7 Course Extravaganza

For months and months, Alyse and I have talked about having over some of our favorite food lovers:  Boss Dave and his wife Jen, Chefs Tom and Christy.  Each has blessed us with delicious food and wine, and it only seemed right to return the favor.  And I have to admit...this was going to be an intimidating meal.

After all, Chefs Tom and Christy are ACTUAL Chefs (not my pretend "wannabe" variety) that have an awesome restaurant (Food Matters) and have cooked at other awesome restaurants (Cafe Atlantico).  And Dave and Jen, also awesome in the kitchen, have rather refined palates themselves (their last meal was at Alinea).  Finally, Alyse and I settled on a 7-course (7!!!) tasting menu that would give us the chance to showcase a wide variety of preparations and flavors.

The preparation for this meal actually began weeks ago with the veal stock, which was the base for the espagnole sauce, which was the base for a cheuvreil sauce that was served during the second to last course.  This has indeed been a many-weeks-long process.  But the outcome was well worth the hours and hours of preparation.

We started with an amuse bouche that had been inspired by a trip to Farrah Olivia for restaurant week.  Chef Morou serves a "shocked escolar"....a small cut of fish that has been poached very quickly, and then set in a chilled mixture of soy and wine.  It's a dish that totally stole my heart and made me crave escolar for weeks and weeks.  To get some, I had to special order it from Balducci's (did you know you can do this?  if you want a cut of meat or fish or poultry, or even produce, and you're not sure where to get it...just call and ask!  a lot of times they'll order it JUST FOR YOU.  Pretty sweet).

In any case, that is too long an explanation to tell you that I fell in love with escolar and wanted to serve it almost-raw.  I diced the raw escolar, which basically has the texture of butter, dusted it with some freshly ground cumin, placed it over some cilantro oil and topped with some fleur de sel before going at it with my blow torch and finishing with lemon zest.  I absolutely adored this amuse.

The first course was a chilled corn soup topped with a tarragon oil that was done from start to finish by Alyse.  There are few words to describe how perfect this dish turned out.  Sweet, with just the perfect toothy texture and a surprisingly mild yet well-balanced contrast with the tarragon oil.  The presentation was beautiful, with the bright green oil sitting atop the creamy yellow soup.  This was probably my favorite dish, overall, of the whole night.

And I forgot to get a picture of it.  AGH!

The second course was also all Alyse:  she wrapped some beautiful raw tuna in basil, let it sit marinate in the fridge, and then lightly steamed it right in the leaves to infuse the basil into the tuna.  She served it on top of a light, acidic slaw with a little basil chiffonade.  Another beautiful presentation, and another great starter dish.  At this point, we had hit three extra-base hits and I was feeling great about the night.

Next up was our version of "Shrimp and Grits."  We marinated the shrimp in an oil that had been infused with red pepper flakes, orange juice, copious amounts of garlic, and parsley and then sauteed them over really high heat.  At the top of the picture is my 15-spice blend (for the ribeye later) and the cilantro oil from the earlier amuse bouche

The grits were polenta and gruyere, chilled to room temperature, cut into rounds, and then deep fried until they were crispy-on-the-outside, gooey-on-the-inside goodness.  They were served over a red pepper sauce that had sweet and salty notes of polenta.  4 for 4.

So we were due for a mistake somewhere along the way, and finally we hit ours.  We thought a nice, simple, chicken consomme would be a great palette cleanser.  A little dash of it into a bowl with a sauteed mushroom and some scallions would do well to transition from the lighter first courses into the heavier main courses.

But the execution ended up all wrong.  When reheating the consomme, I must have left it on the burner too long, because while a consomme should have the clarity of this (which it did, before I reheated it):

mine had the clarity of this:

Yes, that's miso soup.  And that's what it looked like.  The flavor of the consomme itself was ok, but the mushroom was a little bitter and my idea for using toasted rosemary as a garnish that would impart a nice, herbal scent failed when all the rosemary fell into the soup.  Just, massive fail.  Although, if there were any dish to miss on, it was this one, and if there was any way in which to fail, it would have been that (and not overcooking/undercooking a main protein, for instance)

The pork tenderloin got us back on track.  I started by butterflying a tenderloin--something that requires a bit of practice to get right.

We then added layers of bleu cheese butter and red bartlett pears that had gone through a mandoline before rolling the entire thing up, tying it, sprinkling with salt, pepper, and paprika, pan-searing, and then oven roasting while glazing with maple syrup that had been infused with thai bird chiles.  We served over some wilted dandelion greens that had been tossed in a roasted pear vinaigrette.  This was a wonderfully balanced dish.  The mild, salty bleu cheese worked together with the sweet and spicy glaze over the bitter and acidic greens to achieve a balance of the entire palette that is often hard to come by.

Carla from Top Chef actually inspired the last of our main courses.  I loved how she was perfectly content to put a perfectly cooked piece of meat, a slam-banging sauce, and some well prepared potatoes in front of a panel of food experts.  So I picked up a huge dry-aged, bone-in ribeye and crusted it with my 15-spice blend before basting it with clarified butter and finally roasting it in the oven.  The preparation was relatively simple, something I had done dozens of times before, and felt good about.

The most complicated part of this dish was unquestionably the sauce.  The veal stock--->espagnole sauce---> chevreuil sauce.  We started with another basic mirepoix.

From there, I added bacon and some trim from the ribeye that I didn't feel like using and let all the fat render out.

My thinking here, since I wasn't working from a recipe:  "Well, I love bacon.  So I should just use tons of it.  I mean, what could be better than bacon?"

Oops.  Because after I added the sauce espagnole and began to reduce, something became very quickly apparent.  The balanced, superb sauce I was looking for was just....a bacon sauce.  Forget chevreuil and all that.  This was bacon sauce.  Sounds great in theory, but in reality....not as good as it should be.  But this was my favorite moment of this dinner for me--I didn't panic.

I added more veal stock and another dose of white and red wine.  I added a sachet d'epices.

I reduced and reduced and reduced and finally (about 3 hours after I started, and about 15 minutes before the ribeye was ready) it hit the sweet spot of both the consistency I wanted and the rich flavor with just hints (HINTS) of bacon and herbs that I wanted).

Our other part of the plate, a potato brioche, didn't quite brioche the way we had hoped, so we substituted with some (less than perfect, but still quite edible) potato chips with alderwood smoked sea salt.

Finally, we wrapped up with an ice cream that I had based off one of Christy's white bordeaux dessert wines she had introduced me to a couple of weeks earlier.  With just a touch of cinnamon and caramel, it paired wonderfully with some apple fritters and a reduction of another Food Matters special offering--the Alcyone dessert wine (also know as "the most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth")

And there we had it.  7 courses and an amuse bouche.  All the food got out, and with generally only 10-15 minute waits between courses.  And while there were a couple of missteps, Alyse and I both agreed that this was by far the most challenging, impressive, (and, at least for me, rewarding) meal we had ever put together.  Special thanks to Dave, Jen, Tom, and Christy for joining us and letting us try this out on you!  A great night with great friends, great food, and great wine.  Can't complain about that!