111. Chocolate Souffle (p. 840)

The seeds of this Project were sown a year ago when I decided to make the Chocolate Souffle recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking for a homemade Valentine's Day dinner with my wife. So, I thought that it was only fitting that I should make this recipe from The Book for this year's Valentine's dinner.

Souffles always fill people with dread and fear. The recipe itself isn't very hard, though. All you do is melt some chocolate and then stir some egg yolks into it, then fold in some beaten, sweetened egg whites and bake. The hard part is dealing with the anxiety. Will it rise? Or even worse, will if fall? Resisting the urge to open the oven door for a peek takes a level of willpower that most of us don't possess. (Seriously, if you want to make 24 minutes feel like an eternity, put a souffle in the oven and try not to check to see if it's collapsed.)

Well, the good news is that my souffle didn't fall. That's probably because it wouldn't have had too far to go since it didn't rise all that much. I'm not quite sure what happened. Maybe I beat the egg whites too much? Not enough? As The Book says, "the trick is to know when to stop beating" the egg whites. No matter, it was still airy, rich and delicious. Maybe I'll just have to make this an annual tradition and keep at it until I get it right.

Date Cooked: February 14, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: B+

110. Sauteed Potato Balls (p. 565)

The Book contains several recipes for elevating the pedestrian potato to something impressive. The Parsley Leaf Potatoes are one example, this recipe is another.

There really isn't much to this recipe. Just take a couple of russett potatoes, peel them, and, with a melon baller, scoop out as many balls from the potatoes as you can. As you scoop out each ball, plop it in some cold water to keep them from turning brown as you work. Once you're done, par-boil the potato balls. (I also turned the Swiss-cheese-looking scraps into mashed potatoes that I stashed in the fridge for another day. Waste not, want not!) To sautee the potatoes, melt some butter in a skillet, add the potatoes and cook until they are crispy and browned, shaking the skillet back and forth frequently to keep them moving.

I served these potatoes with my Fish en Papillote. It was a nice pairing. The potatoes were crispy and buttery on the outside and soft and creamy on the inside. They were pretty, too, I guess. I was kind of hoping for perfect little potato spheres, but, either my melon baller isn't sharp enough or the potatoes I used were too hard. I could only manage to get the potato balls to be somewhat spherical. This recipe is somewhat similar to a potato preparation in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but Julia Child would have you whittle baby potatoes into little ovals: a lot of work. The melon baller makes for much easier preparation. The other nice thing about this reciepe is that you can do some of the work in advance. You can cut out the balls and par-boil them a day in advance, and sautee them right before serving.

Date Cooked: February 14, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: B+

109. Fish en Papillote with Tomatoes and Olives (p. 302)

I decided to make a romantic dinner for my wife for Valentine's Day ... No small feat with a seven-week-old baby, but I decided to give it a try anyway.

I picked this recipe* because it looked elegant but relatively easy. Basically, all you do is put the ingredients on a piece of parchment, wrap it up, cook, and enjoy.

The recipe calls for red snapper, but Whole Foods didn't have any. No worries, since The Book says that you can substitute tilefish, halibut, cod, haddock, salmon, striped bass, white sea bass or mahimahi. I decided to go with the halibut, and it worked out just great.

I seasoned each of the halibut steaks with a little salt and pepper and topped each with some sliced tomato, sliced kalamata olives, a little red pepper flakes, some thinly sliced orange zest, a couple of sprigs of parsley and a little bit of butter. I folded the edges of the parchment to make a nice, tightly-sealed envelope. Into a very hot oven for just a few minutes (I pre-heated the baking sheet before putting the fish in the oven).

After they cooked, the parchment had browned a bit. I carefully took them off the baking sheet and put them on a couple of plates. I slit the paper open, and a whoosh of orange-scented steam came out. Inside the little package was a perfectly-cooked halibut steak swimming in a flavorful, buttry sauce.

This was a very delicious dish. The fish was excellent: sweet and firm with a nice flavor. The sauce was nice, too. The olives gave it a nice briny-ness, the orange zest gave it a nice citrus zip, but not the pedestrian lemon flavor that you'd always be expecting. The red pepper gave it some bite ... maybe a little bit too much heat, though. I'll probably use just a little less next time. The other thing that I'd do differently would be to seed and chop the tomatoes rather than slice them. The sliced tomatoes were pretty, but they didn't cook enough and they gave off too much liquid.

Even though we didn't get to sit down and eat together (we had to take turns tending to the baby), it was still a romantic dinner in its own way. Parenthood brings with it a whole host of challenges, not the least of which is trying to find some time for mom and dad. But, romance comes in all different shapes and sizes, and I wouldn't have wanted to spend my Valentine's day any other way.

Date Cooked: February 14, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: A-

*This recipe isn't online.

108. Triple-Chocolate Fudge Brownies (p. 689)

What's in this recipe?* Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. They are, after all, triple chocolate fudge brownies.

This is the second of the four brownie recipes in The Book that I've made so far. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Homemade brownies are so easy to make, and so delicious, I'll never, ever make boxed brownie mix again.

To make these brownies, I melted some bittersweet chocolate and some unsweetened chocolate with some butter in a metal bowl over a pot of simmering water. No fancy double boiler necessary. After the chocolate and butter have cooled just a bit, I mixed in some sugar and vanilla extract, and then a few eggs, one at a time. Finally, some flour, a bit of salt, and a generous helping of semisweet chocolate chips (I used big chocolate chunks). I spread the batter into a buttered 13 by 9 inch baking dish and cooked them until a toothpick came out just about clean.

These brownies were excellent. They were moist, chewey and, of course, chocolatey. The Book says that the brownies keep for three days in an airtight container at room temperture. I guess I'll just have to take their word on that since my brownies didn't last that long.

