marathon brunch 2: butternut squash baked eggs/french toast with roasted banana ice cream and toasted pumpkin seeds/bagel and lox

If you've been reading along, you'll recall that least year, Laura and hosted a brunch to celebrate the New York City marathon, which conveniently passes right by our apartment. If you've never experienced the marathon, it is hard to imagine how much fun it is to stand out there on the street, cheering and high fiving the runners as they run a seemingly super-human distance. It is also particularly great to be able to pause and reflect on their amazing accomplishments by eating ridiculous amounts of french toast and eggs.

In other words, let me tell you what I made for our second annual marathon brunch.




That's boozy french toast (as discussed in my second blog post ever), with amaretto, eggs, milk (or cream? doesn't matter really), a little sugar and some cinnamon. I let it soak in the egg mixture and then baked it in the oven. I served it with fresh whipped cream, candied pumpkin seeds and roasted banana ice cream. Oh, and a little maple syrup. Just in case there wasn't enough deliciousness piled up on there. The roasted bananas get really lovely and caramelized, and because the fruit is so naturally sweet, you barely need to add any sugar. (My only thought is that this might be even better if there was an egg custard base, because it wasn't quite as creamy as it could have been. But I am afraid of egg custards because the only time I tried to make one it broke so I'll take a slightly crystallized ice cream over prolonged stove-top trauma.)

thoughts on top chef

Believe it or not, one of our readers, (and my good friend), has elicited my opinions on the conclusion of the most recent season of Top Chef. Hi Kristen!

While I was impressed with how much the judges seemed to like everything the contestants prepared the last three episodes of the season, I can't help but be disappointed in the end results.

First of all, I was rooting for my girl Kelly all the way through the season, so I was super bummed she got booted before the last episode. Also, I had a free dinner courtesy of Nathan and Pete riding on her performance, so it would have been nice to see her take home the big prize.

As for the actual winner, Kevin, I'm not really too pleased that he won. I think Michael Voltaggio may have given him a little extra creative edge. You're telling me that a man who made STEAK for a NASA challenge suddenly came up with the idea for and some crazy method for cuttlefish pasta? I smell a Volt. Sadly, the Kevin win came a season too late. I would have much preferred the red-headed Kevin to defeat Voltaggio the younger, and for this season to have gone to Kelly, or at least Ed.

I don't dislike Kevin, and I think he's a talented dude, but he was just too inconsistent for me to believe him to be worthy of the title of Top Chef. He's no Hosea, but he's definitely one of the lesser winners IMHO.

If it were up to me, he would have gone home instead of Tiffani in the NASA challenge, and again instead of Kelly in the first part of the finale. Last season, I was really upset when Jenn failed to make it to the last supper, leaving an all male finale, so it was sad to see the women come up just short once again.

Once we lost the women, I would have had Ed as the winner. He's got lots of chefly skills, but he isn't a total creeper like Angelo with his mail order bride. That being said, Kevin is a nice guy and I'm sure he has a beautiful family, so congratulations to the newest Top Chef winner!

top chef: original flavor AKA we're not cooking these unproven shmoes' food

Let me just start out by saying that there is no new recipe today, and if you're not a fan of Top Chef, this post won't be of much interest to you. You also might not want to read ahead if you missed the season premiere and don't want to be spoiled. With that much said...

Nathan and I have decided that we aren't going to do a blog feature for the new season of Top Chef. I liked making our Master Meals, but to be perfectly honest, we often found it difficult to find many recipes from the cheftestants, and I think the small selection left us with some less than fabulous dinners. I definitely think that our overall success rate with the Master Meals was lower than for the regular dinners we make. Moving forward, we're going to cook whatever strikes our collective fancy. If that relates to Top Chef, cool, we'll make a note of it, but we're certainly not going to make a point of it.

We did however, decide to make a little friendly competition of the new season. Based solely on the opening sequences, pre Quickfire, Nathan, Pete and I each placed our bets one cheftestant to win. The loser has to buy dinner, and the cost of the dinner is proportional to how well the winner's chef does compared to how poorly the loser's chef performs.

