Chef's Tasting

Here are new photos from a recent tasting.

Shrimp and Mango Seviche; Shrimp and Mango Skewer

Shrimp and Mango. We're planning to do shrimp and mango seviche for a big crowd next week, so this was a test run to get the flavorings down. Served with a shrimp and mango skewer sitting on a bit of mango vinaigrette.

Grilled Opah, Okinawa Sweet Potato, Curry Sauce

Opah. This is opah grilled to about medium sitting on a piece of broccoli and some Okinawa sweet potatoes that we cooked in coconut milk. The now-purple coconut milk was fortified with red curry paste, fish sauce, and lime juice. Topped with a little grilled pineapple salsa.

Lumaconi Stuffed with Pulled Rabbit

Rabbit. The local rabbits are really rolling in now forcing us to get creative in finding ways to serve them. Here we braised them and pulled them off the bones, then created a sauce by reducing the braising liquid and finishing with a little cream and Dijon mustard. The meat and the sauce were combined with sautéed local carrots, leeks, and brussels sprouts, chilled, and stuffed into lumaconi (large snails). We topped the pasta with a touch of béchamel and browned that, then spooned over fresh local peas just barely warmed in butter.

Hummus, Lamb Chops, Phyllo, Olives, Preserved Lemons, Fresh Chickpeas

Hummus with Garnishes. This started as a way to showcase the fresh green chickpeas that a local farmer grows for us. In the center of the plate you see some hummus that we flavored with chile, garlic, and lemon. Sticking out of this is a phyllo crisp that has salt and ras el hanout (a North African spice mix) between the layers. The lamb chops are local and marinated with garlic, more ras el hanout, and ground sumac. Other garnishes are the aforementioned green chickpeas, winy Niçoise olives, and some of our house-cured preserved lemons. Over all is sprinkled a chiffonade of mint from the flowerbed out in front of the restaurant.

Panna Cotta with Black Berries and Anise Hyssop

Panna Cotta. Down on the plate you see a ribbon of three flavors of panna cotta: blackberry, apricot, and blueberry, three of the most abundant fruits right now. The plate is garnished with a little quick blueberry jam, apricot coulis, oat and sunflower seed granola, crème anglaise, honey-lime blackberries, and anise hyssop.

Alien Ingredient #35: Wax Apple

So here's an interesting tropical fruit that I stumbled on yesterday. It's called the wax apple in the store where I bought it. Officially known as Syzygium samarangense, it hails from Thailand to India and Malaysia to the Philippines.

It's a small fruit (refer to the cherry tomato in the photo) that is firm and has a smooth skin like a pear but with a waxier texture and a dimpled end just like a chayote. Biting into the fruit, the first thing that comes to mind is a pear or a watermelon because the fruit is dripping with juice.

I found the fruit to have a sweet flavor at first, dissipating in the middle, and then finishing with a slight piny afternote that I think comes from the skin. The flesh is fairly pithy and nearly flavorless. I wound up sucking all the juice out of the fruit and spitting out what little flesh there was.

Vote: they're a fun fruit in the summer, but their uses are pretty limited.

Alien Ingredient #34: Dosakai

Dosakai to left of Mango

And here's another random fruit that I found surfing the produce section of the market, this one labelled "Dosaki" [sic]. Almost round, about as large as a small grapefruit, and bright yellow with a smooth skin, this fruit seemed to be a melon from the outset. So I picked one of the more yellow ones with yielding flesh just like I would have picked any other melon (and in retrospect, this may have been a mistake). It didn't have much scent, perhaps just a touch of honeydew. In the photo above, you can see it in comparison to a large Tommy Atkins mango.

Looks like a Melon or Cuke

Cutting open the fruit, it sure resembles a melon, so I scooped out the seeds and spooned out a bit of flesh. It was mealy in an overripe kind of way and sour like the rind of a watermelon, without a whole lot of flavor. I admit that I consigned my bite to the trashcan. Turning to the web, I found that this is a dosakai, a type of cucumber that comes from India where it is used in all manners of ways. Now knowing that, I wish that I had picked a less ripe one that I could have used in a pickle or a curry, like I would use a winter melon.

