Quarter Life Crisis

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Three courses

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Fun three course meal for the Saturday: We started with another serving of the fish with buttery grapes that I first tried recently. This time I had bought some Seeteufel (sea-devil / monkfish ?) for it which just has a superfantastisch texture and stays in really good shape when being fried. In fact, the whole dish came out even better this time than previously. I seem to be getting the hang of cooking it.

Seeteufel before frying

Rice and fish and grapes served on a plate

After that lovely starter we had some lovely quiche as a main course. Quiche with goat’s cheese, which has a wonderful taste. The strange thing about quiche is that you see it coming out of the oven and think ‘uh this is small, it’s never going to be enough for all of us’. But well before you are through your first slice you start feeling rather well-filled because it’s much richer than it looks.

Quiche, served

While less filling and fulfilling, the dessert was the pièce the résistance if you wish. After indulging in cotton candy recently, looking how it is actually made (melt sugar and quickly spin it) and wondering whether you could make it at home, I happened to run across cotton candy making machines being sold at a real price.

Cotton candy machine

The machine has a rotating container in the middle which is heated by a halogen lamp below it. All you need to do is drop some sugar in the middle which will melt after a while and then drift outwards as candy floss. You’ll just need a wooden pin (chopsticks turned out to be too smooth and the candy wouldn’t properly stick to it) which you swipe around the cotton candy to pick it up.

Cotton candy coming out of the machine

It turned out that doing this isn’t entirely trivial as being too slow or going the wrong way round will make things collapse, touch the hot parts of the machine and end you up with a burned caramelised mess. But after a few attempts and a bit of a mess you start figuring out how to do it properly and you’ll end up with with reasonable cotton candy. Not as large as at the funfare because the machine is smaller, but still a lot of fun if you’re easily amused.

Freshly made cotton candy

Wondering whether this would also work with brown sugar and whether other substances could be suitable for the ‘melt and rotate’ treatment (I’d guess that some of those molecular chefs must have tried similar things).

December 16, 2007, 13:17

Tagged as food.

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