Sunday Night Dinner Menu:
- Spring Mix salad topped with crushed walnuts and dried cranberries tossed with oil, apple cider vinegar, and salt and pepper.
- Coconut Risotto with sautéed onion
- Braised Beef Roast served with sweet potatoes and carrots
- Pillsbury Grands! Biscuits
- Torta al Vino made with red wine and blueberries (based on Lidia Bastianich’s recipe from Lidia’s
Translation:
- Salad with stuff in it
- Fancy Rice
- Pot Roast
- Pillsbury Grands! Biscuits
- Blueberry Cake
We had a very nice dinner Sunday and we had Malcolm and Mary over; it was really nice to get to catch up with them. Life gets busy and it is entirely too easy to let things slip until you are counting the number of times you see your friends in a per year manner instead of a per month manner. We’re drifting that way, and we’re trying to remedy that.
I got a dutch oven for my birthday present this year, and hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. So this weekend I cooked a roast. We were still getting ready when Malcolm and Mary showed up. They were nice enough to pitch in so Mary helped Amon with the cake and Malcolm offered a hand putting the risotto together. He did a great job and the flavor and texture were great. You could notice the individual grains of the risotto, but it definitely had a creamy texture. We used coconut milk as the liquid, which is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and then the sautéed onions, garlic, salt and pepper finished the flavors.
I made a bid to time the ingredients as they went into the dutch oven to make sure they didn't get too mushy. The roast started off in the dutch oven by itself with the vegetables added in the end. I had shocked the carrots to make sure they stayed nice and bright orange.
Unfortunately, the potatoes weren't done at the same time as the roast and carrots. I had timed the carrots right, but should have put the potatoes in earlier. My fault.
I took the carrots out and let the roast rest while the potatoes finished up in the oven. Things could have been salvaged if I had served everything here. My final mistake was when I put the roast and carrots back in with the potatoes to make sure everything was good and warm, and left them in while we ate the salad.
I had taken the roast out initially when it reached 160 degrees internal temperature. After resting, my roast had this beautiful light red center surrounded by a blush/pink fading to a wonderfully caramelized exterior. After going back in the oven to warm up, it had turned into a dull medium well with a uniform brown all the way through. Worst of all, the potatoes were now soft. It was very frustrating. The only thing that ended up just as I wanted them to were the carrots.
This was just one more in a long string of lessons about the importance of not only Mise en Place, but timing your cooking to make sure the right ingredients are added at the right time. Good food tastes delicious, great food has good taste, appearance, and texture. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give last nights dinner a 9 for taste, an 8 for appearance, and a 7 for texture. It’s a work in progress.
It is equally true that we are our own harshest critics in cooking as in other aspects of life. We know what we were going for, even when other's don't. Also, unless you're a professional chef it's likely that the people you are cooking for are more concerned with spending time with you than eating a perfect meal. Even when I felt that the dinner could have been better, it was delicious food and more importantly it was good time spent catching up with great friends.
I mean, how bad can pot roast with roasted vegetables and biscuits be?
