Whew! It's over!
Spent almost all Saturday preparing my 'mise en place' for the Sunday noon party. Chopped pounds of celery, peppers, onions. Boiled gallons of fresh chicken and shrimp stock. Made pie shells. Planned the synchronization of Sunday's cooking (we started at 0730). Tending to a living room full of live cray fish.
Twenty-five kilograms of crayfish is a lot of crayfish. Imagine a mover's box. Now imagine packed entirely solid with crayfish. That's what I had. I didn't want them dying on me, so I put them in many large plastic tubs with some water and periodically picked through them, plucking out freshly-dead ones into the freezer.
All night long I could hear the crayfish stirring in their pens. When I woke up the next morning, the death count was higher than I hoped so Ling took the Volvo and filled its trunk with ice, then I iced down all the crayfish in a few enormous tubs.
I stuck to the schedule and against all odds things started and finished on time.
The much-practiced ribs were really exquisite, as good as I could have hoped for. I insisted on baby back ribs from Espirito Santo, the brazillian butcher. Last time (I suspect) the Swiss Butcher foisted 'loin ribs' off on Ling, more, tougher meat. Baby Back ribs are the way to go. The Alton Brown recipe is the best. I thing people raved more about my ribs than anything else.
I thought the baked beans were total shit. The recipe, calling for a twelve-hour crock simmer was itself a crock. The beans had (to me) a burnt taste and the spices were all denatured, except of course, for the asshole of spices, cayenne. I think this weekend signalled the death sentence for cayenne in my book. I think it is an attention-seeking, ugly, shrill spice that ruins all food its in, regardless of how little I use. The funny thing was, several people quite liked the beans. I refused to eat them after I tested some, but many others had multiple servings.
The cornbread was fine. One girl really liked it. Hard for me to get super-excited by cornbread as is, but it was an able accompaniment for the gumbo.
Yes, the gumbo... it turned out really nice and rich. Two american guys had had gumbo before and told me that it tasted quite good, but that mine was far far thicker than normal gumbo, in fact, it was more like an entoufee. Explains why I was left with so much extra stock. Gumbo with that much stock would be much more like a brothy soup. I basically made mine a stew. Oh, and 1.3kg of okra is a shitload of okra to add to a stew. Much more and it would have made the gumbo disgustingly slimy, but as it was, it broke down enough and tsated good. Probabyl could have dared add even more spice, and some more heat, but it was roundly enjoyed.
Ling hated the gizzards in the first round of Dirty Rice. I loved their crunch. But to oblige her, I cut the gizzards thin and precisely as fugu fish. It preserved most of the crunchy texture and as long as no one knew that there were gizzards and liver in the rice, they loved it.
The potato salad was fine. i think it demanded a bit too much timing attention to make it good for a large, catered party, but i have no complaints with the taste, especically after I replaced dismal parsley with coriander/ciltantro.
Then, of course, you're wondering about the crayfish.
The crayfish were really good and cooked nicely and were fun to eat.
Then everyone was really full of crayfish.
But we still had another 50% left, chilling in their ice bath. Whatever website told me I needed 25kg of crayfish for my 20 guests was out of their fucking mind. My american friends said my crayfish were more like mini-lobsters than what they'd taken as crayfish in the US. They said in the bayou, crayfish produce pitiful amounts of meat, like the size of a the stub of a pencil. My crayfish were producing one-ounce chunks of flesh the size of a man's thumb. Everyone ate like pigs but there was tons left over.
We'd already packed my freezer full of frozen, dead ones from the night before, so I started fobbing off 'gift packs' of crayfish to people. No one wanted to take them for themselves, but they were passed on to mothers and dad's. These were nice little packs -- 2kg bundles of crayfish from a 25kg crate that cost me $500. So everyone went home full and happy and with plenty of crayfish for family.
The drinks were horrid. I got one chinese girl to drink a hurricane. She promptly turned red (a chinese reaction to booze) and stopped drinking them. The other girl said that she wouldn't even have known it was a mojito if there wasn't all the muddled mint floating in the grass. I poured those pitchers out and we all drank beer throughout the hot afternoon anyway.
The desserts were good. Ling's pecan pie was country-fair good. I made an alternative Jamie Oliver chocolate tart recipe. Those who have had the original one agreed with me that the old recipe is better. I will stick with the old one.
Anyway, we finished up, last guests leaving at 7pm, and I was in bed by ten, the house finally cleaned up.
Quite a nice little party, I'm very pleased how I was able to cater successfully for what was definitely my biggest cooking project.
Now in two weeks I have to deep-fry a turkey dinner for some friends of ours and her parents/family. Her mom has really good taste and is an excellent hostess, so this will be an exercise in detail and perfection to make that dinner a success.