Entry tags:
Cookbook Project, Book #204
"San Francisco: Authentic Recipes Celebarting the Foods of the World," Williams-Sonoma
This is the other cookbook that <lj user="umbran"> brought me back from when he went to San Francisco for job training a year and a half ago. Sadly, since I got it shortly before my spinal surgery, and since it's a big enough book that I couldn't lift it for 3 months after said surgery, it languished forgotten for some time until this project was revived.
It's a big, beautiful, glorious, coffee-table-sized book, full of shiny, glossy, sexy pictures, and there's at least as much "local color" and discussion of trends and ingredients as the are actual recipes. So it's fun to look through, but not quite so useful as an actual cookbook.
Still, the recipes it does have all look beautiful. They're also largely more appropriate for dinner parties than they are for just plain dinner - as delicious as Dungeness Crab Risotto sounds, I'm not likely to make it just for supper some work night, and the same goes for slow-roasted duck legs with caramelized turnips. But Foccacia Burgers with Tomato, Arugula, and Aioli? Sounded delicious.
I had never made aioli before, so this was a good excuse to try a new technique, too. I had always been under the impression that aioli (or mayo) was hard to make, and finicky, and likely to just never emulsify and just leave me in tears. But honestly? It was simple. Slow - I dripped the oil into the egg yolk as the thinnest trickle ever - but it set up like a dream, and was surprisingly rich and delicious. And the burgers were good, and the flavors of the meat and the chewy bread and the olive-oil-y aioli all blended together amazingly. It's hard to go wrong with burgers, but these were above and beyond.
I'd make them again. And I kind of need to host a dinner party, just for an excuse to make that risotto.....
This is the other cookbook that <lj user="umbran"> brought me back from when he went to San Francisco for job training a year and a half ago. Sadly, since I got it shortly before my spinal surgery, and since it's a big enough book that I couldn't lift it for 3 months after said surgery, it languished forgotten for some time until this project was revived.
It's a big, beautiful, glorious, coffee-table-sized book, full of shiny, glossy, sexy pictures, and there's at least as much "local color" and discussion of trends and ingredients as the are actual recipes. So it's fun to look through, but not quite so useful as an actual cookbook.
Still, the recipes it does have all look beautiful. They're also largely more appropriate for dinner parties than they are for just plain dinner - as delicious as Dungeness Crab Risotto sounds, I'm not likely to make it just for supper some work night, and the same goes for slow-roasted duck legs with caramelized turnips. But Foccacia Burgers with Tomato, Arugula, and Aioli? Sounded delicious.
I had never made aioli before, so this was a good excuse to try a new technique, too. I had always been under the impression that aioli (or mayo) was hard to make, and finicky, and likely to just never emulsify and just leave me in tears. But honestly? It was simple. Slow - I dripped the oil into the egg yolk as the thinnest trickle ever - but it set up like a dream, and was surprisingly rich and delicious. And the burgers were good, and the flavors of the meat and the chewy bread and the olive-oil-y aioli all blended together amazingly. It's hard to go wrong with burgers, but these were above and beyond.
I'd make them again. And I kind of need to host a dinner party, just for an excuse to make that risotto.....