For Valentines day, I cook three courses from fancy cookbooks, and my wife takes photos. This has been our tradition for a few years. I typically plan it out a week ahead and then swear I'll never do it again. For a while, it was French Laundry Cookbook, but we recently branched out to the Eleven Madison Park cookbook.
The first course was a salad with lobster, grilled fennel, grilled grapes, belgian endive, radish, and dukkah. From Yotam Ottolenghi's book "Nopi". It was good, although I made the mistake of not dressing the lobster. The dukkah was new to me. A very nice accent. I've since used it on my morning poached egg and on pan-roasted salmon.
The second course was venison and beets. It was adapted from "Eleven Madison Park: The next chapter". The original recipe called for a venison loin, which I couldn't get, so I subbed venison tenderloin. I ditched the whole "wrap in a crêpe and vegetable ash" because I wasn't going to source the "black cocoa replacer". Instead I did a tenderloin, with some juniper salt, sous vide. Seared it, and dipped it in brown butter.
I completely improvised the plating. For the beet chips, I tried two different thicknesses. The thin ones curled up a lot, but I kinda liked it, so I plated both. There is also a caramelized onion + beet juice purée, and a relish of beets, onions, and mustard seeds.
For the "smoked beets", I substituted applewood smoked salt for cold smoking the beets and used joule in lieu of a combi oven (2 hr at 92C).
The sauce called for pigs blood. I almost omitted it, but I managed to find it at a local asian grocery (Uwajimaya). I made it a little too early, and it thickened too much, but it was a good sauce aside from that.
Later in the week, leftovers of the purée and relish ended up on a sandwich with some sliced beef and a wee loaf of pretzel bread made from leftover bagel dough.
Oh and there was some shaved horseradish on the beets, but I left it off my wife's plate (pictured) because it's not her thing.
Dessert was "Milk and Honey" from The Nomad Cookbook. It was an ice milk, an oatmeal/honey crumble, honey brittle, and dehydrated milk foam.
