Saturday 23 November
It's Holt's Heinz birthday - and
there was nothing from that company in this dinner, except the decor.
This week was also Kathy and Russel's joint birthday, and Julie and Liz came to help us celebrate them all.
Holt's theme was "good things
in small packages" - he began putting the dinner together four days in
advance. First he made up a batch of paté St. Hubert, i.e. venison, topped
with duxelle de cèpes, each in its
own little brioche.
For the second course, he took our
standard recipe for fish fillets en
papillote and adapted it for half portions of salmon, without carrots (as
they'd appear in another course); and 12-15 minutes was ample cooking
time.
Perhaps the biggest job was preparing
a covey of quail according to the Fatted Calf's recipe; unfortunately these had already been hacked in half for
grilling, so he had to debone, stuff them with lemon-zested sausage centering
on a single (dried) fig; then wrap them in prosciutto to keep them together. They made a perfect small plate when presented
with Moroccan carrot salad.
Dessert
was another small package: friands stuffed with fresh raspberries, with more
marinated raspberries and dusted with powdered sugar. Here's a shoutout to Elizabeth Minchin of
Canberra, who gave us the recipe from the Sydney
Morning Herald.
So everyone had their own little birthday cake to enjoy with a glass of Ipsus passito di Pantelleria.
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