Menu planning

starts now.....

North Central Regional Sieger Show
Judges Dinner
Saturday, October 17 at 7:30pm
Your chefs: Wayne Simanovich & Liz Crawley
Sous chef: Val Bauer
menu subject to change due to seasonal availability

Prime

Foie Gras Truffle Mousse Croustades With Chamomile & Dried Cherries

Vietnamese Gazpacho (Hubert Keller)

Kumquat, Aquavit, picholine olives, caraway (Alinea)

Heirloom Tomato Water martinis with pickle bar

Seconde

Fresh tomato and onions with blue cheese

Grilled NY Strip steaks with Port Wine reduction

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Roasted Harvest Vegetables

Ciabatta

Tierce

Ludo Lefebvre's Chocolate Cupcake with Foie Gras Chantilly, Maple-Bacon Coulis, Caramelized Almond Dragées and Balsamic-Maple Syrup

Artisinal Chocolate selection from David Bacco Chocolates

Local cheeses

The Omnivore’s Hundred

Very Good Taste had a meme for food bloggers that looked like fun called the Omnivores Hundred. Out of the hundred foods listed you're supposed to find the ones that you have eaten. After getting 84 out of 100, I really have to thank my mom and dad for dragging me all over the world and making me try everything! I didn't see dried squid bought off a street pushcart in Bangkok on the list, that would put me at 101 :) some of these are things I'd never eat again, but at least I tried them (hear that kids????)

Here's the instructions if you'd like to try it, along with my list.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Seared Scallops with creamed bitter greens

Saute a large pan full of bitter greens in olive oil with a little salt. Deglaze with 1/2 c chicken stock, reduce, add 1/3 c heavy cream and 1T horseradish. Cook over med/low heat till cream is reduced. Add 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese.

Saute dry scallops till seared. Serve on top of greens with bearnaise butter. I also served some roasted beets with this.

Vietnamese Chicken with baby bok choy and scallion dirty rice

Vietnamese Chicken with baby bok choy and scallion dirty rice
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Recipe from Sunday Nite Dinner.
Somehow I didn't quite get the skin crispy enough, but the sauce worked well.

Pan Seared Scallops, roasted beets, Russian Kale, horseradish emulsion

Pan Seared Scallops, roasted beets, Russian Kale, horseradish emulsion and roasted potatoes

This recipe came from WrightFood and we *loved* it. I sliced the potatoes and oven roasted them with fresh rosemary, then included them in the plating rather than doing them separately and that worked really well. I think next time I might slice the beets the same way and roast them as slices with the thyme and olive oil, then plate everything together. We got frozen scallops from Woodmans and they were actually quite good. I also used fingerling potatoes, kale and beets from Willy Street Co-op.

Pot Roast

Pot Roast
Originally uploaded by elfed.

I don't really have a recipe for this - Val asked me to write it down and I forgot. Basically, you take onions, celery and carrots, saute them in olive oil then throw them in a crock pot. Take a largish chuck roast, season and flour it and sear it off in the pan you used for the vegetables. Throw that in the crock pot. Add about a half bottle of good red wine and a cup of water. Cook it on low for 8 hours or so while you're at work. When you get home from work, throw in a bag of baby carrots and some quartered fingerling potatoes - turn it up to high for about two hours, et voila.....

Breakfast Pizza

Breakfast Pizza
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Bacon, egg and tomato pizza using the olive oil dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking

Preheat the oven as high as it will go. Use a baking stone if you can, I used a pizza tin.

Fry 1lb bacon (I used Nueske's) till crisp, drain and crumble.

Whisk together three eggs with 1/2 cup of ricotta and 1/2 cup grated parm.

Slice a large handful of cherry tomatoes.

Roll out your dough and place it on the peel or in the tin. Pour the egg mixture onto the dough and spread it around evenly. Scatter the bacon and tomatoes over the egg mixture. Salt and pepper. Top with mozzarella cheese and bake at 500 till browned.

Thomas Kellers Coffee and Donuts

Thomas Kellers Coffee and Donuts
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Best donut ever.....

This was fun, and fun to eat! There were extra donuts, which the kids loved. No extra semi-freddo though!

This was from the French Laundry Cookbook again. Buy it. Really. It looks intimidating, but it's very easy to follow. Truly. A two year old could do it...

well....with help.....

New Years Eve 2007

Butter-Poached Maine Lobster with Leeks, Pommes Maxim, and a Red Beet Essence
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Yes, I spent my New Years Eve cooking crap I cannot eat. I just don't like lobster, but the boys do, so this one was for them.

Butter-Poached Maine Lobster with Leeks, Pommes Maxim, and a Red Beet Essence from Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook. And a much better blogger than I am has already run down the steps to this one, so go read the French Laundry At Home.

The Tru Dinner

Comments will be added later, but I wanted to at least get these out as it's been months since the dinner actually happened!

