In our lives pre-R, I often would take weekends when we had no real plans and make fancy multi-course meals, some of which are detailed right in this very space. R has no real experience with that sort of thing - my excursions into fine(r) dining are all after we stopped living together. So I thought I would bunny-slope him into it.
Traditionally, each of these meals had a theme. In this case, feeling whimsical, I decided to make several courses of a thing folded into another thing. Except the soup, which I thought about - I could’ve made soup dumplings, or served it inside a pumpkin, or something like that - but ultimately decided to just make the normal way, mostly because Lo specifically requested french onion soup, since the putative occasion for this meal was her birthday, and that’s her favorite thing.
It started with agnolotti. I roasted a squash and some apples together. I scooped the meat out of the squash and mashed the apples, mixing them together for a pasta filling. I made a regular pasta dough - egg, flour, knead, wait, roll - and cut it into squares. I spooned some of the filling into the squares and folded them corner-over-corner so that they were little triangles, which I then boiled briefly to set the dough. While that was happening, I melted some butter and cooked the froth out of it, letting it brown slightly. I drained the agnolotti, then transferred them to the brown butter pan, then squeezed a lemon over it to brighten it up and help the apples out. Ordinarily I would also add some red pepper at this point, but I find that spicy first courses really take something out of the rest of the meal, so I refrained in this case.
Up next was the requested french onion soup*, which had started first with a few onions sliced and cooked slowly until they achieved a state of deep caramelization. I deglazed the pan with a little wine, cooked that out, then stirred in some water to pick up the reduced wine and onion. I added a splash of champagne vinegar (tradition would call for sherry vinegar, but I almost never have sherry vinegar). I added some homemade bread**, then some swiss cheese over that, and ran it under the broiler to melt and bubble immediately before serving. It was, as I could’ve predicted, the star of the show.
The third course, to come back from the deep, savory flavor of the soup, was lettuce wraps. I shredded some cucumber and tossed it with lemon juice, some capers, some shallots and feta cheese, and wrapped the result into some red leaf lettuce, then drizzled it with olive oil. Of all the wrapped foods it was, ironically, the only one that you could comfortably eat with your fingers.
The fourth course was to be pea dumplings. I added rice flour and hot water to a food processor and ran it until the dough came together, which took about zero time at all. After resting it kneaded beautifully. I made the filling of peas, garlic, ginger and red pepper. In this case, a spicy course would be just about right - there was going to be five courses in this meal, but the last (enchiladas, which I made the next day) was dropped at the last minute for stomach-space reasons. The filling went into the dumpling wrappers, which were then boiled briefly, and then fried in an inch or so of vegetable oil to get truly crispy. It was hearty and vegetal (although not nearly spicy enough) and delicious.
And then I ruined a mousse for dessert, which makes me two on ruined desserts for the year, and which I’m also not going to write about, because there’s no real point in remembering how I did it, except to say that whipped cream is a fickle monster of a substance.
R seemed to like it, and I’m trying another one again fairly soonish, so we’ll see if it sticks.
* R, as previously discussed, doesn’t like onions, so obviously for him french onion soup is right out. For his soup course I took the trimmings from the agnolottie dough, cut them into thin ribbons, boiled them briefly and then finished them in chicken stock with some garlic, some thyme, some carrot and some ginger.
** Lo actually made the bread on this occasion, and there was some left. She has none of my bread problems, and is an excellent baker.
