No, this wasn’t a charity thing to help raise funds for Mila’s Holt’s habit. Besides, I don’t vote Conservative (especially under Steve) though they are a more palatable alternative as the thought of Jack as PM gives me hives (vote for the NDP? why don’t I just throw my vote away…).

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

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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.

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