Dangerous recipes

[muckefuck]

Pursuant to a recipe post from bitterlawngnome:

Three Delicious Things I Will Never Make Again Without Proper Tools

1. Cold cherry soup Wonderful on a hot day. But do you really want to sit there in the heat for an hour pitting cherries with a paring knife and mashing the meats through a sieve with a wooden spoon while the sticky juice runs all up your arms? I didn't think so.
2. Khachapuri Everyone loves this Georgian cheese bread since the gooey-cheese-to-crust ratio is even higher than for baked brie. To get the gooey filling, however, you need to grate like a pound of Muenster, the most ungrateably semisoft cheese imaginable. Last time I did that using an old-fashioned grater instead of a new-fangled apparatus like a Cuisinart, there was a lot of me in the filling. Never again.
3. Key lime pie Hey! What could possibly be more fun that juicing twenty or thirty tiny little citrus fruits with about a teaspoon of juice in each and then grating the skinny, miniscule peels of, like, all of them to obtain maybe a tablespoon of zest? Finding out that your boyfriend threw out the half of the pie the two of you couldn't eat! [Note: Any wannabe Marthas out there pointing out that what we ate was not real key lime pie since key limes are extinct I will personally zest to death.]

Comments

[go-wade-in.livejournal.com]

i've heard an easier way to zest lemons is to use a peeler and then throw the peels into a food processor. i tried the technique myself and it works pretty well--as long as your food processor can finely chop to small pieces.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

You are the reason why I tell everyone to just buy a bottle of key lime juice.

I still coo over the cute tiny limes, though.

[twnchicago.livejournal.com]

1. One of the best gadgets I've purchased (albeit one of the least used) is a cherry/oliver pitter...

2. Stick the cheese in your freezer for about an hour before you grate it either by hand or in a food processor - don't leave it in long enough to freeze solid - frozen soft cheese is icky...

3. Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice. Use the zest from a regular lime - you'll never know the difference. And - if you don't already have one, get a microplane grater.

[aroraborealis.livejournal.com]

Key limes are extinct??

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

An exaggerration. But the so-called "key limes" that show up in the grocery store around this time of year are not real key limes:

Key limes were grown commercially in southern Florida and the Florida keys, until the 1926 hurricane wiped out the citrus groves. The growers replaced the Key Lime trees with Persian Lime trees because they are easier to grow, easier to pick because they have no thorns, and due to the much thicker skin, are easier and more economical to ship. There are still many Key Lime trees throughout the Florida Keys in backyards however, commercial production is only on a very small scale. Though they do seem to be making a slight comeback as a Florida crop in recent years. [Source: Chef James Ehler of Key West.]

ihnp

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

ijls "zest to death" :)

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

a *knife*? what are you, masochist? you pit them by thrusting your thumb into the top and extracting the seed with your fingers. 5 seconds max. but do it in a deep vessel.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

A stiff drinking straw works pretty well, too.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Surely there's got to be a better cheese? I've had khachapuri in both Tbilisi and LA, and both times they used kind of a bland, salty, farmer's cheese... maybe there's a Russian deli that does cheese like that? Think white, crumbly, and cheap...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Mmm...bland saltiness...salty blandness.

I can find crumbly farmer's cheese if I want, but I don't know that it will go over as well as my wildly inauthentic version.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Cook's Illustrated's 'suggestions from readers' section this month includes two different easy-to-make-at-home-and-cheap cherry-pitting methods: one involves a paperclip, and the other a board with three small nails hammered into it close together.

Cherry pitter

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

You need a cherry pitter! They only cost $5 or so.

Also, the Key West relatives say you can get the key lime juice in a bottle to make the pies; one of your other commenters has the details.