What's Flay Got That I Don't ... OK, Nevermind

I made another attempt to become Bobby Flay last weekend.

On the menu was blue corn encrusted crab cakes with mango-pepper salsa and roasted red pepper sauce. For dessert was chocolate cakes with molten dulce de leche center.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really a matter of following each step one at a time, for 468 steps. For instance, the red pepper sauce requires roasting peppers, peeling them, blending them and a bunch of other ingredients in a blender, emulsifying the result with some oil and straining the mixture to produce the sauce. Sure it sounds complicated, but it’s only cooking, not brewing a polyjuice potion.

The meal was tasty, but time consuming. Luckily most of the heavy lifting could be done in advance, simplifying the cooking process, but straining our Tupperware supply.

Plus, the dessert, the piece de resistance, didn’t come out right. The taste was correct, but the dulce de leche didn’t ooze. Normally, one doesn’t want one’s food to ooze. Oozing usually signals that your food hasn’t cooked long enough and is likely to run off before you can stab it again. But in this case oozing caramel is the point of the dish. Otherwise it’s a brownie sundae.

The Doctor is convinced it’s because I used the low fat coconut milk. I was standing in the store, and on the shelf there were two cans. One can of regular coconut milk and one can of low fat coconut milk. The regular coconut milk had over 75% of the RDA of saturated fat per serving. I stupidly went with the low fat option, trying to save a few calories. Since I was ultimately reducing the coconut milk anyway, I couldn’t imagine it would make a difference.

It did. The Doctor still doesn’t confuse me with Bobby Flay. I’ll try again soon.