Dinner #16: French Fall
Menu
October 19, 2019
Appetizers
Charcuterie Board with Fresh French Bread
Course One
French Onion Soup
Course Two
Salad Lyonnaise
Course Three
Ratatouille Tart
Course Four
Beef Bourguignon
Course Five
Strawberry Mille Feuille
Beverages
The French 75
Pinot Noir
Chardonnay
Port
A lot of life things happened between Dinner #15 and Dinner #16. Let's start with John graduating from his graduate program on a very sunny June afternoon in LA, then less than three weeks later, we got married! Yes, about a year and a half after we got engaged, a little over a year after our wedding party got together for their personal AJRB, we thai-ed the knot - first in a Thai Ceremony, then in an American ceremony the next day. The next day, we were on a plane to our one of our two honeymoon destinations (France) where we would spend a little over half of our two week vacation, then went to Iceland! When we came back, we moved apartments, and John started his new post-MBA job.
Phew!
And then we were back at it - thinking about when to host an AJRB....and how to incorporate some of the amazing flavors and things we had tried on our honeymoon so we decided to go for a French theme! So as usual, we picked our date, sent out invites pretty early (about a month and a half in advance) and began the usual process of building our menu. Except one big thing changed between us planning and when everyone arrived.
We got a dog!!
The newest addition to our family, Sirius Olson. He now goes by many many many (made up) nicknames but he actually came with the perfect name from the dog rescue that we got him from. He is a perfect, sweet little rascal and I could spend the entire blog post talking about him but I won't because I don't think that's the point. Anyway, he definitely added a new dynamic to things - How is he going to react to everyone? Should we bring him to doggy day care that day to tire him out or the day before? What if he tries to eat something?
But I needn't have worry - he was pretty good considering all of our guests were strangers to him. He didn't even go for the appetizers - which was a charcuterie board with fresh french bread - even though it was very much at Sirius-level height.
Course One was (what else?) French Onion Soup - John even used Julia Child's recipe! When I first met John, he didn't even like French Onion Soup - but on our honeymoon, he tried it and loved it. We also did a Salad Lyonnaise, which had poached eggs for each guest (with the help of the Instant Pot was much easier than would have been otherwise).
And then came Course Three. Something always has to happen around Course Three. We had this idea of doing a Ratatouille Tart - which I was super excited for. We found this recipe and it called for laying in all the vegetables in a very particular pattern after cutting them all very finely (which was done with a mandolin). This painstaking process took way longer than we thought it was going to, like four hours worth of long, but that was okay because it looked awesome. As guests arrived, we put it the two tarts in the oven to bake. When it came time to take them out, John was closer and he did the honors. Now is probably the time I should mention, we only have one pie tin, so we also used a tart tin. Tart tins are different because you can pop the bottom of them...which is exactly what happened when John went to take my tart out of the oven. Raw pastry hit the floor (raw because all the water from the vegetables, as they cooked, had just seeped out and refused to have the dough cook) and the vegetables blobbed everywhere. It was pretty much gut-wrenching.
However, at least we have the pie tin, I thought. We can show the guests before we take the veggies out and serve them wait- that's when I saw John scoop out all the vegetables from the pie tin and dump them all on a cutting board to serve. I must have looked rather horrified because he asked me what was wrong. All that work - the pretty presentation! But ultimately, the food got served and at least we still have the picture of the pre-baked tart.
Thank goodness we finished on two showstoppers - Course Four was Julia Child/John's Beef Bourguignon that was so good that we forgot to get a picture. We were shocked we didn't have leftovers - it was 6-7 pounds of beef, 4 pounds of onions, 2 bottles of wine, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things. Course Five was my showstopper - Strawberry Mille Feuille, which is a multi-tiered puff pastry extravaganza, which sandwich layers of fresh strawberry and pastry cream.
Both of our French showstoppers were utter high notes, and we ended the meal pretty thrilled, and Sirius was kinda bummed that no one had spilled anything on the ground.