drunk with power

Dinner was a hit, but dessert was the best, or at least that’s what I was told, both verbally and by the happy “mmm”s that accompanied each bite.

A couple things:

• I used the wrong kind of dates and roasted them at either too high a temperature or for too long, because there was more than a little of the black bits I had to break off. Stuffing them with Parmigiano Reggiano was completely unnecessary. Goat cheese would have been better, or a good blue.
• The peppers were amazing. Goat cheese combined with chives, parsley and garlic, then piped into peppers from the antipasto bar, then topped with olive oil and roasted. The red ones were good if a little too hot, but the yellow ones were mind-blowing.
• Lobster. Pretty simple: simmer the tails, remove the meat, sauté mushrooms, add flour, add lobster stock, add half-and-half, add lobster, spoon into tails, top with grated Parmigiano and broil until bubbly. I over-salted a bit. Brussels sprouts were sautéed because we weren’t as hungry as I’d prepared for and didn’t need many with all that lobster (2 tails each—long story).
• Chocolate pots de crème with cinnamon whipped cream. Awesome. It’s a simple custard: melt a bit of chocolate, scald heavy cream and milk, whisk egg yolks with sugar and a pinch of salt, temper the eggs with the hot cream, whisk into the melted chocolate, into ramekins into a water bath and covered with foil in the oven for half an hour. I was concerned when the room-temperature one I tried when I made them was watery on the bottom and too grainy in texture, but after a few hours of refrigeration, they absorbed the liquid and took on a texture somewhere between a high-quality baked cheesecake and a custard. The whipped cream had powdered sugar, vanilla and cinnamon from Penzey’s, and I was delighted to learn that I could stabilize it with xanthan gum, lending it a refrigerated shelf life of several days instead of a couple hours before it starts weeping.

Good stuff, and I’m glad I could share it with someone who appreciated it.