Kitchen and Party

We had a party last night and before long, everyone was gathered in the kitchen, which, I think, is always a good thing.

Adam took pictures of food. The tray of amuse bouche are based on a Thomas Keller recipe from his cookbook The French Laundry. The cookbook is named after his restaurant. Thomas Keller may be the best chef in the country and even if I could get the ingredients he uses, I don't think I have the skill to cook a lot of his stuff. But this one is simple. Keller was thinking about a cheese course, and he thought that since Brie is a double cream cheese, it could be whipped like whip cream. And it can. Just cut the rind off and put it in a mixer. This is why he is perhaps the premier chef in the United States. I mean, who thinks this way? But the result is whipped Brie, which he serves on a syrup of reduced balsamic vinegar. So I did, too. Only I put mine on toast. They are incredibly good.



I think that it's fun to have, in addition to food that I'm reasonably sure everyone will love, a dish that I'm reasonably sure no one has ever eaten. Last night I made a recipe from Mario Batali's book The Babbo Cookbook. It's a smoked fish 'carpaccio'. Essentially, smoked fish (he uses sable but says salmon or trout will also work--I've never even seen sable, so I used alternating slices of salmon and trout) with a salad of grapefruit and oranges in olive oil and lime juice.

It was the dish I was uncertain anyone would like, and a number of people liked it a great deal. So now I've cooked Thanksgiving and thrown a party in the new kitchen, and it's slowly starting to feel like ours.