Insanity.

As Richt even alluded to in a press conference not too long ago, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. As much as I'm sure there will be some coach bashing after UGA embarrassed themselves against FU (again) giving up 41 points (again), that wasn't the problem. It was discipline, plain and simple.
The refs are not going to be helping UGA for a long time, and FU gets away with a lot. I though for sure Penn Wagers would be officiating this game, but when I saw him calling something in the Auburn/Ole Miss game, I thought we might actually have a chance. Richt got in their ear a little bit, but it wasn't enough. What's maybe not so crazy is that Florida had the perfect gameplan: sit back, do their thing, and watch us implode. They played well, particularly on special teams, but they didn't have to beat us. They did, but we helped take care of that ourselves.
I hope the seniors enjoyed the black helmets and black pants. We're going to catch hell and ridicule for it as a desparation move. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. It was fun, but considering the weather that we were about to be facing, you have to think it was the wrong thing to do. Black absorbs heat, right?
A final word about the coaches. There's going to be a lot of talk about how bad the coaching was. Florida came out running a different offense, heavy on misdirection that was eating us up for their first two drives, but noticeably, Marinez made the proper adjustment and we started holding them. Bobo and company had the run offense going, inexplicably against the best defense in the country. The playcalling was 90% effective, subject to execution. The special teams play was there. Good kickoffs, decent coverage, even success in the directional kick.
This game was yet another in the many implosions we've seen this season. Penalty after penalty, and many of them couldn't have come at worse times. Joe Cox is a gunslinger, but like the dude in Top Gun said: "Son, your ego's writing checks your body just can't cash." I have not doubt about his heart as a DGD. But for every brilliant flash, we've seen at least as much that is inexplicable. 3 interceptions, and he has yet to have a game where he doesn't throw a pick. The attempted throw aways that go to a defender for an easy pick. The pressure that he never sees and gets plowed. The wide open receiver that he doesn't throw to, opting instead for the guy in quadruple coverage. As good as some of the blocking was, you can point out just as many blown assignments that have just about gotten Cox killed.
This loss won't be about bad scheme or playcalling. This was about bad decisions and lack of discipline. I don't know who to pin that one on, and frankly I don't care. The bottom line for me is that since 1991, we've beaten UF 3 times. Got that? 3. Despite 2 coaching changes since I graduated from high school, NOTHING HAS CHANGED. I'm tired of coming up with commentary or suggestions. I just know that whatever we're doing now isn't working, and it would be insanity to think that a different result would come from doing the same thing over. And over.

Don't send the lifeboat. I'm going down with the ship, wallowing and basking in the masochism and perpetual self-inflicted misery that appears to be mandatory to be a Georgia football fan. If only the black and gold nerds could beat the white and gold nerds tonight in the game down the street (GT vs Vandy).

Halloween-UGA vs FU

Nothing to say other than I'm dressing as an eternal optimist. That's right, I'm a UGA fan that thinks we can win today!

GO DAWGS!!!!!!! HBTD, GATA!!!!!!

Filet mignon with sauce Bernaise

Filet mignon, one of the most coveted pieces of meat, is awesomely tender, but low on flavor. That's probably why you see it served with sauce just about everywhere you go. Almost uniformly, the sauce is based on some fat emulsion because fat provides an irreplacable combination of flavor and mouthfeel.

Filet mignon with sauce Bernaise

Bernaise sauce is an augmentation of Hollandaise sauce adding shallot, herbs like chervil and tarragon, white wine, and white wine vinegar. Hollandaise sauce, in its purest form, is an emulsion of butter and egg yolks. It's like mayonnaise made with butter instead of oil. The technique to make it is different because to get butter in liquid form, it takes heat, and heat scrambles eggs.

For the filet, dry well, lightly oil and season as you wish with dry ingredients. Salt and pepper are really all you need, but you can put other stuff on there.
Sear in a heavy-bottom pan over high heat, open your windows or turn on your hood ventilation system. My preference is rare to medium rare.
Take the filet out, set it aside and let it rest on a wire rack about 5-10 minutes, save the juice if there is any. This should be made to order, and will take about 10 minutes total, depending on whether you already have them seasoned and your pan is ready to go. The reason to rest meat on a rack (particularly with a temperature sensitive meat like filet) is to prevent steam from being trapped on one side (the down side on the plate) and either overcooking or cooking unevenly.

