Though we both love a good restaurant, neither of us was keen to go out on this night, when the forced conviviality seems to spark the worst in the catering trade. Looking at those old blog entries, I was reminded that two of our worst meals together took place in restaurants, on Valentine's Day. Clearly, time to stay in but do something special in the kitchen.
Since I work from home, cooking duties defaulted to me. (Piers becoming sommelier, sous chef in the evening and sender of a fine spray of red roses.) In an attempt to get more use out of our large but dusty cookbook collection, I told Piers to pick one book, and I'd do a
whole menu out of it. Unfortunately his tastes and my safe cooking territories do not align. He went straight past the well-thumbed stuff ... The Silver Spoon (Italian), The Beautiful Mexico Cookbook, Cooking in Spain and The Sugar Reef Caribbean Cookbook to pull out Raymond Blanc's Cooking for Friends. Damn. French. Fiddly. Heavy. Sauces. But I set the challenge, so I could hardly complain. And I did need to get out of my comfort zone.Some observations about Blanc's book. First, it's an odd mix of light, spring- and summer-friendly starters and meaty, wintery mains. It was a challenge to get a starter and main that worked well on the palate and into my schedule. Second, even with good local farm shops some basic ingredients were tough to find. Third, even though this book was supposedly written for dinner parties and notes all the stuff you can do in advance, French cuisine is complicated cuisine. Every recipe has sauces, garnishes, multiple steps. I picked what I thought were three easy recipes and I was still scrambling all day and got my first course on the table 40 minutes later than planned.
I started with an asparagus mousse, tempting because you could prepare it in advance and pull it out of the fridge to cook just before dinner. The finished dish has potential, but I was
n't thrilled with it on first attempt. The flavours were delicate, but almost too much so. If I did this again I'd toy with doubling the amount of asparagus. It did make a very pretty plate, with the green disc of mousse surrounded by asparagus tips. The labour-intensive chervil jus seemed pointless, but my own addition of two discs of breaded, baked goat's cheese (a recipe from elsewhere in the book) seemed to complete things, its sharp flavour bringing some punch to the mousse.
On to fillets of beef with a marrow, horseradish and mustard crust. Once you get the marrow, it's a simple preparation, and absolutely delicious. (And a big favourite with the dog. The butcher gave me an entire shin bone from which to get the marrow.) But this being French cuisine, the recipe had two garnishes ... caramelised baby onions and a fricassee of wild mushrooms ... plus another multiple-ingredient, multiple-step sauce. So much for simple. The saffron potatoes I put on the side were super, though probably not worth the cost of the ingredients once the last of my hoard of cheap Tunisian saffron runs out and I actually have to pay market price for the stuff again.
While I can fine tune the dish (reduce the sauce more, skip the potatoes because those garnishes are actually vegetable sides), my Francophile, carnivorous husband was most pleased. To kick things up a notch, when sent to the wine cellar (aka the garage) to get something good, he came back with the bottle of 2004 Smith Haut Lafitte he'd given me the first time he came to my house for dinner. We'd been saving it for something special. And it was. Rich, fruity, dark and smooth ... if I'd needed an explanation of why the good stuff gets better with age, here it was. A web search shows this particular wine is no longer available in the UK, but Americans can get it for around $50 a bottle. Believe me, that's a value for money.
Time for the chocolate and walnut tart. It looked lovely. As a French dessert should. I broke the rules and injected a side of whipped cream with orange marmalade folded in on the side, found nowhere in Blanc's b
ook. Oddly, though every savoury dish had a sauce with it the poor tart recipe had the slice being served naked. It just didn't seem right. Piers and I split on this one. I thought it was a great addition, he opined too many flavours on the plate. I thought the tart itself was average. Even though I used top quality chocolate, it just didn't seem chocolatey enough. It didn't have the gooey, chocoholic satisfying richness of the much more humble devil's food cake, or the even more plebeian brownie.
But that's being picky. On the whole, it was a resounding success. Had I fed this to Mr. B on the night he brought the Smith Haut Lafitte, instead of the Italian food I served up, he might have proposed months earlier.
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