Showing posts with label goat cheese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label goat cheese. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

The Dessertation, and on giving thanks





This past spring, I received my Ph.D. Here's the victory photo with one of my dissertation advisors, from graduation in June: (and you'd better appreciate this, because I hate being in photographs!)


It's taken me a long time to write about my PhD celebrations because, quite frankly, the experience of grad school and (more crucially) the ensuing academic job market is a bit traumatic -- even if everything turns out okay in the end, and you find yourself with one of those elusive and coveted tenure-track faculty positions in an amazing R1 department and location. Anyways.

One does not achieve a PhD and job-hood alone. It took at least two freakin' villages, if not more, to rear me into the academic that I turned out to be. So, as an expression of gratitude to those who helped me through the process, I threw what I am not-so-humbly going to call a grand party. To be exact: a ten course, tasting menu-style dinner, entirely of desserts, inspired by the past seven years. A dinner worthy of being the capstone to an entire chapter of life. In short: epicness.

(Most photographs in this post are courtesy of Toni Bird Photography. With exception of the phone photos.)

(Above: place cards were a print out of an article by each guest, which alarmed me as to how erudite the crowd was!)

My friend Rob kindly let me host the dinner--aka: "the Dessertation" (because we linguists love our puns)--at his beautiful home in San Francisco. I don't think he knew what he was signing himself and his kitchen up for! Because to do a French Laundry-type dinner at home requires... well, let's just say that his kitchen (and dishwasher) got quite the workout.

I continually planned and revised the menu for months and months beforehand, and did serious detailed prep for about a week leading up to the event: menu planning, dishware and cutlery sourcing (12 times 10 courses worth of dishware!--thank goodness for my prop closet), ingredient buying, menu print design, food prep. Then we basically hunkered down and cooked for 48 hours straight. On the day of, Rob's talented friend took us, bleary-eyed at 5am, to the San Francisco Flower Market, and then preceded to put together the most breathtaking flower arrangements for the event, based on my favorite flowers (tuberose, peonies) and my requested colors (dark blue for Berkeley, white for Stanford, dark green for myself). The guy is a serious flower whisperer.


Each course in the menu was designed as part of a narrative of my grad school time, and each was carefully balanced such that there would be no sugar or carb overload. Not an easy feat, I tell you! (I also prepped some savory finger food and soups on the side for people to snack on.) I was so busy plating and hosting that I didn't take a single photograph of the food at all! So I hope you don't mind that what I'm sharing here today are some of my friend Toni's photos, and then my planning sketches--how I diagrammed every component of every dish while designing the menu.

Without further ado, may I present, the Dessertation: in defense of desserts for dinner.

First course - Aperitif/Amuse Bouche
For the amuse, I wanted to start on a really optimistic note, a snapshot of the sort of euphoria one experiences at the moment of graduation and achievement. Hendrick's gin is something that I learned to love in grad school, from my various travels to Scotland. And with its fresh, floral undertones, I felt like it was the perfect way to kick off the night. The gin and tonic jello shot was lightly flavored with a dash of rosewater, served on a slice of English cucumber, and topped with a delicately crunchy sugared rose petal that my dad picked from his garden at my childhood home. Also, jello shots were a great vehicle for the aperitif component, because who doesn't want to see a bunch of prominent academics take jello shots?

Below: sugared rose petals drying; plating of the gin & tonic shots, with cucumber slices.



Second course
The second course represented "grad school," generally. It was super dark, with dark chocolate and dabs of espresso reduction. It was bitter, with concentrated fresh grapefruit flavoring the dark chocolate truffle. It was tart, with a dab of plain yoghurt at the bottom. But despite all of that, it was surprisingly good for you, with a candied purple carrot curl on top.

Below: purple carrot; the final dish. Also, little known fact: candying a purple carrot slice makes it sort of look like bacon. Now you know!



Third course - Appetizer
In my book, everyone is allowed at least one vice during their dissertation days. For some, that's coffee, or binge-watching Netflix, or extreme (lack of) exercise. For me, I took up a soda habit, which I hadn't done since before college. But given that I didn't drink coffee much, Coca-cola became my go-to, desperate-for-fast-caffeine-and-sugar fix. So, the third course is inspired by all things Coke: cherries and vanilla. This was a fun dessert to design architecturally, since it featured a block of dark cherry ice cream frozen within a shell of Coke. Then, it was topped with some vanilla-almond milk "air", which froze upon contact with the frozen Coke shell to become sort of a stable foam that you'd find on a glass of ice cold soda. Yay, molecular gastronomy!



