The basics of the show are pretty simple. There are four people, and each one of them arranges an three course dinner for the others. After each dinner, each contestant gives some points, and after the four dinners, the winner gets a price.
For the sake of our friendship, we skipped the grading and winning part. We'll all be winners! It is a lot of fun, with good company and with good food!
In the first round, one of our friends did a California themed dinner: sour dough clam chowder, baby rack ribs with mac'n'cheese and wild berries smoothie. The sour dough bread and BBQ sauce for the ribs were self made! It was certainly an excellent dinner!
Next was my turn and I was out of ideas. Fortunately I had help from my fiancée for the first dish and from Tommin Keittiö for the main dish. I think I did come up with the dessert... not sure though. Let's get down to business!
Beef carpaccio with parmesan cheese and rucola
I found a suprinsingly good looking and well priced piece of beef fillet (K-Market in Iso Omena). What I then did was spice it up with thyme, oregano, salt and pepper by rolling it to a board.
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| Spices on the board, meat ready to roll! |
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| Spiced and nicely rounded fillet |
Then (Jamie Oliver's influence here), I quickly fry it in a hot pan. This gives it a bit brownish color to the outside and sticks the spices to the meat. Then I wrapped it in plastic foil and to the freezer goes for about 20 minutes. It doesn't get frozen, just firms up so it's easier to cut.
The next step is cutting the meat with a sharp knife. I used a ham/salmon knife. Funny, right? According to the label, in Finnish is lohiveitsi (salmon knife), in Spanish cuchillo jamonero (ham knife) and in English just ham and salmon knife. To get the slices thinner we used a rolling pin wrapped in plastic foil (I don't like raw meat and wood combination).
We used olive oil and lemon juice in the base of the plate, laid down the meat and finally add some shaved parmesan cheese, rucola and sea salt.
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| Mmmmm.... |
Fried monkfish with sweet potato and three sauces
The idea was good but it is difficult to find monkfish in Finland (rap in Catalan, merikrotti in Finnish). I did find it though, also in the same grocery store! The person who sold it to me wasn't very familiar with the fish, so I took the full piece and decided to clean it and fillet it myself.
For those of you who may not know it, monkfish is a fish with delicious and very white meat, a big spine bone (?) and no other bones (espines in Catalan), and it is VERY ugly. We saw huge looking ones in Stockholm in the Östermalm Saluhall next to some salmon fillets.
Anyway, the first thing to do is peal it and get all jelly looking stuff from the sides away. If you slice it perpendicular to its spine, once fried you can actually eat pretty much everything, but I wanted to leave just the good stuff for this special dinner.
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| The full piece, all included. Yak. |
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| Skin pealed, removing the big spine bone. |
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| Two beautiful fillets. |
I then spiced the fish with salt, pepper and a little bit of curry powder, fried it in a pan to get it brown and a little crunchy outside. With such thick pieces of fish that means that the inside is likely to be raw still (yak). Tommi's trick is then to wrap it in aluminium foil and finish it into the oven (around 180 degrees and 10 to 15 minutes).
The sweet potato needs a good hour in the oven at 180 degrees. Mine was a bit 'al dente'... not bad, but it should have been more cooked.
And for the sauces I didn't find what I was looking for. What I would have like to do: all-i-oli, tapenade and roquefort sauce. Instead I offered dijon mustard, soy sauce and blue cheese (not roquefort though). Since I was disappointed with the sauce selection I decided to serve them in summer pumpkin. I had to carve them and then cook them 'a la planxa' so everything in the plate could be eaten.
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| Carving the summer pumpkin to hold sauce |
And it was good, the fish was nicely cooked and tasted good as well. The sauces, the sweet potato and the pumpkin... well, next time they'll be better!
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| The main dish! |
White chocolate and lime mousse
I'm hopeless at baking or making any kind of dessert. The only thing I can kind of do is 'crema catalana', but get me out of that and I'm like a fish in a garage.
Luckily for me my fiancée knows about this stuff! So she did guide me along the whole process. Cut this, boil that, stir this, a little more, mix it, pour it... and I was just following instructions. Technically I did it, in reality though the merit is all hers. That's also the reason why there aren't any pictures of the process... The result was delicious though.
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| White chocolate and lime mousse |
Enjoy your meal!
Bon profit!
Hyvää ruokahalua!
R
PS: I'm looking forward the next two rounds now :)
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