Cooking a la Alli: Day One

Mike says he is going to cook Chef Alli's recipes in DC at the same time I cook them here, in order to advise me on technique.
Hasn't happened so far.

Since I was on my own, the first recipe I tried was for Mushroom Risotto. I had made risotto before without tragic consequences, so I felt pretty confident. I even already had arborio rice.

The recipe called for "flavorful mushrooms like chanterelle, shitake
or oyster mushrooms."  Safeway carries button mushrooms.

I know button mushrooms. I feel at home with button mushrooms. Button mushrooms are my friends. However, apparently, they are not flavorful.

So I tried the new Sprouts grocery. They had oyster and Portobello mushrooms so that's what I got.

Oyster mushrooms (a.k.a. abalone or tree mushrooms) are weird looking clumps of fungus that grow on trees. I tried to chop them evenly but their stems and caps go in every which direction.

I have eaten Portabello mushrooms many times and enjoy their meaty flavor but I hadn't cooked them before.

At least the mushrooms were clearly marked. I looked all over for shallots. I thought they must be like green onions so I picked up what turned out to be leeks. Don't laugh. It's not nice. When I asked the cashier if I had guessed right, everyone behind me in line snickered.

Shallots look like what you'd get if an onion and a garlic have been naughty in the pantry: stunted brown onions made up of multiple cloves like garlic.

You are supposed to cut them in half lengthwise, lay the cut side down and make horizontal slices -not going all the way through the root. Then make vertical lengthwise slices still not cutting through the root and finally cutting across vertically from the tip through the root.

While I understand that this means the individual lengths stay together, I could not make horizontal slices of the small bulbs without risking slicing my finger.

I sauteed the 'shrooms and shallots in melted butter and then added the rice. The recipe called for white wine and so I had to face The Cork Puller. I ended up pushing the cork into the bottle but Chris drank the rest of the bottle with dinner (tough day) so it was OK.

After the wine had cooked down, I added hot chicken broth a cup at a time, stirring all the while until it was nice and creamy with a little bite. The last step was adding just a little cheese. Delicious and much healthier than my last risotto (which had more than twice as much cheese). So far so good!

 

My Life with Food in 2013

My wonderful son Michael gave me the best Christmas gift: the services of  professional chef, Allison Sosna, to create 30 recipes that avoid all my allergies.

Chris and I first saw Chef Alli on Chopped back in November of 2011 where she opened a basket of Thanksgiving weirdness. I often wonder why we watch Chopped since real life doesn't usually hand you pomegranates, polenta log, maple syrup and seafood sausage and ask you to make an appetizer for Marc Murphy, Alex Guarnaschelli and Aarón Sánchez. But it's become something we do together as a bonding activity.

Then on Christmas morning, Mike gave me a spatula with Chef Alli's picture on it. An ordinary spatula (especially one I recognized by the melted handle as coming from my own kitchen) really can't compete with the meat thermometer Chris's mom gave me as a Christmas gift thirty years ago.  But this wasn't an ordinary spatula. The picture, Mike explained, was the real gift: the inpiration of a professional chef.

Mike met Chef Alli through her fiancee, Kristen, who works in community organizing. Apparently, they talked about food (imagine that!) and somehow they must have gotten around to talking about how Mike has been trying to teach me to cook and what pain I am. I guess Alli was up to the challenge.

We had a conference call in which I told Chef Alli what I couldn't or wouldn't eat and a week later thirty recipes showed up in my email. I need two things: inspiration and skill. Mike thinks he can handle teaching me the skills but I think he finds my dietary restrictions boring and limiting.

Chef Alli's POV is fresh, healthy foods. http://www.chefallisosna.com/  While at DC Central Kitchen, she introduced fresh foods to thousands of school kids. Now she's running MicroGreens, a non-profit whose goal is to "arm children and their families with the skills they need to shop for, prepare, and enjoy healthy foods within the confines of a government supplemented budget."
http://www.microgreensproject.org/

Chef Alli supports her non-profit by cooking as a private chef, catering, teaching cooking classes, designing menus and creating healthy recipes. So like her on facebook, follow her on twitter, support her non-profit and, if you need a little pizzazz in your dinner routine, give her a call.

I am planning to cook Chef Alli's recipes on Tuesday ansd Thursday evenings. I figure cooking twice a week is a good start, another small bite.