Initially, we were going to pick immediately after the credits rolled, but they went by in a blur of names and faces, so we decided to let the competitors introduce themselves and that we'd choose right before the first challenge began. I first wanted to go with Angelo based on the opening, because he reminded me of season five's Fabio, the most likable little Italian man. Then he opened his mouth and reminded me instead of that jerk from Flipping Out. Part of me is glad I don't have cable at my apartment because that means I can't get bored and watch the crap that makes up the rest of Bravo's lineup. Anyway, since I very quickly went from thinking Angelo was cute to thinking he was repulsive and cocky, I switched to Kelly from Colorado. This was probably a mistake, because Angelo ended up edging out Kenny for both the Quickfire and Elimination challenge wins. Winning the first challenge almost always guarantees you a spot in the finals. Season three's Tre was controversially axed after a Restaurant Wars redo, but Kevin came in third, Stephan came in second, and Stephanie, Ilan and Harold all took home the title. If I had stuck with Angelo, I probably could have ridden his coattails to a very nice dinner indeed.

That being said, I did better than Nathan at the very least. Kelly's dish garnered compliments from the judges during the show, and Gail Simmons called it "another standout, even if she was not the strongest in her group," on her blog. Pete's pick, 51 year old culinary instructor Lynne, skated through without much notice, but Boyfriend's horse, John of the scary dreadlocks, struggled the whole episode through. I knew he was in trouble the moment he pulled something out of the freezer in Whole Foods and announced he had never used it before. Frozen, pre-made AND you've never used it before? Three strikes you're out, John. On top of that, he foolishly attempted a dessert, the usual kiss of Top Chef death. Needless to say, he went home, even over fake Kate Hudson's grainy chicken liver mousse. Sorry Nathan... now where do you want to take us to dinner?

master meals, week 8: tony mantuono's crespelle with ricotta and marinara

crespelle with ricotta and marinara sauce

So, Top Chef Masters ended its season last week, with Ethiopean born Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson narrowly edging out Rick Moonen and Susur Lee. If you've been reading along, you may be thinking "hmm... this Master Meals series thingie didn't feature two of those three finalists." You'd be right, and I'm afraid that's not going to change. We kind of fell off the bandwagon the final two weeks of the season, partly because Marcus and Susur's food is a bit removed from our culinary comfort zones, and partially because I had a Yelp event with free food one Wednesday and that killed our momentum. So, we skipped cooking entirely the second to last week, and then last Wednesday we made chicken marsala instead of a master meal (we'll eventually get around to blogging about that too, I'm sure).

For now, I'm going to talk about this awesome dish by Tony Mantuono, Obama's favorite chef. Crespelle are really fun to make, like little crepes, only not quite as thin and therefore less delicate and difficult to perfect. The batter was particularly easy to prepare. Simply combine the wet ingredients (two eggs and three quarters cup milk) with the dry (three quarters cup flour and a half teaspoon salt), and then stir in a tablespoon of melted butter. Aside from the instructions to cover the crespelle batter and let it sit in the fridge for an hour, this recipe was really quick to prepare as well.

I fried the crespelle for three minutes each in a frying pan rubbed with an olive oil soaked paper towel. I wound up with only six of them, because I didn't have a quarter cup with which to measure the batter. They are like thin pancakes. Then Nathan and I spread each crespelle with a mix of ricotta, parmesan, parsley and cracked black peppper and folded them into quarters. Nate had made up some tasty tomato sauce, so we spread half of that in the bottom of our baking pan, and put the crespelles on top. Another layer of sauce, some parsley and extra grated cheese, and we simply popped the pan into the oven for 25 minutes.


oven baked crespelle

Nathan will disagree with me but I think this dish blows a simple lasagna, (which will also be making a blog appearance one of these days), out of the water. It's like an easy manicotti. So good!


getting ready to plate

master meals, week 7: jonathan waxman's steak tartare and potatoes with melted raclette

waxman's tartare and potatoes

We've fallen a bit behind on our Master Meals series. We made this quite awhile ago, after loading and reloading the google book copy of A Great American Cook until we found a Jonathan Waxman recipe that we both liked. Nathan is crazy about steak tartare, and I was willing to give it a shot.

