jeff bachman

Some people are going all out this Christmas.

via i.imgur.com

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Amy and I @ The Mansion, MGM Grand. Class acts.

Golden retrievers can be as artsy as they are sheddy. And smelly.

Dog sitting. iPhone app. Loud barks.

We deliver.

If you know me, you know I don’t cook much. I blame it a lot on being color blind, honestly. Cook something until golden brown? I don’t know what golden brown is, let alone one of those at a time. But I went ahead and said I’d cook dinner for New Years Eve, and Amy held me to it. [Full photos after the jump]

So what’s something that beginner chefs are advised to stay away from? Mushroom risotto, of course. Looking into it, though, it seemed pretty straight forward. Ladle when rice looks dry? I can do that. So I put that on the menu….but Amy was expecting that already, I need to do some sort of appetizer as well. So I scanned our bookshelf of immense cook book proportions, found Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, and decided to go with a goat cheese mousse served on parmigiano reggiano crisps. Looked easy enough, right? Well yes and no.

Here’s the food porn walk-through of my attempt at these dishes.

Goat Cheese Mousse served on Parmigiano Reggiano Crisps

So here’s the original inspiration from Thomas Keller’s French Laundry. Make crisps, make the mousse, garnish, and you get this appy. GREAT LET’S DO THIS, TOMMY K.

So the first step was to shred up some of the parmigiano reggiano, which, to put it bluntly, is a really expensive cheese. Taste delicious? Yes. Could some minimum wage kid gorge themselves on this after a shift at blockbuster? No.

From there, Tommy K told me to steal the girlfriend’s Silpat and cookie cutters (verbatim, I swear) and make some discs with a tablespoon of shredded cheese in each.

Throw them in the oven for about 9 mins or so at 325, they’ll bubble about. Now, Tommy K warned me about this next part - act quickly when pulling them out to let them cool enough to lift with a spatula, use an egg carton to press them into to form the tulip shape, let harden, then remove promptly. More or less, I didn’t work fast enough…so here’s the few that turned out at least in cup shape:

Nice, eh? If melting cheese was an art, it might be something I could do…because the color blindness wouldn’t be an issue. So next, the mousse! Not knowing much about goat cheese I thought hey, let’s go with a soft-ish one thinking it’d be the better mousse:

Judging from the logo, it’s either made from goats or it’s approved by goats, but I could hear Tommy K in my head whispering that it’d do the trick. Throw 170 grams into a processor to chop it up, and slowly add a quarter cup of heavy cream:

Keep processing, throw in some spices, and it turns into a mousse. Or so Tommy Guns promised. Whether the cheese was not the same moisture or the cream was too much, I ended up with something a little more of french onion dip consistency. The finishing touch was to pipe it onto the crisp, which, judging from the texture, may not work out so well now. I threw it into the fridge hoping it’d solidify up a bit before serving. Got it out, crossed the fingers, piped it…..but I might as well have spooned it in. Apparently New Years Eve is when everyone buys chives as nobody had them, so I had to garnish with green onions. Regardless, here’s the final product:

You’ll also notice the star shape, which I was hoping would spear nicely into the mousse. But again, my goat cheese dip seemed it wasn’t up to the task. Nevertheless, it tasted pretty good and was a fun start to the meal. Next time, I’d consider a firmer goat cheese or cut back on the cream.

Mushroom Risotto

Let’s be honest, if I didn’t know how to do something, I’ll google it. Mushroom risotto is no different, so that’s how I decided to stick with this recipe courtesy of AllRecipes.com.

I went with two of your standard supermarket ‘fancy’ mushrooms, shiitake and portobello mushrooms. Chop up about 400 grams or so (could have gone with more, recipe called for about 500) of your mushrooms, your shiitakes:

and your portobellos:

The recipe called just to cook them until soft with a few table spoons of olive oil, but after that we went ahead and simmered them in some white wine to give them what they really needed. And let me tell you, they definitely benefited:

Having set them aside, you want to make sure you’ve got your broth heating up already. I just went with some off the shelf organic chicken broth:

Throw it on a back burner and heat it to a steam, then cut it back. Back in the main pot it was some more olive oil to heat up two diced shallots:

Once they had sweated out a bit, in went a cup and a half of arborio rice. Again, this seemed to be the most typical kind on the shelves:

Stirred it around for about six minutes until it became a….golden brown color (ok, Amy helped me with that part). After that a half cup of white wine (a local sauvignon blanc, same that was used for the mushrooms and then in our glasses) went in:

Once reduced, it was a ladle at a time of the chicken broth, and mixing, mixing, mixing. Amy and I took turns on this one, as I was prepping and cursing the goat cheese “dip” at this time. Apparently this is the “hard part” of risotto, but it wasn’t hard at all:

Slowly and surely we added and reduced the broth, then added in the mushrooms, a few tablespoons of butter, a few tablespoons of green onions, and a few tablespoons of the parmigiano reggiano. In the end, our final result:

And let me say, it was delicious.

On a side note, I had fun both cooking and taking a stab at food porn photography, although with food being very particular at how the color and tint is rendered, I should pick up grey card rather than trying to blindly handle the white balance in post-processing. And when I say blindly, it’s pretty accurate.

Happy 2010, everyone!

summer chariot, ahoy! (via jeffbachman)

critical mass june 2009

YVR Critical Mass June 2009 (Set)

The new tamron, mounted.

via nedroid.com

Fixie tricks are so 1899.

And now for the cutest thing you’ll see all day…a jack russell pup with a wild pig of some sort.

Graduation is never official until things are under glass.

Sign a crazy cat lady lives in a house: there’s a flag full of cats on your porch. iPhone quality shot from a moving car…. I almost want to go back and take a better photo.

One of my favorite shots I’ve taken. Made with the thrifty nifty fifty or whatever people like to call it. The Canon 50mm F1.8 II.

Ordered a Tamron 17-50 f2.8 and am really excited for it to come in, going through old flickr stuff.

Could never keep a wordpress blog going. Still own internetcelebrity.ca. jeffbachman.com remains the resume site. After getting into twitter and pretty much killing fbook, I think I’ll somehow bridge a twitter+flickr+tumblr existence.