Green salad
This was easy. I got three kinds of lettuce-like salad greens, chopped them coarsely, added finely chopped green onion, chives and parsley, salted and dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
Main course: slow-roasted pork, with a caramel coating
Get two smallish rolls of pork with no fat chunks. Luckily, they sell them rolled and tied. Stab the meat and plant thin slices of garlic in the holes, total about one clove of garlic for each roll. Then mix:
- a pinch of chili powder
- 1 teaspoon paprika
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
Then mix:
- 3-4 tablespoons of brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 1 tablespoon mustard
When serving, take out of the oven, move the meat to a dish and slice. Then move the oven pan over a stove on low heat. There should be bits of burnt seasoning, bits of caramel, oil and fat and maybe a bit of meat juice left. Sprinkle a teaspoon of flour in that, and stir it in. Then, deglaze by adding some beef stock, and stir until all the burnt bits are dissolved, and you have a nice thick gravy. I poured the gravy over the meat, and served.
It helped to have two oven pans with the two rolls of meat, because the second one was in the oven while we were eating the first, and I took it out just when the last slice of the first roll was gone. Deglazing to make the gravy takes 2-3 minutes, so it's easily done "online" at the latest possible moment.
Side dish: Mashed potatoes
Mashed potatoes is a very standard dish to serve with roast and gravy, and easy to make. Usually you boil and peel the potatoes, mash them, add salt, milk and butter, and serve. Well, I had a small constraint, I couldn't use milk in the food. So, I substituted that with vegetable broth. I make vegetable and beef stock and store it in the freezer, it's easy and much better than the "cube" things, or the broth sold in paper boxes. I'd made this broth from leeks, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, parsley, fennel, and probably other stuff that I forget now. So I used the broth to make the mashed potatoes instead of milk, and a bit of olive oil. I should have used less broth than I would milk, the mashed potatoes tasted more "light" and less filling than normal but also a bit more aromatic. I think it was good enough for a side dish.
Side dish: mushroom risotto
This one is easy too, except it takes a bit of stirring. In a sauce pan over low heat add a tablespoon of olive oil and a finely chopped shallot. After 2-3 minutes add a tablespoon of butter, and chopped mushrooms. If you have many kinds of mushroom add them in the right order so that they are all cooked to the same consistency at the end. The softer ones are easier to cook, add them last. Then, add two cups of risotto rice, and stir for a minute to coat it with the fat. Have some hot beef stock ready, and with a ladle add a cup of broth, salt and stir. Stir often, and add more cups of hot stock when the previous cup is absorbed. You have to stir often, so that the rice on top (that is not covered by the liquid) is also cooked. Keep doing that adding one cup at a time for about 25 minutes. It took 4 cups of beef stock, if I remember correctly, maybe 5. After it's done, turn off the heat and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and chives.
Dessert: chocolate and strawberry cake
I might have gone a bit far with how chocolaty this one was. Isn't that great?
For the cake:
- 2 eggs
- 100g butter
- 1 2/3 cup flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 2/3 cup cocoa powder
- vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (or 1 teaspoon baking soda)
- pinch of salt
While it cools down, make the strawberry filling.
- 1 packet of strawberries
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 cup white dessert wine: Vinsanto would be nice here, but I didn't have any, so I used one I found on the local grocery store.
Then put a frying pan on low heat, and melt the butter. Add the strawberries with any liquid that they've sweated, and the wine. Simmer until it thickens a bit. Let it cool.
Then, make a ganache. Warm up some heavy cream, and pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until smooth and shiny. Set aside to cool. I didn't measure the quantities, it was a big bar of chocolate (minus the bits I ate), and about a cup of cream.
When everything has cooled down, cut the cake into layers. I cut it in three layers. You can use a long serrated knife and try to make the layers have the same width everywhere. Or, you can use a knife to draw a shallow "guide" around the cake, wrap it with a piece of thread that goes in the guide, and pull the thread to cut it evenly. I wanted it to be moist, so I made a quick syrup by mixing another cup of the sweet wine with a bit from the liquid in the strawberries, and I spooned it in the three layers. Using liqueur instead of the wine would have been better, maybe dark rum, or Grand Marnier, or kirsch, or a mix of brandy and fruit syrup, or something like that. Well, I didn't have any, I only had the sweet wine.
Assemble the cake carefully, starting with the layer that was on top of the cake as it was baked, so that you'll end up with the nicely round-shaped bottom part on top. Spread half the cooked strawberries on it, and then pour some of the ganache on them, not much, you want to be left with half the ganache at the end. Add the second layer and repeat. Add the third layer so that the round bottom-part of the cake is on top. Unfortunately, I managed to break my top layer in two, when transferring it, but managed to hide it at the end. After it's assembled, spoon some of the ganache left on top, and carefully spread it so that you barely push it to drip on the sides. Add more ganache on top and keep doing that, until the ganache has dripped all around the cake. Smooth carefully around the sides if necessary to cover all of it. Try to avoid pouring all the ganache at once, and then pushing lots of it over the same side, because you'll end up with a partly iced cake, in a pool of ganache, not good. Then wipe the plate all around the cake with a napkin to make it look better, and put it in the fridge for the ganache to set.
After a couple of hours, it's ready to decorate. I melted some white chocolate and poured it on the cake with a spoon to make random shapes, then chopped two strawberries and sprinkled it. Here's how it looked.
This is the inside view, it was quite moist, very chocolaty, and the sourness of the strawberries broke the heaviness of too-much-chocolate, balancing it out.
I was left with a cup of sweet wine, not enough to serve to my guests, and I don't like sweet drinks too much, so I decided to make a zabaglione sauce with it. Usually people make that with champagne, but sweet wine will do. In a metal bowl put two egg yolks and two tablespoons of sugar. Mix immediately, otherwise the sugar will dehydrate the egg-yolks and "cook" them, and you'll have bits in your sauce. Put the metal bowl over (but not touching) almost-simmering water, and mix. After a minute add the wine, and whisk until it's foamy and thick. You can serve it like that, warm, over fruit. Alternatively, whisk some more to make it like a mousse, and then you can serve it cold too. I added a spoon around every piece of cake.
Here's a piece of cake, served with a couple of spoons of zabaglione sauce around it. The sauce could have been served to look better, but I didn't care for appearance much at that point.
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