Our first Collaborative Dinner with a curated menu!
The Uncommon Meal website has been quiet for almost two years. A couple of fun meals happened and left happy memories untethered by words. These were the Bahn Mi Fest in Summer 2021 and the Solstice pizza night of 2021. Both were culinary triumphs that deserve a story. This is not those stories…
Feeling self conscious about my lack of writing followup in 2021, I am boosting the chance for success by partnering with Heide to re-imagine and energize this dinner party and cookbook review series using the website in new ways to connect with people around food.
Together we quickly chose NOPI as the featured book and with minimal deliberation we narrowed down the 100+ recipes to 12 to share with our actual guests and our (new concept) virtual guests. This is how the new collaboration page was born and immediately put to the test. Our guests were able to choose recipes from the 12 offered and make their dishes without needing the actual book in front of them. I am eager to make more changes and improvements with enhanced sophistication and interactivity.
In starting the vision of our own part in cooking this meal, I was immediately and oddly attached to the Jerusalem artichoke soup with hazelnut spinach tarragon pesto (pictured above on the night of service). More on that later! This dish was a star. To round out the meal and to take responsibility for a main dish, we choose Lemon sole with burnt butter sauce and toasted capers. For the week or two before the event it was definitely a, “calm before the storm” kind of feeling mixed with a familiar, “life is busy outside of the kitchen” vibe.
I did most of our shopping a couple of days in advance, stockpiling specific needs of this menu and planning a final ‘day of service’ shopping trip to AJ’s for the fish and the artichokes and a few last minutes inspirations.
I started the day with an easy sense of having plenty of time for everything, while Heide wisely suggested making a timeline that included prep work, setup, and each phase of cooking. Having taken that extra (for me…) step of planning really paid off in making the day flow smoothly and stay fun even with the inevitable little bumps in the road.
So, we had one other unofficial dish to make because I found chickpea flour buried in the fridge that called out to be made into NOPI’s faranata flatbread. It seemed simple with only three ingredients and I pictured it as a perfect soup and sauce dipping food. To my surprise it was complicated to make and didn’t even taste good to me (others liked it at least ok…)
As mentioned earlier, the soup was amazing. It was fun to make, starting with the pesto, and even including the peeling of a zillion odd shaped Jerusalem artichokes. (Pro tip: use the tip of a spoon to peel) Everything about this dish felt great. I mean, each ingredient seemed special, tasted good, and played an important role in the final experience. I made my own vegetable broth from scratch in order to bring all of the flavors of fennel, leek, carrot, onion, lemon, and jalapeno into the soup base.
Cooking the fish was always going to be a last minute thing. We prepped as far as we could with toasting the capers (who knew?!?), chopping the parsley, and zesting the lemon. The fish slipped under the broiler as the guests arrived to be plated with the burnt butter sauce mixed with ginger, lemon, and parsley.
The meal itself was a great experience of connecting with people socially (9 of us total) and of tasting so many great dishes inspired by the same book.