For the sauce, get your Hollandaise setup with a simmering sauce pan of water, ice bath in the sink, and a non-reactive mixing bowl, preferably steel or something that will cool quickly.
Mince 1 tbsp of shallot, put in a saucepan with 1/2 cup of white wine (dry preferable over sweet) and white wine vinegar. Reduce by at least 1/2. That's your augmentation, although I didn't have the herbs. Since I was serving with salad (and I didn't have chervil), I left it out.
Strain and add that to your melted butter (about 1.5 to 2 sticks, yeah, no joke) and keep it warm.
Take 3 egg yolks, a little salt, a little pepper, 1 tbsp of lemon juice +/- 1/2 tbsp of water and whisk in your steel bowl. Dice up a couple of tbsp of cold butter and add to the egg yolks. Put this over your simmering water and start whisking. If it gets too hot, take it off heat. If you don't use the double boiler techique, you could really get it too hot, and that's where the ice bath comes in handy to cool it quickly. Curiously, the melting butter can look a little like scrambled eggs, but don't be dissuaded- press on! When you're done with this part, you should have a nice sticky yellow goo at the bottom of your pan.

To this you'll emulsify the melted butter/shallot-wine-wine vinegar reduction, slowly at first (drop by drop) until you get it started, then faster towards the end until you get the consistency you want. The only thing I can say about the consistency is that you want smooth and creamy like a salad dressing as opposed to thick like mayo. Check the Julia Childs instructions on classic Hollandaise for full instructions including bail out tips if you screw it up.

A little time consuming, but the ingredients are pretty cheap. Done that way, it's worth about 20-30 bucks per plate at the restaurant if you can even find it.
Below I've served it with sweet potato gnocchi and a basic green salad with balsamic vinaigrette.

From Drop Box

Ridin' on empty: roux part deux

Just as a follow up to MAB's post, I wanted to put up some pictures of a roux that we made for a recent gumbo. If you'll recall the Seinfeld episode when Kramer and the guy from the car lot drove the demo until it ran out of gas, it's like that. Go until you can't stand it, then go a little more. "I've never felt so alive!"

For roux ingredients, you have some choices. It's going to be about equal parts by weight of flour and fat (butter, oil, or animal fat), and the amount will vary on how much you're going to make. A rough estimate is about 1-2 oz of fat to each quart of final product. I used either a 5.5 qt or 8qt enameled cast iron dutch oven and it's pretty full. For that, I used a whole stick of unsalted butter, and I added flour to it until it had the consistency of something between heavy cream and pudding. Clarified butter might be better, but requires an extra step. I heated it up until it was barely bubbling, stirring the whole while for about 20-30 minutes, maybe longer.

White Roux

From Drop Box

Blond Roux

From Drop Box

Brown Roux

From Drop Box

Brick Roux/Dark Brown Roux

From Drop Box

It goes really slowly, then it goes really quick, as depicted above. That's why you have to hover because there's a fine line between perfect vs burnt and ruined. Rurnt. Also remember that it will continue to cook when you add the veggies.
The color should be more like chocolate sauce before you throw the trinity veggies in (onion, celery, green pepper). Throw the veggies in and give them a few minutes to soften, then add the stock. From there, add the meat in reverse order of cooking time. Whatever you can find in the bayou or the ditch out back will do. While you're at it, throw some alligator meat in. I don't think I've seen any recipes without Andouille sausage.

Final notes

1. The roux provides taste, color, and thickening. Using a reduction method would require several gallons of stock and a lot of time, but could be done. Add okra if you can, because okra does the same with regard to thickening. Finally, file' powder is added just prior to serving which has an interesting aromatic flavor, but also is a thickening agent. In the end, the consistency is up to you, but the thicker the better. Think stew, not soup.
2. Oil-based roux is a little easier to work with because butter burns so easily. You can also work with it at higher temperature than you can the butter based roux.
   
3. The darker the roux, the less the thickening, the more the flavor. If you want to go really dark, you'll need more roux to get the same thickening.
   
