Hollandaise Sauce

Yesterday, we celebrated my mom and her husband's birthdays by having them over for brunch. Brunch is my favorite meal, I think. It's so special that it takes the place of two meals! I'm also usually at my best midday- by the evening I'm pretty tired (Luke keeps us on our toes). I wanted to come up with something special, yet not too time-consuming. My mom is a fan of french food, and Eric likes english muffins and we all love salmon. Salmon eggs benedict it is!

I've never made a hollandaise sauce, and I probably should have practiced in advance. I used Mark Bittman's recipe, and while I adore his writing style and find his recipes easy to follow, I think I failed somewhere along the way. It tasted great (I added extra lemon to complement the salmon) but it was slightly curdled. I think I kept it over the heat too long? The recipe calls for three egg yolks and nearly a stick of butter, so it's definitely a fancy treat rather than an every-day sauce, but I'd try it again, since the execution of the entire meal is relatively simple.

I topped a perfectly-poached egg (I finally figured out how to poach the damn things without them looking like dying jellyfish) with the (slightly lumpy) sauce, and perched it on smoked salmon atop a toasted english muffin. I sauteed cherry tomatoes with rosemary and scattered them around, and served it with a side of sauteed chard. 

I adore leafy greens- I usually cook them the same way, regardless of type: chard, kale, mustard greens, sukuma wiki- by sauteeing them in a fat (olive oil or butter) with minced garlic, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and a tiny drizzle of honey. The honey is key, I think. It balances the bitterness of the green and mellows out the lemon, and really rounds out the dish. 

I think the meal was a hit despite the sauce. Next time, I'll make the hollandaise sauce in an enamel pot and keep the heat as low as possible. Any other tips? 

Making a comeback!

It's been a while. Oddly enough, I've been kind of busy. Who knew a baby would take up so much time? He's a pretty cute distraction from the blog, though.

Our food adventuring ground to a halt before and after Luke arrived, and I've just regained the energy to play around in the kitchen again. I've got itchy feet, but since we won't be travelling anywhere soon, I'm planning to continue exploring the world of food from my kitchen and neighborhood.

This blog started in January 2009, when I was an antsy, vaguely unmotivated grad student. I got the idea to set a cooking challenge for myself, selected 20-odd dishes to learn how to make, and muddled my way through fun dishes such as tamales, mole, dolmades, and potstickers. It was fun, and overall (I think) a success- I learned a lot of new techniques and more importantly- I gained a lot of confidence in the kitchen. I was enthusiastic about food before, but I think learning how to make seemingly complicated dishes has heightened my appreciation of various cuisines.

Then, we moved. To rural Kenya. It was a challenge to cook fancy and familiar foods there, but I enjoyed having something to do while Nathan worked and I job-searched. Then I got pregnant and my enjoyment of food disintegrated into a sad, dismal heap. It took a while to regain my tastebuds and a stable stomach, but in the mean time, I enjoyed blogging about horrible train rides, Kenyan weddings, and hyenas.

But now! I'm back! I'm hungry, I'm slightly less sleep-deprived, and I have a baby who is about to start eating solid foods! Not only that, but I'm living in a house with a gloriously huge kitchen complete with a 6-burner gas stove. Six burners! Imagine!

Needless to say, I'm inspired, and I'm looking forward to lots more food explorations in 2012. I've been concocting a plan for the next year's worth of culinary adventures and I'm excited to learn more kitchen-y tricks this next year.

Did you notice a difference in the blog? It's pretty, yes?! I gave Nathan free reign over the design of the blog and he cooked up this beautiful design. I love it, and the new look makes me look forward to more blogging. (Unfortunately my photo quality probably won't get better anytime soon, since my best and most convenient camera is my iPhone.)

I'll be back soon to share my personal food challenge for 2012- I'm looking forward to exploring food from a range of experiences: from my stovetop to restaurant visits, from the farm to my kitchen, and exploring new (to me) cultures, food-related books, and some ethical food dilemmas as well!

Catching up: recent food adventures

On a lighter note, since my last blog entry was more serious...

... I thought I'd briefly post some pictures of recent meals.

I've been food-blog-crushing on Joy the Baker for a while, and when she posted this recipe for Hasselback potatoes I had to try it. Truly revolutionary- and how pretty and fancy do those potatoes look? I pretty much ignored her pesto recipe because we found huge bunches of basil for about $0.25 each in Nairobi, so we've been making massive batches of super-cheap pesto (basil+lemon zest+ lemon juice+pepper+salt+olive oil+local macadamia nuts). But the potato part? Dead on. So yummy. We highly recommend. It's pretty simple (and simpler if you use store-bought pesto but not *quite* as yummy) and looks gorgeous on a plate! 

