December 15, Day 2 of NYE Prep

Day 2 of NYE extravaganza is here.  I had a busy day planned for today with several prep items, a couple tryouts, and 2 plated dishes.  Of course not all of that happened, but attempts were made on many fronts.  Here’s the schedule I’m following.  As you can see Day 1 was a bit hit or miss….

First we need to get the mushroom stock filtering.  I set up a metal bowl with a sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth and put the frozen mushroom stock in it to begin the slow process of melting in the refrigerator.  Ice filtering takes a significant amount of time, but leaves you with a brilliantly clear stock and a pile of gunk to discard.  If the stock is going to be served as a stand alone element this is the only way to get the visual you’ll want.

I was supposed to begin with the deep fried custard, but that never happened.  The recipe called for deep frying it in potato starch, which I had ordered from Amazon several days ago, but still hadn’t arrived.  Guess I’ll do that one tomorrow.

Next was the vegetable stock which will end up in the Mushroom Parfait.  The pressure cooker was getting a quite a workout and this was its last big task.  Unfortunately, it’s also a big task for the cook who has to prepare over a kilogram of vegetables.  In my planning, I had failed to register just how long this would take me.  And one hour later with carpel tunnel in my fingers I was finished and behind schedule.

Next up was the lobster sauce.  I had a live lobster chilling in the refrigerator and from the sounds of it he was getting antsy.  So I freed him from the confinement of his iced bag and treated him to a nice hot bath in the stock pot.  This sauce needs to marinate overnight so once the prep work was done my lobster friend went back into the refrigerator minus his tasty meat.  Of course this now meant that I wouldn’t be finishing the lobster dish tonight, so yet another thing that moves to tomorrow.

On to the Prime Rib, Potato Pinwheel, Bone Marrow sauce, and Bordelaise Syrup.  This dish, despite having many components, isn’t all that difficult.  So rather than practicing, I was actually just making it so I could have something good to eat for dinner.  The sauces are a bit tricky and while I did manage one of them, I was again awaiting an amazon shipment (this time of glucose) so I couldn’t do a tryout of the Bordelaise sauce.  While I might need a little plating design help the test dish turned out pretty well.  The two sauces in this dish leverage the beef stock I made yesterday.

So after two days I definitely had one good dish and the makings of a few others.  Tomorrow I’ll finish the last two dishes and then make the master schedule for the week of New Year’s Eve.