Archive For December 31, 2019
Ok, so ordinarily I don’t get excited about seagulls. I call them Pooping Pests. Rats with wings. And less friendly terms. But just after dawn today I was very happy to see them, because seagulls mean land! I felt a bit like Noah with the dove. And sure enough, mid-afternoon the island of Fernando de…
I must say, the sun is truly an awesome thing. Not only does it light and warm the whole world, through the artifice of Victron’s amazing solar panels it provides all the electricity we need. Lights, navigation, refrigeration, desalination, hot showers, satellite internet, watching movies, even air conditioning is running purely off of the tropical…
Crescent moon, low on the horizon. One bright star above it, or maybe a planet. It could be reddish, maybe it’s Mars. Wish I had a star chart. So many stars in the sky! Unimaginable. There’s no way to capture this with a camera, and words don’t do it justice. I lie up on the…
I would never have thought I’d be celebrating Christmas in the tropics, a thousand miles from land. And yet here we are. Santa managed to find us – he must have great GPS and filled stockings with candies and small gifts. Dunbar shared Christmas crackers, something I’d never encountered before, and grilled lamb chops for…
Wim my taste for whisky runs more to the Irish.
Two secrets of cooking: Weighing ingredients rather than measuring by volume (I have two Ozeri Touch Professional that read in grams, milliliter, poundscc BBC and ounces, and fluid ounces, and rare easily with a bowl and/or ingredients on it. They’re hard to get so for the next one I’ll try an Ido Good Grips food…
Assembly of the Beef Wellington: FIllo dough, shingled in prosciutto, spread with duxelles, reduced with whisky and cream, rolled with the browned, painted with mustard/horseradish beef, rolled up and shrink wrapped, tightened and chilled, then unpacked and wrapped in the rolled out puff pastry dough, scored with a fork’s tines and coated with an egg/double…
Ingredients to Beef Wellington Center cut tenderloin, the chateaubriand; puff pastry dough; double cream, soy sauce, and Marmite; Welsh single malt aged in Madeira casks; duxelles; hot English mustard, horseradish, and black pepper; and a full grade A foie gras lobe. Missing is the fillo dough: I hated it, too dry, it split, flaked: next…
Christmas dinner: marrowbones with toast and Beef Wellington mixed fingerling potatoes fried up with shallots and thyme and pancetta (there’s thyme in the duxelles layer and I use pancetta as the meat wrap in the Beef Wellington so it helps tie it together), and steamed asparagus with Hollandaise. I forewent the crême brûlée so we…