We wanted to do a full dinner from Tru using recipes from Rick Tramonto's book, Tru: A Cookbook from the Legendary Chicago Restaurant. The menu for the evening was:

Prosciutto di Parma with Tricolor Melon and Mascarpone

Caramel Taffy Apple Foie Gras with Lavender Salad
and Green Apple Chips

Salad of Baby Vegetables and Greens

Arctic Char Poached in Duck Fat with Spinach Almond Puree

Heirloom Tomato Water

Duet of Venison with Rutabaga Mash

Chocolate Malted Semifreddo with Chocolate-Bergamot Paint

We had my cousin Patrick and his family over and my brother Dan with his family made it for dessert and leftovers. Del had already eaten their foie gras and fish portions by then! The prosciutto dish tasted nice but was messy and hard to eat, everything else was wonderful, especially the fish and the foie. Prep was not too bad, I started a week or so early and had time to throw things together or heat them up in the kitchen between courses. We did wine pairings as suggested in the book. I'll add more comments and sources to specific dishes later, but here are the photos:

The above are prep shots, the one to the right shows the venison bones ready to roast for stock.



the foie!!!!!


Arctic Char poached in duck fat. This was absolutely amazing! We got the fish online from Gortons Seafood, which was really reasonably priced.




The duet of Venison.









The dessert....chocolate malted semi-freddo with chocolate bergamot paint. This recipe made a ton of leftover semi-freddo which was marvelous. It really tasted much better than the photo looks!





more to come..............

Tilapia with curried veg

20070806 011
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Long beans, eggplant and scallions sauteed with coconut milk and curry paste. Served with pan fried tilapia.

Lamb chops

20070806 012
Originally uploaded by elfed.

Lamb chops marinated in rosemary and garlic, served with a port wine/fig reduction flavored with chipotle and espresso

Quick & Easy - Gordon Ramsay's Sunday Lunch

Not quite as exciting as the last one, but serviceable. Sunday Lunch is divided into meal sections. Each section has a full meal including dessert. Quick & Easy consists of:

Vine tomato & bread salad
Italian sausage with lentil
Lemon posset

We went to the farmers market for heirloom tomatos which worked out really nicely. The sausages came from Frabonis. The salad was great and we'll definitely do it again - heirloom tomatos, sliced red onions, lime juice, olive oil, parsley and bite size pieces of torn bread. I used a sourdough which I toasted because it was supposed to be stale bread.

There were a LOT of lentils. I cut the recipe in half and we still have enough leftover for four people. They were good, nothing really to rave about, but they did work nicely with the sausage. And Lili liked them - I think that was the only part she ate.

The lemon posset was a little too heavy for summer - or for any time really - a teeny little bite was nice, but overall the cream was way too much. These were just boiled double cream, sugar and lemon juice. I'm not sure how you would thin it down. Bill put it in the iSi whipper which helped a bit - maybe I'll try making ice cream out of it next time.

Tonight is Skate Grenobloise from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook, but I probably won't write that one up because I do it all the time.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten

Tonight was just a regular dinner night, but I figured I'd try a couple of easy ones from Jean-Georges - Cooking at home with a four star chef. They really were easy, I got home at 4ish, got the mail done, got Lili settled, etc. , started prep at about 5:15 and we were actually eating at 6:10!! I made Pork in Caramel Sauce, which was a sliced pork tenderloin with a nam pla and caramel sauce - really easy, super fast and just gorgeous. Del ate three pieces (I doubled the recipe). Bill said it needed lemongrass foam - we're growing a lot of lemongrass right now because it keeps mosquitos away. No leftovers on this one and definitely something I'll do again.

I had some cioggia beets and some baby turnips so I also made his Caramelized Beets and Turnips - another super easy great tasting dish - also a keeper.

For dessert I did the Warm, Soft Chocolate Cake. This didn't go quite so well. My oven usually runs hot, so I stuck to the short end of the timing on these and it definitely wasn't quite enough. The kids said they tasted good, but it was really runny. Lili had fun with hers, she's having a bath right now to finish it off. Will have to try them again at a longer cook time.

I guess I really should start taking pictures, the pork was beautiful, and there's nothing left of it now....

Mediterranean flavors - Sunday Lunch by Gordon Ramsay

O.k., Gordon Ramsay rocks my world, and Lili loves him too - she sings along with the F word these and "reads" his cookbooks. This was just a perfect meal. It's from Sunday Lunch, which I don't believe has been released in the US yet, I have the UK version, so you have to convert a little on measurements and degrees. I bought it on ebay, for some asinine reason, you can't get UK cookbooks on Amazon US. So, I have no link, but really, it's a great book, google it!

Sunday Lunch features entire meals - starter, main, veg, starch and dessert. The starter for this one was scallops with a cauliflower puree. We skipped this because, well, we live in SC Wisconsin. Scallops here taste like dust - some restaurants can seem to get good ones, but everything I've ever tried from a local grocery store or even a nice seafood shop is just icky.

