Top Chef Just Desserts is back, and the season-opening challenge was to translate a fairy tale into a showpiece. In this episode Team Hansel and Gretel missed the symbolic cue of the story and end up at the judges’ table. We find out what went wrong, after the jump.
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As I stood in the butcher shop, or macelleria, in San Cassiano, Italy, staring at the meats hanging along the wall and what looked like a family working behind the counter, I wondered, why is the food here so good?
Back in America, I live in a place where the ground is fertile. Things can grow. It’s Nebraska for goodness sakes. If you drive through the state, you will be tired of corn after the fourth hour of looking at the continuous rows. You also might be nauseous from the smell of the cattle feedlots as you drive through Ogalalla, NE. The food tastes different in Europe. The yogurt is better. The cheese is better. The meat is better. What is different about the land on which the cows graze and the vegetables grow?
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Sometimes life gets too busy for dessert. You’re playing defense, offense, triangulating with co-workers and family members to keep the things moving with forward momentum and with as little conflict as possible, right? By the time you finish up all this life-playing, you’ll probably have enough time to catch a syndicated Seinfeld episode before falling asleep.
Wrong. You still have time for this s’mores bar recipe, which is super easy and pretty much fail-proof. The only difficulty comes with the wait period in which the chocolate needs to set.
Oh, and Cocoa Pebbles is my secret ingredient to keep the chocolate portion from being too rich and give it a textural contrast.
We’re full service over here at Endless Simmer: we travel where the food lovers live.
We’ve recently expanded our food porn to Tumblr and Pinterest. So if you play on those sites, come by and say hi. And of course, we’re already on Facebook and Twitter.
Speaking of Twitter, make sure you follow the whole gang: @gansie, @russellwarnick (formerly Britannia), @bakersroyal, @forkitude, @emilyteachout, @madelinesho (ML), @mcj4476 (tvff), @BellyRulesMind (Borracho) and @roodeloo.
Recent food world discoveries the ES crew is loving and hating…
An awesome new tumblr dedicated solely to luscious images of WILFs. Drool.
We’re all for food safety, but sometimes it crosses the line into ridiculous. The latest: the State of Illinois is shutting down local, artisan ice cream makers for such terrible offenses as using fresh fruit instead of fruit syrup and fresh cream instead of pre-packaged soft serve mix. Way to look out for our health, guys. (Via: Kitchen Lore Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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On Friday I left you with my most recent Fuck Up (and a discussion on whether or not we should continue using the word fuck). I’m awfully glad I did, because we actually figured out why my open omelet, which I’ve successfully made before, turned to mushy, gross shit.
Last week I started the egg dish with the tomatoes warming on the pan, oozing out all sorts of acidic liquid. I added the eggs into that big, ol’ mess, and the eggs never set. I had no idea why. But from some reader advice here and on Facebook, I learned that I should add the tomato at the end.
Advice highlights:
Read More›Jenna: Did you de-seed your tomatoes? The omelet looks really watery, and the extra water from the tomatoes could cause the eggs to break like that. And then you’d be steaming the egg bits in their excess water, which would totally mess up the texture.
With the great East Coast Earthquake behind us and Hurricane Irene fast approaching, it’s about time for some disaster preparedness here at ES. This weekend I suffered one of the scariest things that can happen to a food lover…the dreaded dark fridge.
It was Sunday morning when I realized the freezer wasn’t working. Water was dripping from the ice box, the M&M’s ice cream cake a friend brought over the night before was a mess (possibly the best thing to happen from all of this), and the tequila was near room temperature. There was much frustration in the household. The BF and I are not practical grocery shoppers, we’re menu-specific shoppers. If we need ingredients we tend to buy them for the meal we’re going to cook. But this Sunday we wanted to go out and do a full shop, for the coming week or two. A lot of the items on our shopping list we were going to freeze, so we decided it was best to hold off, reset the freezer and hope for the best.
Ten hours later, upon our return home, the power in the fridge was gone too, the beer was warming and the butter was soft. What to do?
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