Author: Mark Linton

Fillet of Beef in Puff Pastry with Sauce Madeira

Recipe courtesy Wolfgang Puck

Recipe Summary

Cook Time: 1 hour 20 minutes Prep Time: 15 minutes

Yield: 6 servings

• 6 tournedos, 6 ounces each (fillet steaks, 1½ inches thick)
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 shallots, minced
• 1 pound mushrooms, finely chopped
• 4 tablespoons heavy cream
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 pounds puff pastry
• 1 egg with 1 tablespoon of water, lightly beaten, for egg wash
• Sauce Madeira, recipe follows
• Watercress, for garnish

In a large skillet, over high heat, saute tournedos in 3 tablespoons butter for 30 seconds on each side. Set aside to cool completely.

In the same skillet, with the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter, cook shallots and mushrooms until all liquid evaporates. Add cream, salt and pepper. Reduce over moderate heat to a thick puree. Cool.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Divide pastry into 6 equal portions. On a lightly floured board, roll out each portion to a rectangle approximately 6 by 12 inches and ¼ inch thick. Place each tournedo on one side of a pastry rectangle, leaving enough room to fold over.

Top each tournedos with mushroom puree. Brush edges of the pastry with egg wash and then fold it over and shape it to the contours of the meat. Cut away excess pastry and decorate as desired.

Glaze the tops of the pastry with egg wash.

Bake the tournedos 15 to 20 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown.

Arrange each tournedo on a heated plate and garnish with watercress. Nap the sauce Madeira around the tournedos.

Sauce Madeira:

• 1 cup Madeira
• 2 tablespoons minced shallots
• 1 teaspoon minced thyme leaves
• 1 cup veal stock
• 2 tablespoons butter
• Salt and pepper

In a saucepan, bring Madeira, shallots, and thyme to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook until only ⅓ cup remains. Add the stock; continue to reduce, over medium heat, until slightly thickened. Whisk in the butter. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper.

Yield: Makes about 1 cup

Episode#: WP1B26

Copyright 2003 Television Food Network, G.P., All Rights Reserved

Plastic: Two Paradigms Enter, One Paradigm Leaves — The Philosophy Of Mad Max: ”In preindustrial society, most people spend most of their time simply generating power with human muscles. Energy was expensive, labor was cheap. The five pound sack of rice or potatoes that sells for about $2 at the grocery store (minimum wage for about 20 minutes of work in a modern industrial society) is an excellent day’s pay in preindustrial society. It makes no economic sense to keep a compost heap and grow potatoes in your back yard in an industrial society, but all kinds of sense in a preindustrial one.

The reason we do not recycle most garbage is simply that it’s not worth our time. The time required to create any given item out of scraps (or even repair the item) is far longer than it would take to earn enough to buy the item, even working at minimum wage. Where this equation doesn’t hold true, people are already repairing and recycling.

I do not want to agree, but a friend of mine just discovered that it is cheaper to buy a new inkjet printer when the ink runs out on your existing one than to replace the cartridges in the existing one. He did just that, took it home, and threw the old one away. A perfectly functional, nearly new, inkjet printer now sitting in a landfill because it is cheaper to buy a printer <strong>with ink cartridges</strong> than to buy ink cartridges alone. <em>Go figure.</em>



Then there is this from the same thread:

I watched a blacksmith demonstrate how they used to make nails by hand. [If I recall correctly] he said that a skilled blacksmith could make about 100 an hour. If he worked ten hours doing nothing but make nails, he would have 1000 nails at the end of the day. Go down to Home Depot and look at all the nails they have in stock and think about how many days it would take to hand make those nails. The blacksmith said when they needed to demolish a building, they would burn it down so that they could retrieve the nails.

Definitely a different mindset.



Lest we get to thinking to much of ourselves, there is this (to be read with tongue firmly planted in cheek):

Oh, for those glorious days when someone — someone else, that is — would live from the scraps and castoffs of higher society! How wonderful for them — not me — to wear constantly-mended clothing, to eat thin soup made from scavenged bones, to heat their roadside shacks with dried horse dung! Oh, woe that those halcyon days are lost to this age of machines and degeneracy!

