a chocolate kind of new year

i guess i could never be a dishwasher, because a day after the dinner party, my hands are all itchy and irritated by constant dishwashing. i just put two kinds of gunk on my hands in hopes that they will be happy soon. it’s strange, though, because throughout my clay travails, i never had an angry hand problem. it’s probably the soap, then, which is even called “mild” but merely seems to be mild in the sense that it doesn’t clean as efficiently as normal dishwashing liquid.

so the party- let’s return to the subject of actual party. celina and i had wanted to have a chocolate-themed party since last fall, but studio got in the way of having any time for anything else, so it got pushed to iap. we wanted to have a party party, but instead we did a dinner party because, sadly, chocolate (and the wine that goes with it) is expensive. after intermittent perusal of the internet, here is the menu we came up with. it’s a balance between budget, chocolate, not too much chocolate, and time constraints (we started on friday and cooked pretty much through til the beginning of the party, minus sleep).

the menu

to start : chocolate chestnut soup
this was ok – probably my palate was just unused to the combination of chocolate and chestnuts in a savory context. it was a chestnut soup made with onions, chestnuts, vegetable stock, white wine, and a bit of chocolate – just enough to change the flavor. we used valrhona 70% per the recipe, from art culinaire. unfortunately, commercial vegetable stock is too tomatoey to really be of any use in cooking. i have no doubt that this soup would have been better with homemade vegetable stock, but as it’s the kind of thing you can’t really make on short notice, we had to settle. i don’t think i’d make this again, but it’s one of those things you have to do once so you can taste it.

and then : beet, romaine, and mint salad with balsamic vinaigrette
this salad is fantastic! we bought about two pounds of beets and roasted them. they turned this fabulous dark magenta, darker on the outside and lighter on the inside – hands down the most beautiful beets i’ve ever seen. the beet juice bleeds into the salad a little, so it’s not the most beautiful salad you’ll ever see, but the combination of beets and lettuce is good, and adding mint makes it even better. the balsamic vinaigrette cuts the sweetness of the beets and adds a little acidity to balance the whole affair. i made the vinaigrette from olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, nothing out of the ordinary. for a head of lettuce, 2 lbs of beets, and 1/8 cup of torn up mint leaves, you’ll need about 1/3 cup of vinaigrette. this serves maybe 10-15 people.

glazed carrots and peas
i’ve now tried two recipes in my bouchon cookbook. i was tempted to make french onion soup from it earlier this month, but i didn’t really have the motivation to cook onions for eight hours. however, i do love this cookbook dearly – everything in it has these great, basic flavors that really showcase the main ingredients. for example, with the glazed carrots and peas, the glaze complemented the vegetables and wasn’t too heavy. the garnish, chives, is actually a real part of the dish, rather than being an aesthetic consideration. for herbs (basically you boil the vegetables in water, butter, herbs, and peppercorns until it becomes a light glaze) we used thyme and rosemary.

roast chicken with chocolate-pear sauce
this is an altered version of a recipe we found online. it’s for cornish game hens, but cornish game hens for a large dinner party is ridiculous in terms of effort and cost, when you’re a student, so we decided on regular chickens. to boot, when we got to star, roasting chickens were on sale (for 79 cents a pound as opposed to $1.49 per pound for young chickens) so we went with the larger 6-7 lb chickens instead of the 4-5 lb chickens. anyway, the recipe also calls for you to basically steam the birds with pears and chicken stock, which i’m not so much a fan of when you can stuff them, rub them with salt and sugar, and stick ’em in the oven and forget about them for an hour and a half, so we roasted the chickens and made the sauce from the recipe. the sauce is essentially chicken stock, onions, garlic, white wine, pear poaching liquid, and pan juices from the roasted birds. of course, the bonus with roasted chickens, as i believe i opined in a previous post, is that you have the satisfaction of getting every last bit of mileage out of that bird, from roasting it, to leftovers, and making soup out of the bones. in fact, right now, there’s a pot of chicken-asparagus-carrot soup sitting on the stove, and it has a lovely color and lots of chicken-y goodness in it. regarding the chicken for the party, i will say here that i really need to learn how to carve an entire chicken instead of the drumsticks and the breast, because nobody will eat it unless it’s easily detachable (ie, detached) from the rest of the bird. it went well with the sauce – what chocolate seems to do for savory things is give it a feeling of body and richness that is unfamiliar but not unwelcome to the palate. the pears, given the state of fruit in boston, and the state of fruit in the winter, were negligible.

stuffed eggplant
this is the first recipe i’ve made from les classiques de camille, which rob brought me from his trip to france. it was quite good – basically your typical stuffed eggplant with a rice-tomato-raisin-mint mixture inside, all baked. we bought sushi rice for this as well as to go with the chicken, which is generally my preferred kind of rice for anything. people seemed to like this a lot.

