I mean, it was high time for Experimental Supper Club to have a spectacular failure, amiright? The good news is no one got hurt. The bad news is it took me the better part of a day to wash my kitchen down from ceiling to floor (including the dogs).
We had a vaguely Spanish/Portuguese theme for ESC #37. Everything turned out very well except the xurros. TL;dr: do NOT make these at home unless you own a true Spanish xurro press with a deeply-enough-indented star disc to pop all of the air bubbles in the very stiff dough; a spritz-cookie press will NOT substitute. Fortunately, no humans were in the blast radius when those air bubbles exploded in the hot oil, emitting a series of bangs as if firecrackers were being lit on the stove and a 6-foot sphere of boiling oil droplets that baptized half my kitchen and lightly splashed one of my dogs that was passing through; fortunately, her fur is so thick that she was unburnt, and I was the only one who suffered having to wash the oil out of her coat the next day…. Woo, exciting!
- Rosemary-Scented Potatoes Topped with Caramelized Onions and Gruyère
- Porco à Alentejana
- Lettuce and orange salad from Tastes of North Africa
- Zucchini and Feta Fritters
- Bamboo cocktail
- Not even giving you the recipe for the xurros.
ESC #38 was Brunch Edition with a French theme, and everything turned out great and went together very well. It might seem weird to pair a gingered carrot soup with French food, but that’s exactly where I had that kind of soup for the first time—at a little French café in downtown Colorado Springs (that’s not there anymore—I think it was called Emilie’s).
- Ginger Rogers cocktail. This version is very close, but our recipe had a delicious ginger/black pepper syrup instead of the plain ginger syrup.
- Super-Duper Soup from Shape Magazine (sadly, no longer on the Internet, but just pick any carrot-ginger soup without a cream base and with a little dried red chile thrown in there; I think the original point of this soup, if I recall, was it was supposed to deliver like 40,000 IU of Vitamin A for the winter-time…)
- Oeufs en cocotte au saumon fumé. As I told my guests, don’t sleep on Wolfgang Puck just because the man has restaurants in airports. There’s a reason he got that popular—and after scooping up his Alsatian take on shirred eggs with slices of crusty baguette, they got it.
- Salad of Haricots Verts with Confit of Tomato and Chive Oil. A Thomas Keller joint (from the French Laundry Cookbook), and not an overly chef-y one. Comme c’était delicieux!
- Fresh Orange Tart with Hazelnut Crust
The Rookery 