In just a matter of days, each of us, as Americans, will be faced with a decision of critical importance, and with profound consequences.  It is a choice not to be taken lightly, for it carries the weight of generations of tradition and obligation, and the path that each of us takes will have lasting effects on how we are viewed and respected by our family and our friends.

I’m talking, of course, about making your own gravy for Thanksgiving.

I like cooking for Thankgiving.  It’s one of the few days where there is nothing else that needs to be done other than preparing the big meal, and, for me, preparing gravy from scratch is my favorite part.  It signals the turn into the final stretch of cooking, and the process, and results, are immensely gratifying.  It also throws all caution to the wind with respect to calorie counts and fat content.

The idea for this post came when our supermarket recently went into holiday mode, and with it comes many many endcaps filled with gravy in a can, gravy in a box, or gravy in a pouch.

This year, if I hear that any of you bought gravy from a store, or made it from a mix, I will personally come to your house and punch you in the head.  I’m that serious about gravy.

Before I list the recipe, let me explain the process and try to convince any of you gravy-purchasers of the validity of my argument.  Gravy, at its essence, is nothing more than a mixture of a thickening agent with liquid.  For my gravy recipe, I use butter and flour to thicken a combination of pan drippings from the turkey and stock.  That’s pretty much it, so you see why I am so vehemently against packaged preparations.

The long form is this - when start to prepare the turkey on Thanksgiving morning, I throw the giblets and the neck into a pot with some vegetables and water, and get a stock going, which simmers for most of the afternoon, extracting as much turkey flavor out of the meat and bones as possible.  When it’s time to make the gravy, I make a roux out of butter and flour, and let that cook until it’s a deep, deep brown, then strain the stock into the roux, mix it up, and keep it at a low simmer.  The pan drippings from the turkey get stirred in whenever the turkey’s done and been transferred to a carving platter.  And that’s it.

I realize that some people may be apprehensive about cooking in general, and for this reason Thanksgiving tends to kick off the holiday season of stress.  The only thing that I can think of that could go wrong with this recipe is you could burn the roux, either by cooking it on too high a heat setting or letting it cook for too long.  Remember, making a roux is the act of toasting flour in butter - some words to remember are “toast” or “peanut butter”, which are the levels of browning that you are looking for.  If you reach this point and discover that you haven’t strained the stock, or are otherwise not ready to add stock, just move the pot with the roux to a cool burner and keep stirring until it cools off a little.

Thanksgiving Turkey Gravy by The Best Food Blog Ever

Stock (can use prepared stock if necessary)
[stock] 10 cups water
[stock] Olive oil
[stock] Contents of giblet bag from the turkey, minus the liver
[stock] 2 carrots, unpeeled
[stock] 2 onions, unpeeled, hacked into halves
[stock] 3 stalks celery, broken in half
[stock] 1 Tbs peppercorns
[stock] Fresh parsley and thyme, no need to chop

Red or white wine

If you are using prepared stock, make sure you have 10 cups available, heated, and proceed past the next part.

If preparing your own stock, take a large pot and heat a thin coating of olive oil over medium heat until shiny.  Add the contents of the giblet bag (no liver) and the turkey neck and saute until browned, about five minutes per side (flip with tongs).  Throw your carrots, onions, celery, and peppercorns in, along with half of the parsley and thyme, give everything a stir, and cover.  Turn the heat down to the lowest it can go and let that cook for 20 minutes.  This is called ’sweating’ and the process extracts a lot of flavor out of the pot ingredients that would otherwise not be available by just boiling them in liquid.

After 20 minutes, add the remaining parsley and thyme and 10 cups of water.  Cover, bring the heat to high, and bring it all up to a boil.  Once boiling, you can reduce the heat and let that simmer on the back burner until you need it.  When you need it, you can either strain the solids out or just use a slotted spoon to scoop most of the solids out and use a ladle to pull out the stock you need.  Keep the giblets and the turkey neck, though.

