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Cheese Dinner

I had some friends over for dinner over the weekend, and since one of the guests was a vegetarian I decided to use cheese as the theme around which to construct an entire vegetarian menu.

Cheese is actually a surprisingly useful theme for a multi-course dinner because it can play completely different roles depending on the dish. It can be the main ingredient, a garnish, a sauce, a foam, a filling, or even part of a cocktail. The main challenge was making sure that ten cheese-based courses did not turn into ten increasingly heavy plates of melted cheese.

The final menu ended up ranging from a blue cheese martini and a fairly light beet salad through several pasta and vegetable courses, before finishing with Japanese cheesecake.… Read the rest

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cooking recipe

Sous Vide Massimo Bottura Cacio e Pepe Risotto

I have been a fan of Massimo Bottura since I first saw him on Chef’s Table many years ago, and his cacio e pepe risotto is one of those dishes that I have wanted to make ever since.

The original dish was created after the 2012 earthquake in Emilia-Romagna damaged a huge amount of Parmigiano Reggiano. Bottura came up with the risotto as a way to help encourage people to buy and use the affected cheese. The resulting recipe takes the basic idea of cacio e pepe and turns it into a risotto built around an intensely flavoured Parmesan stock and cream.… Read the rest

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cooking recipe

Palak Paneer Ravioli

I first made this dish as part of a multi-course dinner where I wanted to put a twist on the classic Indian dish palak paneer.

The basic idea was pretty simple: instead of serving cubes of paneer in spinach gravy, I would put the paneer inside ravioli and use the palak as the sauce underneath. The nice thing about this approach is that the flavours remain very recognizably palak paneer even though the presentation is completely different.

It also turned out to be a pretty good dinner-party dish. Almost everything can be made ahead of time, and at service all you really need to do is warm the spinach sauce and boil the ravioli for about a minute.… Read the rest