We have a business meeting with our good friends and business partners, Anna & Steve Magillicutty (names changed to protect the innocent) on the first Tuesday of each month. The meeting is technically supposed to be at their house but they, conveniently, have no kitchen, so here we are. Since we're here and I'm doing a year of Julia, this month might as well be fabulous. Oh, one more caveat: Anna is a committed Weight Watcher, so everything must be low fat, low calorie and high fiber.
Last night's dinner was:
Appetizer: Cantaloupe wrapped in fat-trimmed Parma ham paired with Prosecco
Soup: Low-fat, homemade Chicken Vegetable Soup paired with Pinot Grigio
Entree: Scallops simmered in white wine; brown and wild rice and carrot and celery sticks with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and basil
Dessert: Red pears and Honey Crisp apples
If you haven't already tried Parma ham go directly to the deli. It is delicious. But so is cantaloupe and I am not sure either of them are improved by putting them together-not to mention that the trimming, peeling and wrapping become exceedingly tedious.
The soup was great. The broth was salvaged from the Chicken Simmered in White Wine from the night before and the vegetables and chicken added in accordance with Julia's Chicken Vegetable Soup recipe. I regularly make very good soup, but I may tend to over do the vegetables and her light delicate recipe is delicous.
The scallop recipe called for them to be simmered in white wine and shallots for 2 minutes, steeped in the broth for 10 minutes, then removed and the broth reduced until thickened and poured over them before serving. However, by then I was tired of waiting and one never knows how long this reduction thing is going to take so I just served them 'au naturel'. Unfortunately scallops alone have a very light flavor and without the additional boost from the sauce they were essentially tasteless.
The rest of the meal: the carrots, celery, tomatoes, pears, apples and rice (available in the bulk foods section of Central Market in Shoreline) were all served as they were born, which was perfect.
The Bottom Line
Cantaloupe Wrapped in Parma Ham-Thumbs Down
Chicken Vegetable Soup-Thumbs Up
Scallops Simmered in White Wine-Thumbs Down
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It sounds great. You should have actually let it cook.
ReplyDeleteYou have taken on quite a project! It is fun reading about the different foods you are making. Maybe I can be invited for a Julia meal in the second half of December.
ReplyDeleteI think you should redo the scallops since you didn't let the sauce cook down it's not a fair assessment of the meal. Also, I just bought a Bon Appetit magazine and they also had a cantalope/ham recipe inside. Funny, I had never heard of it before, and now twice in a week. Another very interesting thing I learned, which you will probably not believe, but that's ok, is that what you call yams and sweet potatoes are actually both sweet potatoes. Actually, yams are a totally different species, and they aren't readily available in the US. Everything we get here is really a sweet potato, but we call the red skinned ones "yams" and the brown skinned ones "sweet potatoes". Just FYI, since it's coming up on Turkeyday soon.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually not surprised to hear that as the yams we ate regularly in Africa were much larger than the yams I would never eat here. A re-do on the scallops might be fair, but if I re-do all the recipes that could have been done better if I had known in the first place what I know now, they would all be re-do's.
ReplyDeleteWhats wrong with re-do's. They could be done on Non-Julia days. That way they dont actually count but you could actually enjoy your hard work.
ReplyDelete?
ReplyDelete