Phyllo -

by BS

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

Since we were all-Top Chef, all the time this week, I just had to share this photo. First Tom Colicchio for Diet Coke, now Padma Lakshmi for Hardee’s. What’s next? Gail Simmons for Baconnaise? But I digress. On with the comments…

– Is Stefan the new Carla? Maybe, judging by the love ESers are showering on him:

Eick: Over the course of the season I was warming up to Stefan more and more and starting to like Hosea less and less. This interview is the fucking awesome and the icing on the cake. I am now a full-fledged Stefan proponent. His line about how read the blogs he DID win and will be able to lay valuable eggs – awesome.

Leahsucks: I was hating on Stefan for a while but have been coming around and this interview totally won me over. He’s a lovable good hearted jerk. I don’t think I will be buying the cock panties anytime soon though.

– So who is the new Top Chef villain? Casey, obv. Leahsucks: Umm… Casey’s bitter rant. You are done with TC and we are done with you. Good Day sir. Maids: wow talk about a contrast. Carla = gracious and protective of Casey (True mark of a fine competitor) Casey = nasty and hateful toward Carl.

– Most of you are as excited as we are about bacon cheese. KMango: They serve that on the sammiches you get when you arrive in heaven. But not JoeHoya:

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by BS

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

Another week gone by already?! Here’s what everyone said while T Piper and Maids were fighting…

– Gasie hit a nerve with her feminist critique of Super Bowl commercials:

Nick: Convinced me. Not that I have ever drank Pepsi… but definitely won’t start now. You are very right about super-bowl ads. It’s not even funny how bad the commercials are. There is also a large double standard on what commercials they allow during the SB. Sexy and Danica Patrick is okay. Sexy and vegetable-related is inappropriate. And when I saw the Doritos ad, I literally said, “This is going to end in a groin joke”. So predictable.

But Doug has a bone to pick: OK, maybe, just maybe, feminists should notice the routine anti-male sexual sadism in commercials and programming today. It was not very long ago that it was taboo to show men or women being sexually injured on TV. Now it is obligatory to have either commercials or programming show men being sexually injured as ‘humor’. I’m speaking of the Doritos ad, of course. I no longer watch the super bowl because of such obligatory ‘humor’. Indeed the last time that I watched the super bowl was the famous Janet Jackson breast-exposing affair (while everyone seemed to ignore that Budweiser showed an ad with a dog sinking its teeth into a mans genitals). Until feminists start taking notice of such sadistic, anti-male content on TV, it is hard for me to view them as advocates of HUMAN rights/dignity. Instead, I tend to view them as ONLY advocates for and ONLY caring about half the human race.

And Mariah Carey really sums it all up:

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by BS

Flaking Out Again

Red alert! the Endless Simmer phyllo tag has not been used in 14 MONTHS! What a cruel, pathetic abomination. First of all, let me apologize to the entire community for this reprehensible failure. When we started this site, the public quickly got excited about our promise of extensive phyllo coverage, yet this flaky deliciousness somehow got lost among the maze of pine nuts and fried eggs. I take full responsibility for this failure and sincerely apologize.

But let me explain why. When I started getting serious about cooking, I used phyllo dough all the time. People are just so damn impressed with it. There’s something about this fragile, flaky dough that screams “I’m fancier than you are.” I swear, you could wrap cheez whiz and spam in phyllo and people would think you were the most gourmet chef ever.

But the truth is, it’s really not that impressive. I mean, all you’re doing is buying some dough, wrapping things up in it and throwing them in the oven. It’s about as impressive as a pre-made pie crust. Also, once you’ve made spanakopita and baklava a couple dozen times, you start to run out of ideas. But enough phyllo bashing. This is a phyllobration, not a phyllo funeral. I had to make something for a potluck this weekend, and running low on creativity, I thought of my old friend phyllo, and decided to get a little crazy…

by BS

Everybody Loves a Tart

Since I was down in D.C. a few weeks ago, I got to partake in dadgansie’s endless bounty of green tomatoes. Mmmm.

This savory tart (torte?) was inspired by gansie’s tomato bake. Of course, I had to add in the three p’s that rule my life: pine nuts, pastry and parm. (sorry Phyllo, I went with the easier puff pastry this time, and besides, your p. is tenuous given its silence.)

Now, even though this is a tart, I didn’t want the tomatoes to be tart, so I caramelized them with brown sugar (I got some inspiration/instruction from Gary Rhodes). This worked well in the deliciousness department, although it unfortunately left dadgansie’s beautiful greens a less-than-appetizing brown. I covered my tracks by throwing on some red (non-caramelized) tomatoes and covering the tart with enough pine and parm to drown a cat.

Recipe after the j.

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by BS

Hott Links: Puff the Magic Pastry

Washington Post food blogger Kim O’Donnell made the exact same kitchen faux pax that I did. I think we must be cooking soul mates. Don’t worry, Kim – one day we’ll meet in a flaky, phyllo heaven.

Celebrity hot sauces are so hot right now. [Stereogum]

Hidden between fluff pieces on General Petraeus and President Ahmenidijad, the New York Times Week in Review offers an in-depth analysis of the cupcake trend, asking such soul-wrenching questions as:

– Should cupcakes be banned from school bake sales? (No!)

– Can the cupcake loyalist support the sale of a chocolate Guinness cupcake with green-tea cream cheese frosting? (Bring it!)

– Has the cupcake been stolen from the people by the baking aristocracy (are you fucking kidding me?)

Photo: Stereogum

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by BS

Puff, Puff, Pies

Every once in a while – not too often of course – I stop blogging about food for long enough to go cook something. Spinach pie (spanakopita) is one of the first semi-gourmet things I figured out how to make. It’ s one of those dishes that is fairly easy to do but somehow still really impresses people.

Unfortunately, I seem to have run into some bad kitchen karma lately, possibly due to my making fun of gansie and Howie. While shopping for ingredients, I made a major mistake and bought plain old puff pastry dough instead of perfect phyllo. So I had my spinach filling all mixed and ready to go, and opened up my phyllo to discover that instead of 100 sheets of beautiful flaky goodness, I had four doughy layers of puff that would be much better for making some kind of weird English meat pie than the delicate spanakopita.

I grabbed a rolling pin and did some emergency work, flattening them out to more sheet-like layers and then just went ahead and made it anyway. Fortunately, this was one of those “how bad can it be” situations, since it was still a mixture of dough, butter, spinach and cheese.

Recipe, assuming you buy the correct ingredients, after the jump.

in Cheese / Recipe / Veggie 9 comments

by BS

Top Chef Recap: Episode 10 – Puff Pastry D’oh!

It has taken me two full days to digest the craziness of this week’s Top Chef, which was chock full of spam, fruit loops, and IMHO one of the worst sins a reality show contestant can commit.

The Cheftestants started out with a supermarket sweep style quickfire challenge, where they only got ten dollars to spend in one aisle, so they were limited in their ingredients to a comical degree.

Michael Schwartz served as perhaps the snottiest guest judge they have had yet, most critically showing absolutely no respect for what in my mind was the dish of the competition so far: Hung’s fruit loop-potato-leek-smurf-village whatever it was. Bravo has for some unknown reason not included this genius recipe on their site. What gives Bravo? As far as I am concerned, this should be on the menu at every haute cuisine restaurant in America.

Instead Brian won for his spam-filled dish, which did look pretty fancy, but come on, it had spam in it.

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