That aside, the discussion I had earlier on the practical and artistic aspects of menu planning has me going back and re-evaluating the my earlier endeavors under similar criteria. Turns out I don’t do so well. The menu progression that I created and executed a few years back happens to be one of only three that does work: it “makes sense” and doesn’t have any gustatory jolts along the way.

The “Baie Comeau” was a meal I was asked to make for someone actually from Baie Comeau (no, not Brian), but with constraints which I uncharacteristically accepted to work with rather than my customary “don’t worry about your dietary quirks because I’ll serve it anyway” approach:

• no tentacles
• no tentacle suckers
• no squishy or chewy animal bits
• no cucumbers
• no legumes/pulses
• no melons

Not sure why I said yes. Some were related to difficulty in digestion but none were in the religious or death-inducing categories that I would pay attention to. There was something I just set aside outright after thinking long and hard about it, because I heard “balle au nez”. What I did ignore completely was the suggestion that maybe I could make cinnamon and chile jumbo prawns with mango chutney and Chilean sea bass with caramelized onion mashed potato and pancetta. Those elements are just so… 2005.

The first menu

• quail-sickle

Okay, so it was a very short start.

My original idea for quail never got off the ground but no one ever likes the idea of presenting a little bird on a stick. I mean, the technique works with squidsickles, why shouldn’t it work with quail? You can even get them off the konro that way in Japan and Taiwan.

The second menu

I actually shopped for this menu, which in hindsight 2 years later would have been really cool with some octopus suckers incorporated into the amuse-bouche:

• Strawberry gazpacho with shrimp
• Lobster and foie gras
• Ikura and peas salad
• Duck
• Strip steak
• Cheese
• Some kind of pineapple-based dessert

Foie gras is one of those things that’s always available in Québec (and with no dose of PETA), and since it’s duck foie gras, duck is also readily available. Ditto cows. It was also early summer so Québec lobsters were full and plentiful.

The second iteration ran off the rails pretty quickly after that. That strawberry gazpacho?  It was actually a great idea from my pal Amy as it met all the criteria of being a refreshing early summer dish. The unfortunate situation with à la minute shopping is that there’s always the outside possibility that one hits a pothole, or in this case, fruit mold on pretty much all the strawberries I found at the market (that I distinctly remember). Lots and lots of fruit mold.

The ikura and peas got scratched by the major requirement for fresh peas and fava beans, neither of which were available at the time I was shopping. At this point things were starting to resemble a shopping “fail” I had on Granville Island (also back in 2005; I created two menus to cook for friends and couldn’t find ingredients for any of it).

The eventual menu

• Tsukemono
• Lobster with spring vegetables
• La panolplie des asperges! (cuz it sounds classier in French)
• Chinese 5-spice roast duck
• Strip steak
• Cheese
• Pineapple

The interpretation

Tsukemono : This was more of a ración size but it made for an interesting saladō kickoff. Click the photo to expand. Top right: yama-imo with shoyu glaze (soy, mirin, sake) to demonstrate the love of nebaneba shokuhin (slimy foods). Middle: black tomatoes with komochi konbu (herring eggs on kelp – though I could have glued on the eggs if I had some transglutaminase, I didn’t because it’s actually bought this way). Top left: takuan (daikon rice-bran pickle; generally you buy this unless you happen to own a daikon farm). Bottom right: red carrot shiozuke (salt pickle).

Lobster with spring vegetables : Well, the lobster made it onto the menu. Québec lobster is supposed to be identified by claw bands that say “aliments du Québec” when you visit your local grocer or fishmonger. In all honesty the one I got was a 650 g /1.4 lb female with white claw bands with no writing on them so I have no idea where they nabbed it. This is a variation of something that I made during the Omelette Atonement (another menu experience), but with a couple of minor adjustments, notably in that everything tastes better with some foie gras on it. I’ve also included snap peas, red carrots (at $2.49 for six micro-carrots you better believe I’m going to include them), Québec green asparagus and Peruvian white asparagus. Sauce was a nigori sake reduction. Plating? Blech – composition needs work because it’s visually unappealing.

La panoplie des asperges! In hindsight this is slightly atypical of me since I don’t normally make a standalone vegetable dish because it encourages less-desirable behavior (you know, vegan-ism) but early summer also means local asparagus and I lucked out and found some wild asparagus. If you look carefully past the long pepper, you can see the regular green and white spargle underneath (actually spargle stalks – I used the tips for the lobster). Also finished off with the nigori sake to offset the slight bitterness.

