Sunday, February 22, 2009

Braised abalone

I was in Calgary and bought a can of abalone to try:




This is a pretty typical "banquet" Chinese food. Kind of expensive, but I wanted to try it once. The can contained 1.5 abalone. This is what the whole one looks like:



To cook, I blanched some broccoli florets as garnish, and braised some Chinese dried shiitake mushrooms (rehydrated, of course) in a sauce made from the abalone cooking liquid, oyster sauce, and a bit of the mushroom water. The abalone was sliced thinly and heated briefly in the sauce:




The appearance was not as good as the banquet food (I did not arrange the abalone slices too well), but the taste was right. So at the end I am happy with the dish, though there are other $60 dish that I would rather have...

Weird foods

I hosted a couple of parties last year with the theme "weird foods". Here are some selected items:

Simmered smoked beef tongue



Preserved duck eggs and jellyfish




Frog leg tempura



Puff pastry tart with escargot and garlic parsley butter



Overall, everything was good although nothing was made to be presented nicely :).

Ravioli

Has been a long time since the last update...just posting various food pictures from the past...

Now that we have a pasta machine and ravioli maker, we have made ravioli a couple of times. First time, we made a filling with shrimp, ricotta, and tarragon. The sauce is made with the shrimp shells and cream:




The filling the second time (no pictures...) was roasted butternut squash with a brown butter sauce.

It is a bit of work to make the pasta, but it is certainly worth it. They were great.