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.

Fried Ravioli and love

Why not. Fried ravioli has been on many menus. Who doesn't like fried raviolis. Well, I guess when it's made in foreign countries and has a ton of food additives, well then yea you might not like fried ravioli. But still the bar food hound in all of us loves fried ravioli.
And this is one way chef's come up with ideas. We love fried foods and especially fried raviolis. Yea it may sound a little base but when you make fresh pasta, fill it with crab meat, blanch the raviolis, and batter them all in house you have shown a lot of love to a fried ravioli. And that is exactly what we did. John being from St. Louis told me fried ravioli were on every menu. So why not.
So here us what we came up with.
Fried Crab Ravioli- corn nage an red pepper coulis.
It sound so simple but there really is a lot of love here. The raviolis alone are a four step process. The crab filling has marscapone cheese, sour cream, cilantro, pimenton, cayenne, and lemon juice. The corn nage is simple, corn, onions, garlic, and chicken stock. The red pepper coulis is great. We took local red bell peppers and roasted, seeded and peeled them. The we took shallots, Garlic and chicken stock and cooked the mixture until liquid reduced by half. Then we pureed the mixture in a blender adding EVOO as neede and the strauned the red pepper puree through a fine mesh chinois. That is love for a fried ravioli.

Short Rib Ravioli

We have been working on our ravioli dough recipe for a while and really trying to get it down to a science. Now, ravioli dough has been around for a long time and many many people make great ravioli. This shouldn't seem like something hard to make. But when we looked at compressing the dough for tenderness we ran into a slew of visual problems. After lots of experimentation we have finally put our compressed pasta dough to bed and we can move on. Here we took shots of our local grass fed short rib raviolis from start to finished plate. The finished dish:
Local Grass Fed Beef Short Rib Ravioli with Shitake Ragout, Edamame, and Red Wine Syrup.

A lot of goat cheese and marscapone went into the mix

Lobster Lasagna

It is always strange where inspiration can come from. While down in the USVI my sister in-law made us lasagna one night for dinner on the boat. The lasagna was great filled with great Italian sausage, cheese and a great tomato sauce. The thing that set of the light bulb was the fact that my sister in-law rolled the lasagna instead of making a traditional layered lasagna. What a great way to present a uniform dish. Here is my thanks to Leigh.

We took her idea and ran with it. Lobster hit ur minds and trying to use all parts as always. We used our base pasta dough recipe and added the coral from the lobsters.

The lobster coral makes the dough bright green when it is raw but when cooked the dough turns a light a red. We rolled out the sheets and blanched thm. We then mixed the lobster meat with ricotta and marscapone and rolled it in the pasta sheets. Using the shells of the lobster we made lobster stock which we used to make a rich tomato sauce. Here is the finished product. While the sauce is running a little with the basil oil I can't help but love these imperfections.

Tender Ravioli Dough

We are working on a spur of the moment VIP amuse bouche. Something we could have on hand for surprise VIPs. Then we had one of those light bulb moments. Ideas in Food had written an article on the perfect chocolate chip cookie dough. Most people rest their cookie dough for 36 hours for the flavors to fully combine and for the flour to be fully absorbed. Aki and Alex figured out that by compressing the dough it seemed as if the dough had been rested, but with out the lapse in time. Pretty Cool.
Next, Michael Ruhlman wrote about a dinner he had with Symon in which Symon kneads his ravioli dough very little. Almost like he was kneading biscuit dough so as not to develop large gluten strands. We put these two ideas together to make or new ravioli dough. We put our ingredients together as one usually does with pasta. Eggs and oil in the middle and flour around the outside. We slowly draw the flour in and when the dough just starts to come together and it becomes like a shaggy biscuit mix we stop and compress the down for 50 seconds. Our dough was finished. It couldn't have been an easier pasta recipe. We have also used this method for tart shells and we will probably use it for biscuits as well. We have made a bouche ravioli of red wine braised oyster mushrooms with chevre.

Here is our recipe:

All Purpose Flour 1200 grams
Kosher Salt 15 grams
Whole Eggs 5 ea
Egg Yolks 25 ea
EVOO 100 milliliters
Whole Milk 100 milliliters


Mix flour and salt together and put on a large work surface and create a well in the center large enough to hold eggs and oil. Put eggs and oil in the center and slowly stir, gradually drawing in the flour. When you have a fairly solid dough work in the rest of the flour until just barely combined. Compress for 50 seconds and refrigerate.