Chinese five-spice roast duck : I remember at the time that I had been visiting Asian grocers on my quest to find bentō ingredients and was constantly passing by the roast ducks. I really like those ducks but getting one wasn’t suitable for this meal because I wanted to actually make one just to say I can. I wound up buying a magret, which may or may not have been the smartest thing to do because one magret costs about as much as a whole roast duck but at least this way there was less stuff left over. The magret itself was dusted with five-spice, long peppers and salt, put into a sous-vide bag with some butter for 3 hours at 57ºC/135ºF and then finished in a pan with a little bit of butter. What was roasted was the skin: crocheted onto a cake rack, roasted for 7 hours at 60ºC/140ºF and then finished off with hot oil and the blowtorch. I didn’t have time to make pancakes and didn’t want to serve just a pile of scallions so it was a microgreen salad with a Meyer lemon vinaigrette and some streaks of hoisin cut with mirin and sake.

Strip steak : A summertime favorite for a lot of people is steak off the grill served with sautéed onions and mushrooms. I have no grill (still saving deposit bottles for that Napoleon PT600RBI with the ceramic infrared burners) but I do however have an induction burner and I do have a grill pan. I decided to use the grill pan for something else. So, one 5 cm /2 inch-thick 680g / 1.5 lb strip trimmed striploin, one frying pan and just a little bit of butter for that Maillard reaction deliciousness. Served with caramelized onion purée (that goo on the plate; made with caramelized onion, demi-glace and nigori sake) and pied bleu and girolle mushrooms that were sautéed in the leftover foie gras fat (and just a little bit more butter).

Cheese : La Sauvagine, a mild soft-crust cow milk cheese from St-Raymond-de-Portneuf in Quebec, and an ash-covered Valencay goat cheese from Poitou in France.

Pineapple : yeah, pineapple – one of the three options within my dessert repertoire. Originally to be another implementation of the chest-clutching buttery roasted pineapple goodness, but it transmogrified into grilled pineapple because I wanted to see what a Le Creuset grill pan coul do. What I found is that the iron content in this grill pan allows the induction unit to heat the thing to over 329ºC/625ºF (gee, does it sear?). The pineapple pavé was marinated in soy sauce and mirin before grilling and it’s served on a sauce made from the leftover marinade, nigori sake, pineapple juice, honey and piment d’espelette. The basil does indeed go well with it (it wasn’t an afterthought).

Photos

[View with PicLens]

Notes

As I said, this is one of exactly three menus progressions I’ve made which worked harmoniously – no jarring flavors, good transition from dish to dish, no outliers. So what did I learn from this? Nothing at the time, but 2 years later, that I was actually quite lucky that it turned out the way it did. Especially the pineapple.

When I look at this now, I could have had several fails, notably with the tsukemono and the duck as they’re the most overtly Asian elements of the meal. What saved them was probably starting with the tsukemono to reset the palate, and a very restrained use of five-spice for the duck.

It is also a continuing reminder that have to work on oh, plating since everything looks tired and dated. Except when asparagus is involved - that’s just like one really bad basketball game gone wrong.

The ingredients for a roast pork sandwich don’t necessarily have to be assembled as a roast pork sandwich – they look nice (and taste nice) as a straight-out plating.

 Synchronicity? Serendipity? Some amazing forethought?

Probably not.

I think it’s a fluke coinkidink that I happened to be reading this specific book at the same time that my pal Butter Boy decides to run off to have a vegan fling.

I wasn’t aware of Schatzker’s book if it were not for a free copy of the Globe & Mail in early May. Ian Brown had a write-up of his interview/meal with Schatzker and I found it fascinating enough to order a copy (nice pairing alongside Rocket Robin Hood Volume 2 by the way).

It is a fascinating read as I don’t really see this type of single-mindedness towards food outside of Asia, where people have devoted lives to studying ramen, or pursuing the ultimate shark fin. Schatzker spent three years identifying what’s currently so wrong with North American steak and what constitutes a good steak, going so far as to raise (and consume) his own cow. His description of that experience, including a hilarious observation of the Two Solitudes while obsessing over what constituted a Canadian cattle breed was revelatory.

