[Sca-cooks] OT/OOP Exercises in Surrealism, Holiday Edition

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Nov 26 06:42:18 PST 2009


Hullo, the list! A happy Thanksgiving to you all for those who are celebrating in an official sense today, and for everybody else, all the joy of the season (and all seasons, for that matter...).

So in my usual sleep-deprived semi-mania, here I am, musing on the mild cases of foodie <oneupmansh...ahem> enthusiasm I've encountered, and got to thinking about some of the things we eat because they're good, the things we eat because they're traditional but really don't necessarily like very much, but still find them filling some emotional void in the soul...

After a while, it occurred to me to ask myself what would be the ideal Thanksgiving dinner. The question then morphed into, what is every foodie's dream (possibly pipe dream, or otherwise unrealistic)?

I decided that just for the comic value, I wanted a Thanksgiving dinner, with all the trimmings, prepared by Ferran Adria, the Spanish sensation chef and former neurosurgeon known for introducing the tools of the laboratory and the hospital into the kitchen, strange sensations and textures, some even stranger ingredients.

Which brings me to our game.

The challenge is to invent a dish for Ferran Adria's Thanksgiving table. I will kick it off with cranberry sauce.

Fresh Cape Cod cranberries (exactly 27% white cranberries 73% red) are distilled for their essential oils and used to flavor rare aged berry aquavit to which sodium alginate has been added. Small globs of this mixture  are introduced by guys in white lab coats (or possibly hazmat suits?) into centrifuge vials of calcium chloride solution and spun, resulting in perfect zero-gravity gelled spheres of concentrated cranberry flavor that taste a hundred times more like a cranberry than any cranberry ever seen on the planet*... serve in a festive Petrie dish...

Now it's your turn. How do you think he'd tackle pumpkin pie? I was going to say something about genetically engineering a turkey, but it's too early in the morning for that.

Happy holiday, everybody!

Adamantius

*Adria actually did this with green Spanish olives at El Bulli






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter




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