mis en possible

Greetings and welcome to the first real post for mis en possible!

Our friends have dutifully separated the holidays, each of us getting one or more on which to throw our regular parties. At some point in the distant future, we ended up with New Year’s Eve.

Every year we did something easy and generally Italian. The food was OK; not great, but OK. Last year, we decided to go a bit more toward ‘French Bistro’ and decided to course it out rather than serve family style. It was also the largest dinner we’d done (6 courses for 12 people, not including myself). It was a chaotic mess, but the food turned out well and was well received.

Last year’s dinner pretty much encompassed everything I could do at that point and it was a bit disorganized — though the main course was obviously French (Boeuf Bourguignon) as well as some other courses (Vichyssoise for soup, Pork Rillettes for an appetizer ), I also included a New Orleans-style shrimp remoulade, a goat-cheese and Parmesan crisp recipe from The French Laundry cookbook, the salad was do-it-yourself and made up of the various bits from a classic Delmonico salad; there was no cheese course.

This year, I’d occasionally worked on the recipes, tweaking them and trying new things. When it came down to the menu for this year, it was a series of dishes that I wanted to do, not limited by what I could do.

We were also limited by the fact that my wife, the pastry chef in the house, had to work both New Year’s Eve and the night preceding, necessitating the evening as a whole be made a bit easier on me due to lack of prep time. Our diners numbered 8 instead of 12 and we cut out a few dishes, numbers-wise to arrive at a 7-course meal.

To start out, we put out a loaf of bread with some oil with vinegar and tomatoes and pesto in the case where the courses would come out too slowly. Nothing exciting, and no, no pictures…

The first course is based around my second favorite preparation of duck: duck leg confit. Under the duck is a layer of tomato “tartare” (a component I’ve lifted from The French Laundry cookbook for a number of dishes), under that some caramelized onions splashed with red wine and tomato paste, on top of a brioche crouton. The sauce is whipped creme fraiche with agave nectar, cayenne pepper and sweet paprika.

For the second course, we fell back on our old standby: potato leek soup. Over the course of the year, I’ve tweaked my personal recipe which has its origins directly from Alton Brown’s Good Eats as well as obtaining a new blender which gives it a superior texture. In addition to Alton Brown’s recipe, I’ve added a diced and sweated onion prior to sweating the leeks, reduced the amount of potato by about 1/4th and finished with a bit of nutmeg. I’ve also started using more mature leeks. I’d used almost exclusively younger ones for over a year but I’m more satisfied with the flavor of the older vegetables. In addition, I served this with optional white truffle oil.

For the salad, instead of an everyone-for-themselves family style, I opted to plate everything. Last year, we had 4 dressings that were all over the map in terms of quality; this year I worked out one really good vinaigrette. The salad was simple: mesclun greens on top of sliced pear, 3 slices of blood orange, dried cranberries, shaved gruyere and chopped, caramelized walnuts.

The fourth course was originally intended to be a palate cleansing sorbet, but due to the fact that my wife had recently acquired an entire case of mangoes, we decided to instead just serve a little bit of dessert in the middle of the meal: Mango Sorbet.

For the main course, I again elected to present Boeuf Bourguignon and potatoes au gratin. This recipe is taken from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles cookbook and modified only slightly in that a bit of tomato paste was added early on, an entire bottle of burgundy was used and reduced, and the meat was cubed three days in advance, seasoned and vacuum sealed. The scalloped potatoes are an old family recipe.

This dish, even in its original form, is an easy, elegant, flavorful and amazing stew. I make this all throughout the winter and this particular execution came off better than I’d expected. We served it with some baguette croutons with grape seed oil and cracked pepper.

To bridge dinner and dessert, we offered a European tour of three milk cheeses: a soft and creamy French cheese (the name of which I’ve sadly forgotten) Spanish Manchego and English Shropshire. The cheeses were served with, respectively, a shallot confit, fig-brandy jam and caramelized walnuts, cranberry and port gastrique and balsamic reduction. The Shropshire was compressed, vacuum packed and frozen prior to slicing and serving. For delivery, we offered a number of crackers as well as some toasted baguette and toasted French bread like the breads served earlier in the meal.

With limited time, my wife put together a pecan, fig and bourbon bundt cake for dessert as well as having our grand old standby — banana bread (she makes many loaves in December, much to the delight of our daughter). It was a sweet-yet-slightly-savory end to our meal.

In all, a distinct level of preparedness brought the dinner together quite nicely. I spent most of the night not in a frantic mess, but calmly waiting the next course. A couple of our guests helped out with the serving as well as doing dishes as we went, and Sherry was kind enough to do the duty of taking pictures.

I’d have liked the soup to turn out better (it had too much white pepper for my taste, though the people eating told me it didn’t), but I felt the rest of the dishes came together. I still need to work on portion sizes for a meal this big, but this was far better than any of our previous dinners.

We have, in the end, set the standard for our future New Year’s Eve menus and I’m happy to be locked into French Bistro mode once a year or so.

Bon Appetit!