Tagged: dinner party
Indulgent Comfort Menu
“A Nice Bowl of Hot Soup”
Cuban black bean soup/snow crab
“Liver & Onions”
Foie gras/asian pear/caramelized red onion/calvados reduction
“Meatloaf”
North African lamb/raisins/apple/almonds/curry/apple sauce
“Mac & Cheese”
Macaroni/lobster/oak smoked cheddar/cream/tarragon
“Sunday Dinner”
Quail/wild rice/porcini/chanterelles/pomegranate glaze/pomegranate reduction
Beef Wellington/tenderloin/mushroom duxelle/puff pastry/chasseur sauce
Sweet potato/fennel/red pepper
“Save Room for Dessert”
Lemon cheesecake/ginger crust
Chocolate pot du crème/basque peppers***
Dried wild berry compote/coffee cream
And what does one pair with such a dinner? It’s about indulgence, not properness.
Red wine/still water/root beer/Strongbow/tea
Indulgent ingredients:
Crab/lobster/lamb/foie gras/quail/chocolate
***It is my good fortune to know an incredibly talented young chef whose passion for food is unmatched and whose thirst for food knowledge is nowhere near being quenched.
When hearing about this upcoming dinner, he generously shared these peppers from Spain’s Basque region. The heat is complex and smoldering as opposed to an intense fiery eye-watering heat; it lifted the deep dark chocolate to a whole other place.
Thanks Jon!
Indulgent Comfort
Comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love-Song of Solomon
To hell with apples, I wanted to be comforted with good food, good company, and good cheer. Having each suffered a personal loss in a short span of time, I invited two good friends for dinner on Saturday night for just such an evening. (I love to cook, and they love to eat, so it’s a great fit.)
I planned the menu based on Indulgence (we deserved it, sometimes life sucker punches you when you least expect it, and it takes a great effort to get off the canvas and back on your feet, and I don’t know why the boxing metaphor, or maybe it’s because I’m giddy with a food hangover, but where was I?)
Yes, the menu.
For this dinner, I wanted to feature indulgent comfort food, with ingredients and preparations that we didn’t have everyday, because of cost/health/availability reasons. With that in mind, I headed out to poke around and see what was on the go, and it wasn’t long before I had the basis for our feast. Aside from the general theme, my menus tend to be pretty fluid, I let them go wherever the food takes them, and I just follow along.
This is the point where I’d planned on sharing the pictures but alas, by the time I realized I hadn’t gotten any snaps there was nothing left but bones and crumbs.
But in the grand scheme of things, the food is secondary. It is served, and it serves. It serves as a starting point for conversation, a conduit for gathering people around the table, a communal meal. And as we ate and drank and talked well into the night, I could feel my spirit being nourished as much as my body, and the strength to get back up to go another ten rounds.
It’s all about the company
It’s all about the company, our gracious hostess said, as I ooohed and aaaahed over our meal. We’d been invited out for dinner, and I just love it when someone else cooks for me. Having been a chef and a critic, some people has expressed a discomfort or unwillingness in preparing a meal for me, a trepidation that somehow, whatever they offer will not “be up to standards”. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because I was a professional cook that I enjoy so much when someone else cooks, and I don’t care what it is. Grilled cheese? Yum! Canned soup? Spoon please! Sh*t on a shingle? May I have some more? As far as being a critic, that’s too much work when I’m eating recreationally.
I have to say that on this particular evening, I was completely blown away. Our hostess had chosen to prepare a Chinese dinner, having perfected her skills out of necessity. Originally from the West Coast, she had problems finding the style that she was used to on our side of the country. We started with a platter of shrimp toasts and fried filled wontons, made from scratch (as was all the meal), and throwing restraint to the wind we scarfed down far more than was polite. (I thought that not pulling the plate right onto my lap showed at least some manners.)
Now, I love to host dinners, and I always have a theme around which I build the menu, but holy cow, this woman put my careful planning and preparations to shame! The table was set beautifully with Chinese dishes, chopsticks at the ready, and with each setting there was a gorgeous Chinese art envelope with a coin inside, and a Chinese New Year stamp (a symbol of good luck and prosperity, I think she told us). There was a large pot of real Chinese tea (as in, a friend had brought her tea from China, that’s how real it was) and a large ‘lazy susan’ upon which all of the dishes were served, family-style. No detail was left undone, certainly to the eye.
And it quickly turned out that what we tasted lived up to what we saw–an incredible array of expertly cooked pork, salmon, noodles, scallops….the list goes on.
It was the most incredible dinner experience I’ve ever had in someone’s home, and I was quick to tell my hostess this.
At the end of the evening, we waddled out to the vehicle, sated in body and mind, giddy with the pleasure of both the table and the company. (And no, we were not hungry again in a hour).
I’m really going to have my work cut out for me when it’s our turn to have them for dinner…
back to the blog
So the problem with taking off so much blog time is that all kinds of things happen, and then you don’t know where to start…
Since I last posted, Mix lost Ray Bear and closed after hobbling along a few more painful weeks, and idiotic comments about Bear and fine dining (or “dinning”, as one feisty blogger wrote) abounded.
I did the photo shoot for my soup book with the photographically gifted Scott Munn, and I’m even more exciting about the release next spring.
I had a fabulous evening with a couple of friends, during which I finally opened up a bottle of very, very old balsamic vinegar I got in Italy. Bellisimo!
Knives, my knives, how I’ve neglected them…now, thanks to a local knife sharpening fanatic, they are sharp and happy.
And although I’ve always been diplomatic with regards to other food critics, some recent goings-on have led me to wonder about the state of restaurant reviewing in Halifax.
What the hell has happened to Food Network Canada? How many shows about warring bakers can there be?
And what to do when Fabulous Fishcakes becomes Sustainable and Scrumptious Fishcakes?
More to come on these and other foods for thought in the days ahead.
the end of the world
I have to stop looking at billboards. There’s one on the north end of Barrington, looming, ominous, telling us that the end of the world is May 21. Doesn’t seem fair–all I’ve heard the past year is how the world is going to end at the (debated) end of the Mayan calendar, in 2012. This is a year early. May 21 is a Saturday, the end of the world means a lot of peoples’ long weekends are going to be screwed up.
Worse yet, I have plans for the 21st. Two old, dear friends will be joining us for dinner, and the end of the world would kind of put a damper on that. Now, according to one UK minister, the End will be after 6pm so I guess I’ll make my menu around a meal with time constraints. But will anyone have an appetite, knowing how close we are to The End? And what if the soothsayers are wrong, and The End is 2012? I’d better have a great dinner planned, just in case we are to be spared this time.
If you knew it was the end of the world, what would you eat as your last meal?
