As promised, we had a lovely meal last night. I tried a couple of new things, mushroom ciabatta and ligurian seafood stew. I also had a small cheese incident at Whole Foods on Saturday morning--that's the trouble with sampling! We invited Craig's sister Lisa and her husband Chris to share in what I hoped would be the goodness--I was a little nervous. The seafood stew recipe, from Food & Wine, called for bottled clam juice, but I thought if I was going to expend the time/effort on it, I wanted a real stock, hence the fish heads in the previous post. The rest of that snapper went into the stew, and the branzini were from a pre-blog meal. If you've never removed gills from a fish head, I discovered that it's pretty easy to just hook your fingers in and pull them out--a knife just seemed to get in the way.
The ciabatta recipe was from the Bread Baker's Apprentice (Reinhart). Usually I bake whole-grain hippie bread with the Tassajara Bread Book as my guide, but every once in a while I go fancy. A pizza stone and a cast iron skillet steam pan transformed Hollie into a hearth, and I did my best with the pull and fold techniques. It came out looking pretty good:
It tasted good as well, but I definitely think I could use some practice. It didn't seem to have any of those big holes ciabatta's supposed to have, and it could have been crustier.
I decided to serve a vegetable first course, blanched then sauteed baby bok choi and carrots topped with shaved jerusalem artichoke and parmigiano reggiano.
And on to the seafood stew! In addition to the snapper, it's layered with onion, tomatoes, olives, shrimp, squid, mussels and littlenecks. The shrimp were the little wild ones from Maine, tiny and pink even before they're cooked. It came out beautifully, despite the fact that I nearly forgot to add the fish stock (!).
It turned out serving it up wasn't too difficult, and we seemed to have just about the perfect amount of food. The recipe included orange zest, which came through beautifully, and the calamari were not overcooked, to Craig's delight. We enjoyed a bottle of Planeta La Segreta (2005) with the stew.
We finished with a cheese course, chosen using the scientific method of What's Being Sampled at Whole Foods.
We had Laguiole (in the middle of the board), a crumbly French almost like cheddar but way smoother and just a hint of stinky and Campo Montalban, a mild Spanish (pretty sure) cheese that reminds me of Gruyere, which went beautifully with my new discovery, Armenian Tea Rose Petal Preserves. No lie--it's such an amazing taste, like roses but not in a bad soapy way. It just really was one of those flavor experiences that lets you know there's so much more out there.
What a fun meal, both to cook and to eat. And the best part is that despite 40+mph wind gusts, we never lost power!
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