Entertaining Reborn!
After a long hiatus, we have started entertaining again. Well, entertaining at full blast. We managed to sneak a couple of things into the entertainment hibernation I was forced into by unemployment, but this was the first time in almost four months that I was able to let loose. We warned our dinner guests: Tyler and Michelle, who we know through puzzle collecting and who rival if not surpass us in love of food and wine, and Melissa, who is, confusingly, my Melissa's boss at Cody's Books. Another person who loves good food and wine with a passion.
So let loose I did. In an ideal world, I would also have my digital camera now, but Best Buy didn't have the one I wanted in stock, and so I have to wait a bit. This means you will just have to suffer through my descriptions without the benefit of pictures.
Here is our menu, with comments. For the first time, we tried printing out menus and presenting them to our guests, an idea we stole from both my friend Tom (whose parties demand menus because of the vast array of dishes) and Tyler and Michelle when we were at their house for dinner.
I love amuse-bouches. A little bite of something, just enough to intrigue, to get the juices flowing. This one was based on some stuffed onions I made and described on my Eating Well Cheaply blog a while back. They came out really well, and even then I hinted at the idea of doing a small version as an amuse. I stuffed roasted cipolline onions with a mixture of porcini, calabrese sausage, and the centers of the roasted onion. I laid each half on a bed of frisee, which I dressed with a simple garlic vinaigrette, and because we had such beautiful dried porcini, I took one whole but small rehydrated porcini for each plate and laid it to the side. It looked really nice; all my presentation practice is finally beginning to pay off.
I always like bagna cauda, but I was particularly interested in trying it again for two reasons. First, I found a source for salted anchovies (a couple sources, actually), an ingredient which has cropped up in the recent books of several talented chefs, including Jeremiah Tower, Judy Rodgers, and Nancy Silverton. Second, I did that whole presentation class a couple of weeks ago, and we spent a lot of time sculpting radishes, which are a traditional accompaniment to bagna cauda (as are cardoons, but those are hard to find). So the very delicious bagna cauda (a Piedmontese "warm bath" of olive oil, garlic, butter and anchovies) was burbling away, and next to it was a plate of intricately cut radishes, blanched fennel and celery.
As for the Prosecco, this seems to be a trendy little drink nowadays, but we started drinking it around September after I read about it in Gambero Rosso, the Italian wine magazine. It's similar to Champagne in style, but is made with its own unique, eponymous grape. It's a delightful sparkler from Northeastern Italy, and is always a nice way to start an evening.
This was probably the prettiest plate I did all night. For the prep work, I brunoised some carrot and red chili pepper. Then I cut a bell pepper into semi-circles across the middle (cut the bell pepper in half down through the stem, then cut each of those into strips across what used to be the pepper's core). Finally, I made some sourdough brioche, cut it into slices, and then cut rounds out of those slices with my biggest cookie cutter. To actually serve it, I sautéed the shrimp and made my sauce with crab stock and minced conserved lemon I made two months ago. The crab stock I made last week with the shell of an entire crab (we ate the meat in mid-December and I froze the shell). I was worried that the sauce would be too overpowering, but it worked out pretty well. The conserved lemon was definitely a useful touch. Then I laid a brioche round in the middle of each plate, and arranged the shrimp (actually prawns) and bell pepper arcs around the round in a pinwheel. Then I put some of the sauce over it (note: don't use a squeeze bottle for the saucing here; it splurts more then squirts and was the one downside to the presentation) and sprinkled my orange and red brunoise all over the plate. Tres nice.
Txocalina is one of my favorite little wines, a Basque wine from Northern Spain. It's a crisp wine, with just the slightest effervescence, and goes very nicely with shellfish. I always try and keep a bottle on hand to open as a treat.
In my presentation class a few weeks back, our instructor used a star tip fitted into a pastry bag to pipe his mashed potatoes on the plate. This was something I had known about for a while, but never gotten around to doing. But once you see how stunning this looks, it's hard to not want to do it. I figured something like that would be perfect with the steak. I made mashed potatoes with a small amount of turnips, and then added some parsley for color and a healthy dose of white truffle oil. To plate it, I piped the potato/parsnip purée onto the plate in a coiled stripe, laid the steak next to it, and then a row of roasted beet wedges on the other side. Finally, I laid three steamed baby French carrots on the potatoes in a cross formation (think an X with a line through the middle). The dish was quite good, but I overcooked some of the steak (I had to do it in two sauté pans) so three of us got a steak that was more medium-well and two of us got a more medium-rare steak. Urgh.
As for the wine, well, I've not yet had a Ridge wine I didn't like, and that rule still stands. Petite sirah is often a pretty robust grape, with peppery notes, and it worked nicely with the steak.
I was definitely in the mood for a washed-rind cheese, so I gave Melissa three options when she went to the Cheese Board for me: Epoisses, Red Hawk, or Alsatian Munster (not to be confused with, well, any other Munster you've ever had). The Red Hawk won out, and that was plenty fine with me. I made pain de mie the night before, and toasted it just before plating it. I cut the pain de mie in half to make two perfect little triangles and laid one on top of the other to make little chevrons, and then positioned a wedge of cheese facing the opposite direction. Finally, a little arugula for color and an added bite, and the dish was ready to go.
We bought a case of the Meulenhof at the big German wine tasting we went to a month ago, and we were eager to share it. It was so good at the tasting that I took a break from the tasting itself and went next door to buy a case; I didn't want them to run out. This was the perfect opportunity to open some.
The pear dumplings came from one of my new favorite cooking magazines, Art Culinaire. It's a magazine aimed at food professionals, but a lot of the recipes are doable for home chefs. The dumplings were simply a pear compote put into wonton wrappers and fried. I made the honey-vanilla ice cream the night before, using all the rest of my supply of Marshall Farm's CIA honey, honey made from beehives in the herb garden at the St. Helena Culinary Institute of America. This was my favorite when we did a tasting of all their honeys, so it was the obvious choice when I decided to do a honey-vanilla ice cream. To serve these, I put a scoop of ice cream on the side of the plate, and then arranged four dumplings in a row next to the scoop.
As Melissa (my girlfriend, not our guest) wrote up the menus, she decided to just write "Wine TBA" on the menu, a total wine geek joke, as TBA is the common abbreviation for the otherwise unwieldy trockenbeerenauslese. Given our guests, I was eager to pull this out; I knew they would fully appreciate it. In addition to the case of Meulenhof we walked away with last month, we picked up two half-bottles of this TBA, because we fell in love with it at the tasting. TBAs in general are high on my list of favorite dessert wines, and this is a particularly nice one.
In addition to the amuse-bouche, my next-favorite meal component is the mignardise, the little plate of candies and treats you get after dessert. As the amuse-bouche gets your appetite moving, the mignardise provides something for you to enjoy as you settle down after dinner. Conversation lingers, and the little plate of candies provides you with tasty bites to enjoy as you talk with your dinner companions. I had made the caramel chews the night before (they sit out overnight to harden) and was really hoping to find little mini muffin cups at Market Hall the next day; they've got a surprisingly decent candy-making section, given that their primary focus is oils, vinegars, deli food, pasta, and cheese. But alas, they were out of stock. If I had actually thought it through more, I would've found time to go to Spun Sugar in Berkeley, but as I conceived of the idea the day before, that wasn't very likely. So I did the most annoying of the many fussy tasks I did that day: I hand-wrapped each caramel chew. The fact that the little cups would have looked great and been a lot quicker only fueled my annoyance. Still, they were quite good.
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