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dessert #1 : black pearl cake
this is not inspired by pirates of the caribbean, but is rather the cake version of the haut vosges chocolate bar with the same name. the chocolate bar has black sesame seeds, ginger, and wasabi in it. it’s a great combination – carrien made this cake for lmf last year, with great success. not only is it an interesting combination, it’s also a beautiful cake, with dark brown cake layers, lighter brown ganache, and whipped cream frosting. there is ginger in the cake – it has ginger in the actual cake and is soaked with a ginger-vanilla syrup. we made the ginger-vanilla syrup with lots of ginger and a vanilla bean, which made it really quite spicy (we also steeped it for much longer than the recipe called for). i’m not a fan of the ginger bits in the cake. i think i’d make it into a paste instead, or steep it in some liquid part of the cake, because your mouth reads the little bits as hard little “things” and you wonder, what the hell is this in the cake? is it a bit of egg, because the batter wasn’t mixed correctly? i think you only realize what it is if you’ve eaten the cake. but the general cake is fantastic – the cake is pretty dense, and with the ganache filling (which has the sesame seeds and wasabi in it), the whipped cream frosting is the perfect foil.

dessert #2 : vanilla panna cotta with balsamic chocolate sauce
i love panna cotta for two reasons. 1 : it tastes good. 2 : it’s incredibly easy to make. alright, this panna cotta is a bit more work-intensive, but it’s still done in a snap. besides, i tripled the recipe. we picked a vanilla panna cotta to balance out the chocolate in the desserts; it comes from mario batali via epicurious. it’s technically supposed to go with balsamic vinegar and strawberries, but we decided to make a chocolate-based sauce with balsamic vinegar in it. this panna cotta is also fantastic because it’s half yogurt and half cream, so by itself it has a bit of tang to it that’s very clean yet indulgent. mmm. the leftovers are in the fridge…it’s all i can do not to eat all of them this very moment. not so much a fan of the sauce – i made it and i didn’t get the proportions right. rather, i got them in the ballpark, then i messed them up by adding too much salt and it went downhill from there. oops. but the panna cotta itself was great. i replaced the vanilla extract in the recipe with a vanilla bean (you heat part of the cream and mix the rest with the yogurt, so the vanilla bean steeps in the heated cream).

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compote
this is actually a polish drink, not the typical american/european concoction that is composed of dried fruits cooked together. we wanted a non-alcoholic drink that wouldn’t be too heavy, and would balance with the chocolate, and this is what we came up with. basically, it’s a fresh fruit juice/fruit tea. you boil fruit with water and then add sugar, and voila, you have a great, mild but fresh-tasting drink. we used about a gallon and a half to two gallons of water with three pears, three peaches, and three apples. this gets better when you have better fruit, so the best time to make this is in the summer rather than in the winter.

recipes will be posted soon when it’s not past my bedtime.

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so my general thoughts on this party are that it was fun, expensive, and we almost got the timing right. we intended to do a port wine granita between the main course and dessert, as a breather, but it wasn’t done by the time we wanted to serve it, so it’s still in the freezer. people were really wanting dessert by the time they finished dinner, anyway – we had announced the order of the courses in the meal so people would know what was in everything (so as not to have any unpleasant surprises, allergy and food-preference wise). i wonder if the desire to have dessert is more common in the buffet-style dinner party than the sit-down-at-a-table-style dinner party.

since we have real silverware and dinnerware we used it, but this created an immense amount of mess. it coordinated pretty well – this is the closest i’ve gotten to being on time (we ate at about 7:30, 7:45?) when doing a multiple-course dinner like this with somewhat complicated recipes. we got to do a bit of setup, which was good, but not the cleanup that one does in the kitchen beforehand, so the kitchen was a huge mess during the whole thing, sadly. hopefully i’ll get better at this dinner party stuff as i continue to do them. in the meantime, somebody else should do one… as for the chocolate, it was an interesting experience to do a whole menu based on chocolate. i would do it again…just for a few people and not fifteen. still, there’s nothing like cooking for lots of people.