As it required no cooking, the tartare was pretty easy to make. It did, however require a whole lot of chopping. First, the meat, which I sliced into ⅛ inch strips and attempted to dice. Then we quartered a lime and chopped up half a red onion, a couple of shallots, 4 cloves of garlic, a jalapeno chile, a serrano chile, a tomato and a half cup of parsley. Like I said, a lot of chopping. Then we mixed the meat with salt, pepper, a few shakes of tabasco sauce and the juice of a lemon. The other ingredients we piled on a plate, and added them in as we saw fit at the table.


tartare mix-ins

Somehow, this didn't quite come together. It wasn't bad, but I didn't enjoy it all that much either. I think that the steak wasn't chopped small enough. I did the best I could with a knife, but I think having it coarsely ground would have worked better. Nathan also thinks we should have mixed in some egg yolk. That probably would have been good. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is evident in the picture below. You can see that the pile of onions and shallots and such was almost as big as the pile of meat, and I didn't even do the full three recommended shallots. It was pretty much all we could taste after we mixed it all together, and I kept on tasting it all night through to the next day's lunch. Decidedly unpleasant.


a salad, tartare and all the fixins

The potatoes, on the other hand, were great. We boiled them for 20 minutes, and then sliced them real thin. After tossing them olive oil and salt and pepper, we crisped them under the broiler with half a pound of shredded raclette cheese and cooked until it got nice and bubbly, which only took two or three minutes. Raclette tastes pretty nasty cold, but it melts into total deliciousness. I would definitely make potatoes like this again, and I'd love to find another raclette recipe.


raclette roasted potatoes

Master Sneals Week MCMXXIV: Rick "Bayless" Moonen's Bluefish with Dijonaise Sauce

Broiled Blue Fish Dijonnaise

Don't be fooled by the unappetizing picture, what appears to be a mound of gray and yellow goop is actually a delicious piece of fish! We got this recipe from this guy Rick Moonen. He is one of the contestants on Top Chief: Masters of the Universe and he looks a lot like last season's winner, Rick Bayless. He has an elaborate, yet surprisingly successful, combover. It's probably the best combover I've ever seen. The guy must shellac his hair with about 2 pounds of crude oil each morning to get it to work. He's also into sustainable fish and stuff. I actually found this recipe on some sort of eco-fish website, which has a bunch of other good meal ideas too.

You will need:
- Some small, portion-sized fillets of fish, or just one big fillet that you can cut up later. The original recipe said mackerel in the title, but then the actual text said bluefish, so who knows. We used one big bluefish.
- 1/4 cup mayo
- 2 tbsp. dijon
- some thyme and oregano, probably any herbs would do, whatever you like
- salt and pepper

This was incredibly easy. The only remotely difficult part was getting the pin bones out of the fish. Why don't fishmongers do that for you? I bet they have some tool that could do it really quickly with no effort. I thought this was America.

Start by putting a griddle under the broiler. I got a big griddle at Good Will a few years ago for like a dollar. It's probably worth more than that in scrap, and it is such a great cooking tool. I also got a little toy hippo at the same time. I've still got the hippo, too; it was really a bang-up day at the Good Will.

While the griddle is heating up, mix together the mayo and mustard and herbs. Season the fish with salt and pepper, then slather the top of the fish with the sauce mixture. Once the griddle is hot, put the fish on there, skin side down, for about 3 or 4 minutes. When the sauce on top has started to brown and bubble, you're done. That's all there is to it.


fish on the griddle

We served it with rice and peperonata. We tried Rick Moonen's peperonata recipe, which, while still good, is a step down from the one we used last time. It's pretty much the same as a standard peperonata, except it adds anchovies (wasted, no impact on the flavor at all, save them for something where they can make a difference) and tomato (no flavor impact, just made the dish more watery). He also did not call for red wine vinegar in the recipe, but I made a game-time decision and threw some in.

