The Week After
In the Bay Area, fall turns into winter with the quick-change flair of a magician. One week we are suffering through the blazing heat of October's Indian summer, the next we are pulling extra clothes out and putting flannel sheets on the bed.
This can make planning dinner parties during this time a bit of a challenge. You have one thing in mind, assuming the day will be wiltingly hot, and the day comes and you end up with a frigid evening that threatens rain.
All this to explain why I didn't do raw oysters as the opener for our most recent dinner party. It's too bad, as it would have been the group for it. Lisa, Josh, Brian and Anisa all have a deep love of food that rivals, perhaps surpasses, Melissa's and mine. I imagined half a dozen Kumamotos each, served on a bed of crushed ice with a simple mignonette sauce and a wedge of lemon. But oysters means some sort of chilled wine, and I didn't think the group would be up for four cold whites and only one soul-warming red.
So after our appetizers of olives, butternut squash pickles and chicken liver paté, paired with an estate-bottled Champagne from René Geoffroy a Cumières, I opted for French Onion Soup. The soup was good, helped along by home made beef stock, but I couldn't get quite the right browning on the cheese. Still, everyone slurped it down. To go with this most classic of brasserie dishes, I opted for a classic brasserie wine: Beaujolais. In this case from the set-apart Julienas appellation. It was a nice wine, one that reminded me that I don't drink enough Beaujolais anymore. Perhaps it's time to restock.
The main course was half a cornish game hen served atop a bed of wild rice and white rice, surrounded by a "fennel ceviche"--fennel sliced super-thin and briefly cooked in a warm vinegar solution. Over the birds, which had a beautiful brown skin from the balsamic glaze I had applied while they cooked, I spooned a beurre noisette sauce. It wasn't visible against the brown birds, but it added a nice richness of flavor to the whole dish. To go with this course I pulled out our bottle of the L'Aventure 2001 Estate Cuvée from western Paso Robles. When I tried this wine at the winery as research for an article I'm writing, I mostly tasted cloves from the oak. I don't know if its couple of months in the bottle had been kind to it, or if the different glasses we used made a difference, but the cloves weren't present at dinner. What was there instead was a nice, well-balanced and flavorful wine.
I mentioned that our guests are all food lovers, and it's always a treat having such guests, because I can pull out the stops for the cheese course. I served Livarot and Epoisses, two of France's stinkier cheeses. There are laws which forbid carrying Livarot on a plane. It's an intense, flavorful cheese at its best, and Epoisses, from Burgundy, is one of the few cheeses which can stand up to it when served alongside. On the side, I served more of our pepper-cured dried figs, and in the glasses I served our beloved Meulenhof 2001 Erdener Kabinett Riesling.
The cheese course worked nicely, but I was disappointed by the dessert. It tasted fine, but its presentation lacked interest. Mentally, I more or less knew how I wanted to present it: three poached pears lying in a pool of honey caramel, with piped Brie de Meaux in the center of each pear. But the Brie didn't whip up quite right, so I only had enough to pipe into the center of the peace sign of pear quarters. And my original batch of honey caramel burned as I was reheating it, so I had to quickly make a new batch, which didn't have the depth of color that I wanted. So the plate was somewhat monotonous to look at. Still, the flavors worked well together, so it's just something I need to touch up a bit looks wise. Accompanying it, I opted for an Austrian Trockenbeerenauslese made with Chardonnay, an unusual wine I got at a tasting for Blue Danube Wines, a new importer of Eastern European wines.
A note on pictures, by the way. Our camera has been replaced, but it turns out to be awkward to deal with pictures in our new apartment. There's no good place in the kitchen to set up dishes, and it's terribly uncomfortable to take pictures at the table; people are there to enjoy their food, after all, not wait for a photo shoot. So until we figure this out, no pictures of platings, though I know some of you liked having them available.
To close out the evening, I served each person a small plate with three chocolate truffles and two pomegranate jellies. After my failed experiment with The French Laundry's jellies the week before, I wanted to try again, and this batch came out much better. One person whose opinion I trust quite a bit suggested they were still somewhat sweet, so it's not perfected yet, but they were significantly closer to what I wanted: deep red jellies coated in sugar with a pure pomegranate flavor (I juiced the pomegranates to get the most flavor, rather than buying pomegranate juice). The truffles had a healthy dose of port in them to add complexity to the flavor.
It's funny how your perspective changes. I don't like to do dinner parties on Saturday nights, because of the amount of work I put into them. But after the ten-course meal the week before, doing the five-course meal, or however many it was, didn't really phase me. I had time to take a break during the day, oddly. And this despite the fact that my oven (though not the burners) went out mysteriously during the day, which meant that the paté was cooked in a different oven. Just as mysteriously, it came back on later that day, and so I didn't have to cook the French onion soup and the hens in a different oven. Maybe I'm beginning to get comfortable with this whole entertaining thing.
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