ESC #26

This one had a sort of late-summer-at-an-Argentinian-estancia theme. It was all pretty good, but the lomo al trapo stole the show—as you would expect from a $90 piece of meat that you wrap in a red-wine soaked dish towel and throw into a fire…as long as it comes out right, which it did b/c it’s a Kenji recipe and he has his stuff together.

• Costa del Oro cocktail: this one I reverse-engineered from the sadly now defunct Padrecito in Cole Valley, which I think I’ve mentioned before had one of the best tequila/mezcal-centered cocktail lists in the country. Basically it’s 2 oz pisco, 1 oz “seasonal shrub” (I used the leftover plum/red wine/rosemary syrup from DessArt Day 3), .5 oz each of apricot jam and lime juice—you shake and strain all of that into a highball and top with 3 oz. of strong ginger ale. Like a grownup sangria—fantastic.
• Goose liver terrines with Concord grape jelly: my Concord grapes set this year, and I had some nice cans of foie gras to use up from a friend, so I made this. We all agreed it was great but so rich you only needed a fraction of what the recipe makes.
• Lomo al trapo. The changes/additions I made to Kenji’s recipe were to soak the dish towel in red wine instead of water (per the recipe in The South American Table); I grilled corn cobs and potatoes along with the lomo; and I made the chimichurri from the cookbook mentioned above. An absolute show-stopper, and so easy as long as you can handle a live fire. You can send guests home with a little of the smoked-red-wine-infused salt as a party favor….
• Crab salad with peaches and avocados. We used nectarines since mine were ripe at the right time. An old Cooking Light recipe and perfectly fine—with the ring mold it was a charming throwback to late 90s fine dining when everything had to be a shape.
• Raspberry Sorbet and Meringue sandwiches. This was another old Cooking Light recipe and is now gone from the Interwebs, but you basically bake sheet meringue cookies and sandwich store-bought raspberry sorbet between them before cutting into squares and refreezing for 4 hours. These were delicious but a mess to make b/c the meringue sheets shattered when you tried to cut the sandwiches. We would either add a layer of chocolate ganache to stabilize the meringue sheets or pipe the meringue in little macaron-type circles instead of sheets.