Fourth course - Entrée
 
A stress-relief outlet throughout grad school was playing in classical music trios. In my current trio group made up of linguists, we've been playing a lot of Hungarian, folksy-inspired music, including Dvořák's Dumky Trio. This recurring theme made me think of the Austrian dessert dumplings germknödel that I had once with Emma when I visited her in Oxford during grad school. These are soft, fluffy, steamed dumplings that are served in a poppyseed-butter sauce, with apricot jam. In my version, the germknödel dumplings were miniaturized, and served with a lavender-poached, in-season Blenheim apricot with a poppyseed and vanilla bean crème anglaise. (Also, sorry about the horrible pun.)

Fifth course - Palate cleanser
For a palate cleanser, I wanted to incorporate an element of savory, so I turned to a beetroot-cranberry sorbet. The rest of the dessert is inspired by summertime and the time I spent in Hawai'i, which of course is sort of like a palate cleanser reprieve for each school year: guava, toasted coconut, and tranluscent candied lime.


Sixth course - Main
The main course comes from my pièce de résistance dessert--that is, the best dessert that I have ever made during my grad school years, called the "Random Forest Cake." The Random Forest Cake came to being during my third year of grad school, when we were in the midst of hosting a workshop on quantitative linguistics at Stanford. One of the honored guest speakers was from the Black Forest in Germany, and so there was a plan to make a black forest cake for the conference dinner dessert. At the same time, however, I was in the middle of writing (i.e., scrambling to write) my own talk for the workshop, and our analysis that I was supposed to present had just been, at the last minute, totally ripped to shreds in the practice rounds. To save our work, our lab director suggested I investigate a recently introduced method of data mining called "Random Forests," which I proceeded to teach myself and learn faster than I had ever learned anything in my life before. (It paid off, and the paper (together with my coauthor) went on to win a national presentation award.) Anyways, suffice it to say that the night before the conference rolled around, I was in no state to make a black forest cake, so I opened my pantry and refrigerator and grabbed the first ingredients that I saw. And so, the "Random" Forest Cake was born, made of dense dark chocolate flourless cake, atop a tart sauce of passionfruit, topped with barely whipped crème fraîche cream (because I was too exhausted to whip it good :)), and a sprinkling of smoked sea salt. Perhaps it was exhaustion or perhaps it was a triumph, but the cake was so good that everyone at the conference dinner ate it in complete and total silence--something that never happens at academic conferences!

So, for my Dessertation dinner, the Random Forest Cake of course had to make an encore apperance as the main course. I kicked it up here one more notch by adding a dash of popping crystals in with the smoked sea salt--gotta keep it random and continuously surprising!


Seventh course - "Salad & Cheese"

This seventh course, titled "Thanksgiving," turned out to be my favorite course of the night. On paper, the dish sounds totally insane--salad and dessert?!--but let me tell you, I swear on my PhD that this "salad" is utterly sublime. In a single bite, there is creamy and crunchy and toasted and sweet and savory and fresh. The "salad" was inspired by my grad school tradition of cooking Thanksgiving dinners in Los Angeles, which started out simple but year after year became more and more elaborate. One thing that my best friend always requested for Thanksgivings was goat cheese mixed with garlic and chives, and each year, I would think up a new way to serve it. We moved from simple bread and crackers to--in the final Thanksgiving--a spoonful of garlic-chive goat cheese in a small boat of Belgian endive, topped with Buddha's hand-yuzu marmalade. In this dessert-inspired version for the dessertation, I took out the garlic/chives and added a trio of hazelnut tones: a brush of hazelnut oil, a crunch of toasted hazelnuts, and an airy creaminess of Nutella "dust". I've made this "salad" again and again since as an appetizer course for dinner parties, and it's always a hit! The recipe is included for you below.... for Thanksgiving? :)


Eighth course - Dessert
One faculty member once told me that I am one of the incredibly rare few who have done all their schooling (college, grad school) and then gotten a faculty position, all within a sixty-mile radius. I am so lucky to be in such a situation, and so thankful, too, since I feel like a good lot of my identity is ingrained with a deep love for California. For the dessert course, I wanted to make an homage to California, so I knew it had to be a blue and gold cake: homemade tayberry and olallieberry jam filling with a lemon-thyme cake base. On top, I painted the cake in the style of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, which are sort of these amazing colour distillations of the essence of California scapes. I'm also quite fond of the Ocean Park series because one of my advisors had a print of #54 in her office, which I spent lots of time staring at while trying to avoid awkward grad student eye contact when I felt like I wasn't measuring up!



Ninth course - Mignardises
I liked the idea of bringing the evening to a slow close with a very simple, straightforward dessert, because sometimes in the complexity and stressfulness of life, simplicity is comfort. For the mignardises, I made whole wheat chocolate chip cookies that were studded with toasted wheat germ, and milk and dark Tcho chocolates. It's a chocolate chip cookie recipe I've been working on perfecting for the last three years of grad school, slowly upping and lowering flour and sugar contents, changing butter ratios, tweaking chocolate ratios, swapping out different types of flour. The cookies were served with a small shot of really good fresh whole milk. Because even big whig academics need comfort food sometimes.