Overall, this meal was awesome and required very little time or effort. It even made good leftovers. It seems like fish is usually really easy to cook, all you do is kind of throw some sauces on a fillet and then cook it on high for a little bit. Or maybe that's just amateur hour stuff? Who knows. I like it.


blue fish and peperonata

Master Treals Week 5: Rick Bayless' Picadillo

the master's picadillo

I've been wanting to make a picadillo for a while. So we made one with this recipe that we took from Rick Bayless, as it was Cinco de Mayo and Sarah felt it would be allowable to make a recipe from the guy who won Top Chief Masters last year. As I understand it, for a picadillo you can just kind of throw a bunch of shit in a pot, let it cook down, and then eventually serve it. Here's the shit we threw in our pot:

1 28oz can of diced tomatoes
1.5 lbs ground pork
1 diced onion
1 minced clove of garlic
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 slivered almonds (we toasted them first)
2 or 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
Cumin
Salt
Pepper

The recipe we worked from recommended adding a canned chipotle chili, but who knows where to buy one of those, so we used a delicious chipotle sauce that we found at Whole Foods.

Cooking this thing is really easy. Cook the diced onions in oil until they are soft and browned, then add the garlic and cook for a couple more minutes. Then add all of the pork, and cook that until all of the little pieces of ground meat are cooked and brown. Make sure to stir during this part so that everything cooks evenly.

Once the pork is cooked, just dump everything else in - the tomatoes, the vinegar, the cinnamon, etc. We actually added the chipotle sauce later, when it was almost finished, but I don't think it matters too much. At this point, just let the pot simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid from the tomatoes etc. is cooked down and the whole thing is "a thick, homogeneous mass," to quote the recipe we used. Doesn't that sound appetizing? This took about 4o or 45 minutes for us but your mileage may vary.

Overall, the whole process took maybe an hour, with only about half of that involving actual work - the rest was just simmering time. Serve over rice, with salad, (ours had shredded cheddar, tomato, avocado, cilantro and lime). This is a pretty large amount of food - even after a hearty dinner, there were 3-4 lunch portions left over (accounting for a roughly 1:1 ratio of picadillo to rice), so I was eating well for the rest of the week.

You could really mix this recipe up if you wanted to. Substitute beef for pork, add olives, use different spices, more onions, etc. Go buck wild and never let anyone tell you what to put in your picadillo, this is America.


a meal in honor of cinco de mayo

master meals, week 4: jody adams' gnocchi with mushroom fricassee

I have not been looking forward to writing this entry. Jody Adams may have broken our losing streak by becoming the first featured Master Meals chef to make it to the Champions round, but Nathan and I were less successful back in his kitchen. This was easily the worst thing we've cooked all year, including our blue cheese sauce disaster.

The recipe was for homemade gnocchi with mushroom fricassee, and it looked straightforward enough. Sure, I'd heard that making gnocchi can be pretty tricky, but I had done my research and I thought I had a pretty solid grasp of the process.


our gnocchi

Unfortunately, a theoretical understanding of making gnocchi will only take you so far, and we fell more than a little short in the execution. Instead of light, fluffy potato-y pillows, our gnocchi were dense, doughy bricks. It was quite a disappointment. I think that making good gnocchi is probably one of those things that you have to just develop over time, because I couldn't tell you what went wrong. My only thoughts are that I may have over kneaded the dough, and that it would have been lighter had I added more flour. The Jody Adams recipe used about twice as much potato as compared to flour than the other two recipes I was using as a reference.

Anyway, I won't pretend to give you any gnocchi tips, as I could use some good ones myself. I will, however, tell you a bit more about the mushroom fricassee, which was quite delicious and was the only reason I was able to stomach as much of the gnocchi as I did. We sliced and browned a whole pound of button and portabello mushrooms in some butter. We had to do this in two batches so as to not crowd the mushrooms, (a Julia Child tip). Then we removed them from the pan and sauteed up a shallot and a clove of garlic with more butter until soft. Then we tossed the mushrooms back in with a half a cup of marsala wine and let that reduce to a nice glaze. The recipe also called for fresh thyme, but we did without.

