Fourteen eggs, and thirteen tablespoons of butter, not to mention the 1 cup of heavy cream, the chocolate and the sugar. According to my calculations over 6,000 calories for the meal. More than one thousand per person, at 6 servings per dish - about as much as the Bride should eat in one day.
But no sacrifice is too great in the name of Sisterhood! The Bride took liberties, but did not cut the amount of fat/eggs etc in the recipes.
Recipe #1: The strange egg dish. The COG and the Son of pronounced it delicious, but possibly too rich and the texture was too soft. The Son said he would eat it again. Next time, we'd add more onions, serve it on toast or with crusty bread and a green salad. The Bride experienced some difficulties in preparation. The 10 minutes called for did not fully hard cook the eggs, but the Bride averted disaster, though she does not wish to discuss how.
Recipe #2: Couldn't get the right kind of veal and used veal chops. They were perhaps overcooked in this method and were a little tough. All of us agreed that they were nicely flavored, but there was a huge amount of sauce left over and I don't think it thickened enough.
Recipe #3 The Mousse. Liberties were taken. Instead of Hazelnuts we used Hickory nuts gathered this autumn along the road while walking the dog. It was a pleasure to use local nuts and they tasted fabulous! However, extracting the tiny nut meat from the shell was tedious to say the least. It took an hour or more (over 3 days) to get enough tiny pieces. The good news was that there was no need to crush them, since the pieces were so tiny. (Think - Hickory Nut is to Hazelnut as Crawfish is to Lobster).The Bride also used brandy instead of scotch. That was because we had no whiskey in the house and, because it was snowing, we couldn't get any.
And the Bride used chocolate chips instead of chocolate cut into small pieces. They were the nicest chocolate chips, however.
And, worst liberty of all, the Bride stirred the chocolate, risking having her chocolate 'seize'.
The verdict, intensely chocolatey, but waaaaay too rich to eat very much of. The sugar didn't seem to dissolve enough - possibly due to the Bride's impatience. The COG pronounced it 'Nice'. The Son of didn't eat any. He's a bit squeamish about raw eggs. The COG and I are old, so we take more risks with our lives.
OTOH the pastry bag is really fun and The Bride is looking for ways to use it again.
Wine: We had a Russolo Mussignaz, an Italian white that we'd never heard of before, but which was recommended for the meal by our favorite wine store. It was nice, but not a patch on what Chez Peaceable had.
2 comments:
Where did you find the pastry bag, btw?
Are you saying that the hot chocoate doesn't cook the egg yolks????
Our chocolate-melting experience was amusing. We also used chips (we weren't supposed to???) and I was going to transfer the bowl to a microwavable something because I didn't think it was melting over the stove. But it turned out that everything was soft, it just had held its form. I have so rarely melted chocolate that I had no idea.
I thought this really was a basic technique meal. The eggs, the meat stew, could both be improved with more ingredients, and I bet we will get there by lesson 30!
1000 calories per diner. Wow. Not Core. I'm having a penitential day.
The pastry bag was $12 from Williams Sonoma, with 6 tips.
The hot chocolate may have cooked the yolks, but the whites were not cooked.
In points, using WW recipe builder, 6 for the eggs, 7 for the veal (I figured the veal chop separately at 4.5 and 1/12 of the sauce at 2.5) and 13 points for 1/12 of the mousse.
Damn. There is a lot of mousse left and I would have loved to have had some.
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