My Dinner Table

Getting back on this horse

OK. I'm getting back on this horse. It has been way too long since I posted about a meal that I have had. I could give you a dozen different excuses why I've been absent so long, but really, I've just been lazy and not posting. So I'm going to try to get back in the routine of posting about my meals.
This is the hangar steak that I made on the weekend. I love the beefy up front flavour of hangar steak. Sure, tenderloin great. So are New York Strips and I do love the ribeye, but there is something a little special about hangar steak. I had a great one in Milwaukee earlier this year and there is always the Hamilton Street Grill, where I first tasted hangar steak.
This one was bought premarinated from Saslove's, which has become my favourite Ottawa butcher. I don't know how long it was marinated for, but the package said it was best before June 12. Cooked under the broiler, it was pretty rare when it was done. I do love red meat rare, though maybe I should have taken it just a little bit further. I think hangar steak is best when done a medium rare instead of a really bloody rare. It was beautifully tender and the marinade was delicious.
If you're craving red meat and looking for an alternative, I would highly recommend the hangar steak from Saslove's. It is cheaper than the other cuts. About $17 for the roughly two-pound piece and in my opinion, a fair bit more flavourful.

Tasting Menu at Beckta

We went to dinner at Beckta a couple of weeks ago. For our wedding some of our friends gave us a gift certificate to the restaurant. Actually, some of our friends gave us a couple of gift certificates. So we decided to use one of them for the tasting menu. The dinner began with an amuse, but unfortunately I can't remember what it was since it was so many weeks ago, but the first course stuck with me. It wa a little stack of Ahi tuna and crispy prosciutto and a frozen lemon vinaigrette with a pickled turnip remoulade. This was fantastic. I loved the taste of the prosciutto and the tuna together. The frozen vinaigrette was a great idea that went very well. The wine pairing was a 2007 Muller Thurgau by Peter Zemmer from Alto Adige in Italy. All very nice.

The next case was my favourite dish of the night. Crispy fried veal sweetbreads, a ragout of Christophe's mushrooms and pomegranate sauce, paired with a 2007 Chardonnay by Parducci from Mendocino County. I loved the soft rich sweetbreads. Crazy rich with the crispy fried coating. One of the best things I've eaten in a long time. I loved the mix of mushrooms. The sauce was crazy good. Probably included a little veal demi glace.

There is often a pasta course with the Beckta tasting menu and this time it was a truffle and mascarpone ravioli with pine nut pesto, blood orange shortbread and shaved frozen foie gras paired with a 2007 Pinot Noir by Flat Rock from the 20 Mile Bench region of Ontario. This dish was far more than I have come to expect from Beckta. Don't get me wrong, it is a great restaurant, but I don't expect them to really push the envelope. This was a very pleasant surprise. One of the richest dishes I've had in a while. Truffle and foie gras in the same dish. Loved it. The shave foie gras was a very cool touch. The whole dish was about the combination of the fats and the truffles. What's not to love.

The intermezzo was a cranberry, orange and thyme sorbet. A nice little break before the main meat course hit the table. Pan-seared fan of ostrich with baked beans and coriander sambal, curried matchstick potatoes and mole sauce pairied with a 2004 Syrah by Lotus from Paso Robles. The ostrich was beautifully tender, like a truly wonderful piece of beef tenderloin. The great part of the dish was the coriander sambal. Loved it. It was unapologetically hot. Wonderful dish.

We opted for the cheese course this time. We had never had the cheese at Beckta before, but both Daphne and I were feeling like we could do it this time. The cheeses, left to right, were Nettles Gone Wild, Alfred Le Fermier, Pierre Robert, Double Gloucester, Reblochon and Bleu Benedictin, all served with Commandaria "St. Nicholas" from Cyprus. I loved the Nettles Gone Wild, an Ontario goat cheese that used nettles in the making. Great grassy notes. The other one on the plate that I loved was the Reblochon. Soft. Smelly. Delicious.

Dessert was a tropical theme. Sticky pineapple cake, pineapple pot de creme and coconut panna cotta served with 2006 Coteau du Layon Carte d'Or Baumard. It was all fantastic, but my favourite thing was the coconut panna cotta with the crispy bit of pineapple. Delicious.

The finale was a bit of rice pudding and a couple of little squares of cake. This really was probably the best tasting menu I've had at Beckta. The ideas in the dishes were fantastic. The truffle pasta dish was far more than I would have expected from Beckta. The tuna dish is something I might try at home, though I'm not sure how I would be able to do the frozen vinaigrette. And the veal sweetbreads will stay with me for a while. It was a wildly decadent meal.

