A recreation of a romantic French meal

I have to tell you, Internet, tonight's dinner was one of my favorites. Recently, Alex and Jim had the idea of taking their friend Rick from Seattle to one of their favorite restaurants in the South End (Boston). The restaurant is a really cozy, soothing French restaurant called Gaslight. Brian and I also got invited there a while ago and I loved the layout of the place: big wooden booths, a sort of mysterious underground feeling to the place, nice bar. The food was pretty good, too, of course.  Anyway, Alex and Jim had something there on their more recent visit that inspired tonight's menu. As it was described to me, it was some sort of impromptu creation that the Chef made for them since the only vegetarian option on the real menu was something that Alex couldn't face, namely beet ravioli. So the Chef graciously threw together a roasted squash thing that involved smoked blue cheese and it just blew Alex's socks off- so much so, that he went on a quest to find smoked blue cheese to recreate the experience.

Naturally, he went to his favorite cheese shop, Formaggio's Kitchen, where they shocked him by telling him that "smoking" cheese was something that cheese makers do when they want to disguise an off flavor of the cheese, or to enhance an otherwise bland result. So Formaggio didn't have any, being a posh place that doesn't deal with people who make mistakes like that (I guess). They did have "smoked salt", though, so Alex bought some of that.

First Course

Alex, who is Head Chef tonight, came up with a four course menu that we ate in stages as we watched our current sci fi series, True Blood.  The first course was a simple salad made with mixed greens, carrots, red onions, parmesean cheese and a balsamic vinegrette.  Sounds simple, but since we ended up beginning dinner sometime after 9:30, we fell upon that salad like locusts on the proverbial plain. Or at least I did.


Our reviews:

Brian: B. "Salad happened."
Alex: B. "It was a salad. Red onions added a lot."
Jim: B. "It was a salad."
Deb: A. "I loved it. LOVED it. I don't usually put cheese in my salads and I forgot how good it can be. This is a definite drawback with being a veganwannabe. [Also, I was hella hungry.]"

Second Course

The second course was the much anticipated Squash Thing, or to be exact, "The warm squash salad with smoked blue cheese."  Alex made squash in the One True Way, as he calls it. That is, he roasted a butternut squash with olive oil until it caramelized. You just can't go wrong with that technique. He also dry sauteed some pumpkin seeds. This was a pretty simple meal to assemble: squash, pumpkin seeds, crumbled blue cheese and a bit of smoked salt.  The end result was delicious, though. I loved the combination of favors. Luckily, I opted out of the extra salt, because apparently that made it a bit too salty even for my saltophile friends. They recommend not salting the squash beforehand.


Our reviews:

Brian: A! "Total A. Delicious."
Alex: A- "The pairing with the blue cheese was really good. The pumpkin seeds texture wasn't perfect, but better than we have done in the past."
Jim: A. "If it didn't have the pumpkin seeds it would probably be an A+."
Deb: A. "If it didn't require cheese to taste that good, it would get an A+. Loved the pumpkin seeds and the weird combination of squash and blue cheese was surprising but so perfect."

Third Course

Yes, we're living like swells tonight. There is a third course!  This one is also unusual. I believe the recipe came right out of Alex's imagination. It's a tomato tart.  The crust for the tart is a variation of a savory crust that Alex and Jim has experimented with before, but this time they replaced half the flour with bread crumbs for a denser, more interesting texture. Jim thought the end result was a bit too sandy tasting, so you might need to experiment with the ratio to make it perfect.  For the filling, we were supposed to roast tomatoes for two hours, but being less ambitious tonight, we opted to use canned tomatoes. So it was a mixture of tomatoes, ricotta cheese, some other cheese, the name of which I can't remember...  alright, I fail as a good documenter. In my defense, I was trying to troubleshoot Jim's laptop at the time. You can't hand an IT person an interesting puzzle like that and expect her to care about what's going in the tart.  So, all I know is it looked like this as it was being made:











And it looked like this after it was cooked, maybe even more beautiful that this photo conveys. It was pretty impressive looking, actually. It's something you could serve to your mama with pride. Taste-wise, though, it needs a bit of work.->>


Our reviews:

Brian: B. "Cheese, crust, good. Tomato was... workable. Wouldn't want to make it, again, myself. Maybe some other vegetable besides tomato would have better."
Alex: B+. Tomatoes needed more roasting, they should have been drier. The crust turned out really good--flaky and buttery. It had a nice texture from the bread crumbs. The tomato flavor did not taste as rich as I was hoping for. It tasted like a good tomato sauce baked into a pie.
Jim: B+. I would definitely make it again with tomatoes roasted longer. (the recipe really requires 2 hours. ) I thought the crust was a little sandy, but it had a nice flavor.
Deb: B. Yeah, not my favorite. It was good, and definitely edible, but it tasted like milk to me. The ricotta cheese made it bland. I agree that it tasted like tomato sauce pie.

Fourth Course

Ah, dessert. For this, our favorite course of each Cooking Club menu, we return to the challenge of making cake pops. Brian originally had the idea and I think we have failed twice since then to actually make the damn things because of last minute missing ingredients. Tonight is the night, though. Even though we forgot to buy popsicle sticks, Jim saves the day by scrounging some skewers out of a drawer somewhere, so we're finally going to experience a true cake pop. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we're all cake pop virgins at this point. (Ok, bad mental image. Moving on!)

I first discovered what the plan is (remember I was deep in the heart of diagnosing Jim's laptop throughout the beginning of this Cooking Club night.) when I overheard this comment:

"Ok, so we should take some of these cupcakes and crumble them?"

WHAT?!

Now that is just something you don't want to hear about your dessert. We took beautiful cupcakes that looked like this-->



<---And we did this to them! During this process, we mixed the cupcakes with cream cheese frosting which helped them hold their shape.








Then we stuck skewers in and coated them with a chocolate ganache that our go-to former choclatier (Brian) made for us. While we were watching an episode of True Blood and eating dinner, these beauties were in the refrigerator getting a nice hard coating.

Soon they will be mine...

Our reviews:

Alex: B+. The ganache was not a good pairing with the cake AND the frosting (too fucking rich). With one or the other, it would have been fine, but the two together were too much. Also, the cake tasted better when it was at room temperature.
Jim: A. A little too sweet. It needed a bit of sea salt, or at least bigger salt crystals. A less sweet chocolate in the ganache might have been good.
Bri: A+. I know not what this 'too rich' business is. I think a dessert is too rich when it glows in the dark. Now that our cakepop curse is lifted, we need to start experimenting with other combinations. raspberries in the cupcake, jam in the center, flavored ganache...
Deb: A. They were perfect. [And you know, having eaten the raw cupcakes the next morning with just the ganache...I really missed that frosting taste. Don't listen to Alex. They weren't too rich, trust me.]



And that was our night! Here's a gratuitous shot of Brian with his new t-shirt:

Do you see Beeker from the Muppets? Because I see Crow from MST3K.