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July 2013 Savory Dinner: Summer in Paris

This is going to be a nice one. July 23, 24, and 25. Tickets are now on sale! 

July 2013: Summer in Paris

• Vodka gimlet with basil-meyer lemon syrup
• Socca (chickpea flour crepes) with braised Belgian endive
• Soupe au pistou with creme de pissenlits (dandelion cream)
• Compressed market vegetables with nasturtium leaves, candied peas, and baby leek vinaigrette
• Molecular nicoise salad with olive oil spheres
• Potato gratin with swiss chard
• Shiitake stroganoff with straw potatoes
• Crêpe cake with fresh ground cherry currant jam and candied wild violets
• Chocolate chervil tart with tempura strawberries and mint
• Mignardises

The fine print:

• Unfortunately we can’t accommodate substitutions for the menu.
• Want to bring your own alcohol? Bring it! (Glasses of whatever you’re drinking sent to the kitchen wouldn’t be turned down…)
• Dinners contain all kinds of things like nuts, wheat, gluten, soy, & sugar—but never any dead animals or animal products. ‘Course not!
• If you have a birthday in your party, let us know when you place your reservation.
• Mignardises are a secret treat we give you at the very end of the meal to take with you…or eat as you linger with your new besties all night long!
• Dinners are $65 per person, plus tax and gratuity.

today was a fun day.

I love cocoa butter painting, man, I do.

These are testers for a fundraising project we’re working on for May! That’s all I can say right now…

 

June 2013 Savory Dinner: Foraged Feast

Dinner #2 of the 2013 season! Tickets are currently on sale. SOLD OUT! THANKS SO MUCH!!

June 21, 22, and 23:

June 2013: Foraged Feast

As many found foods as we can stuff into one giant meal. Depending on what’s in the fields, forest, backyard, and garden, here’s a loose idea of the menu:

• May wine
• Almond deviled eggless eggs with backyard chives and sautéed daylillies
• Schav (Yiddish sorrel soup) with garlic chives, white chicken mushrooms and fried pickle lace
• Creamed spring spinach, garlic mustard, and dandelion with burdock
• Beet salad with woodruff, cashew cheese, radish, yuzu, and pine oil dressing
• Spring mushrooms (ideally morels and chanterelles, we’ll see what’s out there in the world!) with pickled ramp béarnaise
• Lilac sorbet with strawberry flowers and fraises du bois
• White chocolate mousse with chamomile sauce and wild walnut cream
• Mignardise: Spruce sablee cookies

The fine print:

• Unfortunately we can’t accommodate substitutions for the menu.
• Want to bring your own alcohol? Bring it! (Glasses of whatever you’re drinking sent to the kitchen wouldn’t be turned down…)
• Dinners contain all kinds of things like nuts, wheat, gluten, soy, & sugar—but never any dead animals or animal products. ‘Course not!
• If you have a birthday in your party, let us know when you place your reservation.
• Mignardises are a secret treat we give you at the very end of the meal to take with you…or eat as you linger with your new besties all night long!
• Dinners are $60 per person, plus tax.

May Savory Dinner: Imagined Shanghai

SOLD OUT! THANKS!!!

It’s happening! Our first savory dinner of the season. Mark your calendars and buy your tickets now. May 7, 8, and 9 we are excited to present to you:

May 2013: Imagined Shanghai

A fantasia of urban Chinese excitements. Please note that menus can and most likely will change based on whim, whimsy, and market availability.

• Lychee and pink grapefruit slushy
• Xiao long bao: soup dumplings: pockets of tender dough with a soupy surprise
• Braised eggplant with stinky tofu
• Hushi Suanla Geng: Hot and Sour Soup with woodear mushrooms and daylily buds
• Dry fried green beans
• Hand pulled street cart noodles with XO sauce and fried arame
• Ma-po tofu
• Dessert congee
• Corn ice cream with burnt sugar caramel
• Mignardises

The fine print:

• Unfortunately we can’t accommodate substitutions for the menu.
• Want to bring your own alcohol? Bring it! (Glasses of whatever you’re drinking sent to the kitchen wouldn’t be turned down…)
• Dinners contain all kinds of things like nuts, wheat, gluten, soy, & sugar—but never any dead animals or animal products. ‘Course not!
• If you have a birthday in your party, let us know when you place your reservation.
• Mignardises are a secret treat we give you at the very end of the meal to take with you…or eat as you linger with your new besties all night long!
• Dinners are $60 per person, plus tax.

Savory Dinner highlights and previews for 2013

Last year I was honored to cook a series of spectacularly popular (if I do say so myself…) savory dinners in our little back room at the shop.

