Little Nuggets of Failure

I started this blog post on such a positive note and have had to go back and revise to set the tone.

We screwed up. With just about everything. Kind of. (Mostly. It was hilarious.~Rei)

These are nuggets of failure that should have been beautiful pasta noodles.

The little nuggets of failure refer to the pasta. I couldn’t recover after failing to follow the directions on a recipe I’ve successfully made dozens of times. Rei is laughing hysterically and manically (Yeah, at that point I had kind of lost my marbles. They were in the failure of a dinner we were preparing~Rei) at the stove attempting to save the shallot sauce that isn’t turning out well either. (Spoiler alert: it tasted great with the lamb!)

But back to the original post. We’ll eat and report back once we are done. Hopefully we aren’t ordering pizza as a result of our failures tonight. (Crisis averted!)

Back to the (First) Beginning

Rei got to choose the menu tonight and opted to cook with Laura Calder and Julia Child but didn’t want to strictly to adhere to any particular recipe. (Spoiler: bad decision) (I would like the record to note that I, in fact, did not say that I didn’t want to follow a recipe. That was a miscommunication on both of our parts. lmao~Rei)

After an afternoon of shopping (I have a keynote next weekend and needed a new outfit), we got to work. Menu: roasted lamb (a la Julia) with shallot sauce (a la Laura Calder), home made pasta (not French), tomatoes Provencal (a la Laura Calder) and for dessert, apple tarts (shown above) with creme fraiche ice cream.

Rei didn’t even bother to follow the pie crust recipe and went with their own from memory. The did the same with the apple pie filling and decided to dice the apples and add lemon juice, ginger, and brown sugar. (To be fair, I have made that pie crust dozens, if not hundreds, of times. It turned out great, for all y’all’s information. I never really follow a recipe with the filling, and Laura Calder’s cookbook was extremely vague about that particular point as well.~Rei)

They are now in the oven and look beautiful. The tarts, not Rei. (You were half right. I am not in the oven, but I am indeed beautiful~Rei) (No comment~Terri)(Okay, you got me. I’m just incredibly handsome~Rei)

Rei quickly whipped up the base for the ice cream with creme fraiche, cream, sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest and popped it into the Cuisinart ice cream maker that is about is old as my marriage. It took all of five minutes from what I could tell. (Just got a taste and man is that creamy and tasty!)

(Note to self and anyone else who makes Laura Calder’s creme fraiche ice cream: the lemon zest clumps together in the mixer, so beware. You might want to forgo the zest for more lemon juice, or simply discard the zest completely. Your choice, though~Rei)

I was distracted by the lamb that needed to be basted with butter and oil every five minutes (and a call from my bestie Jacqueline). After 20 minutes I dropped the temp down from 450 to 350 and spread roughly chopped onions and carrots in the bottom of the pan. My stomach is growling from yummy smells coming from the oven.

Oh, we thought we were so on target. Sigh!

Rei has moved on to the tomatoes and is combining goat cheese with fresh parsley to be stuffed into the tomatoes. Rei may have over-cheesed them but really, can you ever have too much cheese? (Yes you can) (No, you can’t~Rei) (Rei, can you say omelettes?~Terri)

I made the dough for the pasta about an hour ago and totally screwed it up. I’ve made this recipe dozens of times and honestly don’t know where my brain was. It calls for six egg yolks plus 2 whole eggs and for some reason I reversed it. I added some extra flour and olive oil and have my fingers crossed that I can salvage the dough. (Spoiler alert: complete and total failure!) (It was hysterical~Rei)

Later I will roll it out by hand, cut it with a knife and pop it into the freezer until we are ready to cook it. (Spoiler: it never made it to the freezer. It barely made it into the salted boiling water)

As we wait for things to cook I thought I’d share the cookbooks we are cooking from tonight. I purchased French Food at Home many years ago after seeing Laura on some cooking show.

I only made a few things out of it like the Spiced Almonds (great recipe) and the Celery Radish Butter Salt which we have as an appetizer every once in a while. But for some reason I felt compelled to highlight sections in yellow and even took it to France for our 2013 and 2015 home exchanges. (The fact that Mom highlighted these sections infuriates me so much as a book lover; I hate it when people highlight in books. Big pet peeve alert, everybody~Rei) (Rei, get over it!~Terri)

The kids got me the other one for Mother’s Day one year. (When? I don’t remember that at all to be honest~Rei). It’s glossy has beautiful pictures and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever cooked from it. I am glad Rei decided to find recipes from these for tonight. I don’t like to neglect my cookbooks. Plus, if I don’t use them, Zeke may decide to purge them to make room for something else. (Well, that means room for more cookbooks, though!~Rei)(Rei, you are not wrong. ROFL~Terri)

Tonight’s music selection is Madonna. Rei had heard of Madonna but had only heard one of her songs and that was in the Pitch Perfect movie. We later moved onto the soundtrack from The Greatest Showman when things were going sideways.

