The Unreal Meal

I’ve been reading Michael Ruhlman‘s The Making of a Chef recently (on the heels of Ratio, actually), and it’s done a lot to open my mind and the way I think about what food is.  Specifically, there’s a part where he’s describing Bob del Grosso and one class that he taught that centered around a discussion on what food actually is.  To quote the book (which quotes del Grosso):

“Say you’re a Socratic cook and you want to make a hamburger.  You would begin the process by posing a question: ‘What is a hamburger?’” He posed this to the class.  One intrepid student offered, “A round patty of ground beef put between toasted buns.”  Del Grosso clarified: “Round?  Let’s call it disc-shaped.”  A lively discussion of the hamburger followed.  The point, del Grosso said, was to get them thinking critically about food.

This, of course, got me thinking critically about food.  It started with the hamburger question — does it have to be round (or disc-shaped, as it were)?  Does it even have to be beef?  What if it’s ground pork, and it’s triangular, does that make it any less a burger?  What if it’s not between a bun, but on toast (a patty melt) or an english muffin or something completely different?  Does that change the intrinsic burgerness about it?  So of course, I’ve been thinking about everything in that manner since I read that, including the old standard, French Onion Soup.

It started with onions, a pretty key component to French Onion Soup.  In fact, I’d venture to say that without the onions, you can’t have French Onion Soup.  Traditionally, it’s made from deeply caramelized onions in some kind of stock with a toasted crouton floating on top and melted cheese over it all.  It’s simple, it’s delicious, it’s pretty much perfect, so why fuck with it, right?  Well, why not, actually!  Can it be improved upon, probably not, but my thinking was that it could be altered a bit and still be, well, really freakin’ delicious.

So we come back to the onions.  What goes really well with deliciously caramelized onions?  Steak!    And what goes well with steak?  Potatoes!  The wheels in my brain started turning.  What if I made onion soup the normal way, then tossed in some beef, and instead of a crouton, I could top it with a potato cake made from shredded potatoes, then the cheese.  It’d still be French Onion Soup at its roots, but just a little different.

It just so happens that I cooked a beautiful 2 lb sirloin for dinner on Monday, but with only four people in the house, I had leftovers (even after making sandwiches from it).  I also had a couple quarts of chicken stock because I’d roasted a chicken on Saturday for some friends, and I never let a good chicken carcass go to waste.  I even had a random spare bag of frozen hash browns that had accidentally been delivered to me as part of my last Fresh Direct order (I’d never order these, to be fair, but since they were there, I thought it silly to waste them).  Oddly, the one thing I was missing was onions, as I’d used the last of my 10 lb. bag of them for the chicken stock, but onions can be gotten easily enough, and I asked Alex to pick some up on his way home last night.

I thinly sliced my onions, put them in a stock pot to cook down and caramelize, diced up the remaining steak, warmed up my chicken stock, and proceeded to cook up some hash browns in a small round that would fit in a soup bowl, then finally assembled the whole shebang, topping it with some mozzarella cheese (it was all I had, and sometimes ya gotta make due).  The result was a pretty good soup.  I should have deglazed the onions with a little white wine for some acidity, but I didn’t have that, so instead I added in a splash of red wine vinegar at the end.  It went from a good soup that seemed a little lacking somehow to a really good soup that had much more balance and depth.  Pictures and recipe are below (clicking on the pictures will give you the ginormous version)!

Monday's Sirloin Dinner

Thinly Sliced Onions

Steak, All Diced Up

Deliciously Carmelized Onions, After about an Hour of Cooking

Tasty Potato Cake

Mmmm... soup!

