Cooking with Lesley

I had a really good time cooking with Lesley and her really nice kitchen tools. Here are a couple of dishes that came out.

The salad was Lesley's creation. It contained hearts of palm (my first time), fennel, greens, pine nuts, parmesan, grapefruit (not in mine). There was a very nice vinaigrette with shallots, honey, and chardonnay vinegar.


The "main course" is mussels with mustard and saffron. I took this recipe from Thomas Keller's Bouchon book. It worked out very well.


We also made deep-fried tofu, a rather typical Chinese "street food", with some hoisin sauce and szechuan pepper salt.

Presentation skills

Okay, I admit that my plating skills suck. I am just not much of an artist, unfortunately. I have decided to try and improve, however: I just ordered the book Working the Plate: The Art of Food Presentation by Christopher Styler. I will patiently wait and see if I can learn anything.

Weekend dinner

I had a dinner party and it went reasonably well...

For starter, it was a leek and stilton flan and leek fritters (variation of this recipe).


For main course, I made braised beef back ribs in a sauce made from a mixture of fermented soy bean products (chee hou, hoisin, and just ground fermented bean paste). Served with garlic mashed potatoes and carrots. This was inspired by a meal I had at 360. The vegetarian option had shinbo tofu substituted for the ribs.




The dessert is tira misu with a Barolo reduction. The most difficult part when making this one is watching a bottle of Barolo reduced down to almost nothing because the wine isn't cheap...this was inspired by a similar dish at Wild Tangerine in Edmonton.



Here are some pictures...I can't say that my plating skills are that great. But the taste was good.

Fruitless Meatless Adventures

My next dinner party is one of the most challenging one in terms of dietary restrictions: no meat, no seafood, no peppers, and of course, no fruits. I spent the weekend trying a number of "meat substitutes" for braising.

After trying a number (too many in a single weekend!) of veggie burgers, ground "beef", tofu products, etc, I found that most of them are already heavily seasoned and not really suitable for braising. This turned out to be a bit more challenging than I thought. Luckily I didn't have to resort to the generic "textured soy protein" chunks. I found something called "shinbo tofu" from the Asian Supermarket which is flavorless and should have a nice spongy property to soak up the braising liquid. This is similar to the Chinese tofu puffs but seems to be denser.

Seared Foie Gras on Turnip

This is one of the few things that I had time to try in the last little while. This was inspired by a meal I had at Iron Chef Ishinabe's restaurant Queen Alice in Japan a couple of years ago.

It's a piece of seared foie gras on top of a piece of turnip that has been stewed in beef broth. Topped with some chopped chives and truffle salt. It tasted good but the presentation could have be better if I was actually serving this. I used only a half-sized piece of foie gras as a test, and I could have been less lazy and cut the turnip with a circular cutter instead.

Sodium Alginate

I just saw the Iron Chef America battle between Morimoto vs. Cantu. This "mad scientist" type of cooking is exactly the kind of thing that made me want to be a chemist when I was young. Maybe I can use it to make some bubble drinks, or fake caviar.

Now I need to go around town and see if I can get my hands on some sodium alginate. Not exactly easy in Lethbridge.

Welcome

I have finally decided to start a blog. This blog will be mainly about my cooking experiments but may also include other food topics. My adventures are, for the most part, fruitless.