Date Cooked: February 8, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A

*The recipe on epicurious is exactly the same as the one in The Book, except that The Book's recipe is doubled. I wonder if, after the original recipe appeared in the December 1996 issue of Gourmet, readers wrote in to complain that they ate all of the brownies in a single sitting and needed to make another batch right away. To avoid such problems, maybe the editors of The Book just went ahead and doubled the recipe.

107. Chicken and Rice Soup (p. 122)

A lot of people have been talking about the Great Depression these days. When Herbert Hoover promised Americans "a chicken in every pot," I wonder if he had this recipe in mind.

This is, without a doubt, a recipe for our times. It is simple, cheap and delicious. Really, this soup couldn't be easier (The Book calls it "the simplest soup ever made from scratch"). All you need to do is throw all of the ingredients - including a whole chicken, brown rice and some onion, carrots and celery - in a pot and simmer it for an hour. As the soup simmers, the soup makes its own stock. When it's done, just take the chicken out of the pot, pull the meat apart and put it back in the soup. That's it.

This is also a very economical recipe. The only thing I needed to buy to make this soup was a chicken (and I even had a coupon!). I already had all of the other ingredients in my cupboard and refrigerator. And picking up on the waste-not-want-not theme, I supplemented the soup with whatever leftover vegetables I had on hand: a bit of green cabbage, a zucchini, some frozen green beans and corn. Not only was it thrifty and resourceful to add the extra veggies, I think that it made the soup all the more wholesome and delicious.

Speaking of delicious, this was one of the best soups I've made as part of The Project. The broth was fresh and bright, the veggies were delicious, the brown rice gave a nice substance and texture, and the chicken was perfectly cooked. It was tender and moist. I will definitely make this soup again, maybe even as soon as next week.

Date Cooked: February 8, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: VERY easy
Rating: A

UPDATE: 2/23/09
I made this soup again yesterday. This time, I added some zucchini, summer squash, red bell pepper, brocolli, and a whole mess of frozen veggies: corn, green beans, and even some snow peas. The result was just as good as the first time I made it. It was a little sweeter than last time, I think because of the red pepper and the rather large amount of frozen corn that I used. Delicious just the same.

106. Raspberry Jam Tart with Almond Crumble (p. 787)

If you're looking for a delicious, impressive-looking dessert for your next dinner party, but your short on time, this recipe is the one for you.

It really is very easy. All you do is grind some sliced almonds, sugar, butter, flour and salt in the food processor until it resembles beach sand. Reserve about a cup of this "sand" for the topping. Then pulse two tablespoons of beaten egg into the remaining almond-sugar-flour mixture until it comes together. You need to beat the egg, measure out two tablespoons and discard the rest. I can only imagine the amount of trial and error it took the Gourmet test kitchen cooks to figure out that you need exactly two tablespoons of egg.

Then you take the mixture and press it evenly into a removable-bottom tart pan and bake it for a little while. Then, take it out of the oven and spread some raspberry jam over the tart shell. I used jam made by the Trappist Monks. Finally, you mix some more sliced almonds in with the reserved "sand," sprinkle it over the jam and bake for a little while longer.

This was a great dessert. The tart crust was sweet and tender with a nice almond flavor. The jam was sweet and tangy and the almond-crumble topping gave the tart a nice crunch. The Book suggests serving the tart with vanilla ice cream. This is not optional in my opinion. The ice cream is the perfect compliment to this dessert, and I think that it would be missing "something" if you had it without.

This recipe marks my first project-related injury. As I was trying to remove the tart from the pan, my finger got pinched between the removable bottom and the sharp edge of the pan's rim. There was some pain, and yes, there was some blood, but none on the tart, thankfully). It healed pretty quickly, and I'm back in fighting form and ready to cook some more.

Date Cooked: January 31, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A-

105. Guacamole (with Tomato) (p. 9)

I had guacamole for the first time when I was a freshman in high school. Our debate team went to a tournament at Harvard (yes, I was a bit of a nerd in high school), and our faculty advisor took us to a Mexican restaurant in Harvard Square for dinner. I remember getting my plate of food and seeing "a big blob of brown stuff" and "a big blob of green stuff" on the plate. As unappetizing as these things looked to an uninitiated fourteen-year-old, I gamely gave them a try anyway. I've never been a picky eater, and I've always been willing to try just about anything once. With those first bites, I became a life-long fan of guacamole and refried beans.

This recipe* is pretty easy. I started by mashing some chopped white onions, a minced serrano chile, and some kosher salt into a paste using my mortar and pestel. I transferred the paste to a larger bowl and, using a potato masher, I mashed the paste together with four perfectly ripe avacados (my lucky day at the grocery store). Then I squeezed in some fresh lime juice and tasted it to make sure that the salt, heat and acid were just right, which they were. The Book's basic guacamole recipe ends here.

I opted to enhance it with some chopped, seeded tomato to make one of the several variations suggested in The Book ... Guacamole with Tomato. The other variations are a bit more exotic: Radish and Cilantro Guacamole, Fall-Winter Fruit Guacamole (with apple, grapes and pomegranate seeds), and Summer Fruit Gucamole (with grapes, peaches and raspberries). These other variations sound "interesting," but I'm sure that I'll give them a try someday.

This guacamole was superb. The texture was smooth, creamy and decadant. The flavor had the buttery mildness of ripe avacado with just the right amount of saltiness and a little zip of lime juice and just a hint of heat (I used a lot less of the minced serannos than The Book calls for). The tomato added some nice substance and interest. I want some more right now.

Date Cooked: February 1, 2009
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Rating: A

*The recipe in The Book isn't on epicurious.com, but this one is close enough, just add some lime juice.