which_chick | (no subject)

Soup done, bagged, ready to be put in cooler tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, while I was cooking the soup, I could not find the garlic press. I'm not sure where it is. It might be in the wrong drawer or something. Because I was in the middle of cooking, I went ahead and minced the garlic fine on the theory that this would be good enough and then I could get on with the serious business of assembling the soup.

I was wrong.

When one is making a smooth and creamy squash soup, the fact that the garlic has been minced instead of pressed will be obvious. This is particularly the case when the squash (butternut) has been baked, carefully peeled and deveined (peel and devein after baking b/c baking peeled squash makes it all hard and stuff. Yield is higher if you bake unpeeled squash and then peel it after baking. You can get bonus martyr points for doing that while it's still hot enough to burn your fingers, too. Boiling or simmering the squash in water stops the hardening problem but also leaches out flavor and doesn't dry the squash out to concentrate the flavor. Therefore, wet cooking the squash runs a poor second to baking that shit.), run through a thrice damned food mill, and generally babied along to be as velvety smooth and flavor rich as is humanly possible. Even the fact that one is using spectacularly rich home-made chicken stock cannot disguise the fact that one's uninspired and lackadasical garlic mincing effort stands out against the velvety smooth and gorgeous texture of the butternut squash like turds in a swimming pool.

I SUCK. Next time, I promise I will hunt up the fucking garlic press. (For real, the soup tastes fine, actually better than fine. Overall, it is a fantastic soup the execution of which r0xx0r for its ease and speed. I just should have pressed the fucking garlic.)

I'm also taking eclairs to the function, which I did not sign up to bring but, y'know, I have that ganache that I need to use up seeing as how it came out OK and all. So, I made eclairs again. (Anyone who is the slightest bit surprised to hear this, please stay after class for involuntary sterilization as you are clearly too stupid to breed.) This time, I made small, party-sized ones that are cute. They're a couple of bites each, three if you're being dainty, so not a bad size for finger foods. They're done baking and drying but haven't been frosted yet. I've got to do that yet tonight and I have some spare shells for testing my frosting technique so that I can not-suck at it. (I hope.) I'm frosting them here but will fill them with pastry cream (already made, cooling in fridge) on site b/c it's easier to chill just the filling en route than it is to chill the whole eclairs. Also, I cannot stand soggy eclairs... so no pre-filling. I'm going to bag the pastry cream in a ziplock and pipe it (in a ziplockish way) into the eclairs, so that'll be a minimal-mess affair. People besides me will have to eat the eclairs even though I didn't sign up to bring them. Please.