Valentine's Feast (Alternate Title: My Mom is Awesome)

UPDATE: I've now uploaded the recipes here if anyone wants to recreate portions of this meal... The soup with lemon dumplings is here.

As I was enjoying an amazing 5-course dinner with my parents last night, I realized something: Nobody has ever cooked a dinner party for me.  I love to cook (obviously), and I love throwing dinner parties, but it was one of the nicest gifts my mom could have given me when she prepared everything for this feast and then brought the whole production over to my house so that she and my dad could share it with me.  There's sometimes a misconception about us people who are obsessed with food and cooking... an idea that, because we love to go crazy in the kitchen, we're going to be harsh critics of other people's cooking and thus are too intimidating to cook for... (When, in fact, I love very simple food, too... and even a grilled cheese sandwich is enough to rock my world if I didn't have to make it myself...) Even though this wasn't a cool restaurant or my own cooking, I wanted to share the meal my mom prepared for us...

The menu was inspired by a wine pairing dinner we had attended at the Oregon coast... plus one added course that's a family favorite...  We opened with a course of Seafood Flatbread, Toasted Almonds, and Crème Fraîche.

An herbed flatbread crust is topped with a smoked salmon spread, Dungeness crab, and shrimp, baked off to warm through, then topped with toasted almonds and a drizzle of (homemade) crème fraîche. 

This is such a fantastic celebration of seafood... and was followed by one another seafood course: Oysters Rockefeller with a Maltise Sauce.

These were served on a bed of rock salt at the wine pairing dinner (to hold the oysters upright), but the problem with this is that if you lose any yumminess out of the shell it is immediately coated in salt and can no longer be enjoyed... so I pulled out some tasting spoons that the awesome Steph got me years ago and they were perfect oyster-holder-uppers...

The sauce gets its hue from the juice and zest of blood oranges, which provide a lovely bright contrast to the smokey bacon and briny oyster...  From here we strayed from the wine-pairing menu to add a soup course: Creamy Asparagus Soup with Lemon Dumplings (link to recipe and step-by-step pictures here).

These are time-consuming but relatively easy to make, and provide a bright citrus-y surprise when you break open the dumpling and the filling (lemon juice and pulp, gelatin, salt, cayenne) bursts out...

This was also an excuse to use my super-adorable bowls...

We took a wine break here while the next course cooked: Horseradish-Crusted Lamb Chops with Roasted Squash, Wild Mushrooms, and Apples.  The crust on these is fantastic. You grate a potato and then get it all toasty-brown and crispy using a cold oil method (like with the world's greatest fries...), then combine your super-crispy potato with Panko, garlic, shallot, and freshly grated horseradish.  This awesome mix adheres to the seared lamb double-chop with a mixture of mayo, dijon, gelatin, and a bit more fresh horseradish...

After roasting to perfection, the double-chops are split and served on a bed of roasted winter goodness...

Somehow there were still two courses to go.  For a cheese course, my mom baked off some kick-ass little Blue Cheese Tartlets.  We were going to serve this with a Pinot Noir reduction, but in the end decided that that was both more work than we felt like and also a waste of Pinot, so we instead added a drizzle of this amazing "cream of balsamic" stuff that I had in the fridge...

Finally, for dessert, we had adorable little Hazelnut Tassies with Spiced Chantilly.  

We saw at the wine dinner that these pair perfectly with something like a late-harvest Gewurtz (which is kind of cool, since I usually pair late-harvest whites with fruity things rather than Nutella-y things...), but it was almost 11pm by this time, so we decided to save that pairing for another day...

So, there you have it: Incontrovertible evidence that my mom is pretty much the greatest...  I've been missing my Boston friends a lot lately, and missing a lot of things about my life back east... but I moved here to be closer to family and my parents make me glad I did almost every day.  

I've been going through a cycle of spending time in the kitchen, loving it, and then spending more time in there until I'm in too much pain to cook for several days... Trying to learn about this whole "moderation" concept I've been hearing so much about... I should be back in the kitchen this week doing some fun stuff, though, so stay tuned...