Trattoria No. 10 - Chicago

So this isn't exactly current, but I thought I would post about it anyway. There are two nights that I try to avoid restaurants. New Year's Eve and Valentine's. But we were in Chicago, so we went out with Daphne's friends from Indiana, Doug and Teri. The restaurant was recommended by a colleague of hers. Trattoria No. 10, an Italian restaurant, not far from where we were staying. Walking in, we were warmly greeted by the staff and quickly seated. The room was nice. It is underground, so no windows, but it felt warm and had that wonderful buzz of a restaurant in the middle of a busy service. My dinner began with the carpaccio. I love carpaccio and I think of of the best is the one found at Cru in Vancouver, so ordering it here was a bit of a risk. This one was great, but very different from the version at Cru. What I loved about this one was the little bits of pickled things that they used to top the carpaccio. It added a great contrast in texture and flavour. Slightly crunchy and tangy against the soft rich flavour of the beef. I think the Cru version is still better, but this was very good.

Next, Daphne and I split an order of their ravioli with spicy sausage. I love ordering a pasta course, but didn't really want to have it as my main, so this was nice. Our server was nice enough to divide the order before bringing it to the table.It was a nice sized portion for a pasta course. Not quite as spicy that I would have hoped, but pretty good.

For my main course I had one of the specials for the night. A braised pork cheek. I love braised meats, so this was immediately attractive to me. It was rich and quite tasty. The pork I think could have been a little more tender. It didn't quite fall apart as easily as I would have hoped, but the flavour was great.

We were all pretty full, but thought we could manage a little gelato. If I remember correctly it was vanilla, dulce deleche and chocolate, I think. The vanilla I remember though was outstanding. I loved that they included a little pastry.

Overall dinner at Trattoria No. 10 was pretty good. The service was great even though it was insanely busy and the food was solid.

Gnocchi Pictures

I've posted up a few pictures of the gnocchi making if you want to take a look. They are on Flickr. Posted here.

Gnocchi Battle - Marcella Hazan vs. Mario Batali

I know I haven't posted in a while. I thought about quitting, but then decided against it. But if I wasn't going to quit, I had to start posting again. So here I go. I've been wanted to make gnocchi for while. I tried making it a couple of years ago and it was a disaster. Really a disaster. It turned into a sticky ugly mess. They were edible, but they were heavy and just not the pillowly potato goodness that I was trying to achieve. So this time I set out to redeem myself. I reviewed several recipes and found two very different recipes. One was by Marcella Hazan's, the grandmother of Italian cooking. Her recipe recommended Yukon Gold potato and flour. No eggs. In her introduction, she writes derisively about the use of eggs calling them "Paris style" and warning that they resulted in a tougher more rubbery product. She also warns against the use of a baking potato, suggested that it will result in a gnocchi that will collapse while cooking. The other recipe was that from the Babbo cookbook by Mario Batali. Batali specifically recommends using Russett potato, which is a baking potato. And Batali uses an egg. So unable to decide which one to make, I made both recipes.

The first was the Batali. Last time I steamed the potatoes to avoid them taking on too much water. But the Batali recipe recommends boiling them with the skin on. The dough felt light and a little bit sticky. Not the mess that it was last time. I had to work quickly in the rolling because as Daphne and I worked to roll them out, the dough started getting stickier. I boiled them for about 90 seconds and then served them with a tomato sauce. They were incredibly light. Fantastic.

The next batch were the ones from Hazan. They started out the same by boiling the potatoes. Only this time once they had been put through the ricer, I sprinkled about a cup of flour over the potato and then kneaded it into a dough. Even though it didn't have an egg the dough actually came together a little easier than the Batali recipe and was much easier to handle, but it felt a lot heavier than the Batali recipe. They took slightly longer to cook, but not much and served with the tomato sauce they were also excellent, but different. They were definitely heavier than the Batali gnocchi, a little more of a bite to them. The flavour was also slightly different. They had a more distinct potato flavour than the ones made with the Russets.

I think I preferred the Hazan recipe. Though the gnocchi weren't quite as light as the Batali recipe which yielded little potato pillows of goodness, I preferred the flavour of the Yukon Gold potatoes. But really they were both great recipes. And now I have a freezer full of gnocchi that I will be able to boil up for a dinner just any night of the week.

Milwaukee - Coquette Cafe

After the concert in Milwaukee we went out for a late dinner at Coquette Cafe. It is a bistro in a gentrified bit of the city. It was one of just a few places that would be able to take us at close to 11 p.m. Walking it the restaurant hit all the right notes for a bistro. The menu had all the things a bistro should have and it was priced at a point where I think a bistro should. There wasn't an entree over $20. Ordering quickly as the kitchen was reaching the of its service, Daphne's friend Julie raved about the onion soup, so I followed her lead and ordered a bowl. It was terrific. A rich beef broth, lots of onion, but most importantly for me lots of well browned cheese. I love the little bits of crispy cheese around the edge of the bowl. It was a right proper french onion soup.

