The next stage at which the brewer really influences the product is in what you choose to add to the wort by way of hops (type, quantity) and malt or other sugars (same). This is also when you can get into experimenting with things like fruit beers or other flavors. 

Look at those pretty hops!

Once the wort is ready for fermentation, two things are VERY important:

• You need to chill your wort FAST
• Your carboy needs to be CLEAN (so does your filter and your airlock)

Mad Kitchen Scientist created a clever gizmo from copper tubing to cool the wort by plunging the coil of copper tubing into the wort, attaching one end to tubing that runs from the cold water tap and letting the water run out the other end back into the sink.

Clean carboy? Bleach solution, scrub scrub, rinse rinse rinse.

Then you filter the wort into the carboy, add the yeast and cool, clean water to fill, insert the airlock, and let those little guys get to work eating, digesting, and, per Alton Brown, farting, which is what creates the fermentation and, ultimately, the fizz.

Saturday was glorious, so we also smoked (and ate) a brisket and played with the dog. To drink? Homebrew that was already aged and ready to go, duh. 

Get to work, Yeast! 

How did Mad Kitchen Scientist's brewing expertise come to be? Well, it turns out, a little more than 30 years ago, he was housemates with his "Brew Daddy." Both of them were also competitive Ultimate Frisbee players, and their house was definitely the hip hangout for that crowd. Brew Daddy was already an accomplished brewer, he showed Mad Kitchen Scientist how to brew, and then it became a situation of iron sharpening iron as they inspired each other to up their game. It's been many years since they shared a living space, but, unsurprisingly, Mad Kitchen Scientist has continued down the path set all those years ago.

I will likely not start down that path - Chef Spouse doesn't drink beer, so I'd just be brewing for myself, and I already have a good source of homebrew at the ready - but I am glad to understand, conceptually, how to do it.

I'm also looking forward to cracking one of these babies at Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee's resumed New Year's Eve house party later this year....

Food Lab: Under Pressure

In at least one way, Chef Spouse and I have had an unusual pandemic experience: We haven't bought much stuff for the house. We already both worked from home full time prior to the pandemic, so we didn't need any office set up items, and we had the athleisure wardrobe thing covered. We redid our yard a few years ago - new porch, new patio, nice yard furniture, landscaping - and it's too small to ensure six foot spacing between groups, so we weren't part of the run on outdoor heaters and electric lap blankets in the fall.

We've been doing our damndest to keep a few small vineyards we love in business, buying every time an allocation is released (SO MANY BOXES OF WINE IN THE BASEMENT right now), but other than that, there just really wasn't anything much we needed to comfortably hibernate. 

Well, almost. 

One of our ongoing Food Lab jokes is "no uni-taskers!" (with much love to Alton Brown)

We have exceptions, of course, and we give each other unending shit about them (Mad Kitchen Scientist's rice cooker, Chef Spouse's asparagus pot, etc.). 

It's all part of the fun, along with jokes about ramekins, exploding shrubs, flying chocolate, cleaning lobster off the ceiling, Mad Kitchen Scientist and me not being allowed to shop unsupervised, and me laying on the floor with Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee's dog after our second Food Lab moaning: "ATE. TOO. MUCH. STEAK."

At Christmas 2018, Mad Kitchen Scientist turned in his rice cooker in favor of an Instant Pot. Out: one uni-tasker. In: one Instant Pot convert.

Chef Spouse, who never met a decision he couldn't research to the nth degree, has been pondering getting one ever since. Yes, that means he's spent more than two years dithering over a device that costs about $75. 

So we finally decided to test it out.

There are many potential uses of an Instant Pot, but it's really best suited to pressure cooker or steamer type applications. Mad Kitchen Scientist has mostly used it for beans and grains (rice, oatmeal), and making homemade yogurt.

We decided to test it with beans, kidney beans to be precise.

One batch, we prepared the traditional way: Soak overnight, stovetop cook.

The other batch went into the Instant Pot, no prior prep required.

One of the advantages touted for the Instant Pot is that it's faster. In this case, it wasn't - the stovetop beans were ready first. Then again, we had done a FULL 12 hour soak, and stovetop didn't beat the Pot by much.

But the real question is: Which were better?

There, it was the Pot, by a nose. Slightly creamier, and definitely much more consistent texture. Which you can see in the photo below - the stovetop beans are on the right, the Pot beans are on the left.

The other thing, of course, is that we ALL do the thing of planning to have a bean dish for dinner, forgetting to start soaking the beans the night before, and then either bagging it in favor of carry out or eating at 10 pm because it took that long for the beans to soften in whatever the planned dish was. In that, the Instant Pot is the CLEAR winner.

Now that we had all these beans, what were we going to do with them? Red beans & rice of course! 

We cooked the rice in the Instant Pot, with no stovetop comparison.

Per Mad Kitchen Scientist, the big rice cookery advantage of the Pot is seen in brown rice that takes half a lifetime on the stovetop and about 30 minutes in the Pot (including time to come up to and off pressure). The other big advantage is that, like a rice cooker, it can hold cooked rice at temperature without getting gluey for an extended period of time. 