Remember when I made mole? I brought some chipotle and pasilla chiles with us to Kenya, and have made several giant batches of sauce recently. Nathan recently learned how to make chapatti (which are a common food item here) and quickly altered the recipe to be less oily and made with more whole wheat flour, resulting in: tortillas! Hooray! We've been having lots of chicken, mole sauce, black beans, sukuma wiki, and avocado soft tacos. I'm trying to up my protein intake, ya know, for the baby, and the mole totally does the trick! 

Pumpkin pie. From scratch. I roasted a pumpkin, Nathan magically found condensed milk at a store in Nairobi, and of course I had all the necessary spices. Nathan also contributed by making the crust, since I lack the patience to make pie crust. We made one pie for a Thanksgiving celebration and immediately made another a few days later- and yup, that's real whipped cream! 

Also from Thanksgiving- we hosted one of Nathan's bosses and several of his PhD students and Kenyan co-workers for their first Thanksgiving celebration- we rotisseried a chicken, I made the aforementioned pie, mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy (so good!), and a rice pilaf thing with butternut squash, sukuma wiki (the world's most versatile veggie!), carmelized onions, cranberries (sent from the states!) and balsamic reduction. It was tasty, too. 

This is Nathan's doing. I believe it was in the midst of my first trimester anti-food period, and Nathan took up the slack and did a lot of the cooking. He made potato cakes with (you guessed it) sukuma wiki, cheese, and seasonings, served with a side of lime-and-chili-roasted broccoli. It was amazing and probably the healthiest thing I'd eaten in a month. (Seriously.) 

Somewhat less food-related, but still fun- we celebrated Geemi's birthday on New Years Eve out at Fisi Camp, and I made him his first birthday cake. As far as I can tell, many Kenyans aren't big on sweets, but the cake was a huge hit with at least the American researchers. It was my first layer cake, too... chocolate with raspberry filling and chocolate buttercream frosting. It was incredibly rich and perhaps too dense but the flavors were great. I went through a brief chocolate cupcake phase and I've discovered that adding cinnamon to any basic chocolate batter recipe makes the end result that much better. 

For Geemi's birthday gift, we surprised him with a bee suit- he loves honey and frequently assists people with honey collecting. Until the bee suit, he did it entirely unprotected (by which I mean... he often just wore his skivvies so that he wouldn't get bees trapped under his clothes.) We're hoping the bee suit will prevent some stings!

The other night Nathan roasted potatoes, carrots, and green beans in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and herbs d'Provence. Totally delicious. I'd never thought of roasting veggies in balsamic vinegar as well as olive oil until we were recently served it at Fisi Camp, and it's delicious. It adds a sweet, earthy, tangy touch. 

One of Nathan's bosses briefly visited a few weeks ago and brought us two giant jars of totally mind-blowingly good Dutch peanut butter. I immediately turned the peanut butter into dessert by dipping it in dark chocolate. We call these creations "Safari Poops" which only makes sense if you know what gazelle and zebra poos look like:

I don't know exactly what animals made all the poops- but the smallest on the right are tiny dikdik poos, and the large ones are zebra poos. The others are assorted ungulate poos, like impala, thomson's gazelle, and grant's gazelle. 

Yes. That's fondue. We made fondue! In Narok! We were pretty excited. We found semi-decent gruyere at the Nakumatt in Nairobi, and some ok sharp-ish cheddar cheese at a dairy in Eldoret. (Long story short: the trucking town of Eldoret in Western Kenya has a dairy which makes cheese, yogurt and ice cream. The cheese ranged from awful (the blue cheese) to ok, and we accidentally (language barrier) bought 2 kilograms (that's 4.4 lbs) of cheddar and Derbyshire cheese.) Anyhow! I turned some of this into a fondue and we gorged. So yummy! In retrospect, I should have burned the alcohol of the white wine off a little better because it was potent. Altogether though, the fondue was a total treat! 

And, who can resist a picture of a cute tiny black backed jackal? They really are surprisingly small- maybe 15-20 lbs or so. This little guy was gnawing on a snack (dead bird, I think?) just off the road and couldn't be interrupted from his meal to run away, so we stopped and watch him munch for a while.