“French” Onion (and Steak and Potato) Soup

3 lbs thinly sliced onions
2 quarts chicken stock (beef stock could be substituted, but then it would be overly beefy, I think)
1 cup dry white wine
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
2 bay leaves
4 sprigs fresh thyme, tied in a bundle
6 ounces rare to medium rare sirloin, diced
4 cups shredded potatoes
2 cups grated gruyère (or other delicious and easily meltable) cheese
coarse salt, to taste (I use almost exclusively Morton Coarse Kosher Salt)
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

In a large dutch oven or stockpot, put all the onions, the two bay leaves, and the bundle of thyme over medium-low heat.  Season with a liberal sprinkling of kosher salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Let the onions heat up and cook down, stirring in the pan every ten minutes or so, until all the moisture has cooked off and they start to get a deep brown, caramel color.  That took over an hour for me, and it’s worth waiting that and letting the process happen slowly.  It can be done faster, but the onions have more a tendency to burn and get bitter that way, and that’s not so much the makings of an unreal meal!

Once the onions are deliciously brown, and they’ve started to form an onion equivalent of fond on the bottom of the pan, fish out the bay leaves and deglaze the whole shebang with the white wine.  You’ll get a wonderful burst of steam to give you a nice wine facial — it smells divine; I nearly wanted to dive into the pot.  Stir with a flat edged wooden spoon or a heat-resistant spatula to pick up the little bits of onion that have stuck to the bottom, and continue to cook until the wine has almost completely cooked off.  Stir in the vinegar.

Add the chicken stock to the onions, stirring so that the onions don’t stick to the bottom of the pot, and bring everything to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.  It was at this point that I chose to dice up my steak and grate my cheese.  Once the stock and onions have simmered for about five minutes, add the steak and turn the heat as low as it will go while cooking the potato cakes.

For each potato cake, use about 1/2 cup of shredded potatoes.  In this instance, I used frozen hash browns, which are very dry and easy to cook to a crisp golden brown.  If you are using fresh potatoes, make sure that as much water as possible has been squeezed out or you’ll end up steaming the potatoes and they’ll be soggy, mushy, and not browned at all.  I find that a non-stick skillet is perfect for this, and I tend to use non-stick cooking spray rather than oil, because I feel that it makes the individual potato pieces adhere to one another well while crisping perfectly on the outside.

Cooked over medium heat, the frozen potatoes take about 4 minutes per side for each potato cake, depending on how thick you want them.  Mine were about 1/2″ thick, so they spread out a little (mostly because I was using a wide-mouthed soup bowl).  If you wanted them thicker, more like a crabcake, it would probably take longer to cook (but be sure to flip them so that they don’t burn).

Once the potatoes are cooked, ladle the soup into a bowl, top with a potato cake, and sprinkle with 1/4 c of shredded cheese.  The whole thing can be placed under a broiler to melt the cheese and crisp up the top of it.  I forewent that step because our broiler is an old-fashioned one underneath the bottom of the oven, and it’s occasionally challenging to get things in and out of there.  I really want a new range, but how does one justify buying a new range for an apartment that one rents? :p

The final product makes about 8 servings, depending on how big your appetite and whether you’re choosing to make a whole meal of this, or if you’re serving it as an appetizer.  Had I chosen to put these in the wonderful little soup tureens that I have, we probably could have gotten 8 servings.  As it was, it turned out to be about five dinner-sized portions.  Oh, and don’t forget to pull the thyme bundle!  Most of the leaves will probably have fallen off, so it’ll likely be a bunch of naked stems tied together.  Don’t be alarmed — that’s a good thing!

It occurs to me that if one wants to write a food blog, one actually has to, you know, write.  It’s totally the small, obvious details that get me sometimes.  So with that, I present you my first real post (I’ve no idea if anyone’s actually reading, but we’ll see).

There’s a lot of things that probably go into someone deciding to start a blog of any kind.  I’ve always been one of those “weird internet people,” involved in this community or that, so writing about various and sundry things often feels somewhat second-nature to me.  However, moving away from “yo, this is what I did today” type nonsense that can be interesting to my friends and toward a more specific niche requires a bit more focus and refinement.  Time will tell if I’m able to pull that off effectively.

