A La Cuisine!

I should probably start off by writing about my adventures in San Diego last weekend. Great friends, food and weather made for a wonderful time.  But right now, my head is still woozy from drinking half a tequila at dinner, so it’s probably best that I wait until I can get all my facts straight.

While it's still fresh in my mind, I had a terrific first night in LA. It’s not often that I get to meet other food bloggers, espcially one whose writing, blogging frequency, and good taste I revere. So as you can probably imagine, I was ecstatic to have dinner with Sarah from The Delicious Life last night.

Aside from finally getting to see what she looked like above the jawline, I took the opportunity to ask all the questions that had been accumulating in my head for the past two years. Questions like, who are you? and how do you manage post so frequently when it takes me weeks to write a single entry that’s not nearly as witty?  Before tonight, I’d only met three other food bloggers (Rob and Rachel and June) and I always get a kick from feeling like I already know them even though it’s our first in-person encounter.  So as you might expect, Sarah is as funny and interesting as she is on her blog, with camera in tow to take pictures of every dish we ordered.

Speaking of which, we had dinner at Tlapazola, a Mexican restaurant specializing in Oaxacan cuisine. My experience with Mexican food doesn’t extend much beyond burritos and quesadillas, so eating cactus and shrimp with blini-like pancakes was all new to me, but delicious nonetheless. Many thanks to Sarah for a wonderful evening!

Okay I’m back. Or at least I hope I am. The past six months have been a sleepless blur, from the beginning of one job to my final day last week. I start a new position next Monday (which I’m looking forward to very much), but before I begin, I’m in California for the next few days. I’ve been looking forward to this week since April, so it’s great to finally be here.

I arrived in San Diego last Friday and will be making my way up to San Francisco via LA and San Jose. My original reason for coming was to attend a dinner at Manresa in Los Gatos. But while I’m here, I’m really looking forward to visiting some (hopefully many) food shops and restaurants that I’ve read and heard so much about. I’m also looking forward to meeting a few of my favourite food bloggers (live, in person!).

At the moment, I’m on the train travelling from San Diego to LA soaking in the beautiful palm-tree lined shores and sunny California weather. After such a long hiatus from blogging, I’m hoping to start writing more frequently. I’m sure I’ll have much to write about in the days ahead.

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out what makes food taste incredible as opposed to merely good or great.  And now, I think I’ve found the answer.

It’s often said that great cooking is a combination of great ingredients and technique.  Unquestionably, the quality of produce and skill of the cook* both have a tremendous influence on the final dish.  But incredible food often contains one additional element – nostalgia.  Like flipping through an old photo album, food has the power to arouse memories and bring us back to special moments in time.

Incredible food, in my opinion, has at least as much to do with nostalgia, as it does with ingredients and technique.  To anyone else, my mom’s meatballs are probably not the best in the world.  But they are the best to me, because of the memories I associate with them and because they’re the meatballs that I’m most familiar with.  So even if a dish doesn’t use great ingredients and technique, it’s possible for these limitations to be overcome by the nostalgia that a diner brings to the table.  Understanding and taking advantage of your guest's food-related memories is cooking’s secret ingredient.

After a spectacular start in 2005, the Independent Food Festival & Awards are back, and I’m honoured to have the opportunity to participate.  The IFFAs, hosted by Hillel of tastingmenu.com, let food bloggers from around the world recognize people who create exceptional food.  Each award is creative and unique – so if you take a look at other food blogs this week, you’ll find many unusual and impressive awards being presented.

In keeping with the theme, I wanted to create an award for something I truly enjoyed.  Last year, my award was for the Maple Syrup Confection Worth its Weight in Gold, and this year I’ve decided to present an award for Cold Smoked Salmon so Delicious that You’ll Want to Build Your Own Smokehouse.  To clarify (for all those people who may not think like me) – if I like something a lot, I’ll usually try to make it myself.  So, if I were to eat an amazing piece of smoked salmon, I’d probably want to figure out how to make it... which would in turn entail building my own smokehouse or acquiring a smoker.  Hopefully that makes sense and doesn’t sound too crazy.

My blog exists because I love to cook and write.  But being recognized for my work is always special, whether it's by readers, other bloggers, or in the press.  Last week, Canada's weekly news magazine, Maclean's ran a story about my recent dinner parties. 

The article can be viewed here, and the original article (with a photo) can be found in the March 6th issue of Maclean's. I'm ecstatic at how well it turned out.  It's action-packed and exciting, and the author has really succeeded in capturing the entire event with great detail, even though she wasn't actually present at the dinners.

Many thanks to Anne Kingston, photographer Christopher Wahl, and the staff at Maclean's!

