Tart Tatin

Yesterday I made a tart tatin using Anne Burrell's recipe. I think it was Emily who said that she is basically a female Guy Fieri, an observation that makes me not want to watch her show. But I was looking into tart tatin recipes, starting with Smitten Kitchen's, and then I looked it up on Food Network just to see what other people did. I landed on Burrell's video, and I think what won me over was the suggestion of adding lemon juice and apple cider to the caramel mixture. This seemed to be, indeed, a secret from a restaurant chef. I was also turned off by SK's endless tale of how she's failed at this supposedly simple tart so many times. I acquired some Golden Supreme apples at the Logan Square farmer's market, Pepperidge Farm's frozen puff pastry at Mariano's, and decided to make this on a slow, gray, Tuesday afternoon.

Everything was going smoothly, especially since I didn't have to make the puff pastry. Which is easy to make with a food processor, but I just didn't feel like it and if you aren't impressing anyone then frozen puff pastry is sufficient, even pretty good. (It seems to have a crispy yet chewy texture, maybe because of all the syrupy awesomeness, but I really like that effect.) I wasn't quite sure how the apples away from the bottom of the pan were going to get blessed by the delicious caramel sauce, but with some flipping and submerging in bubbling caramel using mismatched chopsticks, the apples started to brown.

When I flipped the tart over, to both my horror and delight, this is what emerged:

The apples shrunk in the oven! And they all shifted over to one side! I thought they were fine when I put the pastry over the pan. Even though there was this size problem, and generally, I think tart tatins are not the prettiest things you can bake, this looked alright. The apples themselves looked just as I expected--basically, like in Burrell's video--which is a pretty good feeling one gets in the kitchen, particularly when baking. I wouldn't mind just folding this mess in half to get a big tart tatin croisstant-like thing, but I've been consuming it in slices like a civilized person. There's really nothing to say about the way this thing tastes except, to put it succinctly, "this shit real good." You can never go wrong with recipe that involves a stick of butter and a cup of sugar simmering and baking over the course of an hour. That is just a fundamental principle of LIFE!

Vegetable Soup in Nodame Cantabile

I realize that to most people, this is a movie and not real life, but to me...it is what it is. Chiaki helps Nodame cram for a number of piano sonatas so that she can be considered to enter competitions while studying abroad in Paris. In addition to assisting her analyze, interpret and play better (not that she can't do these things on her own, but I think she tends to, in her own charming but not necessarily approved manner, get carried away and ignore the notes and directions on the page more than the average student), he prepares her meals. Here, he's made "vegetable soup" (yasai soup) even though I spy a rather conspicuous wiener. She leans in to smell his concoction while holding a baguette, with which she has just been humorously struck by Chiaki, and then sees that he has been up all night preparing to prepare Nodame. They're currently working on Beethoven's Sonata No.31, Op.110, which she will later play for Stresemann, a.k.a. Milch (played so wonderfully by Naoto Takenaka, who was in the original/native version of "Shall We Dance?"), which will significantly stir things up later. This chapter in the DVD is referred to as "Love's Lecture." I think. 

When I watch this scene, I can smell that soup. I imagine it to be a dish that is a Japanese cook's take on Western food, which reminds me of Chiaki himself. He was raised to eat with a fork and knife rather than chopsticks, at a dining table rather than on the floor with a low table, but at the core, he is Japanese. Anyway, I WANT THAT SOUP. 

Chicago weather has been pretty steady and nice, but generally, I wasn't looking forward to the fall. Then I revisited part two of the Nodame movie series the other day, and realized a couple of things. One is that I need to revisit Nodame once a year. The other is that it's good to do this during the fall and winter, because most of her outfits involve plaid and are perfect for those seasons. So for the past week, I've been perusing style.com for Nodame-like outfits at New York's Fashion Week, trying to see if there are any designers who have the same eye for fashion like Nodame's mom, who makes her outfits. (In "real life," if you must, "Nodame's mother," in the sense that she makes her daughter's clothes, is this store.) Then I remembered that there are other fashion weeks in other cities, and I will want to save some perusing energy for at least Paris. And then I realized that they're all showing spring designs, but I'm too excited to be looking for Nodame clothes again that I don't really care. 

VEGETABLE WIENER SOUP!

Fall Fall Fall

Yesterday I busted out the penny loafers. I wore them with a black dress and tights; I looked like I was either a week early for Halloween or like I attended a funeral. All I did though was go to my piano lesson, drop by the baseball card shop, and play Animal Crossing which as usual ended up in a nap. At night we went to see UFC 104 in Jonny's basement, so in case someone died, I was prepared to mourn right away. I've seen a man convulse as a result of not the breathing kind of choking, but the blocking-blood-flow-in-a-major-artery kind of choking. I forgot who he was, but I think it was the guy with a gigantic samurai tattooed on his back. Other UFC banter: Lyoto Machida looks like a manga character. I like how he shifts and twists his hips, like he's dancing, but really, he's preparing to kick his opponent. He was the one receiving most of the leg-beat downs yesterday, but whatever, I didn't have to mourn his or Shogun's surprise death.

Also, there's Mordecai locking his door in a new coat from Zara. He seems to be a fan of the epaulets. Why does he have more luck at Zara than I do?

These photos were taken on my iPhone with an app called Toy Camera. Sometimes I walk around with my Canon G9 and/or Sony W300, but end up taking pictures with my iPhone most of the time because of convenience. This is sad, but perhaps it's a sign that some giant companies need to start getting beyond-Toy-Camera creative.