DAF: Lobster Eaten, Lessons Learned

this round of DAF was bitter sweet. this post covers 2 aspects of the dinner: the food (sweet) and the personal (bitter - why i wasn't a rockstar). WARNING - THESE DISHES TASTED BETTER THAN THEY LOOKED!

the food (sweet)
of the menu this time, sadly, only 2 of the 3 courses were captured. UPDATE: leonard did get all the courses, including dessert. leonard, our resident photographic guru may have captured more so i hope to be able to come back and add a photo of the first dish. anon - the menu:

~ pan fried ling cod, samosa filled ravioli, curry emulsion, vegetable salad

~ chicken tikka masala, indian saffron rice

~ butter poached lobster, puff pastry medallion, lobster sauce, baby bok choy, baby carrots, pearl onions

~ melon balls in simple syrup

 ^ Ling Cod & Samosa Ravioli ^

 

^ The Tikka Masala ^

 

^ The Curry Butter Poached Lobster ^

might as well start with the photos of the finished products above, none of which are very pretty due to my BEING WASTED at the time of plating - which is covered in more detail in the "why i wasn't a rockstar" section following this food section - so those of you so inclined can skip the rest of the rambling. but i give fair warning: if you stop now, you will miss out on the cruel lobstercide of 4 lovely maine lobsters and a glimpse at what $85 of freshly extracted lobster meat looks like!

the menu was all sorta prep time cooking. although, in retrospect, i should have made both sauces, the curry emulsion sauce for the fish and ravioli, and the lobster sauce, the evening before. seems to me now that sauces can develop their flavors when the rest in the fridge for a day. any of you notice that as well? ah well, that's NOT what i did. instead, the previous day's prep duty included: 1) steeping the lobsters (boiling 2 minutes just to kill 'em, and make it easy to extract the basically raw lobster meat for its subsequent poaching in the beurre monte), 2) marinating the chicken overnight for the tikka masal, and 3) preparing the samosa filling for the raviolis.

course 1 - pan fried ling cod, samosa filled ravioli, curry emulsion, vegetable salad
the first corse, not pictured, was a pan fried piece of ling cod on top of a samosa ravioli in a curry emulsion sauce. i say this again in case you didn't get that from the header above (uh huh.) there was a deceptive amount of work done here, but, like the lobster, all the vegetables were chopped, blanced, iced and stored prior to cooking. the plating worked out well with a nice circle of sauce and the ravioli, fish and vegetable salad stacked in a tower.  the fish was bland and i'll have to remeber to either NOT buy ling cod again, or to season the ever lovin sweet jesus out of it. the curry sauce (from none other than the french laundry cookbook) rocked - it was smooth, mounted with a lot of butter and the warm curry flavor worked well with the bland fish. curry just rocks, period.

for the ravioli i wanted to do a play on indian samosas to compliment the indian nature of this particular dinner. so i created a traditional vegetarian samosa filling of potatoes - but omitted the green peas, since i hate the little bastards, and went with finely chopped carrots to add some crunch. seasoned the potato mix with some garam masala, tumeric, cumin and chili and combined with well mashed potatoes. i think the result was pretty interesting - enjoy this photo of Leonard, the photo guy, assembling the raviolis:

and the finished product:

 

course 2 ~ chicken tikka masala, indian saffron rice

i've made this several times using this recipe: http://www.recipezaar.com/25587. the recipe is great and i only change a few things to suit my tastes - namely marinating the chicken overnight and adding butter and sugar to the sauce in its final stage of simmering. (i'm sure this came as a shock since i rarely use butter... except for when i cook ANYTHING savory.)