What made me ultimately decide to give this a go was a dinner party that I hosted earlier this year.  It’s no secret that anyone who knows me (or even talks to me for two minutes) can tell how much I love food.  It’s not just eating, it’s the act of creating and crafting good meals that appeals to me on a very basic level.  Perhaps it’s about ego — who doesn’t love seeing people enjoy something delicious that you made? — perhaps it’s just the nature of cooking and seeing things come together and transform.  Whatever it is, it’s what I love to do, and because of that, I sometimes seek to do completely insane (well, insane for a home cook, anyway) elaborate things for my roommates and friends, and this dinner party definitely falls into that category.

A couple years ago I cooked a small, intimate five-course dinner for my boyfriend and I, and it turned out really well.  It wasn’t particularly elaborate, but it was particularly delicious, mostly because I put a lot of thought, effort, and care into it.  It’s become a total cliché that you hear on every competitive food show these days, but there was a lot of love that went into it.  Afterward, I started thinking about how I could do something more involved, so I got a wild idea to do seven courses.

Something to know about me — I get these ideas to do things from time to time, and pretty much nothing can stop me from achieving my goal, no matter how ridiculous, costly, time-consuming, or just downright odd it might seem to others.  When I was a little girl, my Nana used to call me “Pigfoot” because I was so stubborn, and my mom endearingly referred to me as “truculent.”  I can see how, in trying to rear a child, those would be occasionally troublesome qualities, but as an adult they serve me well — I like to consider it determination.   This determination led me to believe that I could easily put together a seven course dinner, and nothing was going to deter me from executing that.

I decided that the dinner needed a motif, and posted to a LiveJournal community to brainstorm theme ideas (see? I told you I was one of those weird internet people).  Lots of interesting things were posited ranging from ideas that incorporated the number seven (the seven seas, seven continents, seven wonders of the world) to individual types of cuisine for each course.  Someone suggested seven deadly sins, and I loved the idea, so I took that and ran with it.  People who have been loyal watchers of Top Chef know that this isn’t necessarily a unique theme, but I had never watched that show before about midway through the 4th season, and I was confident in my ability to bring this to fruition with in my own way.  I’ve actually still never seen that episode, nor even really read anything about it — I didn’t want it to influence my own choices.

At some point during the summer 2007, I started writing down notes here and there about things I could potentially use for the eventual 7DS dinner.  I’d focus on it on and off, creating spreadsheets and lists with possible course ideas, wine ideas, and even tableware.  Sometimes I’d go months and months without looking at it, then I’d think about it, and I’d say to Alex, “You know, I should do the Seven Deadly Sins thing…”  He’d drool a little, agree, and then it’d fall by the wayside again.  Until eventually it didn’t, and I decided it was time to make it happen.

And so on April 25, 2009, my roommates and I had four of our friends over and started eating and drinking at about 5 pm.  We finished somewhere past midnight, having successfully enjoyed every single bit of the following (click the image for a large version):

Seven Deadly Sins

As a result of that meal, a dear friend of mine encouraged me to document everything.  ”You could create a website — call it The Unreal Meal,” he told me.  Much like my decision to make the meal, I took that and ran with it, and here we are.  Stay tuned for more about 7DS, and about all the other unreal meals that I can invent.  They won’t all be so elaborate (most of them won’t, in fact), but I promise that they’ll all be unreal in some way!

It occurred to me today, as I was corresponding with a chef who is much more suited to using that moniker than I, that perhaps having something here explaining what The Unreal Meal is/will be might not be a bad thing.

Quite simply, The Unreal Meal is a forthcoming food project that is dedicated to making every meal an unreal one, whether it be of the most humble or the most elaborate ingredients.

Within the next couple weeks, I hope to have more fleshed out for the site (beyond just the basic WordPress layout that you might be seeing now), and be able to start sharing my own adventures in unreal meals with you.

We’re still under construction, but The Unreal Meal will be coming soon!