All-Star Weekend
This weekend everything worked. 3 meals with 3 different styles played off of each other. Interesting little tweaks to classic dishes. Classic frameworks that I adapted to the best ingredients I found while shopping, and that I knew my diners liked.
French dip using a perfect filet mignon, hold the bread and cheese.
Grilled Tuna with a yuzu sesame sauce, paired with avocado, tomato, and sourdough.
Caesar Salad with endive, radicchio, and cabbage.
Meatballs with charred “French onions” and mushrooms.
Halibut with a tempura hat, half-naked ‘fish and chips’. Malt vinegar.
Roasted Potatoes boiled whole with skin on, sliced carefully, dried, and roasted to unbelievable sweetness.
Branzino “shingled” with Cremini mushroom slices and finished with a clean ginger and shallot broth.
Try thinking this way about your favorite classic dishes, even passed down family recipes. Substitute, tweak, and re-think them. Is there a part of that dish that you just tolerate, that maybe you wish weren’t there? Re-thinking dishes without disrespecting or disregarding the good parts about them can be an interesting exercise and a way to breathe fresh air into them. Maybe you have access to ingredients and techniques that the original recipe maker didn’t have. Maybe your grandmother wanted to use way less breadcrumbs in her meatballs, and if she had more meat would have preferred to cut the amount in half. A lot of early cooking was dictated by limitations that we don’t have as cooks now.
The best cooks I’ve ever met, from legendary French Chefs to my Seafood Gumbo perfecting grandmother, had a real quality of being curious, adventurous, and adaptive. Their fans obsessed over their recipe’s but they didn’t. They knew savory recipes are frameworks to guide the reader, not to be followed exactly. The recipes of the best cooks mostly have a secret hidden note at the end of them stating: use the best ingredients you can get and don’t let your dislike of one particular facet of the recipe keep you from the other ones. Use this as a guide to make something you like.
Read a recipe a few times, make a few notes and then close the damn book. Let your brain do the work, it’s really hard to write recipes and techniques that translate between cooks of differing experience levels, skills, and kitchens.