Day 34

Drinking in the morning? We can only wish. No, these are glasses of consomme and clear beef stock. The consomme is on the left. What? How did I make such culinary feats? Okay, I will tell you.

So you take your clear beef stock and bring it to a simmer while you prepare your Clarification mixture. The magic mixture is ground beef, chopped tomatoes, egg whites and finely chopped carrot and celery. You decide how much mixture you need based on the size of the pot of stock you wish to clarify. Once simmering you dump the grody sticky mixture into the stock and whisk as hard and fast as you can, burning your forearms. You must stop whisking so that your mixture will form a raft and filter your stock. This MUST NOT BOIL. I assume the world ends along with your chances of clarifying your stock. So as is forms the raft you poke a hole in the center, not unlike ice fishing, so that impurities can float up through the hole. You ladle the stock over the sides of your raft and let it filter back down. You can see your stock getting clearer through the hole. If the gods shine on you, you will have consomme. Ladle the consomme out from the hole quickly (the raft will start to sink) into another container. Below is a picture of the raft with the hole in the center.

This would be amazing to watch if the pot was clear. Do they make see through pots? They should. Just for this process. Which is amazing. It's nerdy and awesome. Cloudy to clear via ground beef, egg whites, and tomatoes. You should try it. Plus then you have lots of egg yolks leftover and you can make cinnamon gelato like I did. You can do all sorts of smug culinary tricks with consomme. Float little raviolis in it, or fancy cut vegetables. Just think how crazy things could get!


These are the ingredients for pappa al pomodoro. Its a way simple tomato basil soup that you throw old bread into for thickening. Saute your onion and leek, add your garlic and basil, add your tomatoes (fresh and canned), add stock (we used chicken), and simmer until the onion is tender. Serve with old bread. Its satisfying and light. I ate it for breakfast the next day.

That's it in a big bowl. I don't like that much bread in mine, but that's just the lunch pot. We also made some bruscetta. I'm sure you can figure out how to top bread with stuff. Saute mushrooms and add Parmesan on top of toasted bread. Make a tomato, basil, garlic sauce and top bread. Mix together raw Italian spicy sausage and cream cheese and spread on bread. Bake until bubbling, sausage will be cooked. I did not like the last one. Real white trash like. What's up with that?
The white nuggets with the parsley garnish are spinach/ricotta gnocchi in a Gorgonzola cream sauce.

I had my doubts about whether my stomach could handle the gnocchi sauce but I was okay. The gnocchi are really easy and only involve mixing and chilling and boiling. My favorite flavor in them was the grated nutmeg. They are spinach, ricotta, flour, Parmesan, eggs and nutmeg. The sauce is just onion cisele, delgazed with wine, add cream and simmer, add Gorgonzola cheese and melt it in. Toss gnocchi in sauce. Take aspirin to help with heart attack. If you live through heart attack you can make it for others who wish to suffer myocardial infarction.

Tomorrow we make pizza.