Brett Chiquet

So October in dental school can suck, a lot, so my practice leader decided that we needed a practice pot luck, and since it was going to be the day before Halloween, she thought that we should all bring some ghoulish dishes. I signed up for "deviled mice" and while searching for ways to improve it, I also found another cute idea for "eye of newt". Of course I had to make some changes, and I was very happy with how they came out. Here's how they're made:

Boil eggs, let cool, peel, slice in half (length-ways) and remove the yolk. Side story- as much as I love to cook, every time I have to boil eggs I lose confidence in myself. Do I boil them for a certain amount of time and then rinse under cold water? Do I bring them to a boil, cover and then remove from heat for 15 minutes??? I'm so confused. Shortly after I graduated from college I was enjoying cooking all these new meals and I remember having to call home to ask my mom how to boil eggs. Embarassing, and I still haven't gotten over this. To set the records right, this time I brought the eggs to a boil, covered, removed from heat and then let cook for 15 minutes before cooling in ice water.

Combine all of the yolks in a bowl. Add mayonaisse (I used ~ 1/2 cup for 18 eggs) and yellow mustard (I used ~ 1 TBSP). Just make sure its a consistency you like. Add salt and pepper. Because I was using this as the basis for both eye of newt and deviled mice, it's time to start assembling the deviled mice.

Deviled mice: slice ~ 5 olives. Place a couple of slices into each of the spaces the yolk occupied. Then fill with yolk mixture. Do not over fill, as these will be placed yolk-side down on your serving dish. To make look like mice, cut 2 toothpicks in half for whiskers, arrange 1 olive slice with pimento as the eyes and ears. The original recipe suggested placing an olive slice as the tail and then use chocolate sprinkles as droppings. While cute, I didn't have enough room for the tails and most of my friends know that I truly dislike chocolate, and I thought the mice were cute enough as it.

Eye of Newt (sweet and spicy): Tony Packo's has the BEST pickles ever! The only problem is that they are based out of Ohio and I have to order them online, but it is totally worth it. Start out by dicing sweet and spicy pickles and placing a couple into each of the spaces the yolk occupied. Now, add 1 tsp Tobasco, 1 tsp of Sriracha and enough blue or green food coloring to give the filling a greenish tint. Spoon into eggs, you can overfill. Next place a black olive slice on top of the yolk mixture. Fill the center of the olive with white horseradish. Next, mix a little red food coloring with horseradish sauce and paint jagged lines on the eye whites.

Enjoy!
Sarah Ferstel
Oh, dearest readers!

I'm so sorry for the long delay between posts. Hopefully, your lives have been filled with other frivolities and you have not been made desperate by the dearth of posts on this blog.

/apologies and beseeching for forgiveness

Here's what I've been up to while away from the blog.

1) For Kate and Dimitri's wedding, I baked about 120 cupcakes (see picture at left). All my practice sessions this summer really paid off and the lemon and devil's food cupcakes were a hit. I had a little help from some of the wedding guests, but, all in all, I spent about 8 hours baking and frosting these tiny, cakey, cup-sized, bits of joy.


Most importantly, the bride and groom loved them.

PS- check out their wedding buffet! It was beautiful and delicious.



2) I made an awesome mushroom, caramelized shallots, and fontina cheese quiche, but I won't go into details since Shelly already posted about quiche.


3) For Ilya's birthday, I made a fig jam crostata. It's super simple to make. Take a pie crust, either store bought or homemade, put in the pie pan. Mix 1 and half cups of fig jam with tsp of almond extract and two teaspoons of lemon zest. Pour into pie crust. Then top it off with another pie crust (or cut up the second pie crust into strips and criss-cross them). Bake for 45-50 minutes at 350. It's super easy.

Here's a link to a more complicated (and more authentic?) recipe for Italian fig crostata.

By the way, you can use whatever jam you like and some people may even like to mix different jams together. Experiment! Have fun! Mangia!

4) Also for Ilya's birthday, I made homemade pasta. Kate's mother sold me this beautiful pasta machine. I love it so much, and it's not as scary to use as it looks.

Here's my beautiful machine. Her name is Pastalina and she's the prettiest pasta maker in all of pasta-dom!


Sooooooo shiny! Don't get too mesmerized by her beauty. She's mine, all mine.

I'll tell y'all all about making pasta from scratch when I can cajole someone into taking pictures while I make it. My hands get way too messy to take pictures myself.

5) Coming up this weekend, I'm going to make Halloween cupcakes (Hi, my name is Sarah and I'm addicting to making cupcakes). Look out for pictures of those too.

Hopefully, my fellow bloggers will post soon too. Hint, hint, hint...