Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Crab Ravioli - Feenie Style

Thanks Mrs. Chan for another awesome gift - by the way, for those of you who don't know, the Chan women are absolute maestros of gift giving - the Feenie's Cookbook. You can Google Robert Feenie to learn more, but the important thing about him is that his former restaurant, Lumiere in Vancouver, is where I took my beloved foxy babe for dinner the night I asked her to marry me. Anyway, here's the first dish I made out of the book: Crab Ravioli with Truffle Oil Buerre Blanc. Very fun dish to make - hand made pasta for the first time from scratch and rolled it OLD SKOOL with a rolling pin, picked the meat out of two crabs, and made a buerre blanc which, i must say, is my current favorite sauce - booze and butter? oh hell yea... in hindsight the ravioli should have been a little smaller and the parsely more artfully placed, but the dish tasted great according to babe and our friend Diana, so no complaints!


Thursday, October 9, 2008

Wrapped 2 ways...

Wrapped way #1 - So i made my first set of dumplings finally - something i've been wanting to try for a long time. the recipe, although i'm sure it's pretty standard, came from ??? in a recent issue of Gourmet magazine. ground pork and chives baby, doesn't get any better i think. they came out ok but... wait for it... i learned ANOTHER lesson. minced ginger out of a jar is both lazy (bad chez berliner, bad) and extreemly potent. so i call these dumplings the "pow-kick-yo-ass-with-ginger" dumplings. however i must say, wrapping those things was totally zen for me - i wrapped 43 but would have been happy to wrap another 100. i just wrapped, enjoying a beer, listening to the tv. very nice.

Wrapped way #2 - I finally nipped the tip of my finger off using my kick ass Benreinier (or however u spell it) - thanks Myra!! I feel more "official" now but I'm afraid it was too wimpy to leave a scar so I'll have to keep trying. anyways to prevent, um, bleeding all over the rack of lamb i was making - with some incredible poached fingerling potatoes from an Alice Waters recipe - I just gauzed it and then taped the sucker up - yea!