Fire, Fire! My Beets!

Sorry again for the delay. I have been back in Boston for a couple of weeks now, focusing much more on trying to make sense of my thesis research and forge a new direction than on cooking and blogging. But I have managed to cook a few nice meals, including really fantastic mussels and clams marinier, which unfortunately I could not photograph, because my camera didn't have any batteries. I really need a new camera, one that you can recharge. Keeping mine supplied with batteries has been a whole ordeal which has interfered with my blogging. There has been lots of meals I haven't photographed in the last months because I had no batteries or because the recharger was broken, and then there has been other times that I couldn't load my pictures onto my computer because the camera had no batteries. I took virtually no pictures on my second trip to Japan because I had no batteries. I don't know if that's a good enough excuse, but it really is the main reasons I've been less diligent about posting in the last months.
At any rate, one of the more notable meals I recently cooked was at my friends' Abby and Sam's house. It was actually the day I had arrived in Boston from Paraguay, and, as they have played host to me before on my brief and tardily announced trips to Boston, I wanted to offer to cook them dinner partially by way of thanks. They gladly accepted, and before I set off to look at apartments in Porter Square and Beacon Hill (where I did in fact find my current residence), I hurriedly scoured the rather extravagant shelves of Savenor's market for something from which I could throw dinner together after returning from my frigid hunt. Despite having been transported from the tropical splendor of Paraguay to the gray, icy, darkness of Boston in less than a day, I was already craving wintery comfort food. I spotted some duck sausage and settled on making a meal from fettuccine with duck sausage, wild mushrooms, and radicchio and a warm salad of roasted beats and shallots with lemon and goat cheese.

While I think the meal certainly showed Abby and Sam the extent of my burning gratitude, I think they would probably have preferred a nice thank you card. Suffice it to say that I did, without a doubt, the stupidest, most embarrassing thing that I have ever done in the kitchen--and mind you I have been cooking since I was probably seven or eight and starting cooking whole meals in high school. The beets were taking a longer time than I had anticipated and so I had to keep checking them and finally, in frustration, I turned the temperature up to 500 degrees hoping that a few minutes of intense roasting would finish them off while I finalized the rest of the meal. Well, it did nearly finish off beets along with the occupants of the whole building, because, minutes after I turned up the heat, the oven started billowing foul-smelling black smoke that quickly filled the whole apartment. As it turned out, I had inadvertently left the oven mitt inside the oven beneath the roasting pan after returning the beets to the oven and turning the heat up. I must stay that such things really are well made, because rather than bursting into flames in the 500 degree oven, the hot pad simply blackened and smoldered, and it ceased to exude any smoke as soon as I extracted it from the oven with a pair of tongs and ran it under cold water.

As Abby, Sam and I desperately tried to vent the smoke out of the house by creating as much of an icy draft as possible, we noticed the flashing red lights outside.


Literally less than five minutes after we noticed the first bits of smoke, the Cambridge fire department arrived at the apartment with two trucks and a full team of firemen ready to kick some serious ass. The neighbors had smelled the smoke and called in the emergency thinking that plumbing work done earlier that day had provoked an electrical fire or something like that. By the time the firemen were there, the smoke was all gone, and everything was under control, but we had to sheepishly explain that 'we' had left an oven mitt in the oven and apologize for the false alarm. While I walked away from this meal with a great deal more confidence in oven mitts and my local fire department, I was deeply embarrassed and shaken, and I don't think I'll try cooking a meal after international travel again.

In the end, nothing was ruined, and the beet salad and pasta were both pretty good. I left the skins on the beets which gives them a roastier potato-like quality,


and, while the pasta was good, I think it need to be a little saucier. The bitter radicchio contrasted well with the richness of the duck, but it would have been better if I had made the effort to get a bottle of sweet vermouth, as I had originally planned, to reduce as part of the sauce to give it some sweetness as well.