lemon curd cheesecake, engineer style

Today I decided to make a "healthy cheesecake" recipe (cheesecake with lemon curd) because I feel I'm neglecting my new kitchen and the dinners I've made so far have been, for the most part, inedible.

Anyway, who doesn't love dessert.

For the record I've never had cheesecake because I'm allergic to it.

Ready to start cooking! That red thing in the back is my new mixer. I was going to buy a mixer with the bowl and shit attached but the italian, who went shopping with me because he knows I can't really cook, said "why don't you buy the $20 mixer, and it you find you really like mixing shit, you can buy the $300 mixer." He also made sure I got a spring form pan. I thought "spring form" was a brand name, so if he hadn't been with me I would have screwed that up. He also showed me how to work it.

So far so good. Crust.

They left the part out in the directions about moving your wine glass away from the mixer when mixing the heavy cream. Splatters. I drank it anyway because I read somewhere the best chefs drink while cooking.

The "cheese" part of the cheesecake. It's just cream cheese and heavy whipping cream and some other shit. How hard can that be? I tasted it and it tasted pretty good.

Broke my lemon squeezer thing making lemon juice for the lemon curd. Guess I'm working out too much.

To make the lemon curd that goes on top of the cheesecake required a double boiler, which I don't have. So I rigged this up - a glass bowl in a pot that has some boiling water in it. Recipe for disaster? Maybe. No. Probably.

 Also, the directions said to cook the curd until it was the consistency of Hollandaise sauce. Since I've never had Hollandaise sauce I had no idea what that meant. I mean, who orders eggs with egg sauce on them? Meta egg sauce... Anyway, I texted the italian, and then called him when he didn't respond to my text. Surprisingly he answered even after the prank fart gone wrong. He was drinking with a cop friend of his in a bar so the conversation went something like this:

me: Hey, how thick is Hollandaise sauce?
Italian: You mean Hollandaise sauce?
me: Fucking however you say it. How thick is it?
Italian: It's definitely sticky.
me: Not STICK, THICK.
Italian: Why? What are you up to now?
me: I'm making a lemon curd and it has to be as thick as Hollandaise sauce and I don't know how thick that is.
Italian: A lemon TURD?
me: CURD!
Italian: Jesus! A lemon curd? WHY are you doing THAT?
me: For the cheesecake. With lemon curd sauce on top.
Italian: I'm not eating any of that.
me: Fine. But how thick is it?
Italian: It should pour off the spoon at the consistency of a millimeter* (obscured due to bar noises) and the spoon will (obscured due to bar noises).
me: What?
Italian: Pour it off a spoon and when (obscured due to bar noises) the spoon will have (obscured due to bar noises).
me: MY CURD MAY BE BEING RUINED! IT'S ON THE STOVE! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! HOW THICK IS HOLLANDAISE SAUCE????
Italian: Like syrup.

Feh.

So the lemon curd eventually gelled or what ever the fuck it's supposed to do (I hope). Then I realized, reading the directions (should not do real time cooking) that I needed a fine mesh screen to pour the curd through. Fuck. I briefly considered cleaning the screens of one of my windows and then remembered I had a flour sifter.

Problem solved? Maybe. At least some shit collected at the bottom of the sifter. Think that's a good sign.

The cheesecake is currently in my refrigerator "setting". I might be able to get someone to eat it. I've decided to make a raspberry sauce to go over the top of it. With lots of alcohol in it.

Bet the italian will have a piece if I offer it to him after he's been drinking. And who doesn't like sauce with alcohol in it?

Stay tuned...


*the italian is an engineer

in case you're stupid, this is the front

Tuesday I decided to take a day off work to go ski with the italian. They got at least 8 inches at A basin so it was worth the trip.

I got us rooms at the holiday inn in Frisco Monday night since my points are about to expire and we didn't want to drive up in a snow storm Tuesday morning. An american car company got rooms there too to test out their new cars. I found that out because when we pulled into the parking lot Monday night there were all these cars covered in tarps. Under the tarps the cars had more tarps taped all over them (so they could drive with the tarps on). The italian, who knows a lot about cars (I think from watching shows like "R U Faster Than a Redneck", which I watched with him Monday night after I fixed my TV remote by punching it repeatedly with my fist - the italian thinks it's not necessarily that I don't know how to work a TV but that I always get broken remotes - but he wasn't sure) said they are prototype cars and they're all taped up so no one could see them.

In case the car testers are REALLY stupid they identified the front of the car

It was a fun ski trip marred only by the fact that I have only been skiing once in the past 2 years. I invented a new move I call "the flying starfish" where the skier eats shit when her ski gets stuck in the fresh powder and she goes tumbling down the hill with skis flying. The italian gave me some coaching instructions and said I'm easy to coach, so hopefully my skills will continue to improve unless the italian gets tired of coaching me because I fall, and not just little falls, but massive wrecks.

Skiing in deep fresh powder is not as easy as it looks in the Warren Miller films.

Don't worry. The zombie knee is safe.