Vote: I'll pass. Persian cucumbers are better for eating. Winter melons seem better for cooking.

Alien Ingredient #33: Mamoncillo

Mamoncillo: What Exactly is the Point?

I was walking through the produce section of the market when these tiny, lime-looking fruits caught my eye. Yet another fruit I've never heard of, this one called mamoncillo (Melicoccus bijugatus). They are lime green to olive green in color with a skin that approximates that of a lime, albeit without any of that beautiful citrus fragrance in the rind. The skins are very thin and easy to peel off after cracking with your teeth, leaving a pulpy (in a very ripe mango kind of way) flesh that is a light orange in color. Biting into the flesh was a mistake. As you can see from the mamoncillo in cross section in the photo, it's all hat and no cowboy: there's just a tiny layer of flesh around a big, hard seed. Tony tried the seed and wished he hadn't: I've never seen somebody spit something out so fast in my life! He reports it is very bitter.

So, you're salivating wanting to know what the pulpy not quite slimy flesh tastes like, aren't you? It is sour in a tamarind kind of lemony citrus way. OK, not so wonderful. I read on the internet that people boil them to make a juice from which they make aguas frescas. Yeah, I'm going to leave that to them. It seems a whole lot more productive to make an agua fresca from tamarind or lemon or lime.

Vote: What exactly is the point?

Chef's Tasting

Here are photos from last night's Chef's Tasting. Appearing for the first time this year are cherries, summer squash, sockeye salmon, new potatoes, and red raspberries. This is likely the very last tasting of the year to feature strawberries and asparagus: only the weather knows for sure.

Deviled Egg

This dish is the happy coincidence of foie gras and duck eggs. You know, the late afternoon, between shifts conversation on the deck that goes like, "What happens if we mix foie gras into a deviled egg?" The result is so rich that it can only be eaten in tiny quantities. Notice the relative size of the cornichon fan to the egg-foie mousse. We kept adding more and more pickle brine to the mousse to balance the fat and the acid. The olive-looking critter in the center is a truffled pickled immature peach.

Sockeye Salmon

Over the years, I have done many takes on a dish of salmon and Thai curry and this is another. The sauce is a green Thai curry and the green dots are a curried avocado mousse. In the center of the plate are cubes of deep-fried salmon and avocado, topped with some tobiko for crunch and a little Thai basil.

Soft Shell Crab

Not much to say here except the salad is awesome. It's a mix of Beth's mesclun, bean sprouts, carrots, Thai basil, cilantro, and green onions tossed in a dressing of vinegar, sugar, lime juice, fish sauce, chile paste, and garlic. Very Vietnamese and very cooling and refreshing.

June Salad

Gorgeous! The first new potatoes of the year down in a ring with grilled asparagus over and then topped with a sauté of peas, asparagus, and morels in a white wine and shallot butter sauce. A quail egg gilds the lily. These peas are so amazingly sweet that we probably ate more than half of what we shelled. They are addictive!

Squash and Goat Cheese

This is a quick taste of summer in an otherwise late spring menu. Because of our crazy spring, everything is running 2-3 weeks early, including these awesome pattypan squash that we sliced, grilled, and stacked with rounds of fried goat cheese. The goat cheese is an amazingly creamy product that was made locally on Wednesday (and served on Friday). We mixed it with roasted red pepper before forming it into rounds and breading it. A drizzle of pesto and some borage blossoms complete the garnishes.

