7 course dinner

We did a seven course tasting menu last week for some friends of the owner. I wanted to show some of the highlights from the dinner. We had a lot of fun with this. These first 3 pictures are of the beet root carpaccio with aged balsamic, Greek extra virgin olive oil, mint and radish.
We did a pasta course of Carbonara. Housemade spaghetti, roasted tomato, Meadow Creek Dairy mountaineer, applewood smoked bacon and quail egg.

I got a chance here to work with 2 cool new items to me. Yellow Tail hamachi and Grains of paradise. We seared the hamachi for sashimi and served it with julienne salsify root and orange butter emulsion.

Here we have Cavendish Farms quail stuffed with housemade port, current sausage; black current jus and puffed quinoa.





Like an idiot I forgot to get a picture of our dessert. It was more or less fair food or everything you want from the South in a desert. We made graham cracker grit cakes with sugar and honey and battered and deep fried. We topped the hot grit cake with banana ice cream and sweet tea caramel. Can't beleive I forgot the picture.

A lot to catch up on

It's been too long so I thought I'd just roll a bunch of blogs into one. It's hard to think of where to start as we have been up to a lot in these past few weeks. Spring time has come as well as local produce. It almost makes your head spin. So much produce rolling in and what to do with it all. It's a good problem to have.

Why by a thermal circulator when you can have a Johnski!!!

So many chefs today focus on sous vide cooking and cooking at the right tempurature in order to yield a steak that is 99% med rare and 1% well done. This was a steak on a party of 60 we had one saturday night. John, my sous chef, grilled probably about 35 filets to medium. This was one extra one and had sat for a good 20 minutes after the party before we cut into it. It is pictures like this that makes me up in the air about how so many chefs are begining to use so much equipment to get results like we have above. Proper cooking, using methods proven to give standardized desired results, is almost always as good as any machine. So get yourself a Johnski. He also slices, dices, chops, and gets mad a staff meal!

Of course John always does a great job but we can't let his head get too big. So the front of house sent back a joke ticket. I had no idea and as I called the ticket John looked at me and said "I think I quit."

New Dishes

We have come up with a lot of new menu items. Here they are and we should have these on the menu for a little while longer.

Here we are looking at our new pheasant. It is a provencal style sauce with tomatoes, fennel, olives, roasted peppers, and fresh herbs de provence(we use thyme, parsley, majoram, and lavender). We serve the pheasent with artichoke hearts and grilled polenta.



Here we have a boneless lamb loin. Grilled and served with a lavender-port jus, arugala, asaragus, fava beans, red peppers and roasted tomatoes. This is like lamb over a warm salad.


These are the soft shell crabs we got in for one weekend. The season is so short and we had so few. Here is what we came up with. We battered the crabs in kadafi dough (shredded phyllo) and deep fried them. We served the crabs with arugula, and pommery mustard vinagrette. The brioche and quail egg we made like a tiger's eye, aka toad in a whole. The quail egg tiger's eye is a small tribute to my late grandma who used to make me tiger's eyes in tomato soup.

We finally changed our scallop dish. We pan sear the scallops and serve them over a puree of cauliflower and sauteed spinach. We made a gremolata and used brown butter solids to reinforce the brown butter in the plate. A tarragon-basil emulsion, more brown butter and candied lemon finish off what I think is a great dish.

Some random pics

Exactly as the title says.
This is John making roasted garlic and mushroom butter. It looks really cool on the plate having 2 different colored butters.






Suck it Sergio!!! Winslow is funny!
Jeff stealing the Tryon truck.
Nicely seared salmon. Courtesy of cisco.

Ups and Downs

It's been a long couple of long weeks and I have personally had some rough times. But things are looking up again. We had a great Graduation and Mothers' day at the restaurant and now we are looking at some great local produce as well as some fantastic fish.

Today I rolled out our new tuna and I am really happy about it. It's a play on salad nicoise. You can find it in just about any Paris bistro and is great this time of year. We lightly poached the tuna in Zoe extra virgin olive oil, local radishes and mizuna, tomato confit, piquillo peppers, our house tapenade and hard boiled egg with a broken mustard vinaigrette. I look forward to serving this for a while.


Here we paired miso with salmon, nothing out of the ordinary. It's simple and great. We dust the salmon witha spice mixture or coriander, black pepper and cardomom. Daikon, edamame, carrot, cucumber, Spain farm shitakes and sugar snap peas finish this dish. A while back we were trying to re-work a vegetarian option on our menu. I am not sure exactly how we got to this but we can't stop selling it. I am really happy with this dish and the flavor and colors really pop. We roast white and green asparagus and set it atop an essence of red pepper. A black beluga lentil cake and butter braised shitakes and oytser mushrooms top it all off.

