Sorry, all. More “talking about food” rather than recipes. I haven’t made anything new lately. I’ve got one recipe almost ready to go, and I’ve gotten some recipes from readers that I may make this next weekend. Or whenever my fridge runs out of leftovers.

So, I went to see Alton’s show on Saturday. The event ran from 11am to 4:30pm. I think I stayed until about three or so. Alton’s segments didn’t start until after noon- I think he got there a little late. I was watching from near the back so I wouldn’t be crushed by people. I could still see over their heads pretty well. Unfortunately, AB was not wearing his Utilikilt, as he did when he performed at the Orange County Fair (read Cynthia’s account here). I think he said it was getting cleaned. Drat, I say.

Alton’s first segment was on beef jerky. He used the same idea as when he dried herbs, with a box fan, air conditioner filters, and bungee cords. Unfortunately, the Simon Super Chef Tour did not get caterers’ insurance, so none of us could actually taste anything he made. (It’s not required everywhere, but it is necessary in California.) You have the jerky dry out for… twelve hours? Seven days? Somewhere in between there. Anyway, apparently every dog in your neighborhood will be drooling at your doors by the end of it. (You have to make sure you point the box fan away from your house or else it’ll end up smelling like a smokehouse or a butcher shop or something.)

His second segment was about pâte à choux. I was really quite amazed by how quickly the dough/batter came together. I mean, I’d seen the episode (“Choux Shine“), but still, it was very impressive in person. Ryan said (when I told her about it later) that she’d be interested in trying it. Using the dough/batter (I forget which one it is, or if there’s a word that means “kind of both”), he made cream puffs (well, empty ones), a funnel cake, and a doughnut. The doughnut was interesting because he’d just done a show on the more cake-like doughnuts, and these were, I guess, more like the puffy glazed ones you’d get elsewhere. He piped a circle on a little square of parchment paper and then turned the whole thing into the frying oil. When the doughnut fell away, he fished the paper out with the tongs. Messy, but easier than trying to pipe a circle into the oil itself.

I have to say, the Simon Super Chef Tour stage wasn’t great. I wish they had installed a mirror over the cooking surface so you could see what was going on. They did have a couple of monitors set up that had video of what was happening, but it was very hard to see. Sun and glare and whatnot. It also would have helped if they had more chairs.

I was so glad that I’d gotten my cookbook signed by him last year (he did a signing at the Draeger’s in San Mateo). Wow, was that line long. Lydia met me after the second segment and we hung around for about fifteen minutes, taking pictures of AB. We could actually get pretty close to the signing area.

I didn’t stay for the third segment because I had a lot of shopping to do for Sunday. I think I heard it was going to be on turkey.

Oh, yeah, and I got a free loaf of bread at Boudin. The Simon people were giving out some rather excellent coupons at the event.

Finally, a yay to AB and Good Eats for getting recognized as darn good television by Heather Havrilesky in her column, “I Like to Watch,” over at Salon.com.

I spent yesterday hanging out with my family. Yay! Jon and Dad played golf, Ryan and Mom completed their lamps from last weekend’s craft party, and I made appetizers. Nothing very new and exciting. I was going to make the Steamed Wonton Bundles from my Thai cookbook (so I can post a real recipe and stop feeling horrible about the Sandra Lee monstrosity that I somehow like), but we all decided that we would be too full for dinner. As it was, we had salsa, hummus, bean dip, and chicken liver mousse. It was a very dip-intensive round of hors d’oeuvres. And then I made twice-baked potatoes to go with the lamb we ate for dinner.

I got a chance to try out a new drink with my mom and Ryan. We had tamarind margaritas. These were a lot of work and far too strong for my taste. It took me about three hours to get to the point where I said, “Here, Dad, you finish this.” (Because, you see, I nursed it for so long that they returned from their golfing.) Also, not terribly attractive drinks, kind of a tan color.

I’ll post the recipe anyway. I need to write to Ryan and ask her for the recipe to my dad’s margaritas (which I also think are too strong [although everyone else seems to love them], but they’re easier than the tamarind ones). She wrote it down last night, but I was too lazy to grab a pen and paper.

Argh! Well, I was going to post the tamarind margarita recipe, but I can’t find it. I was sure I stuck it in Here in America’s Test Kitchen before I left last night, but apparently not. That’s really annoying.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to find dried shrimp? My plan of buying some ramen cup-o-soups and fishing them out hit a snag. I guess they don’t put as many in as they used to.

Asian market? Mexican market?

I’ve got a meatloaf currently cooking. It’s the first time I’ve made one. I asked my mom for the recipe yesterday. Let’s hope it turns out okay. I thought I had an onion, but I didn’t, so I used some green onion.

