Run Home Amanda!
Amanda is Melissa's closest friend. But unfortunately she lives in Portland, so Melissa sees her only rarely. On a recent trip, Melissa and Amanda's mother decided to start a campaign to get her to move back home to the Bay Area.
I offered to cook, a hint of the food she might eat more regularly if she lived nearby.
It's been a while since we had a dinner party, and though this was a tiny one (only three of us), it felt great to stretch my cooking wings again. Here's our menu, still suffering from lack of pictures due to our broken camera. This is unfortunate, since this dinner featured some of my best presentations, courtesy of the many plates we got for the wedding. I'll do the best I can describing them.
Simple, sure. But I mostly wanted to make sure there was something to eat when Amanda arrived. A lack of dinner parties has left me out of practice, plus I was in a new kitchen. So I figured having snacky food available was a good idea.
Normally I like to do a different wine for each course, but normally we have at least four people over. With just three of us, I decided to stretch each bottle for two courses so that the cook, at least, could walk from the kitchen to the dining room. Tablas Creek is a vineyard and winery in Paso Robles, and they make a lovely rosé. It's not a complicated wine, but it has a lot of sparkle (figurative, that is) and personality.
As we were moving, I noticed a set of plain espresso cups. Since we had gotten a bunch for our wedding, I asked why we needed two whole sets of the things. Melissa reminded me that someone had wanted them around for amuse-bouches.
Good point.
"Tomato consommé" sounds a lot harder than it is. Mash 4 pounds of potatoes in your Kitchen-Aid (and then take some time to clean up the tomato juice spattered all over your cabinets), put in a strainer lined with cheesecloth, and let drain into a container overnight. What you're left with is a vibrantly colored, delicious liquid. Add some seasoning, and serve, chilled, for a refreshing opener. I topped each serving with dots of French Laundry style basil oil (which is to say, extremely green and flavorful), and carried the little espresso cups gently into the dining room to prevent the oil from glomming together.
It was visually stunning and the consommé tasted wonderful. But the basil oil didn't come through as much as I wanted, even when I added more.
I've said before that I'm pretty proud of my risotto cakes, but these were particularly good. A while back I wrote about inaugurating my smoker, but what I didn't mention was that since I was going to be in the kitchen all day, I dug out a bunch of frozen chicken parts and made stock which I left bubbling gently on the stove. For hours. And hours. It was a very good stock.
I decided to use most of the stock as the base for the risotto, which I made the day before and then formed into cakes in the afternoon before the dinner. The result was great, a risotto which I flavored with large chunks of raw garlic and Parmiggiano-Reggiano cheese.
The plating was my favorite part. We got some gigantic bowls for our wedding. Really it's just the rim which is gigantic, the bowl itself is somewhat large. Supposedly they're pasta bowls, but that's not my preferred use. I love the look of a large expanse of plate with a small plating of food in the middle. So I laid down a bed of mixed greens, which I dressed lightly with a mustard vinaigrette, and then topped that with a risotto cake, and then put a small dollop of aioli on top.
Another nice presentation. I frenched the rack I got from the butcher, which was a huge pain in the ass (I've not done it very often, so don't have a natural flair yet), which ensures that the rib bones come out of the oven clean and visually dramatic, a sweeping arc of clean bone rising out of the meat.
When I served it, I did the frou-frou thing of scooping the mashed potatoes into a pastry bag equipped with a star tip, making a long, swirly stripe down the center of the plate. I put the lamb (leaving two pieces together for each person) alongside the potatoes, positioned so that the bone flowed up into the air over the potatoes. Then I laid the fennel along the other side of the potatoes.
And finally, the sauce, which I spooned over the lamb. Ah, the sauce. One of the better sauces I've ever made. I had just a little bit of the chicken stock left, reduced even further as I warmed it up for the risotto. I heated it up yet again (it came out of the fridge as "chicken jello", always a good sign), and rehydrated an ounce of dried porcini in the liquid. I didn't have much liquid left, so I unfortunately had to add some water to bulk it up a bit. After I was done browning the rack before its time in the oven, I deglazed the pan with the porcini-chicken stock mixture. And then reduced it until it was thick and sludgy. I was only able to eke out about six spoonfuls of sauce for us all, but it was worth it.
The wine worked nicely. I'm a fan of Barbera, which is a Piemontese grape. I think it has a lot of character and depth. The best examples come from Italy, of course, but the Rabbit Ridge one is pretty good as well.
Stretching the wine over two courses each made for a rarety in the Schneider household: a cheese course accompanied by red wine. I planned the cheeses accordingly, selecting harder styles which tend to work better with the wine.
When I first saw the idea for a rosemary shortbread, I was surprised. Always eager to try interesting flavor combinations, I made a batch and was surprised by how well they came out. Since then I've seen rosemary used in other dessert-y ways, a role it's well suited for.
The sorbet was based on a peach ginger sorbet I made a while ago, inspired to do it myself when I was disappointed with a version I tried at a local restaurant. I don't like subtle ginger, and I don't like wan peach flavor. So the sorbet was a burst of peach flavor with an after effect of ginger kick which sent jolts through my system.
To serve this dish, I used our "New Wave" bowls. Villeroy & Bach released this line of plates, and they have sold phenomenally well. They're total faddy foodie dishes with undulating curves in three different directions and a plain white look. It is a sad thing to realize I've become a plate groupie, but I can't deny it. I put three scoops of sorbet on the bottom, and laid a wedge of shortbread on its side balanced between the three balls.
The wine pairing was inspired by a recent dinner at Charlie Trotter's, which I hope to write up soon. It was one of the two wine pairings on that menu I had which was truly inspired, the wine and food interacting with each other in ways I wasn't expecting. My rendition worked nicely, though it didn't have the same synergy as Chef Trotter's.
Did it work? Is Amanda coming home? Well, she definitely felt spoiled, but I don't think we quite convinced her yet. Perhaps another dinner the next time she's down...
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