There’s more to the book than the Canadiennes,  a multi-continent taste test and whether acorns are valid items to feed cows, as Schatzker recounts:

• the dining experience at the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo (home of the 72 oz steak challenge as seen on Man v. Food)
• commentary on the late and definitely unlamented leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei being a proud vegetarian
• fat overload from overdoing A3 and A5 ishiyaki in Japan
• Heston Blumenthal’s cooking method for steak, which takes more time than a roundtrip flight from London to New York to eat a steak
• biochemical analyses (it’s all about the terpenes)

Anecdotes aside, what I found most interesting was some of the insights arising from the work. While I was already aware that grass-fed beef offers superior product, I wasn’t aware that there was so much variability and expression of terroir when finishing cows on grass. Nor was I aware that “Angus Beef” in North America has nothing to do with actually getting beef from an Angus cow. Or that the breeds that are being raised for meat (e.g. Beefmaster, Charolais, Limousin) don’t taste particularly good but that the dairy breeds (which we don’t get as steaks) are the tastier ones.

Anyway, reading this book over the last week has actually gotten me thinking about my own carnivorous tendencies as well as how I approach meat.

I’ve eaten a lot of cow and for a long while, steak was my favorite meal. I don’t recall eating steak much less beef when I was a kid in Taiwan. Taiwan by the way is not a destination for steak. Soup dumplings, oyster omelettes, squidsickles, bamboo shoots, amazing seafood and other treats, yes, but not steak. Not spiny lobsters either, but for entirely different reasons. Taiwan really hasn’t been about beef until fairly recently since the only bovines were water buffalo used for tilling rice paddies (the buffalo were treated as our friends and one doesn’t eat one’s friends), but steak really wasn’t something on the menu until the arrival of the first Ruth’s Chris in Taichung in 1996 (the year the mainland Chinese tried to influence the presidential vote by shooting missiles into the Straight of Taiwan). I’ve actually had steak on subsequent visits to Taiwan and while it isn’t an abject disaster like Gallagher’s was a couple of years back, I can safely say that it’s not a meal that one needs to seek out unless one has a hankering for Australian feedlot cow and industrial quantities of gloopy sauces that Taiwanese chefs haven’t gotten the hang of making.

I do however remember eating my first restaurant steak at a Ponderosa in Fort Collins (an elementary school classmate’s birthday party), and I remember the steak I had at the Holiday Inn in Omaha Nebraska, which my father continues to remind me was the most expensive item on the menu. I remember saving up my per diem so that I could go have a steak in Winnipeg (this was a whole lot harder than it sounds), and how steak dinners became one of the calming comfort foods after high-stress moments, especially in South Jersey. It didn’t go too well with the Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay, but it was one of those “they can’t screw this up” selections that one could look forward to after a long day of “the best of the best of the best” perseverative behavior. That of course isn’t quite true since I still remember the “Kansas City-style boneless New York striploin” with its complimentary wing bone, but those incidents generally resulted in giving my pal Ronny and I a laugh.

And apart from ordering steaks in restaurants, I can of course make my own. I try to purchase from only two local bouchers because they carry higher-quality sources and get dry-aged when it’s available, leaving commercial (supermarket) beef  for practice. My knife skills mean that I can efficienty cut/trim pretty much any primal cut I care to use. I know multiple preparations for many types of steaks and know how to get the maximum Maillard reaction for each without overcooking the protein. I have gotten good enough at it that my superchef pal Amy has noticed.

So that’s all great. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. What Schaztker’s book has me scratching my head over however, is whether or not all of that beef actually tastes/tasted beefy.

Beefy.

Did it taste beefy?

Did any of that steak taste like beef?

I’m not so sure I can answer that.

From left: cucumber and kombu shiozuke (left), Thai-style grilled beef salad (centre), asparagus and tomato salad with saikyo miso dressing and toasted black sesame. I figured I may as well reset my butter-loving pal’s palate after his vegan experiment (who says I don’t know how to make something butter-free?).

Besides, it’s not like we can have him switch over, since “Vegan Boy” sounds more like a Baltimora tune than it does a nickname.

This post is about Butter Boy, but for one of the few times on this blog, it actually isn’t about me trying to kill him with tasty bovine buttery goodness, or jerking his chain for personal amusement.

Nope. Not this time.

So what exactly does my pal and ride-share have as personal plans for tonight? He’s going to have dinner at a vegan restaurant, apparently because one of his friends is always on the lookout to do something different.

A vegan restaurant. And willingly. As a social outing.

I’ll pause just to say “hmm…”, but that certainly falls into “different” all right.

I had a case of the willies when I read where he was going, because personally that ranks right up there with Amway meetings.

I’m not truly opposed to vegetarianism, except perhaps in the cases of expectant mothers and parents raising young children ([rant] dumba$$! you are so putting the kids at risk! [/rant]). I fully grasp and comprehend the underlying concepts of vegetarianism as it pertains to health, lifestyle choice and religion, and I’m fine with this: Buddhism for example espouses vegetarianism and there are entire (and rather complex) vegetarian cuisine offshoots from both Chinese and Japanese culinary traditions.

