Tag: food

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cooking thoughts

The French Laundry review

Took us 10 years to finally get a reservation
For foodies in the Bay Area, there is one fine dining place that we all have on our bucket list – The French Laundry. Nithya and I have had the pleasure of dining at Per Se and doing the French Laundry retrospective at Next, but we never managed to get reservations to the big daddy. However TFL moved to a ticket based reservation system last year and that allowed us to finally scored a dinner reservation for he birthday a few weeks ago.

Tuna tartare cornet
The first course was this cornet of tuna tartare. They usually serve this dish with Salmon tartare but this night it was tuna instead and just as delicious as before.… Read the rest

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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

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cooking

Spaghetti Carbonara Dessert

One of the concepts I have been toying with is creating a dessert that looks like a savory course but is actually sweet in taste. Since my next fancy meal is going to have “Eggs” as its theme, I decided to try making a new version of Spaghetti Carbonara as that is probably my favourite egg based pasta. The end result is what you see below, Spaghetti Carbonara Dessert with white chocolate spaghetti, candied bacon, crystalline honey, black pepper and lava salt.

Spaghetti Carbonara Dessert

The first step was to make white chocolate spaghetti using the recipe from the Molecule R kit (175ml water, 2g agar agar, 85g white chocolate, boil, extrude).… Read the rest

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cooking

Breakfast for Dinner

While planning my second home tasting meal I was investigating some molecular cocktails and really fell in love with a recipe for a deconstructed white russian with rice krispies. I loved the fact that diners have no idea what they were going to get and the fact that it was a drink but looks exactly like breakfast cereal. So with that as the starting point I decided to create the meal around the theme of “breakfast for dinner” and that I would skip the wine completely for more interesting alcohol.

Deconstructed White Russian
White Russian Krispies
Made from the White Russian Krispies recipe, this dish uses kahlua infused rice krispies with a half and half plus vodka “milk” to make a white russian that looks exactly like breakfast cereal.… Read the rest

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cooking

10 course tasting at home

Last weekend Nithya and I made our first really complex dinner at home. It was a 10 course vegetarian tasting menu for 6 and it defintely gave me a much greater appreciation for what chefs have to deal with in getting a multi course menu on the plate at the right time. The following post is a quick recap of the various dishes we made:

Menu

Beets
Our first attempt at spherification pretty much followed the Beet Sphere and Goat Cheese recipe with the only difference being the use of straight calcium lactate instead of calcium lactate gluconate in the beet juice.… Read the rest