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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

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cooking personal

A Michelin Tasting at Home

In the last year of COVID life I only made one multi course meal and it was a collection of old favourites that I put together for a Pandemic Thanksgiving meal. During the meal I was talking to our guests about those recipes when I realised that I hadn’t really made a truly new menu since my Potato Dinner of 2018. We got to talking about cookbooks at that meal and I brought out the Alinea and Manresa books to show people. I then spent the Christmas break going through the two books and marked out a selection of recipes that I thought were both interesting and practical to make at home.… Read the rest

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review thoughts

3rd Cousin

3rd Cousin
Recently I’ve been getting a large number of Facebook Ads for a new restaurant in SF called 3rd Cousin and in an example of well targeted advertising I ended up checking their menu when I was looking for a new dinner place. The dishes looked very interesting and they had an available spot so we signed up for their grand tasting which is 10 courses of the greatest hits from the menu.

Hamachi Crudo
We get started with the Hamachi Crudo which was my favourite dish of the night. A clean simple preparation with the acid from the yuzu making a nice contrast with the fish.… 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