Onion Fluid Gel

Motivation
I remembered reading about a onion gel somewhere.  After a bit of investigation I tracked it down to Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck Cookbook.  For a Fat Duck recipe, the gel is pretty simple.

Ingredients
30g Butter
250g Onions, finely sliced
1g Sprig of Thyme
200g Milk
95g Whipping Cream
150 Beef Stock (or Chicken)
2.7g Gellan F

Method
Melt butter in sauce pan, add onions and thyme and sweat for about 5 minutes until onions are soft and translucent.  Add milk, cream, and stock and simmer another 5 minutes.  Remove thyme and pulse a few times with an immersion blender.  Strain through a fine sieve and add salt to taste (if needed).

Weigh out 400g of the onion milk.  Place in a sauce pan, add gellan, and heat.  Whisk often to dissolve gellan. When onion milk reaches about 80 degrees C (on the IR thermometer) remove from heat, pour into another container and place container on ice.  Blitz with immersion blender everyone so often until mixture is cool.

Keep refrigerated and deploy as called for.   Gel should be heat stable if you want to rewarm it.

Ramen Gnocchi

Motivation
I saw this recipe in a new food (or should I say foodie) magazine called Lucky Peach.  To quote the magazine, "this recipe is a riff on a French riff on the fluffy, soft potato gnocchi you see all over Italy."  I remembered it when preparing an Italian inspired appetizer and gave it a try.

Ingredients
2 cups Milk
2 packages Instant Ramen Noodles (ditch the seasoning packets)
4 Egg Yolks
2 tbsp Butter

Mise en Place
Crush the ramen noodles a bit in the bag and remove the seasoning packet.  Bring milk to a boil and remove it from the heat.  Dump all the noodles into the milk and let them soak for 1 minute.   Strain the noodles reserving the milk (I just fished them out of the pan with a spider).  Place noodles and 1 cup of milk in the food processor and process for 30 seconds.  (The recipe called for a blender, but I found it didn't work very well and transferred over to a food processor).  Add egg yolks and continue to process until smooth.

Transfer batter to a gallon ziplock bag (you'll be using this as a pastry bag later) and place in the fridge while you're waiting for a stock pot of water to boil.   Uh, fill a stock pot with water and start it boiling.

Method
Cut a corner off the ziplock bag to make a hole about an inch in diameter.  Working in batches, pipe gnocchi out of the bag over the stock pot and cut the batter into inch long logs.  When gnocchi start to float they're ready to fish out.  Place on a greased plate or tray (I used a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper).   Gnocchi can be cooled and refrigerated for up to a day.

When ready to eat, melt butter in a saute pan.  When foaming subsides, add gnocchi and cook them stirring occasionally until a brown crust forms on all sides.

Dinner Riced Out - Jambaliar

Motivation
It's a week night and I don't want to spend 2 hours cooking and dirty every pot we own.

Ingredients
Rice maker:
1 prepackaged rice and red beans mix plus the listed amount of water
1 bag frozen okra
1-2 Tbsp dried onions
1-2 tsp dried garlic
1 can of corn (optional)
turkey sausage to taste
chicken to taste (optional)
beef to taste (optional)

Garnish:
cooked shrimp or scallops (optional)
Frank’s hot sauce to taste

Mise en Place
Cut up the sausage and other meat.
Put everything but the garnishes in the rice maker in the order listed. Set it to "quick cook."

Method
When the rice maker is done, mix in the seafood and hot sauce and serve.

I’ve done a version where I added the seafood raw to the rice maker. It cooked just fine, but the overall flavor of the dish was fishier than I wanted.