Make the roux - in a saucepan over medium-low heat, melt the stick of butter until its fully melted and no longer foamy.  If you want to live on the edge, you can even wait until it starts to brown a bit.  Dump all of the 1/4 cup of flour in at once and stir vigorously to absorb the butter (a whisk will help immensely with this part).  At first, all of the flour will clump up into chunks and balls, but as the mixture heats up and relaxes it will become more viscous.  Keep on stirring until the roux has darkened to the color of peanut butter, then add 10 cups of hot stock, whisking mightily as it bubbles and squeaks.  Once all of the stock has been incorporated, maintain the gravy at a simmer while you finish preparing Thanksgiving.

Once the turkey is done and moved out of the roasting pan and onto a carving platter, drain all of the pan drippings into a bowl or large measuring cup (or even a defatting beaker).

Set the roasting pan across two burners set to high heat (if you have a vent fan, now would be a good time to turn it on).  Using an oven mitt to hold onto the pan and give it some stability, pour a good amount of wine into the pan and use a wooden spoon to scrape up all of the bits that are stuck to the bottom.  Once everything is loosened up, let all of it cook for about a minute, turn off your burners, and (use two mitts) carefully pour all of it into the simmering gravy.  Add the pan drippings, defatted or not as is your preference (if there’s a large amount of fat, it’s probably better to defat it).   Stir it all together.

This part is optional.  If you’d like, you can now take the meat off of the turkey neck with your fingers, and chop the meat up along with the giblets.  Add all of this to the gravy, taste, and adjust for salt just before serving.

I want everyone to join the homemade Thanksgiving gravy revolution.  Feel free to email me at ddl[at]bestfoodblogever.com if you have any questions about this recipe.

We returned from our beach house vacation to 50 degree weather.  One of the few good things about colder weather is that it puts stews, braises, and richer meats on the menu.  I found a good set of boneless beef short ribs at the supermarket, which were originally intended to be prepared in a red wine sauce until I remembered that we had a cache of stout beer.

I’ve modified this recipe from Epicurious to account for the smaller amount of short ribs.  I also decided to do the opposite of a slow cooker and instead used my pressure cooker, which enabled me to complete the dish in under an hour.  The result was exceedingly tender chunks of beef, immersed in a thick sauce that was made slightly sweet by the stout and the spices used in this recipe.  You’d be surprised that you don’t need many short ribs to make a meal, since they’re very rich - one, or at most two, per person.  I served this over roasted potatoes, but the next time I’ll be sure to have some egg noodles on hand.

Beef Short Ribs Braised in Stout Beer

1 lb beef short ribs

1 small can of tomato sauce

Pat the ribs dry with a paper towel and set aside.  Combine all of the spices in a bowl and shake to mix thoroughly.  Rub all sides of the beef ribs with the spice mixture and set aside, uncovered, in the fridge for about an hour (skip the resting period if you lack the time).

Take a pressure cooker and set it over medium-high heat.  Add a splash of olive oil, and when it’s hot and shimmery, add the short ribs and brown for 1 minute per side (watch to make sure the spice mixture doesn’t stick and burn).  Remove the ribs to a plate, and add another splash of oil to the pot.

Throw in your onion/carrot/celery mix, along with the bay leaf.  Stir that up and let that cook for about 3 minutes, or until the onion looks softish.  Throw the chopped garlic in, give it a stir, and let that go for a minute or two.

Add all of your liquids at this time - the beer, the broth, and the tomato sauce, and stir up the bottom of the pot to get all the sticky stuff off and into the goop.  Add the ribs to the sauce, turn the heat up, and lock the pressure cooker lid on.

Bring the pressure cooker up to pressure, until the excess steam steadily escapes from the valve.  Reduce the heat to medium, or to the point where the pressure is maintained, and cook for 40 minutes.  Rapid-release the pressure, taste for salt, and serve.

Yes, you read that right.  Franks and Beans is a staple of American cuisine, something that everyone remembers having as a kid, and for most of us, a bygone memory of childhood.  As adults, we aren’t really enthusiastic about revisiting these kinds of pre-adolescent culinary recipes, because in retrospect they weren’t really much to write home about.

Out of a can, baked beans tend to be a mushy mess of legumic hell, not getting much better when paired with a few cut up hot dogs.  Made from scratch, though, with a few ingredients that most of us probably already have in our pantry and refrigerators, and Franks and Beans becomes our Recession Meal this week.

