I had volunteered to cook everything, not just pudding, for Y’s birthday, if he would tell me what he wanted to eat. Sitting on the sun-filled deck at lunchtime, eating bowls of my homemade leftover Thai curry, he came up with the following menu of things he loved and I added a few things too:
Discs of grilled New Jersey goats cheese with walnuts on sourdough toasts with a mustard vinaigrette, fried pancetta & frisée (endive) salad
Roast pork tenderloin, wrapped in smoked bacon (Which Y cooked to his special recipe)
Green beans, steamed & then tossed in melted butter, thyme & garlic
Mashed Idaho potatoes (cream, butter)
Cauliflower cheese, gratinéed (crispy crumb topping)
Homemade apple sauce
Instead of cake he opted for strawberry tart with crème patissiere & strawberry purée.
The whole menu took three hours from unpacking the shopping to putting on the table. For such a super simple menu, there was an awful lot of prep as we made everything from scratch from the fried breadcrumbs on the cauliflower cheese to the salad vinaigrette. (And I also added an extra element to the first course, dropping the walnuts and adding deep fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta & mushrooms.)
[I read on Obamafoodorama that the US pork industry has suffered badly from shoppers (erroneously) eschewing piggy products due to Swine Flu. Not in this household is all I can say. There were barbecued pork escalopes the night before, and sausages tonight.]
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh, maman… J’en salive! That desert menu filled my mouth with water like nobody’s business. I’d have been particularly keen to try the starter.
What IS wrong with me? When I wrote desert menu, I in fact meant birthday menu! Must be the heat getting to me… Sorry!
I am making snorty red-faced lustful noises like Kenneth Connor in a Carry On film.
I am making snorty red-faced lustful noises like Kenneth Connor in a Carry On film.