Valentine's Day Tasting II

So Helen and I just finished watching an entire season of Master Chef in one week and it’s put me into a cooking mood. I’m hoping to make this a regular tradition, so here is my homemade valentine’s tasting menu for Helen this year. To be honest, the menu is quite a potpourri of dishes, but it’s mainly inspired by Helen’s insatiable love of seafood and Korean food. Learned a few things from last year and tried to manage time and prep-work better this time so I could get the dishes served out with minimal downtime in between. Shoutout to Helen for giving me the idea to infuse earl grey into the creme brulee. Fail to me for the blowtorch running out of butane mid brulee without having any refills. Other than that, it overall turned out fairly well I think!

Valentine's Day Tasting Menu

Valentine’s Day is kind of an odd day. I feel like the celebration of love shouldn’t just happen on one particular day, but cherished every day. Having said that, it still gives me a good excuse to a) spoil Helen, and b) experiment in the kitchen. As you may be aware, Helen and I love all things food, so what better than to put together a personalized tasting menu?

The menu planning started in early February as I tried to think of dishes that Helen would enjoy while also being somewhat reasonable/practical in the amount and types of ingredients I would have to get. In the end, I settled on seven courses plus a cocktail. The tasting menu ended up being an entire day affair as Helen will attest to my snail-like pace in all things, but it was all worth it (I think).

Raw ingredients: Here are most of the main ingredients i ended up using for the tasting menu minus the chicken wings

Course One: Amuse Bouche

For the amuse bouche, I decided to make sweet and spicy Korean fried chicken wings. The inspiration for this dish comes from our love of Asian food. Helen and I both love to watch all sorts of Asian Youtube cooking channels like Cooking with Dog (R.I.P. Francis) and Jun’s Kitchen (a must watch - if not for the food, at least for the cats!). The recipe that I used comes from another one of our favorites, Maangchi. The recipe I used can be found here. Overall I think these turned out really well! I only made 6 wings for the two of us because I knew we had to save room for the rest of the menu, but after finishing these, we couldn’t help but wish I had made more.

sweet and spicy korean fried chicken

Second Course: Salad

For salad, I wanted to try making a kale salad. Generally kale is pretty tough due to all its fiber, but for this salad I tried blanching it for a few seconds in a pot of boiling water and then massaging it for a bit after straining it out to break up the fibers. I’ve read that you can just massage it for a few minutes as well without blanching, which is something I’ll have to try next time, but overall I think this method was pretty successful. I mixed in some golden raisins, pine nuts, fresh parmesan with a drizzle of olive oil, lemon juice, and seasoned with salt and pepper to complete the dish.

kale salad with pine nuts, golden raisins, parmesan

Course Three: Charcuterie

Just before I left Michigan/Ohio for 3 months of away rotations for emergency medicine across the country, we wanted to have a nice dinner together, so I booked a reservation at this restaurant in Toledo called Registry Bistro. It was a really cute restaurant in downtown Toledo where they seated us on table with a balcony. One of the dishes we ordered there was a charcuterie board, which was incredible. The meats, cheeses, and accoutrements were all so rich and flavorful, that it inspired me to put together a charcuterie board of my own. For my board, I chose a lot of ingredients that I thought would taste great on their own, but could also be used for other dishes throughout the menu. I also threw in some gherkins and manzanilla olives because Helen loves them (I hate olives). The final board consisted of camembert cheese, gruyere cheese, parmesan cheese, prosciutto, genoa salami, peanuts, manzanilla olives, gherkins, grapes, and french loaf slices.

Charcuterie board from Registry Bistro

Course Four: Soup

I’ve never really been much of a soup person. I always felt like soup took up too much space for the main course, but Helen absolutely loves soup. This of course has started to rub off on me a little, and I now have more of an appreciation for it. That’s why for the tasting menu, I decided to make not one, but two soups! The first soup I decided to make was a French onion soup. I’ve only tried French onion one other time in my life, and that was a year and a half ago when my friend Joanne made it for my birthday potluck. I really enjoyed it and wanted to give a crack at it myself.

french onion soup with gruyere cheese

Course Five: Meat

I suppose you could call this the ‘main’ course of the meal. For the fifth course, I made a medium rare beef tenderloin on top of a bed of asparagus and potato puree with a rich pan sauce. It’s kind of silly, but I brought my cast iron pan all the way from Detroit to Toledo just so I could get a good sear on the steak. Tenderloin is my favorite cut of meat and never fails to simply melt in your mouth, but I think what made the dish sing was the pan sauce, which is pretty easy to make. After you sear your steak, deglaze the fond (all the bits stuck on the pan) with some brandy (and flambe if you like fire). From there I added in a bit of beef stock, worcestershire, aromatics (I used rosemary and thyme), a dash of butter, and a bit of heavy cream.