Beans are inexpensive no matter how you look at them, being about a dollar or less for a pound of dried beans, or about the same price for canned.  Everything else in this recipe is something that you probably already have on hand.  As for preparation, there are actually three ways to pull this one off, but one of them involves specialty cookware in the form of a pressure cooker, which I highly recommend for time savings.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide how you want to approach this, and include directions for all alternatives.  You may find that you like Franks and Beans made one way more than another, but I would presume that since each method uses the same ingredients, the end result should not vary much in taste.

Franks and Beans - a Recession Meal Recipe from The Best Food Blog Ever

1 lb white beans (Cannelini or Great Northern), dried, or use canned (rinse both under running water) [89 cents]

1 onion, chopped [5 lbs for $2.99]

2 cloves garlic, chopped [1 head for 75 cents]

Some bacon, about two or three slices, chopped [$4 per lb, thereabouts]

1/2 Cup ketchup [on hand, or about a dollar for the cheap stuff]

1/2 Cup maple syrup [on hand, or about $3 per bottle]

2 Tbs mustard [on hand, or about a dollar for the cheap stuff]

2 Tbs brown sugar [on hand, or about $2 to $3 for a box]

Hot dogs, cut up [$3 a pack, thereabouts]

If you are using dried beans: Put the beans in water to cover in the morning before leaving for work so that they soak all day.  Prepare according to the directions on the bag (which probably involves boiling them for about an hour or so).

Option 1: You can do the quick-soak method in a pressure cooker - put the entire pound of beans into a pressure cooker with 6 cups of water.  Seal the cooker, bring to a boil over high heat, and pressure-cook for five minutes.  Quick-release the pressure, drain the beans.

Option 2: Just open up a can or two of beans and rinse them under running water.  The final texture of the dish will probably be softer, so consider yourself warned.

Put the bacon into a saucepan (large enough to hold all of the beans when you add them) or pressure cooker over medium heat and stir it up.  Let all of that wonderful pork fat render out of the bacon, about five minutes or so, and then use a slotted spoon to scoop the bacon bits out onto a paper towel.  Leave the bacon fat in the pan.

Throw your chopped onion into the bacon fat and give it a good stir.  Let that run for about five or ten minutes, until the onion is nicely browned and your kitchen smells like IHOP.  During this step, if you were using dried beans, have six cups of water ready to go.

After the onions are soft and browned at the edges, toss in your chopped garlic and stir vigorously to keep it from burning (if garlic burns, in this or any other dish, you should immediately shut off all of your burners and order a pizza.  Srsly.)  After 30 seconds of garlic-stirring, add all of the beans.

If you are using dried beans, add 6 cups of water, bring to a boil, and simmer the contents of the pot until the beans are tender, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Option 1: If you are making this in a pressure cooker, add the 6 cups of water, cover and seal, bring to pressure and cook for 10 minutes.  Quick-release the pressure and continue to the next step.

Option 2: If you are using canned beans, just add the drained beans and a little bit of water, like a cup, to keep it all from burning.  The beans are already tender out of the can, so you can skip ahead to what I call the EXTREMELY TASTY PART of this recipe.

If you are using dried beans, once they are tender, drain the contents of the pot using a colander and dump it all back into the pot.

Here’s the EXTREMELY TASTY PART of the recipe.  Add the rest of the ingredients, that being the ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, and maple syrup, to the beans and mix well.  Throw in the chopped bacon and the hot dogs.  Bring it all to a simmer and cook for about five to ten minutes, making sure to stir it often so that the beans on the bottom don’t stick and burn.

You’re ready to go.  If there are no kids or picky eaters around, you can hit the pot with a shot of whiskey and stir it in.  It makes it better, trust me.

Homemade Franks and Beans is nothing like what you remember from your childhood.  The flavors are brighter, the textures are more defined, and you may find yourself becoming a fan all over again.  As an added bonus to this Recession Meal, this recipe makes a ton of Franks and Beans, so it can actually serve as two or three dinners, or multiple lunches, as the case may be.

Given the ongoing collapse of the American financial system this week, I’m starting a new series named Recession Meals here at the Best Food Blog Ever.  I’m even going to tag the recipes with ‘recession’ so that you can find them easily.  The goal of Recession Meals is to get food on the table without spending a lot of money - which should be an everyday goal anyway in the absence of a bad economy, but which is a virtual necessity now.