I opted for the grilled hangar steak with red wine shallot sauce, pommes frites and garlic aioli, another dish that Julie raved about. I ordered it rare and it came bloody. I loved it. It was wonderfully tender. Great flavour. I love hangar steak because of the great flavour. It was as good as the Hamilton Street Grill. It was that good. I think I'm going to have to find a butch in Ottawa that will sell me hangar steak. The frites were also solid. I loved that they served it with an aioli.

It was a regular haunt for Daphne when she lived in Milwaukee and I can see why. Coquette is a great bistro. The food was excellent, but also the price was reasonable. I think the only change I would make would be to get rid of the table cloths. I would want a slightly more casual feel for the place, but it is a small quibble. It is the bistro that I wish the Metropolitain in Ottawa was.

Milwaukee - Kopp's Frozen Custard

High on my list of things to do on my journey into the Midwest was a stop at Kopp's Frozen Custard. Ever since I took Daphne to the Milky Way in Regina, she has talked about the joys of frozen custard. A richer more decadent version of soft serve ice cream. So, when I found out we were going back to her old stomping grounds of Milwaukee, a trip to taste what she was raving about was a must. This is Kopp's Frozen Custard. An outpost of burgers and the fabled custard. Since we were going to have a late supper that night we decided that before the custard we would have burgers and onions rings. Sorry no pictures. The burger was a simple affair. Quite large though with a bun much like the one found at White Spot. No triple-O sauce though, but I still enjoyed it. The onion rings were terrific. Breaded like the A&W rings. I quite like the style and finished most of them before Daphne had a chance. All washed down with a Sprecher's root beer.

But we weren't there to eat burgers. We were there to eat frozen custard. Daphne must be living right because one of the two flavours of the day was her favourite, tiramisu. I only comes around every couple of weeks, so she was delighted. I opted for a dish of one scoop of vanilla and another of tiramisu. Upon first inspection, it looked like ordinary soft service ice cream, albeit a little smoother than others. But once I had my first taste, I realized this wasn't soft serve. I would describe it as the best buttercream icing, only really cold. It was that rich. The mouth feel was more like a creme brulee than any ice cream I have had. The texture told you it was insanely caloried filled. The tiramisu had little bits of ladyfinger cookies and streaks of chocolate. It was fantastic. The vanilla was very good too, but certainly no tiramisu. Apparently they will make an ice cream float if you want. It would be a little crazy, but I'd love to try a root beer float made with the great Sprecher's and the vanilla frozen custard. I might have to train for that though. It might be a little much. They also have milkshakes that I'm sure would be over the top. I can't wait to go back and try it all.

Trout with Brown Butter and Almonds

There hasn't been a tonne of cooking going on at home recently. I've been busy or away or some other lame excuse. But this is from a little over a week ago and I was so pleased about how it turned out I thought I would post about it now. It was quite a simple dish that packed an punch. It began with the trout that was seasoned with salt and pepper then cooked skin side down in a fry pan to get it nice and crispy and then when it was almost done flipped over and finished cooking. Once the fish was cooked it was taken out of the fry pan and more butter than I care to admit to was added and cooked until it was just getting brown. The chopped almonds were added and then just as the butter was getting to where I wanted it, I squeezed in a whole whack of lemon juice then spooned my brown butter with almonds sauce over the fish which was on the plate neatly stacked on top of a mixture of wilted spinach and lentils.
I loved this dish for a lot of reasons. I didn't overcook the fish. The skin was crispy. The brown butter and almonds was a fantastic flavour. I loved the texture of the almonds against the soft fish. And it was so simple.

Vancouver Wedding Banquet

I'm not sure anyone is still reading as I haven't posted in a very long time. It has been a busy couple of weeks and you'll get to read about all the food I've eaten in my recent travels over the coming days. But first, I needed to write about the second wedding. For most people to have a second wedding banquet they need to get divorced and remarried. Luckily for me and Daphne that wasn't the case. As regular readers, if there are any of you left, know, I got married last year on Nov. 1 in Cordele, Ga. It was an amazing weekend of non-stop parties and feasting. But for my parents that just wasn't enough. I have lots of relatives in Vancouver who did not make the trip to Georgia. Nearly all of my family is there, so we needed to go to Vancouver and hold some sort of event to celebrate there. So my parents decided a sort-of-traditional Chinese wedding banquet was in order. I say sort of traditional because we didn't exactly follow all of the traditions, but it was in a big Chinese restaurant, Sun Sui Wah. My family loves the place and they treat us well, so it was my Mum's first choice. Dinner began with an appetizer plate of all sorts of goodies. Roast pork, some honey garlic spareribs, jellyfish, some deep fried rolls of some sort, some bean curd thing, it was all great.