This year I’ve planned one dinner a month, starting in early May and ending in October (when our holiday chocolate orders become so intense that doing anything but making chocolates becomes impossible). I wanted to share with you some highlights of the menus I’m planning, but unfortunately I don’t have dates yet for most of the dinners. My partners in the dinner series are Jacob, who takes care of all the logistics like designing the menu and the table and transforming the back room from a chocolate box-packing factory into a beautiful, twinkling dining room; and Lucy, who is our beautiful hostess and always makes herself flashcards about each dish so she can answer every diner’s question about it.

Without these two this little scheme couldn’t happen, and because Jacob sometimes tours around with indie rock bands as a sound engineer, it’s super-duper hard to make plans for when he’ll be around to work at his much more important job of setting the table.

So, we’ll be adding dates as soon as humanly possible.

In the meantime, it might be a good idea of subscribe to this blog (I think there’s a button somewhere where you put your email in and every ice age or so when I post something you’ll get an email…) so you’re the first to know when tickets go on sale. The very first thing we do is post a blog post about each offering, and post on our Facebook page.

We’re hoping to do each dinner for two or three days with ten seats at our big communal table for each day, but last time those 20-30 seats sold out in a few hours, so, ya know, stay in the loop! : )

Coupla things:

• Unfortunately we can’t accommodate substitutions for the menu, although if there is a complimentary alcohol beverage we can make you a virgin one—just tell us when you place your reservation.
• You wanna bring your own alcohol? Bring it! (Glasses of whatever you’re drinking sent to the kitchen wouldn’t be turned down…)
• Dinners contain all kinds of things like nuts, wheat, gluten, soy, & sugar—but never any dead animals or animal products. ‘Course not!
• If you have a birthday in your party, let us know when you place your reservation.
• Every menu has “mignardises.” These are a secret treat we give you at the very end of the meal to take with you…or eat as you linger with your new besties all night long!
• Dinners are $60 per person, plus tax.

Please note that these dishes are only partial highlights of the menus—each menu will be 8-12 courses (yep) and will definitely be changing depending on what I can weasel out of farmers that week. There are just a few teasers and working ideas to get you excited. 

May 2013: Imagined Shanghai

• Lychee and pink grapefruit slushy
• Xiao long bao: soup dumplings: pockets of tender dough with a soupy surprise
• Braised eggplant with stinky tofu
• Hushi Suanla Geng: Hot and Sour Soup with woodear mushrooms and daylily buds
• Dry fried green beans
• Hand pulled street cart noodles with XO sauce and fried arame
• Ma-po tofu
• Dessert congee
• Corn ice cream with burnt sugar caramel
• Mignardises

Early June 2013: Forager’s Delight

• May wine with Japanese knotweed straws
• Almond deviled eggless eggs with backyard chives and sautéed daylillies
• Schav (Yiddish sorrel soup) with garlic chives, white chicken mushrooms and fried pickle lace
• Creamed spring spinach, garlic mustard, and dandelion with burdock
• Beet salad with woodruff, cashew cheese, radish, yuzu, and pine oil dressing
• Spring mushrooms (ideally morels and chanterelles, we’ll see what’s out there in the world!) with ramp béarnaise
• Lilac sorbet with strawberry flowers (if Pete will sell me some, even though “Why would you want the flower, when a few weeks later you could have a STRAWBERRY?” “Because it’s pretty, Pete! Please!”) and fraises du bois (foraged by moi, those)
• White chocolate mousse with chamomile sauce
• Mignardise: Spruce sablee cookies

Late June/Early July 2013: Early Summer in Paris

• Vodka gimlet with basil-meyer lemon syrup
• Socca (chickpea flour crepes) with braised Belgian endive
• Soupe au pistou with creme de pissenlits (dandelion cream)
• Compressed asparagus with nasturtium leaves, candied peas, and baby leek vinaigrette
• Molecular nicoise salad with olive oil spheres
• Potato gratin with swiss chard
• Shiitake stroganoff with straw potatoes
• Crêpe cake with fresh Huguenot Street mulberry jam
• Chocolate chervil tart with tempura strawberries and mint
• Mignardises

Late July 2013: A holiday in Corsica

• Roasted lemonade with vanilla bean muscat
• Minestra with heirloom beans, cabbage, applewood smoked potatoes
• Fresh apple and parsley vinaigrette with lamb’s quarters
• Pea mousse with lemon
• Mediterranean braised green beans
• Swiss chard cannelloni with eggplant fries
• Lavender-melon soup
• Torta Pisticcina (chestnut flour tart) with candied zucchini
• Mignardises

August 2013: Mad Men Summer

• Peach punch with thyme
• Barbecue potato chips with caramelized onion and shallot dip
• Heirloom iceberg lettuce salad with cashew blue cheese dressing
• Cream of tomato soup with fried curly parsley
• Macaroni and cheese casserole with croissant crumbs and potato cracklings
• Gin and Tonic gelee shots
• Deep dish peach pie
• Chocolate-covered neapolitan ice cream bombe
• Mignardise: Chocolate caramel nougat bars with chocolate Bavarian cream