Tenth course - Nuts & Fruit
For the final course of the evening, I wanted to leave off with a dessert inspired by lessons I had learned in grad school. Before grad school, I had never made pecan pie before, so finally our grad advisor took it upon herself to teach me how to make this staple pie of American celebrations. We also had a lot of discussions over the years of how I didn't like plums, and each plum season, she would bring to me a new variety of plum from the farmers' market until I learned to appreciate the fruits' unique blend of sweet, clear flesh and tart seed and skin. This dessert was a sort of nod to all of my teachers over the years, as a way of demonstrating that I'd taken their lessons, however small, to heart.


Acknowledgements are always my favorite part of dissertations to read, but it was even better that I was able to bring mine to edible life through a meal for those I wanted to thank!


Read on for recipe....

Monday, August 20, 2012

Kitchen Prep and a Simple Summer Menu



It's not often that the actual counters of my kitchen make a public appearance. The light in my kitchen is particularly horrid, either with direct sunlight bursting full blast through a small window or no light at all (and I don't have a budget that can afford flash strobes for an artificial light set-up), and the counters of my kitchen are usually covered with a layer of caked-on chocolate or dirty dishes waiting to be wiped up in the chaos that pervades my life. But, thanks to some extreme coincidence and some miraculous cleaning from family and friends after July's wedding cake adventure, there happened to be a day when I was prepping for a small dinner party that (1) my counters were (relatively) clean and (mostly) chocolate-free, and (2) clouds drifted in front of the sun outside, letting diffuse light brighten up a corner of the kitchen without its usual uncontrollable intensity. So for once, that day, I got to cook with my camera beside me and capture the process rather than the end result, which is quite refreshing since usually, it's the opposite for me.




For this dinner, I didn't have any elaborate plans: it was a casual hangout on a Saturday night for a couple of friends who live a bit further away and who aren't in the area very often. (Then, a few more friends joined at the last minute--but the more, the merrier! :)) Basically, the menu was formed from whatever I managed to find inspiring at the market that morning:

a Summer Saturday Dinner

crostini
kalamata olive tapenade or tomato conserve
with toasted sweet baguette


nasturtium and granny's bonnet salad
with shaved radishes, mixed greens, and whole grain mustard and honey balsamic vinaigrette

red and gold beets
marinated in apricot-orange jam vinaigrette
with goat cheese and honey


blackened padrón peppers
with lemon zest and smoked Maldon salt

seafood paella
with mussels, shrimp, and spicy chicken sausage

Greek yogurt
with orange blossom strawberries, brown sugar shortbread crumble, and Tcho chocolate

drinks
Pine Ridge rosé
lemon and fresh mint fizz


I've been somewhat obsessed with beets lately, and the marinated beets and goat cheese that I made that night was a dish inspired by a recent visit to State Bird Provisions--an amazing up-and-coming restaurant in SF that serves small plates as you chat with the chefs working in the tiny kitchen. The tender beets are marinated in a sweet and tangy combination of apricot-orange jam (leftover from making this dessert) and a dash of vinegar and served with creamy goat cheese topped with dabs of mild honey.... so simple and divine. The olive tapenade that I made for the crostini appetizers was from David Tanis's book, with a quick squeeze of lemon juice thrown in for a wee bit more acidity than his original recipe calls for (but that I think makes the recipe even better!). The tapenade matures for a few hours in the fridge and is even better the second day, satisfyingly salty when I slathered it on top of leftover paella for lunch.

For greens, we had a colorful floral salad, all spicy with crunches of shaved radishes and whole grain mustard vinaigrette, and the spice theme continued through the blackened padrón peppers (lightly salted with some lemon smoked Maldon) and the spicy and saffron-y seafood paella, boasting a kick of smoky pimentón and tomato. For drinks, I broke into a Pine Ridge rosé that's been sitting in the back of my cupboard for a while since I thought that the dry pink would go well with the spice and seafood, but the real hit of the night as far as drinks went was the homemade lemon and fresh mint fizz. Inspired by my mint plants (which I've miraculously kept alive for over a year now), I mashed together mint leaves and lemon zest, threw them in sugar and water with whole lemons for a simple syrup, and added sparkling water to the syrup as needed for some awesome, brightly-flavored, home-grown soda.