I don’t know- I just really felt like a meatloaf sandwich. Which I’ll eat tomorrow, once the loaf is chilled.

Tomorrow for dinner. Lunch tomorrow is Thai food with my mom and some family friends.

I am very uninteresting today. It’s a blah day.

Meatloaf

1 pound ground beef

1 egg

1/2 onion minced

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup bread crumbs (about)

Pinch of garlic powder

Salt

NOTE: add the bread crumbs slowly until you have the right consistency. You may need more or less.

Preheat oven to 350. Mix ingredients together with hands. Form into loaf. Place on a rack over a sheet pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour.

Hee. I’m watching Sara Moulton cook with Gordon Hamersley, and she’s just so wee. He looks like a giant in her kitchen (which I have read was specially constructed for her petiteness).

So they’re doing something with artichokes, and I have to ask, is it dangerous to eat the choke? Because I used to. All the time. When I was in college, we were pretty close to artichoke country, so when spring rolled around, you could get them really cheap. I hated halting my eating of them in order to scoop out the choke, so I just ate it. It was a little bitter, that’s all. I didn’t really run into the problem that gave the choke its name.

Pardon me while I become a gibbering fangirl.

Next Saturday! Alton Brown! At the Stanford Shopping Center! It’s part of the Simon Super Chefs tour! Oh my god, I’m SOOO there. Thank you, KCBS (my morning radio station), for having a commercial, or I never would have heard about it.

Copy from the website:

Simon Super Chefs Live! invites local food fans to a free day-long in-mall celebration of food, cooking, wine and shopping. Get up close and personal with some of today’s most popular TV Celebrity Chefs, including: Lidia Bastianich, Michelle Bernstein, Alton Brown, Mary Ann Esposito, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pepin, Martin Yan and more.

Eeee! It’s listed under San Francisco for some reason, but whatever. We get Alton! Whee! One grumble- the announcer on the radio spot pronounced Alton’s name wrong. It’s a hard “A,” people. I asked AB about that when he signed my book last year.

So who wants to come with me?

Yesterday, Ryan hosted an AV Fest, during which we covered Ikea lamps with filmstrips and watched Mental Hygiene short films. There was a great deal of food, and some of that was made by me.

I made basil leaves stuffed with goat cheese, pork wrappers, chicken liver mousse, potato cheese sticks, salsa, roasted garlic and caramelized onion dip, and basil lime spritzers. Jon made guacamole, and Ryan made scones and mojitos (as well as cutting up the veggies served with the garlic-onion dip).

We do like going overboard with the foodstuffs. Jon’s guac, as always, was superlative. The scones Ryan made were fantastic- she has these wonderful dried cherries from Michigan, and she incorporated them into the dough. I don’t know how good I’d be at making scones. They require a quick hand, and I tend to dawdle over things. Well, I guess biscuits demand alacrity. Maybe I’ll try the scones in the near future. Man, were they good.

Julia Child’s chicken liver mousse is amazing. Totally kicks my recipe’s ass. Adding an entire stick of butter and some cream really does wonders.

The garlic-onion dip was… okay. It tasted weird with the carrots, but with more bitter vegetables, it was good. I should have thought better than to have the sweetness of both the caramelized onions and the roasted garlic.

The potato cheese sticks didn’t really turn out right. The mixture tasted fine- maybe a little overbeaten, but fine. (I don’t own a ricer, so I kind of mashed up the potatoes with a fork. Clearly, this was not going to yield the same results.) I could not get them through the pastry tube at all. I ended up shaping them into little patties and baking them. They tasted pretty good right out of the oven, but I had made them the night before, and these were an item that needed to be served fairly soon after baking.

The basil-lime spritzer was kind of a surprise. I’ve wanted to make it for a while now. I have a binder full of clipped magazine recipes, and the recipe for the syrup was in the middle of the first page. Whenever I went in there to find something, it taunted me. Really, it’s not very hard to make, and it’s really quite refreshing. Ryan had some lime-mint-sugar mix left over from the mojitos yesterday, and so I went over today and made some more. I made a few changes- added some lemon zest to the first step, and included some mint with the basil during the blender step. It was kind of a “why the hell not?” thing to make, and I was glad it turned out so well.

Yes, I made the pork wrappers for people. And they liked them. Jon even made a little dipping sauce with soy and rice wine vinegar. Seriously, every time I make them, I’m just going to feel dirty. Sandra Lee made a sauce with Cheez Whiz on Semi-Homemade yesterday. CHEEZ WHIZ, people. I fear for our nation’s digestive systems.