Tech/food/rant

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A little while ago a pretty revolutionary application showed up on the radar bigtime. Spotify became the meme of the season, promising streaming access to 95% of all music ever published. And their app was beautifully crafted, snappy and the best example I've ever seen of "everything goes to the cloud".. My two initial thoughts were.. 

Right. I felt an urge to make some scones today. But the though of making the same old ones I always do was not tempting. So I played around with a few taste combinations and came up with this rather intreresting taste paring. Now this not the final version at all, but a good start. Here is the recipe and instructions:

Ok. I'm not big at new years resolutions. In fact I think they are stupid. Life changes when you decide it to change (that's if you are in control of the change), habits break when you break them. The turn of the calendar has no significance on this. All this said, I will try to do one thing this year... update my blog more than once a season :) So, now I'll just have to go dig up my voice and motivation from wherever I hid it..

This is so not good. Just been on the phone with an idiot at Apple support. We got a Macbook Air that was DOA on friday after waiting four weeks for the machine to arrive. Now here's the thing. Since I ordered it four weeks ago (apparently the so called "sales date") they can't declare it a DOA even though I just got it on friday. Nothing they can do, he says. Now, my pointing him out the lack of any logic in this way of thinking just made him hang up on me. I order Apple products for 100's of thousands a year. If you don't want my business I'll take it elsewhere.

Today I'm going to revisit a great type of meat: Tenderloin of Icelandic foal. This meat is absolutely one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and I've used it only once before, when competing in the Nordic Amateur Championship this winter. I've got the meat ready for an eight hour sous-vide now and I'll finish it off on the barbecue or in a grill-pan if the weather stays crappy. Today I'll serve it old-school with perfect fries, seared tomatoes and a emulsified sauce.

Icelandic horse

I stumbled upon great quality onion-eyed grenadier (Isgalt in Norwegian) when shopping yesterday. I've not worked a lot with this fish before so I promptly bough a kilo or so. Back home I did not have sky high ambitions, but below are some pictures of my experiment. Turned out ok, not great. I think I'll sous-vide the fillets next time.. Furthermore the presentation needs to be a lot better. I'm thinking of cutting the potato in half exposing the contrast between the salt wrinkled skin and the fluffy potato flesh. The sour-cream souse needs to be laid out differently. I'm going to try a new technique detailed by the great Chef Achatz enabling me to create a rectangular sheet of dressing laying it out over the fish and potato and when it melts it creates a perfect sheet over the fish and potato. Last, but not least the spring onion must be presented better, how I've not figured out yet.

Curry fried Onion-eye grenadier

Sushi-grade fillets of onion-eye greandier

Flash frying spring onions

Blanching spring onions

Rhubarb Soup

Rhubarb holds a special place in almost every Icelanders heart. It's one of the few things that grow in the cold and barren climate and for me rhubarb is a great childhood memory. Much to my joy I discovered great quality spring rhubarb at the shop yesterday. I picked up a bunch without giving much thought to what to do with them. The last couple of days have been very hot here in Oslo so today I decided that a cold, sweet rhubarb soup would be nice in the heat. To make it a bit more interesting I made a quick panna cotta to go with and. After boiling the soup I was left with quite a bit of pulp that I could not get myself to throw away. So I added a final twist to the soup... I used my immersion blender to break up the fibers and then I sweetened the pulp ever so slightly before I carbonated it. The result - Cold Rhubarb soup with Panna Cotta and carbonated Rhubarb pulp... very nice and the carbonated pulp added a bit of curiousness to the dish.

Spuma

Rhubarb Soup

1 kg rhubarb, washed and cut into 1 cm bits

220 g sugar

2 vanilla pods, halved and seeds scraped out

1 cinnamon stick

1 liter water

Add everything to a pot and boil gently for 15-20 minutes. Sieve off the liquid, save the pulp. Chill the soup in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Panna Cotta

5 dl double cream

2-3 sheets of gelatin

1 vanilla pod, halved and seeds scraped out

100g sugar

1. Bloom the gelatin sheets in some old water for a few minutes

2. Bring 1 dl of the cream to a boil in a pan together with the sugar and vanilla (also the scraped out pod)

3. Discard the vanilla pod, take the pan off the heat and stir in the bloomed gelatin

4. Add the rest of the cream

5. Divide into four cups and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours

Carbonated Rhubarb pulp

Discard the vanilla and cinnamon stick. Use an immersion blender to break down all fibers in the pulp. Add a couple of teaspoons of sugar and blend a bit more. Put the pulp in a spuma and load with a couple CO2 cartridges. Shake the spuma a few times. Chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Rhubarb soup with Panna Cotta

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