A new season at Farmhaus

What is really good for me, when it comes to writing about Farmhaus, is that they change their menu so much that every time I have gone there, they have a different menu.  Things that are locally found change throughout the weather patterns and the seasons so everything is new and different.  My wife and I went to Farmhaus this past Friday night.  We thought that we would enjoy our Black Friday out while the rest of the world was still shopping.

Farmhouse had a special tasting menu and with some seafood items on the menu, my wife grabbed that as I went ahead and ordered two larger plates from the regular menu.

So, she started her's with a little chef's tasting of a little corn cake with some yummy things on it: like shaved foie gras.

She then had a dish which was potatoes, mushrooms, foamed up eggs and caviar.  

Then the next dish in her tasting list was a sun choke soup with mushrooms on top.

She then had the Bay Scallop Gratin.

Next came a pork loin, with apples and greens and a mustard sauce.

That was all finished with a plate with a piece of chocolate cake and a piece of a coffee flavored cake with little flavors that added up to a Bourbon stout.

Here is how you can judge if the food is good enough for my wife: if she eats all of it or as much as she can. My wife is on a diet and if she eats the food and loves every bite of it and is willing to come back, then you know it has to be good.

What did I get?  I ordered the Porchetta dish.  It is done in a Korean style with home-made kimchi.  The pork belly is sliced thick and cooked tender so it has that looks and smell and taste of bacon and goes so well with the warm puffy pancake like buns.  I like this at a 4 out of 5 stars.

I finished with the bacon meatloaf, which may not seem so great at first, but they slice off these big chunks of meatloaf and then wrap them in bacon, like a Filet Mignon.  There wasn't a dry part in the whole dish.   The yellow potato mash was good at sucking up excess sauce giving it more flavor.  The crunchy onions went well with the tiny pearl onions and everything just went well together.  I'd say a good 3 and 1/2 stars out of 5 on this one.

Overall, if you haven't been to Farmhaus this season, please check them out and enjoy what you can.

http://farmhausrestaurant.com/

I think I found my calling.....(insert choir music here)

I remember going to Catholic school and being told that the all-powerful being has a calling or a vocation for each one of us.  Well, 30 something years later, I find that I have an easy time doing things that others, even professionals, have a hard time doing.

What I have here for you all to see?  Well, the first thing is when a friend of mine in Texas (Ms. Campos), wanted me to make a low-calorie tres leche cake.  Well, think of that, how do you make a tres leche cake lower calories?  It already is a basic yellow cake, then you poke holes in it and pour sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and whole milk all over the top.  As the cake sucks that up, you make some whipped cream using heavy whipping cream and then cinnamon on top.  But that is a lot of fat(whole milk, heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, butter and sugar in the cake.)

So, what did I do?  I made it sugar free.  I was told that it was "impossible" and it sounds like it would be, but I did it anyway.  How, you may ask?  Simple.

1.  I first made my own sweetened condensed milk; http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/129/Sugar-Free-Sweetened-Condensed87845.shtml

2.  I then bought some evaporated skim milk, it is low fat and sugar free.

3.  I then followed this recipe, basically: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/tres-leches-milk-cake/Detail.aspx

I made my own whipped cream by just whipping the cream and adding some almond flavoring as it reached soft peaks.  I put everything together and then, BAM, it was done!

Now, the cake worked really well, because of the almond flavoring I put in the whipped cream.  That flavoring helped to hide and add sweetness to the end product while retaining the sugar free element.  Now, while it isn't considered fat free, it is very close to sugar free.  The reduced sugar or my substitutions took sugar and added calories out of the cake, whipped cream and sweetened condensed milk.

I did Monster caviar.  As weird as Monster caviar sounds, like fish eggs so a monster must have eggs too, right, I did make some. 

I did the normal process, which even though they sell whole starter kids, not everyone who has tried this has been successful.  After mixing Monster, which is a 2.7PH, with the sodium alginate, I dropped the solution into a bath of the 'salt' water.  I got my Monster caviar as a result.  Because Monster already has such a sweet and concentrated flavor, the beads still had a strong Monster flavor. I also had to add some food coloring and they turned out nice.

So, what's for dinner?

I admit, that the photos I take for this blog are not the most professional looking nor do they always sometimes make the food look really tasty. Like the above picture, that may not look that delicious, but hey, that was the cactus dish I made, before adding the quinoa.  It had chopped onions, tomatoes, green chilis, garlic, and salt and pepper besides the chopped cactus in it. While I did take a course on food presentation, to be honest, I have so little time each day to experiment and cook fun things that I don't have the added hour or so to plate this dish and then clean it up and take the most awesome photo of it I can.  And let's face it even further, if you are a stay-at-home person or just the one who cooks at home, chances are that you don't have the time to make it look really nice either.

