the kitchen is open

We’ve lived for the past year sharing a half-sized fridge with a roommate and a 2x2 counter. We hadn’t really realized how little we had been cooking, but the motivation levels for cooking where way down. Hense are head over  heals in love with our new kitchen, our normal sized fridge and the huge expanse of counter and cabinets. Charley is back to his usual exploratory self and we’ve both hit this point of “FOOD! oh yeah remember that stuff?! wow!!”

This past week Charley bought a carbonator and has been experimenting with everything…I mean Everything that he could potentially carbonate. Milk, grapefruit juice, blueberry juice, whiskey, as well as making whipped cream and meringue.  It’s the same one that they use at Starbucks for your whipped cream but he’s decided he likes hand whipping way better. When you whip eggs or cream, you are slowly building up the molecular structure as air is folded into the mix. By the time you have hit peaks, it’s solid enough to sit in a refrigerator and hold it’s form: an important factor when you’re creating desserts for a restaurant. The carbonator instantly adds air but the fluff will only last for about a half hour and then it deflates. When he made a lemon meringue pie, the meringue had dissipated completely after revisiting it in the refrigerator. He felt like the carbonator has it’s uses in making cappuccinos and such but for traditional desserts he’ll stick with a good old fashioned whipping.

 

 

Last night he experimented with our leftovers. He had made olive bread earlier in the week that had gone a little stale. It’s a rich bread that comes out super moist from the olive oil with and has oive chunks in it. Toasted it make awesome croutons. Tonight he cut it into cubes and made a bread pudding from it. He served it on top of a cauliflower mash with our (also leftover) steak on top. The pretty red sauce is made from roasted red peppers and rhubarb.

Our new place unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of natural window light and it was already dark outside, so I’m not in love with this photo but I thought I’d still share.