I have long been an advocate of having dessert for breakfast, but at England’s The Fat Duck, breakfast is the new dessert.  Amidst the restaurant’s menu of Snail Porridge and Sardine on Toast Sorbet, a finale of Smoked Bacon and Egg Ice Cream seems to fit right in.  After reading rave reviews about this dish, I simply had to try it myself.  But since my chances of dining at The Fat Duck in the foreseeable future are next to zero, I spent last weekend trying to recreate it at home.

As you may have guessed, this dessert is Chef Heston Blumenthal’s whimsical take on a traditional English breakfast.  In addition to the Smoked Bacon and Egg Ice Cream, the dish also includes a sweet and slightly sour Tomato and Red Pepper Jam, caramelized French Toast (or Pain Perdu), a rich and creamy Salted Butter Caramel, and a refreshing glass of Tea Jelly.  The complete recipes for the dessert can be found here and here.

While the Steelers and Seahawks spent the past couple weeks training for the Superbowl, I was in my kitchen preparing for two big events of my own.  My dinners last weekend may not have had a halftime show, and I didn’t get to douse my guests with Gatorade, but I accomplished what I set out to do, and thought the food was delicious.

Here's a summary of the dishes I served.  It may seem like a lot of work, but it's hardly fair for me to call it that when I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.

Butter-Poached Lobster Salad and Lobster Bisque (not shown)

Succulent lobster, bitter greens, and creamy and sweet lobster bisque.  The star of this dish is Thomas Keller’s famous butter-poached lobster.  After steeping each lobster in water and extracting its semi-raw meat, the meat is gently cooked in a butter emulsion, which loads the lobster with flavour and creates a melt in your mouth texture.

Crab and Avocado Ravioli

This is my attempt at L’Astrance’s signature dish.  Essentially, it’s a very simple preparation consisting of fresh dungeness crab meat sandwiched by two thin slices of organic Haas avocado.  The top slice of avocado is seasoned with lime and orange zest, Fleur de Sel, and almond oil (which helps lubricate the palate just as the avocado begins to melt).  Simple as it may be, this dish succeeds on a very fine balance of ingredients.

It took long time to persuade myself to charge my friends $50 for dinner next weekend.  After all, if someone invited me to their place but told me that I’d have to pay that much, I would really have to be convinced that it was going to be worth it.

Although the $50 is only to cover the cost of ingredients, it’s still a lot of money and my guests will undoubtedly have high expectations.  It’ll be different than all the other meals I’ve cooked (which I paid for) where good food was a bonus, but nothing was lost if things went awry.  Perhaps it’s the loss of this safety net that makes me a bit nervous.  Thankfully, I’ll still be cooking for friends who are much more understanding and appreciative than most restaurant customers.

On the bright side, this will be an opportunity to improve my standards.  There have been a few times in the past when I’ve served dishes that I knew weren’t quite up to par.  If this happens next week, I think I’ll dump it into a tupperware box.  Quality’s more important than quantity, especially when there are already eight other courses being served.

I've sharpened my knives and have amassed pages of plans.  And now I'm ready to begin.  For the next two weeks, I will be preparing and rehearsing for two dinners that I’ll be hosting on February 4th and 5th.  They will be the first two nights of what I hope will become a dinner series, where guests are asked to pay for the cost of ingredients in a multi-course tasting menu.  By charging $40 - $50 per person, I hope to be able to host fancy dinners more often (instead of only once a year), and to also cook and experiment with preparations I otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford.

On February 4th, my friend Renée will help with service and will contribute a couple of her own dishes, and on the following night I’ll be on my own.  We’ll be doing a plated service of small dishes, and tentatively, our menu will include canapés, three appetizers, two mains, three desserts, and mignardises to take home.

Until last weekend I had never cooked for strangers.  The prospect of actually charging money for food was something I hadn’t thought much of.  The possibility of preparing food for dozens of people and inadvertently poisoning them all was a dream I had had more than once.

Fortunately only the former came true last Saturday when I catered a charity concert organized by my friend.  In total, my friends and I made about 600 hors d'oeuvres for 120 guests at an after-recital reception.  In my brief history of kitchen adventures thus far, this was certainly one of the most exciting.

About a month ago, my friend, Grace asked if I would be interested in catering her concert.  I suppose she asked based on her previous experiences eating my food, but also because I offered to cater at a fairly reasonable price of $5 per person.  In other words, my competition may have been the frozen hors d'oeuvres aisle at the supermarket.  But nevertheless, I was ecstatic to get the job, since I rarely cook for more than four or five people at a time, and had only once cooked for 20.