A Summer Dinner with Friends

It's been a few weeks that we haven't seen Rob and Dyce as both our schedules have been a bit busy this summer. We (well, Ann and Dyce are the planners) decided to have dinner Saturday night and invited them over to our house. In part, we wanted to make a nice dinner to thank them for their hospitality during our recent trip to McMinnville and wine country. But we also wanted to drink a little wine and sit out in our courtyard and have a pleasant evening, the recent wildfire smoke having abated somewhat.

Dinner would be on me. Ann stated that she would make her summer pudding for dessert, which is a good thing, because I don't eat sweets, don't care about dessert, and wouldn't have even thought about making any.

I'm the breed of chef that needs to be hands-on with foodstuffs in order to pull together a menu. That is, seeing and touching food starts my mind cranking through the endless possibilities to arrive at a menu. Without that input, I really don't get anywhere. I find it hard to create a menu in a vacuum. My menus have always been a response to what is fresh, what is best, and what is seasonal: the menus at my restaurant changed every day of the 15-plus years that I owned it.

My menu was informed by two shopping trips : Wednesday to the local Bend Farmers Market and Friday to Costco, still, believe it or not, one of the best places to secure center-of-the-plate proteins in Bend. It's not like the restaurant where I had access to anything and everything you could imagine, but it is what we have to work with out here in the high desert.

Wednesday at the farmers market, I saw just one pint of Padrón peppers and into my bag they went. When Ann asked me why I bought them, I answered, "to have another weapon in my arsenal." I didn't buy them with a plan to use them in Saturday's dinner, rather to have them on hand for whatever use because I am not going to pass up an opportunity to buy and eat one of the world's most delicious peppers.

That happy accident behind us, we went to Costco on Friday, primarily to secure new eyeglasses for me, my first in 15 years and sorely needed at that, but also to look around for interesting proteins. For me, interesting does not mean expensive. It merely means something that looks really good and which piques my chef-interest. We added a tray of tremendous looking and highly marbled USDA Prime tri-tip slices and a container of tiny Oregon pink shrimp, for a quasi-surf-n-turf dinner menu.

We're not big beef eaters (I might eat steak once per year) but it seemed like the safest bet. Dyce isn't a big fan of oily or fishy fish (the kind that we really love) or lamb, both of which looked really good, so we opted for beef. My preference would have been a nice cut of pork, but there wasn't anything on offer other than some rather ordinary and very lean top loin.

By the way, I have never worked with tri-tip, which when I was growing up was called bottom sirloin. I believe the name tri-tip originated in California long after I grew up. In any case, at my restaurant, weekly, I shared a local 180-day corn-fed Angus steer with several other restaurants and my share consisted of short ribs and skirt steak. Somebody else got the sirloin. Moreover, in a very high-end restaurant, it is hard to get customers, who walk in the door salivating for tenderloin or strip steaks, both fairly uninteresting cuts from a chef's perspective, to order more prosaic cuts such as tri-tip. Fortunately, I could move my skirts and ribs on the nightly tasting menu.

Gorgeous Tri-Tip (Bottom Sirloin) Slices

Reflecting on the menu and remembering the padrones that I bought at the farmers market, my mind turned a bit towards Iberia when planning dinner. And in a back-and-forth with Ann about menu ideas, she mentioned that she might like some Israeli couscous. This reminded me that at the restaurant, we often made Israeli couscous in the style of paella and I was off to the races with a plan for dinner.

Tri-Tip Marinating in Pimentόn, Olive Oil, and Garlic

First thing on Saturday, I mixed up a marinade of smoked paprika (Pimentόn de la Vera), garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper and slathered it on the tri-tip slices. Into the refrigerator they went to await their turn on the grill just before dinner.

After this, I turned my mind to the tiny pink shrimp that I planned to use for an appetizer. Again, I took my cue from Ann. As we were kicking ideas around and after I had rejected a bunch of more usual ideas, she asked, "Why not shrimp cakes?" I loved that idea for ease of preparation and ease of eating. I can make cakes of pretty near anything and I have during my restaurant career. But never shrimp, however.