Before I let Rei wrap this up, I did need to share that I didn’t screw up the lamb. It turned out perfectly as depicted above. (It was indeed delicious~Rei)

Dinner looked good but damn, the pasta was disgusting. Our chickens will enjoy it. (At the dinner table, I took one bite of it and immediately regretted it. It was all chewy and just overall gross. Mom saw my face and started laughing, which caused me to laugh and almost choke, so be warned, if you fuck up your pasta, you might choke and die.~Rei) (Well, the dog liked it just fine~Terri)

And the dessert was lovely. Rei caramelized the top of the apples with some cinnamon and sugar and a little blowtorch. The ice cream was tangy and the perfect compliment to the apples.

And with that Rei, want to wrap us up?

Oh goodness, where to start? Today was an adventure. A horrific, hysterical adventure. (With lots of laughter, because if you don’t laugh, you cry.~Terri)

The thing is, everything didn’t start to go downhill until we were a decent way into cooking. Sure, Mom fucked up the pasta (which I will totally give her so much shit for), but I assumed that everything would be fine in the end. It wasn’t.

After that, I finished the tartlets, and they went into the oven. I had no reason to suspect that they wouldn't turn out fabulously. Another note to self: don’t listen to Laura Calder when she says it’s okay to put uncooked fruit into the oven in the tart crusts. She is a lying liar who lies. COOK THE DAMN FRUIT. (Rei, do these cookbooks need to go into the lending library out front? Remember that the spiced almond recipe is in one of them. ~Terri)

Seriously, though, cook your filling so it’s nice and soupy and soft, then blind bake your crust so it’s nice and golden and crispy, then cook it together so it’s nice and delicious and NOT A FRICKING DISASTER. (Rei, you are overreacting…they were only mildly off putting.~Terri)

Anyways, I did the tomatoes and that was pretty uneventful, then I took a little break. I checked my phone, and then I checked the recipe for the sauce (Mom did the lamb and it was beautiful) only to see that was supposed to take 45 minutes to make the darn stuff.

So I hop to that, as it is already six o’clock, and try my best. I must not have put in enough wine, because the pan is dry in like 20 minutes. What the fuck? So I added more wine, and again it disappears quickly. The directions specifically said to boil the sauce, so the pan isn’t on the wrong heat or anything…so what did I do wrong, you might ask?

I have no idea. They say hindsight is 20/20 but I’ve needed glasses in recent times. I was probably not patient enough or something (that kind of thing is usually my Achilles heel).

We ended up totally changing the sauce (by adding chicken broth, cream, some of the oil from the pan we roasted the lamb in, and a general air of “we’re totally fucking this up and it’s gonna backfire anyways so we might as well try what we can just for the hell of it”).(Yep, that pretty much sums it up!~Terri)

It separated. A lot. Don’t try this at home, kids, it’s a nightmare.

The sauce ended up being really good on the lamb, though, so that was a plus. That being said, I’m glad that dinner was over. The pasta was inedible, the tomatoes were really good in my opinion (Mom doesn’t like goat cheese as much as me, so she didn’t care for the tomatoes), and the lamb was good with the sauce and kinda chewy (we fed a couple of the grislier bites to the dog). (She was VERY happy!~Terri) Dessert was fine, with the ice cream being the star of the show. The tartlets were mediocre at best.

Alright, Mom wants to go to bed so I shall wrap this up so she can go through one more time before posting! (It’s not even 8:30 pm, but it’s been a hell of a day.)(And I have a really good book to read~Terri)

Remember: Even the perfect, all-knowing, fantastic gods/goddesses — who are incredibly internet famous — that share their experience with all of you lowly humble humans in the magical realm of cooking (that’s us, by the way) can fuck up tremendously. And yes, I laughed so hard at my perfect title for the pasta — “Little Nuggets of Failure(TM)” — that I snorted and almost choked again. Seriously, what was with me and choking because of the pasta tonight? (I don’t know. Maybe you need sleep.~Terri)

Okay, until next time, have a halpierentic day! (Rei, you need to come up with made up words that make more sense. My friends are asking about these things.~Terri)

Rei and Terri