We also made some mango sticky rice for dessert.

That is traditional sweet rice - the reason it's light brown is that we cooked it in coconut milk with a little palm sugar (rather than white sugar).

We had talked about Labbing stock making, stovetop versus traditional pressure cooker versus Instant Pot, but we quickly realized that was pointless: Why would one ever make only 3-4 quarts of stock? That's just silly.

Verdict? Pretty sure Chef Spouse is going to be getting an Instant Pot, as soon as he decides whether he's OK with a "regular" Instant Pot or if he wants to pay extra for this bad boy:

What about drinks? I had ordered something special for Chef Spouse a while ago that took some time to come in, but arrived just prior to our Lab and inspired our libations.

Let me preface this by saying there are a few kitchen tools I've been leery of getting. A mandoline and a kitchen torch top the list. Chef Spouse has had a mandoline for some time, and had cut himself, badly, on it. Never using it - always setting it up or cleaning it. Still, my caution was justified, and I'd sworn he was not getting a kitchen torch because I was afraid he'd burn the house down.

Call it pandemic insanity, but I broke my rule to buy him a drink smoker that was recommended by a friend of mine who's a licensed bartender and swears by this particular brand.  

I gotta say: a smoked whiskey drink is truly special - and delicious - and, as of yet, Chef Spouse has NOT burned down the house. Fingers crossed. 

Food Lab: Celebration of America

We had another plan for a Food Lab for Saturday, January 23, but Mad Kitchen Scientist pointed out that it felt like it should be more of a celebratory thing, drawing from the heritage and background of our new President Joe Biden (Delaware, Ireland) and Vice President Kamala Harris (California, Jamaica, India).

We decided on the following menu:

Kerala hurricanes

Crab cakes with cilantro chutney and champagne

Fried plantains with mambo sauce (tostones because they weren't ripe enough to be maduros) 

Oxtail stew

Curried collard greens

Naan

California cabernet

"I cannot tell a lie" cherry pie

Irish whiskey

The table, decorated for Mardi Gras bien sur!

Although we didn't plan on it, we did end up doing a little labbing in the process.

The hurricane is a much-maligned drink, in part because too many people have only experienced it as red kool aid plus cheap rum. That is NOT a hurricane. A real hurricane is a sophisticated tiki drink that requires a variety of fresh juices, including passion fruit. What made it a "Kerala" hurricane? The addition of local DC Pratt Standard True Ginger Syrup, Kerala being the region of India where ginger was first grown commercially.

The crab cakes were a nod to Joe's Delaware roots. The key to a good crab cake is to have as little non-crab binder as possible. Chef Spouse generally goes with the minimum amount of panko bread crumbs and mayo that will allow him to form the cakes. Mad Kitchen Scientist had brought along some shrimp, which is another direction you can go: shrimp puree. We had a few extra, so we fried them up as a topper.

The plantains are a staple across the Caribbean, with the addition of Mambo sauce as a shout-out to Kamala's years at HU (You Know!). We ordered them from Baldor Foods, so of course the minimum 

order was 10 pounds. The only difference between tostones and maduros is the level of ripeness of the plantains, and with a 10 pound order, you would THINK that would be plenty for us to wait until some were completely ripe so we could try both kinds, and you'd be right, but we've had to intentionally restrain ourselves from frying up the last two. 

The oxtail stew was where we got into the labbing. Speaking of Baldor, that's also where we got the oxtails: 15 POUNDS of oxtails, and they did NOT come sectioned. Chef Spouse started with the cleaver, and quickly realized that was not going to cut it (see what I did there?). Fortunately, we remembered our Food Lab: Butchering lessons and immediately reached for the hack saw. 

Chef Spouse started with the Jamaican oxtail stew recipe from the NYT Cooking column, and it mostly worked well, although we did have a few notes. 

One, it takes MUCH longer than the three hours they list as a cooking time. Two, it should really be made over two days. On day one, take it up to the place in step five BEFORE you thicken the sauce. At that point, take it off the heat, remove the oxtails, let them cool, remove the meat from the bones, and chill the whole thing overnight. On day two, DEGREASE, reheat, and THEN make the water (or stock) based slurry to thicken the sauce. DO NOT DO IT AS A ROUX - which we did - because, trust me, it does not need any more fat added. 

Even day of, it was delicious - although greasy - and we were able to degrease some the next day before having the leftovers, although since we'd done a roux as a thickener, a lot of the fat did not separate to allow for degreasing. Oh, and it's DEFINITELY a "better the next day" type dish.

On the side, we had curried collards and naan (which was a throwback to our last lab), and accompanied the main meal with a lovely California cabernet. All of this, of course, in tribute to MADAM VICE PRESIDENT. 

Finally, in honor of a return to truth and accuracy to the White House (and to bad ass woman, White House press secretary Jen Psaki), a cherry pie made with a little Ginja cherry liqueur and MORE of the 40 pounds of sour cherries from our last Baldor order (there's a theme here) and a tot of a lovely gift from Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee (which I think is also now the official house Irish whiskey) Writer's Tears.

Welcome, President Biden and Vice President Harris! You have NO idea how happy we are to see you!