now what i really love about cooking indian is that it's like a little science experiment - mixing 4 or 500 spices together like little chemicals. i may have to use a beaker somehow the next time i make this. here's the mise for the marinade (and no, the gatorade didn't make it into the dish) (and another "and" - no making fun on my cheap ass spices. i'm cheap, deal with it):

course 3 ~ butter poached lobster, puff pastry medallion, lobster sauce, baby bok choy, baby carrots, pearl onions

here it comes, the lobstercide - that, for you uneducated folks, is the murder of lobsters. the dish, in theory, came from Michael Minna's Lobster Pot Pie. i got to eat there with my engineering group at work - score - and i did, if i do say so myself, pick the perfect menu. for my main i had the lobster pot pie. there's a great video showing the serving of said pie which i encourage you to observe. the frakkin' pie tasted 10x better than it looked and i was determined to make it. of course by this time i was commited to making the tikka masala, since i knew i could do that well, and thought, how do i make this lobster pot of goodness indian? curry. duh.

first up, the lobstercide:

 

 ^ "oh, hi larry!" ^

 ^ "uh, larry?" ^

 ^ "you sick f@ck!" ^

note: the preceeding commentary was originally provided by my buddy Paul Wang outta New Yoke City. 

that last picture is of Larry and 3 of his brothers and sisters, each of which was steeped in hot water for 2 mins, just to Lobstercide them but not enough to cook the meat, and then the meat was removed. this was so that i could control the cooking of the meat in the buerre monte (aka water and butter emulsion aka almost melted butter. if you really want to know the difference, look up emulsion) - yet another technique culled from the great FLC. it was amazingly difficult, especially 4 times over. worst part of it was that it took a long time for each lobster to finally die! i felt awful when, even after a full minute, they were still twitching. next time im putting them straight in boiling water - no more torture in my future. then came the meat extraction - frakkin' hilarity. i got pretty good at it, but no matter how you do it, there are a lot of juices that need to come out of a recently deceased lobster. by then time i was done twisting the tail off, ripping the top of the body off, and whacking the shinto out of the large, very tuff claws of four lobsters, there was LOBSTER GORE EVERYWHERE! haha, you had to be there... (although i laugh now, it is only to try to protect myself from the terrible empathy i feel and guilt over causing what must have been a hellishly painful death - seriously, im going to try another method next time to ensure less suffering)

ok, meat out of lobsters - check - vegetables cut and blanched - check - time to make the sauce. first a quick shot of my OCD in action, followed by 2 stages of the lobster sauce in it's 2 hour development of searing the lobster bodies, and, well, read the recipe to find out how if you're so inclined:

^ trust me, at this point it smelled like effen lobster heaven! well, except for the lobsters, although i certainly hope they were in lobster heaven... won't be going there myself. maybe in hell, where i belong, larry will get to come back and kill me slowly. damn... ^

so that's the food. all in all pretty tasty. i need to work on the photography though, don't think i've quite nailed the "story of dinner" yet. alas, on to the bitter part of this post...

the personal (bitter - why i wasn't a rockstar)
first, im not ashamed to admit that one of the main reasons i love cooking and hosting DAF is the personal satisfaction that comes from my peeps being impressed by my work and by enjoying it. bottom line: when the crew comes over, raves about the food, eats and drinks for hours, and, in general, has a kick ass time, then i feel like a rockstar -- and really, who doesn't like feeling like a rockstar?!?

that being said, this DAF taught me that letting your guests relax (preferably by making sure they drink way more wine than you do) and not "fishing for feedback" about the food is the true path to a night of decadent dining pleasure. this time around, against a background of lobster shells, sauce and meat, i didn't let anyone relax, and i fished away, all damn night. it was still a lovely night, and not wanting to cry over spilled milk, i will simply say it could have been better and i won't make the same mistake twice.

and did i mention that i think this was all cuz i was totally wasted? i had been prepping for 2 days - my poor babe had been hearing maniacal murmers like "mmhh ahh i could just plate the lobster on TOP of a piece of puff pastry instead of using a pot, mmwhaa..." - and come sunday morning i woke up ready to rock the day! after all that hard work i figured i deserved a beer while i cooked. so first up, start decanting the 2001 jordan river red, next drink a beer... at 10... IN THE MORNING. come 2 pm the vegetables were peeled (ok, pearl onions are just little bastards, no other way to put it), chopped, blanched, chilled and ready. lobster bodies were seared, mirepoix and cream gently bubbling away around them. all was well. by the time the first guests arrived i was half way through a 6-pack of sierra nevada and having a grande ole time. my boy leonard and i took off to procure some fresh pasta dough and i promptly put him to work on the samosa ravioli. now leonard is about as cheerful as a person can get and hanging out with him just puts you in a mood to have fun - so why not start on the wine? (eff'n genius!)

