J & J 10 X 10
It was an email I didn't think I'd ever see. "Hey, what if we did a 10-course meal when James and Jeffrey come over?" Melissa is usually the voice of reason when it comes to dinner parties. It is not a coincidence that she is also the person who cleans up afterwards. She is understandably reluctant when I want to introduce a second amuse-bouche, or an additional course, or anything that would require a new set of plates and attendant glasses.
But since we were inviting James and Jeffrey over to celebrate their 10-year anniversary, she thought it would be a cute touch. Never one to pass up a challenge, and worried that she might renege once the reality set in, I eagerly agreed (and said at work, "Ha! I've worn her down at last!").
Still, the theory of an all amuse-bouche menu is different than the reality. At their best, amuse-bouches (or amuse-bouchen, the pluralization I concocted) are just a bite or two. Twenty bites is not a lot of food, especially considering the several hours our dinner parties typically last.
So I decided to do a "small plates" menu. Something a little larger than an amuse-bouche, but smaller than the modest plates we serve at our normal 5-course dinners. So ten courses, each one a small plate of food for our guests to sample. And wines to match. Oh, and the two other guests were vegetarians, and would need seperate courses as appropriate.
It was a challenge, but it was a lot of fun. I often feel like our 5-course dinners are a bit of a rut: appetizers, opener, entree, cheese, dessert, plus amuse-bouchen and a mignardise course, plates of cookies or truffles or whatever after the dessert itself. I realize this is a skewed perspective, but whatever.
We greeted our guests with platters of salami and olives (the only items on the platters I hadn't made) and fried oranges. I also had a tapenade and red-pepper, pine nut, and dried cranberry relish. Obviously, vegetarian items were on one platter, carnivorous items (including the tapenade, which had anchovies) on the other. To hold the spreads, I made brioche in my little pain de mie pans from Paris. One square, one round, they made impressive slices, especially when toasted.
Some at the table argued that I snuck in an extra course, but I consider the amuse-bouche a part of the appetizer, so I maintain that there were only ten courses. In this case, the amuse-bouche was a pumpkin soup served in an espresso cup with a drizzle of pumpkinseed oil for garnish. Our friends Tom and Carol tipped us off to how well pumpkinseed oil complements squash soups, and they're quite right. Its nuttiness balances out the sweetness of the soup.
With this course and the next one, I served the obvious celebratory beverage: Champagne. In particular, the René Geoffroy a Cumieres, Cuvée 1999. This Champagne is an estate Champagne, with all the grapes grown on the property (most Champagnes are blends from around the region). It's the Champagne which won the tasting we held for our wedding Champagne, but it was also the one we had thrown in that we couldn't afford to have for our wedding (we used a non-vintage from the same producer). But we did buy a couple bottles for our enjoyment. The nice thing about Champagne is that it complements a wide variety of food, so I didn't have to worry about the pairing too much.
The next course featured an ahi tuna tartare for the carnivores, and a "tomato tartare" for the vegetarians. The ahi tuna I cut into small dice which I then marinated in a bit of soy sauce and molded with a cylindrical mold on top of a thin, hexagonal slice of celery root. The tomatoes were prepared similarly, but marinated with a decent sherry vinegar and garnished with basil chiffonade and 25-year-old traditional balsamic vinegar. Both dishes were garnished with a teardrop shaped Parmiggiano-Reggiano crisp, which I made by grating the cheese, cooking it, and then cutting out the shape I wanted with a teardrop-shaped mold. The celery root was a last-minute impulse, but worked beautifully with the tuna. Its sweetness and crunch contrasted the salty fleshiness of the fish.
After this, I served a tart inspired by an Alsatian classic: an onion and ham tart. The vegetarians got theirs without the ham, of course. For each one, I made a small tart crust which I pre-baked. Each tart crust was about four inches in diameter. Once they came out of the oven, I spread a chestnut purée over the bottom, laid ham over the puée on one of the tarts, and topped each one with lightly caramelized onions. Then I put the whole assembly back into the oven and finished cooking it all. Each person got one fourth of the small tart, and I garnished the plate with three steamed baby carrots with an arugula and melted-butter sauce.
