Wednesday 30 January 2008
The conference wound up with a grand bang-up dinner out at Riccarton House (one of the old estates, complete with a couple of acres of "bush" intact.
This was pretty impressive catering for 160 or so people. So two nicely chosen starters: Akaroa salmon with a little sweet fennel and a blue swimmer crab cake with apricots and walnuts (two new fish species, if not genera). The mains were lamb rump with port wine and what they called a "traditional coq au vin." It wasn't, but fine for all that. It, too, seemed to be in a port wine sauce (concentrated and a little sweet0, with Portobello mushrooms and little criminis. Nuts seemed to be a running theme, so the desert was a berry salad with pecans and vanilla cotton candy ("candy floss"): pretty and silly but it detracted from the taste. People kept buying us bottles of wine, so we found a Crawford Farm Pinot Noir. The pinots in these parts tend more to soft fruit. They're simpler than Oregon and lack that California austerity. We like 'em.
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Holt and Barbara -
On the Wednesday you had dinner at the RIccarton House, I had dinner at the CIA - the cooking I, not the spy I. Weather is cold and brisk in upstate NY but inside the Escoffier, it was warm and smelling good! Started with mussels in saffron creamy broth. Truthfully, the mussels could have been younger but then...that comment holds true about so many of us. Entree was salmon with potato leaves and rouge beurre. Well, I like my salmon medium rare, this was not, but the taste was acceptable if not much enhanced by the leaves and sauce. Dessert was peanut butter mousse on devil's food cake - obviously not going for French authenticity here. But the whole experience was made exquisitely charming by the friendly eager faces of the student waiters. All is well here!
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