I posted a status message about this on Facebook as for some reason, just a pan full of onions cooking smells so good that I once wondered about making a relish purely on diced and cooked onions; and did it by the way. The problem with that photo is that onions are pale and pretty much colorless.  So taking a picture of them doesn't show a lot of color and such so they look like a blob or just not so appetizing.

Now when I am out and reviewing restaurants, I pull my tiny camera out and take pictures of the food and the place, on my own, and quickly as to not get thrown out or have anyone complain towards me.  These in-restaurant food photos tend to have the lighting off a bit or the color and again, as most restaurant reviewers don't want to be recognized, now with the growing number of food bloggers, and the increasing number of people bringing cameras with them wherever they go, I find it easy to take a snapshot and get away with it.  What I can do in the future, is try to take better photos at home, with a better camera.  This way, when I am doing something, you can get a better view of it.  Even my wife suggested using a stand to place a camera onto it so that I could record my process of cooking or doing something fun, like make caviar and place it on here for all to see.  Either way, with luck and more time, better photos will be on here.  Or maybe, when I finish each dish or thing I cook, I can plate it and take a good photo or two.

the secret recipe...

 In the world of cooking there is the sub-field of molecular gastronomy and as this sounds like any other cooking field, this one is fairly new.  Especially when it comes to making fruit caviar or turning things into powders or foams, this form of cooking seems to be very new, about 5 years new. It is so new, that while there are a few sites out there and a few blogs, there isn't that many recipes that deal with everything.  For example, the way to cook chicken has been around long enough that there are probably over a million different recipes involving chicken. However, imagine wanting to make strawberry caviar and not finding a single recipe.  What do you do? Experiment.

 I started by taking out the juicer from our basement and after cleaning it, I juiced some strawberries.  I added about 2.5 grams of sodium alginate to the 250 grams of strawberry juice and made chunky strawberry juice.  It almost looked like a puree' which means the alginate didn't dissolve properly.  I mixed the calcium chloride into the water and then got my things ready.  When I first did caviar, there was still a salty taste on the beads even though I thought I washed them off. Now, after they are 'cooked' I place them in a giant bowl of water, so the salty residue on them becomes diluted in the water and they only have their juice taste.

 When I placed my syringe into the juice mix, it was chunky going in, but when I squeezed it out, 2 feet over the bowl, they did form perfect drops or spheres as they fell and splashed a bit.  Out of 250 grams of juice, I messed up once but still had enough to fill a 4 ounce jar with strawberry caviar. 

 The issue was two fold:  First, I read online that the caviar could be heated, and not break the bonds. That much is true and I found this out by adding a bit of water into a 4 ounce jar, adding the caviar, sealing them in and then processing the jar like I do all of my other jars.  After 10 minutes in boiling water, the jar came out and was all ready and the little pearls were still jiggling around in the water, so it worked! The other issue had to deal with taste.  Since there wasn't a clear and easy recipe on strawberry caviar online, I had to improvise and the frozen strawberries that I used, after the caviar was done, didn't have a very 'strawberry' taste.  It tasted like watered down strawberries, which isn't something I enjoy that much.  It is a lesson though that I do need to either get better strawberries and get a better juice mixture or, as my wife suggested, storing them in something.  My wife was shooting ideas out like storing them in jars with some sweetened water or perhaps something tasty like wine.  Those ideas didn't go unheard and now that I have the chemicals and the fun when doing things like this, more flavorful strawberry caviar in red dessert wine, may be something you can buy soon, from me.  

molecular gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy isn't a new term but it is new that you may have heard it. Originally known as the science of food and cooking, it has become a term for new science techniques applied to food. For example: while adding gelatin to foods and liquids is nothing new, it seems that using it in new ways is. In this video with Jamie Boudreau, he takes a simple liquid and adding gelatin to it, makes it a jelly-like consistency that when added to an oil, causes the item to come together and form balls or "caviar" that help make any dish new and exciting.
http://www.smallscreennetwork.com/video/26/molecular_mixology_aviation/#vcx_xocz9tdg4081

In this site, carrot caviar was made using a similar idea pattern but different solutions.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Carrot-Caviar/

A hydrocolloid is the term that describes gelatin es and things like agar or pectin that can tern a liquid into a solid or a jelly-like state. So, for any of you experimentalists out there, try playing with your food.