While I drained the shrimp (already pre-cooked and shelled, if you have never worked with these tiny so-called bay shrimp that actually come from the ocean off the Oregon coast), I got busy chopping fines herbes: tarragon, dill, Italian parsley, and chives. I mixed the tiny drained shrimp with these herbs, a tiny amount salt (they are naturally fairly salty), white pepper, one egg (for two pounds of shrimp), and just enough mayo and panko to hold them together. Ann and I tasted the mix and I adjusted it by adding more parsley and dill. Into the fridge the mix went for several hours. This achieves two goals: it stiffens the mix as the panko starts to do its binding trick and the herb flavors bloom into the mix. 

After this, I made a quick lemon and chive aïoli using a single clove of garlic that I pounded to a paste with a touch of salt in my big green granite mortar. You have to be really careful with garlic paste in an aïoli because the garlic flavor will bloom in the sauce over time and can get really out of hand. One garlic clove is sufficient to make a cup of sauce. After mixing in finely minced chives and the zest of a lemon, I put the resulting aïoli in the fridge. All the flavors bloom (get stronger) and come together over the course of a couple hours.

An hour or so before Rob and Dyce were to arrive, I pattied out two-ounce cakes and pan-fried them. A trick with a really loose cake-mix like this is to lower the heat a touch and let the cakes really brown well. The crust will help them hold together.

Pink Shrimp Cakes

Shrimp Cakes in the Courtyard with Lemon-Chive Aïoli

Premier Cru Champagne with our Shrimp Cakes

After yakking and eating our fill of shrimp cakes (plus boiled peanuts that Rob and Dyce cooked and brought over) on the patio in the courtyard, it was time to grill some steaks in the gathering dusk. Grilling steaks, I'm an old hand at, having run the broiler station at the restaurant for years. Ordinarily, I grill steaks with two turns on each side to get beautiful crisscross grill marks, but these large, chunky steaks being square in profile, I cooked with one turn on each of the four sides, to a rosy medium rare by feel. Years of experience on the broiler means that I can pretty much tell temperatures of steaks just by looking at them.

Pimentón-Marinated Tri-Tip Grilled to Medium Rare

The steaks having been grilled and it getting dark outside, we moved our show into the kitchen. The steaks rested on the counter while I made the Israeli couscous and seared the peppers. Earlier in the day, I had prepped my sofrito just like I would have for paella: finely diced poblanos, red peppers, red onion, and green onion, along with minced garlic. These veg went into a pan with some saffron and pimentón to cook and then I added Israeli couscous and water (for paella, I spend a lot of time making a great stock). When the couscous was just tender but still had a bit of remaining bite, in a twist, I stirred in four ounces of softened goat cheese. This has a similar enriching effect to stirring butter and cheese (mantecare) into risotto.

Israeli Couscous Cooked à la Paella, Finished with Goat Cheese

Padrones Seared with Olive Oil and Salt

Plate Up: Couscous, Sliced Tri-Tip, Padrones, Pimentón Sauce Drizzle

Along with dinner, we opened a couple of bottles of Barbaresco, one of our favorite beef wines. Dinner was admittedly rich yet quite flavorful and so we wanted a wine that would help cut the richness (tannic or acidic) but not hide the myriad of flavors in the couscous (lighter bodied), so we chose a youngish Barbaresco. We just love the tannins and flavors along with the light body of the Nebbiolo grape.

So many sommeliers would have paired this with a bigger bolder wine such as a Cab, Cab-forward Bordeaux, or big Syrah such as Côte-Rôtie. To my palate, those big fruity wines hide all the nuance of the dish. What do I pair with Cabernet? I don't. To my palate, pairing Cab with food is akin to using a sledgehammer to nail in a tack.

And now we come to the highlight of our meal, Ann's summer pudding. None of us are dessert eaters, but she insisted. Her summer pudding starts with briefly cooking strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries in a scant amount of sugar. Then she lines a trifle mold with challah or brioche and then fills the mold with alternating layers of fruit and bread until the mold is filled. It sets in the refrigerator (blueberries in particular have a lot of natural pectin) and then is unmolded. She served it with a touch of cream whipped with dark rum.

Ann's Outstanding Summer Pudding

Ann served Dyce and Rob first and I asked her for a third of what she served them, not really wanting dessert and already very full from dinner. Not one to listen to me, she passed me an entire serving telling me to eat what I wanted and she would finish the rest. I took one bite and told her that she better make her own plate. It was so delicious that I ate the entire thing! We all did. This is one of those dishes that is so much more than the sum of its parts. Brava Annie!

All our Dessert Plates Looked Just Like This!