February 11, 2024
Finally, had our neighbors, the Knapps over for dinner. At long last, I changed to a vector program to create the menu. Affinity Designer 2 handled the job quite easily!
Yes, it says February 9, 2024, but things came up and it was postponed until today. Chris had never seen anything like our menus 😉! We had a really great time and everything worked out perfectly, thanks to a massive amount of ahead-of-time work. The background photo is the sunrise we had on January 20, 2024.
Here’s the table at the very start of the meal. The napkins are folded into the classic candle fold. The vinegar and cheese tasting is on the small square plates. The cheese is a 24 month old Parmigiano-Reggiano from Cheese Importers and the vinegar is Aceto Balsamico di Modena D.O.P Extra Vecchio
Our guests brought over an Amuse-bouche, Cowboy Caviar! This is a neat little starter. A little fast footwork to put it into our small desert cups and add a small spoon to the place setting and dinner could start.
Martin was too busy to document anything once we got started, so this and the rest of the course’s pictures were taken afterward. This is the second course, the Tomato Bisque. This was made yesterday as part of the massive make ahead. This was amazingly bright, the Muir Glen Fire Roasted Tomatoes pushed this classic over the top!
The recipe we use is from the late Taunton Fine Cooking magazine, issue 49, in the insert at the back.
Sometimes it works better to take the shot of the course in its baking dish. This is certainly true here because you can really see the layers! This is a Classic French Gratin Dauphinois using a recipe from a really neat site - The Spruce Eats. The cheese was a wonderful Gruyère, again from Cheese Importers. We made this at the same time as the tomato bisque.
We finished with one of Bill Knapp’s favorites, Key Lime Pie. The recipe is amazingly simple with only lime zest & juice, egg yolks and Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk. The crust is equally simply with just graham crackers, sugar and butter.
The only difficult part of the recipe is the graham crackers. When the recipe was written, in March of 1997, graham crackers came 11 to the package. Then, a few years ago, that went to 9 crackers to the package. We got another nasty surprise on Friday when we actually made the pie. The crackers themselves had been shrunk, so we had to guess at 12 crackers. Fortunately, Cook’s Illustrated also gave a measure of 1 1/4 cups so we could check our guess and it turned out about right.
The mise en place and inspection by Livingstone of the Salmon en Papillote from Julia & Jacques Cooking at home. It’s been modified by us by greatly increasing the amount of shiitake mushrooms, zucchini squash, carrots parsley and butter. That Straus butter is very rich at 85% milk fat instead of the USDA minimum requirement of 80% or the EU requirement of 82%.
Part 1 of the assembly
Part 2 of the assembly. We then put the finished packet in the fridge and put it into the oven partway thru dinner so it came out at just the right time without us having to leave the table for very long!