Celebrating Baby Kai (and his parents)

A couple of weeks ago we gave a celebratory dinner for our friends Amy and Frank in honor of the recent birth of their son, Kai. We also celebrated Amy's return to drinking wine!



We assembled a special menu and pulled out all the stops to fete them right.

For hors d'oeurves, we served a selection of cheeses, with honey and marcona almonds.

For the first course, we served a sunflower sprout salad with sieved egg, orange and red pepper sections and a citrus-champagne viniagrette. I had been imagining a salad with sieved egg for a few weeks, and Lou thought of using the sunflower sprouts as greens. It turned out to be a light and refreshing spring salad.



For the second course, Lou made a potato and black truffle tourine, a recipe he found in a Masters of European Cooking cookbook he bought a year or so ago. I had dismissed most of the recipes in the cookbook as being a little too fussy for my tastes, but Lou picked out a winner. And, he executed it flawlessly. He prepared the tourine by layering shaved, cooked potatoes and shaved truffles and then soaking them in a rich beef and mushroom broth. The tourine chilled in the refrigerator for several hours before serving, allowing the broth to seep into the layers of potato and truffle and flavor them completely. He garnished the dish with homemade mock creme fraiche. It was a masterpiece.



For the main course, I grilled flank steak, using a dry herb rub that Lou's sister had given us for Christmas. I also roasted cauliflower, using our Delfina Pizza inspired recipe of olive oil, capers, anchovies, green peppercorns, red pepper flakes, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Lou concocted a homemade Kimchi-horseradish sauce, which he made by mixing mock creme fraiche with grated horseradish root and store-bought kimchi. Delicious! We forgot to take a picture until after we had mostly devoured the dish.



For dessert, I baked a strawberry-rhubarb pie, which we served with homemade vanilla bean ice cream.



For wines, we started with a Roederer Estates sparkling wine, followed by a 1985 Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon, which was devine. It tasted of tobacco and blackberries and was perfectly balanced and smooth. This was the special bottle Lou had reserved for Amy. With dessert, we served a Sauternes which I bought at Bi-Rite. I don't remember the winemaker.

I bet even baby Kai will remember this dinner. Congratulations, Frank and Amy!