We celebrated Thanksgiving on Sunday with a gathering of Texans in Marnes-LaCoquette. Our friends, the Gilberts, hosted an awesome feast for a group of Houstonians complete with turkey and all the fixins'.
I wanted to show my cooking prowess--you know after all these cooking classes I've been taking, thinking I could really whip up some impressive "something"...I found sweet potatoes at my market, so I was pretty excited to make a down home, Southern dish. Finding pecans was a little difficult--went to 3 different stores before I found some--you get about 1/4 cup for about $6.00. But who cares?? Sweet potatoes must have brown sugar, butter, and pecans on top to be any good at all, right? The other thing I wanted to bring was the Tarte Tatin I learned in cooking class (Cuisine de Dominque!)
So, yesterday morning, I got up early to start cooking. I should begin by letting you know I call my oven an "Easy Bake" because it's about the same quality of the one my girls had when they played with dolls. And, it just has these weird symbols that mean what?? What kind of setting is an ice cube??
 |
| BTW, the temperature is in celsius (celsius, dang it!!!) |
When I preheated the oven, I used the "fan" setting to heat it up all evenly. ("Learned that in cooking class" I said smugly.) Apparently, there was some "food substance" on the roasting pan, which caught on fire and smoked up the kitchen. Not really a great start to my cooking adventures, but I am UNBROKEN!!!! Katherine has figured the oven out better than the rest of us, so I usually set the dial on whatever she tells me, and that has been working pretty good--until today when I wanted to make something to take to a dinner... Not sure how it happened (well, we actually found out she has been using the "grill" feature), but next thing I knew, the oven was smoking and I had burned the pecans off the top of the sweet potatoes.
So much for 3 stores and $12 worth of pecans. Paul found an online manual for the oven after that, so now we knew which setting to use for the tarte. (HOPEFULLY!!)
While I had been making the sweet potatoes, Paul was busy peeling the apples for the tarte. His next step was to make the carmel for it and that's where we had a little problem. You heat sugar with a little water on the stove, then after it turns into carmel, you add butter. You pour the carmel on the bottom of the pie pan, put the apples on top, then bake it. After it comes out, you flip it upside down, Voila!
But, back to the problem with the carmel. It just wasn't working, so he started over. (first time).
 |
| Carmel #2: singed |
There could have been a 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th time, but I left to get in the shower. Still no carmel after my shower, so I took a turn. (Paul had begun making carmel while I was busy burning the top off the sweet potatoes).
The first time I tried to make the carmel, I got it. (I take classes, you know!) I also got to use my vanilla bourbon sugar, which was very exciting! So, I put the tarte all together and put it in the oven to bake. All was well until after I took the tarte out of the oven and the carmel was still stuck to the pan after we flipped it over--somewhat uncooked, I might add. So back to the stove with the vanilla bourbon sugar carmel to cook some more.
 |
| okay, it DID look pretty!! |
After all this, it was time to go to the Gilbert's, so we were like WHATEVER!!! and poured the questionably-cooked carmel on the apples and shoved it in a box to take with us along with our charred sweet potatoes. Happy Thanksgiving, ya'll! and by the way, no matter how many cooking classes I have taken, I am still bringing an uncooked apple tarte with some blackened sweet potatoes to this shindig.
No comments:
Post a Comment