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.

Chef's Tasting

Last week, Brandon and I did a Chef's Tasting for two of our longtime customers and two of their friends. Sometimes we go all out with technical tricks (soup filled dumplings, spherical piquillo peppers, etc.) but we just weren't feeling it for this tasting.

The day before the tasting, we had the first tremendous flood of local goods of this growing season and so we just decided to showcase what awesome food products we had and leave the technical tours de force for other tastings. I think these dishes show my less-is-more philosophy: just enough ingredients on a plate and no more.

Shrimp Cóctel

This is a pun, a wink at Luis Uno-Ojo, and an Americanization of a Mexican version of an American dish. Whew! Many years ago, my friend Luis from Guadalajara (Jalisco) introduced me to a soup that he calls cóctel (cocktail), a cold tomato and beef bouillon soup garnished with poached shrimp, avocados, cilantro, and so forth. His cóctel is a soup version of Cóctel de Camarones, the American classic Shrimp Cocktail. I reverted the soup to a true cocktail of beef consommé, tomato juice, and a good shot of that Jaliscan joy juice, tequila. I always serve it up in a martini glass as you see here, rimmed with cumin salt and finished with a fun garnish including shrimp. This version is garnished with a shrimp skewered around a piece of chorizo, then grilled. Putting the fun back in dinner and the cocktail back in Shrimp Cocktail, Guadalajara-Style!

Blue Cornmeal-Crusted, Crab- and Lemon Zest-Stuffed Softshell Crab with Grapefruit Beurre Blanc

After our brief trip south of the border, we brought things right back to Virginia with some local softshells, the first of the year from the Chesapeake Bay. The lemon zest and crab stuffing is a flavor idea that I stole from a crab cake appetizer from Tracy O'Grady at Willow (Tracy, your crab cakes rock!). A little organic blue cornmeal from a local mill gave a bit of crunch and the grapefruit beurre blanc brought the dish in line with a really grapefruity Sauvignon Blanc.

Chicken with Morels and Haricots Verts

I got a perfect pastured chicken and it was easily the highlight of this particular dinner. I loved the resulting dish so much that I've already blogged about it. Classic French technique meets impeccable local American ingredients, paired with Jim Law's equally impeccable Linden Hardscrabble Chardonnay.

Local Veal Skirt Steak, Blue Cornmeal Hoe Cake, and Poblano Crema

Upscale fajitas anyone? I had a lovely local organic veal skirt steak in the cooler along with the remnants of a case of poblano chiles that had seen better days. I've replaced the corn tortilla with an organic blue cornmeal hoe cake (cornmeal, garlic-infused butter, salt, pepper, and boiling water) and converted the rather limp poblanos to a roasted poblano crema. The skirt steak is lightly marinated in garlic, fresh baby cilantro, and kaffir lime, then lightly grilled to medium rare, rested, and sliced across the grain.

Lamb Samosas with Apricot Chutney and Red Wine Rosemary Demiglace

One of the things about working with local lamb is that we only get so many cuts off of each lamb. With each batch of lamb, we get chops (rack and loin), shanks, ribs, leg and shoulder (usually in kebabs), and then all the scraps go into ground. Needless to say, we have a lot of ground lamb to work through, so we're always having to find ways to use it.

Somehow, Brandon and I were both thinking samosas at the same time, so I made a bunch of them. We decided to stay away from traditional Indian spices and go with a more or less traditional Shepherd's Pie filling: lamb, mirepoix, herbs, garlic, gravy from lamb stock, and mashed potatoes. A quick reduction of Grenache and rosemary bound with demiglace gave us a sauce and then a sweet and spicy apricot chutney (what would be called a pickle in India) finished the plates that you see Brandon setting up here.

And the finished plates. I'm OK with white/negative space on a plate, as you can see here. Oh yeah, the samosas were banging—like little lamb empanadas. Yum.

 

 

Red-Cooked Bison Short Ribs with Local Spinach and Fried Rice Cake

Here you can see the fried rice cake and the spinach down in the soup plate, before we add the bison. The fried rice cake is merely fried rice bound with egg and fried into a pancake. Easy as can be and a crowd pleaser. We have this beautiful whole local spinach, cut off just above the roots, so we blanch it, toss it in butter and then curl it on the dish, in this case on top of the rice cake.

And here is the final dish with the bison on top and the sauce over and around. Red cooking is an awesome braising technique that you should have in your arsenal. I need to do a blog post just on that. In short, it's a classic Chinese braise in which the meat is cooked in a sweet and spicy liquid made from soy sauce, white wine (Shaoxing is typical), brown sugar or caramel, ginger, garlic, green onions, and sweet spices such as star anise, black pepper, Szechuan pepper, cinnamon or cassia, and so forth.

We braised the bison ribs in such a liquid, then strained the liquid, refreshed it with fresh spices, green onions, garlic, and ginger, reduced the sauce, strained it, added a bit of hoisin sauce, and brought it down to final sauce consistency. In China, the sauce is often used over and over to braise new dishes; at the restaurant, such practice, no matter how delicious, would certainly raise red flags at the Health Department.

Frozen Strawberry Soufflé with Lemon Verbena-Mint Shortbread Cookies

Finally, local strawberries arrived after 11 months of being gone. Throw together strawberry purée, Italian meringue, and whipped cream and what do you get? A frozen strawberry soufflé if you're patient enough to wait for it to freeze. The mint and lemon verbena are from our herbs growing outside the front door of the restaurant.