Pork and Cherries

We love cherry season! Sorry this photo is so dark. All hell was breaking loose in the kitchen at the time: the dining room was full and our ticket rail was overflowing onto the counter. We were in hyperdrive, which lends itself not at all to decent photography. On the left there is a pork cheek, braised, chilled, sliced, and crisped in a steel pan, topped with a cherry-celery salsa. Cherries and celery, sweet and bitter, yin and yang, awesome! In the center on top of the grits is a piece of our pork belly topped with the remains of our dried cherry olivada, a tapenade-like relish. On the right is a salad of microgreens and pork confit threads. We cure the pork confit and age it under duck fat. For this dish, we shredded it and deep fried it, then mixed it with greens and tossed it in a cherry vinaigrette. All our pork is certified Berkshire.

Berries

This is a fun and light way to celebrate the end of strawberries and the beginning of raspberries. Their seasons only ever overlap for a week or two. I baked some oatmeal tuiles and layered them with a lemon meringue and fresh berries. Simple, light, and a fitting ending to a late spring menu.

Chef's Table

Each Thursday night we host up to 8 people at a communal table in our back bar for the Chef's Table. It's fun for us because unlike formal tastings where clients give us their likes and dislikes and we build a menu around that, for the Chef's Table we cook what we feel. More than that, we are experimenting with dishes, ingredients, and techniques. It's great way for us to start working on a concept for a new dish and get some immediate feedback. Some dishes work well, some need improvement, and well, some will never grace our table again.

Borage Granita, Sockeye Tartare, Cold Pea Soup with Riesling

What does one do with a surfeit of borage? Granita came to mind for us and we really liked its cucumber flavor as an amuse bouche.

Warm Rabbit "Terrine", Dijon Vichyssoise

Local purple potatoes and garlic chives on the bottom, local rabbit in a Dijon cream in the middle, local snow peas on top, warm cream of leek and potato soup flavored with a hint of Dijon mustard around. Pain in the rear to plate.

Duck, Duck, Goose

On the plate is a slab of sourdough bread French toast made with a goose egg custard and fried in foie gras fat. On top of this is what we call duck bacon, breast tenders that we cure in salt, sugar, and pink salt and then smoke. The next layer is scrambled goose egg with chives, done in the classic French preparation oeufs brouillés, whisked over a water bath until creamy and custardy. On top are threads of house-cured duck confit that we have shredded and deep fried. Maple syrup completes this delicious, over-the-top dish. The duck bacon was killer.

Sockeye Two Ways

Sockeye belly flaps (the really good stuff) confited in duck fat on a salad of tomatoes, Niçoise olives, fresh basil, and sliced caperberries; seared sockeye filet on lentils with bacon. Not much novel here; just letting the first sockeye of the year shine.

Île Flottante; Horchata Crème Anglaise

Playing games with chufa (aka tiger nuts) from Spain, we decided to make a classic horchata and convert that to a crème anglaise. What to do with crème anglaise? Float an almond meringue in it, old school style and top it with some fresh strawberries and a poppyseed tuile. The novelty for us here is that we cooked the meringue in the microwave, just to see if it could be done. Yep, easy enough.

Alien Ingredient #32: Fresh Lychee

About 30 years ago, I got turned off to lychees when I was served a plate of canned ones as a dessert at a really bad American Chinese restaurant. They tasted and smelled like bad perfume.

Flash forward to 2012. The local FoodMaxx had a huge display of fresh lychees at a very reasonable price, so I brought a big bag back to the restaurant, where we immediately set about them. You can see in the photo above that they have a thin red skin which peels off easily revealing a very juicy white fruit with the consistency of peeled grape. Some have a big pit like you see here; others have a very tiny pit and correspondingly more fruit.

Fresh, ripe lychee tastes like good Gewürztraminer, sweet with essences of rose petals and other floral characteristics and none of that old-lady-with-way-too-much-perfume character that turned me off to the canned variety decades ago. The fresh fruits have a bit of tannins that I was not expecting. This is not a bad thing: the tannins are quite refreshing.

Like most fresh fruit, we don't plan to do anything with them; just eat them out of hand. It's really hard to improve on something that is already good.

Vote: Delicious, affordable, love them!