Categories
cooking photos

The Thomas Keller Affair

As we got ready to move out of our house in Santa Clara, I wanted to cook a final meal in our fancy kitchen before we left it behind. I had always been fascinated with the famous French Laundry preparation of Oysters and Pearls and very early on decided that it was going to be the anchor dish of this meal. As I kept looking for other dishes to go with it I was intrigued by enough TFL dishes that I decided to go all the way and make this a Thomas Keller themed dinner and to only cook dishes that either his recipes or are served in one of his many restaurants.… Read the rest

Categories
cooking

Potato Dinner

After a year long hiatus from doing my home tasting menus, I got the urge to a do a new one around the humble potato which led to last weekend Potato dinner. We have a total of 7 diners which did slow down the plating, but having done this several times I have gotten much better at managing my time and we were done with the 7 savory courses in just under 3.5 hours despite this meal including some fairly complex dishes as well as one multi-item course.

Hot Potato Cold Potato
Hot Potato Cold Potato is a classic Alinea appetizer that has a hot ball of butter poached potato that is dropped into a cold potato soup made with truffle juice.… Read the rest

Categories
cooking

Fast Favourites

Now that I have started my new gig at Apple I no longer have the time to investigate and plan super elaborate meals like the Egg Dinner. However having done a bunch of these in the past we decided to make our March dinner a set of Fast Favourites – dishes that we have tried before and do not take too much time to prepare on the day of the meal. So without further ado, lets dive right into the menu.

Farm Egg
We got started with the classic Manresa Farm Egg. It was a huge amount of work and testing when I made it for the egg dinner, but now that I have a reliable method of topping the eggs I no longer had to prepare the yolks in advance and sanitize the shells overnight.… Read the rest

Categories
cooking review

Alinea Kitchen Table Experience

Living in the Bay Area, I had heard of Alinea a few times but since I never had a reason to go to Chicago, I never investigated it as a destination restaurant like the Fat Duck. In fact when I did eventually go to Chicago for the first time we made a special trip to Moto instead since I was a big fan of Homaru Cantu’s Iron Chef episode with Morimoto. All that changed when I saw the Grant Achatz episode of Chefs table and Alinea instantly went to the top of my list based on its presentation alone. It took several months but I was finally able to get a group of 6 California friends willing to fly out to Chicago and do the full Alinea Kitchen Table experience on a cold night in December.… Read the rest

Categories
cooking photos

Egg Dinner

One of the dinner themes I have been toying with for a while is “Eggs” and I finally got to try it out over the weekend. It ended up being a 13 course meal over 6 hours where everything included eggs, looked like eggs or looked like something that should have eggs in it. It was fairly successful with only a few minor hiccups along the way despite several of the dishes being first time attempts. The spectacular photos were all taken by Nithya using her DIY lightbox setup. The following is a description of the dishes with any tips and tricks I discovered along the way.… Read the rest