We had our Gourmet Club dinner on February 20th. It followed hard on the heels of Beaches’ dinner and Howes’ dinner is only two weeks after ours.
We had such a good time in France last summer that we thought we would try to recreate some of the delicious food we had there. You can get any kind of food in Paris, but Normandy has a fairly unique regional cuisine so we decided to go in that direction. Many of their dishes feature apples, butter and cream. Since it is a region that is on the coast, seafood is also very common.
The Menu and Winelist
The Presentation
Our appetizer was Crouton avec Pate, Brie, et les pistaches. We had the Devil’s own time trying to find paté. We wanted to have duck paté since it is another common ingredient in Norman cuisine. It is almost impossible to find, even on line. We did find a place in Los Angeles that sold it. But because of its perishable nature, they had to ship it next day air to meet federal regulations. That brought the the total price for 8 servings up to about $40 and they were out of it anyway. We finally used an adequate and locally available paté.
The Salad Cauchoise had julienned boiled potatos and raw celery with ham and peas in a creme fraiche dressing.
On our last day in Normandy we met two of my aunts and two cousins who drove over from England. We had a super lunch at our hotel and the Mousse de Saumon et Cocquilles avec Sauce Normande was the best thing we ate in all of France. That would be our entree. We often have green beans in our gourmet club. Cooking them with the carrots made them taste a little different than normal.
The dessert was Black Current Crepes. We tried the recipe a week before the dinner making a whole batch of crepes and freezing the extras. Making them worked like a charm but we were a few short of the number we needed for the meal so we made the extras the day of Gourmet. What a disaster. Just about all of them fell apart as I was trying to flip them. In the end we got exactly the right amount but did not have any to spare in the event of additional flub ups. All turned out ok however.
As you can see, there was plenty of wine to go around, as usual.
As usual, this sounds completely delicious!
wONDERFUL. I probably had tuna on toast. Not quite the same!