apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The most complex recipe I've attempted is sticky-rice stuffed duck. My mom makes it at Christmas and Thanksgiving, though in a turkey. I scaled it down for a Chinese New Year celebration.

The complexity lay in the variety of ingredients I didn't already have, the overnight soaking required to rehydrate many of them and then prepping the night before for what was a Friday night dinner.

Thankfully, it went well and was a big hit, though nobody knew that the unstuffed duck slipped off the chopping board and onto the floor during carving...shh!

Julia Child's version of cassoulet for New Year's. It took all day to prepare and cook.

boeuf bourguignon - http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_13758,00.html

an all-day affair (with marinating the night before) but so worth it in the end.

I made a not-quite-authentic Toulouse cassoulet. I'm glad I made a large batch, because (a) it was tasty, but more importantly (b) it took two days and a lot of pots 'n stuff. I would make it again, but not in the near future!

My husband is Korean (I'm Swedish American) so the most complicated dishes I've made are kimbab (Korean sushi-style rice rolls) and chap jae (potato noodles with various veggies, egg and beef). There are so many ingredients, with each getting it's own prep work. But my husband and his brother do agree that they taste just like his mom's!

Some of my baked goods have gotten pretty elaborate, but usually I justify the effort with a good cause (usually someone I love combined with a particularly special milestone) and a particularly delicious-sounding bunch of flavors. I try to cut out a bit of the work (so that later when I'm exhausted I can thank myself at least for what I didn't have to do) by making some easy substitutions or most helpfully adding an extra pair of hands to the process. Beyond the extra help, cooking with a partner makes the work go by much more easily.

Not too over-the-top complicated, but a lot more complex than my standard 3-ingredient short ribs recipe was Suzanne Goin's recipe for braised short ribs. The night I had them I didn't think they were worth all the trouble and the cost, but the next day they were even better and I think, worth it. It helps to get some distance from the cooking--the mess of it and all the dirty dishes.

It's a tie between involtini (Americans would call it braciola) and beef wellington (individual-sized ones). For the time spent, the involtini/braciola was way more worth it.

Oh my god... a few years ago, I made mini artichoke quiches and the experience was brutal and crazy-expensive in the end. I bought special tartlet baking sheets and way more pricey cheese than I needed. I hadn't made pie crust from scratch in AGES, so you can guess how that part went. And I'd never made quiche of any variety before. And of course I'd invited people over for dinner.

The food was okay in the end, but, for obvious reasons, I've never tried to repeat that meal. I still have those bloody baking sheets, though, possibly to serve as either a trophy or a humbling reminder of my own cooking-related hubris.

Brioche tops my list.

The most complicated dish I have ever made (and I have done it several times) is the mole Poblano from Rick Bayless' first cookbook, Authentic Mexican. It calls for 26 ingredients, and has numerous steps of toasting, frying, reconstituting, pureeing, frying again, pureeing again, frying, frying and frying, etc. of several varieties of chiles, nuts, broths and spices. Fortunately, it makes a good amount, so I can it for future occasions.

I'm almost out, so I'll probably make another batch this summer. Frying chiles is best done outdoors. See: The Great Chile Frying Incident of 1999 when the fire department showed up at my door after the smoke alarm (connected to the Firehouse) went off, and they had to put enormous fans in several windows to clear the smoke. In January. In Chicago.

Is it worth it? Absolutely!

My "biggest production" turned out to be not nearly as hard as I feared, but it had major WOW factor. It was a timbale: http://verbatim.blogs.com/verbatim/2006/03/big_night.html

I'd forgotten mole until I saw Peggasus' mention. All the other recipes I can think of, like coq au vin, danish from scratch, decorated wedding cakes, and strudel with it's careful pulled dough, were mostly just time consuming. And, as Peggasus also said, the results were definitely worth it!

Heston Blumenthal's Spaghetti Bolognese. The cooking took about 8 hours and the prep took another 8 hours over two days. Fortunately, it made a lot of sauce that could be easily frozen. And it was really good!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6530258

Pretty much all my dinner parties featuring Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques recipes. And yes, I think they were all worth it. Most are on my blog:
http://katek.wordpress.com/?s=lucques&searchbutton=Go%21
It's definitely a commitment, especially if you do a full three Goin courses, but I've been so proud of the results; it all looked and tasted like really top notch restaurant food, and the complex processes taught me a lot about cooking and food, too.