September 2013: Smoke and Spice (for people who like spicy, super weird dishes)

• Manhattan with local whiskey and smoked ice
• Citrus salad with fried rosemary, olives and long pepper
• Green chile corn chowder with smoked oyster mushrooms
• Invisible ravioli with homegrown tomato ragoût
• Cauliflower with rye crumbs and sage air
• Salim: Thai green bean noodles with incense-smoked coconut syrup
• Grilled pineapple tart with raspberries and aleppo pepper cream with oven dried pineapple
• Mignardise: Fiery hot pepper smoked sea salt caramels

October 2013: Fermentation Fetishist’s New York Deli

• Pickleback
• Shrub
• Soft sourdough pretzels with violet mustard
• Beet and celery root tartare with horseradish and caraway
• Beer brined kale salad with yuzu kosho
• Onion soup with sage, croutons, cashew cheese “truffle” slices, and lemon peel
• Tiny tempeh reuben with four homemade fermentations (gin caraway sauerkraut, sourdough rye, cashew cheese, housemade tempeh)
• Peaches and cream ice cream cake
• Mignardise: Black and white cookie with white miso

It’s going to be a fun year!

Cabbage rolls stuffed with sauerkraut, apples, and rye bread with creamy dill sauce

A customer of ours was browsing the archives of this blog, and asked if I could post a recipe of the Cabbage Rolls, because the photo looked so tantalizing. It does, they are, and I can.

I’m happy to, because I love this recipe so, so, SO much.

Like most good recipes in this world, it’s adapted from Bloodroot.

Like most good recipes in this world, it’s a bit of work. Not too much though. And it’s fun work.

And look what you end up with:

Cabbage rolls stuffed with sauerkraut, apples, and rye bread

with creamy dill sauce

makes about 30

 

2 large onions, chopped

4 stalks celery, stems and leaves, chopped

olive oil and grapeseed oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 1/2  c diced tart, crisp apples, such as Mutsu or Fortune or Pink Lady

2 packed c sauerkraut, rinsed and squeezed

1 Tb. caraway seed

1 1/2 Tb. sugar

3 Tb. apple cider vinegar, or to taste

sea salt

fresh pepper

1 1/2 c cubed rye bread, toasted until crisp

1-2 large cabbages, depending on size

small amount ground seitan, optional

1. Sauté onions and celery in a mix of ¾ grape seed oil and ¼ olive oil until lightly browned. Add apples and sauerkraut to frying pan and turn heat to high. Add more oil as necessary. Add caraway seeds and sugar and fry until sauerkraut begins to brown a little. Add garlic and sauté one more minute, stirring often to make sure garlic doesn’t burn. Turn off heat and add vinegar. Season to taste rather aggressively with salt and pepper.
2. If using seitan, roast or sauté it until lightly browned, then add to mixture.
3. Turn mixture into a bowl and mix with breadcrumbs. Let cool and adjust seasonings.
4. Use a small knife to cut out the core of the cabbage. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and place cabbage in, stem end down. Cook until leaves begin to soften, about 3-5 minutes, depending on size of cabbage. Remove cabbage to a colander over a bowl and gently pull off as many leaves as are par-cooked. Return cabbage to pot as often as necessary until all leaves are par-boiled.
5. If center vein of leaf is thick, cut most of it out. Hold one leaf at a time in your hand or on a plate, top generously with filling, and roll up. Tuck sides in and place in a shallow baking dish. Repeat. The smallest inside leaves of the cabbage will hold just a little stuffing like a cup.
6. Lightly brush tops of rolls with oil and refrigerate until serving time. Rolls will need ½ hour to 45 minutes in a 375°F oven to heat thoroughly and to glaze the tops. If you want, you can baste the rolls with the Dill Sauce as they bake.

Creamy dill sauce

Makes about 5 c—you definitely won’t need this much, but I like to make a lot and freeze it. It’s great on roasted vegetables.

¼ c grapeseed oil

¼ c flour

3 Tb. prepared mustard

2-3 Tb. shoyu or tamari

2 Tb. nutritional yeast

sea salt to taste

fresh pepper to taste

3 Tb. chopped fresh dill

1. Heat grapeseed oil and flour, whisking constantly. When mixture begins to bubble, add remaining ingredients except dill along with 4 c water. Bring to a boil, whisking until thickened.
2. Remove from heat. Season to taste with more salt and pepper as necessary, and add chopped dill.

That’s it! Go forth! Make them, post photos of ‘em on Instagram and tag them #lagustasluscious! Then eat up.

Oh, and psst, if you like Eastern European heavy duty wintery dishes, you’ll probably go crazy for my Cabbage and Onion Pie. 

Enjoy!

 

my gals

ARE INSANE AND I LOVE THEM SO