Potato, mango sauce

Mango coulis, mango foam, whipped mango, mango sauce.

You take your mango, peel it, pit it, cube it, and put it in a jar. Process with a stick blender until the fruit turns to foam, process for only a few seconds. Oh, lime!

Potato, the gateway vegetable. 

They're actually good for you if you can manage to avoid the customary toppings in excess, butter, sour cream, bacon, cheese. The idea here is to substitute a fruit sauce for regular potato toppings and see how we like it. 

This potato has butter because I wanted a fat element to slow the digestion of the fast-sugar mango and fast-sugar starchy potato. Two fast sugars together and the only thing to brake them is a single teaspoon of butter. 

Linguini in cream sauce, toast

Stiff dry pasta dough is extruded through bronze dies fitted to the machines of the pasta maker. The rough texture imparted onto the pasta surface makes a significant difference in the way the cooked noodle holds sauce, or even plain oil, but only for those people who decide to notice and value such things. 

By now you can easily deduce the simple ingredients, so guess.

Go on, guess. 

Guess, I said.

Okay Playas; select the contents of the box below to reveal the answers, or else just select all.  

Sauce Ingredients * butter and olive oil *  crushed garlic *  white wine *  cream *  dry Italian herbs of choice *  fresh herbs of choice, here parsley and cilantro *  dry chile pepper flakes *  salt and pepper *  Parmigiano cheese, off the heat I'm tired of thinking up precise amounts and then stating them as if you were not going to make your own adjustments anyway, or on the other hand, as if you were helpless or insufficiently creative to proceed without them. So then, in amounts that suit you just fine and that pass your built-in common sense evaluator.

Bananas, ice cream, caramel

Bananas Foster. Sometimes dinner looks like dessert. 

I decided that flambé is BUNK !

Purely for showmanship and there is nobody around to show off to, so a step that goes "poof" and that's the end of that. I think flambés were big in the 60's but I have no real way to know for sure. That was back in the days when it was believed most of the alcohol is burned off. This is wrong. The alcohol is always mostly still there by 70%. 

On an episode of Restaurant Impossible, Robert Irvine teaches a crew how to make bananas Foster. Robert's version calls for two sauces, one to cook the bananas and another similar sauce to pour over the final product. I cannot see the need for that. This approach is just a way to get two alcohols into a flavored caramel. 

*  banana liqueur

*  rum

You melt yourself some sugar, in this case, brown sugar and refined white cane sugar. Sugar melts irregularly in patches spread out there on the bottom of a pan. It is fascinating to watch. The liquid sugar portion may darken faster than the unmelted portion so the process might need to be halted before all the sugar actually melts. The process is arrested by the addition of cream which boils away at temperature lower than it takes to melt sugar so arresting the process is violent and exciting. Then those alcohols ↑ are added, the pan tipped to the flame, and poof there is a lovely fire while all that ↓ is shaken together. 

*  cream

*  butter

*  cinnamon

*  ginger (impulse addition)

*  pinch of salt

Update:  Here is an example of a situation that makes me go, "Wut? Did that just happen?" There is no logical place to sort this so I will file it under "M" for,

"Man, oh man, these coincidences sure can be coincidental sometimes."

I made a version of bananas Foster. Photographed the finished plate. Ate the ice cream, bananas, and sauce. Resized and adjusted the photos. Uploaded photos. Wrote a brief post on bananas Foster. Solved crossword puzzle that featured bananas Foster.

Is that last bit funny or spooky?

The puzzle came from a file of puzzles in this format. Now the format has changed and so has the situation with the free puzzles, so when these are gone, that's it, there is no replacement. So I pick one randomly, thus diminishing the file of puzzles. It says "Sunday Challenge" so naturally a difficult puzzle is expected. I notice large open corners and an open cross in the center. Those are good signs for a serious un-themed puzzle. I am familiar with the constructor from previous puzzles and from the crossword convention web site. These things are usually bears. As it turns out, this one is not. I got "American History" from its three first letters and an unhelpful clue that refers to the other answer within the puzzle that runs all the way across and forms the shape of a cross with this answer, so that is the nearest this puzzle will come to anything so much as a theme. That the two clues are self-referential means the across answer will have something to do with American History and that is a very helpful clue to have, much better than the two clues provided which simply refer to each other. John Quincy Adams formed up with just two starting letters. From my point of view the puzzle is not difficult, in fact the opposite, so nothing close to challenging. Now you could probably go, "Well, maybe you got lucky this time like you did on the CLEP tests, and just happened to know the stuff they are asking."  And I would see the wisdom in that stance and not be tempted to argue because, after all, how many letters do you imagine were needed for "ice cream" to solve this bananas Foster ingredient clue?