On its own, this mushroom fricassee would have been great. Adams poured reduced heavy cream over her gnocchi and spread the mushrooms, chopped tomatoes and parmesan cheese on top to bake. We used canned chopped tomatoes, which actually worked fine-- it was the gnocchi that were the real problem. They were just a leaden mess, and soaking in all the cream probably didn't help any either. Sprinkled with parsley, though, they actually looked pretty good. As we sadly learned, however, appearances can be deceiving.


not bad looking gnocchi

master meals, week 3: mark peel's cornmeal crusted trout

God dammit Nathan, we were going to do Jonathan Waxman, and he cleaned house, winning both the quickfire and the elimination challenge. They spent the whole episode calling him "Chef Kenobi," for god's sake!!! Instead we settled on Mark Peel, who followed the trend of our featured chefs by finishing in LAST PLACE. Our chosen cheftestants have also managed to drop the bar for the lowest score each week, with Peel garnering only 9½ out of a possible 20 stars! Nathan tried to console me by assuring me that probability was not on our side, as there are way more losing chefs than victorious ones in these early rounds, but I pointed out that the chances of us selecting the absolute lowest scoring chef three consecutive episodes is way less than choosing one of the two winners.

I'm very frustrated in our inability to pick a more masterful top chef master, but I have to admit that our Mark Peel Meal was incredibly easy and delicious, and he just happened to get slammed with some particularly bad luck during the episode. He prepared a delicious seafood sausage with mustard greens, and only needed to bake them into a puffy Yorkhire pudding. Unfortunately, the oven they were using was faulty, and his dish didn't bake in time. He was forced to crank up the temperature at the last moment, which turned the pudding into a leaden clump of dough at the bottom of his dish. The critics seemed to like the rest of the dish despite its overall failure, but the diners gave him only one star, leaving him to finish in last place behind the ever odious Ludo Lefebvre. Sorry Mark, and better luck next season!


cornmeal crusted trout

The one thing that Mark did leave us with is this phenomenally easy recipe for cornmeal-crusted pan-fried trout. Coat a couple of nicely seasoned trout fillets in a mixture of cornmeal, flour, chopped parsley, salt and pepper, and then place them flesh side down in a pan with some very hot oil. After a minute, add some butter, wait two minutes or until skin begins to curl, and then flip and cook for another 30 seconds or a minute. Serve with lemon wedges. Incredibly simple, but so good!

We had ours with some rice and some spinach I sauteed with a little olive oil and garlic until it was thoroughly wilted. I love meals that come together in under a half an hour and without any stress!

Next is the last of the first round top chef match ups, and we're going to featuring the work of our first female chef, Jody Adams. She's the owner of Rialto's, which is in Cambridge, and is Nathan's dad and step-mom's favorite restaurant. We always eat really well there and I'm confident we can find a really good recipe of hers to replicate. Here's hoping that she does better than our first three Masters!

master meals, week 2: david burke's steak and egg salad pita

This week's Master Meal features David Burke, who has like, seventeen amazing restaurants in New York City. Nathan and I had a lovely meal at Fishtail, and Nate's also been to the former David Burke & Donatella. I was really excited to learn that Burke would be appearing on Top Chef Masters, because I feel like he's one of those chefs in New York whose touch turns everything to culinary gold. Even though I've only eaten one inexpensive Restaurant Week meal at a David Burke establishment, I can tell that this is a man with great vision for his food, who considers every detail when creating his restaurant experiences.

For our second Master Meal, Nathan and I had the distinct challenge of translating Burke's playful and artistic culinary creations into home dining. Luckily for us, Burke had done half the work for us, drafting several "easy way" versions of dishes he actually serves at his restaurants for Food & Wine Magazine. After much consideration, we went with the steak and egg salad sandwiches. OK, to be honest the minute I saw the phrase "deviled egg salad," I knew Nathan would insist we make it, and that was fine by me. Instant end to deliberation.


steak and egg pita

Unlike our first Master Meal, which was slightly underwhelming, this was a great success. The egg salad mixed four chopped hard-boiled eggs with mayo, hot sauce, Woucestershire, paprika, dry mustard, diced celery, and some parsley and onion in place of the recommended chives. This had a nice kick to it, but wasn't too "angry," (this appears to be David Burke's favorite food adjective), in part because I added some extra mayo. I was skeptical about the egg boiling method, (cover eggs with water, bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and let them sit for ten minutes before draining and peeling), but it worked almost perfectly, with firm yolks that still had a hint of orange gooeyness in their centers. (I love my eggs to be slightly less than hardboiled.)