I try to do a major supermarket shopping trip once every other week.  Sometimes, though, this means that we run out of meat a few days before I’d want to go to the supermarket again.  I could break down and just go to the store, but it’s an interesting challenge to stick to my grocery schedule and try to stick it out for a couple of days.  I think the financial experts call this ‘budgeting’.

Take a look at any of your supermarket receipts and you’ll find that meat is the most expensive item on your list.  If you reduce your reliance on meat and focus on replacing it with beans, tofu, or some other protein, you can make a serious impact on your food bill and possibly discover new things about yourself, like the fact that you like beans.

I saw this soup for sale in my supermarket’s Sunday flyer and figured I had the stuff to make it myself.  It is a very filling, autumn-perfect meal that is very inexpensive because the bulk of it is composed of beans - lentils and a can of chickpeas that I found in the cupboard.  You could literally make this recipe with water instead of chicken stock and it would be just as good.  I had some frozen sausages, so I sliced a couple and put them in, but they are completely optional.

Moving to soups and beans is great for your personal economy, because they are cheap nutrition and the ingredients can be used for multiple meals.  For the Recession Meals, I am including information about the costs of each ingredient.  These are based on my local prices, so your mileage may vary.

Lentil and Chickpea Soup with Indian Spices

Olive oil [about 3 bucks for a small bottle]

8 cups of water [free!] or chicken stock [about $3 for a large can]

Rinse the lentils and set aside.

In a large pot (remember, you are adding 8 cups of water here, and also remember Archimedes’ Principle), heat about 2 Tbs of olive oil until shiny, add the garlic and stir until golden.  Add the chopped onions and stir to combine.

Once the onions have softened and browned a bit, add the carrots and celery.   Food science - since celery is mostly water, if you add it at the same time as the onions, the onions will never brown since the water given off by the celery will steam everything up.

Saute the vegetables over medium heat for about ten minutes.  Add the lentils and chickpeas and stir to coat with oil (add a little more oil if need be).

Pour 8 cups of water or stock into the pot and bring to a boil.  Lower the heat to a gentle boil and go do something else for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, add the garam masala (or your choice of spices), stir, taste for salt (it will probably need 1 to 2 tsp), and cover the pot.  Continue to cook for another 25 minutes.

Use a fork and fish out some lentils and check for tenderness.  When the lentils are tender, the soup is ready to serve.

We’re coming off of our first heat wave of the summer, four straight days of 98 degree weather which culminated in violent thunderstorms last night that finally brought some relief.

On Monday, it was so hot that I had absolutely no desire to cook anything, nor did I want to venture out into the heat to pick something up.  Whatever I made, I wanted it to be cold and really easy to make with things that I already had in my kitchen.

My solution was cold peanut noodles (you may see variations of this recipe as cold sesame noodles, but seeing as the bulk of the recipe is peanut butter…).

A quick search on the internet turns up lots of recipes for cold peanut noodles, and they all basically read the same.  Some of the recipes can get complex, but especially when I’m in a rush, I’m going for the most straightforward preparation possible.

Here’s a quick and dirty mockup, based largely on a Tyler Florence recipe that I found on Epicurious.  Feel free to adjust proportions and add items as you please.

Cold Peanut Noodles for Hot Summer Weather

3/4 lb of spaghetti

2 Tbs soy sauce
2 Tbs rice vinegar
1 Tbs sesame oil
1/2 Cup peanut butter
1/2 Cup water or stock

Protein of some sort - tofu, cooked chicken, cooked beef, really anything

Put a pot of water on to boil.

While you are waiting for your water to boil, put everything else into a small saucepan and set it over medium heat.  Whisk everything together, bring to a simmer, and turn off the heat.  Sauce is done.

Make your spaghetti.  Drain it, and run some cold water over the noodles to cool them down.  Tumble the pasta into a serving bowl and toss it with the sauce, adding your protein if you are using it.

This is good at room temperature, or even cold right out of the refrigerator.

Additional Hints:  I like to make this super spicy, which you can do by adding hot sauce, or sambal if you have it on hand.  It’s a spicy red chile mash that you can find in Chinese grocery stores, and some supermarkets.  Other neat additions would be chopped cilantro or cucumbers.

I took the day off from work today.

