Just back from Tokyo late Saturday night. Only seven days till I hold my Bayou Christmas celebration for twenty guests. It will be a tight schedule for the week, if I procrastinate until Saturday (party Sunday noon) I'll be dead meat. Today I practiced some new recipes and refined some old ones.
So here's the menu:
Mains
BBQ Ribs
Crayfish boil
Gumbo
Sides
Beans
Potato Salad
Cornbread
Dirty rice
Drinks
Beer
Hurricanes
Mojitos
Dessert
Pecan Pie
Watermelon
Chocolate tart
Ribs
I've been working on the rib recipes. I don't have a BBQ (they are ludicrously expensive here and I don't even care for BBQ so much anyway). So instead I am using an Alton Brown/Good Eats recipe for oven-baked ribs where the ribs are gently braised for 2.5-3 hours until they're as tender as anything. First time I made them, I fucked up the proportions and ended salt-and-cayenne curing the baby back ribs. They would have been good as Iron Rations on the Oregon trail, but not otherwise edible.
I tried them again today, on two racks. I used Alton Brown's braising liquid on one set, and a hacked version of someone else's recipe on the second set. Unanimously we preferred the "other" recipe. Alton Brown's tasted too much like a Chinese-style spare-rib, it lacked all the sticky sweetness we associate with ribs. Looks like the target cooking time is 2:45. 2:30 is a bit soon, and 3:00 starts to dry the meat a bit.
Gumbo
I've never eaten anyone's gumbo except mine. so I don't have a good reference. So I found the most detailed, tedious recipe I could and figured that would steer me best towards the correct product. I kicked off the process by making a dark roux. You make a roux by stirring flour into hot oil. That's all there is to it, you just stir and stir and stir. To get the roux to a color just this side of milk chocolate I stood and front of the pot for fifty minutes whisking non-stop. No joke/no exaggeration. But at least it came out properly. When I poured it across a skilletful of soffreto of the Cajun "holy trinity" of celery onion and bell pepper, it instantly darkened and thickened into the perfect roux. Worth the work. In the meantime I had a massive stock pot simmering up a whole chicken, shrimp heads, vegetables and spices into a powerful stock for the real party. Into today's gumbo went spicy sausage, chopped-up flower crab, prawns, and chicken.
Glad I ran this prototype recipe because I realized just how enormously filling gumbo is. After all, it's basically a soup of oil and flour. For the party, I'll make the same amount of roux, but treble or quadruple the amount of ingredients I put in (shrimp and chicken and sausage), drop the crab (it turns into a flavorless mush), and double the soffreto. That way the dish won't be nearly as filling as it was tonight.
Crayfish
I had planned on running a prototype of the crayfish boil. The gas man delivered a 12kg LPG tank for me, so my massive burner is ready to go. However Carrefour had no crayfish in stock today. This really bummed me out. so looks like I will have to test the recipe on next Saturday for Sunday's party. Close call.
Have a lot to do in the meantime. I want to try to get as much prep done during the week as possible so that I am not totally swamped on Saturday, because I know I'll be swamped anyway.
Have bittorrent furiously downloading Bayou Christmas music. Got a bunch of weird Arcadian/Cajun music, delta blues, and, since it's Christmas, Bing Crosby's Christmas album. After all, it's not Christmas without 'Mele Kalikimaka'.
I did express concern when she remarked, "it's hard to get out of the high-side pie pan, so I'll take the pie out of the pan first for the guests." "How are you going to do that?" I asked. "Oh, just turn it over once and then back over," was her straight-faced answer. I ordered that she do that Saturday, before the party, as it sounds like a terrible idea to me, and I warned her that I would forbid her from serving my guests Pecan Pie Stew if the flip-flop worked poorly.
Posted by Nils Blutig at December 3, 2006 10:02 PM | TrackBack