I'll never forget those ghastly, ghostly jellyfish-looking gnocchi I was served at a dinner long ago, nor the twitching faces of all the guests pretending that this wasn't a horrible, horrible meal.
I'm getting ready for the deep-fried turkey on saturday. The dishes are reasonably straightforward. I am trying to figure out some clever way to to serve the balance of the crayfish I'd frozen up as leftover from the last party.
I took the day off, tested some recipes, and reminded myself the Host Rule #1 should never be violated.
I want to serve the crayfish as some sort of cold salad, but wanted to avoid some gross, glurpy mayonaise-based dish. Today I found a recipe for a dill-based vinagrette tossed with sliced mango, melon, snow peas, and julienned carrot.
First, I steamed the crayfish. They somehow cooked faster in the steamer than they do in the pot of boiling water. (well, I guess steaming water is hotter than boiling water, so that's the answer) Thus I overcooked the crayfish and left their meat tough.
Then the salad was way to heavy and chunky and dominated the tiny, tough crayfish. The vinagrette was lame, oil with a slight astringent taste of dill, and nothing else.
Blah. Maybe we'll be eating crayfish and hellman's after all.
Fact of the matter is.... ketchup+horsradish+shellfish tastes damn good, no matter how low-class it is. I've not been able to find a sufficiently strong horseradish here. Mostly it's served a a cream-based horseradish, already diluted with some mayo-like white sauce.
What else? Saw an off-hand reference to glazed pecans with sugar, garlic, hot sauce. It wasn't really a recipe, just a scribble. So I tried it and it was horrid. I should have put in much more sugar and far less butter. My sauce didn't generate a thick-enough glaze. More like an oily stain. And the heating seemed to denature the hot sauce flavor. When I redo this, I'll use molasses, brown sugar, and probably chili padi (those horrid little thai chilis) as they pack enough punch to outlast the temperature.
Finally finished up a recipe Ling started. It was sesame-encrusted fish fillets with a strong ginger and garlic soy-based sauce. The sauce was really good. I didn't cook the fillets very well. It's not something I do very often. After abusing a few fillets I got the hang of it. The oil needed to be hotter than I realized to pan-fry them, I needed to be more vigilant about turning them to make sure the sesame seeds don't char and become toxic bitter. Finally, to tell they're done, hold a knife into a thick part of the fillet for eight seconds, then hold the knife to your lip. If it feels like sipping hot tea, it's ready. However, it still requires that you flip the fillets, otherwise one side burns before the fillet cooks nicely.
Anyway, wasn't pleased with the execution of any of the recipes and didn't even like some of the recipes, so I am damn glad I had my experiments today and not saturday.
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.
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.