Into Thin Air

Our book club read The Time Traveler's Wife this month. The fictitious time traveler vanishes into thin air every 10 or 12 pages. When considering what food to bring, it struck me that something with a foam would be appropriate, foams having a propensity to vanish into thin air. I decided to baptize my ISI whipper and made the mango espuma from the recipe in the booklet in the package; it's also posted on the ISI website. As a host food, I made a panna cotta from blood oranges from our backyard trees, with heavy cream and sugar.

The foam was a bust! No air at all. The flavor of the mango sauce was good, but it just dribbled out of the nozzle like the trickly remains of water left in a turned-off hose. Obviously I need more practice with the device OR the recipe requires some improving. The process could certainly be simplified as it took too many pots and pans for the end result. First there was the mango peeling and chopping and the orange squeezing. Then these two had to be boiled together with the sugar. Next, pureeing the mixture and then pushing it through a sieve. Finally adding the gelatin, cooling, hand whipping and then filling the whipper followed by refrigeration for several hours. You could probably start with a mango juice of some kind, adding sufficient gelatin to achieve the right consistency and then blast it out. I'll try that next.

My fellow book club members were sympathetic and enjoyed the panna cotta even though the foam flopped. We recalled our various bad experiences giving demonstrations and the difficulty of handling a lot of equipment plus managing the on-camera requirements at the same time - following a multitude of directions, looking directly at the camera and still concentrating on the main task. I told them about doing egg demos for the egg commission when I got tangled up in mike cords; walked off stage dragging pans behind me and did other stupid things. The sisters told me about doing craft demos on camera - one of them had practised her schtick over and over but when she arrived at the studio, they told her she was going to have to do everything upside down on camera. Quelle Horreur. Somehow she managed but even though it was years ago, they have never looked at the video. At about the same time they hired a young woman to do some of the crafting on camera and she ended up just staring wide-eyed into the camera for the whole thing - like a deer caught in the head lights.

We all agreed that on-camera work is more difficult than it looks and that the most masterful people make it
look incredibly easy.

Next day report: after sitting in the refrigerator overnight, the mango espuma, espumed when dispensed. No audience. It was actually very good - light and airy - perfect for my lunch today over a nectarine.