#chalet chef

Today's pie!

...This is what happened to the Jamaican oxtail recipe I was experimenting with the other day. I had some of the original stew with pasta, and then I thought "Hmm, there's a whole lot of gravy here, what if I reduced it...", and after I'd done that and refrigerated it, it jelled almost immediately. Meaning there was a whole lot of natural gelatin in it.

Which more or less immediately provoked the concept, "This desperately wants to be a cold pie!" So to add some flavor (and a bit more heat) I simmered some parsnip slices in clarified butter with smoked paprika and cayenne, and added them to the meat. (Those who note a lack of onions and other alliums: that's me, not the recipe: alliums [except for chives], to my intense grief, infallibly set off my IBS.) And then I let that whole business and the gravy sit overnight in the fridge; and the next morning, made a butter-based "short" pie crust, broke up the cold-and-very-gelled-again meat, put it in the crust, and baked that for an hour.

Then I left the pie out in the boot room (which is cool but not cold cold) overnight, and finally had a slice of it for lunch today. As you can see. 😄

It was terrific. Oxtail works really well for this kind of treatment. (And it also paired really nicely with the kinda-burnt-sugar flavor that the Jamaican recipe provides: the slight sweetness works well with the dark rich quality of the oxtail.)

...The werewolves are gonna love this. 😀

(Just for those who might be curious: these "casual" / "using up the leftovers" recipes will appear in The Chalet Chef and the Snow Pack: I'm not going to publish them online.)

Fur color and shape testing for one of the Chalet Chef werewolves in "full woif" mode.

...Daz's wolves vary from "okay, not too bad" to "oh come on now", depending on the maker. In some cases their fur looks lovely, but is well-nigh impossible to control in any detail: and the nicer it is, routinely the less controllable it gets. (eyeroll) Also there's not always a lot of choice of colors... so if you want something beyond "standard timber wolf," or black, or white, you're shitoutaluck and must fall back on editing the underlying files for basic color and contrast.

I think I started out attempting to do the pack leader's (Coelyn's) fur here, as he's kinda dark-silvery. But achieving that effect requires altering the way light hits sixteen different sets of guard hairs, and also altering the way all those layers transmit light in terms of transparency, and how each hair differs in light-transmission between root and tip. And every time you get it wrong, you have to change the settings and then render it again.

I'm maybe halfway there at the moment. But I've got an 8:15 AM cab pickup tomorrow for a midday hospital-clinic appointment up in town... and if I try to stay up late to complete this, I'll be sorry in the morning. So for the time being I need to knock off, and will get back to hammering on this on Wednesday sometime.