Veganism is of course an extreme form of vegetarianism. From the point of view of being a lifestyle choice by an informed adult, I’m also okay as it’s really the free-will choice of that individual.

I guess my main problem with veganism is that many professed vegans (along with many regular vegetarians) I’ve met over the years are poseurs who have espoused the choice either to further political views (e.g. PETA, Jediists, NDP) or to mask compulsive dieting and personal issues with body image perception. When I hear someone say that (s)he is vegan while eating honey because it’s a plant product, I tend to call shennanigans: honey doesn’t magically grow in flowers as it’s a product of animal (bee) activity and if you eat it, you support the enslavement of bees for your own base pleasures.

And while I personally enjoy eating honey, I do have to write more about this, including some scribbling about a recent trip to Paris and Berlin, partially because of one dinner shepherded by a waiter named “Fabian Boom” (how cool a name is that?), and partially because of interesting conversations with a team member who so happens to be a raw vegan. That was a fascinating discourse in and of itself, but in the end I do believe she associates me with the second and third coming of the AntiChr*st.

And Butter Boy? Well, I’ll at least get to find out how things went when we meet up next week. But in the meanwhile, I’ll point him to the following:

It’s pronounced “meal-a”, with the “a” pronounced as it is in “apple”, and it’s essentially a century-old German company whose products are designed by overachieving anal-retentive engineers. Most people know them for vacuum cleaners and dishwashers (the LaPerla is the best on available bar none) but they happen to make other stuff too, like kitchen appliances and laundry machines including a rolling iron platform. It’s all good stuff since their wares are seriously over-engineered for those “just in case” failsafe scenarios.

Miele happens to have a Miele Gallery Showroom in the greater Montreal area now, which is great because it’s entirely dedicated to their products. Since Miele doesn’t have its own retail presence, that means these galleries are designed to just show off the hardware and how the individual items can be installed and grouped together. Sort of a “kick the tires and open the hood” kind of place for high-end appliances but without the hassle of someone flitting around trying to make commission. Neat concept. What’s not so great is the location, since it’s in Laval. Laval I guess is okay. Going to Laval on a weeknight from the southern apple fields? Not fine.

Apart from showcase stuff, the Montreal Gallery does have a fully functional demonstration kitchen available for hire for private functions that happens to be equipped with:

• H4882BP MasterChef Series single oven
• H4892BP2 MasterChef Series double oven
• H4080BM MasterChef Series speed oven
• DG4080 MasterChef Series steam oven (all four of them)
• ESW4822 MasterChef Series warming drawer
• CS1223 I CombiSet Program induction wok unit
• CS1012 G CombiSet Program gas cooktop
• CS1421 S CombiSet Program salamander
• CVA4062 Built-in Coffee System
• DA5000D Classic Series 42-inch island hood
• KF1911 Vi MasterCool Bottom-Mount Fridge/Freezer
• G2832SCi LaPerla dishwasher (did I mention it’s the best dishwasher currently available?)

I got an invitation to the Gallery’s inaugural cooking demo which I thought was pretty cool as I wanted to see how the steam oven and the CombiSets work in a “live” environment (with food and stuff). So what was on the demo menu?

• Mesclun salad with lemon vinaigrette serve with a goat cheese stuffed phyllo
• Salmon and asparagus paupiette, basmati rice with crunchy vegetables and fish stock white butter sauce
• Caramelized bananas with salted caramel and roasted almonds

So what happened? I saw that I generally have better knife skills and overall mise en place: I chopped red and yellow bell peppers. I peeled and trimmed one asparagus shoot. I rolled asparagus in salmon fillets (twice, but others took my paupiettes, leaving me with some less-than-stellar exemplars). I used the induction wok (weird – I don’t normally use a wok, but the CombiSet is fast). I declined using a blow torch on some banana, primarily as I already own a blowtorch and go medieval on a variety of foodstuffs. I plated. I confirmed that I really hate working with phyllo. Really, really hate working with phyllo.

It wasn’t a huge demo of everything the kitchen was equipped with but everything was used except the salamander CombiSet. Too bad, but I got to watch the broiling platform rise up from its base and go back down (whee!).

All in all, a really nice time especially after a pretty harsh drive from the southern apple fields (remember my Road Warrior reference? just like the photo, but in springtime). The recipes were nice if a little tame but they could be adapted to larger gatherings. Except for the phyllo (erk).

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a down side to the evening as I left the Gallery thinking ”dang - I so need that DG4082 MasterChef Series steam oven with the straight door handle.”