Happy Valley Ranch: Homesteader: “The ‘Homesteader’ is a single-tub cider or wine press with the same basic frame and press screw assemble as our double-tub model. It has been specifically designed as an all-purpose fruit press which is capable of grinding and efficiently squeezing apples and grapes.

“The ‘Apple Eater’ grinding attachment is conveniently mounted on the back of the press – allowing the ‘pulped’ fruit to fall directly into the tub for squeezing”

You cannot use DHCP as a security mechanism. If a DHCP client elects not to follow the protocol, a network administrator can do little, other than to track down the offending device and shut it off. A malicious user who wants to access the network can always simply make up an IP address, send an ARP request for it, and then, if it does not get an answer, use the fabricated address. Access control based on client identification can be very convinient, but it does not prevent unauthorized access to a network. [Droms and Lemon, 2002, p. 16]

Droms, Ralph Ph. D. &amp; Lemon, Ted (2002), <i>The DHCP Handbook, Second Edition</i>, Indianapolis: Sams Publishing.

Breakfast this morning was cereal. I think the scale read 159, though I do not know if I should believe my eyes.



<ins datetime="2003-12-10T15:17:00-05:00">Scott and I walked over to the Carnegie building to check out their network equipment. On the way back, we stopped at the HUB to grab some lunch. I had a salad. The walk was maybe 2 miles, round trip.</ins>



<ins datetime="2003-12-11T13:21:00-05:00">Dinner was another batch of <a href="http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1950,159184-233192,00.html" title="Cooks.com | Recipe | BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND VEGETABLE GRATIN">butternut squash and vegetable gratin</a> and a <a href="http://www.sierra-nevada.com/beers/celebrationale.html" title="Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale">Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale</a>. We modified the gratin recipe to leave out the walnuts and to add a breadcrumb and paparika topping more like that on potatoes au gratin. We also salted the squash a little bit before going in to roast in an effort to kill some of its sweetness. The changes were quite successful.</ins>

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/10/business/10FOOD.html?ei=5007&amp;en=e2e72041650fe5e0&amp;ex=1386392400&amp;partner=USERLAND&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;position=">Restaurant Hiring May Lead the Way to Wider Job Gains</a>: &ldquo;Since the beginning of August, the restaurant business, which includes everything from McDonald&rsquo;s to corner bars to four-star restaurants, has accounted for 18 percent of the 300,000 jobs created in the nation&hellip;



&ldquo;The restaurant business, which has about $420 billion in annual sales in the United States, accounts for 6.6 percent of economic activity and has 11.7 million workers, according to the National Restaurant Association. When consumers are willing to spend more freely, the business tends to benefit directly. &lsquo;Dining out is generally considered a discretionary item,&rsquo; said Richard D. Rippe, the chief economist at Prudential Securities. &lsquo;As income rises, there&rsquo;s more willingness to do that. Now, as we begin to get a little better employment cyclically and as consumer confidence gradually improves, I think that would be a plus as well.&rsquo;&rdquo;

Sally Squires has this to say in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47067-2003Dec8.html" title="The Holiday Challenge: Fun With Fiber (washingtonpost.com)">today&rsquo;s Lean Plate Club</a>:

“Eating more fiber is one of the best things that you can do for your health,” notes JoAnn E. Manson, chief, preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and co-author of the study. Foods rich in fiber and whole grains “increase satiety — you feel fuller — and that may lead to consuming fewer calories, which can help with weight control.”

