A Home Cooked Meal for the Family

Until now, my blog hasn't shown much of my deep interest in cooking. Those who know me, know that I love to eat as well as cook, and I wanted to share the menu, and some pictures of the meal I made for my family this past Sunday. I hope also to post more of my eating and cooking adventures here in the future.

Having traveled widely, and being fortunate enough to live in New York, I have experienced a great deal of good food, and from that I became interested in cooking early on. A few times a year, though less frequently in the last few years because I haven't had the facilities to do so, I come up with a gourmet meal that pushes my abilities to cook, plate and serve a meal that aims to come as close to a high end restaurant meal as possible.

In the past, these meals have ranged from parties with as many as 16 diners with lots of "flair" (custom hand made invites and menus, floral arrangements, specialized place settings, etc.) to something far more intimate like the one this past Sunday with just my nuclear New York family where the other restaurant trappings are discarded and the focus is solely on the food.

We started off with three small dishes, really each an hors d’oeuvres / amuse bouche. The first was a variation of a dish created by José Andrés of Zaytinya in Washington, DC called "Pinchitos de tomate con sandia 'Ferran Adria'” or "Tomato and Watermelon Skewers 'Ferran Adria'."

As the name of the recipe states, the dish was itself inspired by Andrés' mentor, Ferran Adria, the chef at El Bulli in Spain and a pioneer in the world of molecular gastronomy. I put the dressing for these skewers in plastic pipettes, so that my diners could squeeze it into their mouths after first getting an uninterupted taste of the watermelon and tomato "filets" (the gelatinous seed packets that were bursting with tomato flavor).

The skewers were followed by Panko Crusted Meatballs Stuffed with Foie Gras.

These tasty mouthfuls were quite a crowd pleaser, though they did not quite meet my standards in terms of execution and presentation. in the future, I need to increase the heat during frying so that less of the foie gras dissolves before it is cooked, and I might consider dipping the meatball into a second coat of panko. I would also prefer these be served on a skewer for easier handling. For a first try though, they turned out well enough.

The last of the amuse bouche was a dish called Bacon and Eggs, which is a surprisingly simple dish from Thomas Keller's French Laundry.

The dish is a simple mouthful of just a soft poached quail egg, some bacon, and a little brunoise (a micro-dice of carrots, turnips and leeks) all arranged on a spoon, and yet the taste is quite magical.

Another celebrity chef in the world of molecular gastronomy is Grant Achatz of the Chicago restaurant Alinea. I had the good fortune of dining there a couple of years ago, and it is a truly amazing experience which challenges a diner's very concept of how and what to eat to the edge. A more luxurious version of this soup, called Hot Potato Cold Potato, is served at Alinea where they have the ability to make the soup with a base of black truffle stock, and serve with a bit of black truffle, all arranged and served on custom made serving pieces.

I was unable to find fresh black truffle at several of the gourmet stores I went to when shopping for this meal (it's the Great Recession, stupid!), so I substituted a fresh Morel mushroom from Oregon instead. What is not clear from the picture is that the cold soup, a truffled mushroom and potato cream, is served with a hunk of black truffle butter which is under the cube of Parmasean cheese at the center of the photo. The hot potato spheres provide a surprising contrast in temperature for the diner.

Somewhat unusually, I chose to stick fairly closely to published recipes for this meal rather than come up with original recipes, in part because I had a limited amount of time to come up with my menu. However, the next course was something that I put together myself after refining the recipe from a dinner for my mother's friends in St. Petersburg, FL. This dish, Diver scallops with caramelized banana, bacon, thyme, smoked sea salt and grapefruit, is seen here before the final presentation was put together.

I have had a healthy interest in smoking things over the last few years, and one of the new toys that I came across recently is called The Smoking Gun made by a company called PolyScience. The compact handheld unit allows you to create a good quantity of smoke to apply directly to foods. I used the unit to add a bit of extra smokiness to this dish as well as a good deal of drama and diner interaction by pumping smoke into a glass dome (a.k.a. an inverted wine glass) that covered the scallop before serving.

I like the fact that the diner is presented with a dish that is at first shielded from full view by the shroud of smoke under the glass, then is treated to a burst of smoke for the senses when the uncover the dish to reveal what is inside, and finally gets to taste the flavor of the smoke as a part of the dish. As a personal recipe, the dish still requires a good deal more refining, but it was definitely coming closer to what I wanted. My uncle mentioned that this was like a genie in a bottle, which is an interesting idea for a name for the dish.

The next course was a Roulade of Duck Breast with Creamed White Sweet Corn and Morel Mushroom Sauce, another French Laundry recipe, which I very much enjoyed. The photo shows the dish just before it was finished with a glaze and some black Hawai'ian sea salt.

The dish was simple in its ingredients, pleasing to the eye, and tasted fantastic, with lots of good contrast in flavors.

For the next course, I made a small portion of Seared Salmon with Salmon Skin Chicharon that was based on something I had tried well over a decade or more ago from Chef Michael Trama.

At this point, dinner was to continue with the final course, Porcini Encrusted Lamb, but even with the far smaller portions that I had prepared compared to what I would prepare for other parties, my diners were already quite satiated, so I skipped this course (more for me over the next few days!). It is interesting to note that our family, a family known for its great appetites, has matured and continues to winnow down portion sizes as we all are increasingly conscious of our health.

No meal would be complete without a salad, but rather than the normal leafy greens, I wanted to use it as a palate cleanser between the main course and dessert.

To that end I presented my guests with this frozen salad of spinach, romaine lettuce, and arugula with a sherry and walnut vinaigrette. This tart entre'act definitely cleansed the palate quickly, but also challenges everything you know and expect from a salad from its ice cold temperature, to it crunchy crystal texture.

To bring the meal to a close I served a Chocolate meringue cake with Rose Cream andRose Granitas.

In terms of presentation, this was the dish I was least happy with. The flavors in the dessert were astounding, but to me the dish needs some serious revamping to make it as pleasing to the eye as it was to the palate. In making the dish however, I did gain quite a bit of knowledge about what is possible with and how to handle chocolate couveture.

In making dessert I also encountered an interesting thing: Heavy Cream that fails to whip into whipped cream. After searching around the internet a little, apparently this is something that happens. There seems to be no real idea why this occasionally happens, though some posit that it happens more with ultra-pasteurized heavy cream. I checked the carton yesterday, and sure enough it was ultra-pasteurized, though that is not enough to convince me that that is the issue. The brand, Tuscan, is one I haven't used before for heavy cream, but it didn't look like there should have been an issue.

My guests enjoyed the meal, both in terms of taste, and in terms of being entertained by the novelty of many of the dishes. Watching them be entertained by the final preparation of the dishes in the kitchen and then enjoying the results at the table was a great reward for me, and made all the hard work definitely worth the while!