After mowing the lawn, watering the garden, and refilling the bird feeder, I decided to treat myself to one of the most basic, yet misunderstood, of food preparations - the scrambled egg.

If your exposure to scrambled eggs has only been in restaurants, or at brunch buffet lines, then you probably do not understand my enthusiasm for the dish.  After all, it’s only eggs and butter, something to be whipped up quickly and in mass quantities for a crowd, right?

But that’s the problem - our society has taught us to interpret scrambled eggs as a dish that’s to be made as quickly as possible.  Here’s the real truth - haste is the enemy of scrambled eggs.  High heat makes for tough, dried out eggs, and result in the short-order scrambled eggs that you find in diners, and the egg jerky that you find in buffets that’s been sitting over a sterno flame for an hour.

Preparing perfect scrambled eggs requires the exact opposite of the process to make an omelette.  When sauteing an omelette, you want to work quickly, tilting and swirling your pan to coat the bottom with egg, over the highest possible heat so that the egg sets and you can roll it around whatever filling you’ve chosen.

For scrambled eggs, you want to cook them as gently as possible, over the lowest heat possible, to yield the most delicate structure that you can.  Perfect scrambled eggs should take a long time to make, and should just barely hold together.  It’s a spot-on dish for a day off from work.

This is my recipe for Perfect Scrambled Eggs.  You can jazz it up a number of ways, which I am sure will show up here soon, but today we’re starting with the basic master recipe.  As with all recipes with fewer than five ingredients, the better the quality of your ingredients, the better the final product.  Find the best eggs and butter you can get your hands on.

Perfect Scrambled Eggs

Butter
3 eggs, preferably organic or at least free range
Salt
Freshly ground pepper

Take a nonstick pan and set it over medium heat.  Place about 2 Tbs of butter into the pan, and keep an eye on it while you whip your eggs up.  You want to let that melt, and tilt the pan so that it gets an even coat of butter.  Once your butter is melted, turn the heat to the lowest possible setting. [note - all of my recipes presume gas cooking; if you are working off of electric burners, have one set to low and transfer the pan over to that one]

Crack the eggs into a small bowl, and use a whisk or fork to stir them up until you have a uniform beaten egg mix.  Pour the eggs into the pan.

Take a nonstick spatula or spoon, and give the eggs a good stir.  Wait a bit.  Stir some more.  What you’re doing here is incorporating the bits of egg that have cooked into the bits of egg that haven’t yet cooked.  As the eggs heat up, they’ll start to slowly firm up - the key is to reach this point in as much time as possible.  Avoid the temptation to turn up the heat - the eggs will cook faster, but they will be nowhere near as delicate, and you will have missed the fun train.

When the eggs are done to your liking, tip them into a serving bowl and top with a fresh grinding of pepper and some salt.  Welcome to the world of real scrambled eggs.

This is not a pretty dish. The picture above is merely for the purposes of illustration.

This all started with oregano, which I have an abundance of in my garden. Oregano behaves much like mint does, in that it gets everywhere and doesn’t ever die off. Since I have more use for oregano than mint, though, I let it live, since it seems to happily coexist with my thyme and my insane sage plant.

So, I have this fresh oregano, and I snipped a bit of it out of the garden. The last time we went grocery shopping, I picked up a can of green chiles without a specific plan on what to do with them - at worst case, they’re really good stirred into a batch of scrambled eggs.

I had forgotten to take any meat out of the freezer, so I was stuck with frozen chicken thighs and breasts. I decided to go with the thighs, but since they were frozen I knew that I’d have to cook them for a while to ensure that they were completely done. That ruled out any sort of roasting or grilling, so my thoughts turned to stew.

In the pantry, I found an unopened bag of Great Northern beans. Despite the fact that I didn’t soak these overnight, it wasn’t a problem since I have a pressure cooker.

So, to sum it all up, I had oregano, green chiles, chicken thighs, and white beans.

This is what I made:

Canola oil
4 chicken thighs, preferably thawed
2 to 3 Tbs oregano, chopped
1 can green chiles
8oz Great Northern beans, or other white beans
White wine
Garlic, chopped
Chicken stock

Get your beans ready - if they are dried, cook them according to the package instructions, and if they canned, open the can, drain them, and rinse them off.

