Tag: food

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cooking recipe

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

Protein Themed Dinner

A good friend came over for dinner, and since he is very into grilling meats whenever I visit, I decided that I should do something meat-related to return the favour. That idea then expanded into a multi-course meal where every course used a different protein.

I particularly liked how broadly I could interpret the protein theme. When people normally think of protein, they tend to think of red meat, but I wanted to use a variety of things like seafood, eggs, milk, etc. The final progression was egg, salmon, shrimp, dairy, chicken, lamb, beef, and then back to egg + dairy again for dessert.… Read the rest

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cooking

Full English Breakfast

When we went to the UK in 2016, one of my favourite things to eat was a full english breakfast. The mix of bacon, sausages, eggs, black pudding, baked beans, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms and toast really hit the spot especially when served with grilled haloumi. Also its a truly iconic meal and we got to try several versions ranging from the traditional at the famous Layer Cake diner and a deconstructed version at the Fat Duck.

Fast forward to 2022 and I had a meal at Gucci Osteria da Massimo Botturo where they served a fantastic American Breakfast dish which consisted of poached quail egg and caviar covered with a potato foam.… Read the rest

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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