4. Black flecks=burned=throw it out, start over. Those burned pieces will make it taste awful. The flavor of the dark roux will be something like toasted chocolate coffee. With butter!
5. The gumbo "base" is made when you soften your veggies and add stock and aromatics. From there it's a matter of adding the meat. You can stop at this stage, simmer for an hour or two, depending on how meticulous you were with your stock.
6. The next time I make it, I'm going to sautee the uncooked meats and add them with the cooking liquor/pan sauce towards the end. Again, the better the stock is to start with, the less you have to rely on the added meats to provide an extra layer of flavor.
   
7. Adding beer is fine, but it's probably a cheat to make the gumbo look darker. Think Abita Turbo Dog or Guinness, not Miller Lite.
8. Does the technique of making a roux then adding a flavorful stock sound familiar? It should because it's the basis of bechamel/veloute'. Gumbo is a veloute' (roux + stock) based on a dark roux with Cajun/Creole veggies and meats, served over rice. Cajun style is dark, Creole is a little lighter, don't forget the tomatoes.
   

Dinner party with the Newmans

Danny and Meredith dropped in last Saturday for a dinner party/wine tasting at our house. I made 4 simple dishes, all of which were quite good. The 3 appetizer types will definitely be featured time and again at future JW-led events.

1. Salmon cornets ala the French Laundry, super easy, damn good. Cheated on the cornets and bought these crunchy little pastry cups from the Fresh Market. I actually preferred these to the overly buttery cornets that Keller makes.

2. Ceci bruschetta, the amuse buche that Batali serves at Babbo... Since there was only 4 people, I actually used the $250 basalmic Jennifer bought me for Christmas last year...decadent.

3. Zucchini crudo salad...details on Ruhlman's blog. This is wonderful, please try it!

The main dish was a pan-seared grass fed petit filet topped with a bacon/mushroom/red wine demi with pan-roasted white asparagus.

Had a bit much to drink, so the main dish could have probably been prepared better. I made ala minute after course 3 and after 6 glasses of the vino.

I Tore My Rotator Cuff Making Roux

I tore my rotator cuff making roux
The whisks were more than a few
It cooked for an hour
I required a shower
To clean my sausage for the stew.

I’ve attempted, successfully I might add, to make a gumbo on only three occasions. The first two were magnificent. The third (last week), was acceptable, but not up to my expectations. The first two were for tailgating at Georgia games, and included some interesting ingredients. The last was during the family mountain trip on the night assigned to Laura and me for dinner. I got no complaints from the adults, but I was completely disappointed with the final product.

The History
Round 1, I made a stock with chicken, whole crawfish, and shrimp shells, along with the customary root vegetables (onion, leeks, carrots), peppercorns, bay leaves, and thyme. It was a 4-hour stock, and was delicious. For the gumbo, I included chicken, andouille sausage, and some quail that my good buddy Danny Newman shot. Quite good.

Round 2 involved making a brown chicken stock (chicken browned in the oven and then simmered on the range with leeks, carrots, onions, bay leaves, thyme, peppercorns) and a seafood stock (shrimp shells and crab leg shells). The gumbo included chicken, andouille sausage, crawfish tails (meat only), and alligator sausage. Again, this was good.

Round 3 involved the same brown chicken stock above, no seafood stock was used. The gumbo included chicken and andouille, both of which were browned in the oven. Here’s where I made the mistake. In round one and two, the chicken was brown, but the sausage was not. I was using an unfamiliar stove, and left the sausage to brown while I had a glass of wine and walked to the nearby raging river (this was in the TN mountains) to relax. We came back early to check the sausage only to realize it was overcooked. I knew better than to leave it, but needed to relax for a while. Lesson Learned: Never leave your sausage unattended (I know – “that’s what she said!”).

Roux
Now, about that roux. I make roux scared. Not that I scare the roux. It scares me, cause I’ve read too many gumbo recipes that say “if ya see black specks while makin’ yer roux, throw that mess out – iss dun burnt up.” Since I like the dark variety, it takes quite a while on low(er) heat. I could crank it up and get it done in about 25 minutes. On low(er) it takes close to an hour. Hence the rotator cuff incident. When “they” say stir constantly, “they” ain’t kiddin’. You never put your whisk down. Or your roux paddle. Yeah, I never heard of one either. There's a crawfish paddle and a gumbo paddle too. BS if you ask me, but here's a link if you are interested - http://www.cajunbrands.com/proddetail.asp?prod=KMays%2DPaddles&cat=103.