The steak, which we seasoned, brushed with olive oil, and pan fried for five minutes a side, was delicious, with a wonderfully seared crust and perfectly juicy, medium rare interior. The watercress, tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper, finished off the sandwich with a burst of freshness. My only slight complaint is universal to steak sandwiches: the steak strips are too hard to bite into, and I always end up pulling huge pieces out of the bread. Other than that, everything was great. Even the fact that we could only find whole wheat pitas to brush with olive oil and grill couldn't bring down our meal. Total success.

Unfortunately, while our meal may have turned out better this week, the result for our contestant of choice was the same: last place. And while Jimmy Bradley's failures could pretty much be attributed to his partner, David Burke had no one to whom he could pass the buck. He choked all by his lonesome. To his credit, they did seem to have a fair number of good things to say about what he made, but I think the editors must have been being really nice to him, considering the critics gave him really awful scores. It's a bummer too, because Marcus Samuelsson, who wound up in the winner's circle with Carmen Gonzalez, seems like a cocky bastard. If he's the ultimate Master, I'll be so angry, especially when I think about just how totally sweet and awesome last season's winner, Rick Bayless and runner up Hubert Keller were.

Anyway, we didn't just pig out on steak sandwiches and watch tv. I also made up a quick baby arugala, itty bitty tomato, blue cheese and crouton salad with dressing using this Alice Waters' recipe because I felt like we couldn't just have sandwiches for dinner, and also because I'd had the tab with the (incredibly easy) recipe up in my work browser for almost a week. The directions call for smashing one small garlic clove and two pinches of salt into a paste, adding two tablespoons of red wine vinegar and some freshly ground pepper. After that "macerates," or whatever, you whisk in two or three tablespoons of olive oil and you're done! Easy and delicious.

The only step that is remotely tricky is the garlic smooshing, which is meant to be done in a mortar and pestle. Now, while I have dreams of a Julia Child style "mother of all mortars" someday gracing my countertop, this is not currently something either of us own. However, Nathan and I both have nice wooden muddlers that some alcoholic beverage vendor was handing out for free at a Yelp event we went to last year. Aside from my recent venture into the world of mojitos, the muddlers rarely get used in their first line of work. Instead, they usually get called into duty as pestles, and they are pretty good at making the substitution. We've tried various stand in mortars, and last night I finally found the perfect one: some random ceramic sake container that someone in Nathan's apartment had left down on the free stuff table. It was deep, with a narrow bottom, and had a spout which later proved quite handy when it came to pouring the dressing. I love successfully improvising kitchen appliances.

Thus ends this week's edition of Master Meals. Next week six of the chefs featured in season one will be back, which rocks my rocks. Unfortunately, among them is Ludo Lefebvre, who was one arrogant son of a bitch. I can tell you for certain that we won't be featuring him on the blog any time soon, and I will definitely be rooting for him to lose again. I am also hesitant to try my hand at anything of Wylie Dufresne's, because I probably wouldn't have the necessary gadgetry.

So what are we going to make? Well, unlike the first two installments of Master Meals, Nathan and I haven't eaten at the restaurants of any of these six chefs. However, I did read The United States of Arugula, and I was intrigued by its mention of Jonathan Waxman's roast chicken dish, which sold for an unprecedented $23 way back in 1984. We had such great success with Julia's chicken recipe that I've been itching to make another one, so don't be surprised if you find an oven roaster featured next week. We'll see what Nathan has to say about this idea. Until then, stay tuned.

master meals, week 1: jimmy bradley's orzo lentil salad

So today's post introduces our first weekly feature on Garlicus Maximus: a dinner featuring a recipe from one of that week's Top Chef Masters competitors. I'm calling it Master Meals. (I'm sorry if that's unspeakably corny, but I kinda like it.)


