Vegetarian Wine Dinner

Each August, we hold our annual Harvest Dinner to celebrate the hard work of Beth and Gene Nowak at Mayfair Farm. Beth and Gene supply the vast majority of produce to the restaurant and this is our way of saying "Thank you!" for all that they do for us and for our community. The dinner is made, as much as is feasible, exclusively from products from their farm. And because they produce no meat, the dinner is vegetarian.

This year, our dinner was almost entirely vegan although that wasn't a criterion in designing the menu. It was an artifact of our taking a tour through Asia with our dishes. This was our seventh Harvest Dinner and after working with the same vegetables and fruits each August with the same American/Western European mindset, we needed to do something entirely different. And so we embarked on a tour of Asia.



Melon Soup with Lumpia

Filipino Melon Soup with Lumpia. The soup is made from cantaloupe and cucumber and seasoned with a few aromatics and a touch of chile. The lumpia are filled with a mixture of red and green cabbage, onions, green onions, and carrots seasoned with soy sauce.



Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce

Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce. We marinated strips of eggplants, yellow squash, and green squash in soy sauce and garlic, then grilled them. When cool, we threaded them on skewers in the manner of satay. The plate is finished with a peanut sauce (natural peanut butter, hot water, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sambal oelek, palm sugar, and a lot of lime juice to balance).

Building the Eggplant Bánh Mì

Eggplant Bánh Mì

Grilled Eggplant Bánh Mì. We decided since we were doing tasting portions for a crowd to build our bánh mì on grilled focaccia for ease of handling. The large eggplants were sliced; marinated in a slurry of kaffir lime, Thai basil, cilantro, ginger, and garlic; then grilled. We have developed our own style of dressing bánh mì: we first brush the bread with the same slurry that we marinated the eggplant in and then we drizzle the bread with a sweet and spicy chile sauce that we make in house. The layers are pretty traditional: cucumbers, lots of cilantro, and carrots. We don't pickle our carrots in any way.



Soba

Soba. One of the beautiful things that we got from Beth was a haul of cheese pimientos, red peppers so called because pre-annato they were used to color orange cheese. Another was some really pretty broccoli. For some reason, they both triggered visions of soba in my head. So here we have buckwheat noodles, green onions, peanuts, broccoli, cheese pimientos, and white sesame seeds in a dressing of rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and sesame oil.

Green Vegetable Curry on Thai Fried Rice Cake

Green Thai Curry. Curries are never beautiful dishes, but they are so fragrant and so delicious. We made a classic Thai fried rice by first frying a shallot-cilantro-Thai basil paste in oil and then frying the vegetables and rice. Then we added egg to the cool fried rice and made rice cakes from that, cakes that we subsequently re-fried. On top is a curry of a eggplant, squash, the broccoli stems from making the soba, yellow peppers, and cherry tomatoes. The curry paste we made very heavy on kaffir lime both for color and for fragrance. We finished the curry with huge handfuls of cilantro and Thai basil leaves. The tricky part of this dish, because it is vegetarian, was getting the flavor just right without the use of fish sauce.

Plum Clafoutis

Plum Clafoutis. This is another in a series of experiments in making gluten- and dairy-free desserts. To give our clafoutis an Asian feel, we made it with rice flour and coconut milk. Quite delicious if I do say so myself and really wonderful when paired with an Orvieto Amabile.

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 #5: Banana Flower

We were all super excited to get into this banana flower. It looks cool and exotic for starters. I have seen banana flowers for sale before at the big Korean supermarkets, but they have never looked like they were in good condition, so I always passed on them. And interestingly enough, I have never been to a Thai, Vietnamese, or Cambodian restaurant that featured them or I would have tried them out already.

After boning up on our banana flower prep skills on YouTube—who says the Internet is not a great thing?—we peeled this flower down to expose the flowers/immature bananas at the base of each petal.



And then we kept on peeling until we got to the tender heart that we split with a knife. After removing the fibrous core, we put a fine chiffonade on the banana flower and put the bits in acidulated water to keep them from oxidizing.

The taste of the raw flower was of bitter banana rind. We were hoping that blanching would help eliminate the bitterness. Not so. This dish of Banana Flower and Shrimp Curry looks great, but none of us could get beyond the bitterness of the banana flower.


Vote: Two thumbs down. We'd eat it if another chef brought it to our table as a special treat, but we won't be ordering any for ourselves. Major let down.