Let’s take a look back at the year in food, shall we? Here are just a few of my favorite links from 2009. 

It was destined centuries ago that 2009 would be the Year of the Ox, but you could have fooled me. Another four-legged animal seemed to dominate – in fact, the same one that dominated 2008. Pig was everywhere. 2008 was also a good year for pigs, but the animal’s staying power seems almost herculean. I mean, swine flu? Though they say you can’t catch H1N1 from pigs, the unfortunate naming of the influenza strain didn’t ease our demand one bit. We still love bacon. Long live. 

When this 2006 NY times story ran about Amazon.com selling Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gallon, 128 fl. oz, there were a few hundred comments on Amazon. Flash forward three years, and the comments have steadily grown to more than 1,100. (For those keeping track, Tuscan milk is the OG, coming way before this year’s Three Wolf Moon craze.) What I love? You can waste all kinds of precious time on Amazon reading about how peoples’ lives have changed worldwide over Italian milk. The latest comment is an expertly written poem that echoes of Poe’s “Raven.”: 

“Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey, 
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore 
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping, 
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door. 
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door - 
Only this, and nothing more.’” Read more here. 

Then there’s Nick from Foodie at Fifteen, who elfed himself into a Christmas hip-hop music video with Eric Ripert, Thomas Keller and Michael Ruhlman. Totally genius. 

Anthony Bourdain writes an Op-Ed piece for the Times, pinpointing 2007 as the year that put food and chefs on the map.

After Conde Nast announced Gourmet’s demise, I kept waiting for somebody — anyone — to announce they  were buying the mag and reviving it from its deathbed. It was wishful thinking on my part, but I’m not alone. Tributes and farewells popped up everywhere, including Thank You Gourmet, a site with sweet memories and tweets about the mag. 

After five years of trying, Adam of The Amateur Gourmet finally scores a reservation to El Bulli. It’s a lively post with all kinds of photos that seat you right at his table. 

Mobile food, paired with Twitter, exploded this year. Here’s hoping 2010 will continue the trend of restaurants bringing the food to us, or at least meeting us halfway. 

And lastly, I’d like to add to Bon Appetit’s Best of 2009 list by saying that this was the season for homemade gifts. Given the economy and the spike in food interest, everyone seemed to be giving homemade delights as gifts. Check out jam and cookies from the Chickenless Kitchen, a slew of Christmas goodies from Naturally Ella, Christina Eats’ chocolate covered pretzels, La Fuji Mama’s chocolate dipped caramels and homemade vanilla extract from the Italian Dish. 

And here are your top picks from my little slice of the Internet. These most-viewed posts on Furey & the Feast have a lot to do with brulee-ing and satisfying those sweet cravings. Starting in 2010, I’ll aim to give you a weekly double-dose of F&F, posting twice a week. 

1. Strawberries in bruleed marshmallow creme
2. A memory, bruleed
3. Bread pudding with chocolate and cinnamon
4. Like Home (Nutella brownies)
5. Gimme S’more (s’mores cupcakes)
6. Chocolate pots de creme, chocolate mousse
7. A Viet Hapa tackles (authentic) Vietnamese pho
8. Go for Croque
9. March Madness: Taylor’s Refresher
10. Green, velvety bliss

A safe and happy new year to all!

– Cynthia Furey

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Drop In & Decorate, a fantastic concept dreamed up by Rhode Island-based food writer Lydia Walshin. The idea is that you have a party and set up a station for people to decorate cookies for the charity of your choice.

So I had a Christmas potluck last weekend with Drop In & Decorate as a focus. I supplied the booze and blank-canvas cookies, and my friends each brought a dish and their labor. As you can see from these photos, I’ve got some pretty talented friends — all whom have steady decorating hands and imagination to boot. There was a whole smorgasbord of royal icing, sprinkles and edible spray colors. All in all, 30 people dropped in to decorate 120 cookies (and, you know, to eat and booze it up).

Our charity of choice was the Ronald McDonald Family Room and House in Orange, Calif. The programs put in place at the family room and house allow for families to stay close to their children who are undergoing treatment at the hospital, which is just across the street. Some of these children are in there for weeks, and the House acts as a second home to their families.

The cookies would be served at a Christmas party the House was throwing for current and past families who’ve stayed with them over the years. Thanks to my friends who came to my potluck to spread some Christmas cheer to these families. If you’re thinking about throwing your own event, visit this link. It’ll tell you everything you need to know.

Hope you all had a great Christmas, and that the warm fuzzies and love continue on into the New Year!

– Cynthia Furey

I have in my kitchen what one local chef tells me is “the kiss of death.”

“An electric range?” she asks. “How do you ever get anything done with one of those contraptions?”

Well, I told her, it’s getting easier. But it’s still an uphill battle.

Moving from my previous apartment meant leaving the luxury and reliable power of gas, where everything cooked evenly and the oven temperature was always spot-on. What a dream that was.

Now I’ve got this shifty nightmare with hardened coils in place of those glowing rings of blue flames.

