Alinea

Short version: Best meal I've ever had by leaps and bounds. Nothing else comes even remotely close.

Long version: Will come when photos are posted.

Shan Dong

We've had hand-made noodle dishes delivered from Shan Dong Mandarin Restaurant before, but today was the first time we got their specialty: Special Shan Dong Dumplings. They are 10 for $6.95 and are served with a very delicious soy, vinegar, garlic, red pepper sauce.

I LOVED THEM. I am still drooling. They are very rustic-looking; I'd post a pic but all the flickr ones have restrictive copyrights, so I don't want to post them. The first few matches from a search are the correct dumplings though, so you can see them there.

I also learned that Shan Dong cuisine is the variant to Chinese cuisine that crossed over into Korea, so jjajangmyun (zhia jiang mien) and cham pong (chao mao?) are originally Shan Dong dishes. Koreans also inherited gganpoonggi (sort of a sweet and sour chicken or shrimp dish) from Shan Dong.

I wish to have about 2 dozen of those dumplings. Right now. I think these are my favorite type of dumplings now, after xiao long bao (Shanghai soup dumplings).

Extra bonus is that they always deliver within 30 minutes. Even when they tell me it'll be 45 minutes, it's more like 25. :)

Me me me! (seppo)

Here's "The Omnivore's Hundred." A list of 100 things somebody thought people should eat before they die. They ask that you post all of the following and then mark it up. Begin:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

By far, the biggest category I miss out on are the alcoholic beverages. It's not even that I'm actively avoiding them, so much as I just don't really care all that much. It's a pretty odd list - some really lowbrow stuff, some really common stuff, some stuff I can't really imagine anyone wanting to eat (the clay, roadkill - stuff like that).

There's not really anything on the list I'm missing where I feel like I really, really have to have it.

The next question is, how much of that list can you do in one day?

A Delicious Sandwich

Ingredients:

• Sort of normal sandwich roll
• Pepper salami
• Thinly sliced turkey breast
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tablespoons mayo
• 1/4 avocado
• 1/2 roasted red pepper (I used one from a jar)
• some Pepper Jack
  

Finely mince garlic - probably using a press would give even better results. Mix with mayo. Let sit around a little bit. Cut roll in half, spread on mayo. One layer of salami, one layer of turkey, one layer Pepper Jack, one layer sliced roasted pepper bits, one layer thin slices of avocado. Oil bread, squash in a panini press (or do like I do and use a Foreman Grill). Cook 'till cheese is nicely melted and bread is thoroughly toasted. Chop in half on the bias, and go to town.

Cassoulet

Spent the better part of the day making a cassoulet from America's Test Kitchen. While it turned out well, it was pretty radically underseasoned. If I make this again (which I might), I'd definitely have to check the seasoning once the beans are done. We had the cassoulet with some broiled asparagus, grilled eggplant, and portobello mushrooms.

Earlier in the weekend, Seth made us some pineapple/pork skewers, which we had with some homemade guacamole and sour cream taco-style. Delicious! Saturday night, we had grilled kielbasa and some artichokes. I really love artichokes. Mmm.

Another picture of the cupcakes

Just because...

Cupcakes!

So. Friday, we made cupcakes. More accurately, Friday, Ei-Nyung, Lindsi and I made 144 cupcakes for a pair of friends' wedding. That's a picture of the finished result at the wedding. I can't say much about the cakes themselves - Ei-Nyung's been making cupcakes semi-regularly over and over again over the last year. This batch was the best she's ever made, fittingly enough.

For me, I ended up doing the frosting. There were two kinds - a vanilla cream cheese frosting and a chocolate ganache. The vanilla was really simple - 2 sticks of butter, a package o' cream cheese (both whipped 'till fluffy), a quarter vanilla bean, 2 tsp vanilla extract, and 4 cups sifted confectioners sugar. No cooking required, goes together quick, easy as pie. I could probably have used a touch more sugar, and the frosting could have stood to be a little stiffer (made piping out something that looked nice difficult), but the flavor was awesome and complemented the cupcakes perfectly.

I'd 'stolen' the recipe from http://cupcakeblog.com/, which has so many delicious recipes for cupcakes it boggles the mind, but even more recently, from Jess, who brought over some vanilla cupcakes with the very same frosting.

The second frosting was chocolate - the original request was for chocolate/chocolate, so I looked around for a bit and independently of the first recipe, ended up at the same blog again (before having tried Jess' cupcakes, this was the recipe I'd found that I'd wanted to try for the choco frosting). Still, since H wasn't into the dairy thing, I wanted to try something dairy-free/minimal if possible. One recipe I'd seen was from David Lebovitz, who wrote a *spectacular* ice cream book called The Perfect Scoop. This one, strangely, had you melt the chocolate *in* water, then add a little butter and some sugar. It turned... interesting. You could make a really nice smeared-on-with-a-knife frosting with the stuff, but piping it was, far as I could tell, impossible. Impossible for me, anyway.

One weird side-effect of that frosting was that if you put it into a canvas piping bag and squeezed, you would separate the fat from the water, and the fat would ooze out the pores in the bag. Gross, and the resulting frosting was... not great. REALLY chocolatey when you smeared it on a cake, but unusable for what we were doing.

So, the end result was that I went with the Cupcake Bakeshop recipe - 4oz bittersweet, 5oz semisweet, 2 tbsp butter, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1 cup cream, 2 cups sifted sugar. Heat the cream 'till bubbles form around the side, pour over the chopped chocolate. Wait a minute, stir to combine. Add vanilla, butter, mix till (at least mostly) combined. Wait 10 minutes (this is actually really, really, really, really, really important). Slap into stand mixer with whisk head, whisk in sugar, mix at high speed until thick enough to ribbon. By the time you get it into the pastry bag, it'll have set up enough to pipe.

I originally tried a triple recipe (at the beginning of the evening), but because when you triple a recipe any time-to-temperature sorts of conversions fall apart, it didn't turn out right. Those 10 minutes are there so that the icing cools down. If you mix it up to hot, it never sets up. I spent a couple hours trying to see if I could salvage that batch, then eventually gave up and made three single batches in series. Mix up frosting, pipe 20 cupcakes, wash (literally), rinse (literally), repeat.

All in all, it took way longer than it should have, though about an hour less than I'd mentally budgeted for the task. My piping technique got better as the night went on, but some of the early cupcakes were *ugly*.

We ended up topping the cupcakes with some little vanilla meringues we got from Trader Joes on a whim the evening before. Ended up being a real lifesaver. We'd tried making little fondant decorations - some little flower cutouts, but they looked a bit too cutesy. We then tried something more "realistic," which was a white calla lily thingamabob with a pair of pink and blue spheres contained within, but being novices with fondant, they were a bit more elegant in concept than execution. We ended up topping four of the cupcakes (the tops of the "trees") with the best of those. Part of the problem is that vanilla meringues are delicious, fondant really isn't. So, not really a problem - it all turned out for the best.

All in all, despite the lack of visual flair, the cupcakes ended up delicious, H&M were happy, the other guests seemed to enjoy them, and the wedding was a blast. Awesome.