I love fancy dinners. Eating them, making them, reading about them, photographing them - if it's related to a fancy dinner, I am down. So naturally, when
the most blessed event of the year was announced, I seized the opportunity to make Mellis, Dan, and myself a very fancy meal.
I turned to this guy for help:
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The French Laundry cookbook: a weighty tome devoted to recreating meals from one of the best restaurants in America. It details fussy, multi-step recipes requiring, for instance, twelve lobster bodies to boil down into a garnish, or fresh Perigord black truffles to chop up and use in dip. Not for every day.
Fortunately, there is a fantastic blog written by Carol Blymire, who, over the course of ~two years, made every recipe in the damn thing, so with her step-by-step instructions and the occasional cheat, I settled on Parmigiano Cups with Goat Cheese Mousse to start (this is a cheat - I've made it before and it's easy), followed by some kind of fancy salad and then
Lobster Crepes with Ginger-Carrot Emulsion and Pea Shoots as the main course. For dessert I'd churn some salted caramel ice cream, a spectacular recipe from Amanda Hesser that made Dan, upon tasting it, drop his spoon, fall to the floor, and curl into a ball of speechless joy.
First up were the Parmigiano Cups, which were child's play. Melt some discs of grated parmesan cheese in the oven, allow to slightly cool, and then shape into cups using an egg carton for your mold. Blend goat cheese with some flavorings and a little cream. Voila!
The lobsters required a little more work. Because I am a wimp, I asked the guy at the lobster place (which is called, incidentally, The Lobster Place) to kill the lobsters for me. Then I cooked them using a modified version of Thomas Keller's excellent "steeping" method, which involves boiling a giant pot of water, turning off the heat, and then adding the lobsters. They cook for two minutes, after which you remove them, return the claws to the pot for an additional five minutes, and then, while the lobsters are still hot, remove the meat from the shell. The theory is that extreme heat, as you'd get from boiling or even steaming, makes the meat seize up and get tough. By cooking them just a little at a somewhat lower temperature, you get all the meat out of the shell and then finish cooking them with another method later. This was my
second time doing it, and it works. The meat stays extremely tender and sweet.
As that was going on, I made the carrot-ginger sauce, which involves
manually juicing three pounds of carrots with some ginger buying 2 cups of carrot juice and letting it simmer down with some ginger before whisking in a frightening amount of butter.
I also made some crepes. Hot tip: a small offset spatula (ordinarily recommended for icing cakes) is my new & improved tool for flipping crepes. I usually ruin half of them, and this time I only tore one!
Once all those components were done, the lobster filling (lobster meat, mascarpone cheese, shallots, chives) got rolled into the crepes and baked for ten minutes, and then placed on a pool of the ginger-carrot (carrots!) sauce and then topped with a little pea shoot salad (peas!). It looked like this:
Yes! It worked! The craziest part is that BY FAR the best part of this dish was not the laboriously prepped lobster filling, but the carrot sauce. This carrot sauce was out of control. Creamy, buttery, structured, smooth, slightly sweet - I will make this again. I will put it on anything. It was insane. The crepes and pea shoot salad were delicious as well, but dear lord this sauce. Go buy some carrot juice and make it today.
So that was dinner. My camera got stolen a few weeks ago (sniff) so that's it for pictures. We ate, we drank, and we played with the laser pointer.
Life is good.