Ahi tuna, shrimp, melon

I have been craving this ever since I discovered it way back ... way back ... way back there 2/3 through August, which is like a month ago. 

You know how when you put salt on watermelon it completely changes it? It's great to begin with but a tiny bit of salt, POWIE! It's suddenly 10X  better.

That is what is happening here. The dressing was a little bit different that first time, but still the same dealio.

Dressing:

*  1 tablespoon soy sauce
*  1/4 cup cold tap water
*  1/8 teaspoon mixed pepper flakes (last time it was Sriracha sauce)
*  1/8 teaspoon toasted sesame seed oil
*  1/2 teaspoon refined sugar (last time included strawberry coulis)
*  3/4 teaspoon rice vinegar (last time used lime juice)
*  1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger (omitted last time)
*  black pepper


*  (no olive oil like last time)
*  (no shrimp last time either, and orange segments were included)

So, the exact same thing as before, 'cept di-fernt.

Egg, bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato sandwich

This started out a simple cheese sandwich: bread, butter, cheese. That's it. 

But then I kept seeing fried onions and an egg seemed like a good idea too and it was all downhill from there, bacon, lettuce, and tomato. So a BLT then, with egg, onion, and cheese. 

Sandwich:

Step 1 Wheat

a)  plow land and sow a field of wheat

b)  tend wheat field to maturation

c)  harvest, thresh, ensile wheat

d)  mill wheat

Psyche!

No, SRSLY. Step One of making a sandwich around here is to bake a loaf of bread. 

We baker types have words for everything, every phase of dough and yeast activity and fermentation -- a whole vocabulary unique to baking that amounts to another language. Sponge is such a word. Sponge is an early and wet phase of dough with an active yeast culture that lacks salt and the final addition of flour that will stiffen a sponge to a proper dough. 

But wait, there's more! 

This sponge contains 1/2 cup foreign material. 1/2 cup of dry small red beans were milled to a powder using a small household coffee bean mill. This is a small amount of bean powder relative to the amount of all purpose flour, an estimated 5 cups, possibly even so many as 6 cups, so 1/10 or 1/12 total dry ingredients. The milled bean will not contribute to the gluten matrix that is formed by wheat and that makes bread leavening possible by yeast. The bean powder is dead weight, as it were. It will also absorb twice its weight in water. The funny thing is, the yeast loves this bean powder and gobbles it up like there is no tomorrow. There is also 1 tablespoon of Lyle's Golden Syrup, because I do no not know why, I was going for the honey and saw the Golden Syrup first. 

ARTS !

This is an excellent sponge. The yeast is really going like mad in there. The sponge has non yeasty, non spongy things in it like milk, butter, and egg, all things that you wouldn't think would contribute to perfect yeast environment. Butter and egg also interfere with gluten web formation. But the sponge also has things that yeast thrive on, sugar, flour, bean powder, warm liquid environment. 

So the sponge proofs for a period, as a semi dough free of buffering salt and rife with an active yeast culture eager to maximize its mostly advantageous environment. 

The sponge visibly expands. It develops an odor of fermentation. 

Fine! Now the full amount of salt and the remainder of flour is added without any appreciable salt-buffering effect on the highly active and newly fed yeast culture. 

Working in the final cup of flour into the dough on the work surface, the baker can feel the dough tighten up by the addition of salt and stiffen with each pass picking up additional flour until a suitably sturdy dough is attained. 

You know how bread instructions say to punch down the dough and form into a loaf? 

This is where we are different. Yeast loves a liquid environment. By keeping the environment wet as a sponge we gave the yeast what it needs to reproduce the best. It has done that magnificently as a sponge and not as dough. We will not punch down our sponge but we will process it down as the salt and the final amount of flour are finally added. The violently redistributed yeast culture is now at maximum activity and freshly fed. The second period of proofing at room temperature is even faster than the first.