Our Valentine's Day tradition is to make a fancy three course meal from a three star restaurant cookbook. This year I made three courses from the Eleven Madison Park cookbook.
The first course was titled "Potato, Ice Cream and Caviar" and included a whipped crème fraîche, potato ice cream, a waffled potato chip, caviar, chive tips, and rosemary blossoms (which I substituted for out-of-season chive blossoms - they were the same color and rosemary works with potatoes).
The second course was a lobster course: "Lobster, Poached with Fennel, Orange, and Persimmons". It included a orange beurre blanc poached lobster tail, a fennel/potato purée, compressed fennel, braised fennel, pickled persimmons, fresh persimmon, and some fennel fronds. (I left off the lobster roe powder and oil for lack of ingredients.)
The third course was dessert: "Chocolate, and Milk". It included dehydrated milk foam, dehydrated chocolate mousse, a frozen chocolate mousse (this was a substitute for a "frozen chocolate foam" that required LN2), browned milk solids, aerated chocolate, dulce de leche (I cheated and used cajeta from the farmer's market), caramelized white chocolate sorbet, and whipped crème fraîche.
Overall, the meal turned out fairly well, despite a few issues:
In the first course, the potato ice cream needed to warm up a lot to be formed into a quenelle (it was flaky at freezer temperature). I ended up using the palm of my hand to help form it.
In the second course, I got to use my brand new chamber sealer. It worked well once I figured out which way to put the seal in the machine. (The manual left that bit out.)
And in the third course, the sorbet didn't set up in the ice cream maker, so I whisked it a couple of times while it was finishing in the freezer. I also improvised a custard-based caramelized white chocolate ice cream as a backup plan. In the end, the sorbet turned out fine. The aerated chocolate wasn't as aerated as I'd like. Not sure if that was an issue of technique, doing a half batch, or using the wrong iSi canister (it wasn't designed for hot applications).