I made Ina Garten's Chicken with Morels and the dish cost about $60 (for four people) to make plus a lot of hours coordinating it and fretting I would ruin it (after spending so much money). Although delicious, it wasn't worth the expense, monetary or emotional.

A braised artichoke concoction that required a lot of raw artichoke prep. Really, it's not THAT complicated, but I made it on a weeknight about 2 weeks after I went back to work fulltime post-maternity leave. In my exhausted state, I absolutely should not have gone anywhere near an artichoke. Sharp knife plus sharp vegetable plus tired, cranky cook? Bad. It was awesomely delicious, but I haven't tried it since. Now that it's artichoke season, maybe I should rest up and try again!

I made salt crusted whole trout for a dinner party last summer. You know, when you bake a fish stuffed with citrus fruits and herbs in what looks like an igloo of salt mixed with merengue. The biggest challenge, I thought, was to make sure that the fish didn't come out salty. All of the recipes and blogs I read stressed that salt baking is all in the technique.

Anyway, I got it in my head to use the best local fish I could find, so I went down to the farmers market early Saturday morning and bought a beautiful whole trout that was caught the night before. BUT, it wasn't cleaned. I lugged that fish around in a plastic bag full of ice on the subway from the financial district to Harlem and stopped at 4 different grocery stores along the way to beg the fish mongers to clean it for me. No dice. I finally had to tackle the beast myself in my bathtub in a makeshift HasMat suite (garbage bag dress, shower cap and rubber gloves). By the end of the ordeal there was blood, guts and scales all over the walls and I was in tears.

I stuffed the thing and made the salt bake mixture and cooked all of the much simpler side dishes before the guests arrived. And, here's the kicker...the damn thing came out salty! I'm sure it was all down to my novice cooking skills and frazzled mindset. But, I can say that I'll never attempt it again.

p.s. The meal was saved by the yummy chocolate cake my other half made for desert.

To Likey's p.s.--

I will remember that. If you're going to try something grand, make sure you've got dessert!

And booze. Booze helps soothe culinary disaster very nicely. OK, booze AND cake.

Those croissants look amazing! Where's the recipe for those?

I think a Valentine's Day dinner I made a couple of years ago takes the cake for most complicated. Making candied orange peels, macaroons and ganache for dessert... trimming and blanching and baking veggies and making a compound butter. Very daunting for me- especially because I was rather new to cooking at the time.

Probably the most difficult was the umpteen layer 2# butter, 18 separated egg two types of filling, swiss buttercream Martha Stewart birthday cake I've mentioned before. However, speaking of difficult recipes...has anyone ever made the croissants from the Tartine cookbook. It's a fabulous bakery in San Francisco. The recipe looks doable, but you would definitely need some time and few interruptions.

My sister and I made a Turducken (chicken inside a duck, inside a turkey, with wonderful cornbread sausage stuffing between each bird) for Thanksgivings. After deboning the turkey and duck we decided just to put chicken breast in the middle. Then it took 10 hours to cook. But it was totally worth it! Here are some pictures on my blog if anyone is interested
http://ikeoletti.blogspot.com/2006/11/happy-thanksgiving.html
Yummy I am getting hungry just thinking about it!

I've made pretty complicated things -- my initiation into gastronomic pursuits at age 14 was a 6 layer torte with 2 kinds of buttercream as well as layers of dacquoise; or the nutmeat paté in brioche, or the many Christmas feasts I have made single-handedly.

But the experience that brought me to my knees was my Martha Day.

I had decided to make one of her monthly meals -- you know, the ones that come on the little card squares in the magazine. I seem to recall it was shell steak with mushrooms, homemade spaetzle, baked orange beets, and apple brown betty. Simple enough, right?

Well, add to that a Martha Weddings present wrapping (artfully wrapped wedding presents as featured in the Wedding mag). A friend was getting married... Anyways, I had to drive 200 km roundtrip to the city (we lived in a little town on the Prairie back then) to buy all the ingredients. In those days, there was no Michael's, so shopping for the crafty stuff was a pain.

And my husband was going on a business trip and needed his shirts ironed.

