Creating Menus

People often ask me how I come up with ideas for our 'Dinners.' So in this blog I will share with you, at least in part, my thought processes on creating the following menu:

Egg-rolls Almondine

Wild Mushroom Ravioli
With Carmen Sauce

Haricot soup with Chevre Crème

Smoked Rock Cornish Hen
over Mixed green Salade
with Balsamic Chevre Dressing

Mango-Blackraspberry-Lemon Glace’

Veal Scallops with Shirred eggs
with Traviata Sauce
Spinach and Sweet Red Pepper Souffle

Chocolate Surprise Popovers
With Crème Fraiche

The truth is that most of the time I focus around a specific theme or even just an entree and build from there. In this case I had some nice veal scallops and started from there. No real theme, but a 'sort-of' theme eventually crept in -- Sauces.

Once I had chosen the veal scallops as the centerpiece I just let my imagination go -- I had shirred eggs on the brain, so that seemed like a nice 'topping' for the veal and I decided I would create my own "Traviata" sauce, since my wife and I are going to the opera "La Traviata" in a week. The sauce idea started with a Lemon base (ala Veal Piccata) but I wanted to vary that a bit. For grins I looked up "Traviata Sauce" on the web and came up with a restaurant -- 'La Traviata' in Long Beach -- and they had a sauce with green peppercorns, mustard and brandy. This twisted my head in a slightly different direction so I ended up with -- Lemon, Chardonnay, Green onions, Mustard, and, of course, butter. The spinach souffle came about because I had some nice fresh spinach and some roasted red peppers I had frozen and wanted to use. I also diecided that I would skip the carbs for the main course and though I was, in a sense, doubling up on the eggs, the individual souffle dishes finished off the plate nicely (and handsomely, I might add -- the 'red' of the peppers made a nice change to the traditional spinach souffle look).

The rest of the dinner flowed from there. Usually I get ideas, check local stores for what looks good, and dream up courses. In this case what came next on the menu was the Wild Mushroom Ravioli, which I had wanted to create for awhile, and the sauce for those became a browned butter (ala Roux) saffron menage. The name 'Carmen Sauce' alludes to Spanish Saffron.

The Smoked Rock Cornish Game Hen salad was chosen mostly because one my guests didn't eat seafood, so while I would have traditionally had a fish or seafood course, I decided to smoke several hens and thus three of the courses grew in my head from that thought: the salad, the navy bean soup (stock used boned carcasses of smoked hens), and the egg rolls. The sauces/dressing for these I thought up as I went: Salad dressing for Hen breasts became a balsamic vinagrette with Chevre; bean soup -- a chevre creme (yummy! and a great match BTW); and egg rolls -- pepper jelly-lemon sauce with toasted almonds sprinkled on-top(pepper jelly is something I originally came across in New Orleans served with boudin blanc -- sausages). Note: the egg rolls contained the non-breast meat of the Smoked Hens, veggies (spinach, cucumber, green onions).

The palate-cleanser, also a tradition in many of my dinners, started with some ripe mango I had frozen, and for a change of pace I added homemade blackraspberry puree, lemon, and berry vodka.

I wanted a light dessert and popovers are always a favorite, so I made James Beard's recipe, added cinnamon and sugar, and tossed a square of Giardelli's caramel chocolate in the center of each just before popping into the oven. The creme fraiche I made from scratch and whipped it, sweetened it, and added a touch of pure vanilla.

And to be perfectly honest, all of this grew in my head over the period of about a week. The final touches taking place as I was actually preparing the food.

The rest, as they say, is now history and part of our waistlines.

Best,

Joe Koob