This was a gift from my boss. Yes, you should consider yourself lucky to have a boss who gives you an eight inch long venison tenderloin. Apparently, her father hunts and, if I understand it correctly, he bags one to two deer a year, and this is enough meat to keep her family supplied with venison so it's all the meat they eat. (I have no idea if her father also only eats venison.) So she said they put venison in lasagna and burgers, chili, etc. That sounds pretty damn sweet.
I was lamenting my ability to find venison these days to a co-worker who mentioned it to my boss which culminated in a surprise bag with this venison inside. SCORE!
This is a corn soup. It's definitely not much to look at. Josh had defrosted some Riverview corn from ... uh, last summer (not the one that just passed) and cooked up half for dinner. With the other half, I made this soup, based on a recipe from Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food. It's onions sauteed in a whole lot of butter (but I didn't use that much) then add the corn, and then I added chicken stock instead of water to make up the difference from the cut amount of butter.
Then you whip it up in the blender. You are supposed to strain it in a medium strainer, but I didn't bother. There were maybe a couple pieces that would have been better strained out, but it was pretty good.
I had purchased some button mushrooms (organic) since the market was out of creminis but I thought those had been really successful. For these, I peeled and cut up the mushrooms. Then I sauteed them until they looked about done, salt and peppered them, and then tossed in a lot of chopped parsley and garlic, based on a James Peterson recipe. They were great.
We have a few left. Josh said we should put them in an omelette. Ha.
Saturday morning, we headed over to Chef Liu for breakfast before running errands. We got the siu lung bao, some wor teep, and a leek pie. We got there just after 10, which is when they open, but there were already probably six tables already there. This was the first time that I had ordered wor teep directly instead of asking them to fry dumplings or ordering the pan-fried dumplings. I really think that these were actually different dumplings altogether with thinner skins. I liked em!
We were still out and about until around 5pm but we had dinner plans at 6.30. I was starving and it seemed silly to go home, so we headed over to Double Zero Napoletana for a snack and a cocktail. Chris was at the bar. Josh had a barrel-aged Negroni and I asked for something in the lines of a fizz. He made me a sidecar fizz which was very tasty. I know I am so super spoiled having these great mixologists who know what I like and then create drinks on the spot for me.
Since we had dinner in an hour and a half, we split a margherita which I inhaled. Yum.
I also had a take on a manhattan which included some rye, carpano antica, and grigottes syrup. That was good.
Then we headed over for dinner at Taka with some friends who are going to Japan in March and are relatively new to sushi. We got a selection of starters -- tuna tartare, kanpachi carpaccio, tuna takaki (which we didn't order but I blame Josh's mumbling as he ordered), and hamachi kama. I was on hamachi kama serving duty which was fine for me.
We then requested a mixed selection of sashimi and sushi so our friends could get a good tasty. It was great!
The sashimi platter came out first. Flounder, snapper, aji (jackfish), calamari with uni, tuna, toro, salmon, hamachi, scallop, mackerel.
Then the nigiri in rounds. Tuna and hamachi. Salmon and eel (anago). Live scallop and ... obviously I'm missing one. To finish, even though we were all bursting, our friends split a bowl of udon. Josh got a soba salad. And I finished off with this piled high uni with quail egg.
It was a delicious dinner for beginners and old-timers alike.
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