I wasn’t able to post anything for the past few days, because boy was this a lot of work. Friday and Saturday were both about 11 hour days and that was in addition to all of the time that was also spent Monday through Thursday.
It was worth it though. The meal was outstanding. Though if there was a quibble, it’s definitely with the editing of the cookbooks. Someone needs to go in behind him and recreate these recipes and provide some pointers on technique and just make sure things work. There were at least three recipes that were just flat out wrong as written, and that’s frustrating when you’re buying pricey, hard-to-find ingredients and schlepping all over town to find them.
That being said, if you know your way around a kitchen and you’re comfortable using the recipes as a guide as opposed to a definitive how-to manual then I think you’ll do just fine.
We started the meal with a sample of spreads and pâtés over some compliant, but store-bought crackers, and also some graham/white bread that I had just made up. The spreads were amazing. The “Millennium Spread,” which purports to have a “cult following” was highly addictive and wonderfully nuanced. That just sat out on the counter all day Sunday as I worked to finish off some of the leftover bread. It was really good, easy to make, and I would probably do it again. It’s a nice substitute for butter that was oil-free and highly delicious.
There was also a slab of the Mushroom, Walnut, Rosemary Pâté. The only change I made to this recipe was to use some Dry Sherry I had in place of red wine. I think the red wine might have worked better, but this was still a really decent take on pâté with several of my guests commenting that they thought it tasted like real pâté. I call that a win.
I also made up a French Onion Dip that I cribbed from memory. I sautéed five pounds of onions — yes, really — in my enormous 12 quart rondeau. Once that had cooked down and was nice and brown and caramelized, about an hour or so, I threw it in the food processor with some Miyoko’s cream cheese and some vegan Worcestershire sauce and a touch of salt and pepper. It was a dead ringer for the cracky-oniony Super Bowl dip that I’d seen in the San Francisco Chronicle years ago and that had been a mainstay for parties for a while. Now, without dairy!
Once we’d poured some drinks and gotten a little something in everyone’s mouth to keep them from going off the deep end, we seated everyone to begin the main attractions.
First up was the Potato Torte with a Gruyere-style tofu Cheez and a Pistachio Arugula Pesto. This is where maybe you start to understand why this took so long and just how much work was involved. This is really three recipes in one. First I had to make the Tofu Cheez, which was pretty easy, but that’s a step that needs to be done. This is one of the areas where I had fault with the cookbook. It goes through a list of four somewhat oddball ingredients: umeboshi vinegar, fermented bean curd miso and tofu. The flavor was in the vinegar and bean curd, but on my first pass, it just tasted like a very bland white cheese whiz. Maybe this is what the intent was, or maybe it was designed this way so that you could kick it up a notch to your own taste, either way, it was a little frustrating and when things don’t turn out as expected you start wondering if you missed something or what happened.
That turned out a little dry. I’d made it a week in advance to try and to see if I could tolerate the tofu cheez, and I quite liked the first one. The second one not so much. The instructions in the book recommend heating it in the oven for 10 minutes and then sticking it under the broiler for three, but it dried it out too much for my taste. The same thing I had Sunday, but microwaved, was a more moist and had a better flavor, I thought.
Next we moved on to the Warm Cabbage Salad. This was another one, where I liked the first attempt a little more than the one this weekend, though it still wasn’t bad, and I think everyone loved it, but not quite as good as the first attempt. I think I got a little impatient with a room full of people watching my cook the onions, and if I feel like people are having to wait on my then I feel like they’re having to wait forever. Otherwise, it was pretty easy to put together, the only thing being you’ll want start this a day in advance to give the cabbage a good soaking.
