Jenise wrote:Still not all unpacked yet, but enough to plan a good menu for tonight:
Salad of mixed soft lettuces and herbs in lemon vinaigrette with hot, crusty goat cheese medallion; gruner veltliner
Wild Alaskan scallop ceviche with asparagus and white truffle vinaigrette; sauvignon blanc
Fresh wild steelhead trout coated in black pepper and fresh ginger served on celery root puree with cabernet reduction sauce; pinot noir
Strawberry and chocolate tart with walnut crust
Uh oh, I need some kind of a snacketizer too, don't I. Hmmmm....
Okay, this is what I served:
Crab, green onion and sesame-chili salad on baked wonton crisps
The salad as above
The scallop ceviche as above
The steelhead as above
Parfaits of chocolate cream and fresh sliced strawberries in red jalapeno jelly with crumbled walnut cookie
Can you smell a disaster in that last item? You should! I mean, what I made was delicious and everybody loved it--the disaster part was why it wasn't the tarts.
God I hate baking.
The recipe (pulled off of Epicurious) was for one big 11" tart. A walnut crust that was very much like a biscotti dough (flour, sugar, egg yolks, walnuts and a pinch of salt) on the bottom, then a layer of strawberry jam, then a layer of chocolate cream, then whole lopped strawberries cut side down. I already had strawberries, and what I was attracted to here was the possibility of using these little individual tart pans I own four of and have never used. They have little baby removable bottoms and everything. The reviews by people who'd made the recipe varied, and after reading them all one could pretty much determine that if you had very very ripe summer berries you would love the result as-is, and if you had the kind of drier, early winter berry I had you'd find it a bit dry and needy. For the jam component I'd planned to use some raspberry freezer jam my friend Chris made, and I figured I'd thin a bit of it for double-duty as a glaze. In the meantime I made the crust and went to bake off the shells.
And burnt them. That's because the oven was set at 400, my all-purpose temperature where I'd baked the wanton skins at and forgot to turn it back down before the tart shells went in. The recipe called for 25 minutes at 375: Mine had only been in the oven 12-15 minutes, so I'm thinking 375 was probably too high anyway. But whatever, I had no tart shells and no time to make another batch. But I did have a small log of leftover dough that miraculously I'd not thrown out and instead put into the fridge thinking I might bake them off later as cookies. So I could do that, serve a small stem full of strawberries with a little cookie. Okay!
So I sliced that log into five little 1 1/2 inch wide by 1/2" tall wads of dough and put those into the oven. And boy did they come out ugly--that dough didn't BUDGE, didn't round out or fill in the crevices at ALL. They were beige pellets that had the look of something pooped out of some large factory extruder and baked on a conveyor belt. Livestock feed. Pig food.
At 5:55 with guests due any minute, I had an ulcer but no dessert.
So the last act of desperation was to go into the pantry to see if there was anything at all that suggested itself, and there I found a jar of red jalapeno jelly that someone had given me like two years ago. More southwestern than pacific rim as was the overall bent of the rest of my menu, but because I had started the meal with chile flavors, it suddenly sounded okay, good even, to toss the sliced berries with that so I went back to the kitchen to whip up a quick chocolate cream (thank god for microwaves) and set the bottom of the parfaits. The rest was layered in just before serving.
The result was actually so good I'd consider serving it again on purpose, but man, that's the kind of tension I don't like.