Nathan's Top Chief pose

I've been a fan of Top Chef since its second season, and it actually was a big influence on me as I began cooking more and more. The Masters spin off is arguably better than the original, as the chefs are way less bitchy and competitive. Much of that stems from the fact that they are established and successful chefs, and are playing for charity, rather than to jump start their careers with nationwide exposure and prize money. There also seems to be a great camaraderie between all these culinary giants, and it is great to see how much they all respect and admire each other's different cuisines. The challenge of our Master Meals will be to find recipes from these great chefs that can be easily prepared by the home chef, aka Nathan and me. Needless to say, I don't expect we'll be making anything of molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne's, but I hope we can find some cool things to cook.

The season actually started last week, but I had a job interview so Nathan and I were not able to prepare our first Master Meal until Sunday night. While finding the time to cook was tricky, selecting a cheftestant was easy. My parents took us to the Red Cat for my birthday last month, and we were just blown away by the Jimmy Bradley's food and the restaurant as a whole. I especially loved that everything I read about Bradley's approach to cooking and dining echoed what we had experienced at the Red Cat. A "purveyor of straightforward, occasionally irreverent, food, and contagious conviviality, all of it wrapped up in an attitude-free package"? Yep, that was our meal in a nutshell. Not to mention the incredibly solicitous and helpful staff! As Bradley said himself in this (otherwise somewhat boring) interview, "All of my restaurants are chef-driven. Everything starts from the kitchen. My places aren’t about what’s fabulous, exclusive, and snooty. Customer service is a top priority, too. I concentrate on anticipating guest needs and recovering when we fail — we need to know what you need before you need it, and when we do make a mistake, we should be able to make up for it easily." I can say from first hand experience he's made that vision a reality.

For our Jimmy Bradley Master Meal, I found this recipe for Lentil and Orzo Salad. It seemed easy but tasty, with tomatoes, cucumbers, toasted almonds and fresh herbs. I basically picked it because I was intrigued by the french lentils, which Nathan's stepsister Helen had recently blogged about with great enthusiasm. I didn't know where I'd get them, but I happened to take Matt to the Chelsea Market on Friday, where recent addition the nut box was serendipitously selling them for only $2.50 a bag. Because the dish called for mint leaves, it seemed natural to pair it with lamb chops, which we rubbed with mustard, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper before pan frying. I also decided that I needed to try my hand at mojitos, my favorite cocktail, the result of which was incredibly exciting and satisfying and summery. We rounded out the meal with some cumin roasted carrots, which I'll be covering in depth on another post.


lamb chop, orzo, and a sprig of mint

As much as I would have liked our inaugural Master Meal to be an unqualified success, the recipe wasn't all that exciting. I wouldn't call it a dud, necessarily, but it was a little bland and forgettable. Nathan and I both felt that the lentils seemed out of place in a pasta salad, like they were a very conscious attempt to add protein to a vegetarian dish. The toasted almonds were a nice touch, but there were so few of them that they were easily overlooked. It also probably didn't help that the out of season tomatoes were flavorless pink mush. I also would have added way way more basil, and maybe some red peppers or a crumbly cheese or something. As Nathan pointed out, it's easy to make a good orzo salad, and we could easily improve on this one, perhaps even at the Whole Foods salad bar. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't recommend this recipe.


orzo and french lentil salad

Unfortunately for Bradley, his time on Top Chef Master's went much the same way. While his seared lamb carpaccio salad was beloved by the judges, they found his partner, Gorvind Armstrong, had a prepared a rather dry and boring lamb chop. Sadly, the team finished in third place. I had been rooting for Bradley to move on to the Champions round, but I'm looking forward to seeing more of winners, Tony Mantuano and Susan Feniger. Meanwhile, for a Bradley fix I can just head back to the Red Cat, or try swinging by the Harrison. As for the rest of the French lentils, maybe I'll try Helen's sausage recipe before the weather gets much warmer.

Tonight's episode looks like it is featuring some heavy hitters, and I'm looking forward to it. After work, Nathan and I are meeting at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods to shop, and then we'll head up to his place to cook, eat, and "watch what happens." We've already selected our second Master Meal, and I'm excited to say we'll be preparing a dish by the one and only David Burke! Stay tuned to find out what it is!