I always like to serve some kind of soup at dinner, and I wanted something that would be easy to execute, easy to reheat, and something that if the recipe didn’t seem quite right, woulnd’t be hard to tweak. I settled on the African Yam Soup with Teff Croutons. The soup is an African-influenced puree of yams and a melange of spices, but also some orange juice and peanut butter that put this on a whole other planet, as far as things I’ve made. I honesty think this is one of the oddest things I have ever made, but it was really good and absolutely worth the effort. I managed to follow the recipe for this and it worked out pretty well. The only difference being I pushed the soup through a Chinois to give a better texture and I think distribute the flavors even more. Ironically, I had the teff croutons on my to try list early in the week and I kept moving it. Oh, I’ll do them the next day. And then the next day. And the next day. Then it was Saturday morning and I had to try. This was another recipe that wasn’t right. The recipe called for 1/2 cup of “dried teff” and I had no way of knowing whether they meant just straight up teff of maybe teff flour. I tried doing some searches and just couldn’t tell for sure. For some reason, I keep forgetting that I have some, and I had three bags of the flour, so I decided to just try to whip some up and see how it went.
Flour: Not right.
Okay.
Teff itself. 1/2 a cup, right. Stir until it pulls away from the sides of the pan the instructions say. The teff is swimming in 2 cups of water and it’s not going to be pulling away from the sides of the pan for several hours at this rate, not the 10 minutes the instructions suggest. So, knowing most grain recipes are 1 to 2, meaning 1 cup grain to 2 cups water, I doubled the teff and voila, I appeared to be on the right track. These were definitely an odd creation. They totally didn’t seem like they were going to work when I was cooking them, but once they were poured out onto the baking pan, I could see where this was going. Once they baked up, there were really neat warm, sort of crispy on the outside, but tasted almost hollow on the inside, even though they weren’t. Once they had cooled, they were still really interesting in the soup, as the croutons would dissolve, but you were left with a very distinctively grainy texture in the soup. It was a really neat effect, and reminded up of a chef in Oslo who had done a similar thing with toasted buckwheat to great effect. That was pretty cool and it wasn’t something we knew was going to happen until we were eating it with everyone else.
Once the soup was done, we were ready to move onto a pasta course, Fettuccine with Lemon, Black Pepper, and Caper Cream. This used as a base a ridiculously garlicky braise of twelve cloves of garlic that I braised in advance in a little white whine and fine herbs. That was step one. Then you come back and add a boatload of lemon juice, zest, piper nigrum, and capers. This was a really impressive dish, flavor-wise. Strong, almost overwhelming garlic flavor wrestling with the strong, almost overwhelming lemony pucker and the punch of pepper with the brightness of the vinegary capers. Wow. I’m probably going to make this again at some point.
After all of that garlic, we focused on the lemon side of things with a little Lemon-Ginger Ice to clear the palate. Our guests were delighted. I don’t think most home cooks think to include something like this. I actually had to make this twice as the first version was weirdly bitter. I chalk that up to an old lemon that had been sitting on the counter that I thought might work anyway. It didn’t.
Our entrees were some massive Bastilla — Moroccan-inspired filo pastries filled with an intoxicating blend of onions, mushrooms, eggplant, cumin, mint and rosemary that had layers of flavor all over your mouth. The filo layers were lightly dusted with a bit of an almond-cinnamon-sugar, stuffed with the aforementioned intoxicating blend, then it all sat on a Golden Curried Tomato Sauce with rubies of beet sauce reduction punctuating the bright yellow. A couple of bright, crispy green beans finished the plate. I think only two people at the table managed to finish these. They were quite large. I think with all of the other food I had served, I should have made these about half as large. I’d been quite intimidated about working with the filo dough, but found it to be a lot less fussy than I’d feared and the results were really, really impressive looking. I can definitely see trying something like this again, but maybe using a more seasonal assortment of vegetables. I could see this working equally well with a nice Fall assortment.
The whole table was completely stuffed. I set out some of the Pine Nut and Anise cookies that I’d made. They were also a hit. I will probably make these again, too. Especially if open pine nut farm.
We finished with their version of a German Chocolate Cake with the Coconut Sorbet. I have to say this was a really winner, too. Gooey sweet coconut nut caramel sandwiched between Deep, deep, dark, dark almost bitter chocolate with a couple of scoops of a super-simple coconutty sorbet. I had some of this for lunch on Sunday, then again Sunday night, and I broke down and had some more last night. Shut up. It was that good.
This was a great experience and it was really eye-opening to see that one can create just as filling and interesting a meal as any using just plants. There was no meat, dairy, or legumes involved in the making of this meal.