"There's a potato dish I haven't heard of?" So asked my Irish diplomat friend, Iseult, when she heard Keryn was whipping up twice-baked potatoes. For my part, I had at least heard of them, I had just never tasted them before last night. (Refried beans, on the other hand, are an old friend. As they say, "My compliments to the chef. Again.) Keryn baked, twice, two varieties, one with roasted broccoli, the other roasted red pepper.
Tonight's dinner: Keryn's salad nicoise, with green beans and kalamata olives.
In other Pipóneratable news, here's three juicy culinary tidbits from a wedding invitation that just came in the mail from my friend, Harvard Magazine writer Elizabeth Gudrais, who is getting married in Minnesota and the Azores in June:
- The "campfire" steak gets a cognac demiglace (a rich brown sauce that begins with a basic espagnole sauce and is combined with beef stock and madeira or sherry and slowly cooked until reduced to a thick glaze)
- The almond-encrusted walleye gets a cream veloute (one of the five "mother sauces," velouté is a stock-based white sauce)
- The post-wedding "picnic lunch" in the Azores involves burying food in the soil of a volcanic geyser, canoeing and then, when you return a few hours later, "it's cooked!"
