At a service auction my Relief Society had a couple weeks ago, I offered to provide a French meal. It was actually a pretty hot item, which cranked up the pressure. It had to be good! lol.
I was surprised the first course turned out as well as it did. In France, they always start with the vegetable/salad course. Or at least my host family did. So I made a simple green bean dish with butter, savory and oregano. I usually don't like frozen green beans, but then I discovered you could get the French style green beans in the frozen variety! I've only seen them in cans.... These beans had a much, much better texture than the "squeaky beans" my mom made us eat. And get this: Jeff actually liked them! And Jeff hates green beans! For figuring out that dish an hour before dinner was served, I think it was a success. We even hit a road bump because our stupid microwave doesn't work (it hardly melts chocolate!) and we had to dump the beans in a pan after our guests arrived.
After beans, I made salmon tartelettes on a bed of lettuce. I marinated salmon in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, honey, lemon zest and salt and pepper. I kind of made it up as I went.... It actually turned out, though! This was a re-creation of a dish I had in France. The tartelette shells were phylo cups. I bought pre-made cups, but Jeff and I agreed that it tastes better when you just buy sheets of the dough and make the cups yourself. I feel like they need a sauce to make them a little less dry, but they were still good. On the lettuce, I put the only dressing one could find in France- balsamic vinegar and olive oil. I hated it while I was in France (I just wanted a good Caesar or Ranch) but I realized I actually like that kind of dressing. It's really fresh and flavorful. And it contrasted nicely with the sweetness of the salmon. Jeff was pretty skeptical about the honey marinade, but he loved the whole dish together.
After this course came the main course- Boeuf Bourguignon. It's a really filling beef stew with onions and carrots and pearl onions and bacon and garlic. And a bunch of herbs, of course. It has really simple ingredients, but it's so tasty! And it doesn't taste like a regular beef stew. We each only had one bowl of it, but we were all stuffed by the end. And we still had more courses to get through! I thought my presentation was cool (I garnished with thyme sprigs) but I didn't get a picture of it. As Jeff says, I have a phobia of letting food get cold...
I combined the fruit and the cheese course. A lot of times, the fruit course is last and is used in place of dessert. The meal had already gone for an hour and a half by this point, so I just combined them (which was a little difficult on our tiny table). For cheese, I bought Smoked Gouda and Fontina. Gouda is a harder cheese and Fontina is soft (but not as soft as Brie, which I've explained before that I can't really eat anymore). One of the people we were eating with said she loved the Smoked Gouda. I think it's pretty good, but Jeff prefers the softer, mellower cheeses. For the fruit, another dish that I pulled out of nowhere the day of. I cut up pear slices and made a strawberry vinaigrette as a dipping sauce. I thought it was pretty good. The dressing wasn't perfect, but it still tasted good. It was more like blended strawberries than a vinaigrette (I added to much vinegar...so I had to add more strawberries). I'll have to work on that recipe... The bread was an unbaked loaf from Smith's, which is an okay substitute for real French bread. It doesn't taste exactly the same, but you can cook it to desired crispiness, so it works. :)
Then came the dessert....which Jeff called "Heaven on a plate." I kinda agree with him. It was sooooooo good! I used this recipe from one of my favorite French food blogs: http://www.tarteletteblog.com/2011/03/recipe-macadamia-milk-jam-chocolate.html. The first time I made this, it wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped it would be. The recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate for the ganache for the tart, but I used semi-sweet chocolate and it was still WAY too rich. Way too dark. And the milk jam (whole milk, sugar and baking powder boiled until it's caramelized and the consistency of jam) which is supposed to sweeten it, didn't do much. The crust felt slightly not crispy enough, too. This time, I added a little extra sugar, some vanilla extract, some almond extract and a dash of cinnamon to the mix. It tasted so good! The tart shells, I added some sugar to them and used regular flour and some ground almonds. (The recipe doesn't call for sugar and calls for macademia nuts and millet flour....) I cooked the shells a little differently, which made for a better texture. Then I added more milk jam than last time to each of the tarts. For the ganache I used milk chocolate chips (Ghirardelli, of course!) and filled the tarts up as far as they would go.
I served the tarts with Haagen-Das ice cream (all natural ingredients!) and garnished them with little words I'd piped with melted chocolate, candied mint leaves (brushed with egg white, dipped in sugar, dried in an oven) and chopped almonds. This is the finished result....
The photos aren't very high quality... That's what comes from having a pretty old, crappy camera and few photography skills. We'll have to invite my sister over next time and have her be the food photographer... ;)
Want to know what I got from the service auction? A free photo shoot! Jeff was so upset when he found out I'd actually chosen a photo shoot and I actually wanted it. (Okay, he wasn't actually upset. He had fun. But at first he thought I'd just drawn it or something, not chosen it.) Mindy Podwys from our ward was the girl doing the photography. Here are a couple of my favorites... Enjoy!
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