Enough Dancing. Rosie Gets Back In Her Kitchen.

Youngest Hawthorne is working this summer as a busboy at The Flying Fish Cafe, one of the better restaurants on the beach. He came home the other night telling me he'd tried their scallops and how wonderful they were and did I know how to fix them and please could I.
"Mais oui, mon petit."

The funny thing is how it came about that YH tried the scallops.
Seems he was clearing off a table and one of the diners had left 1 huge honkin' scallop on her plate. As he told me, "It was in pristine condition and I just couldn't bring myself to
throw it out and WASTE it. So I ate it. And it was delicious."
Middle Hawthorne would sooner gnaw off his foot than eat food leftover on someone's plate.
And that someone would include family members as well.
He would always ask me when I served him food (And we're talking about a very young child here.), "Mama, has anyone touched this food?"
"No, not at all," I would respond. "I didn't even touch it when preparing it.
Am I not amazing or what?"
When he was convinced the food hadn't come in contact with any human appendages, only then would he indulge.


It just so happened the dish YH tasted was one the chef for The Flying Fish made for us at one of our cooking classes.

Scallops on a bed of risotto, with a Parmesan crisp, basil pesto, and caramelized onions.
It's one of my favorite dishes.

Let's start with the Parmesan crisps.

I grated the Parmesan and put 2 heaping spoonfuls of it inside a biscuit cutter, pressing the Parmesan into rounds on top of parchment paper.

Bake in a preheated 425 degree oven for 5-7 minutes, turning the baking pan.

And here are my yummy Parmesan crisps.

Note that all this is done while stepping over puppies, who like Dixie, tend to congregate in the kitchen under my feet.
Both Daughter Hawthorne and Middle Hawthorne left for the beach, she to watch her friend's brother in a skim-boarding contest and he to surf, both leaving their puppies in my care.

Next, risotto.

I have a cup of Arborio rice, chopped fresh spinach, grated Parmesan (Il Villagio),
chopped sun-dried tomatoes (which I poured boiling water over and let set for 30 minutes), and chopped onions.

Melt about 2 TB butter (Land o' Lakes Unsalted) in pan and add onions.
Saute for a few minutes.

Then add in the Arborio rice and cook for for a few more minutes.

Next add in your liquid.
I'm using my homemade turkey consomme.
You just add a little bit of liquid at a time, cook, letting the rice soak up the liquid, then add some more liquid and cook some more.

I like to add in a bit of cream too.
Keep cooking, adding liquid, cooking and adding until the rice is tender, stirring often.
This took me about 40 minutes.

When the rice was ready, I added in my chopped spinach.

And my sun-dried tomatoes.

Stir to mix.

Finally, I added in about 1 cup of grated Parmesan.
And the risotto is done.
Set aside, keeping warm.


Now, on to the caramelized onions.

I heated up bit of Extra Light Bertolli Olive Oil with some Land O' Lakes butter, then added my sliced onions.

Cooked until slightly browned.

Then added in a bit of white wine to deglaze the pan, scraping up all the goodie bits.

And here are the sweet, delicious, caramelized onions.

Now, let's step back a bit and see what's going on on my cooktop.
Front and center is my risotto.
Back is my caramelized onions in the center.
On the back right is my balsamic reduction ... well ... reducing.
On the front right, that lovely caramel colored liquid is my homemade turkey consomme.
The big pot on the front left is chicken stock cooking.
When I went to the freezer to get my frozen consomme, I found a Zip-Lock bag of something unidentifiable. A UFO, if you will. That would be an Unidentified Frozen Object.
I brought it upstairs and realized it was a frozen chicken carcass.
Damn, I feel so ... Ina-ish.
How bad can that be?
So, I decided to add in some water, bay leaves, onions with skins, sliced carrots and celery, and cook it all day long to make chicken stock.

Here's my carcass becoming stock.

Isn't this liquid lovely?
It started out as turkey stock, then I tweaked it with egg whites to get out all the particulate matter, then strained it through cheesecloth to make this
beautiful, deeply flavorful turkey consomme.

Everything else seems to be ready, so I rinsed off my scallops.
After rinsing, I drained them on paper towels, patted dry (very important),
and salted and peppered them.

Heat up olive oil and butter, then add in the scallops.

Maybe two minutes on each side.

Here's the plated dish:
Risotta on the bottom, then a Parmesan crisp, and next the scallops with basil pesto and caramelized onions.

I love this dish.
I know I've blogged it before, but some of you may not have seen it.
Plus, it's worth repeating.