Simple tasks, like using the broiler to brown things like garlic bread and Croque Monsieur, are super tricky. This broiler gets points for reaching temperature at the drop of a hat, yet it’s one hell of an overachiever, blackening everything in its path within a matter of seconds. How odd that the familiar scent of garlic, butter and bread turns to that other familiar odor of char and carbon the minute you turn your back to the stove. Kiss of death, indeed.

This is why I say thank goodness for blowtorches.

Though one can toast garlic bread without a broiler under normal oven settings, the drama of literally taking matters into your own hands is kind of therapeutic when your counter is lined with pans of blackened oblong shadows of the meal accompaniments they once were.

A blowtorch means angry flames shooting out of your fingertips to match the anger in your heart every time you pull a charred one from the broiler. It means victory.

So maybe I’m not skilled enough for the technology of an electric range yet, and maybe I have a bit of an inner pyro. But despite the kiss of death, I do have my garlic bread. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.) Read the rest of this entry »

At a homecoming dance my freshman year of high school, I belted out the lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster.” It went something like this:

• “At the bus stop/of lo-o-ove
• At the bus stop/whoo-ooh-ooh!”

It wasn’t until years later that I realized my enthusiastic warbling of those lyrics was totally wrong. (For those who haven’t heard the song, the real lyrics are “Rollercoaster/of lo-o-ove.”) Luckily, I’m not alone in my public embarrassment.

There’s this site called Kiss This Guy, which houses thousands of other unfortunate misheard songs and lyrics. (And lo, I wasn’t the only one singing about a bus stop.) Between page clicks and our tears of laughter, my bf and I noticed a trend: Many of the misheard lyrics were about food. For example, Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” is turned into a heartfelt love song about everyone’s favorite meat candy:

• “Bebo, loves bacon/
• Bebo, loves bacon”

Real lyrics:

• “Viva, Las Vegas/
• Viva, Las Vegas”

So who’s Bebo?

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more of my favorites.) Read the rest of this entry »

You know what I like about Thomas Keller’s recipes (aside from everything)? His simplicity. Yeah, he’s got intricate recipes with ingredients not readily available to many home cooks, but when he gets the chance to be simple, he’s good at it. Especially when we’re talking about recipe titles.

For the most part, Keller takes a no-frills approach when naming his recipes. His brownie recipe from ad hoc at home is simply titled “brownies” — minus any capitalization and all the other things you can add to a title (i.e., “double chocolate brownies” or “best brownies in the whole freaking world”). Things many of us do to try and make our recipes stand out from the rest of the pack. He doesn’t need all that.

ad hoc at home, Keller’s latest installment, is by far my favorite.  It’s also the first Keller book that I’ve seriously cooked from, unless you count the time I made Bouchon’s onion soup. Though fantastic, it came at a steep price: Cooking the required 8 pounds of onions for 4 hours made my tiny apartment smell like I had a Funyun party the night before. With each passing day the intensity of the onion scent diminished, but the actual scent got worse. It went from smelling like sweet caramelized onions to the inside the mouth of a halitosis sufferer. But I’d spend another 4 hours of my life stirring a stock pot full of onions for that rich, buttery onion soup.

The wafting aroma of baking brownies is much easier to stomach than that of 8 pounds of slow-cooked onions. And in winter, a house smelling of chocolate and warmed by an oven is one of life’s pleasures. A simple pleasure, just like Keller’s brownies. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you all for entering this little contest here. To recap, entrants had commented on this post about their worst cooking disasters — and there were some doozies for sure!

The grand prize winner receives a personalized painting from the talented Lisa Orgler. Three random winners will each receive 8 ounces of Chuao Chocolatier’s cacao powder for baking.

So without further ado, the grand prize winner is:

MEFX, who suffered continuously while making pies. In her words:

“Crazy holiday baking story? I’m in my third year of law school, and it’s the first time I’m not going home for Thanksgiving. A group of friends is getting together to share the holiday meal and play an ever-raucous game of mafia. (Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall during those games?) I volunteered to bring the desserts – pumpkin pie and apple cobbler. I had previously mastered the distinct parts of these recipes, but had never put them together…made the pumpkin filling, but w/ a frozen crust…made the crust myself, but w/ a different pie filling…etc. So the night before comes and do I ever have a plan. 1) make pie crust, 2) make pie filling, 3) finish pumpkin pie, 4) while pumpkin pie in oven, prep cobbler crust and filling, 5) bake apple cobbler, and 6) attain sense of achievement.

“Best laid plans or something like that. My lovely, flaky pie crust shrinks to 1/2 its original size in the oven. So I start over and make another pie crust, doubling the recipe and using all of it. Even with so much extra, the crust shrinks again, but less this time. And at 12:30 am, I remove from the oven a sub-par, but still delicious pumpkin pie. I finally get the cobbler into the oven, and it’s worth loosing sleep to have one presentable dessert to bring.