beef tenderloin with asparagus, potato puree, and a pan sauce

Course Six: Fish

Soup number two! I wanted to try and keep things fairly light after stuffing ourselves with everything else, so I chose to make a Japanese dashi broth soup with fish. This dish was fairly quick and easy to make. For the broth, I put kombu and bonito flakes into a pot of hot water to extract the flavor and seasoned with soy sauce, salt, a bit of sugar, and some sesame oil. From there you can pretty much put whichever vegetables you like in the broth. Wilting greens like spinach, dandelions, pea vines work great. I used spinach, sugar snap peas for some crunch, and the ends of a green onion. I seared some cod on the cast iron and added it to the dish to top it off.

Dashi broth with pan-seared cod, spinach, and sugar snap peas

Course Seven: Dessert

Helen isn’t too much of a sweets person, so for dessert I decided to go with something a bit more savory. I decided to make a puff pastry stuffed with peaches, camembert cheese, and prosciutto, drizzled with honey and a balsamic reduction. I ended up making two of these, but by the time we got to the end of the menu, we were completely stuffed and only had room to share one.

Peach, prosciutto, and camembert stuffed pastry with honey and balsamic reduction drizzle

All in all, I actually had a lot of fun putting together this menu and executing it. It did take a lot of time to prepare and cook, especially since I haven’t cooked most of these dishes before, but I think it was a really good learning experience and something I would definitely try again sometime.

Peace, love, and full tummies.

Daryl

New Year's Eve

December 31st - New Years Eve. A date we often take time to reflect back and look forward to all the great new things to come in the new year. If you were to ask me what I envisioned my 2018 would be like a year ago, I would not have predicted all the amazing things that happened in my life. As a medical student, it’s sometimes hard to find free time outside of school. A lot of my time was spent in clinical rotations at the hospital and doing multiple emergency medicine rotations all over the country, which reaffirmed that emergency is definitely the field that I want to be in. But more importantly, the time I spent outside of the hospital was largely spent with Helen. When I think of New Years Eve, I think about how my life changed entirely from this date exactly one year ago. The date when my relationship with her really began.

It was December 31st, 2017 when we started to see and talk to each other on a regular basis. Looking back at the last year, I’ve realized that my life has never been so full. The experiences, the emotions, and the conversations I’ve had with Helen have made me really reconsider my outlook on life. I used to think that my career was something that was the most important thing in my life. Having gone through a five year undergraduate in engineering, working in industry, going back for a 2 year post-bac, 4 years of medical school followed by years of residency training to come, how could it not, right? Wrong. The more our relationship grew, the more I realized that there’s more to life than a career. There’s such a vast spectrum of the human experience to explore - raw emotions, worldly experiences, and I couldn’t be happier than to be able to experience it with Helen.

To celebrate this day one year ago, I decided to take Helen to The Kitchen - a small and cozy restaurant in Pittsford, NY run by Chef Joseph Picolla. He runs a constantly changing prix fix menu and we found it to be a very interesting dining experience! The restaurant itself seats no more than 20 people, so it was a fairly intimate setting. At first glance, the menu itself doesn’t seem like anything special - butternut squash ravioli, pizza, fish taco, turkey dinner, and cherry pie. However, each dish was deconstructed and elevated in a surprisingly unique and tasteful manner. The food itself was all plated in front of us, which was really interesting to watch as they spent so much effort into making each dish look great!

Helen looking beautiful as usual, wine in hand

personalized tasting menu was a nice touch!

Chef Joseph Picolla: Meticulously plating each dish

Butternut Squash Ravioli: Pea tendrils, butternut squash, sous-vide egg yolk, powdered olive oil, and walnuts in a mysterious sweet and creamy sauce that neither of us can recall what it consisted of.

PIZZA: A very liberal term of what we would call a pizza, but was extremely delicious nonetheless. Vine ripened heirloom tomato cored out and stuffed with sweet Italian sausage and mozzarella on a bed of crushed homemade bread and topped with a tomato foam, olive oil, and balsamic

Fish Taco: Sous-vide halibut, corn chips topped with blanched watercress and 4 different sauces.

Turkey Dinner: Sous-vide turkey breast wrapped in a sage and sausage stuffing served on top of a potato puree and topped with an orange and star-anise spiced cranberry sauce.

Cherry Pie: Interestingly, dessert was the most filling dish of the course. An eggnog creme brulee served with a hashtag pie crust, whip cream, and a sweet cherry sauce.