Dinnertime

We get an F on photography this year. Dinner was delicious, but we were so into the moment that we didn't even realize we had not taken one. single. photo. Until after three courses in. Oops. Here is the menu, though. 

The appetizer was the little cone things that I burned my fingers on, filled with marinated sushi tuna, seaweed salad, pickled ginger, and a sriracha mayo.  No picture, but tasty.

The second thing we ate was a single mussel on a spoon with a small amount of sauce that had a whole bunch of stuff in it, pickles, capers, shallots, hard-boiled eggs, other stuff.  One bite and you're done.

The third item, blini, are little quarter size potato pancakes that are smooth and delicate with reduced eggplant and roasted peppers to accompany. These were delightful. No picture.

It was at this point that we realized we hadn't taken any pictures. So Russ got out the phone and took a picture of this one, half assembled.  It had basil oil, tomato coulis, a crouton, cherry tomatoes, and is missing the tomato sorbet and the garlic tuille that tops the whole thing off. But you can sort of get the idea.

For the main course the only picture we got was of me cutting up the sea bass. I look so focused here. Not angry. Focused.

This was served with crispy skin, that I ate and liked, on top of a spinach ball the size of a bouncy ball, parsnip and cream puree, and a sauce that sounded like it should have been weird, but was really good. It was mussel stock reduced with a vanilla bean and saffron and then butter and cream added back into it. I think it was the vanilla-mussel combination that I was nervous about.

We forgot to take a picture of the cheese course. But it was a 2" round of brioche with a 1" hole cut out of it, and a quail egg cooked in the middle, salad with a Dijon vinaigrette, and wedges of manchego. Manchego *might* be my favorite cheese. At any rate it is the the cheese that sold me on sheeps milk and started my several year long journey to acquire sheep so that I can have my very own sheeps milk cheese. So much so that I kept cooking lamb and trying to find ways to make us like it so that I could justify owning an animal for cheese that I will get little to no milk out of for only 4 months of the year. But that's another story.

We finally got our act together by dessert, and took more pictures of that than the entire meal. I'm only putting two of them on here though. This shows the souffles that have been baked on a cinnamon cookie, straight out of the oven, along side the cinnamon ice cream that had been cut into discs waiting to be plated.

The tricky thing with this is that the chocolate sauce under the ice cream is warm. The souffle on top of the ice cream is hot. So you have about 5 second to get this to the table before the ice cream in the middle is melting. It still tastes fantastic though. So here is a picture, but it looks lopsided because the ice cream has already started to melt, and we were in a hurry to get this to the table. And eat it. And lick the plate.

By the end, I could not have eaten another thing. In fact, I think I'm still full.