RogueChef
“It IS all about the TASTE”
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Meatless Monday – Pimento Cheese
While having brunch this weekend, I noticed an item on the menu that brought back memories of my early days. A creamy cheese spread stuffed with things like pimentos, dill pickles, and as my tastes matured jalapenos, bacon. Once a after school snack and more than infrequently part of a school lunch, this cheese spread has been a true taste of my youth.
Background
Pimento cheese is a common food in the Southern United States. The basic recipe for most pimento cheese spreads has few ingredients: sharp cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, pimentos, salt and pepper, blended to either a smooth or chunky paste. There are a multitude of regional ingredients, which include but are not limited to: Velveeta cheese, Worcestershire sauce, paprika, jalapeños, dill pickles, onions, or garlic.
Pimento cheese can be served as a spread on crackers or celery, mixed in with mashed yolks for deviled eggs, or over hamburgers or hotdogs.
The primary way pimento cheese is eaten, however, is as a sandwich on soft white bread, and is considered a Southern comfort food. A pimento cheese sandwich may be a quick and inexpensive lunch for children, or it may be served as a cocktail finger food (with crusts trimmed and cut into triangles). Pimento cheese sandwiches are a signature item at The Masters Tournament.
The pimento or cherry pepper is a variety of large, red, heart-shaped chili pepper that measures 3 to 4 inches long and 2 to 3 inches wide. The flesh of the pimento is sweet, succulent and more aromatic than that of the red bell pepper. Some varieties of the pimento type are quite hot.
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Ultimate Grilled Cheese
It’s much cooler upstate, but the several hours long trek to get there and then the inevitable traffic jam to get to the grocery store and then to my house on the hill has left me rather ravenous.
Food is called for and it is needed quickly, but I just refuse to do one more set of hot dogs on the grill, I want something with a bit more taste, almost like comfort food.
Classic comfort food is grilled cheese and soup, I’ll pass the soup today, but a good grilled cheese sandwich is a work of art.
Considering the construction of a perfect grilled cheese, I turn to my trusty chill box, where I found sour dough bread, Munster cheese, bacon, Prosciutto, bacon drippings, pickles, and of course butter… This looks like heart attack al la grilled cheese…
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Potatoes with Cheddar Cheese and Jalapeño
It’s cooler, but I am still quite busy, and have a yen for some comfort food. The original comfort food was the potato, crisp on the outside, creamy on the inside. But I want a bit more flavor and texture…
Maybe I’ll par-boil some potatoes, slice or quarter them, and fry them up in my heavy cast iron skillet, maybe adding some cheese and a Jalapeño, along with some spices to kick up the flavor a notch. (One might even go so far as to brown off some Italian sausage while the potatoes boil, and top the potatoes with it while they fry off.)
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Drunken Cherry Ice Cream
It’s hot, it’s fresh fruit season, I found a sale on jumbo eggs, and I have several pints of heavy cream in the fridge…
Sounds like Ice Cream, but not just any ice cream, some thing rich as in a custard based “french style”, and those tend to be sooo rich and smooth, something with a real fruit punch, like lots and lots and lots of berries, and of course the basic rogue chef twist …
Maybe something to extend the luxury, perhaps macerate the berries in a really good bourbon, or perhaps some way to intensify the vanilla taste, like vanilla sugar in the custard base ….
Background
Ice cream can be made with just cream, sugar, and a flavoring (usually fruit) is sometimes referred to as “Philadelphia style” ice cream. Ice creams made with eggs, in the form of a cooked custard, are “French” ice creams. This mixture is stirred while cooling to prevent large ice crystals from forming; the result is a smoothly textured ice cream.
An overview of this operation:
- Prepare Vanilla Sugar
- Make Custard
- Prepare Mix in’s
- Fold Mix in’s into Ice cream
- Turn Ice Cream
- Harden Ice Cream in freezer for an hour
- Eat, and die of pleasure
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Cheese
As I have spoken prior:Any dairy product in the U.K. is 100% superior to what we get. The entire industry, make that the entire country, tends towards small family farms, with quality produce, absolutely glorious meats and cheeses,
As these farms are small family farms, and the dairy is local collectives, the methods of the great food factories just do not get applied. Cattle are allowed to graze openly, chickens run in a yard, and the quality of the product is much better for this.
I found a wonderful 300+ year old cheese monger, and managed to bother the staff sufficiently to get a few pointers on cheeses and type of cheeses.
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Quiche, The English Method
As we all know, I have been on assignment in the U.K. for the last week.
During that time several things have struck me…
Any dairy product in the U.K. is 100% superior to what we get. The entire industry, make that the entire country, tends towards small family farms, with quality produce, absolutely glorious meats and cheeses, the selections of beers, wines and ports are astounding, as as to whiskeys, they invented the stuff….
With that level of dairy, eggs and produce, the quiches there were beyond my wildest expectations. There is a hotel / restaurant called “The Wolseley”, that produces the most amazing omelet, where there is a nice skin that covers eggs so light and fluffy, they would classify as frozen smoke… The quiches were of the same quality…. (They have guards protecting the chefs from being besieged by food bloggers….)
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Affogato, Espresso over Home Made Ice Cream
I love deserts, and I always love coffee with my desert, but this from Il Vicolo was absolute simplicity, and a total joy to consume.
This is one restaurant, I will visit when ever I can, preferably for dinner as it does seem to be a mob scene at lunch.
An affogato or Italian for drowned is a coffee-based beverage or dessert. It usually takes the form of a scoop of vanilla gelato or ice cream topped with a shot of hot espresso, for a try roguechef twist I’ll a a shot of Kahlua or Amaretto..
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Coconut Flan (Banh Kem Dua) with Caramel Sauce (Nuoc mau)
A very simple, and very flavorful desert. One of the ones I can not pass up when it is on the menu. This is a wonderful way to use items soon to expire, eggs, milk, a basic flan takes only three ingredients, but since this is a Coconut Flan, I’ll add two more. The recipe is simple, but does require reading closely, and a rigorous attention to the details…
In making this specific flan the first task is to make the caramel sauce for the top of the flan, basically a sugar and water syrup that has been cook to a amber / brown color, aka caramelized, which would also be known as a malliard reaction, where the act of caramelization adds a rich nutty flavor to the syrup.
Nuoc mau (Vietnamese caramel sauce) is an essential component to many dishes. The English translation is “colored water”, but it adds a deep amber color as well as a slightly sweet, slightly bitter, deeply rich flavor.
Both both créme caramel and flan are french as is the second official language of Vietnam, so it does all have a bit of a gutter zen “What goes around, comes around” feel to it…
Once this is started it goes rather quick, so mis-en-place is quite key. Most people would bake the flan in individual ramekins, but since that is less than authentic, I’ll steam mine. This recipe should deliver 10 mini-flans, so 10 ramekins need to be prepared, buttered and ready for the steamer. (One can half the recipe..)
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