Then came the Peking duck. I love Peking duck. Crispy duck skin and a little duck fat, rolled in a pancake thing. What is there not to love about it. It is crispy and rich. They do it quite well at Sun Sui Wah and it was fun for those who had never had it to give it a try.

Next up the soup. A seafood and winter melon mixture. Just what winter melon is, I'm not entirely sure, but it is great in soups and I've been eating it for as long as I can remember. This winter melon soup though was made special with all the seafood that was included in the soup.

Then came the potato bird's nest with seafood and peas. The seafood at Sun Sui Wah is handled so well. It was just cooked. Not overcooked. This is very important for me. I hate overcooked seafood. How they are able to do 15 tables so quickly is impressive.

After that was the lettuce wrap. We ate the skin of the duck in the Peking duck. This was the meat. When I was a kid this was one of my favourite dishes. The cool lettuce against the warm duck meat mixture and crunchy fried noodles. It is a dish that hits all the right spots.

The crab and lobster stir-fried with ginger and green onion was the next dish to arrive. The crab is always the highlight for me, but maybe not for the same reasons as it might be for you. While I love the crab and lobster and cracking into the shells and getting every last bit of meat out of them is great, what I really love are the innards from the crab and the noodles that sit under the dish. Especially the noodles. They take on so much flavour from the crab and lobster sitting on top of them, they are fantastic. And there is no other way that I know of to get them to taste like that. They were probably my favorite thing I ate that night.

This is the crispy skin chicken with shrimp chips. Imagine the finest roast chicken you have even had. That's what the crispy skin chicken at a good Chinese restaurant is. To be honest I don't know how they cook it. I believe it is a two step process in which the chicken is either boiled or steamed and then either deep fried or had hot oil poured over it until the skin in golden and crispy. This is what I'm trying to imitate when I make my roast chicken at home.

The gailan with squid and prawns came next. I was happy to see a little bit of vegetable hit the table, plus I love the squid and prawns. Heavily flavoured with garlic, the dish is quite simple, but delicious.

These are pea tips. My favourite vegetable. Stir fried with oil and garlic. That's all you need to do to them. Well, it is a lot of garlic and oil, but really, that's all you need. Maybe a little salt. As much as I did enjoy dinner at Play a couple of weeks ago, theirs don't come close to these. I say when cooking vegetables it is always good to consult the Chinese. I didn't get a picture of the next dish. It was steamed black cod with black bean sauce on tofu. I remember having just a bite, because as I'm sure you can imagine, I was quite full at this point in the meal. Black cod though is one of my favourite fish to eat, so I loved having it at this particular meal.

And just in case you were still hungry, there was fried rice. There is some sort of wedding fried rice, but I like this one more, so that's what my Mum and Aunt decided to order instead. Unfortunately I was so stuffed I didn't eat any that night. I had some the next morning as leftovers, but I was just too full.

However I wasn't too full for dessert. Though there was mango pudding, which I also did not get a picture of, my Mum ordered us a cake. I guess she thought a wedding banquet wasn't the same without a cake. But she didn't order just any cake. This is diplomat cake from Notte's Bon Ton. Far and away my favourite cake in the world. It was huge. The biggest diplomat cake I've ever seen. I loved it. As much as I did love the wedding cake in Georgia, this cake was better. Rich layers of cake, French pastry and butter-cream icing. This is the best cake in the world and I've eaten a lot of cake.

And here's a picture of mum Mum and my Aunt, who organized the dinner. I just thought I would post up a picture of them because of all the work they put into the dinner. I've lost count of the number of times I used the phrase "my favourite" in this post because although I had no part in deciding the menu, they picked all my favourite dishes. They hit it out of the park with this one. That's my Mum on the left and my aunt on the right. It was so much fun to go to Vancouver and celebrate our wedding all over again. So many relatives that I don't often see and friends that I no longer see now that I'm living in Ottawa.

Rustic Apple Tarte

I love dessert. I don't think a dinner is really complete without some sort of dessert. It doesn't have to be sweet. It can be cheese. But I need something to complete a meal. So I made a rustic apple tarte for dessert on Sunday night to go with my roast chicken dinner. I think Daphne might think I'm a little nuts. Anyway, I thought I'd go with a really simple apple tarte. I started with a basic pie pastry recipe and rolled it out an put it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. In the middle of that I piled up sliced apples seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar and raisins. A little corn starch to soak up the liquid from the apples. Folded up the sides of the pastry and baked it four a little less than an hour in an oven at about 400. Loved it.