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Daily Archives: March 7, 2018

2: Baton Aubergines

Aubergines = eggplants

 

These little fried sticks of eggplant were so easy and so delicious! I was a little skeptical of the toppings. The recipe suggests to serve them topped with powdered sugar and parmesan cheese. It was delicious! The sweet and the sharp savory from a very high quality parmesan had a very full flavor and it was exceptional. However, the batons themselves were not terribly great. If you have the cookbook and are making this recipe, I would suggest adding a little more seasoning. Otherwise, they were very good!

Category: Side Dish

Rating: (this is the first of this category, so….) 5

Make Again? Yes!

1: The “Eloquent” Oyster

You’re as eloquent as an oyster

This recipe proved to be quite a challenge for my first choice from this cookbook! Do you know how hard it is to get oysters – let alone GOOD oysters – in Colorado?! VERY HARD. Praise Whole Foods.

I had a nice long chat with the seafood guys about what would be the closest to gulf oysters, and they gave me these freshwater oysters that were about similar in size. They offered to shuck them for me, but I’m never one to shy away from a challenge, so of course I planned to do it myself. After scouring the seafood section, I finally found some escargot and even the caviar that it called for. But it was $17 for about a Tablespoon so… sorry, Tennessee, not worth it. With my car smelling overwhelmingly of seafood, I headed home.

Let me be frank. I don’t have an oyster shucker. This should have registered in my mind as a problem, but I wanted to MacGyver it. Second problem, where was my flathead screwdriver. About thirty minutes and a handful of choice words later, a table knife from Walmart had done the trick for most of them. The shells of two just cracked and wouldn’t budge, so they got chucked, not shucked.

The escargot really was not my jam. I’ve never been a huge fan of it, but I dealt with it anyway. The recipe came together really easily, and it was on the table in no time.

Overall comments: the butter flavors were intense and super rich. With the escargot, the dish was heavy but not too overwhelming. The delicate flavors of the oyster were a little lost, which is a bummer because those were my favorite ingredient.

I’m going to rank each because I’d like to know my overall opinions by the end. Since this is the first one, I’ll give it a 5 as a benchmark for the others. But would I make it again, not really.

Rating: 5

Make Again? No.