“No such luck. On the drive over to my friend’s place, a car in front of me stopped short, and I followed suit. Guess whose pumpkin pie flew off the back seat and landed in the cobbler? Mine. So I show up with two imperfect but salvageable desserts. I have such great friends; they didn’t care, and I carefully reconstructed the desserts.

“When dinner was over, I pulled the pumpkin pie out of the fridge and set it on a burner on the stove and put the cobbler next to it. “I’ll warm the pie up,” I thought and turned on the burner. About 5 minutes later, somebody smelled smoke, and it was my lovely pumpkin pie. Rushing to remove it from the burner, I merely touched it, and the pyrex baking dish blew up and shattered, sending shards of glass, bits of pie crust, and globs of pie filling everywhere, including into the cobbler. Love’s labor lost.

“After cleaning the kitchen, we searched out ice cream and cake and discussed the liquid qualities of glass in its ability to expand and contract. And then the townspeople killed me in mafia.

“ps – I have still not solved the mystery of the shrinking crust.”

Man. Shrinking crusts, burning pies and shattered glass is almost more than a person should bear in a single day. Maybe this win for her epic story is the silver lining?

The three random winners were chosen by using randomizer.org. Each comment was assigned a number and the computer chose three. The winners are:  Kristin(2), Susan Wozniak-Hakim and Claudia Davis! You’ll all receive an e-mail from me later today.

Please visit this post to read all of the wonderful (and cringeworthy) cooking disasters. They sure kept me entertained!

And stay tuned for tomorrow’s post: Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc brownies. Thank you for reading!

(Note: Giveaway rules appear right under the recipe.)

Friends, the gods are totally smiling upon me today, for today is a double holiday. Not only is it Thanksgiving, but it’s also (Drumroll! Fanfare!) Furey & the Feast’s first birthday. Which means there’s turkey, pie AND birthday cake. I might add that it’s not just any birthday cake, but it’s a chocolate cake.

A microwave chocolate cake. (Are those crickets I hear?)

Normally I’m not too keen on using the nukebox as a cooking method, but this is a special case.

I was 9 or 10 years old when I bought my first cookbook, which I ordered from the pages of that Scholastic book club newsletter you get every month when you’re in elementary school. “Hershey’s Fabulous Desserts” had this beautiful chocolate cake on the cover, all done-up with chocolate curls and strawberry garnishes. What a cookbook was doing in an Scholastic newsletter I have no idea, but I remember thinking something along the lines of holy crap, I can make that?

Among the 140 recipes in this cookbook, there were only a handful of them that a child could make without parental know-how and knowledge. One of them was this cake. My mom had banned sweets from the house long ago, so this cake was, in my eyes, the greatest of mankind’s achievements. I could have cake every single weekday of  summer while my mom was at work, thanks to the ease of the microwave. She’d never know.

So in honor of these childhood and blog firsts, I wanted to “bake” this cake again. Back then, each forkful of cake laced with deviousness was especially delightful. Without that element, would it taste the same after all this time?

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe and giveaway)

Read the rest of this entry »

My column ran today in The Orange County Register print edition today. It’s not available online, so I’ve posted it here. Thanks for reading!
*****
Every year, we look forward to the annual holiday eating rituals: A golden, grand dame of a turkey, savory sides and a sweet finale with pumpkin pie front and center. (And if you’re household is like mine, the obligatory post-feast nap follows soon after.)

Though there’s nothing wrong with these traditions, why not mix it up a bit? This year, you may want to surprise your guests by serving pumpkin pie at the beginning of the meal instead of at dessert. How? By turning it into a soup. The transformation can be made even easier by using canned pumpkin instead of fresh, yielding fantastic results.

Canned food often gets a bad rap for being, well, canned. And rightly so; fresh ingredients are almost always better in recipes. But there are few exceptions to this rule, and canned pumpkin is one of them. For one, the canned variety is way easier to use. When you’ve got your hands full with roasting a bird and preparing sides to go with it, chopping, boiling and mashing fresh pumpkin isn’t making the best use of your time. Tip: When buying canned pumpkin, make sure you’re getting “pumpkin puree” instead of “pumpkin pie mix,” which is offered in similar-sized cans with almost identical labels.

This recipe yields a spicy soup that’s just reminiscent enough of a pumpkin pie to seem like a before-dinner treat, but packs enough savory ingredients to warrant it a place as a starter or first course. And with the welcome addition of bacon, cream and butter (necessary ingredients for happiness, in my opinion), everyone’s a winner.

The following long list of ingredients may look intimidating, but I promise the procedures are quite simple: You simply cook everything in one pot. If you have a formal party and want an elegant soup, you can puree it for a soft, velvety texture. But it’s just as good when left as a hearty, rustic soup.

When I make this soup, I like to serve it with pie crust “crackers” on the side. Take some ready-made pie dough (or homemade, if you have it), roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut rounds from the dough. Bake rounds on a baking sheet according to package directions.

Another fun way to serve this soup is in shot glasses. If there are appetizers before dinner, you can easily slide a tray of these onto any table, and guests can help themselves to pumpkin soup shooters. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

Read the rest of this entry »