Blog

(Part 2)

We’d gotten back, and we had ingredients. A LOT of ingredients.

Job #1 for Alex was to brine the chicken, a task basically consisting of making some salt water, then putting the chicken thighs in it. What could go wrong?

kamikazecookery http://twitpic.com/6hkvb – As Alex put it, “It’s an Archimedean problem. Chicken go in, water go out.”

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008363342

Meanwhile, all I had to do was heat some cream and mix some sugar in. Of course, Thomas Keller lists all ingredients in cups, which those of us in the Old World don’t use, but a bit of ingenuity plus a hundred-million-dollar emergent artificial intelligence solved that problem.

At the same time, I realised that I’d been cooking on induction for so long that the concept of using actual flames in cooking gave me the Fear.

But my colleagues coaxed me out from under the sink, persuaded me to stop gibbering about the blue dancing burning fairies, and I got to work – until I hit an unusual snag with live-on-the-Internet cookery.

I was so busy Twittering I forgot about the cream, and it boiled over.

Leap, grab, cool. Aargh, aargh, aargh. But I seemed to have saved it – provided I could whisk the cream and get it into the mixture, fast.

I turned around to our host, Phil, and asked where the whisk was. He, to my abiding horror, pointed me to a hand whisk.

Toy game soldiers of to that nuts. It was time to unleash… our secret weapon.

Some say that he can maintain a 58 degree water bath – with the power of his mind. All we know is…

The cream was perfectly whipped – of course. We listened for the sound of the Not-Stig roaring away on his way to another cooking emergency, then mixed in the whipped cream, and poured the result into hemispherical moulds. well, the closest to hemispherical we had, which turned out to be cute little frog moulds. Less yoghurt Charlottes, more yoghurt McCartneys.