Well I think we ate that damn shell steak at 11 pm, and the apple brown betty after midnight. The damn presents took the whole friggin' day to wrap, and the shirts and clean-up had me going until almost 3 a.m., when I fell into bed, exhausted and blubbering.

Okay, more was involved than merely cooking, but it sure showed how misleading Martha's mags are. She makes it look as if she does everything (well, at the time, the mid-nineties, she still did), but my little "experiment" in real time showed how difficult it is for us mere mortals to follow in her footsteps...

p.s. I have 2 different friends who swear at martha to this day over a recipe she did on the Today show one thanksgiving: Turkey covered in puff pastry like beef wellington.

It was a disaster for both, and not worth the effort -- there was no improvement of taste...

Yule Log cake. Took approximately twelve hours of prep work.

That was several years ago and I haven't made one since.

I made a Guinness chocolate pudding from scratch. It took half a day to cook down the Guinness and a ridiculous amount of shaved chocolate (which I did with a knife... oh to have had a food processor!). Was it worth it in the end? Yeah. I served it in pint glasses topped with Guinness heavy cream so that it looked like a freshly poured pint and they were a huge hit!

I made Doro Wat and Yweollo Ambasha back in March for dinner one night and then repeated the recipe in bulk for a dinner party later that week. Both times they turned excellent.

They took all day and multiple trips to the local hippie food market [yay for bulk spices!] but it was totally worth it!

http://www.africanchop.com/chopwa.htm#wa4

french baguettes...takes a whole day....and I have a batch working at the moment....worth every moment of effort

As a (former) production baker, I'm biased- I don't think anything I've ever made has been especially hard to do, but has certainly been time-consuming. I'd never do croissants from scratch at home, but when you're baking all day every day at work, sheeting dough and adding more butter is just a nice meditative step.

I tend not to get too complicated with main dishes at home, but my most "impressive" and probably time-consuming desserts were made for the same event a few years ago: a layered dark chocolate cake filled with mango curd and glazed with ganache, and a double-layered dense hazelnut cake with salty caramel frosting and toasted hazelnuts. The time-consuming part of that last recipe was getting the frosting right: it's a bitch to make frosting that tastes like pure caramelized sugar salt without being "sugary". I think I went through three test batches on that frosting, which made my coworkers very pleased.

The timpano recipe from Big Night. It took a couple of days to put it make all the components and put it together. It was fabulous.

I made my daughter's wedding cake, for over a hundred guests. It had lemon curd and strawberries and I repeated it this May for her brother in law and his bride. Discovering the handy tool, a cake leveler, was a huge improvement. Most dramatic dish ever: salmon with whiskey cream sauce that you flambe before serving.

French macarons. Chocolate, pistachio, hazelnut, cashew. On the one hand, it's some of the most time-consuming, exasperating and frustrating effort I've ever had in baking. Just when the little beasts are baking to a perfect dome... cracks appear! Just when a perfect dome appears... the skirt/feet go missing and the insides are hollow! arg! doh! shoot! But on the other hand, there are those days when the stars are in alignment and perfect batches roll out. Glory! The reward: smooth domes with cute little feet - airy crispy on the outside and light & cakey inside. :) Almost (but never will be) like ones from Paris.

Paticia, a Slovenian pastry with a walnut , raisin, and honey filling. You have to roll the dough out to the size of a large family table, spread the filling across the dough, roll it up then sort of spiral it into an oval, miraculously transfer it to a pan the size of a turkey roaster, and hope the whole middle doesn't cave in during baking. There's a reason it only gets made for Christmas and Easter!

I made a double or triple batch of Bayless's mole for a friends birthday. I don't speak spanish so I had a hard time figuring out which chiles were which as they are called different things in different places and were using different names than the recipe in the mexican grocer. The recipe was made more difficult by the fact that my friend was a vegetarian so it had to be made with veggie stock and served over tvp of some sort (still good but would have been richer with chicken stock and more well absorbed by chicken or turkey). I didn't have a mortar/pestle or a food processor/blender so the whole thing went through a food mill, and at the time I only had a small galley kitchen in a 200 sqf studio.

While I may not be friends with that person any more, I am still very proud of myself for that mole. That was a labor of sheer stubbornness.

I made homemade burgers, homemade sausages, homemade hamburger buns and hotdog rolls (new england style) and all the sides fresh as well. Two days of cooking for the rolls and one entire day of cooking for the rest.