Another Food Blog

I’m in Los Angeles visiting my friend, the journalist Cathy Seipp, for a few days. We watched the Oscars yesterday (which is still today for me) with some friends, and it was quite bizarre to have them on the television when it was still quite light outside. Actually, it was quite bizarre to have them on the television at all, as I haven’t watched that mess in years.

I’ve been looking forward to visiting Cathy, as I knew she’d let me cook for her. Today I made a cauliflower soup, which we reheated when the Oscars started. It’s a simple soup: Boil an entire head of cauliflower, cut into florets, until tender; fry an onion and a few cloves of garlic until soft and translucent; add the onion and garlic to the cauliflower and its cooking water, along with a large, peeled, cubed potato, salt and a large dollop of Dijon mustard, and simmer 15 minutes before blitzing with a hand blender. Add cream for a richer soup (we did), and serve with freshly ground black pepper and shredded Cheddar cheese stirred in and melting.

After a few more awards, I went back into the kitchen and prepared some trout I’d bought that morning. (You’ll understand how huge these trout fillets were when I say that I got enough fish to feed eight people out of only two of them.) I poached them in a mixture of citrus-infused soy sauce, the juice of one Meyer lemon, the juice of a standard lemon (picked from one of Cathy’s many citrus trees), sweet Thai chilli sauce, minced ginger, and minced garlic. I made some Japanese glass noodles to go with this, and stir-fried some broccoli, snow peas, carrot slices, bok choy, mushrooms, red peppers, and onion in a bit of olive oil and the juice of another of Cathy’s lemons.

For dessert, everyone munched on the Fortnum & Mason selection of Piccadilly biscuits I’d brought from London. I have no idea if these really go with the other two courses, but with lemon curd, stem ginger, chocolate pearls, and macadamia nut cookies, it’s pretty hard to go wrong.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 4:14 am and is filed under Jackie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.