Below we have some shots from Mother's Day weekend. Below Ricardo is shaving manchego for our arugala salad.

Kyle came in to help us for the weekend. He never looks as tough as he does in this picture. We never could have gotten ready without his help. Thanks again kyle. This picture really makes his nose look small.
P.S. That's what you get for taking pictures with my camera.

Francisco is reading up on the special menu for the weekend. All great line cooks prepare mentally as well as physically.

Things to work on/ New Ideas

• We need to get morels that look good
• I need a new knife
• Our plating can get better
• Our speed is really quite amazing
• Guilford County Grits are good and we need to utilize more
• Look at what we do with our crab cake
• Scallops need a facelift
• Post pictures of our Panna Cotta!!!
  

New Menu Layout

We have been making some changes in our menu style and layout and we have been really happy. Less is more is the theory. We have been running a two page menu with one side highlighting specials. We now only have one menu which we are printing on a regular basis, and changing pretty often so try and keep up. This allows us more flexability with what's in season. We can change on a dime if need be and we are having a blast with it. This week we are looking at 2 new items going on.

First is a wild stripped bass bouillabaisse broken down. We are going to grill the bass and serve it with a slightly spicy bouillabaisse sauce, rouille croquette, and french bean salad. I
ll try and get picture up soon.

The other is Braised Cane Creek Farms pork butt with spaetzle au gratin, braised red cabbage, and spiced cider gastrique A big twist on Alsatian food and NC barbecue.

We have also been getting amazing NC coastal shrimp fresh!!!. It's been a long time since I have worked with shrimp this good. We are cooking the shrimp sous vide with butter, lemon and thyme and putting it over a spin off of paella. A saffron-chorizo risotto with shitakes, and topping it with basil oil.

Long Time, No Blog

Despite a "poor economy" and an election I have been really busy. So, I haven't been posting much and I apologize. We have been working on some pretty fun stuff. A quick update our dinner menu is updated on our website so please check it out. I would have to say our pheasant is probably or best seller of the new items.

Striped bass out of Virginia is gorgeous. I am a big fan of striped bass and I pretty much always serve it skin on. We press the fish into the pan skin side down to get the best and most even crispy skin. If you really want to learn great techinique for this read The French Laundry. Here we are serving it with a blood orange sauce, slow roasted sweet potatoes and haricot vert. The blood orange sauce is a variation on Alinea's yuzu pudding. You really get a straight flavor of blood orange.
We have had a lot of success with our small plate features and we have continued running most of our specials as small plates. I think it's funny what we call small plates in America. The majority of the world eats small plates as their main course but in the States we tend to eat much larger portions. So small plates have a much different meaning here than in other countries. But I love this style of cooking. It's a lot easier to get creative and really adapt your dishes when you aren't having to load so much food on the plate.

This is another small plate salmon dish. can you tell I like seafood. This is sweet spiced salmon with pomegranate red onion marmalade and roasted root vegetables.
We usually sear our scallops at the restaurant. The caramel richness you get from a seared scallop is pretty much unsurpassed by any other seafood. But this time we strayed away from that. Mainly because duck fat is delicious. I know that may sound like an absurd comment but it is true. get some duck fat and cook just about anything with. So we opted to poach our scallops for a small plate in duck fat. We have large amounts of rendered duck fat on hand because of our duck confit. To cut to the chase: Duck fat poached scallops with black currant sauce and wilted baby arugula:
I thought it was kind of cool how the currants actually look like caviar.

Quinoa

One of the guys just introduced me to quinoa. Having never cooked or tasted the grain I was really intrigued at the possibilities. For those of you who don't know quinoa is an ancient grain originally eaten by the Incas in Peru. Quinoa has a flavor and texture all it's own. Sort of like cous cous but it is a grain. We decided to stick with latin american flavors for the dish and we wanted to use fish. Mahi Mahi came to mind and we were off running.
Our Final dish: Plantain crusted Mahi Mahi with cold quinoa salad and banana ketchup.

Duck Fat Poaching

We are going to poach cod in duck fat. We figured if we can poach in water, olive oil, and you can fry in canola etc, then why not duck fat. Tomorrow:

Duck fat poached cod, summer vegetable medley, celeriac puree, and snow pea tendrils with star anise-red wine reduction.