Sunday, October 26, was my only free afternoon of the entire month. i got home at 1pm and spent the first part of the afternoon lazing around and watching Wanted on DVD. By 5pm, i told my sister Genine that we had to do something fun that afternoon. She originally wanted to see a movie, but since there wasn’t anything good showing, we decided to cook up an extra yummy dinner instead.
The menu
French onion soup
Roasted Portobello mushrooms topped with mozzarella cheese
One roasted bell pepper sandwich
Mojitos
I made French onion soup as a starter. French onion soup has a classy ring to it, but it turns out it’s not so classy when you’re slicing the onions, your eyes all stinging and tearing up (from the volatile acids released by slicing the onion, which cause eye irritation). i resisted the temptation of asking the maid to slice them for me, just so that i could say that I cooked something by myself for maybe the 5th time in my whole life.
Preparing the dish was an experience not only of taste, but of sight, sound, smell. The hiss of sliced onions hitting a hot saucepan, the rich heady smell of them sautéing in butter, the slow transformation of color from a raw white to translucent to a light caramel made for a true feast for the senses.
The caramelized onions went into a pot of beef stock. the soup was ladled into individual bowls, topped with a generous helping of velvety Colby cheese, and served with toasted French bread on the side.
Genine and i thought cocktails would be fun. We started making the Mojitos while we waited for the peppers to roast, so we could have a little drink before dinner. The Mojitos in the recipe called for white rum, brown sugar, crushed mint, and lemon juice. It tasted great, sweet and citrusy with a kick, although it looked nothing like the photo in the recipe. (I don’t see how mixing brown sugar with white rum can still produce a crystal clear drink; ours turned out sort of mud-colored.) It was so good that i ended up guzzling half my drink. By the time dinner was ready five minutes later, i had developed the worst case of lightheadedness in my life. It was so bad that i may never mix a cocktail again.
Anyhoo, we started dinner off with the French onion soup and the Portobello mushrooms. Both dishes turned out great. The soup was rich and creamy, topped with a generous helping of Colby cheese that melted into the steaming hot broth, and served with French bread on the side. Roasting the mushrooms gave them a great, meaty flavor, and mozzarella cheese has got to be one of my favorite things in the world.
Genine made a roasted bell pepper sandwich from different varieties of bell peppers she bought on a recent trip to Indonesia. The peppers were roasted at a scorching 500oF, cooled, then marinated in balsamic vinaigrette. The filling was scooped on top of a slice of French bread and topped with Colby cheese. They sandwiches were supposed to be our main dish, but we were so full after the starters that we ended up sharing one tiny sandwich. Anyhoo, Genine explained that it was one of those dishes that would taste better the next day, when the peppers had overnight to soak into the vinaigrette.
And so my most recent attempt at cooking met its happy ending in one satisifying dinner. I’ll probably be doing this again sometime 
November 4, 2008 at 5:09 pm |
i enjoyed our cooking session!