Patient like risotto

I have an unfortunate sense of responsibility to try the risotto, at least once, if I see it on a restaurant menu. I have always been disappointed and the only high-point has been a willingness to maybe order the pork risotto at Club Chasse et Peche again. You know, if everything else on offer that nights sounds like a mistake.

I prefer my risotto creamier than not which means that sometimes it ends up overcooked. It also means that I am not inclined to like risotto made in a restaurant where the tendancy is to both cook a firmer, more Southern style of the dish, and to disabuse doubts with mindless blather about the firmness of the grain. Repeat after me : firm does not mean uncooked.

I don't envy restaurants that choose to serve risotto because put in their position I'd have no idea how to stage and prepare the meal in between everything else. It is nice to pretend that you will find the restaurant in Big Night where the cook stops everything and spends the next 30 minutes making you dinner but it's hard to believe that ever happens. There is a great story in Elizabeth David's Italian Cooking about a street vendor in Venice who made a mushroom risotto on a bed of white wine in batches of six. If you were the seventh person there was nothing to do but wait another half hour for the next serving. I'd like to believe that stall is still there but, it too, has probably long since moved on under the weight of the city's tourist trade.

The white truffle risotto at Bacco had clearly been sitting out for some amount of time when it arrived at our table. You could tell by the uniformity of the shine on the rice, as if the liquid coating the grains had hardened in to a thin shell. My guess is that the risotto had been cooked until it was just so and then set aside to finish cooking in it's own warmth while the sauce for M.'s pasta was sauteed and tossed.

I do not imagine that they serve white truffle risotto very often. It is probably subject to the whim and fancy of whomever the restaurant gets their truffles from and it is priced accordingly. And then some. Which is to say : It's the most expensive plate of rice you're ever going to eat. And delicious. So so delicious. To my taste it was still a spot too firm but for others it might have been the perfect dish. It made labouring through all the other meals worth it.

Meanwhile, I like California just a little less than I did yesterday for requiring restaurants to have separate liquor licenses for wines and spirits thereby denying me a glass of grappa after dinner. I also thought that if we outlasted everyone else in the restaurant they'd bring a bottle out of hiding but the end of the evening brought no love.

Dinnr 2.0 — The best fucked food in the world.

Or : Why do Americans insist on eating salad before the main course?

We held another big Flickr dinnr last Friday; big like 25-odd people which is a terrifying number to cook for. Here, for posterity, is the menu:

• A cheese plate that Heather brought and which I never managed to try in the rush to finish prepping.

  As much as I find eating cheese so early objectionable, it's probably a good thing while you're waiting for a gazillion people to arrive.

• 180 Kumamoto oysters, ably and patiently shucked by Paul and Eric.

  The plan had been to drive up to Point Reyes with Eric in the morning and come back with a trunk full of oysters and crabs. This didn't happen for a variety of reasons so I called up the local oyster shop and went out on a limb with : “Look, I know I like oysters but I don't know enough to rattle them off by name. Tell me what's good and not too big.”

  These were small and creamy and, basically, perfect.

• Grilled swordfish, tossed in a salad of mixed greens and beans, prepared by George.

• Another salad that flew by in the chaos of the first sitting. If we ever do this again, I am hiding the salad before anyone walks in the door. Eating salad before the main course is just wrong.

  We signed up for a weekly CSA basket from one of the nearby farms and recently we've been getting gorgeous and perfectly mature arugula. I had been planning on serving a simple arugula and tomato salad after the stew but the farm doesn't take special orders and the only thing you ever find in the city are over-priced bags of under-ripened leaves that look as though they were picked straight out of the cell-pods they were planted in.

• Zucchini carpaccio, with lemon and roasted pine nuts.

• Beets not-quite carpaccio.

  Carmalized beets roasted in red wine, honey and tarragon are one of those thing that I make a lot, especially for large crowds. I made these the night before and chilled them in the fridge with a mind to slice them just before serving. Which is what we did but by then they'd lost enough firmness to make cutting wah-fer thin pieces that held their shape too difficult. Perhaps a tool is called for the next time.

• Ricotta and onion torte. Three pounds of onions, one 10-inch springform pan. You do the math.

• Boeuf Bourgignon — or, as they like to say in America, Beef Boorgeeghghghghunn — served on a bed of fresh pasta.

  Some observations : The stew is better with pancetta than bacon and better still with both; A 13-quart casserole can fit nine pounds of beef, a bottle of wine, who knows how much stock and all the other trimmings without breaking a sweat (props go to Chad Dickerson for getting the beast as a wedding gift for John and Elizabeth but damn if I don't wish I'd expensed one for myself!); The problem with fresh pasta for 25 people is not in making it but figuring out how to store it; Home-made stock is probably the best argument for tele-commuting ever.

• A brief pause.

• Chocolate mousse, measured out in spoonfuls and served in small cups.

  For full effect these should have been served in the tall, heavy-bottomed glasses used to drink digestivos, in Italy. The mousse was a last-minute idea, aimed to give me a little breathing room before the profiterolles, so there wasn't enough time to find the glasses or the tiny spoons you'd need to eat out of them.

• Profiterolles au chocolat.

  Okay, so I like Rainbow Grocery as much as the next person (that's actually not true but it's a perferctly fine store, modulo the passive-aggressive granola juices) but their flour just outright sucks.

  There is always something about making profiterolles that upsets me but these just didn't rise properly and, as much as anything they were for Eric, who was forced to missed them the first time around.

  As usual no one else seemed to notice and I'm sticking to my story about the flour.