PeteCarpenter.com

2/26/2007

• After over a year of talking about, construction finally begins on our new closet. Hopefully, by the end of the week, the Lovely Suse will have a nice shiny new closet all for herself.
• I managed to wire an ethernet port in the finished basement so we now have crazy fast transfers from our Tivo down there. I like drilling holes and stripping wires.
• We saw Little Children over the weekend, featuring the Bad News Bears’ Kelly Leak. Also the author of the book it was adapted from lives around the corner from us, so it was really interesting to see all of the references to stuff around town.
• I had this craving for Middle Eastern this weekend, specifically, a falafel. I miss the ones from Sepal, which used to be close to our house, but has since moved on to the MIT campus. They have the best tasting and freshest sandwiches, and there’s nothing even close to that around here. We checked out Shawarma King on Friday, which did the trick, although still not as good as Sepal. We followed this up with making a grilled chicken fatoosh salad yesterday.
• Yes, maintaining my streak, I grilled outside last night in the snow. I have now grilled outdoors every month since last Spring. I plan on maintaining this streak for a very long time.
• In case you were wondering, this is how you make a pizza.
• I’m very excited about the prospect of a Sirius/XM merger. That way, I’ll get Sox games online.
• I finally got a new front emblem for my car. It looked pretty pathetic as all of the paint had chipped off. Of course, it took me wanting the car to look decent before trading it in for me to finally get off my ass and get one.

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More Pink!

Ah Valentine’s Day! A day of overpriced roses, uneaten boxes of chocolates, crappy prix fixe restaurant menus, and loads of frustrated men who feel forced to fall in line with expectations and cliches. What’s not to love? Well, starting from our first Valentine’s Day together, the Lovely Suse and I have done away with most of the normal hooplah and made up our own fun traditions. I can’t reveal some of them, but the one major one that I can tell you about is staying home and cooking an elaborate meal together, almost always a whole roasted fish. I don’t know what the symbolism is, but I guess there’s something romantic about having your dinner stare back at you or something. With fish restrictions in place due to the pregnancy, we made some concessions this year.

The first concession this year was an unexpected one, due to the weather. We got hammered by a snow/rain/sleet/slush storm on Valentine’s Day, so while the Lovely Suse cooked, I sloshed around in the messy stuff trying desperately to shovel/hack/snowblow the stuff from our and our neighbor’s driveway. I came inside covered in sweat and my hair all over the place. Not exactly romantic. Still, we soldiered on and the Lovely Suse did most of the cooking, so great success. Inspired by a recent meal at August, where one of our dishes was a flatbread layered with roasted beets, spiced yogurt, smoked Parmesan, and dill, we decided to make a couscous based on the same flavors. The beets were simply roasted in the oven with a little salt and olive oil, roughly chopped, and added to the Israeli couscous with lemon juice, olive oil, dill, and scallions. I swear, we had no idea that it would turn the couscous a flaming pink color, but seeing as how it was Valentine’s Day, we went with it. To continue the pink theme, some fennel, cumin,and coriander crusted roast wild salmon topped the couscous, and to finish it all off, some dill and lemon spiked yogurt, and a salad of cucumbers and radishes (more pink!). Holy crap, that’s a lot of pink. But it was pretty frigging delicious. Lots of cool, crunchy, creamy flavors, beautifully fresh on a miserable Winter’s night.

Now it was dessert time. For the past couple of year, the dessert that we couldn’t get out of our heads (and 2004″ winner of best dessert) was the Vanilla Panna Cotta with Basil Coulis and Passion fruit from Brunoise in Montreal. We’re not huge dessert eaters, usually going for seasonal sorbets and ice creams and the like, but this was one dessert that sounded so interesting that we had to try it. One bite, and we both sort of just looked at each other in stunned silence, took another bite, and then “Holy crap, this is unbelievable.” The flavors just mesh together so well, with the unexpected basil working perfectly with the sweet and tart passion fruit and the super-creamy panna cotta. It’s been over two years since we had it, and we still talk about it. Since we haven’t been able to make it back to Montreal, it was time to attempt to make it on our own.

The panna cotta part was easy. Panna cotta literally means “cooked cream”, which is essentially what it is. Cream, milk, and sugar simmered briefly, and then solidified with some gelatin and chilled. We used this recipe which we halved. Super simple, and it worked like a charm. Next, came the basil syrup. We made a simple syrup, which is equal parts water and sugar, simmered until all of the sugar is dissolved, turned off the heat, and then threw in a handful of fresh chopped basil. After letting it steep for about 15 minutes, we threw the whole thing into the blender, whizzed it up, and then poured it through a fine mesh strainer to leave us with a deep green syrup with small flecks of the basil.

Finally came the passion fruit. This is the biggest challenge of this dish since we find passion fruits at Russo’s for about a month out of the year, and they’re often small, under ripe,and expensive. The pickings were slim, but I took my chances on a slighly wrinkled one (they’re ripe when wrinkled), and crossed my fingers. I brought it home, sliced it in half, and success! Perfectly ripe oozing flesh and seeds. We were in business.

At this point, assembly is a snap. Pour the syrup over the panna cotta, spoon the passion fruit on top, grab two spoons, and get eating. While not completely as transcendent as the original, it was pretty fricking outstanding, and brought us back to that meal in Montreal. So despite the snow and muck and sweat and messy hair, it turned out to be a another great Valentine’s Day dinner,and nary a rose or a cheesey proposal or box of chocolates in sight.

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