Back to the Kitchen

After a week filled with a lot of restaurant dinners (Grill 23, Oga, Craft, Aureole, Skipjack’s and Bravo), and two weeks of pretty horrible blog posts, it’s time for me to get back to the kitchen. (My apologies for the crap I’ve been making you all read. It’s unacceptable, and it won’t happen again.)

Before I start, I do need to gush a little bit about Craft. Being a huge Top Chef fan, and by extension, a fan of all things Tom Colicchio, I was so excited to eat at Craft for the very first time. We’ll forget about the fact that halfway through the meal I realized I had eaten there before – minor detail. It was an amazing meal, from start to finish. It started with an amuse bouche of raw scallop on pumpkin puree, garnished with fennel frond. Yum. Then I ordered the lemon and arugula salad, the roasted quail and Brussels sprouts. For dessert, I had pumpkin crème brulee (being a lover of all things pumpkin). Everything was great, but I do need to point out that the quail was pretty over-salted. I have a very high salt tolerance, and I still found it very salty. Being that everything else on the table was perfect, it needs to be said that the quail would have landed Tom Colicchio on the wrong side of the judge’s table.

Salt aside, that meal reminded me of why I do this. Write this blog, that is. It is all for the love of food. I may not know much about it, I may not have much of a palate (this, I very recently became aware of), and I may not be that good of a cook. But I love to get in the kitchen and figure it all out. Why else do I have all this fancy cookware and knives?

Oh, that reminds me. I experienced my first knife casualty this past week. While I was drying dishes, my bread knife gave me a good slice. It bled like crazy, and for a good ten minutes I thought I was going to pass out. But I survived, and it turned out not be that bad of a wound. It’s nice to get the first accident out of the way!

So, back to being back in the kitchen… I had two very lovely meals with B this weekend (that’s all you’re getting out of me folks), and I decided it’s time to cook him dinner. In other words, it’s time to scare him away. Since I don’t actually want to scare him away, I decided to keep it simple and stick with what I know. Here’s the menu for this evening: Italian bread, garden salad (with homemade vinaigrette), spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce and meatballs, served with good quality parmagiano reggiano cheese and accompanied by a nice Cabernet Sauvignon.

I have two good recipes for marinara sauce. One is a quick 15 minute sauce, and the other is an all day affair (well, a few hours anyway). I chose the long version, and the sauce has been simmering all day. In my humble opinion, it smells and tastes delicious. My dad has commented that my sauce is too salty. Due to my previously noted high salt tolerance (and let’s be fair, he has an extremely low salt tolerance), I have no idea what he’s talking about. But to be safe, I used kosher salt since it’s far less salty than table or sea salt. While I did use dried Italian seasoning, I opted for fresh basil added at the end for a better flavor.

For the meatballs, I turned to the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. Granted, this cookbook totally screwed me with the clam chowder and cupcakes I made (ahem) for the tailgate clambake, it hadn’t failed me before so I’m giving it one last chance. I normally prefer meatballs that you cook entirely in the sauce, but they tend to fall apart and I’ve come to learn that’s really not a good thing. The primary reason I like that way better is that I can’t really stand browning meatballs in a frying pan and then baking them. Don’t ask me why. I just don’t. The ATK recipe calls for pretty much frying them in vegetable oil until they are completely cooked. I made sure to sample some, and they taste pretty good. But, I do have to admit, they may be slightly overbrowned. Not burnt – I would admit it that were the case. But, they are a little crunchy. I’m on the fence about serving them… I never actually promised the meatballs, so I could just serve him spaghetti.

While I think the sauce and meatballs taste pretty good, the true test will be whether or not B likes the dinner. Or more importantly whether I see him again after he eats it. We’ll see…