well, to make a long story short, when cruch time hit and i had to sear off 6 pieces of fish, blend the curry emulsion suace, warm the vegetable garnish and try to plate all 6 before everything cooled down, i was D-O-N-E... loaded... and sweating bigtime. and this was the starter course out of 3 planned courses. so the first course out and at this point im blabbering on, feeling terrible about the "weak sauce" and the "bad plating." and here was the lesson that hit my like a ton of bricks the next morning:

my guests didn't have the chance to form their own opinions about the food, nor to enjoy it - instead they could only eat and listen to me complain about the food. all of a sudden i didn't feel like the rockstar i did last time and although the party was still fun, it was clouded, like san francisco fog, with my drunk ass bitching and moaning. oh well, cest la vie, lesson learned. we still had fun...

the end (of lobsters)

Enough "creative" writing...

sorry about that last post - tried my hand at "creative writing" and, upon reflection, i've decided that there will be no more of that. ("lovely bath in boiling butter?" yea...)

Morels, Roasted Ribeye, Pommes Maxxim, Love

so here's a wonderful dish, lifted mostly from the French Laundry Cookbook: pan roasted rib steak, pommes maxim and morel mushroom sauce. so here goes. first up, the sweet, beautiful ruby red tower blessed with marbling worth far more than that hard, inedible marble in caesar's palace. I'm talking about a rib cut, 2 1/2" thicks, marbled in fat that looks, gloriously, like this:

And that piece of love, so carefully crusted with coarse cracked black peppercorns and a veritable snowstorm of kosher flake salt, was magnificent. a 2 1/2" thick cut of love, PROPERLY SEASONED PEOPLE, that was ready to be treated to a lovely bath in boiling butter... You wanna see i suppose, how it looked roasting in the oven:

There it roasted, like a king bathing in an golden pool of butter, salt and pepper; and there it bathed being turned periodically, basted... over and over and over so that the roast became one with, infused by, the french cooking secret of butter, butter, butter. and you know what happened next??

We rocked the pommes maxxim - a couple of waxy potatoes gave their lives and were sliced thin, arranged in circular patterns to fit a saucepan and finally, like a great reward, were layered and doused with the sweetest of clarified butter. these lucky potatoes, their slices, fulfilled their destiny and baked together, melting and fusing, one layer after another golden layer, into the pommes maxim they were destined to be. and that was that.

Two quick additions, saucier in nature joined the fray: Bordelaise sauce, easy with the marriage of the proper mirepoix in a ruby splash of red wine, and the sauteed morel mushrooms, bought fresh at Whole Paycheck for way more than I'd care to admit. The morels, although delicious beyond compare, just weren't the purty, so the Bodelaise sauce is pictured here instead:

and finally, since i'm starving now, the finished product: a hunk of the pommes maxim, draped with the sauteed morel mushrooms, topped with slices of the beef, all swimming in a pool of the Bordelaise. enjoy...

holy lobster flavor...

Despite the great prices of for fresh, live, well cared for Maine Lobster over at New England Lobster in South San Fran - I still wanted to try a lobster sauce last night without actually investing in fresh lobster. Enter the Better-Than-Bullion Lobster Lobster Base. See stolen photo below:


Because I still have SO MUCH TO LEARN I went a little nuts with the base figuring more base - more flavor. W-h-o-a. It had kick, bite, and soooo much lobster flavor. The dish wasn't ruined and I learned a bit about using prepared base, this being my first time. Awsome tool to allow great flavor when you don't have time to extract it from the real ingredients yourself (and probably good for all other kinds of situations I am ignorant of).

Check out the results - curry seasoned, sauteed jumbo prawns on a pie crust medallion (pie crust: another first for me) in the afore-mentioned lobster sauce...