And Youngest Hawthorne loved it.

Now while I was cooking, Youngest Hawthorne was communing with nature.

Praying Mantises always give me the Heebie Jeebies.
I remember when I was in grade school at Forest Hills Elementary School, during recess, the boys would go out and find praying mantis egg cases and bring them inside and leave them in their desks. These were the old timey desks with the hinged desk top that opened up. Then one morning when we were in class, the damn things would hatch, and thousands upon thousands of baby mantises would be all over the room.
Good times.


OK, let's back track to yesterday.
I decided to make The French Laundry's Gazpacho with Balsamic Glaze.
Please go to Carol's wonderful blog to see her
French Laundry Gazpacho.The Gazpacho is at the very end, so scroll down.
Better yet, read her blog.

I'm starting out with a cup of Balsamic vinegar.

Heat it over very low heat until steam comes up.
Now, here's the very important direction I ignored:
Place the pan on a HEAT DIFFUSER and let it very slowly reduce, not simmer, for 2-3 hours until it's nice and thick.

I didn't use a heat diffuser. I just kept the flame on the lowest possible I could. Then while I was doing about fifty seven other things, Mr. Hawthorne came home, picked up the Balsamic Vinegar pan, and asked me, "Is this supposed to look like this?"
Well, hell no.
The Balsamic vinegar had bubbled all up and was extremely thick.
I tasted it.
It had a burned taste to it.
Plus, it was like caramel in the hard ball stage.
When I tasted it, the Balsamic reduction formed a ball the size of Texas that stuck to the back of my two front top teeth. The same tooth I had fixed yesterday
with a bond to fix the crumbling crack.
I feared for my tooth.
I was scared when I was trying to get the ball of balsamic off that was firmly attached to my teeth that I would extract a tooth or two.
Not to worry.
The ball finally dissolved.
My teeth are safe.

I trashed the reduction.

That was yesterday.
This morning, I headed to Harris Teeter to buy more Balsamic vinegar to get this thing right.

It was quite fortuitous that I did so, because on the drive home, I looked over to the left side of the road, and lo and behold, there was a deer grazing in the field.
Double click, Mama Hawthorne, Sister Hawthorne, and Mr. Hawthorne to enlarge the picture.

I pulled off the road and shot a couple of pictures.

I'm a firm believer in that things happen for a reason.
I effed up my balsamic vinegar reduction yesterday just so I could blog Bambi today.
That works for me.

Here's today's effort at reduction.
Notice, I used a HEAT DIFFUSER this time.
And what a freakin' difference it made.

The heat diffuser, in this case, is a cast iron pan.
Notice the handle?
It's been welded back on.
Now, how, you ask, do you break the handle of an iron pan?
I tell you my friends, it was not hard for me at all.
As Mr. H. always tells me, "You can break a friggin' anvil."
So, I broke this iron pan.
Middle Hawthorne was taking a welding class at the time
and asked me could he take it in to class and fix it.
Isn't that convenient?
Middle Hawthorne told me his teacher took one look at the broken pan, scratched his head, and asked incredulously, "How the hell did that happen?"
Middle H. just responded, "That's my Mama."

After about 2 hours and change on a HEAT DIFFUSER, my
Balsamic vinegar has reduced to a lovely molasses-like-thickness glaze.

Now, on to the gazpacho.

Here are all the ingredients for the Gazpacho:

tomatoes
red onion
green pepper
(OK. I cheated here. The French Laundry calls for a green bell pepper. I didn't have bells ready in my garden, but I did have a Cubanelle pepper so I used that.)
cucumber
(Cheated again. FL calls for an English cuke. I had a regular cuke in my fridge, so I scraped the seeds out of that and used it.)
garlic
Kosher salt
cayenne
tomato paste
white wine vinegar
(I used white vinegar and white wine.)
extra virgin olive oil
lemon juice
tomato juice
thyme sprigs

I've chopped the peeled tomatoes, onion, cucumber, pepper, garlic, and added the tomato paste.

Here, I'm adding in the tomato joos.

Add in the sprigs of thyme, cover, and refrigerate overnight.

Next day, pull out the thyme.
Then puree everything in the processor.

And here's my pureed gazpacho
with reduced balsamic vinegar glaze artfully drizzled on top.

This was light, refreshing, and FRESH,
what with the veggies coming right out of my garden.
I could taste all the flavors - the onion, the tomatoes, the pepper, the cucumber.
The reduced Balsamic vinegar added a nice tart flavor to the mix.
Good eats.