Heat a thin layer of oil in a wide pan until shimmery. Lay each chicken thigh, skin side down, into the pan, and saute without moving for about 7 minutes, then turn each thigh to cook for another 5 minutes. Remove to a clean plate, and pour off the excess oil/fat in the pan, leaving about 2 Tbs.

Throw your garlic into the pan and fry that up, until golden. Take some wine and deglaze the pan, scraping up all of the chicken bits. Add about 2 cups of chicken stock, then the beans, chiles, and oregano.

Place the thighs back into the pan. Add more stock so that the liquid level comes up about 1/2 to 3/4 up the thighs.

Bring to a simmer, cover, and turn the heat to low. Cook for 1 1/2 hours.

Before serving, take the thighs out and remove the meat from the bones. Add the meat back to the pan.

Two of the garden items that survived through this past winter were the thyme and the sage. As a result, both have gotten an early start on their growing, and it’s gotten to the point where the sage plant is absolutely thriving, reaching halfway to my hip and having developed light green and purple blossoms.

Now, I knew that you could cook zucchini blossoms, but I had no idea what to do with sage blossoms. I tried eating one off of the plant, but the flavor was a little too intense in its raw state - like a little grenade of sage flavor. So, I decided to try the best approach to cooking any untried food item - fry the suckers in butter.

I picked a handful of sage blossoms and some sage leaves and washed them, setting them aside to dry. I figured the best delivery device for fried sage in butter would be pasta, so I made some spaghetti and, seeing that I was already cooking anyway, threw some chicken breasts in for good measure.

I’ll start with the chicken, which is a variation of a recipe that I’ve seen before using veal. If you want everything to come together at the end, you should also start a pot of water boiling for your pasta before making the chicken, and squeeze and zest your lemons.

Chicken with Sage and Ham

2 chicken breasts, pounded slightly to uniform thickness (or as close as uniform as you can)
2 sage leaves
2 slices of ham
2 toothpicks
Flour, salt, pepper
Olive oil and butter

Get yer chicken ready! Take your flattish chicken breasts and add salt and pepper to both sides. Place a sage leaf on each, then cover with a slice of ham. Use the toothpicks to stitch the ham to the chicken breast, then dust both sides of each chicken breast with flour.

Heat a saute pan over medium heat until hot-hot-hot. Put about two tablespoons of olive oil in, swirl to coat, then add a small pat of butter, also swirling to coat. Wait a bit so that the butter begins to darken ever so slightly, then lay your chicken down in the pan. Saute without moving (the chicken, not you) for 5 to 7 minutes, depending on thickness (again, the chicken, not you), then carefully turn and cook the other side for another 5 to 7 minutes. Remove to a clean plate and cover with foil.

Pasta with Sage Blossoms, Lemon, and Brown Butter

8 oz pasta
Sage leaves and blossoms
3 Tbs unsalted butter (more or less)
Juice and zest of one lemon
Black pepper

Drop your pasta into your boiling water and start your timer. You want to time this so that the pasta is done and in a colander by the time you begin the sauce.

As the pasta cooks, melt the butter in the same pan that you used for the chicken until it begins to brown slightly, then add the sage blossoms and leaves and step back about four feet, because the moisture in the sage will create some hot fat splatters. Fry the sage for about 30 seconds, then add the lemon juice and zest.

Leaving the heat on low, add your drained pasta to the sauce and toss it around. The pasta will absorb the butter sauce beautifully. Turn off the heat, add a few grindings of black pepper, and turn the whole thing out into a serving bowl.

Serve the chicken on a bed of the pasta, with lemon halves on the side.

So, I had mentioned that I spent part of the morning on Friday making dessert. While I knew that one of our distinguished guests was bringing a homemade cake (completely from scratch), I also knew that, in said cake, there would be no chocolate. That was my in.

I decided to augment the dessert selection by making a chocolate pots de creme, which is really just a fancy way of saying “melted chocolate held together by egg yolks”. Really, it is.

At first, I had the hardest time finding which cookbook had held the recipe that I used earlier. I grabbed one book, but the pots de creme recipe didn’t look familiar (also, it called for a dozen egg yolks, and I’m fairly positive I would have remembered that). Finally, I grabbed my copy of Williams Sonoma Paris: Authentic Recipes Celebrating the Foods of the World, and found a recipe whose page was splattered with bits of chocolate and stained with cocoa. Pretty sure that was it.