…To help boost fiber:

• Start the day with whole-grain cereal and berries. Some cereals have up to 13 grams of fiber per cup. Add a half-cup of berries and you can get three to four more grams of fiber. Can’t stomach high-fiber cereals? Top regular cereal with a quarter- or third-cup of the high-fiber stuff to make the taste more palatable.
• Switch to whole-grain varieties of bread, crackers, pasta and rice. They have double or more the fiber found in the white bread, pasta and rice, which are stripped of fiber during processing. Rye, pumpernickel and other whole-grain breads are good choices, with about three grams per slice. Wild rice and brown rice have about three grams of fiber per cup. Whole-wheat pasta has about six grams of fiber per cup…
• Snack on popcorn, fruit or vegetables. Popcorn has a gram of fiber per one-cup portion. Get two grams from a small banana, three from a medium apple with the skin or a half-cup of cooked broccoli.
• Sip bean soup. At about 17 grams of fiber per cup, beans, lentils and legumes are also high in protein and rich in complex carbohydrates, which helps keep hunger at bay. Bean dips are another good option.

Breakfast was a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. I weighed in at 160 pounds. I was hoping for an instant that I would break that barrier. <a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/2003_11_01_journal.html#id106901106645625479" title="Easy as Apple Pie">As you may recall</a>, I said I chose a target weight of 155 pounds knowing that I would probably give up when I reached 160. Well, I am there now, and I  would like to prove myself wrong by breaking the 160 pound barrier. I guess that will have to <em>weight</em> for another day. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/wink.png" height="18" width="18" alt=";-)" />



<ins datetime="2003-12-09T13:32:00-05:00">I had a <a href="http://www.naturevalley.com/Products2.htm" title="Welcome to Nature Valley: Products">Nature Valley Oats &rsquo;N Honey Crunchy Granola Bar</a> for lunch before my walk &mdash; about three miles.</ins>

<ins datetime="2003-12-09T19:04:00-05:00">We had some of our own chili, a small salad, and two <a href="http://www.sierra-nevada.com/beers/celebrationale.html" title="Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale">Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale</a>s for dinner. Gretchen made the chili at the beginning of October, using the last of our garden tomatoes, and froze it.</ins>

Martha had <a href="http://www.foodtv.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_22594,00.html" title="Food Network: Techniques-Miscellaneous">James Peterson</a> on tonight. He showed some neat&sup1; techniques. This one shows how he makes a quick brown sauce:

Sauteing is an excellent way to cook steaks. The high heat forms a savory crust on the outside of the meat, and the meat is able to cook quickly enough that it stays moist and juicy. An added advantage of sauteing steaks is that it gives you caramelized juices that can be deglazed with a variety of liquids and slightly thickened to make a quick pan sauce.

Pour out and discard the fat from the pan skillet in which you have cooked a steak. Pour about ½ cup liquid — such as stock or wine into the hot pan. Scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to dissolve the caramelized juices. Reduce the wine until only a few tablespoons remain. Add beef or brown chicken stock and reduce again until the sauce is lightly syrupy. Swirl in butter until the sauce is thickened to a desired consistency. Spoon sauce over meat or pass in a sauce boat at the table.

¹ I was going to try to find an acronym for “neat,” since originally I was thinking in terms of the “cool” definition of neat. In the process, I was reminded of the “free from what is unbecoming, inappropriate, or tawdry; simple and becoming; pleasing with simplicity; tasteful;” definition, and changed my mind about replacing it.

You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!

A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other’s language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry’s underskirts.

This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.

In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout ‘boo!’, upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.

A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges. [Goodyear]

<a href="http://www.rumandmonkey.com/articles/bio.php?authorid=2" title="Satire - Author Bio">Goodyear, Owen</a>. &ldquo;<a href="http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/tests/lunatics/" title="Rum and Monkey : Satire, personality tests and web toys">Which Historical Lunatic Are You?</a>&rdquo; <i><a href="http://rumandmonkey.com/" title="Rum and Monkey : Satire, personality tests and web toys">Rum and Monkey</a></i>. 2003. <a href="http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/tests/lunatics/" title="Rum and Monkey : Satire, personality tests and web toys">&lt;http:// rumandmonkey.com/ widgets/ tests/ lunatics/&gt;</a> (8 December 2003).