Experimenting with My New Blendtec Blender, Initial Trials!

So I bought myself a Blendtec blender for my birthday - it's in competition with Vitamix (which is the one we've been using in class).  Blendtec tries to market itself more for the home consumer - they have a lot of preset recipes like soups, sauces, smoothies, ice creams, etc that you can choose from and it's one button processing (the blender alters speed and duration based on what you choose).  There's also a pulse button and adjustable speeds so you can manually blend something.  Lastly, the Blendtec comes with a recipe book.

I started out trying out one of their recipes - strawberry ice cream.  The recipe seemed simple enough - frozen strawberries, condensed milk, half and half, and a bit of lemon juice (the only thing I had on hand was the lemon juice).  I saw that fresh strawberries were on sale so I bought that, instead of half and half I bought heavy cream (thinking I would make mousse again later on).  So I cut the strawberries and threw them in the freezer, but I don't think I let them freeze long enough - I also used heavy cream instead of half and half, so the consistency was off.  Final result, not a success, but not a complete failure - taste wise it turned out good, but when I first blended it, it was more of a soup than an ice cream (I had to refreeze it again).  Here's a pic - I plated it with some sliced strawberries and a brunoise of strawberries on top: 

Next up - gazpacho.  There was a recipe for this as well, but I again ad libbed a bit.  I had tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bell pepper, garlic, and jalapenos.  I cut everything into pieces and threw it in the blender - one big mistake is that I totally underestimated the jalapeno.  I didn't take out the seeds prior to adding it to the blender, so it was really spicy.  When I tasted it, the consistency and spice level reminded me so much of salsa verde that I decided to convert it to salsa - I added lemon juice, diced some onions, and added tomatoes.  Pictured here is the gazpacho in soup form:

Now that I had this salsa, I decided to make some tacos.  I bought some pork which I seared and took off the pot - I then made my sauce:  onions, garlic, fire roasted tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, oregano, chipotle peppers, mushrooms, beef stock, and dark chocolate.  After I simmered it for a bit, I threw everything in the blender and pureed it - I then added the pork I seared back in the pot along with some of this sauce - it turned out awesome.  Here it is plated with black beans, red onion, olives, cilantro, and a slice of lime:

Lastly, I made a cream of cauliflower soup - it's very similar to what we did in class but I sorta winged it (I didn't look up our recipe).  Mine was cauliflower, onions, water, heavy cream, and salt.  I took the cauliflower and cut some of the florets - I put oil and salt on these and roasted them in the oven to use as a garnish.  For the soup, I added onions and cauliflower to a pot, and then adding some water to boil it.  Once it was cooked, I put it in the blender with the heavy cream and pureed it.  

This turned out really delicious - the soup tasted like the essence of cauliflower and the oven roasted garnish added a nice salty crunch component - a bit on the dark side, but I like charred cauliflower:

So the blender trials started a bit rocky with the ice cream and gazpacho, but I am really happy with the tacos and soup (especially the soup, that was so good).

Oh and one last thing, here's a bonus pic of my cat looking totally surprised when I first used the blender (it's really loud):

Application of Specialty Cresses II - Broiled Rib Eye with Chimichurri Sauce!

In an effort to use more of the specialty cresses, I decided to do a chimichurri sauce to go with a broiled rib eye. I didn't have a recipe for the sauce, so this was by trial and error - I added ingredients and kept tasting until the sauce was good.  The chimichurri sauce contains the following:

mustard cress
basil limon cress
lemon juice
white wine vinegar
capers
shallots
cumin
crushed red pepper
salt and pepper
olive oil

I did a rough cut of all the ingredients and combined them together, then seasoned it to taste.  Here's the finished product:

The chimichurri sauce paired really nicely with the steak.  Presentation-wise, fanning this out was definitely the way to go.  After broiling, I let the rib eye rest for a bit so that the juices redistribute - then I sliced it, fanned it out on the plate, and spooned the the sauce on top.

In terms of criticism, the acidity from the chimichurri sauce overpowered some of the individual flavors of the mustard and basil limon cress - while the sauce was delicious, the individual flavors of the mustard and basil limon were not as pronounced (as opposed to the scallop ceviche, where the cress was used more as a garnish).

All in all, I would still consider this a very successful dish - this was the first time I plated sliced steak, and I'm very happy with how the dish looks and tastes.

Application of Specialty Cresses - Scallop Ceviche and Squid Ink Tagliattele with Uni!

After getting all the specialty cresses I had to figure out some dishes to feature them.  There was a lot of mustard cress so that was my first challenge.

I was trying to find flavors that would complement mustard but the only thing I could think of was honey.  Then I thought the mustard cress would look very pretty as a garnish for ceviche, and decided to go with scallops.  I wanted to reinforce the mustard cress with whole grain mustard, which would also look very appealing on the plate.

Scallop Ceviche - scallops, whole grain mustard, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, lemon zest, and mustard cress.  This came out awesome, one of my favorite dishes that I've ever made.  I think it photo'ed well and tasted great, I'm very proud of this.

So I've been obsessed with squid ink and sea urchin for a while now - it all started with my birthday meal at Marea, where I tasted their spaghetti with sea urchin, one of the best plates of food that I've ever had.  Ever since then, I've been obsessed with non-sushi applications of sea urchin.  Later on, I had a squid ink risotto with snails and octopus at Traif, my favorite restaurant in NY.

I had some shiso cress and thought it would be great to pair that with uni since shiso is often used with sushi.  But I decided to go with pasta because of my meal at Roberta's, which featured an amazing squid ink tagliattele with mussels and sea urchin.  In addition, I had the Trofie Nero at Ai Fiori, (ligurian crustacean ragu, seppia, scallops, spiced mollica, you can read the review here), which was also delicious.  What resulted is an amalgam of the dishes at Roberta's and Ai Fiori.

Squid ink tagliatelle with calamari, shrimp, tomatoes, shallots, garlic, and crushed red pepper flakes, topped with sea urchin and shiso cress.  All the flavors worked perfectly together - in addition, this is the first time I cooked calamari, and it turned out well.  This was a very delicious plate, I'm very happy with how this turned out.