The main is an herb crusted rack of lamb. I couldn't get a rack, so I made do with individual chops from Columbus Discovery Farm (unfortunately they don't have a website - I do have an e-mail address and they're at the Sun Prairie Farmers Market on Saturdays). The herb crust is a sort of gremolata, parsley, cilantro, thyme, rosemary, bread crumbs and parmesan - there was about half a batch left over after making the chops, but I'm sure I can find something to use it on, it was wonderful.

The potatos are layered with sauteed onions and garlic and cooked in a seasoned chicken broth. The veg was zucchini and cherry tomatoes (I used baby romas) sauteed with a bit of balsamic and olive oil. Dessert was a bread pudding with raisins and dried cranberries, apricot glaze and Cointreau - really simple and very good. Definitely a keeper.

Silky Syrah Short Ribs (Michel Richard)

Val and I did this together, he's taking a class from Tory Miller at L'Etoile this week so he wanted to practice prepping. It went fairly well, it's a lengthy recipe, but not extremely difficult. We only used a couple of tablespoons of the clarified butter, and I would leave the star anise out next time, it was a little overpowering. Also, I didn't trim as much fat off the short ribs as I should have. The sauce was amazing, definitely silky! The recipe is from Michel Richard - Happy in the Kitchen.

We served the ribs with Thomas Keller's recipe for Carnaroli Risotto with Shaved White Truffles from Alba (The French Laundry Cookbook). The risotto was perfect, definitely better than arborio rice, however, either we got a bad batch of white truffle oil, or none of us like white truffle oil. The only one who enjoyed it was Del, but then, Del also belongs to that teeny percentage of caucasians who can eat durian without gagging on the smell.

We also had romano beans from Jen-Ehr farms with fresh pesto. The short ribs came from Fountain Prairie's grass fed Highland cattle. Next week....Gordon Ramsay (well, this week because I'm late posting this...)

ROASTED POBLANO-SAGE-BOURBON SAUCE

2 large roasted poblano peppers, peeled, seeded and chopped
4 cloves roasted garlic, peeled and chopped
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup madeira
1/4 cup bourbon
1/4 cup fresh sage leaves, chopped
1 tsp dried tarragon
salt and pepper
2 T unsalted butter

Mix all together except butter, bring to a boil and reduce by 2/3. Emulsify in a blender or food processor, then strain, return to heat and add butter.

Chocolate Cherry Five-spice cake (flourless)

8 oz. bittersweet chocolate
8 oz. semisweet chocolate
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 oz kirsch
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, separated
1 cup hazelnuts, roasted
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp Chinese 5 spice powder

Melt the chocolate together with the butter, cool and combine with kirsch and vanilla. Grind the hazelnuts with the sugar and 5-spice. Mix the yolks in with the chocolate mixture, then add the nut mixture. Beat egg whites till stiff and fold in. Bake in a 9 inch greased springform pan at 350 for one hour.

Topping:

1 can tart cherries with liquid
1 ounce kirsch
1 ounce creme de cacao
1/4 tsp Chinese 5 spice powder
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 T unsalted butter
1/4 cup heavy cream

Heat cherries, kirsch, creme decacao, 5 spice powder and sugar till boiling, reduce heat and simmer till reduced by half. Add butter. Cool and whip in cream.

Great-Grandma Valentine's Plum Pudding

1/2 lb beef suet
1 c sugar - brown or white
1 lb each currants and raisins
1/2 lb each candied lemon, cherries and citrus peel
1 lb flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 Cup cider or sweet wine
1/4 Cup cold water
Brandy or rum

Chop suet fine, then put fruit in. Sift flour, baking powder and spices together and mix with fruit. Add cup of cider or sweet wine, mix, then add baking soda mixed with 1/4 cup of cold water. Mix well. Form into rounds and tie up with cheesecloth or rags tightly. Drop them in a large pan of boiling water and boil for 5-6 hours. Soak with brandy or rum. Should keep for a long time. Makes two large ones or 4-5 small ones. Can add 2-3 beaten eggs, nutmeat or a grated carrot. Don't add any more flour. Lilian Valentine

WATERCRESS/FENNEL SAUCE

Adding some old recipes from a website I haven't updated in years....this one is from 2001

2 cups watercress ends, chopped
1/3 cup fennel ends, chopped
10-12 fresh sage leaves, rough chopped
1 large garlic clove, smashed and minced
salt and pepper

Saute above in about 1/4 cup butter till wilted. Add the juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/2 cup white vermouth and 1 cup chicken broth. Bring to a boil and simmer till almost all liquid has evaporated.

Emulsify in a blender or food processor, whisk in an additional 1T butter and 1/2 cup heavy cream.

I served it over chicken breasts which were pounded thin, floured, dipped in egg wash, breaded with a mixture of bread crumbs, grated parmesan and Penzeys Herbes de Provence then pan fried in olive oil and butter. I flamed them at the end with a little brandy because the kids love it when I set their food on fire