The Soup Nazi's Crab Bisque

OK, lets start by forgetting about the recent unpleasantness, it didn't happen and any leftovers which there would have been had it happened, which it didn't, are definitely not in my freezer. What? Who said that? Lets move on.
So, what is the Soup Nazi's crab bisque? Ever heard of a little show called Seinfeld? No? Check out a very grainy low quality clip here,
the whole idea of the episode is that there is a guy who makes the best soup in the city, but he will only sell it to you under very specific conditions - people put up with it because the stuff is like crack, apparently... I wouldn't know. I'm not explaining it very well, but if you were as obsessed with this show as I am, and had as big a crush on George, and liked soup at all (which I don't), you would totally get why it was a big deal for me when my bro gave me a book for Christmas which had this recipe. It's a shady looking e-book, which he lovingly printed out and bound, called "Top Secret Famous Recipes". Not for everyone, most of the brands covered are American, so I have no idea what they are (does Yoo-Hoo Mix-Up sound tasty?), but at least I knew who the Soup Nazi was!!
So, first problem, this recipe seems to be written in some kind of gibberish. Here is the ingredients list, and next to it are my educated (?) guesses
4lb snow crab clusters - I got as far as figuring out that 4lb is 2kg, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that 'clusters' is some kind of cute pet name. I got 2 crabs
4qt water (16 cups) - I will never understand what 'cups' are. Tea cup? Espresso cup? Athletic cup? 4 quarts equals to 3.75 litres
1/3 cup tomato sauce - I love the vagueness here as well, Google tells me that 1/3 cup is half a pint, whatever. But what the hell is tomato sauce? Ketchup? Bloody Mary mix? I settled on passata
2T half and half - this is secret code, took me a while. I can just imagine being the hip grandma picking kids off from school and telling them about this hip hop crew I just had a listen of on the old radio. I finally decided to go with 2 tablespoons of semi-skimmed milk (but later found out that it was meant to be 12% cream !?!?!)
1/4 cup of unsalted butter - how do you measure a solid using a cup? Especially when you don't know how big a cup is!
The rest is thankfully pretty straightforward, ordinary, human measurements like 2 cloves of garlic.

The crab you use, I mean Clusters the Crab, is meant to be already cooked when you buy him (and take him home from the pet shop), you need the shells too to make the stock so there's no getting away with just getting a pot of crab meat. I went to a couple of supermarkets, and finally to the fishmonger and the sick bastard only had live ones! Obviously you want fresh produce, but after my little test of faith last time I was having a little trouble thinking about, um... being the one to dispatch them. They weren't moving very much from from having frozen their asses off on a pile of ice all day, but the beedy little eyes were right there!
I named them Sunday and Bacardi (there's totally a cool story behind that) which I absolutely shouldn't have done, because by the time I got them home I realised that I wanted nothing to do with them. It's like when you're at school and you spread a rumour behind someone's back and then you feel really bad, and really don't want them to find out that it was you. Only with murder. I had to get a friend, big tall guy with muscles, to take them out of the bag, wait around while I took the picture, put them in the freezer for 5 minutes to 'fall asleep naturally', and then plop them in the boiling water and close the lid. Phew, what a wimp I am! Once you stare your meal in the eye and try to rationalise why it's ok to kill it just because you want to eat it, it's not so trivial. On the other had if I didn't have any other options, like pizza in the fridge, maybe I wouldn't care so much. Now I get why the Soup Nazi always had such an attitude.
Great, now we can get started proper, I murdered the crabs in the water I was going to use later, to enrich the stock, then you boil the shells with onion anf garlic for an hour, strain, boil for 4 MORE HOURS! add the crab meat and reduce for another hour. That's six hours, in case you can't count, not to count the other hour it took to get the pitiful, pathetic amount of meat out of the fricking crabs, oh and Bacardi was pregnant :(
My brother kept walking around the kitchen, looking into the pot and lamenting that it was all boiling away, which it totally was! In all the liquid must have reduced by about two thirds, and took on a very satisfying golden brown colour.
Result: Ugly picture, amazing soup. So deep, salty, herby and rich. There are 2 teaspoons of mustard seeds in this, and you can really taste the heat, as well as the flavour of the five other herbs that are in this. The crab is incomprable to any of the thin, tinny crap you get in a restaurant, it's amazingly fresh despite the long simmering. Worth it.