Dessert was a completely unfussy affair, more of a plateful of the necessary tastes and textures to make up a subtle sweet ending to a simple summertime meal than a big bang at the end: fresh strawberries from the market lightly flavored with sugar and orange blossom, some buttery sweet and toothy crumble (made with hard red winter wheat for some oomph), thick and creamy and tart Greek yogurt, and a square of dark Tcho chocolate to round it off. Sometimes, easy is best. :)









Monday, January 30, 2012

Beet Tart with Blue Goat Cheese and Frisee, and a visit to Portlandia



Portland, you are awesome--and a food-lover's dream. I spent five days in your misty city-straddling-the-river at the beginning of January, and not once in those days did I eat a single un-delicious bite. Every mouthful was beautiful and fresh and thoughtful, and made me wish that we could have our national linguistics conference in your city every year (no offense to Pittsburgh or Baltimore, where the last two conferences were held in previous years). Of course, I have to include the customary mention of the mammoth Powell's Bookstore, but by the time I made it there at the end of the conference, the impressively-large linguistics section had already been pretty picked over, and there are only so many hours (and, more restrictively, dollars!) one can spend in the cooking section, so instead, we ate our way through the city once all of our official business was through. (Also, thank you all for your suggestions via Twitter and blog comments and email on where to visit and eat in Portland! :D)

[pictured top to bottom: Thai Peacock's tofu tom yum soup, Stumptown coffee, Salt&Straw's ice cream tasting]

My favorite, favorite, favorite thing we had in Portland was the tofu and vegetable tom yum soup at Thai Peacock, a few blocks away from Powell's. Seriously, you guys, this version of the soup was the best I've ever tasted: rich, spicy, delightfully sour, a bit sweet from the stewed tomatoes and vegetables, and all around, incredibly soul-warming. It was so good that I went twice in two days, and seriously considered trying to take a thermos of it home with me (darn TSA security restrictions!). Other stand-out favorites that we tried were the fabulous Salt & Straw ice cream (recommended by many of you, so thank you!), with their inventive and perfectly creamy flavors (particularly, the sea salt ice cream with caramel--yes, the ice cream base is sea salt flavored!--and the lemon-basil sorbet); freshly-made and fantastic Japanese curry from Kalé (not heavy like you normally think of Japanese curry, but light and oh-so-spicy and flavorful!); and the adorable Little Bird Bistro, on the recommendation of Language of Food writer, where we ordered a plethora of small French plates to share, including butternut squash+parsnip+apple soup and beet tart. We even managed to spend one night at the cozy Living Room Theater, watching Melancholia, and feeling oh-so-hipster amongst the cool, twenty-something crowd that populated the place.

Here's a list of where we ate--all wonderful.
Kalé - so good I'd like to beg the owner to open a branch in the Bay Area.
Little Bird - the bread served here comes with local butter, salted with crunchy Maldon salt. 'Nuff said!
Rogue Brewery - they have homemade root beer! (which I'll take over beer any day. :))
Salt & Straw - dare I say it's better than some of the gourmet ice cream places I've had in the Bay!
St. Honore Boulangerie - the Normandy apple tart. Try it.
Stumptown Coffee - though I maintain allegiance to Philz here in SF
Thai Peacock - the tom yum soup: you won't regret it.
Voodoo Donuts - to my surprise, I particularly liked the Butterfingers doughnut/donut
Wildwood - wonderful, wonderful food. The garlicky butter of the mussels is perfect with the crusty toast it comes with, the caesar salad is inventive and novel, and the lobster risotto was exactly what a risotto should be.


One of the marks of a fantastic food experience is that it should inspire you, and my visit to Portland most definitely did. Over the following few days, my friends and I recreated at home some of our favorite dishes that we had had in Oregon: butternut squash, parnsip, and apple soup; crunchy, Maldon salt-flecked butter; and this beet tart with blue cheese and goat cheese and frisee salad.

Before having a version of this tart at Little Bird Bistro, I seriously never thought I would like a beet tart. Beets have just never been a vegetable I voluntarily run to, even though I've had very good beets before in my life (also very bad ones, like the canned beets my parents would insist on putting in our salads when I was growing up, which probably contributed to my aversion). But, for whatever reason, the beet tart looked really good on the bistro's menu, and when I had my first bite of it, it was even better than the menu's description. I think what really did it for me with this tart was how the saltiness of the blue and goat cheeses balanced out the sweet juiciness of the al dente roasted beets, with the buttery, flakey crust and the slightly bitter and acidic frisee on top.  It's something I would never dream up on my own, but once I did have it, I had to have more!


One last thing, though not food related: right around my Portland visit, I managed to watch all of Portlandia. I had a few Portlandia moments while I was there (e.g., waiters volunteering detailed information on the origins of the food; little birds everywhere), so watching the show made for was a very hilarious representation of my own experience. I would highly suggest it, in addition to this beet tart. :)


Read on for recipes....