Is it possible to have a food enemy?

There are three foods in this world that I just cannot enjoy (aside from cheese, which I am slowly starting to appreciate and even admire). Olives, liver and white chocolate. Don't get me wrong, I haven't just written these foods off because of their smell or a single bad experience, I just cannot for the life of me get myself to enjoy them. The really unfortunate part of this is that I desperately want to enjoy them.

Except for olives. They're just yucky.

My parents both love love love liver. They order it at restaurants and drool over it at home. By rights, I should enjoy liver too. However, instead of salivating at the sight and smell of offal, my esophagus closes right up and I can taste the bile rising in my stomach. Delightful, eh?
Believe me, I've tried to eat liver. After reading in Julie&Julia about the delicate buttery taste of finely prepared chicken livers and seeing carefully put together dishes of liver on menus, I have tried my best to gulp down a forkful. Not successful. Not even a little bit. So even though I want to be adventurous and cook up a pan of chicken livers with something french and fancy sounding to go along side them, I cannot. This makes me sad.

As for white chocolate... I mostly just find this confection to be a frustrating pain in the ass that pops up everywhere I don't want it to. I still use the stuff. I think I'm deluding myself by believing that if I use it enough I will learn to like it. So far I have only learned that white chocolate can be very expensive and never to mix it with cream cheese no matter what the recipe says.

I made a cake this weekend, a prototype cake for a 50th wedding anniversary that I'm baking for in August. The only request was that the cake be lemony. So I got out my books (of which I have way way too many) and searched through them to find the very best sounding lemon cake. Of course it would have to be the cake with the white chocolate lemon buttercream icing that looked the best by far. Couldn't be the one with the regular chocolate buttercream or the one with the fancy italian meringue buttercream... nope, it had to be the one that called for the really expensive and hard to find white chocolate that made up the buttercream.

When the recipe specifically asked for Green & Black's white chocolate with Madagascar vanilla bean seeds I let myself think that maybe my disdain for white chocolate came from the lower quality white chocolate that I just bought from the bins at Superstore. So I (naively) phoned around to find this elusive brand of chocolate that turned out to cost $4.87 per 100grams at the community health foods store. Awesome. Not only did I have to shell out $15.00 on chocolate I wasn't even gonna like, I would have to go to the grocery store that smelled like patchouli, body odor and guilt (for eating pig) (I love pig).

Long story short, the cake was delicious. A buttery almond lemon cake that, while dense, absolutely melted in your mouth with the lemon curd that filled each of the layers. I didn't even mind the tangy white chocolate taste that came from the buttercream. When placed with the cake and the lemon curd, it all balanced out really nicely. But is it worth the super expensive imported chocolate? I gave out samples of the cake to people at work and they seemed to agree that yes, it was worth the money.

But I still don't like the stuff. I can't help it.

Gifts and Some Pasta

For my Birthday last month I got a great big food processor from my mom. The very first time I used it, I put it to work pulverizing pistachios, sugar, flour, and butter into a struesel for inside an apple strudel I made for my grandmother for Christmas Eve. In the process of figuring out how to work this new piece of heavy machinery, my brother and I both ended up with sliced fingers and hands from the slick sharp new blades. We were in a rush to get the strudel into the oven so I worked one-handed while my little brother bandaged my fingers (and then carefully cut away small layers of dough where some blood may or may not have dripped... but no one was the wiser!).

The second time I (carefully) pulled out my sparkly new food processor was yesterday--when I endeavoured to make my own pasta from scratch with another new toy I got for Christmas: a pasta maker. I went into this thinking it would not only be difficult, but also time consuming and messy. So you can imagine my surprise when, less than 30 minutes later, I was sitting at the table eating my freshly cooked fresh pasta in an ozzy cheese sauce (courtesy of Jamie Oliver). However, the huge pile of dishes and the flour that ended up all over my kitchen meant that I was at least right about one thing. But I'll blame myself and not the pasta for that one.


