Andiamo!: A Week of Food Firsts

25 January 2006

A Week of Food Firsts

On Sunday we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is on the Atkins diet, so Chris tried to come up with a more Atkins-friendly dessert to bring with us. He settled on creme brulee, which he'd never made before. It's not strictly Atkins, of course, because of all the sugar, but it's better than cookies or cake. And it turned out pretty well, too - especially for a first try. Chris added a bit of orange essence to the cream, giving it an almost refreshing taste (and we all acknowledged that "refreshing" isn't a word one would generally use to describe creme brulee). Torching the sugar topping proved to be the most entertaining part, as you'd expect.

The biggest shock came earlier when Chris was reading the nutritional information on the side of the carton of heavy cream. He was reading the fat content, thinking, "Wow, this is much worse for me than I thought." And then he read the serving size - one tablespoon. In that tiny carton there were 30 servings - and each one was more unhealthy than he'd thought the entire carton would be. Let this be a lesson to you - if you think something is unhealthy and you want to eat it anyway, don't read the nutritional information.

Pouring the sugar on top for torching.

Torching the top of the creme brulee, and the finished product. Twas tasty...

Last night in Italian class, two of our classmates had a surprise for us - a friend of theirs called Giuseppe (born in Naples) was going to teach us all how to make mozzarella. Giuseppe spoke primarily in Italian, of course, so there are significant gaps in my understanding of the steps involved, but I do know that once all the ingredients are prepared the cheesy stuff goes into a giant bowl of hot water and you pull it like taffy. Then you create cheese balls and pinch them off, dropping them into a bowl of cold salt water. Giuseppe said that when you're pinching off the segments of cheese that it can help to think of a spouse or significant other - and then he demonstrated by strangling the cheese. We all got a good laugh out of that.