My roux has a wonderful nutty aroma and flavor, and has the color of the bottom of the Guinness foam layer, just before it hits the liquid layer. It has lost most of its thickening power at this point, but it adds a wonderful flavor to the gumbo. Without it, Round 3 would have been hassenpfeffer without the rabbit.

MAB

Surf and surf: tuna and scallops with an asian twist

Check PBS, Eric Ripert (famed chef of Le Bernardin in NYC) has a new show out entitled "Avec Eric." The first episode I saw is mostly gushing over a local garden and it restaurant in California where s**t like that can happen. I'd wager to guess that it's not that feasible in Missouri, Tennessee, or Georgia for that matter.
The good part of the show is that at the end, he demonstrates his cooking technique for various cuts of seafood, and let me just say that there are few in this country that can rival the technique. If you watched Top Chef last season (and if you didn't you should have if you are interested in cooking) the contestants went to his restaurant in NYC, tasted his dishes, and the challenge was to reproduce them as best they could. We do that all the time, but this was on an incredibly different level.
Digression: Ripert demonstrated a slightly Asian style of cooking salmon that looked awesome. He demonstrated that making a marinade was not about making emulsion, it's a broken sauce with fat on top (oil).
His recipe called for salmon marinated in soy sauce, ginger, and olive oil, seared on the "flat top" (his stove top searing station) over peas and pea shoots with a sauce based on the marinade. Salmon didn't look as good as the tuna today, and we were in the mood for some scallops, so what the heck.

"Avec Eric" surf and surf (tuna and scallops)

Tuna: fresh 3/4 pound steak
Scallops: 1 pound of U6 (about 6 total)
3 bunches of baby bok choy

Marinade for tuna
brunoise of ginger, about 1/2 cup
1/2 and 1/2 soy sauce and EVOO to just cover fish in a tight dish
**lay off the salt, the soy sauce probably has all you'll need

**(see problem below) Marinade for scallops
Yuzu and olive oil, same ratio and coverage as before
salt, pepper to taste

To cook with:
Sautee pan for both. This will be a future post: what pan should I cook ____ with? These fish are best when they stay cold until cooked, and they need a heavy pan that holds high heat and won't cool off when fresh cold fish is applied. Oil or fat well (use EVOO or butter or a mixture of both, up to you!), and bring to at least medium high heat.

**Problem!!! The marinade for the scallops was the wrong thing to do. Why? Well, it made the scallops "wet" and the wet surface=no browning. It doesn't matter because they cooked properly thanks to raging high heat, but they didn't brown the way I had intended. In retrospect it would have been better to dry them well, season with pepper only, and then sear the heck out of 'em. They were still tasty, but could have been better. Lesson learned.

The tuna was first, I seared it like crazy on the cast iron griddle on my stove top. It worked great, but splattered EVERYWHERE and I probably will never use it again for that. 2-3 minutes per side, give about 2-3 mm of doneness on each side (just look at the thing), and take it off rare. This you can do, of course, because you got a respectable piece of fish. If they're putting artificial color in your fish to make it look hot pink, don't buy it.

Scallops second, again over as high of a heat as you can stand. The temperature for both fish is rare to medium rare. Again, both fish should be good enough to eat raw if it came down to it, so any sear you put on it is just to create Maillard reaction.

Set the meat aside to rest, it's done most of it's job.
Reserve marinade (or make some anew) from the tuna, strain out the ginger if you haven't already. This is going to be your sauce.

Take the bunches of baby bok choy, cut the leaves off, preserving as much of the stem as you like, and put in a hot skillet with some of the scallop marinade, wilting until bright green. Takie it off heat, and plate immediately.

To finish, it's bok choy, tuna on top, scallops on the side, and then provide a layer of sauce on the bottom to finish.

**Note about bok choy: it's like a lettuce with a charred poblano pepper flavor. I couldn't swear that I could have placed the flavor until today, but it's a nice twist, should go well with anything Asian you're trying to do.

From Drop Box