i just noticed that the only two months of the year i missed posting were the last two. which just happen to be the best months for cooking!! i hope it was more of a result from holiday bustle and less of a result from laziness.
so, with that said, i have something to post. last year marcela and i hosted new years eve with her family and i cooked a 5 course dinner. it turned out wonderful and i hope to post the results at sometime, but for this post, i'll focus on this years family 5-courser! after going to church on sunday, marcela, christina, lucita, heidi, and i went out for lunch. while eating we decided to repeat the idea of a 5-course dinner for new years, except we only did 4 courses. this year though, we'd split up the courses allowing everyone to cook. in true top chef fashion, we decided we needed a theme to tie all the courses together. thanks to heidi, we chose root vegetables. i haven't cooked a lot with root vegetables so i had to do some research in order to get creative. we decided to have mami do the appetizer, lorena and ricardo do the salad, yours truly to handle the entree, and heidi to do dessert. i thought the dinner was amazing. i will only write about what i cooked though...
mami wanted to do tempura carrots and heidi had the limited chore of dessert (ginger being the obvious choice). i didn't want to pick something that would make more sense for a salad so i chose some of the less popular root vegetables. my entree, a pork tenderloin with apple-horseradish dressing, roasted beets with an orange-ginger glaze and i topped the plate with parsnips chips. i have to admit, i had to resort to david for my side dish idea. i realized pork and apple-horseradish are mainly white dishes, parsnips are white, and mami's dinner plates are white! where's the color!?! my dad really likes to cook beets with sweet potatoes, which would have been an excellent choice, but i wanted to do something a little less sweet and something i've never had before. dave's roasted beets with orange-ginger glaze was the perfect solution.
i was able to prep a lot at home and only had to roast the beets and pork tenderloin at mami's house. the apple-horseradish dressing was made by boiling granny smith apples in water and lemon juice, then adding sugar, ground cinammon, and some cinammon candies. this dressing is then cooled to room temperature and you can add the prepared horseradish right before serving. i marinated the pork tenderloin with olive oil and fresh rosemary. the beets were roasted for an hour and the orange-ginger glaze was just an orange juice, honey, grated ginger, cardamom pods, and chicken stock reduction. my parents gave us a deep fat fryer that i filled with canola oil and then fryed parsnip shavings in and then added salt as they cooled to room temperature. unfortunately, not everyone showed up on time and my dinner was a bit cold, but i really look forward to making this again. i thought it had such great flavor and i really did like the presentation of this meal...although i think almost everything looks good on white plates!!
despite a horrid sports year, 2007 brought a lot of happiness to me. i can only hope that 2008 brings more of the same, to me, my family, and my friends.
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I saw an iceberg once. They were hauling it down to Texas for drinking water. They didn't count on there being an elephant frozen inside. The wooly kind. A mammoth.
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