A la Carte Kitchen Week 8

A la Carte Kitchen Week 8

Menu for this week...
Amuse: Potato Chip
Bread: Naan with Raita
Soup: Coconut-Mint
Salad: Fruit Salad
Pasta: Vegetable Pasta
Entree: Fried Chicken & Waffles
Dessert: Tastes and Textures of Coffee

Amuse: Potato Chip. With black garlic, fennel, pea mousse, and coarse salt. It was nice and crispy.

Bread: Naan with Raita. Rubbed with a blend of mustard, nutmeg, paprika, and cumin, then grilled. Served with tzatziki and hummus.

Soup: Coconut-Mint. Red curry-oat-coconut foam, with sesame, lemongrass, cucumber-coconut broth. They apparently had some issues with the soup, but I'm not sure what happened.

Salad: Fruit Salad. Pineapple carpaccio, tangerine, grilled pear, pickled fennel, with moche lettuce, arugula and shiso. With a side of ramp-asparagus panna cotta, macadamia nuts and cheese. Our salads are always quite complex...

Pasta: Pad Thai Daikon "Noodles". With beet juice/fig vinegar reduction, ramp chip, purple radish, toasted peanuts, tempura seabeans, and sauteed shrimp. Everyone loved the presentation and the flavor of this dish!

Entree: Fried Chicken and Savory Waffles. The chicken has been marinated in buttermilk and hot sauce. The waffle batter has chervil, parsley, garlic and manchego cheese, and fried in bacon fat. Reminded me of okonomiyaki...

And Dessert: My creation, Taste and Textures of Coffee. Sourcream coffee cake, hazelnut panna cotta with chopped hazelnuts, Port wine sauce, mocha sauce, and upgraded affogato. The affogato is the one in the shotglass; biscotti on the bottom, topped with coffee ice cream, drizzled with caramel sauce, sprinkled with Barely Buzzed Cheese crisp, then finally, a chocolate disk. For service, the servers pour a tiny pitcher of hot espresso into the shotglass. The heat melts the chocolate and the ice cream into this awesome combination of hot-cold, coffee-chocolate goodness. The coffe cake has quite a background story. My partner made the cake, but when she put it in the oven, she apparently didn't realize that the oven was off. She was quite surprised when she found the cake to be still soupy-looking after an hour. By then, the streusel topping had sunk to the bottom. When she realized what happened, she mumbled out, "I HATE BAKING..." I calmed her down and told her to just continue with the baking. But the cake turned out great! The topping that had sunk in turned into a crisp, caramelized crust on the bottom. Didn't get much comment on the dessert, but we didn't hear any complaints either.