Oooo Mommy.

Bacon and eggs or land, sea, and sky, all about umami...this dish has several concepts.  48 hour cure of soy, brown sugar, and lemon grass on pork belly.  Soy, lemongrass, ginger, shallot, caramelized sugar, carrot and chili flake braised kombu and wood ear mushrooms.  Hard boiled quail egg.  Crispy ice fish.  Rice wine vinegar pickled watermelon rind.  Braising liquid reduction and a pork and lemon grass consomme which is not pictured... This dish is one of my new favorites.  I served this over the weekend.  It was a new dish for valentines but I will move it to the winter menu.  I just love it.

Earth Is The Title

Beets, Chocolate, Dandelion

Whenever I first conceptualize a dish I don't often get to bring it to completion the first couple times I make it due to putting together such extensive menus alone and serving each dish only 4-6 times a month.  Lately I've been pushing, even with my limited space to bring my dishes closer to the originals.  However I do get to make them delicious even if they are not always as originally intended and it seems that the first night I put out this dish my customers gobbled it up.  It was a traditional egg custard infused with dandelion, a chocolate sauce, beets cooked sous vide, a chocolate molasses cake crumble, and a beet and red wine vinegar gastrique.  The original concept looks more like this dish pictured here but is still missing elements. It was originally to be served to each guest on a large, somewhat flat stone, there was to be the addition of tufts of cotton candy adorned with flowers and baby beet leaves and the beet itself was to be a collection of multi-colored baby beets.  Since I buy from local farms or whole foods I don't always get the product I originally intend for so I have to go with the flow.  And I honestly couldn't afford stones at this time but I do what I can.  This dish is a beet-sous vide, cylinders of chocolate cream topped with vanilla salt, a beet and red wine vinegar gastrique, a cocoa, cashew, butter, and sugar crumble "soil," a dandelion sorbet and candied beet slices.  I had some excellent guest over this weekend.  I actually always have wonderful guests and the compliments just flowed in.  It felt really really nice.

Lucy In The Sky With Leopard Tights and One Shoe.

The cutest little red head who's mother said something like, "We were going to go to whole foods then I told Lucy One Sister is going to have her pierogi at Green Grocer, so she wanted to come here."  Freaking awesome.  It's things like that, people like that, which make all the pierogi pinching and arduous hours make sense.  Not sure if they know, or if they ever read this, but that made my day!

Inception.

It must have been my writing about mushrooms yesterday and sending out my news letter saying that I will soon be dreaming of mushrooms which led to my dream last night.  I planted the seed.  I dreamt of crawling around the forest floor in search of morels.  Lucky me I found tons.  They were very small but I wrote the coordinates of where I was, set up camp and waited for a few days until they were the perfect size for cutting.  Twenty pounds.  That's a damn good dream!

Beserk For Mushrooms

Noma, voted the best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino's list of top 50, is Nordic.  And surprisingly there are many other restaurants in Denmark, Sweden and the like that are very avante garde and recognized world wide.  I mean of course we should know that Sweden is a forerunner in style and creativity, after all we have Ikea as an example.  However trips to Ikea, especially when it's with my girlfriend, who I love, still makes me think, "what has become of my life?"  No offense, it's just not my thing.  And then there's Andersonville...Oh how Ann Sathers, Svea, Simon's, Wikstroms and The Swedish Museum with all the hunting/Pippy Longstocking/Dala Horse imagery would really culture and enlighten us on the brilliance of those up there with much longer winter months than we could imagine.  I think it is those winter months, just like the great Russian writers, Dostoevsky in particular (who I always reference when I say crass things, that you have to be in the mind of the evil to write about the evil, or something like that), that unleashes the creative juices.  Either you create or you suffer in the gray and white months.  Ok so where the fuck am I going with this...?
The Norse Warriors, The Berserker Vikings, believed to have taken large quantities of fly agaric mushrooms which made them "berserk."  Fly agaric mushrooms look just like the houses that the Smurfs lived it.  It's the mushroom that most people probably imagine when the word mushroom is said.  It's from the amanita class, mostly poisonous, however it would take very large doses to be lethal.  Anyways maybe it was the mind expansions of the Berserkers which later led to the natural mind expansions and creativity to those artists thousands of generations later.  Just a thought.
And on a side note Maitake, in Japanese, means Dancing Mushroom.

Green!

What a lovely color to drink on such a white cold winter day.  This is it people, I'm convinced, an elixir of life other than that lovely shittake.  Ok so, while in Key West I stayed with my partner's aunt's friends on a boat.  They sell vitamix blenders.  A blender I have wanted for so long but cannot afford to have (my aunt just lent me hers because she only used it to grind coffee). Whoa.  Well this gentleman who was the boat's captain, his name is Mike, was telling us of how he got into the business of vitamix and all the wonderful things it does to fruits and vegetables, pulverizing their cell walls to release something like 90% more nutritional value that usual.  I would have just smiled and nodded as I do when people give me stats, considering possibilities, however, he sold me when he said he was sixty, his hair was coming back, his eyebrows turned from gray back to black, he lost twenty pounds and went from his trifocals to CVS reading glasses.  From that day on I have supplemented one of my meals with one of these lovely green drinks and since all other vices have flown except for coffee I think I will live to 1,000.
The elixir, even if you don't have a vitamix or vitaprep you can use your blender.
10 green grapes, frozen
1 inch slice of pineapple, outside removed, core intact
1/8 cantaloupe, seeded, skinned
4 big leaves of kale
dime size bundle of cilantro
1/4 lime, intact, skin, pith, all
1/2 orange, peeled
6 frozen peach slices
1 whole green apple, seeds, skin, all
5 baby carrots
Enough water, orange juice or other tasty juice (pineapple, coconut water) to cover the blade.  Blend the hell out of this and prepare to be healthy!

Sketched Menu Is Up.

This is the Valentine's Day Menu.

I hope if you haven't gotten a chance to come to my underground dinners that you will for Valentine's Day.  It's going to be a nice intimate setting with tables for two rather than the communal table I usually have.  This is a sneak peak at the menu!  It is going to be much more fun to experience it in person.  Wine will be included.  Dinner for two with fourteen courses will last approximately 3 hours from start to finish.  Sometimes when I have large parties, tables of twelve, those dinners take more time but this seems to be the perfect amount of time to spend with a loved one, experience fun food and nice wines.