Cassoulet.
I had one of the finest meals in my life in an obscure, inexpensive restaurant in NYC in about 1984. It was to die for. So, I comes home and try to recreate this wonderful dish perhaps a year later.
I’m a tolerably good cook, and I had the time. So, I gets out my Joy of Cooking, read the recipe, go get the ingredients, take half a day out of my life to obtain them, cook them, and voila!-----
tasted nothing like what I had(or at least what I remember).
I have once – once! – made a seafood paella worthy of respect from a Spaniard. Even then, the seafood was not fresh, so I suppose it could have been better. To get the rice to taste right, you have to cook the seafood, then pour out all of the water so that you can saute the rice in oil and spices – it doesn’t pick up the flavor as well if you let it touch water first. I watched a Spanish friend of the family do it at our house, then I decided to make paella for friends at their house. It took several hours to cook, and my friends went to bed not long afterward.
Then there was the time that I obsessed over the idea that as the slices peeled off of a fat standing rib roast, they should have a perfectly round and gelatinous medallion of bacon in the center to, you know, harmonize with the Grand Marnier glaze on the outside.
Sublime? Yes. Complicated? Not necessarily. But I did spend a few hours in pursuit of an appropriate device to create the tunnel that would receive the dense packing of bacon. I eventually found it, at Home Depot, in the plumbing department.
Lame: Apple Pie. To this day it’s actually the only time I’ve actually made an authentic crust and everything.
Tried to make a chili recipe that required me to go out and buy about $45 in ingredients I never had. Turned out as a failure.
Sourdough bread, including making a yeast-free starter from scratch over the period of about a week.
Also this three layer lemon meringue cake, which includes freshly made lemon curd and a second baking with a covering of swiss meringue.
I make a moussaka sometimes that is crazy complicated because there are three parts to it that need to be stir-fried separately before they can all be layered together (with a ridiculous amount of cheese) and baked. It’s not really tough, just very time-consuming. The end result is nothing like the moussaka I used to eat in Bulgaria, but tasty nonetheless. (The ridiculous amount of cheese may help.)
I’m not a cook. Most of what I eat is takeout or microwaved. On the rare occasion I might stick something in the toaster oven or boil something. But I once baked a multilayered cake from scratch (except the frosting) with fruit slices between layers.
I’d really like to make my own gazpacho or salsa but I’m not sure how to properly pick and process the tomatoes. I tried once blending tomatoes in the blender and came to the conclusion that that wasn’t the proper way to do things. I’m guessing you only use a specific part of the tomato?
I forgot about fermented foods. A good runner up would be the day I got an urge for spinach dip. I made a round of sourdough bread from my wild-yeast starter, blended up some local greens with my own homemade yogurt. Then I had to bake my own crackers to dip in it! I usually had quite a collection of ferments going- sourdough, sauerkraut. yogurt, honey wine…
I kind of missing having all of the time in the world.
As for salsa, you can easily look up some recipes here. In my experience, the secret to good salsa is to rely more on peppers than tomatoes. I roast peppers over my stove’s flame and blend them with tomatoes, onion, cilantro, garlic, lime juice, vinegar and spices. Then I simmer the blended mixture on the stove for a few minutes before I chill it. Yum.
Which reminds me of the time we wanted chicken enchiladas for Christmas dinner. We had to kill the chickens, spend all day making tortillas, etc. It took several people literally morning till night. But we cheated and used a precious purchased block of cheese. Good times…
Gah, post was eaten. Brewing my own beer in order to make sourdough beer bread. I used Oregon Trail era yeast (RIP Carl) that I’ve been culturing for about 5 years. Good stuff.
Even Sven, I’ve never even thought about making my own ricotta. If you could buy or make your own from supermarket milk, is it worth making your own?
Crown roast of pork with wild rice stuffing and some kind of wine based sauce I can’t remember. The whole meal was soul suckingly ridiculously involved. I prefer not to remember it. It also involved roasted acorn squash puree, some other kind of vegetable I’ve forgotten thankfully, avocado salad with a vinaigrette, chocolate mousse with candied orange peels for garnish and homemade rolls.
Now last night, I made a tasty dish out of velveeta, worchestire sauce (I know - I probably spelled that wrong), ground beef, Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage, garlic, onions and little cocktail ryes. My husband is eating it now as I type.
Tonight it will be macaroni and hot dogs. Tomorrow, possibly pizza bread.
Edited to add that the mac and cheese is Kraft Deluxe, the hot dogs are Ball Park, and the pizza bread is french rolls with Pastorelli pizza sauce from a can and shredded mozz from the store. That’s how I roll.
To the best of my recollection, crawfish etouffe ravioli.
Not true with a good recipe. I made the spiciest, tangiest, yellow tomato ketchup last summer. Very nice on sandwiches or brushed on broiled fish.
I’ve also made the regular red tomato kind and a green tomato ketchup. And a mushroom version. A really tasty spicy brown sauce, tomato chutney, pear chutney, green tomato relish, oh and some lovely sour cherry relish last summer too. I’ve also done sweet chili sauce, corn relish, and numerous pickles.
I love condiments.
The most complicated from scratch dish done recently I guess would be herbed roasted duck with sour cherry sauce. The cherries I grew in my backyard as well as the herbs. I did not grow the duck however.
Lobster newburg, maybe? Lots of different kinds of bread, soup, Italian dishes, desserts like sticky toffee pudding, pies, a 7 layer red velvet cake, chocolate pudding from scratch…I remember my daughter’s little playmates would watch me make chicken soup or whatever, surprised to actually see a meal being cooked and not something from a package thawed out and nuked.
Lasagna from scratch, definitely (tho’ I do purchase the dairy).
Ravioli from scratch, yep (again, purchased dairy).
We brew our own beer, and I’ve made lemoncello (need to get another batch going, incidentally.)
I don’t buy spaghetti sauce anymore, much - I can make better with canned tomato sauce, garlic, basil, some sort of meat mixture, diced canned tomatoes, wine, crushed red pepper, and whatever else catches my fancy.
I grow tomatoes and basil, and my husband bakes bread, so we’ve had bruschetta a lot, as well as that tomato-basil-mozzarella-balsamic vinegar-olive oil salad.
Pizza, certainly.
Just wanted to say re-reading this: awesome!
A few years ago, I made <something>. My rusty memory thinks it was coq au vin, but that’s actually a fairly simple dish to turn out. At any rate, it was some classic French cooking dish, and when all was said and eaten, we were like “OK, Check that off the to-do list.”
I think we wound up using every pot, pan and bowl in the kitchen, and we have a well-stocked kitchen. The dishwashing was far out of proportion to the eating.
My French Onion soup has 16 ingredients and takes the better part of two hours to make.
It’s worth it.
I made a whole chicken baked in a bread crust with peas, carrots and leeks from scratch. It was delicious. Seems like there was lemon and thyme in there too.
I made a fancy chocolate cake. The icing was pink (from the raspberries) so I dubbed it Barbie’s Dreamhouse Cake. It took 2 days to make (lots of steps), but it was very good.
As far as a single dish goes, it’s probably cassoulet.
For an entire meal, it would probably be the one I cooked for my 21st birthday which involved 21 courses for 21 people over 21 hours (while drinking 21 drinks).
Ironically, the 22 course meal I cooked the next year was significantly simpler to make.