Thursday 13 June 2013

Gratin, Gruyere And The Glutenite

seafood gratin
Before Cheese Was Added
As you will now know, this isn't a recipe post which can only mean one thing; something didn't go right. It was by no means a disaster but it wasn't good enough to share, not at this stage anyway.

It started off badly, the kitchen was a mess and I didn't have enough time to tidy. I have this thing where 8pm is my cut off point for eating, even if I've missed lunch no matter how hungry I am as 8pm rolls round I can't eat anymore. My stomach just goes Nope. I don't like to eat late but sometimes it's unavoidable and that just makes it awkward. Avoiding clocks doesn't help either. So that's why I didn't have time to make the kitchen more manageable to cook in.

I took a shortcut that I shouldn't have too, instead of making a roux to start the sauce I cut a big corner and added corn starch and wine to thicken at the end. The sauce was a little grainy for my liking. Nice but not as I wanted it.

With so little space in the kitchen as 7pm arrived, making the breadcrumbs, part cooking the seafood and making the sauce was not easy so my knight in shining armour The Glutenite came to my rescue with the offer of help. I gladly put him on Cheese cutting duty (I wanted it grated but that was somewhere in a huge sink of washing up - a domestic goddess I am not) and he set about dicing up the Gruyere for me.

It was only once the Gratin was ready to come out of the oven that I noticed that some of the Cheese hadn't melted. How odd? The rest had.

When I took it out of the oven all became apparent.

gratin gone bad
Big Mess
"Did you cut the edges off of the cheese?"

To which came the reply something like "I scraped them off"

Quite clearly, the bits of cheese that hadn't melted weren't cheese, they were rind.

I wasn't happy with my sauce but knew where I went wrong so I could have posted the recipe with the correct instructions using a roux, but how the hell could I post this as a recipe looking like that?!

Cheese rind aside it tasted good but I can do better in terms of flavour. I'm finding this one quite funny opposed to being annoyed about it because as much as I thought I had taught my Glutenite the ways of the kitchen, obviously I have not.

My home grown Parsley worked a treat in the breadcrumbs, not that you could taste it due to all the cheese but it looked good.

I'm not thwarted I'm aiming for a recipe post tomorrow. What on earth I'll end up with is anyone's guess.

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