love Ramen.

Why Ramen, you ask? Probably because I have eaten it for lunch every day this week (so far) and am likely to have it for lunch tomorrow. Among its many other amiable qualities, the most wonderful is that this .99 food can be made in under 3 minutes. And it is salty. Did I mention it can be made in under 3 minutes?

Despite my current obsession with Ramen, I actually really do enjoy cooking. In fact, I have a long-standing love affair with cooking. I remember begging my Grandfather for the Easy Bake oven when I was 6 years old and when I received it, spending countless hours cooking many delectable treats (such as peanut butter and chocolate on a saltine) in the mini plastic (PBA leaching?) tray under a 100 Watt light bulb. The rest of my time was spent trying to convince people around me to sample my creations (good thing I had a younger brother). Needless to say, my taste for the epicurean has gone slightly more upscale since then.

The French Laundry is an uber fancy-pants restaurant north of San Francisco, in Napa Valley. It’s food and presentation is the stuff of myths. I have never been there, but I once knew someone, who knew someone that had cousin that went there and he said it was amazing — worth every penny (that I don’t know about, but I am reasonably sure a lot of pennies were involved).

The closest I have ever gotten to the French Laundry is owning the French Laundry cookbook — which is a thing to behold in and of itself. It has beautiful pictures, perfect typography and deceptively simple seeming recipes. It was the latter that caused my husband and I to think it would be a great idea to host a French Laundry dinner party for the holidays. This is one of those ideas that seemed brilliant at the time, to be sure.

As it closed in on Wednesday of the week of the dinner party (which was on Saturday) I began to get just the tiniest bit stressed (who me?). The list of items I needed to buy for my kitchen in order to prep the food was almost as long as the food list: a mandoline (OK, I actually wanted one of those bad boys anyway), an egg cutter (not so much, but OK), a tami (?), 2 silpats (?? WHA?), a chinois (???)…anyway, you get the point.

I decided that I needed to make my life absolutely as miserable as possible, by also arranging all the flowers for the event. This was a critical error on my part. Three days before I made a trip to the SF Flower Mart to pick up flowers and to Whole Foods and Trader Joes and Bell and Trunk and then back to Whole Foods and then one more time to Trader Joes. At one point my kitchen looked like a flower battle ground with stems and leaves everywhere and piles and piles of flowers on the counter. I was standing amongst the piles, my hair in disarray, hyperventilating because things were wilting faster than I could arrange them and because it is hard work to protect a pile of flowers from an onslaught of hungry cats who firmly believe it is their right to eat everything green (and then barf it on my white carpet).

Cooking started two days before the actual day of the meal. Each recipe had so many constituents and all of them needed to be simmered, chilled, set and beaten into submission in advance. The smartest thing I did was make an hour by hour task list of everything that needed to be completed from 7:30 AM right up until we served the last course of the meal…at 11PM.

Other than the general craziness most everything went pretty smoothly. My huz had the brilliant idea to take our menu to a local wine shop and have the sommelier on staff pair the wines by course and since there were 6 courses + amuse bouche, everyone got plenty drunk (another brilliant idea). The most technically difficult course was the starter which consisted of a truffle custard cooked in a bain marie, which was served in a an egg shell with a thinly-sliced potato chive chip. The key was to remove the top of the egg shell without cracking the egg and loosen the membrane so that the custard could be cooked inside. The removal of the top of the egg took crazy mad skillz and to prove it we ate omelets every night for a week after the dinner party.

All in all, it was a fun experience and no one died from a heart attack (due to the amount of butter in the food) or of food poisoning, which I think entitles me to count the event as a raging success. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for how much goes into a meal at a restaurant like French Laundry and a renewed love for a meal that can be cooked in under three minutes.

This entry was posted Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Random musings, culinary. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.