Saturday starts slow, but once you get it going…

Off on a pretty good roll from Friday, I set out on an early morning (11:30AM) grocery run down to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square. I took my bike and dropped it off at a nearby bike shop to have the rear tire replaced while I shopped. I love Trader Joe’s. Everything is so cheap, but still good quality. Even the wine is cheap and they carry Pacific Rim Riesling, a favorite of mine, for about $7 a bottle, cheaper than buying a bottle of Miller Light in some bars in this town.

Their free sample was some Oat’n’Honey kind of cereal. It wasn’t bad, but it was just the shot of it and I didn’t bother to put any milk on it, just tossed it down.

The bike ride back was magnificent. The weather was gorgeous and I hadn’t had a good ride in over a week, so it felt like being able to walk again. You don’t realize how slow walking is till you ride a bike on a regular basis. It’s like ascending to a minor tier of divinity. Even on only a shot of cereal at 2PM I felt absolutely great.

The dinner menu was big, so I didn’t want to eat too much during the day, but I did have an egg roll and three vegetarian dumplings from a new Chinese delivery joint in the area. I also had a handful of “chili peanuts” that one of the roommates got while out shopping for fruit to make booze smoothies. The chili peanuts were saturated with the same kind of vinegar powder that they use to make salt and vinegar chips, but these were way stronger. It was not an experience I enjoyed, because it wasn’t spicy as much as it was just uncomfortable. There were also a handful of potato chips tossed into the afternoon mix as I prepped for dinner.

And I haven’t rescinded my boozeban entirely, but I did have a few drinks in the afternoon and evening. It started with the booze smoothies as we made desert and set it aside to stand. Then there were a few bottles of white wine passed around. I was too busy cooking to notice what they all were, but I did notice a green monkey on one of the corks, if that means anything to you wine aficionados out there.

“So what was this dinner that was the only thing you really ate all day and yet alluded to being so great in the title of this posting?” Well, dear reader, it went a little something like this.

First course was a simple greens salad idea I’d been tossing around. I took a French Baguette and sliced off two 3/8” slices per plate of salad, then toasted them lightly so that the brown just started to encroach from the edges into the center. Then I laid the toast as a bed and set mixed greens on top. I was using Trader Joe’s “Spring Mix” which features arugula, various baby greens and the odd leaf of radicchio. Then I cut a small, flat hole in a tube of goat cheese and used it like a pastry gun to drop a few curls of goat cheese on each salad. Next was a drizzling of Balsamic vinegar and olive oil followed by a dusting of fresh ground black pepper and toasted almond flour.

The next course, and all the following courses, were stolen from an issue of Gourmet magazine. I believe it was March 2008. It has been my bathroom reading for a while and I’ve been looking for an excuse to make some of the recipes for a while, so when a friend from Philadelphia said she was coming to visit I thought I would go ahead and give said recipes a toss with the inevitable variations and that come when you hand me a written recipe thereby giving me an excuse for an unwieldy run-on sentence.

So after salad came seared scallops and shrimp finished in a beure-blanc sauce with shallots. This was very cheap and easy compared to how fancy it sounds and how good it was. The seafood was Trader Joe’s frozen goods, so I didn’t even have to clean them. After thawing, I patted them dry, then seasoned the scallops with a little salt and pepper. Then I seared the scallops at a medium high heat in two batches. Next came the shrimp.

After searing and reserving the seafood I added two cloves of diced shallots to the pan, and as they clarified I added a cup of the Pacific Rim Riesling to the pan to deglaze. Then I added the juices that had rendered out of the scallops onto their plate back into the pan and melted 7 Tbsp. of butter into the pan at a medium heat in 1Tbsp pats, about 3 at a time until just melted. I plated them as two scallops with a shrimp curled on top between them, all covered with the sauce.

The main course was an Alsatian coq au vin variation that used Riesling instead of a red wine. I bought a halal chicken because they are much cheaper than the Purdue cyborg chickens available at my local grocer and seem to be a much better quality of chicken too. It was a bit difficult to explain the way I wanted to have the chicken cut, though. I made a sketch and showed it to the butcher, and he got pretty close to a French style. The thighs and legs were cut at a slightly odd angle that made the legs big, but the thighs a strange shape, and the breasts were not so much halved crosswise as two-third/one-thirded crosswise, but it all fit in my everyday pan, so no worries.

The chicken was also prepped with a simple salt and pepper dusting, then browned in butter and olive oil and reserved. Then I added diced shallots and green onions to the pan and afterward deglazed with Riesling similar to the scallops. Then I added a half a cup of heavy cream before reintroducing the chicken and it’s juices, then adding some mushrooms and asparagus, covering the pan, and then putting it in a 350F oven for 20 min. while I made the aforedescribed sea food dish. At the same time, in water spiked with a little chicken broth, salt and Riesling, I stewed some potato, carrots and whole green onion bulbs with about 2 inches of stem. The chicken was plated with the vegetables to the side and covered with the cream sauce from the chicken.

Then we had to back off eating for a while, so we had a wine course while I plated the desert and let it heat a bit in the oven. Desert was a crepe cake. This entails piling crepes with layers of whipped cream in between. We don’t have a mixer, so a good stiff whipped cream was sort of out of the question, so I made a raspberry-vanilla yogurt sauce that was a brilliant shade of pink to go between the layers. We set it to stand in the fridge so that the yogurt didn’t run too much, and then I plated it in pie slices drizzled in condensed milk and dusted with the rest of the toasted almond flour and some dried, rubbed sage before throwing it in the oven till the condensed milk on the plate started to steep the almond flour into a picturesque blonde cream color and the sage started to give off a little extra aroma.

The whole thing was very well received although I wasn’t that happy with some of my plating, as usual, and the timing for serving several courses to my friends while still being sociable and eating myself. I would have liked to have served the scallops a little quicker after being seared. Although the flavor and texture were there, they would have really exploded across the palate if I hadn’t had to mess with some of the salad preparation while cooking them. I had my friend help me with the desert, but my kitchen really doesn’t leave room for someone else to work at the same time, so the rest of the courses became a juggling trial. For first runs of all the recipes, though, I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s the best meal I’ve made so far this year, anyway.

Later that evening we decided to go out for a bit of dancing. I had a cup of coffee and a Energy VitaminWater on the way down to Astor Place on the 6. Then we went to Rififi’s and had a round of PBR, and then a round of Bass Ale while gradually deciding that the DJ sucked. We got home just in time to watch “30 Days of Night” with my roommates, after which I decided to watch “Lelo & Stitch” as a bit of a mental sorbet course.

It was great to have a few beers after three weeks of dry living. I should have definitely stayed off the coffee, though, because I was up until 5AM trying to wind down. Watching a 6-year-old vampire get her head chopped off with an ax probably didn’t help, either.