alexist

today was one of those days where I could have quite easily just slept. I made myself get up at 09:30, though, and went supermarket shopping. I had the most obnoxious woman bagging my groceries. She spent the whole time complaining about the heat (I was at a checkout near the door) and how she needed to be in the air conditioning yada yada yada. I was tempted to just say "I'd rather not have help bagging than have to listen to you complain", but I didn't. She left just before I was done, and I was tempted to ask the cashier for her name so I could go to customer service and complain, but I didn't (sheer laziness).

Got home, half unpacked, ate my sandwich (most of it), and had a nap for an hour. At 13:30 I made myself get up and finish unpacking and start dinner (spaghetti and meatballs). I ended up making a stupidly large quantity of sauce--even after dinner it's filling up a 5 quart Tupperware. I was slightly annoyed though--Mom came in and offered to do the meatballs, and I forgot to sieve the sauce first (I like to put half the sauce through a food mill, so it's slightly smoother but still has texture).

Also made panna cotta and raspberry sauce. The panna cotta came out well, though a little rich. I can get 2 types of cream. One is standard supermarket ultrapasteurized heavy cream, the kind that has stabilizers added so it will whip. It's all right for cooking, but tends to taste boiled on its own. The other kind is (expensive) organic Jersey cream, which is very thick and rich and yellowish. I used the latter, because panna cotta is very dependent on the quality of the cream (it's just cream, sugar and flavorings [in this case vanilla] set with gelatine). It was lush and creamy, almost like it had been set with egg. Good, but a little too much, if you know what I mean. It definitely needed the raspberry to cut through the richness.

The raspberry sauce is another matter. Raspberry sauce is one of those things that's a pain to do, not because it's particularly exacting but because it's messy. Raspberries have lots of tiny little seeds, and if you don't sieve them out the texture's not right. (Strawberries are all right just puréed, but raspberries aren't.) Because the seeds are so tiny, and cling to the flesh, you can't just put them through a food mill--they'll pass even through the smallest disc. When I've done it before, I've rubbed them through a fine sieve. It works, but it takes a long time and makes a gigantic mess. So I decided to try the strainer attachment to my mixer, which I'd never used before (I got the attachment pack, with grinder, shredder/slicer, and strainer.) I could only find one of the cones, and I couldn't tell if it was the coarse or the fine. Plus, it was one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions with a dozen parts that took 10 minutes to put together (and I'm a veteran of IKEA flat-pack furniture!) So I used it anyway... and the seeds passed through. Grr. It wasn't for company, so it wasn't a dinner party disaster (I can deal with seeds) but still, annoying. (And I'd like to know where the other cone is anyway!)