Coeur de Boeuf en Matelote

Look, I'm trying to broaden my horizons, right? And if it makes the boyfriend throw up a little in his mouth, then that's the price I'm willing to pay!
OK, I'll be honest, I was a little grossed out as well as I walked away from the butchers' with a bag that looked like it contained a human head, I'm not sure why, but I thought that a cow's heart would be a lot smaller...
Anyone still reading?
I've had lamb's heart before, I love the iron rich taste and the thick chewy texture. Calm down, breathe, and keep telling yourself that.
This recipe is very simple, you just leave the heart to slow cook in a pan for 2 hours and then cut into slices, reduce the sauce a little, and serve with croutons. The recipe actually calls for 2 hearts, but they must be cracked. First, I don't have a dish big enough for that kind of crazy good time, and second, this fricking thing cost the same as a real piece of meat would have. By that I mean like a free range chicken or a loin of pork or something that I wouldn't have to spend the next week eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner by myself. I'm not a fricking millionaire!
So, I gently fry the onions in the beautiful baby blue Le Creuset casserole that the boyfriend gave me for Christmas (it's a sign of how much he knows and loves me. I gave him clothes, that's a sign that I think he dresses really bad. Duh). The here's a picture of the big ugly heart filling up the entire pot while I brown it. There's a sinister stab wound on one side, maybe this cow was murdered! Don't look at too much though because it actually looks pretty vulgar. Don't say what you're thinking, perverts!
I pour in the beef stock and wine, which comes about a third of the way up the heart, and close the lid. The book doesn't tell you that you're meant to turn the heart over in this pool of brown liquid, but I'm going to take that as a given, since the last thing I want is to undercook the bastard!
Result: OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I was really hungover when making this. The following comments are not necessarily very complimentary of what is a passable dish, you might be thinking, why did you even make this, if you find it so repulsive? And my only excuse is that I was feeling a little delicate. I mean, one minute I was feeling fine, over at my friend's house, living it up with a few glasses of Cava, then trying to sleep on her couch which is the size of a coffee table, and the next morning I was afflicted with a mysterious illness... I kept getting waves of nausea every time I lifted the lid and the smell hit me. They boyfriend was milling around making unhelpful comments like 'You know the butcher was laughing at you, right? If you hadn't have bought it, it would have ended up in the dog food factory. That's what this dish you're making is, pet food. Not people food. Aren't you cute? I hope you know I'm not eating it'. And I almost lost it when I finally had to slice it and it turned out to be 'crunchy' on the inside! The walls were thick and meaty, I tried a little piece and it tasted just like overcooked steak - might be nice in a sandwich, but once you get to the middle, the bloody offal smell intensifies and it gets a little creepy. The only way I can try and describe it is that it feels a little like what I assume men experience when they see some guy on tv getting kicked in the balls. They cringe and instinctively try and protect that area. Well my hands started shaking a little and I imagined somebody slicing and dicing up my own heart. I finished the gruesome job - God, I would be the worst serial killer ever - plopped the little pieces back in the sauce, and was really thankfull when I could turn off the heat and forget about it completely for the rest of the night. My appetite didn't exactly return on the following morning. I went down the stairs fully intent on making up a little lunch box to take to work, but the sight of the gray meat, surrounded now by globs of yellow fat that had hardened overnight sent me reeling and I ran out of the door with a piece of toast instead.
I'm determined to see this through though. Forget about the social commentary on the origins of meat and all the PETA protestations that animals are our friends, when did I become so squeamish? If it's the last thing I ever do, I will prove the boyfriend wrong. Maybe.

Splendida Torta Maria

Dad and wifey are going on a trip for a week and a half!
I'm going to ignore the obvious feelings of inadequacy regarding the fact that it's pretty pathetic to still live at home deep into your mid-twenties and enjoy this for what it is - a chance to pretend that this is my house and I have my life together and best of all an uninterrupted Valentines Day weekend at the end!!! This is 'Thank You' cake.
I've cooked for the Silver Spoon once already (and amazing roast beef with chesnuts, mmmmm so good) but didn't feel like writing about it, so this is inauguration proper. I'm also quite tempted to write stuff in the margins a la Elizabeth David, and to try everything in the book a la Julie Powell.
Anyway, here's the stuff, I had to go to three different supermarkets to find blanched almonds. WTF? Unblanched almonds? - yes, plentiful; ground almonds? - of course, as many as you want; toasted, slivered almonds? - why wouldn't they be there! (how do you dig my funky grammar, by the way?) I finally found these pathetic little bags stuffed into a corner behind some dates.
The reason I chose this cake is because of the relatively short ingredients list and the fact that it doesn't have any flour (also, I'm determined to use up that bag of potato flour I bought for the kissel. One teaspoon at a time if need be). I'm not coeliac but I assume that this would make for a very light cake (light in texture, try not to look at the entire stick of butter going in).
So first thing first, the short list of ingredients is a joke. Even if you ignore the enormous quantities of everything, there's no getting away from how labor intensive the process it. The almonds are toasted in a frying pan, cooled, and chopped up. The food processor has packed up so I'm doing this, rather romantically, by had. Blah blah blah, long story short, it took a really long time. I could have just found toasted, chopped almonds in the shops, I guess, but there is no getting away from whipping all the eggs individually - the whites to soft peaks, and yolks with sugar. Eventually the butter gets incorporated into the yolks, bit by tiny, agonising bit. Then melted chocolate, nuts and egg whites are mixed in, and the bastard creation goes in the oven.
Result: Urgh, look at this thing. I dusted it with icing sugar but that only accentuated the cracks. Nevermind, right? The proof of the pudding is in the eating? This 'cake' is not a cake at all, it's a house brick. Marie Antoinette might have suggested it as a building material.
The ridiculous amount of sugar doesn't cut through the bitterness of the dark chocolate, it's somehow dense, heavy and very dry at the same time, the shards of almond lie in wait to stab you in the mouth. Not good. Some four letter words are going in the margins. Bad cake. But maybe that's just me, because the next day when I had come home from work, the whole thing had been eaten!