So, here’s the magic formula, with the ingredients straight out of that book and the procedure based on the book but adjusted somewhat for my tastes:

Pots de Creme au Chocolat

1.5 C whole milk

1 C heavy cream

1 C powdered sugar

8oz bittersweet chocolate (I used Scharffen Berger, 72% if I remember correctly), chopped up

2 T unsweetened cocoa

pinch of salt

1 large egg, whole, plus 6 egg yolks

1/2 t vanilla extract

These things are incredibly easy to make, which is probably why they are my go-to recipe for chocolate desserts. First things first, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Some preparatory steps - take eight 6oz or 8oz ramekins (they are cheap and widely available, about a buck and a half each if you shop around) and put them into an ovenproof dish that will fit them (a Corningware casserole is good for this). Take a saucepan of cold water and pour it into the dish until the water level reaches about a third of the way up each ramekin. Take out the ramekins and pour the water back into the saucepan. Set the saucepan of water aside, or pour the water into something that you can heat up in the microwave. As long as the water is hot when you put the dish into the oven, it doesn’t matter how it got that way.

You know what you just did? You just made the preliminary measurements for a bain marie, or water bath. It’s an important part of custard making - by cooking the custards, covered, in water, it maintains a nice, steady temperature which cooks them evenly. You’ve now measured the proper amount of water needed to cover the ramekins halfway (and before you quibble that I specified a third of the way - Archimedes Principle. That is all).

Onwards to the recipe. Take another saucepan and set it over medium heat, then throw your milk, cream, and sugar into it. Give that a good stir to dissolve the sugar, and heat it up until you see some simmering action going on along the edges. Turn the heat off.

Toss in your chopped chocolate, cocoa, and salt and stir until everything melts together. Turn the heat back on and heat until you see small bubbles at the edge, then turn the heat off again. Set this pot aside to cool for a bit while you go get the eggs.

In a large measuring cup (I mean large, like 8 cups or so) or large bowl, whisk the whole egg and the egg yolks together until blended. While stirring with one hand, ladle a little bit (like, half a ladle) of the warm chocolate mixture into the yolks, then a little more (you do it this way to avoid cooking the eggs with the hot chocolate - this brings the temperature of the eggs up slowly). Slowly incorporate the rest of the chocolate in a slow stream (don’t stop stirring). Add your vanilla.

At this point, the book suggests running the mix through a sieve. Seeing that I am lazy, and I don’t mind lumps in my food if they are lumps of chocolate, I generally skip this step.

Assembly. If you haven’t already, bring that reserved pot of water to a simmer, or microwave it in a microwave-safe thingy until it just boils. Either pour or ladle the chocolate mixture into the ramekins, then set the ramekins into the oven-safe dish (leave out one so you have a space to pour the hot water). Pour the hot water into the dish until the water level reaches the halfway mark of the ramekins, then put the last ramekin in. Cover the dish, either with a lid or with foil.

Carefully place the dish into the oven for 25 minutes. Take it out, uncover it, and with great care because you will most certainly burn yourself if you aren’t careful, remove the ramekins and place them on a kitchen towel to cool. When they have cooled to room temp, cover each one with plastic wrap and throw them into the fridge until you’re ready to attack them.

I just realized that the picture here has a sprig of rosemary sitting in the chocolate, and I haven’t mentioned it before. One thing about this recipe, once you get the hang of it, is that you can infuse the chocolate mixture with any number of other flavors, just by simmering an extra element (such as rosemary) in the milk-cream-sugar solution prior to adding the chocolate. Here, I chose rosemary, but you can also go with lavender or anything else you can imagine. Just pick out the flavoring element, or sieve it, before you add the chocolate.

The pots de creme ended up being the perfect counterpart to the strawberry cake that was brought to the party. The cake, which was so light it felt like a prop when I lifted it, was a white cake with fresh whipped cream, and strawberries in the shape of hearts (which is great, because I don’t shape my food often enough), was the exact opposite of the chocolate custards, which were very dark and very dense.

So, to keep things fair, I ate both.

Pictures of each, below: