Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

Hey, I’m not the one who shouted it out…they did, but I did consider the concept once before.  You see, I have this group of tremendous and passionate foodie friends; they inhabit my supper club and like me, live their lives, loving and adoring food.  They are the ones who said it, proclaiming raucously this particular Lobster Bisque was better than sex.  Before I knew it, the terms orgasmic and seductive were thrown out there.  I unexpectedly felt exposed at the dinner table.  Had I really created something better than sex?  I guess that depends upon the state of your sex life but I will say this, this bisque is incredibly sexy.

It all started in the late 90’s when my husband and I would frequent “The Grill”, a restaurant at the Ritz Carlton-Laguna Niguel.  Our friend Jim was the head chef and we were in love with his version of Lobster Bisque.  We would sit at our table, almost giddy with excitement until our waiter delivered the empty, shallow bowls except for the two prawns placed strategically in the center.  He then artfully ladled in the velvety goodness until only the prawn’s tails were visible.  He quickly left us to privately slurp the exquisite bounty present before us.

We desperately wanted to replicate the amazing bisque in the confines of our own kitchen.  Every visit to the restaurant, every taste, brought us a little closer to bringing its luscious taste to fruition in our own home. 

Catastrophe struck the other day. My kitchen drain backed up into the bathtub. Unfortunately the last thing I had cooked and washed down the sink was beets. Do you know what a white bathtub filled with red beet juice and bits of floating beet looks like? Let’s just say what follows will NOT be a recipe involving beets.

I’m truly dangerous with power tools (even the Cuisinart is off limits for me), so I called the plumber. The guy who showed up looked like your typical plumber—clean cut, with a baseball hat and sturdy boots. He began snaking the kitchen pipe, and I went into the next room. Minutes later, I could hear emanating from under the kitchen sink: “Nothing you can do cause I’m stuck like glue to my guy, my guy.”Is he singing “My Guy”? “No handsome face could ever take the place of my guy, my gu-y-y-y.” Yup. He sure is. The rendition continued replete with the backup chorus.

Now, I’ve heard of The Singing Detective but not the singing plumber. I got to talking to him, and it turns out he’s more than a singing plumber. I learned that he really wants to write science fiction novels and that plumbing just pays the bills. That’s the thing about L.A. -- so many people here aren’t what they seem. You think the plumber is just the plumber, but he’s an aspiring writer. Or take my cable guy who told me that his real vocation is poker and that he had even appeared on ESPN in a championship poker series. Then there was the shuttle bus driver who animatedly described attending a Donald Trump seminar. He said driving allowed him to pursue his real career goal: real estate.

I love the story of stone soup. I love it for all the wrong reasons. You know the story, right? The moral is that by sharing what one has, everyone eats well. But for me, I am like the greedy villagers, still amazed that soup can be made with a stone.

While not quite stone soup, you might think of this as "stone pasta". A dish of plain pasta it is made better with a bit of bacon, onion and a knob of brie. The resulting dish is kind of like Spaghetti Carbonara only faster and easier, and possibly even tastier. And I love Spaghetti Carbonara!

Brie has long been considered by many to be the most popular of all French cheeses. It comes from a province once called, "Brie" now called Seine-et-Marne which is not that far from Paris (and now more famous for being the site of a Disney Resort). Real brie is made from unpasteurized cow's milk but the version available in the US is made from pasteurized milk so the resulting cheese is milder and less ripe than true brie.

An excerpt from the latest Simon Hopkinson book "Second Helpings of Roast Chicken" published by Hyperion.

Not only do I find the word linguine the most attractive to pronouce: lingweeeeeeneh – I also reckon its shape is one of the most appealing of all pastas when wrapped around the tongue. Curiously, linguine is a rare pasta within the indexes of most of the reputable Italian cookbooks I have, but when I finally found a brief description, the gist of it seemed to suggest flattened spaghetti. And, in fact, that is exactly what it is: not as wide as fettuccine or tagliatelle, but a bit thicker than trenette. And trenette is often understood to be the most favored pasta for dressing with pesto.