Happy Birthday to Me!

I turned 32 a few weeks ago, and had a dinner party with friends this past weekend to celebrate. Thanks to the total awesomeness of my friends, it was an incredibly fun evening. The food didn't turn out too shabby either. A few highlights below...

Despite the best efforts of my hoarder upstairs neighbors to ruin the ambiance, the table ended up looking really beautiful. (And how adorable are my appetizer dishes? I am totally enamored with them...) There was a trio of appetizers, as usual. On the left we have Shrimp Mosaic with Avocado, Compressed Melon, Jalapeño, Lime, and Cilantro. This was totally delicious, and compressing the melon added a nice intensity to it. In the middle are a couple Fava Bean Crostini with Preserved Lemon, made using cryo-blanched favas and homemade fresh ricotta... Mmmm... On the right are Vodka-Spiked Cherry Tomatoes, a light, tangy refreshing starter for a summer meal.
The soup course was a Chilled Summer Peach Soup from The Wine Lover's Cookbook. I didn't get a picture of it on my camera (still waiting for pictures from friends), but it looked a lot like the one in the linked post, except I garnished with minced crystallized ginger and a chiffonade of mint instead of raspberries and whole mint leaves. This was the one course that was hit-and-miss with my guests. The peaches weren't quite in season, which didn't help, and I think I will use curry powder next time instead of the five spice powder I used this time. I enjoyed it, but I think it could definitely be much better. The salad course was going to be this, but ended up being this (minus the chicken) as a last-minute substitution when it was discovered that the lettuce ice was... gross. (I think this is due to using mature spinach rather than more delicate baby spinach...) Blech. Moving on... I finally perfected that scallop course I had been playing with the other day.
The smoke made for a fun presentation, and the course was absolutely delicious. I made the improvement of using a bacon cream (basically just cream infused with bacon and reduced a bit... yum!) instead of the beurre blanc. It removed stability concerns and was the perfect contrast to the fresh veggies. At least one guest collected my other friends' plates to spoon up their last remaining drops of sauce, which is always a good sign. This is my new favorite way to make scallops...
The steak course had components I would do again (crispy potato ruffles!) and components I would tweak (I used boneless short-ribs for the 48-hour short rib component, and they weren't nearly as moist as my previous experiments with bone-in short ribs or with a 48-hour skirt steak, so I would replace the meat with one of those two next time... I would also use a thicker blue cheese crust, since this one was too thin to contribute to the flavor profile the way I would have liked...) Look how fun the potato ruffles are:
Finally, dessert was amazing. I made Strawberry Sorbet Shortcakes with Sweetened Crème Fraîche Sauce from The French Laundry Cookbook. They were hastily-plated as the clock was ticking down towards midnight and everyone had to go to work the next day (that is my excuse for not making perfect quenelles), but they were the perfect balance of sweet, fruity, and rich... The components were perfect together. I'll give these their own post later to show all of the awesomeness, but you can find the recipe online here and I highly recommend you try it at home. (The only tweak I made was cutting the amount of sugar in the sorbet in half, as I tend to do with almost all ice cream/sorbet recipes...)
The last couple years have been pretty rough, but hopefully Year 32 is a good one. At least it's off to a delicious start...