To go with the onion tart, I chose a wine I thought would complement it nicely. Our wine club (Melissa and I recently changed to the one offered by the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant) had described the 2002 Pinot Gris from Raptor Ridge as "nodding towards Alsace" in style, so it seemed an obvious choice to accompany the tart inspired by the same region.
I didn't anticipate how well the wine would go with the next course, a simple goat cheese salad. Everyone commented on how well the pairing worked, with everything balancing out nicely and the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. The salad was simple. I topped some frisee with an artisanal Piemontese olive oil and some butternut squash pickles I had made earlier that week. On this assembly I placed a warm goat cheese round, which I prepared by breading it in Panko bread crumbs and then baking in a low-heat oven for about 10 minutes.
To get people warmed up for the "main course", I made small plates of gnocchi, which I dressed with a rosemary-garlic sauce. Gnocchi can fortunately be made the day before, sautéed in warm butter at the last minute to warm up again. Each person got about five or six small gnocchi, but Melissa commented that it was just the right amount.
To accompany the gnocchi and the main course, I chose some of our wedding wine, the Cascina Val de Prete Barbera d'Alba. I mostly chose it because I knew it was going to accompany the next course, but it went reasonably well with the gnocchi.
The main course was a departure from the petite, elegant dishes I had offered so far. I thought it would be a nice counterpoint to the meal so far to have a rustic dish. So I decided to do braised oxtails on a bed of taleggio polenta. The vegetarians got "mushrooms Dowdy", a recipe from our friend Tom Dowdy. For the mushrooms, you brown them a bit, then pour in a boatload of wine and herbs and let the whole thing stew until the wine is gone. The oxtails are actually made in a similar way, though the braising liquid was red wine plus homemade beef stock, which resulted in a stunning sauce.
After the heavy food (not to mention the glasses of wine and increasingly late hour), I figured people would need something to perk them up, so I served a lemon sorbet which I started the previous evening and finished that morning. I think it made a difference, getting people reinvigorated for the next three courses.
I wasn't sure how well the 2001 Hexamer Spatlese Riesling would pair with the lemon sorbet, but it ended up doing just fine, its own acidity and sweetness holding up to the tart sorbet.
I was pretty confident the wine would work nicely with the cheese course. For this course, I made a coeur a la creme, a semi-esoteric French dessert where you mix mascarpone and whipping cream and pour into a heart-shaped porous mold. The holes in the mold allow the liquid to drain out, and you are left with a simple cheese that is slightly sweet and fluffy. Since even a small coeur a la creme is a substantial amount of food, Melissa came up with a great idea. We seated the two members of each of the three couples across from each other, and each couple had to share a full heart. The hearts were garnished with pepper-cured dried figs, which have the virtue of needing to be made at least five days in advance. All you do is layer dried figs with peppercorns and bay leaves, and then weight them down for five days. They have a really nice flavor, starting out as all fig and ending with a solid pepper kick.
The next course was a blueberry shortcake. Fairly straightforward, and even making the shortcake was fairly trivial. It was easy enough that I wonder why I don't make things like this more often.
To go with it (and the next course), I chose a Bonny Doon Vin de Glaciere, which I've used before when I need a decent dessert wine.
The final course was the mignardise course, where I served a couple plates of Concord grape jellies. I've made jellies before, but I tried the version in the French Laundry cookbook for the first time, since it's made with apple pectin and is therefore vegetarian-friendly. Chef Keller describes them as "delicate" and my batch definitely was. So delicate that the slab of jelly didn't set up as firm as I would have liked, and I lost half the batch to a corner that folded over itself as I moved the slab. Plus they didn't end up as nice squares because they were so wobbly. And then I had to coat them in extra sugar because I didn't want them sticking like glue to everything they touched. This made the jellies too sweet for my taste, though they did still have some of the grape flavor and they definitely had the gorgeous purple color I hoped for.
It will be a while before we do something like that again, but it was certainly memorable.
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