As for the pasta, it tasted fantastic, so much better than the dried kind you get in a box at Safeway. It actually had nice salty flavor that could almost stand on its own. It cooked so quickly and had a lovely texture that didn't resemble over or undercooked pasta, but the perfect al dente. I liked the taste of the pasta on its own so much that I might try and make it with only melted butter, some sugar, and cinamon for a dessert. The creamy cheese sauce was good, but next time I would go for something a little less cheesy and a little more creamy, as the parmesean was a bit on the pungent side and made the whole house smell like vomit. However, I didn't mind the taste of the guyere and the creme fraiche was an interesting alternative to actual cream and gave the sauce a nice little zing of flavor. I'll also add that this meal was a bit... heavy. I didn't have to eat much at all to feel stuffed. This could either be due to the cheesy-creamy ratio or the fact that I didn't run the pasta through the rollers enough times, so it was a bit on the thick side. Either way, I am more than willing to try making my own pasta again in the near future.







Jamie Oliver's Pasta with Oozy Cheese Sauce
adapted from Jamie at Home

1. Crack 4 eggs into a food processor with 2 cups of flour. Process. The dough should be a bit crumbly looking, if it's sticky, add a bit more flour.
2. Dump pasta dough onto a floured work surface and press into a ball. Knead a few times to get it together well (this should be pretty easy). Divide the dough into four pieces.
3. Take a piece of dough and run it through your pasta machine on its widest setting. Jamie says to run it through a couple times on each setting until it's about the "width of a CD". I would say a little thinner than that because otherwise your pasta is going to be very thick after it's cooked.
4. Liberally flour both sides of your sheet of dough then fold it together and cut it into strips. Seperate the strips and add more flour to coat. Repeat with the remaining dough.
5. For the cheese sauce, you want to place a bowl over a pot of boiling water (the pot should be big enough to cook all your fresh pasta in when your sauce is done) and mix together 1 cup of creme fraiche, and about a handful of parmesean and guyere (although you can use any "good melting cheese"). When it's all melted, add salt and pepper to taste.
6. Throw your pasta into the pot of boiling water and cook for about 2-3 minutes. Drain and mix with the sauce. Voila!

My Quest to Understand Cheese

I don't like cheese.

For as long as I can remember, the only cheese I would eat would be the kind melted on pizza, nachos or inside a grilled-cheese sandwich. And the only way it tasted any good was if it was heavily laced with salt, pepper, pickles or ketchup. I limited myself to cheddar and mozzarella. Parmesan smelled like bile (it IS made of bile...), brie smelled like dirty socks, and havarti had the weirdest texture that I just could not get used to no matter how many times I tried it.

My Austrian grandparents love their cheeses. Gouda and swiss emmental especially. You sit down for lunch and no matter what it is you're about to eat, there will be a platter with gouda and swiss cheese handily sliced up for everyone to enjoy. However, while everyone else is blindly masticating, I sit there and think about how it smells like a pile of pungent old laundry mixed with a unique sour smell that I can't even describe. My mom is also a huge fan of melting brie cheese in the microwave and eating it with a spoon. The smell of the melting cheese permeates the whole entire house so that you can't escape the heavy musky odor.

But over Christmas, with all the wines and cheeses and crackers and people, I was peer pressured into trying some different cheese. And in doing so, I discovered Boursin cheese. It's light and fragrant and has the consistency of butter. It doesn't even smell like an old man's body odor! I went back for cracker after cracker until the whole ball of cheese was gone and I was picking up loose crumbs of cheese with my fingertip.

From here, I decided to begin a quest to try and understand people's love for cheese.

I can say that I've made a conscious effort to buy new and different types of cheeses to try in recipes, like applewood smooked cheddar in potato soufflees (recipe here, from Almost Bourdain). I've made these soufflés a few times, and the best was when I incorporated the applewood smoked cheddar instead of regular cheddar or parmesan. It adds a whole new level of subtle flavor to the dish that you can't get with just spices, salt and pepper.


So while I won't claim to love cheese, I will say that I am trying to understand the (odd) fascination some people seem to have with it and use it to my advantage.